Education & Creativity

Reconstruction

Tocqueville is arguing that the American democracy produces a unique knowledge-based culture in that it has created a specific way of forming beliefs, chasing knowledge, and creating art. This culture is strong in certain ways (pragmatic, not authoritarian, accessible) and weak in others (not curious, artistically mediocre, prone to conformity). He argues that there is a paradox that a society that glorifies individual reason is structurally one of the most conformist societies in history, intellectually speaking. Ironically, the society most committed to individual thinking is also the one that replaces independent thought with the opinion of the majority.

2.1.1+2.1.2According to Tocqueville, Americans follow Descartes’ method better than anyone. They reject tradition being the authority, trust their own experience, and want to “seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone.” This should produce huge intellectual diversity, but 2.1.2 exposes the trap. Once you’ve taken out every traditional authority (church, aristocracy, custom), something still has to fill that role because unquestionable beliefs are necessary even for individual thought. And in a democratic society, the only candidate left to act as this authority is the opinion of the greatest number. “The public therefore has a singular power among democratic peoples, the very idea of which aristocratic nations could not conceive.” The person who trusts only his reason, surrounded by people who are inherently, equally entitled to their own opinion, ends up deferring to the crowd. Tocqueville argues that democratic individualism produces conformity not because Americans are hypocritical but because of the logic of equality itself.

1.2.7This chapter distinguishes the threat to intellectual freedom from state censorship. Tocqueville's concern is that social life will make dissent impossible before anyone is even able to speak. The social aspect concerns him more than any government that could punish dissenters. Socially speaking, when the majority takes a position, anyone who disagrees loses their social standing (sense of belonging, their sense that anyone will listen). Tocqueville states, “You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us.” In my opinion, Tocqueville's most surprising claim in this section is that America is actually where he found the least genuine intellectual freedom, and it wasn’t because of government suppression like it may have been in other areas. In Europe there would have been competing powers that could shelter a dissenter. On the other hand, in America, there is only one power, and it is the majority.

2.1.10Tocqueville divides science into three levels: pure abstract truths, general truths that lead towards practice, and direct applications. He argues that Americans are excellent at the third, attend to the second when it's useful, and almost completely forget the first. This is because in a society where everyone is in constant motion, there is no space for the “profound combinations of the intellect” that pure theory demands. I found the China passage in this section very interesting. Tocqueville describes a civilization that kept the methods of knowledge for centuries after losing the principles behind them: “They made use of the formula without seeking the sense of it; they kept the instrument and no longer possessed the art of modifying it and reproducing it.” That’s his warning to America. It’s entirely possible to look technically advanced while slowly losing the capacity to actually understand or improve what you have. I think this warning is easy to overlook but extremely important.

2.1.8Equality adds one more layer to the picture. Because democratic society constantly changes and because reverses are as common as successes, Americans come to believe that human progress has no natural ceiling. In aristocratic societies, the ideal is to approach a fixed, inherited form of perfection gradually. In democracy, even the concept of fixed limits may get rejected. This connects to the practical orientation because if perfection is always ahead of you and by definition undefined, there is less incentive to stop and think theoretically about what exactly you are pursuing.

2.1.11, 2.1.13, 2.1.14The same forces described above push democratic art towards the commercial and the broadly accessible. When artisans produce for everyone instead of for a refined, higher class, they optimize for low costs and wide reach rather than excellence. “Each artisan, led back toward himself, seeks only to gain the most money possible at the least cost.” Tocqueville's watch example is hard to argue with. Aristocratic watches were few but excellent while democratic ones were many but mediocre. The literary version is his observation in 2.1.14 that democracy produces “vendors of ideas by the thousands” alongside its great writers, and the vendors are more successful against the typical monetary standard. Democratic literature, he predicts, will be bold, full of motion and feeling, and aimed at astonishing rather than genuinely pleasing. I think that maps strangely well onto most of what actually gets consumed today.

Evaluation

I believe that the China passage is the most important and overlooked warning in this whole section, and I think it holds up completely. The distinction between preserving methods and preserving principles is vital. A student who can run code without understanding it or a worker who applies a business framework without knowing where it came from is exactly the person Tocqueville describes. They are useful right up until the formula breaks and they have no idea why or how to fix it. It is a memory game, and I have definitely fallen into that trap at times. I also find the Cartesian paradox to be valid. He describes that democratic individualism structurally produces social conformism, and this connects exactly onto what social media does today. Social media makes the majority opinion visible in real time and thus applies social pressure. Someone who breaks from the crowd doesn’t face legal consequences: they face being ignored and gradually frozen out. It’s the same mechanism, and technology has just facilitated it to be faster.

The argument is weaker in his predictions about American art and theory. America has produced very democratic art forms like jazz, hip hop, and film that are truly some of the best in the world and not the mediocre many he predicted. On the theoretical side, William James’ pragmatism is a serious theoretical achievement that he did not anticipate, and I’m sure there are many more. Someone could argue all of these are still practical, which would prove his point. But, calling them mediocre would be pushing the argument too far. I think his general direction was right, but he underestimated how democratic conditions can still produce amazing work.

Application

On whether America has produced a great theoretician since Tocqueville, I think the honest answer is a yes, but you have to qualify it. I don’t know much about them, but I’ve heard that Rawls and Kuhn are real theoreticians. I think this is interesting that even American philosophy leans toward the institutional and the practical. Pragmatism literally names itself after practical results. America has produced theory, but even its theory is applied theory. It’s confusing to think about. For the Alpha education question, I think the answer is pretty clear. Alpha is very intentionally oriented towards entrepreneurship and real world outcomes, which is directly what Tocqueville calls the “democratic epistemic orientation.” The interesting part is whether the program does anything to counteract the weaknesses that come with that. I’ve been consistently pushed to apply, produce and build but I’ve been pushed less often to sit with a difficult idea for its own sake. That is exactly what Tocqueville calls the "disinterested passion” that democracies struggle with. Reading this book is probably the most classical thing I’ve done with Alpha, and I think that's part of the point. The part about thought is the application I find hardest to think about. It is easy to see majority pressure shaping other people’s thinking, but it’s hard for me to ask myself which ambitions I have because I genuinely want them and which ones I have because they’re what “people like me” are supposed to have. Among Alpha students, or really any group of school students for that matter, there are shared assumptions about what a good school looks like, what a good career path is, and what success means. I realize they exist, but I haven’t thought about them as carefully as I should.