The Art of Being Free

How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves

St. Martin's Press

Contents

Change

We Americans have a relationship problem. And we can't stop talking about it. In fact, much like the stereotypical romantic relationship, our ambivalence extends to talking about it. We can't live with it. We can't live without it. And we can't shut up about it.

What's got us so muddled is deceptively simple: change.

It's "the one constant" in a world where "the only rule is that there are no rules." We love it so much that we use it interchangeably with progress or improvement, two of our favorite things. We hate it so much that we're terrified it'll make us its prey next. We worry which privileged person is about to move our cheese — or worse, which capriciously convenienced schmuck is going to do so. Always everywhere yet never in one place, change is the perfect summation of our fascination with the possibility of everything and our fear of the certainty of nothing.

BETWEEN TWO FERNS

If you're not a complete loser, you probably know all about Zach Galifianakis's hit web series. Crouched, like so many of us, in a defensive posture of emotional unavailability, the celebrity actor's interview show protects itself, and us, by completely scrambling the distinction between mocking and celebrating our culture's self-consciously amateur awkwardness. Between Two Ferns is "really funny" in the way so much of comedy is today: when there are jokes, they don't make you laugh, and when you laugh, it's not because there are jokes. It's "really cool." President Barack Obama has appeared on it.

Putatively, Between Two Ferns is named Between Two Ferns because the title describes the physical location of Galifianakis and his on-set interview guests. But on a deeper level that Galifianakis may or may not have intended, there's a good reason to frame manufactured awkwardness with ferns. As Adam and Eve can tell you, the first articles of clothing were sewn shamefully from the leaves of bushes. Even today, as our better cartoons attest, when nothing else is there for you, when you find yourself awkwardly naked, you can usually count on a fern to duck behind. Sometimes, you've got ferns to the left of you, ferns to the right, but you're stuck in the middle, unable to dive for shelter.

In addition to being a metaphor for awkwardness, the fern is a great visualization of change. In fact, if you've ever experienced it, you know just how closely awkwardness and change are related. One minute, as Heidi Klum tells the weeping losers on Project Runway, you're on top. The next, you're out. Above all, for us, change means changing status. When our status has suddenly changed for the worse, the last place we want to be caught is between two ferns. We don't want to stand out from the foliage — we want to vanish behind it, the way Homer Simpson, in one of the internet's more meaningful gifs, backs unblinkingly into a hedgerow until he disappears.

Yes, yes, we know: sometimes it seems like the jerks at the top of the social food chain never lose out when awkward change strikes. They were "born on third base," or they "gamed the system," or they slept their way to the top, or hacked their lives, or whatever excuse we prefer to make for their enviably secure prosperity. But we also know how unenviably precarious it really is, especially after just a generation or two. In old Europe, aristocratic families persisted at an unreachable social height for century after century; in America, our mighty routinely fall, and our wealthy go broke, in the space of a generation or two — or less! American craziness makes crackheads out of celebrities, convicted criminals out of leading professionals, and casualties out of heirs and heiresses. "The actual moment completely occupies and absorbs them," says Tocqueville of the rich, the well-positioned, and the rest of us no less. "They are much more in love with success than with glory." The manners of our so-called elites mirror those of the rest of us, "almost always" lagging "behind the rise in their social position. As a result," he says, "very vulgar tastes often go with their enjoyment of extraordinary prosperity, and it would seem that their only object in rising to supreme power was to gratify trivial and coarse appetites more easily." We know that even at the pinnacle, people focus way more on living large than on grandiose schemes, and ruination and humiliation are never completely at bay.

That's why, in the back of our minds, our constant anxiety about change boils down to a weird oxymoron. Turns out being "change's bitch," as we would and Tocqueville wouldn't say, isn't the worst fate. That's being ignored by change, so to speak — being simply irrelevant. There's another gif that's probably still twirling away somewhere in your feed, a knowingly outdated 3Dtext image reading lol nothing matters, rotating brightly and briskly like an old customizable screensaver. Meant to mockingly signify the futility of people's feelings and opinions — possibly to the point of all feelings and opinions — it reflects back the ultimate in awkward loserdom imposed by change. Change? Yeah, no, it's too cool for you. Sorry not sorry! Stay FOMO!

