SOURCE: "Of Moderation and Motion: Mother Nature and Father Industriousness," in The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 132-40.

[In this excerpt, Mitchell examines Tocqueville's views on the relationship between activity and passivity and suggests that the vastness of the American wilderness encouraged both activity and "immoderation of desire."]

OF MODERATION AND MOTION: MOTHER NATURE AND FATHER INDUSTRIOUSNESS

What we [Europeans] call love of gain is praiseworthy to Americans, and they see something cowardly in what we consider moderation of desires."

We may wonder why Tocqueville, who well knew of the strenuous efforts throughout the history of Western political thought to instill virtue into a citizenry forever prone to the immoderation of desire, seems so little concerned with this problem in the American context. His claim that the human heart in the age of equality is ruled preeminently by self-interest figures prominently, of course, in his answer;¹⁰⁰ ancient virtue, he says, no longer offers an adequate language by which the human heart may be understood.

This postulate, however, does not take us far enough. More than language is at issue here. Consider, for example, the French Canadians:

In France we regard simple tastes, quiet mores, family feeling, and love of one's birthplace as great guarantees for the tranquility and happiness of the state. But in America nothing seems more prejudicial to society than virtues of that sort. The French of Canada, who loyally preserve the tradition of their ancient mores, are already finding it difficult to live on their land.¹⁰¹

Here was a people who, unlike the Americans, had not forgotten their old, European, identity. Virtue, made necessary by the very proximity of persons in Europe, was transplanted to Canada without modification. Old lessons were retained. Plato's assault upon the appetites;¹⁰² Aristotle's plea for moderation;¹⁰³ St. Paul's derogation of the flesh;¹⁰⁴ Augustine's petition to turn from the City of Man;¹⁰⁵ Hobbes's profoundly disturbing assessment of the depth of human pride;¹⁰⁶ Rousseau's entreaty to disentangle real from imaginary need¹⁰⁷—these are calls for an austerity, for a constraint upon the expansive proclivities of desire. And these calls were appropriate for a geographical region long settled and, therefore, too easily unsettled. The history of Western political thought, in this light, may be understood as an effort by the intellect to limit desire in proportion to the limits of geography. Its truth cannot be disencumbered from the verities of space and density.¹⁰⁸ The French Canadians, in effect, never renounced their citizenship in that delimited world.

The Americans, on the other hand, began anew. In one of its valences this new beginning involved a different relationship to the world in which they found themselves—an empty world that seemed to be "only waiting."¹⁰⁹ Here, the expansive proclivities of desire were not wholly chastised; the motion to which the immoderation of desire gave rise could be accommodated by the very extensiveness of the land; the motion of the Americans was proportional to the scale of the continent. For this reason, they alone would come to dominate the land.

So, then, it must not be thought possible to halt the impetus of the English race in the New World. . . . No power on earth can shut out the immigrants from that fertile wilderness which on every side offers rewards to industry and a refuge from every affliction. . . . Thus, in all the uncertainties of the future, one event at least is sure. [The] Anglo-Americans alone will cover the whole of the immense area between the polar ice and the tropics, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast.¹¹⁰

About the appropriateness among the Americans of what, from the European vantage, could only be considered an immoderation of desire, Tocqueville was quite clear. The industriousness of the Americans, their love of property, was not disruptive. Locke had captured the American mind and heart,¹¹¹ and it was good.

Let me now amplify these remarks. Recall that on Locke's account, property is of biblical origin and justification. In the beginning there was common property given to Adam—that is, to humankind as a whole. This property was, of course, to be used; for only through use could the earth be for humankind, as God had ordained in the beginning:

God, by commanding to subdue, gave authority so far to appropriate. [And this] necessarily introduces private Possessions.¹¹²

Yet the matter cannot be left at that. (Mother) nature, too, figures into Locke's thinking.

Though the Water running in the Fountain be every ones, yet who can doubt, but that in the Pitcher is his only who drew it out? His Labour hath taken it out of the hands of Nature, where it was common, and belong'd equally to all her Children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.¹¹³

"Nature and the Earth furnish only almost worthless materials," he says. Labor "puts the greatest part of Value upon the Land."¹¹⁴ Put otherwise, Mother nature must be appended by industrious labor (which derives and is authorized by God the Father) for nature to be bountiful. Mother is passive; father is active. Nature, the "common mother of all,"¹¹⁵ and God the Father provide the wherewithal and justification for appropriation among the children of Adam.

This way of thinking about property, which requires for coherency the invocation of both active and passive aspects, is reproduced in Tocqueville's thinking about property as well. As we have noted already, the motion of the American soul, its activity, was peculiarly suited for the New World. Importantly, however, Tocqueville never imagined that the active aspect—the industriousness of the Americans—would supervene over the passive aspect. (Locke, in his own way, agrees.)¹¹⁶ For all his praise of American activity, father industriousness was forever being received by mother nature, and he did not overwhelm her.

