• VOLUME IV Contents

Society, Solitude, and Community (Vol. IV)

Introduction

Are you your own woman or man, or do you go with the flow of those around you? Do you like to think for yourself and act on your own or are you more influenced by what other people think? The tension between the individual and society has been a major theme in Western culture and has often become an outright conflict. In the East, harmony between individual and society has been more the ideal. In his book The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that Western society has passed through three phases, in which people were first tradition-directed, then inner-directed, and finally other-directed. Ironically, as we have become more other-directed, we have often become more isolated and lonely. Have you ever had the experience of being surrounded by people, even people you know, but feeling completely alone? Earlier cultures knew solitude, but not the solitude of the crowd; in these earlier cultures the power of society over the individual, though it could become oppressive, also led to closer social bonds, more tight-knit communities. But in our current society we seem to be in danger of losing both individuality and community. The classic writings in this volume explore the themes of the individual and society, solitude, and community.

The volume opens with works from the traditional societies of ancient Greece and China—works that are in fact the cornerstones of the Western and Eastern classical traditions: the Homeric epics and the Confucian classics. Both transmitted earlier oral traditions and were themselves originally composed orally. Oral traditions are the creations of societies rather than individuals; yet both Homer and Confucius were individual creators of great genius. The tension between society and individual creativity is one of the major themes of this volume; it existed already in these early societies, whose moral demands had vastly more power over individuals than any society today. Individuals who went against these early societies’ unwritten expectations suffered terrible consequences of shame and loss of honor. Confucius recognized that this shame was a much more powerful sanction than any formal laws or penalties. Anthropologists have referred to such societies as “shame cultures,” distinguishing them from later “guilt cultures,” in which an individual’s acts are judged by a God or by personal religious values so that one experiences personal guilt for one’s sins, even if they remain hidden from society.

The norms of ancient Greece and China were very different, although both were shame cultures. The world of the Iliad was one in which warriors fought together against a common foe, but also competed with each other for honor in warfare and in speech by showing military skill, courage, and ability to persuade and dominate in public debate. The setting was the Trojan War, but the central conflict of the epic was between two Greeks—Achilles, the greatest warrior, and Agamemnon, the nominal leader of the expedition. Achilles believed he had been wronged by Agamemnon and in anger he withdrew from battle, wanting the Greeks to lose, and they began to do so. Scholars still debate whether or not Achilles was rejecting the norms of his society and seeking an individual greatness beyond its pale. But in any case he was the solitary hero, and his actions introduce the theme of solitude to this volume. In the society Confucius envisions, on the other hand, conflict is to be avoided, the ultimate goal is harmony, and solitude plays little or no role. Honor is preserved and shame avoided when rulers lead the people by example and exert moral influence, and when the people act humanely toward one another and observe the proper rituals.

The next two readings look at American Indian and African societies; they are the works of anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Dominique Zahan, based on their investigation of the rich oral and artistic traditions of these societies, traditions which, unlike those of Homer and Confucius, were not committed to writing.We will find some similarities to the Homeric and Confucian societies, above all the humanism of all these cultures. Ruth Benedict argued that each culture develops its own unique pattern of cultural norms. In the excerpts below from her Patterns of Culture, she illustrates this theory by analyzing the patterns of two quite different American Indian cultures—the just-mentioned Kwakiutl nation and the Zuñi people of the U.S. Southwest. The contrasts are in some ways curiously similar to those between the Homeric and Confucian cultures. The Kwakiutl engage in constant competition for honor and dominance like the Homeric Greeks, while the Zuñi are a ceremonious people who seek social harmony and non-offensiveness like the Confucians.  

Zahan’s excerpt offers insight into the diverse cultures on the continent that was both the cradle of civilization and the cradle of humanity itself—Africa. It focuses on African views of death and time. Death is in many ways the ultimate solitude. But in the societies depicted in the excerpt the dead are often still present as respected ancestors. The role of the ancestor is closely tied to concepts of tradition and time which are very different from modern Western ones. For these cultures “tradition is above all the collective experience of the community over time.” In such a view progress becomes an attempt to realize in the present the greatness of the ideal past of the ancestors.

