The Desires of a Democratic Man
During the middle of my formative years, I was not a boy of letters, nor did I have any scholarly pretensions behind which to hide. Long after the unadulterated joy I felt at flipping through The Hardy Boys, and long before the sublime discomfort I would find in Dostoevsky, I (as many young men my age) was lost. Few of my thoughts from this time survive to this day. Doubtless, the greatest of these meager few is no thought at all; more a gust of wind which filled my mind, a polestar which I saw in the distance. This polestar was yearning. Rarely did I obey the dictates of reason or seek beauty or honor; no, I was animated solely and agonizingly by that which lay beyond. I did not know what was outside me, and, retrospectively, my attempts to imagine it fit neatly into the most saccharine tropes imaginable: “the other” was unrealizable love—no, death! The predator to whom I had fallen captive, of course, was simply the yearning itself.
I can lay my first attempts to escape this yearning at the feet of two moments towards the end of my time in grade school: the first, coming into possession of my first car; the second, picking up a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. These two moments were understandably connected, and taken together, they had a single end: to realize the latent yearning, to name it and recognize it for its significant strength. The car (though Japanese in make) was a worn-down piece of Americana. A half-decade older than me, it was discovered by my godfather, who, after I bought it, offered to help me restore it to a state acceptable for the state inspection. Accordingly, weekends were spent in his garage, grease-stained hands deep under the hood, and a soundtrack, blowing in over the radio, that belonged to men my age in the 80s. It felt, even at the time, like something out of a movie my parents might show me. After a well-spent fall, my godfather dubiously declared me to be a mechanic and sent me on my way, to drive home in my own car, with all but the most insignificant repairs left (to be ignored until they proved impossible to ignore). I was free.
As I began to drive, I noticed some small changes within myself. My capacity to, at any moment, pursue my most common desires made the substance of these desires very much concrete. They corresponded now to actions, which existed as possibility and which I could choose or ignore. They were not floating under the surface as the vapors of longing had done before, they roiled and rocked the ship upon which I sailed. This historic station wagon, though, also brought about some of my first immersion in personal responsibility: I had a job on weekends; I had to give rides to my friends and family. I came to love the car, the freedom it granted me, and the man I thought that freedom had created. My yearning, of course, did not abate with the realization of its concretion. At long last I had concepts to which I could cling with the strength of my mind, and these held me fast, more so than any airy version had before.
It was soon after this car came to me that I first read On the Road. Prior to my experience with Kerouac, I had felt the appeal of the vague idea known as “The Road Trip,” a sort of American substitute for a European Grand Tour. America was a vast country, and there were thousands of towns to wander through and great big night skies full of stars to stare at while laid on the roof of one’s car. What I came to face, though, in On the Road, was not some glorious account of a road trip or three but the most sublime expression of the thirst that frothed within my soul, which I would finally come to know as the great American yearning. In Sal’s desire to experience all that he could and obsession with living more really than others, I found an image of myself. To begin the final segment of On the Road, Kerouac writes, “Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went.”[1] This draw away from the city, brought about by the gravity of the land pouring forth interminably westward over the continent, was the same that drew me into the unknown, into the great vastness of that which is far from home. Never is this more clear than in the nights spent together by Sal and Dean, where they inevitably bounce from bar to bar, house to house, listening to jazz, chasing women, and stealing cars along the way. There is an instability to it all that makes it great, as if the thrill of the whole endeavor is found in the fact that it simply cannot go on perpetually. Such thrill explains the microcosmic changes of scenery which seem to be necessary, such that within a single night, the search for the new must go on forever. There is only so much novelty to be found, however, and the threshold for tolerating novelty is yet lower than that amount (at least for those not blessed with Dean Moriarty’s gifts). This spirit, I find, is the spirit of America, which yearns for more and more, which reaches west until it can reach no more, and then reaches across the Pacific, which seeks to tame the forces of nature, and most of all to drink in all that the land offers and all that fellow-man offers.
This very spirit seems the same described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. He writes of ambition in democratic societies that “life is ordinarily passed in eagerly coveting pretty objects that one sees within one’s reach.”[2] For Americans, the great aristocratic ambitions do not exist, but that does not lead to a lack of desire in our hearts, no, our longings are turned this way and that at every moment. Absent the reality of fulfilling the passions which draw a nobleman to be a military leader or statesman, we are drawn ever more strongly to the immediately accessible goals of our passions. Thus, we see Dean, without a sense of what sort of life lies at the end of his journeys but continually drawn on past the next hurdle. He leaves one woman for another, then returns to the first. He moves to San Francisco, then Denver, then flees back east. Dean, though, realizes this longing more fully than any other of Sal’s companions. He bucks Tocqueville’s claim that “In democratic societies, the sensuality of the public has taken a certain moderate and tranquil style.”[3] The years have worn on our great nation, and we find in the post-war beatniks a casting aside of the accepted conventions of material well-being. Dean is an intertwined mess of democratic failure to yearn for greatness of soul with an anti-bourgeois desire to get at the raw experiences which constitute the basis of our being. Sal, as his youth concludes, finds himself to be a sensible man, though he may never forget his friend.
The most important question I meant to raise from this all is to what extent we can put our thumb on the experience of living in an American democracy. When we call our desires tame and moderate, they lash out and seek the wildest ends available to them; when we (with Socrates) condemn the frenetic nature of a democratic man, we find ourselves thanking this very frenetic desire for drawing us forward. It was, after all, these experiences of acknowledging and coming to bathe in my desires that brought me to seek that was beyond: to seek to lash my ship to the stable things which man may desire. For Americans, the eternal ends of truth, beauty, and goodness, are often occluded, or, at best, presented as idealistic notions that can be selected, as any other good, in accordance with the dictates of desire; that is, their validity is a matter of taste. It seems to me that the development of taste is essential to rebuilding the draw toward the good life from within the American democracy. Perhaps nothing has come closer, in the internet age of my lifetime, to the aristocratic disdain for the ugly, as the labels of “cringe,” “soy,” and “Reddit.” These labels are, of course, themselves quite ugly, but they show a light at the end of the tunnel. If the negative relation to ugly and unedifying ways of life may rise from the roiling sea of the internet, might it be possible, from the same raw mass of humanity, to produce the corresponding (and much more powerful) noble passions which seek the eternal ends? I admit to having no answer to this question. How is it that the taste for beauty or truth might be cultivated from desire? How can the pleasure of virtue come to be emphasized in the midst of all the more immediate pleasure which can be chosen? Truly, man must be made anew, but he must be drawn to this reformation by his vague desires, brought eventually to the steadiness of true passion.
[1] Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991), 249.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 601.
[3] Tocqueville, 509.