Drawing both on Romantic theories of creative genius and radical Protestant conceptions of a divine “inner light” that revealed itself in certain men and women, Emerson developed a novel democratic theory of self-reliant individualism. Lincoln’s life was in many ways a perfect illustration of that theory; Emerson prophesied that America’s democratic civilization would produce men fully as great as the great-souled men of the past, fully as great as Plato and Caesar and Shakespeare. Lincoln, who emerged, unschooled and unpolished, from the frontier towns of Kentucky and Illinois to become one of the great world-historical figures of the nineteenth century, appeared to be a striking vindication of Emerson’s philosophy of self-confident, self-reliant individualism. The vision of Emerson and Lincoln powerfully influenced Bobby; one can trace the intellectual origins of his own antipathy to handouts to Emerson’s and Lincoln’s contempt for them. Bobby did not, like Emerson, go so far as to condemn as a “wicked dollar” every dollar that men doled out to charity.23 But he shared with Lincoln the conviction that a dole tended to undermine an individual’s capacity for exertion and achievement.24
The Neuroses of the Unconfident Self
THE DIFFICULTY WITH Emerson’s project lay in the fact that so many Americans—in Bobby’s time no less than in Emerson’s—lacked the self-confidence that Emerson celebrated in his writings. How much talent, how much energy, Bobby wondered, did his nation forfeit merely because the possessors of that talent and energy had grown up under conditions that destroyed their self-confidence and prevented them from developing their gifts to the fullest degree? This absence of self-confidence was especially evident in the inner city. But it was not limited to the inner city. The “pathological fear and anxiety” that Robert Coles detected in ghetto children could be found in many other Americans as well.25 That overwhelming and almost obnoxious self-confidence that European visitors like the Duc de Liancourt and Alexis de Tocqueville believed to be a universal American trait in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not encountered nearly as frequently in 1965.26 In some ways this was good: Americans had matured as a people; they were less complacent than they had been in the past; they were more conscious of the difficulties of existence, and had perceived the terror of life. But even the stereotypical shallow and self-satisfied American of the period before the Civil War might be preferable to the people Bobby saw too frequently in his own time, and we ourselves encounter so often today—men and women who, crippled by pain and neurosis, shrink from life, become dependent on drugs (tranquilizers thirty years ago, antidepressants today), and are so acutely conscious of their own deficiencies that they find relief from the burdens of self only by engaging in a variety of self-destructive behaviors. These behaviors are the intellectual strategies by which men and women prevent themselves from doing that which they could do were they not so morbidly afraid of failure and humiliation. They are the neuroses of the unconfident self, neuroses that have transformed America from a vale of soul-making into a vale of soul-breaking.
Had America failed? Had it lost its way? Or had the country and its philosophical system been doomed from the beginning? Critics of the American democracy believed that it was bound to fail precisely because it was so hopelessly premised on the ideal of the self-reliant individual. These skeptics believed that individual Americans, cut off from the sustaining nourishment of ancient cultural traditions, would inevitably become either shallow, self-confident successes (entrepreneurial heroes) or neurotic, self-doubting failures (almost everyone else). Commerce might flourish, but not art, or manners, or learning. Henry James maintained that the American atmosphere was too culturally thin to sustain a very high or happy level of civilization. In a famous passage in his book on Hawthorne, James drew up a list of reasons why an artist—and by implication a civilized man—must find American society insupportable:
No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom or Ascot!27
Edmund Wilson made a similar point in his diary:
Good abilities degenerate, go to waste—I think of all the friends of my school and college years who showed such promise and didn’t pan out.… The vulgarity of life in the United States shows up in one of its very bad aspects in the inability of professional men to persist beyond their youthful years in living up to any standard of civic conscience or science or art. Since standards are not there in clear sight, since they are not supported by a hierarchy, the individual has to make more of a moral effort, which, combined with the effort involved in mastering any field with its skills, is likely to prove too much for him.28
The point of James’s catalog of American deficiencies, the point of Wilson’s longing for “standards” and a “hierarchy,” the point of T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” is that the individual, by himself, is not enough.29 Such an individual may be self-confident (although in most cases he will not be), he may be self-reliant (but only in the most elementary economic sense), and still he will never be as fully developed a being as he might have been in a more civilized climate, in a world where he was not so relentlessly thrown back upon himself and his own (meager) resources. Eliot and James—and before them Edmund Burke—believed that traditions, and the institutions that perpetuate them, are essential to the health and vitality not only of civilizations, but also of the individual men and women who compose them. “We are afraid,” Burke said, “to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and ages.”30 It is the very antithesis of Emerson’s idea of “self-reliance.”31
Unlike Henry James and T. S. Eliot, Bobby did not reject the American, the Emersonian, theory of a civilization of self-confident, self-reliant individuals in favor of the system that had produced what James called the “denser, richer, warmer European spectacle.” Nor did Bobby believe, as so many patricians of Eliot’s own generation believed, that Americans must forsake the severe individualism of their democratic creed and learn to rely instead on the Enlightened wisdom of aristocratic mandarins. Bobby continued to believe, as Emerson had believed, that self-reliant individualism could be made the basis, not merely of a system, a vast commercial empire, but of a civilization. It was true, Emerson conceded, that America lacked the institutions—the monarchy, the aristocracy, the clergy—on which the Old World had relied to foster the kind of creativity that makes civilization possible. In his book English Traits he uncannily anticipated the arguments of James and Eliot and analyzed the ways in which English institutions fostered a high degree of civilization in that country. In his Essays, however, as well as in lectures like “The American Scholar,” Emerson set out to demonstrate that the absence of ancient cultural traditions in America was a good thing, not a bad thing, that a race of self-confident individuals, relying on nothing but their own genius, could create a civilization no less splendid and no less satisfying than the civilization of the Old World. Over and over again he throws down the challenge. It was only right, he maintained, that men should be thankful to the civilization of the Old World, to “history, to the pyramids, and the authors.” “But now,” he continued,