It is not an accident that we talk this way about change on the internet — and increasingly, as I'm doing now, in real life. A keen observer of American life could see this coming a sociohistorical mile away. In fact, Alexis de Tocqueville did see it coming and painstakingly transcribed a soulful account of how and why it would come. His awareness of the way change occurs to us is the reason he wrote Democracy in America. It's the reason why we should care — a lot — that he did. It's the reason you're reading this book.

To uncover the art of being free in all realms of our lives — from religion to money to entertainment, from sex to death to love — we can begin with a simple task: taking account of where we exist in historical time. Tocqueville tells us something we're ready to hear: we're not just living at some random moment in human existence. But he also offers a provocation: we're at a crossroads. Our experience has been prepared for centuries, and how it turns out will impact human beings for centuries to come.

Naturally, that sends us into internal-monologue overdrive. Oh, great. No wonder we're all so crazy.

Yes, but hang on! You can do that, right? Americans are great at hanging on.

Let's forgive ourselves for our hair-trigger sarcasm, whipped out, as so often it is, to channel our frustration at being passive objects into a passionate performance as active subjects. Let's take a moment of Zen to soak into Tocqueville's cosmic vision. Life is pretty disorienting. Many of our worries stem from feeling lost in the shuffle of life. Much of what we argue about is how to orient ourselves in space and time. We find it equally hard to just shrug, on the one hand, as to surrender ourselves over to grandiose, all-consuming missions, on the other. Tocqueville offers us a different path, toward a different horizon. We can prime ourselves to embrace his logic just by considering that his provocation is actually an invitation to become extraordinarily (but not ridiculously) more chill. Then we can allow him to coach us through the realms of life step by step.

Ready? Here we go.

We like to think the present age is radically different and distant from the time of the American Revolution, to say nothing of the Puritans. Even though the uncertainties of contemporary life stress us out, we're more afraid of a world where nothing is new under the sun. For us, novelty is a compliment — of course, as Tocqueville would say. The very first words of his author's introduction confess that "no novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions." The definitive aspect of American society, "the creative element from which each particular fact" about us, in Tocqueville's eyes, "derived," was a novelty! The goodness of novelty is in our bones. For us, you can't turn back the clock, and it often seems not just vain but morally wrong to try.

The truth, says Tocqueville, is more complicated. We're so close to our newness, we often can't see it. Lost in the minutiae of small novelties, we forget that we're still fresh fish in a cosmic sea change that began hundreds of years ago. And, ironically, because the patterns laid down at our American origins are far more persistent than we care to imagine, we're extra prone to downplay how much of the craziness of our lives is rooted in what Tocqueville saw were new patterns established and spread by the people whose origins as new Americans traced to Plymouth Rock.

We're still at the very beginning of humanity's journey out of one era and into another. True, our experience tells us that we're in a world hugely unlike that of our ancestors. But we're also so focused on what's right in front of our noses that we struggle to create a long-term vision of our future. We intuit only dimly "what can be hoped or feared"; with "much curiosity and little leisure," we live out lives "so practical, complicated, agitated, and active" that we have but "little time for thinking" — and little ability to project creative intentionality deep into the future. Too stressed out to master the centuries ahead, we console ourselves by at least feeling free of the past.

Were we less encumbered, we could begin to see just how close we still are in our habits, our feelings, and our mores to American life at its origins. We'd glimpse that the strange new kind of change we're going through now has more in common than we think with the kind of change at work in Tocqueville's time — just as fresh, important, and recognizable as it was back then. It's because Tocqueville has enough of the aristocratic mind-set to lounge around, pondering humanity's long-term future, that he envisions what we, as time travelers dumped in the mid-nineteenth century, could not: our own predicament.

By thinking about who we Americans could still be in this and future centuries, Tocqueville tries to warn our predecessors — and their descendants — how not to descend into social and individual madness. That's why he pays such close attention, in Democracy in America, to the way we live out our collective and personal journeys between past and future. He wraps the book around the idea that we can't make sense of our world except as an experience of change.

