That reminds me. Hang on.
There.
This guy was really smart. And he said some amazing things about early America that blows every one's mind. In French.
But he did not say, "America is great because America is good." Or hardly anything like it. The type things Tocqueville said were a lot smarter than that. Let's look at some of the things that Tocqueville did say, be amazed, and see the difference in quality. I'll c/p from Wikipedia.
Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders...
Good Lord he read my mind that long ago. That is precisely my experience. That I thought was somewhat unique. And just as I think that I'm permanently settled someone else snaps the rug and I go spinning. That is my life in that paragraph. The first one shown on this page. Man, that was like randomly accessing the Tao Te Ching after five tosses of a coin.
Here's one about English and French.
The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même, mais oui? Back to Americans.
As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
Here's my favorite, about people.
Men in general are neither very good nor very bad, but mediocre... Man with his vices, his weaknesses, his virtues, this confused medley of good and ill, high and low, goodness and depravity, is yet, take him all in all, the object on earth most worthy of study, of interest, of pity, of attachment and of admiration. And since we haven't got angels, we can attach ourselves to nothing greater and more worthy of our devotion than our own kind.
As to the fake quote, it's believed that Tocqueville biographer conflated his own notes for a quote. Reagan used it. Others followed. It's well known to be made up but nobody cares at this point. It sounds good. To them. (but not to me. it's incomplete, a dangling participle) Here's the thing. The people using it want their broader audience to believe their familiarity with Democracy in America when in reality it's too daunting a book and too long a task to take up. Try it if you haven't already, it's density will blow your mind.
16 comments:
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
Not to put too fine a point on it Chip, but you have inadvertently zeroed in on one of the major problems of American education today. Namely, how many Americans today (especially the youth) would even recognize a dangling participle if it slapped them in the face? :)
The one about money hasn't changed in 200 years.
I keep my Tocqueville and my Orwell next to each other up on a high shelf. They sit up there and look down shaking their heads saying 'I told you so'.
Toque's great fear about America was that mediocrity would win. Although win is too strong a term. That mediocrity would wash over and/or wear down all the great individual promontories of achievement in a great leveling. Needless to say that is the progressive project: the attack on the individual in the name of the collective. Have progressives won? Not really. The American spirit is far too anarchic to submit to one size fits all.
I'm with you, dude.
The WikiQuotes page goes through his work chapter by chapter with notable sayings. It is impressive.
Until you get to chapter XVII, and XVIII
I noticed this last night.
He is racist as all H. E. double whipping posts, and I mean it. He is of his time and his his place but he is so f'n wrong on his position it isn't even funny. And it ruins the whole thing, frankly.
And then on the other hand you look at present day situation through his lens and conclude, yes, fine, Fuckhead, but did you have to say it like that? So brutally?
He wrote, that when it comes to development in important areas that he lists, then Caucasian race is clearly superior and beneath them are blacks and indians (there might have been an intervening race, Mexican, I forget) And that slavery is probably best for them and their maximum comfort. But because of this difference if negroes were to be made free then due to their inferiority they will never fit in and so will form their group apart, an inferior group that is permanently resentful of sharp cultural differences and in permanently conflict with the white race.
He mis-prognosticated so much. He underestimated America by so very much, and yet, and yet, through that sepia lens present day reports of trouble spots can make sense. He'd go, "See?"
I haven't read him in a long time, but here's what I remember. In his discussion of the Ancien Regime, he noted that French aristocratic women would bathe and appear naked before their male servants. They looked upon their servants as housebroken animals. Some inequalities are more unequal than others. The class differences in France were more profound and enraging than those found in the English speaking world. Hence the French Revolution.......He claimed that people are more comfortable with a system where no one had any rights versus a system where some people had more rights than others. I read him during the Cold War. His predictions seemed prescient. No one in the Soviet or Red Chinese regimes had any special rights. If you were high up in the Party, you were just as likely to end up in the gulag as an Orthodox priest. No one had any rights. It's a perversion of equality, but people perceive it as equality. A good chunk of humanity chose to live under such systems.
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