our day is come; we have been born out of the eternal silence; and now we live,—live for ourselves,—not as the pallbearers of a funeral, but as the upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor the E
dinburgh Review, is to command any longer.… A false humility, a complaisance to reigning schools, or to the wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of the supreme possession of this hour.32
This is all very well, but how exactly were Americans to develop the kind of confidence in themselves that would enable them to take “supreme possession” of their time? By taking Dale Carnegie’s course? By learning how to win friends and influence people? Emerson does not give a satisfactory answer to this question, and when we look to the Essays for a method and a program, we are disappointed to find that the inspiring prose dissolves into the sugary vagueness of the author’s own inexorable optimism.
Unself-Confident Ghetto, Unself-Confident Nation
THE QUESTION OF whether America’s system of self-reliant individualism could produce not merely a commercial empire, but a true civilization, was one that Americans who lived in the ghetto did not have the luxury of being able to ask. The more immediate problem of the ghetto was the problem of pain. Physical pain, of course, but even more the kind of psychological pain, the mental anguish, that lack of faith in oneself causes. The cycle is a vicious one. One feels bad about oneself because one lacks the confidence to believe in oneself, and the worse one feels about oneself, the more difficult it becomes to act confidently in the world. It is hard enough even for a member of the more prosperous middle class to muster the kind of confidence that makes progress possible in an indifferent, even hostile world. For the citizen of the ghetto, with fewer resources at his disposal, the struggle to attain self-confidence—and the good grades, job offers, mortgage loans, and credit ratings it brings—is all but impossible. Self-confidence is the fragile foundation upon which much of middle-class life is built; its relative scarcity in the ghetto helps to explain the absence there of a middle-class culture and a middle-class economy. It is true, of course, that racism has had a great deal to do with the failure of a middle-class institutions to develop in the ghetto; no person, however industrious, can achieve economic success if he is barred from competing in the marketplace on equal terms with his fellows. And yet the most insidious effect of racism is not the barrier it throws up between the individual and the marketplace, but its tendency to undermine the self-confidence a person needs to make his way in the world, to break down the barriers.
America ignores this crisis of confidence at its peril. In the ghetto Bobby saw, in an exaggerated form, the same problems that, he was certain, would one day haunt the prosperous middle class itself. Time would prove him right; thirty years after Bobby’s death, crime, violence, and drugs, those unmistakable indicia of underconfident selves, have begun to disturb the complacent dreams of Middle America as well. Although Americans of all races and classes continue to aspire to the old Emersonian ideal of self-reliance, when I look around me today, I am more often conscious of how sadly lacking in many even of the relatively successful men and women among us is the self-confidence that makes self-reliance possible. How much crippling pain has the want of self-trust caused? How often has it caused a person to forbear to say a word, or perform an act, or undertake an enterprise that might have improved the quality of his own life, or that of others? How often has it caused a person to watch his more confident neighbor, in the classroom or the boardroom, receive credit for an idea he was too timid to profess himself?
To believe your own thought [Emerson wrote], to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.… A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.… Yet he dismisses his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.… [T]omorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.33
A person may be inferior to another in intelligence, or beauty, or wit, but such inferiority is not half so terrible as possessing an inferior degree of self-confidence.34
Few American politicians could have been better prepared to take on the problem of self-confidence than Bobby Kennedy. His own battle to achieve self-confidence had been a difficult one. Looks, E.M. Forster says, have their influence on character, and Bobby was painfully conscious, during much of his life, of following in the footsteps of bigger, taller, handsomer brothers.35 As a boy he had been extremely shy and something of a loner, “whimsical and a little bit solitary.”36 His mother had worried about his apathy. While Jack “has had the most astounding success,” Rose Kennedy reported to her husband,
Bobby is in a different mold. He does not seem to be interested particularly in reading or sailing or his stamps. He does a little work in all three but no special enthusiasm.… I am trying to get Bob to do some reading. He doesn’t seem to care for sailing as much as the other boys. Of course he doesn’t want to go to any of the dances.37
He was a poor student; his teachers made fun of him. A Milton instructor once began a class by declaring that two “great things” had recently occurred: “One was that Rommel was surrounded in Egypt,” the other that Bobby Kennedy “had passed a math test.”38 Dave Hackett remembered that “everything he did was very difficult for him. Athletics for him—which he loved—were always difficult. Studies, the same thing. And also, I think, with his social life.… I don’t think he ever had anything easy.”39 When, in adolescence, Bobby began to be interested in girls, he discovered that he was deeply bashful in their presence, and though in his fourth-form year at Milton he fell in love with a girl named Ann Appleton, he never dared to say even a word to her. For many years he lacked the confidence to speak effectively in public; friends remembered him stammering painfully through a toast delivered at Jack’s wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport in 1953.