The deep silence of the North American wilderness was only broken by the monotonous cooing of wood pigeons or the tapping of green woodpeckers on the trees' bark. Nature seemed completely left to herself, and it was far from my thoughts to suppose that the place had once been occupied.... I noticed [however] the traces of man. Then, looking closely at everything around, I was soon convinced that a European had come to seek a refuge in this place. But how greatly his work had changed appearance! The logs he had hastily cut to build a shelter had sprouted afresh; his fences had become live hedges, and his cabin had been turned into a grove. . . . For some time I silently contemplated the resources of nature and the feebleness of man; and when I did leave the enchanted spot, I kept saying sadly: "What! Ruins so soon!" In Europe we habitually regard the restless spirit, immoderate desire for wealth, and an extreme love of independence as great social dangers. But precisely those things assure a long a peaceful future for the American republics. Without such restless passions the population would be concentrated around a few places. . . . What a happy land the New World is, where man's vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues!¹¹⁷

For all its activity, "the silence of the North American wilderness" was capable of containing the (clamorous) American soul. True, the Americans "clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight."¹¹⁸ Notwithstanding the immoderation of their activity, however, mother nature could receive father industriousness without violation; in North America, while the father had dominion, the mother was sovereign.

I have moved in this direction for reasons not directly pertinent to Tocqueville's view of property. A weightier matter is at issue than property alone, which a brief consideration of Tocqueville's view of the relationship between the sexes helps to make clear. That the pattern of thinking is similar is not, I think, merely a coincidence.

With respect to the relationship between the sexes, of course, Tocqueville believed that the purview of each must be separated:

In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for both sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same. . . . If the American woman is never allowed to leave the quiet sphere of domestic duties, she is also never forced to do so.¹¹⁹

Beyond, and in accordance with, this necessary separation, however, he understood that one aspect must have preeminence over the other—a view not unlike Augustine's and Rousseau's about the central place of the silence in the overall human economy of happiness:

There have never been free societies without mores, and as I have observed in the first part of this book, it is woman who shapes these mores. Therefore everything which has a bearing on the status of woman, their habits, and their thoughts is, in my view, of great political importance.¹²⁰

On Tocqueville's view, the passive aspect must have preeminence over the active. Without this relationship being honored, there can be no peace amid the turbulence of human life. . . .

There is, to be sure, reason to doubt the accuracy of Tocqueville's portrayal of these three manifestations of the relationship between passivity and activity during his visit more than a century and a half ago; he was, as I noted in the preface, a moral historian, concerned with what might be called the inner logic of these relationships. Notwithstanding his consolidation, as it were, of the historical evidence, his understanding of this inner logic is suggestive about these three relationships at the present moment. A few remarks are warranted.

To begin with, the attempt to distinguish between the active and passive aspects is being met with increasing resistance. This is an inevitable consequence of equality. Rather than grant each its due, what reigns is a kind of preemptive androgyny,¹²¹ in which the difficult task of delineating rightful boundaries has given way to the enterprise of obliterating them all together. False universalism has come increasingly to prevail. Accompanying this development, however, is a paradoxical development (the reasons for which will be discussed in section 2 of chapter 4) wherein the obliteration of these differences has been accompanied by their resurrection in a caricatured form.

At the heart of this paradox—indeed, it may be the very cause—is the failure to recognize the manner in which the passive element may be preeminent. The three problems that increasingly frustrate us—the degradation of nature, the relationship between the sexes, and the question of the importance and place of religion in the world—are each instances of the passive aspect of human existence increasingly being derogated and being reestablished in anomalous and contrived ways.

The effort wholly to bring nature under the sway of a calculus that would render her accountable to the system of human activity,¹²² for example, is coincident with what might be called the modern cult of nature. The mounting evidence that the "traditional" mother has no place in the contemporary world¹²³ has been attended by her elevation to the status of an icon that is belied by the historical record.¹²⁴ The growing and increasingly dangerous voice of biblical literalism that purports to strengthen religion, too, has been accompanied by a New Age spiritualism as docile as it is vacuous; Calvinism and Unitarianism—the eternal American alternatives—in ever more unsettling guises. These three paradoxical trajectories each betray the diminution of the passive element and reestablishment of it in perverted form. The paradoxes that attend each site, moreover, are not accidental. The relationship between passivity and activity can never be obliterated; the manner in which it manifests itself can, however, become perverse.

