“Society” is a pale, neutral word. It is scientific, technical, emotionless. On the other hand, “solitude” conjures up a host of feelings, both negative and positive—the solitude of isolation, but also the solitude of self-reliance; the solitude of the hero and the saint, but also the solitude of the outcast and the abandoned. The feelings evoked by solitude are intensely personal, individual feelings. Many have pointed to an inherent opposition between the individual and society, but is not the truer opposition that between society and solitude? Durkheim and Benedict argue that the dichotomy between individual and society is largely illusory. Who would doubt, however, that solitude is the very negation of society?
Yet solitude can also stand in dynamic, and even healthy, tension with society. Toynbee and Paz speak of the dynamic movement of withdrawal-and-return of great leaders who have shaped society. Buddha is one of their prime examples; the excerpts included below from Buddhist teachings show how he also combined society and solitude in a lasting way that led to peace and fulfillment. The Western monastic tradition sought, and sometimes found, a similar harmonization. In the two Lays of Marie de France included below, the abbey offers an alternative society in which an abandoned individual can find true sisterhood or brotherhood.
Society and the Individual
This volume opens with three descriptive views of society written by three members of early societies in China, Europe, and Africa. These are followed by three modern, social scientific views. The modern views are those of two of the founders of the discipline of sociology—Emile Durkheim and Max Weber—along with one of the best-known statements of anthropological method, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. The juxtaposition of the old and new is striking. The reader might contrast, for example, Durkheim's statistical analysis of “social facts” with the Confucian view of society as above all a network of relationships. Olaudah Equiano's description of his own African society offers an interesting counterpoint to Benedict's “outsider's” view of native American cultures. And in Geoffrey Chaucer's description of the pilgrims who journeyed to Canterbury we have a remarkably vivid depiction of a society which the sociologist Weber tersely classified as a society of “estates.”
Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is, in fact one of the best examples of a genre known as “estate satire,” which was probably the most common form of description of society in early Europe. In the estates literature, individuals appear as representatives of their estates. They are ranked according to the function which their estate performs in society and judged according to how well they perform the ideal function of their estate. Yet, the characters of Chaucer's Prologue are unique individuals, not just representatives of their estates. Some would say this individualization is the result of Chaucer's consummate skill as a writer. Others might argue that if reflects Chaucer's location in time on the boundary between a medieval view of society and a modern view whose chief hallmark was rising individualism.
Many other scholars have associated modern individualism with capitalism and a “Protestant Ethic,” to use Max Weber's famous phrase in his essay excerpted in this volume. In the same breath, they have often invoked this capitalistic individualism to explain the uniqueness of the West and its rise to world dominance.
But Western traditions have had no monopoly on the cultivation of the individual. The Confucian Book of Great Learning maintained that the proper functioning of society is based on each individual first cultivating his own person. When Buddha, on his deathbed, told his disciples each to be a refuge to himself, was he not talking about something very much like individual self-reliance?
A closer reading of Weber suggests that for him it was more the rationalism than the individualism of the Protestant ethic that helped engender modern capitalism. Weber also argued that this same rationalism has led to the domination of bureaucracy in modern society, a development which may in the long run be one of the most stifling threats to individualism. The individualism of modern capitalism is in fact much more apparent in factors Weber does not discuss—the individualistic rivalry for amassing material possessions and the conspicuous display and waste which result. These patently irrational features of our capitalistic society are treated by the sociologist Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (excerpts included in volume VI of the LCSR, but which belong equally well in this volume). They are not unique to modern “Western” society or to capitalism. Benedict shows how they dominated the society of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northern Pacific, whose economic basis was surely not capitalistic—was, in fact, pre-agricultural.
Benedict also depicts the very different features of the Zuñi Indian culture of the Southwest United States. The Zuñi created a beautiful culture whose goals run counter to individualistic rivalry and possessiveness in every possible way. In doing so, however, they also excluded some of the deepest and most admirable impulses of the human soul—not only the thrill of competition and victory, but also the ecstasy of individual mystical experience. In these impulses we see two kinds of individualism—that of individual greatness in society, and the individualism of solitude.
The individualism of solitude is the individualism of the hermit, the mystic, the prophet in the wilderness. It is often fostered by ascetic practices, such as fasting and sexual abstinence. Benedict argues that the Zuñi sharply limit such practices because they want to exclude the individualistic experiences which these practices foster; for similar reasons they eschew mind-altering drugs and alcohol. But such experiences can also be fostered by non-ascetic behavior, and the individualism of solitude can be brought back into society in many ways as well—in the “Dionysian” practices of collective ecstatic experience found by Benedict in most other indigenous North American peoples as well as in the social leadership of “charismatic” individuals (see Weber), in the “withdrawal-and-return” pattern (see Toynbee) and in the creation of ascetic communities (see Buddhist selections, also Marie de France.)