The societies explored in the excerpts so far have often been labeled as “traditional societies” by sociologists, but not in the special and positive sense of tradition that Zahan finds in African societies. In the modern West, traditional societies have often been disparaged as being mired in irrational customs of the past and thus not progressive. Max Weber, the great early sociologist, sought to trace the path by which Western society challenged traditional practices and beliefs to bring about the progressive rationalization of society. He found that this process sometimes occurred in unexpected ways; in the excerpt from his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he traces one of the most strange. In the “guilt culture” of Western society during the Middle Ages Christians had increasingly sought to deal with their guilt through asceticism (self-denial). Weber finds the roots of this asceticism in the teachings of medieval monastic life, which called men and women to reject the world, its pleasures, and its wealth. Monastic life was a unique fusion of solitude and community, to which Protestants, according to Weber, added a further twist by continuing to practice asceticism, but doing so outside the cloister, in the secular “callings” of the world of work. For them the accumulation of wealth through success at work was now not only acceptable, but became a sign of God’s grace. However, the ascetic spirit dictated that the wealth could not be enjoyed, so the Protestant entrepreneurs systematically reinvested their wealth, thus furthering their capital accumulation. All this contributed mightily, according to Weber, to the rationalizing of society and the overcoming of traditional ways that made possible modern, Western, capitalist society.

Weber believed that such conditions did not exist in Asian societies; he believed Confucian ideas were characteristic of a society that subordinated the individual and was bound by tradition. The recent successes of Asian nations in developing thriving capitalistic economies may call Weber’s theories into question. Asian scholars point to Confucian writings like the opening passage of The Great Learning (included in this volume) which stress the cultivation of individual morality as the basis for all social harmony, and they even speak of a “Confucian work ethic.”  

Weber did not regard Western society as better than Confucian society; he stressed that value judgments must be eliminated from scientific social analysis. And he objectively reported what he saw as the results of the changes he had traced, once the Protestant ethic had become secularized into an inescapable work ethic binding all of society into a kind of straitjacket, introducing new depths of solitude into life. Less objective thinkers in the West have exalted Western modernity and have used the idea of Western progress to support Western domination and cultural imperialism. In doing so, they have helped reduce these “traditional” societies to solitude in the modern world, even though these societies often have very positive conceptions of change, as Zahan shows, and a very rich sense of community.  

Recently “communitarians” in the West have sought to recapture this sense of community. Some communitarians have argued, like neo-Confucians in Asia, that an over-emphasis on the individual has led to this loss of community. But the price of a more tightly knit community in traditional societies has often been inequality, lack of freedom, and oppression for some members of these societies—slaves, women, and outcasts, for example.   They have been subjected to solitude by oppression. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment opposed the traditional oppressiveness of European society through a call for universal human rights of liberty and equality which culminated in the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  

Mary Wollstonecraft eloquently expressed the new commitment of the Enlightenment to universal human rights. She wrote Vindication of the Rights of Man to defend the French Revolution’s struggle for human rights.   But she began to realize that those who spoke most loudly for this universal code of morality were not consistent in their theories or their actions. They generally excluded women, and they often excluded African slaves. Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton identified these inconsistencies and took the ideas of universal rights to their logical conclusion, as did both Maria Stewart in her pursuit of equal rights and freedom for both women and African Americans, and Olaudah Equiano in his attack on slavery.

Equiano records the happy memories of his childhood in West Africa during the eighteenth century before he was captured by slave traders. He describes the terrible solitude of being wrenched out of the community he so loved and transported to an unknown world, where he was treated as a material possession rather than a human being. He thus raises the theme of the solitude of oppression, but also the solitude of self-reliance. Equiano actually gained his freedom and became a successful seaman and later a leading abolitionist in Britain.