The paradoxes that arise in conjunction with the effort to obliterate boundaries aside, however, Tocqueville, along with a host of other luminaries in the history of political thought concur that the effort to make the passive aspect strong by subsuming it wholly within the logic of the active aspect, by "empowering" it, betrays an underlying judgment against passivity. Strength is not, apparently, made perfect in weakness.¹²⁵ What such empowerment yields, Tocqueville warns, is a new and perhaps less salutary passivity.

Heidegger anxiously worries that the modern project involves "filling out the world."¹²⁶ Feminists contend that the concept of the self embedded in liberal theory is suspiciously gender biased.¹²⁷ Defenders of faith righteously proclaim the need for religion to guide human life in a world that would wish to live without it. These insights are, properly understood, correct; and the wanton disregard against which they protest must be redressed. The wood pigeons that filled the "deep silence of the North American wilderness" are now extinct! Mother nature is less and less able to receive father industriousness without violation. What was unthinkable for Tocqueville, namely, that the passive element of nature, in the family, and of religion, would succumb to the active element, is increasingly becoming a contemporary verity. This verity, moreover, can only grow more acute without the once existing mechanisms of an awesome wilderness, differently structured family, and religious understanding that was capable of attenuating what, following thinkers from the writers of the Old Testament and Plato to Heidegger, may be a universal propensity to be drawn to the clamorous, the visible, and the illusory—the active.¹²⁸ The time of retrievable errors (to invoke Tocqueville's phrase), where circumstance favors the Americans' good fortune, is coming to a close.

Notes

. . .⁹⁹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, part 2, chap. 9, p. 284.

¹⁰⁰ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, part 2, chap. 6, pp. 235-37, on the distinction between instinctive and well-considered patriotism; and vol. 2, part 2, chap. 8, pp. 525-28.

¹⁰¹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, part 2, chap. 9, p. 284.

¹⁰² See Plato, Republic, bk. 2, 372d-373e, where the admission of luxury into the city set up in speech leads to war; and bk. 4, 442: "[Reason and spirit must] preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiable by nature of wealth." Because the appetites are insatiable, they must invariably come into conflict, a conflict that the tyrant would purport to sidestep in his promise to the democratic soul that all its appetites may be sated, that he will be a friend of the people (bk. 8, 565d).

¹⁰³ See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2, chaps. 6-9, 1106b37-1109b27.

¹⁰⁴ See Gal. 5: 19-21 ("Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God").

¹⁰⁵ See Augustine, City of God, vol. 7, bk. 14, chap. 4, pp. 353-56 (CG, pp. 552-54).

¹⁰⁶ See Hobbes, De cive, chap. I, p. 113: "[N]o society can be great or long-lasting which begins with vainglory." So tenacious is human pride that there must be a "king of the children of pride," a need for a Leviathan, if there is to be peace at all.

¹⁰⁷ See Rousseau, Emile, bk. 2, p. 81: "[T]he real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy."

¹⁰⁸ Thus, it is not surprising that Smith should begin his defense of the appetites—and even more to the point, should oppose sumptuary laws (see The Wealth of Nations, vol. I, bk. 2, chap. 3, p. 367)—at a moment when expanding markets made possible by empire effectively enlarge Europe. (See, for example, .) No longer constrained by the finite resources within the European market, the appetites now could be allowed to expand; now their defense could appear to be plausible.

¹⁰⁹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, part I, chap. I, p. 30. Tocqueville does recognize the presence of the Indians, yet notes at the same place that they did not take possession of the soil. In contrast, the Indians of South America did possess the soil; the conquests of the Europeans there, consequently, were even more bloody than in North America (see part 2, chap. 9, p. 280).

¹¹⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, part 2, conclusion, p. 411.

¹¹¹ The Locke who is often purported to have captured the American soul is purported to be the Locke of the Second Treatise, that is, the so-called secular Locke. (Hartz, in Liberal Tradition in America, takes this view.) Yet the Locke of The Reasonableness of Christianity was also taken at his word, as the American editor's comments to the 1811 edition indicates. See John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (Boston: T. B. Wait, 1811), pp. iii-xix.

¹¹² Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 35, p. 292 (emphasis in original). See Gen. 1:28.

¹¹³ Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 29, p. 289 (emphasis in original).

¹¹⁴ Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 43, p. 298 (emphasis in original).

¹¹⁵ Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 28, p. 288.

¹¹⁶ See Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 37, p. 294: "[H]e, that incloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind." Mother nature retains her bounty not in spite of, but rather because of, father industriousness.

¹¹⁷ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, part 2, chap. 9, p. 284 (emphasis added).

¹¹⁸ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, part 2, chap. 13, p. 536.

¹¹⁹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, part 2, chap. 12, p. 601 (emphasis added). See also Rousseau, Emile, bk. 5, p. 358: "[I]n the union of the sexes each contributes equally to the same end but in different ways."

¹²⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, part, 1, chap. 9, p. 590.