Not one for overindulging abstract ideas — a vice we are particularly vulnerable to — Tocqueville takes care to detail what kind of "change experience" defines our perplexing, problematic age. This long moment we entered into a few hundred years ago isn't a nonjudgmental mushball of random alterations. It isn't change for change's sake. But it also isn't change in the way that the ancient Greeks and Romans, right up through Niccolò Machiavelli, imagined: as a cyclical, natural process — fickle in its dispensations of fate, perhaps, but, on a cosmic level, locked in a loop. Instead of hurtling forward on the rapids of history, we rose and fell like empires, seasons, or tides. For Tocqueville, the unprecedented moment he sees dawning in America — the one we're still living in now — is the Great Transition: out of what he calls the "aristocratic" age that had begun to die, into the "democratic" age now coming to life. One era, one world, one way of life is ending forever, and another one, a new one, is coming to replace it. The old, ancient age is not over and done with, mind you. And we assuredly haven't yet disappeared into the new one. Instead, we are beginning a long, strange trip through the slow fade-out of the first and the slow fade-in of the second. No matter how terrifyingly rapid particular big changes feel — whether personal ones, like death and divorce, or social ones, like the rise of robots and Donald Trump and other threatening cheese-movers — the truth is that a larger slowness transcends, unifies, and defines them all. In fact, from that higher perspective our pace may move even more slowly in the future, not less, the "irresistible" outworking of "the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history." This strange combination of surface speed and deeper slowness is a hallmark of today's Great Transition.

Our first opportunity to chill, then, has to do with responsibility and speed — two things we stress out about all the (ahem) time. Even at our crucial historical crossroads, the pace of the change that defines us most isn't up to us. It's not our burden. "Just let go," as Tyler Durden would say; "Jesus, take the wheel," as Carrie Underwood would. We long for this kind of release from adaptive responsibility in lots of different, distinctly American ways. Here it is.

* * *

Indeed, says Tocqueville, we are granted access to this release because the tempo of that dominating, defining change is moderate enough not to terrify us. Not everyone was so lucky. As Tocqueville noted, Europe's experience of the Great Transition was traumatically accelerated. Sure enough, its blitzkrieg speed — from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars to the nationalistic revolutions of 1848 to the Franco-Prussian War and the World Wars beyond — made the change from one era to another one big reign of terror. "Carried away by a rapid current," he laments, "we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the ruins still in sight on the bank, while the stream whirls us backward — facing toward the abyss." However potent that kind of analogy to nature, the terrifying tempo of Europe's transition made change a fearsomely unnatural experience, increasingly manufactured and mechanistic, outside of human proportions and exceeding our capacity to cope. In America, by contrast, the speed of change seems blistering at the level of our petty affairs and competitive scrambles. But that we can even engross ourselves in such economies of small differences is a testament to how peaceably, sanely moderate the pace of our change really is. Instead of a Great Transition marked by endless, escalating, exhausting revolutions, ours is marked out in cosmic measurements that human beings, and human generations, can safely reconcile with their real-life experience.

The more cosmic a perspective on our craziness we key into, the more we can chill in its midst. Tocqueville, more a product of the aristocratic than the democratic age, looked upon the implications of this insight with the kind of awe we always get from beholding sublime vistas. When we think about it, the inexorable progress of the Great Transition is pretty much a given, part of the scenery, like water for fish. But for Tocqueville, it inspired reverent astonishment. "This whole book," he says, "has been written under the impulse of a kind of religious dread"; but while any old aristocrat can feel that way watching millennia-old social arrangements disintegrate in the Old World, Tocqueville focuses on America in the New World, where even the most sweeping kind of change plays out in a charmed idyll when compared to the nightmarish panorama of European change. Tocqueville takes pains to observe that race slavery in America is a unique scourge, portending an uncharacteristic degree of blood and misery. But even that sharpest of inequalities cannot accelerate the tempo of change to Europe's terrifying levels.

Of course, human beings have problems, however fortunate they are, and one of our foremost problems develops naturally out of the otherwise blessedly slow pace of the Great Transformation. The risk that looms over us is not of sudden destruction but, as we say, arrested development. As Britney Spears fans might put it, the representative American is not an aristocrat, not yet a democrat — not in Tocqueville's sense, anyway. There is no surprise that ours is an age of mass awkwardness and socioeconomic teen worship. By Tocqueville's lights, we are the tweens of history, working self-consciously to grow up faster, nervous that we can't pull it off. "They see a multitude of little intermediate obstacles, all of which have to be negotiated slowly, between them and the great object of their ultimate desires. The very anticipation of this prospect tires ambition and discourages it. They therefore discard such distant and doubtful hopes," he says of us, "preferring to seek delights less lofty but easier to reach. No law limits their horizon, but they do so for themselves." No wonder Katy Perry's escapist motivational pop, where we're all fireworks and teenage dreams, is such a moneymaker.