These two interlocking themes of solitude are also explored in the excerpts from Maria Stewart, Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stewart told how Africans had been taken from their homes in Africa as captives and even if they gained their freedom in America were kept from having a true home here. Her appeal to free blacks to exercise their independence and defend their rights was based firmly on her deep spirituality.   Wollstonecraft issued the challenge of self-reliance with special force. 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 on his desert island. The use of the novel Robinson Crusoe by Rousseau to teach self-reliance to his young pupil Emile (see LCSR Volume 1) had already impressed Mary Wollstonecraft, but she brilliantly criticized Rousseau for teaching self-reliance only to males, while teaching women to be weak and dependent men-pleasers. Interestingly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her Robinson Crusoe and his “man” Friday into women.  

The Enlightenment ideal of a universal code of human rights, as extended by Wollstonecraft and Stanton to include equal rights for women, is a noble one. However, it has sometimes clashed with the cultural values of other societies, especially when the crusade for such rights has come as part and parcel of Western domination and cultural imperialism. From a different perspective communitarians have recently argued that there can be no universal moral code of individual rights, because each society has its own moral code. Their arguments seem to be supported by anthropological studies like those of Ruth Benedict discussed earlier.  

However, Benedict’s study also leads in different directions, because it reveals that there have been societies, like the Pueblos, in which gender relations have been very different from those in the earlier patriarchal society of the West. Building on such evidence, many recent feminists have argued that gender relations are social constructions; that patriarchy was created socially and can be replaced by more equal gender relations. Benedict, in fact, suggests that we can use the analysis of other societies to help us understand and change our own society’s preconceptions.

The excerpts from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue included in this volume express some of the communitarian critiques of universal moral codes. However, MacIntyre seeks to discover a universal morality, one founded on virtues rather than codes. He believes we can find a number of universal virtues—especially truthfulness, justice, and courage—that enable us to attain goals in a wide variety of different practices, even though these practices might be different in different cultures and even though each culture might have a different code of justice, truthfulness, and courage. One interesting part of MacIntyre’s argument concerns the way in which these virtues exist in individuals and communities. He suggests that it is the narrative of an individual’s actions and interactions with the community that gives coherence and integrity to the life of both individual and community.

One might indeed almost say that narrative makes possible community. It does so by linking the past with the present, by recording interaction among individuals, by building bridges between reality and aspiration, and by placing individual human actions in their contexts, and by giving voice to alternate views, thus reconciling conflicting perspectives. When MacIntyre speaks of narratives he is referring to historical narratives. But in some ways, fictional narrative is even more effective in creating community because of the ways in which it unites reality and aspiration, reminding us that even “historical” narratives may be told differently from the perspectives of different individual participants. In addition to the historical narrative of Olaudah Equiano and the epic narrative of Homer’s Iliad, we have excerpts in this volume from two sets of tales and one novel. These narratives explore themes of community and solitude, and they return us to the theme of the tension between society and the individual creativity of the author.

Both sets of tales are by French women authors separated by four centuries, Marie de France and Marguerite de Navarre. The difference of the social settings is striking. De France describes the ideal and partly magical world of medieval knights and ladies, whereas De Navarre portrays the much more worldly and even cynical realities of Renaissance life. De Navarre’s tales explore the possibilities of narrative in very complex ways with multiple perspectives. Like plays within a play, her collection of tales (the Heptameron), is framed within a larger narrative, because the tales are told by ten storytellers stranded together at a monastery on their way back from a spa in the Pyrenees. After each tale the storytellers discuss the tale, revealing much about their own personalities and interactions. The storytellers are fictional characters, but they are modeled on a circle of De Navarre’s own friends, and they agree that the stories they tell will all be true stories (and some indeed are true).   Narratives like de Navarre’s explore the importance of truthfulness in creating community because they openly address the ways in which truth and fiction are intertwined and the devastating effects of suppressing the truth.