The individualism of greatness in society is the individualism of the hero. Achilles in Homer’s Iliad will provide our classic example. He strove for individual greatness in a society which rewarded such strife. The result of that strife was glory, but also death, and Achilles had to die. But, in fact, Achilles also found himself isolated and alienated in the midst of life because he strove to outdo the standard of excellence of his society. As a result he brought suffering to those who were closest and dearest to him and succumbed to solitude at the height of his social prestige.
Solitude, Oppression, and Self-reliance
For the hero, greatness ironically brings solitude, even at the height of social prestige, and it ultimately brings the solitude of death. A very different kind of solitude is experienced by oppressed people in the same societies inhabited by heroes. The women taken as captives in the Iliad, Chryseis and Briseis, experience the solitude of being uprooted from their people. The epic grants us little insight into their experience because the women appear only as objects, as war booty which foments rivalry among the men.
Olaudah Equiano and Buchi Emecheta do give us direct insight into the solitude of slaves uprooted from their communities and treated as objects. Equiano describes his solitude as he was progressively separated from everything and every person which was a part of his familiar world. Although slavery had been outlawed in the British colony of Nigeria, the Africans in Emecheta's novel realized that they had become slaves to the white man in their own land. Emecheta's protagonist, Nnu Ego, experienced the solitude of those uprooted from their communities in the big city where they work for whites. But she also experienced the solitude of a woman rendered powerless in her own society by the fact that every definition of meaning in her life was derived from some relationship to a man, whether father, husband, or son.
In the texts of oppressed people we find a striking ambivalence toward solitude. The solitude of oppression is often transformed by them into a positive emphasis on self-reliance. Mary Wollstonecraft issued the challenge of self-reliance with special force. Elizabeth Cady Stanton took it up in one of her final speeches, “The Solitude of Self,” in which she conjured up the paradigmatic image of Robinson Crusoe. The use of the novel Robinson Crusoe by Rousseau to teach self-reliance to his young pupil Emile (see LCSR Volume IX) had already impressed Mary Wollstonecraft, but she took Rousseau to task for teaching self-reliance only to males, while teaching women to be weak and dependent men-pleasers. Interestingly, Cady Stanton made her Robinson Crusoe and Friday into women. And two centuries before Defoe wrote his novel, Marguerite de Navarre in her Heptameron had written the tale excerpted below (page 209) about a self-reliant woman marooned on the “island” of Canada.
The women in the Heptameron are resourceful indeed, from the woman ferryboat operator who outwits two friars plotting to rape her, leaving them stranded and quite helpless on two islands, to the wife who devises a clever plan to foil her husband’s attempts at sexual harassment of her maidservant. In her recent book, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Gerda Lerner points to a reason why women have had to be particularly resourceful and self-reliant, a reason directly related to their solitude. All too often women thinkers have been isolated from each other across the centuries; because women were so often excluded from education and because the writings of earlier women were preserved in such a fragmentary manner, later women have been forced by default to conduct their dialogues with contemporary men rather than with the great women thinkers of earlier times. Thus they have constantly needed to re-discover the insights of their earlier sisters on their own, rather than building on these to achieve new insights. Lerner argues that this is one of the most devastating ways in which the solidarity of women has been blocked.
The experience of solitude of oppressed people has also made them aware that self-reliance and solidarity need not be antithetical concepts. Maria Stewart, one of the first black women in America to speak out publicly against racial oppression, combined the theme of self-reliance with that of the solidarity of an oppressed people, invoking the experience of biblical Israel as her example. The combined themes of self-reliance and solidarity are also strong in the poems of the great African American poet, Langston Hughes, included below.
Solidarity has also been thwarted by what W. E. B. Du Bois calls “double-consciousness,” the solitude of having two souls in one body and having always to see oneself through the eyes of another. Such solitude results from all kinds of domination, but especially from racism, which draws a veil of color between peoples.
Du Bois was also aware of the redemptive qualities of this double- consciousness. When he said that black Americans were “gifted” with double- consciousness he chose his words carefully. The solitude of oppression has given to the African-American community a prophetic vision. Blacks, unlike most whites, can see through the veil, partly because they have been forced to see themselves as whites see them, but also because they are both black and American and they know that being black is an integral part of the American experience. When Du Bois wrote the Souls of Black Folk, he believed that this prophetic vision might yet save America, and that African Americans thus held the key to America's ultimate progress.
Society and Time
Europeans had quite a different idea of progress. Edward Gibbon, writing over two centuries ago, was already confident that Europe had reached a level of progress that would prevent its dissolution by any modern barbarians comparable to those Germanic ones who had brought down the Roman Empire. The selections below by Max Weber present the view of modern European society as the culmination of a process of rationalization and modernization. Weber took great pains to point out the uniqueness of Western civilization. Ironically, he was keenly aware of the unattractiveness of the resulting modern society, though his effort to free his study from value judgments kept him from bemoaning it.
