Rousseau’s Influence

One of the most compelling sections for me personally in D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America is the section on Rousseau. The reason is that he helps explain to me the source of many of my own ideas which, like our entire generation, seemed to originate within us, but were foisted on us by the mass culture and pop media.

“Do your own thing” and “Follow your bliss” (yes, this is Joseph Campbell, but rooted in Roussaeu) and the idea of finding within the truth of who you are and being true to that inner you, free from external constraints… this is all Rouseau.

The idea of freedom is powerful, but can also be out of balance, as the label for our generation later became the Me Generation. This ethic was glorified in magazines such as Life’s photo essays on the hippie communes which glamorized the “throwing off” of traditional family and exalted the hippie foray into communal families. The fruit of such follies only came later. Who would do the work? Who will raise the children? If I am doing my thing and watching the sunset on acid, and he’s doing his thing writing poetry, who will do the dishes?

Rousseau, D’Souza points out, was the guiding spirit of Bohemia. And the heart of it is expressed in our total embrace of the ethic of authenticity. Know who you are and follow your star. You must be authentic to yourself. It doesn’t matter if what you are doing is sick and perverse as long as it is honest. Check out where the art scene went in the seventies, with artists who groveled in feces or worse. One German artist filmed himself cutting off his penis, one inch at a time. It was a statement of some kind, I suppose. Bold, original and stupid. (He died, of course.)

I found the ideas in this chapter quite helpful in understanding the problems I see in broken marriages where “my happiness” is more important than our children, and where “self understanding” is more important than self sacrifice or service or understanding another. Our generation took pride in the overthrow of conventional wisdom, and now we’ve paid a price. The funny thing is, we thought we were all being so original. But our behavior was rooted in ideas as old as mankind, voiced more than a century earlier and shaped by a pop media that rejoiced in its power to influence.

There is power in the idea of freedom. But a deeper self-understanding reveals that we are less free than we would like to believe. And though freedom is a wonderful thing, to put it on a pedestal as the ultimate value is a truth out of balance. Someone still has to fix the toilet, and keep the bills paid. Guess that means that eventually one has to grow up.