Slowly, of course, he overcame his fears and began to develop faith in himself and his abilities. But he remained, to the end of his life, a shy man. Diana Trilling, though she thought him “infinitely better-looking than” Jack, noted that he “didn’t exude anything like his brother’s power.”40 Unlike Bobby’s face, Jack’s exuded self-confidence: it “radiated strength,” Trilling remembered, a “power so compressed that you felt it was about to explode.”41 Bobby lacked this “absolute confidence in himself and his charm.”42 When he spoke, Jack Newfield said, he “stammered and his hands trembled.”43 He “walked in a slouch like a man who did not want to be noticed.” His handwriting “was small and squiggly.”44 He differed, Robert Coles observed, from those “glib, articulate, well-psychoanalyzed, well-intellectualized people who always know what to say, who always know where and how to get it across through either the printed or spoken word.”45 Jack Newfield concluded that Bobby was “basically introverted and nonverbal,” and noted how frequently his confidence deserted him: “If a reporter asked him why some people hated him, or thought he was ruthless, he would freeze, and mumble like a little boy.”46 One supposes that what often appeared to the world to be arrogance or insolence was really a form of concealed shyness. Much has been made of Bobby’s brusqueness and rudeness, but, of course, it is precisely with this kind of aloof behavior that shy people so often seek to disguise their want of confidence in themselves. If in the end Bobby surmounted these difficulties and became a brilliantly successful statesman, he himself would have been the first to concede that he had been specially blessed by Fortune. Had he not been born a Kennedy, he once told Jack Newfield, he would probably have become a juvenile delinquent.47
Bobby’s own struggle to achieve self-confidence cannot, however, explain why he embraced the notions of entrepreneurial self-confidence that he did, the kind of self-confidence that enables men and women to go out into the world and hold down jobs in a competitive economy. Bobby’s father, after all, had not wanted his sons to empathize with the entrepreneurial virtues; Joseph Kennedy had wanted his sons to emulate patrician standards
of greatness, to become great-souled men in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, a man who despised shopkeepers’ arts, denounced entrepreneurial success as a manifestation of greed, and celebrated Old World ideals like military glory and conquistadorial prowess. Bobby’s embrace of free-market and entrepreneurial virtues, his belief that a private-sector job could do more for a man’s soul than a government-sponsored handout, startled both his liberal Stimsonian and his radical left-wing friends. “I guess you don’t like all the things I say about free enterprise,” Bobby told the socialist Michael Harrington when the two met in 1968.48 Neither Stimsonian liberals nor the socialist left could accept Bobby’s belief that if only people could develop the self-confidence to take advantage of its opportunities, the free market would do more to improve the quality of their lives than a government bureaucracy could. They stared blankly at him, and were astonished at his doctrine. They had ceased to understand him. He had broken with their faith.
Beyond the Welfare State
HE HAD ONCE uncritically accepted the Stimsonian idea that an Enlightened government could sweep down, deus ex machina, and improve the conditions of peoples and nations. By the spring of 1966, however, Bobby was ready to challenge the conventional Stimsonian wisdom. “The inheritance of the New Deal,” he declared, had been “fulfilled.”49 He did not talk, in the esoteric language of the Stimsonians, of the ability of bureaucracies and programs to transform the “structural” conditions that “caused” poverty in America; he instead worked strenuously to recover the older and more compelling language of Emersonian self-reliance, a peculiarly American moral code that emphasized the importance of liberating the talents and energies of ordinary men and women by giving them the self-confidence to realize the “divine idea” that each of them represented. Bobby had at last reconciled himself to the Emersonian idea that our streets, our houses, our communities are not a reflection of “structural” economic conditions, they are the mirror of our souls. If we would heal the melancholia of the ghetto—if we would transform dreary streets and decaying neighborhoods into something more and something better—we must first transform the melancholy souls, the stagnant intellects, the sagging spirits, the underconfident selves of the people who inhabit them. We knowing moderns can’t quite believe that; schooled in Freud and the horrors that are present in even the most innocent minds, we cannot put our faith in a world that mirrors the confident soul. Emerson no doubt exaggerated the beneficial effects of self-confidence. But he did not exaggerate the terrible effects of its absence.
The Last Patrician Page 14