Benedict, Spengler, Paz, and Du Bois offer views of history that reject the standard paean of modern Western culture as the acme of history. According to Ruth Benedict, every culture has undergone a unique development and has its own unique configuration, or pattern. Looking at the features of smaller, simpler cultures, Benedict held up many of their cultural patterns for favorable comparison with those of our own obsessive society. In place of the view of linear progress leading to the triumph of the West, Oswald Spengler saw many world-societies, each of which has gone through a life- cycle of birth and growth followed by decline and death, and he declared that Western society had entered its phase of decline. Arnold Toynbee followed Spengler’s lead by tracing the life cycles of twenty-eight world civilizations but clung to the hope that modern Western civilization is the only civilization in history which is open-ended and thus capable of staving off decline.
A cyclical view of time evokes cycles of birth and death in the natural world as well as the mythical idea of an eternal return, as Octavio Paz shows in The Labyrinth of Solitude. Modern European historians have often regarded a cyclical view as naive and immature, even ahistorical; often in the same breath they have proclaimed that people without a written history are history-less. All too often such assertions have been used as pretexts for ignoring or destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, for reducing them to solitude. Non-Western cultures have rich histories and conceptions of history. Dominique Zahan’s article below discusses a fascinating non-Western conception of progress in traditional African societies.
History in all cultures grows out of a story-telling tradition. The modern tyranny of the written word and especially of print and more recently of the electronic media has eclipsed the once vibrant traditions of oral composition. Oral composition is by its nature societal as well as individual; it cannot be the creation of a solitary individual writing alone. The vibrancy of this tradition is evident in the excerpts below which are particularly close to their oral roots—Homer’s Iliad, Marie de France’s Lays, Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood, and the poems of Langston Hughes.
Early Greek history-writing had its roots in the epic tradition of the Iliad, but also in the then still oral disciplines of rhetoric and philosophy. Histories were narratives, and they were also efforts to persuade readers and to discover truth. Modern history-writing has often strayed from these roots at its own peril. Positivist historians have created the illusion that history can be reduced to facts and covering-laws. By contrast Gibbon’s eighteenth century history is a wonderful fusion of reason and rhetoric, of quest for truth and narrative delight.
Two of the readings below pose haunting questions about the boundary between truth and fiction in the description of society. In More’s Utopia a fictitious seafarer named Raphael Hythlodaye “discovers” a highly advanced new people in a distant part of the world, and More presents his account as though it were real; García Márquez takes a real incident—a 1928 banana company strike in Colombia—and makes it into an episode in his story about the fictional Buendía family. At first glance, it might seem that Hythlodaye’s “discovery” of the Utopians is something totally different from a “real” discovery of a real people. But when an explorer reported the “discovery” of a new people, was not his report to some degree his own invention? In light of the theme of this volume, it is especially interesting that Hythlodaye was a solitary seafarer, who protested that he would not try to make his discovery known to those in power because they would not want to hear it. In a haunting parallel, knowledge of the truth in the banana company incident also rested with a solitary individual. García Márquez evokes the terrifying ways in which historical truth can be manipulated and suppressed by those who do not want to hear it.
Solitude and Community
Very different are the effects of García Márquez’s interpolation into his plot of magical, fantastic happenings in a completely matter-of-fact manner. They range from humorous playfulness to redemption and liberation, epitomized in the miraculous returns of the gypsy Melquíades. The effect of the marvelous in the lays of Marie de France is similar. It is a poetic vision of society and conjures up the hope of transformation of society into community, even communion. Octavio Paz calls for recapturing mythological elements that have been lost in our Western world and envisions this recapturing as a redemption from the relentless linearity of the modern conception of time. Inherent in cyclical time is a double irony. The story of the Iliad is shaped by the irony that all human greatness brings death. But Paz and Marie de France evoke another, finer irony: out of suffering and death come rebirth and new life.1 Such hope pervades the “Sorrow Songs,” the magnificent spirituals of African Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois, author of many ground-breaking sociological studies, chose to write his central work on the experience of African Americans as a collection of essays which are almost more poetry than prose. And he chose to close it with a chapter on the “Sorrow Songs,” the poetry and music which better than any other expression chronicle the African-American experience.
Thus, the three excerpts which close this volume offer the hope of community. Such a community would be built on both self-reliance and solidarity, and it would not be purchased at the cost of reducing any people to solitude. This community would not be easily won; it is a sobering fact that Du Bois himself finally despaired of creating it in America, at least in the foreseeable future. Yet, in an act of poetic faith let us close this volume with the passage which expressed his former hope.
Phillip H. Stump
Associate Professor of History