The excerpt from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, dramatically explores these themes. The novel is the history of multiple generations of a large extended family, the Buendías, in a Colombian village named Macondo. The pristine isolation of the village is abruptly terminated by the arrival of a North American banana company that brings with it all the good and bad of modern society. It brings much superficial wealth, but terrible condition of exploitation for the workers. The workers resist, taking the company to court, but the company evades legal action by claiming it has no workers (they were all sub-contracted.) Even more disastrous events and denials of truth follow when the workers strike. The whole episode in the novel becomes increasingly surreal, but ironically it is based on the facts of a real historical banana strike that took place in Colombia against the United Fruit Company in 1928. The event marks the turning point in the novel. The banana company withdraws, taking with it the superficial prosperity and plunging Macondo into an even deeper, more hopeless solitude.

In probing the inter-relationship between truth and fiction García-Márquez makes consummate use of a technique known as “magical realism,” by which he introduces fantastical events into everyday life using a straightforward narrative style. When De France similarly introduces marvelous events into her narratives, it is often to redeem the more bitter reality of life and the many types of solitude it brings—the solitude of Tristan and Iseult’s forbidden love in Chevrefeuil, the solitude of adolescence in Guigemar, and the solitude of abandonment in Le Frêne.

Solitude would seem to play a lesser role in the vibrant society of the Heptameron, but the crucial fourth tale suggests otherwise. It tells the story of the attempted rape of a princess by a “gentleman” who was entertaining the princess and her brother at his chateau. Though the princess successfully fights him off, her lady-in-waiting advises her not to reveal the rape for fear the princess’s own reputation will be tarnished. Most scholars believe that the princess in the tale was Marguerite de Navarre herself, and the solitude of living alone with the memory of the trauma and injustice may have played a powerful role in shaping the entire Heptameron.

Solitude is the central theme of García Márquez’s novel. He explores many varieties of solitude, especially that of the Buendía family’s endogamous sexual relations and the constant specter of incest which haunts it.   Solitude is bitterly evoked by the indecipherable speech and writing which recurs in the novel, revealing the inability of even family members and close acquaintances to communicate with one another. Above all there is the solitude of Macondo itself, its isolation from the outside world, from change and modernity. García Márquez was really writing about the way in which Colombia, indeed all Latin America, has been reduced to solitude. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he holds out the hope that writers will envision a different world, in which “no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”[1]

Like García Márquez, Octavio Paz explores the varieties of solitude, but in the discursive format of a book of essays, rather than the narrative of a novel. Paz draws together almost all the themes touched on in this volume. He shows how solitude can be a positive part of life’s dynamic in the solitude of the adolescent, the hero, the prophet, and the saint and how it can be part of a healthy process of withdrawal and return. But he also underlines the varieties of solitude that are oppressive and are signs of the sickness of our society, and his diagnosis of the pathology is reminiscent of Weber’s pessimistic assessment of the alienation which the “progress” of our modern rationalistic, capitalistic, bureaucratic society has produced. As a contrast Paz holds up the Mexican fiesta, which destroys solitude and chronometric time and re-creates a universal present.

Western concepts of chronometric time have too often suppressed a reality that the African cultures discussed by Zahan know well—that progress is not linear, but moves forward by looking back. In his beautiful work of poetic sociology, W.E.B. Du Bois calls into question the narrow Western idea of time and progress and argues that if America is to progress and flourish it will do so through the “gifts” of the African American. The veil of race has created solitude for African Americans, but it has also “gifted” them with a “second sight,” the ability to see oneself and others through one’s own eyes and also through theirs. Through this second sight, Du Bois saw that if true community is to exist in America, it must be possible for the African American to be both African and an American, thus rending the veil.

Some have seen a conflict between the individual and society, arguing that an overemphasis on individual rights and freedoms has weakened communal ties. But precisely the opposite seems to be true for the future. The creation of true community can only occur when each individual is free to experience his or her fullest development, when solitude will not be a state of oppression to which people are subjected, but part of a healthy interchange between the individual and the community. I hope the classic readings in this volume have provided some perspectives on how this might occur.