Self-Reliance, Servility, and Mental Health

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson's incandescent essay "Self-Reliance" of 1841 has long been regarded as a fundamental statement of American values, a manifesto picking up where the Declaration of Independence left off. Perhaps you've heard some of the famous bits: "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." "The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of death, and afraid of each other." According to the explicit guidelines of the American Psychological Association, however, the values expressed in "Self-Reliance" are obsolete and pathological.

"Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct," writes an APA committee, in a prose style that enacts its own point and which stands in opposition to Emerson's writing in every dimension. "The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness." Later in the guidelines the committee adds "components of traditional masculinity" including "not showing vulnerability," "competitiveness," and, of course, "self-reliance."

When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and placed great value on dissent and independence of thought, even in cases where one might pay a social price for it. They understood by hard experience that dependence makes you vulnerable, even if we all do need to depend on one another in various ways. They saw value in questioning the norms and authorities by which one is surrounded; they insisted that each human individual is unique and of incomparable value.

For example, many feminists from before Emerson's era through the 1970s taught that women must become less dependent on men. Abigail Adams advised wives on how to become financially independent from their husbands, that is, on how to be more self-reliant. That women in patriarchy could not be self-reliant was one of the central objections to it, and one of the key factors that made resistance difficult.

If you depend on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are currently at the mercy of Donald Trump, though it was very nearly Hillary Clinton. And as Thoreau argued in "Civil Disobedience," if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it.

Emerson's essay is about self-development and self-realization, things that the APA in another mood might praise, albeit in words to which it would be impossible to attend. And it is about the value, for each of us individually and for our society as a whole, of independent thought, a value that the APA has no terms to express. Even more than in Emerson's time, we think in groups or as groups. This makes many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold, or engage in a process of self-deception in which we come to hold them. It turns us into tribes of warring conformists. It is servile. Also, according to the American Psychological Association, it represents a desirable state of mental health. Well, there's no denying the best patients are the most . . . compliant.

By implication, the APA is viciously characterizing femininity, which they must in the nature of things regard as the opposite and complement of the masculinity they attack. They aver that feminine people are dependent, conformist, passive, obedient, disindividuated, vulnerable, opposed in principle to self-sufficiency, hyper-sensitive. Those features would, by implication, be marks of mental health, and an aid to moving toward a decent society. They choose up sides in the gender wars, but it might be more useful to think of the masculine/feminine pair as a complex problem and resource, or at worst a single binary pathology, than as boys-against-girls battle over the nature of mental health. But, down to it, none of this is about health at all, really, or it's only about 'health' as a synonym for 'goodness.'

Though this is perhaps not what it takes itself to be doing, the APA in fact is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Ralph Waldo Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was quite aware of it. These values are exquisitely opposed to one another, another sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it once was. On the other hand, in diagnosing stoicism as a dysfunction, the APA boldly takes sides with the epicureans in the controversy that still attends hellenistic philosophy. I'm going with the cynics myself.

"The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature," writes Emerson in his gendered way. "A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you."

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.