¹²¹ See Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, pp. 187-225. He links the obliteration of boundaries between men and women, between public and private, to the electronic media. In his words: "[Electronic media's invasion of the home not only liberates women from the home's informational confines but also tends to reintegrate the public and domestic spheres and to foster a 'situational androgyny.' Men are now able to 'hunt' for information at home computers and women can breast feed children while doing business on the telephone" (p. 224). Tocqueville would, I think, see the electronic media as an aspect of a larger movement within the democratic age that would obliterate all boundaries. See also Plato, Republic, bk. 6, 563b-c: "[Within a democracy there is a] spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relations of men to women and women to men." The philosophical claim out of which this particular articulation emerges is that only the just soul may "grant each its due." All others draw boundaries in the wrong place—or not at all.

¹²² Here even the effort to protect nature from industry with the buying a selling of "pollution credits" only further betrays the logic of subsuming nature within an economic calculus, the supposition behind which is that everything has its price. (See, further, Karl Marx, "Money," in Marx's Concept of Man, pp. 163-68.) There are, of course, environmentalists who wish to arrest this movement, but their good will alone cannot interrupt a logic that while manifesting itself as the environmental crisis, lies deeper still. In "Private Property and Communism," Marx soberly offers the suggestion that "the domination of material property looms so large [under capitalism] that it aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by everyone as private property" (p. 126).

¹²³ See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 59: "[W]omen soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence . . . [They] represent the interests of the family and of sexual love. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men. . . . Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it." See also Hegel, Philosophy of Right, sec. 166, p. 114: "[T]hus one sex is mind in its self-diremption into explicit personal self-subsistence and the knowledge and volition of free universality, i.e. the self-consciousness of conceptual thought and the volition of the objective final end. The other sex is mind maintaining itself in unity as knowledge and volition of the substantive, but knowledge and volition in the form of concrete individuality and feeling." For both Hegel and Freud the domain of universality is the domain of men, the domain of particularity the domain of women. That the problem of the democratic age comes to be the reign of a false universalism that derogates the particular, as Tocqueville intimated, is profoundly suggestive.

¹²⁴ See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Coontz's treatment of the traditional family suggests that the passive/active distinction between women and men arises out of the modern complex of capitalism and liberal ideology (p. 49). It is a social construction, rather than linked in some way to nature, and becomes prominent in the early nineteenth century (p. 58). This view is something of a caricature of liberal theory, in that it fails to recognize the rather qualified individualism proffered by liberal theory (see Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone, pp. 132-37), and also fails to grasp the deeper and long-standing philosophical pedigree of the relationship. Having said this much, however, I note that Coontz is helpful in pointing out that the idea of the traditional family reflects as much the verities of post-World War II affluence and culture in America as the facts of history. On the other hand, Bly offers an ethereal fabrication of primeval man that can exist nowhere but in disjointed fantasy. See Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

¹²⁵ Cf. 2 Cor. 12:9.

¹²⁶ See Martin Heidegger, "The Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 134: "[T]he forgotten mystery of Dasein is not eliminated by forgottenness; rather, the forgottenness bestows on the apparent disappearance of what is forgotten a peculiar presence." Heidegger proceeds to note that this living amid errancy and refusing to grasp the Ground thrusts human beings into a certain kind of relationship with the world, one of proposing and planning, of using and using up. Errancy produces a peculiar kind of relationship to the world. Standing before Being in passivity, letting-be, is the condition under which human life does not betray the errancy that is its restless activity and evasion of death. See also Rousseau, Emile, bk. 4, p. 282: "[T]he more [man] wants to flee [death], the more he senses it."

¹²⁷ Although her claims were not directed toward political theory, Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) served to focus attention in this direction. Kolberg's six-stage theory of moral development, she argues, supposes a psychological profile that can be traced (through Piaget) to Kant's privileging of reason and autonomy—historically masculine attributes. (See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt [New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986], pp. 21-35). It should be noted that Tocqueville does not privilege reason and autonomy, and that his "relegation" of women to their own sphere is a mechanism for combating the deleterious effects of both. Moreover, one of the odd paradoxes of the present situation is that while the woman's sphere is on the one hand being derogated, on the other hand the privatization of the life of both men and women is increasing. See Elshtain, Meditations, p. 116.

¹²⁸ The passive aspect will always be present; the only question is where. Tocqueville worries that the form that passivity will take in the future for the Americans is the passivity of citizens before a tyrant. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, part 4, chaps. 1-7, pp. 667-702. In Rousseau's view, the active element can only be appropriately quelled by women. "Each sex ought to keep to its own tone. A husband who is too gentle can make a woman impertinent; but unless a man is a monster, the gentleness of a woman brings him around and triumphs over him sooner or later" (Emile, bk. 5, p. 370).