PSU Magazine Spring 2004

vantage point offered by the sociological perspective. Americans seem to have an innate resistance to it, especially those Americans who are fervently committed to the morality of laissez-faire capital– ism-to pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps. My suspicion is that these difficulties in understanding derive from our widely held but rather naive ideas about individualism, ideas that are strongly nurtured by our common culture and political ideologies of both left and right. A clue to this naivete can be found in an error that Cooley himself unwit– tingly makes in the first part of his statement-that "an individual is an abstraction unknown to experience." Cooley is mistaken here in two impor– tant ways. The first is that we believe that we do know and experience indi– viduals; the second is that we believe that we experience these individuals not as abstractions but as real, concrete entities. We believe these things because of the human tendency toward what philosopher John Dewey called "mis– placed concreteness" as well as what some wag subsequently referred to as a "hardening of the categories. " That is, we tend to see the world in terms of its immediate, physical appearance, and since people appear to come individu– ally packaged in separate corporal con– tainers called bodies, we mistakenly conclude that people are such separate entities. And once committed to these mistaken perceptions, we tend to per– sist in believing them, often oblivious to all kinds of evidence to the contrary. We Americans display a passionate predilection-eloquently sacralized in our Declaration of Independence-to see a group as really just an assemblage of individuals who have voluntarily agreed to forego some of their individ– ual "unalienable rights" in order to create-and become members of-that particular group. 8 PSU MAGAZINE SPRING 2004 Michael Toth has taught sociology at Portland State for the past 14 years. In other words, we tend to assume that individuals exist first , and that groups then come into being if-and usually only if-these individuals trans– fer some of their innate and "unalien– able" personal and independent sovereignty to the group. Thinking they have thus created the group, the indi– vidual members conclude that they are equally free to withdraw from the group whenever they might choose. Perhaps nowhere is this view spon– sored more perilously than by those who argue that the Constitution guarantees an "unalienable right" to bear arms. A bumper sticker often displayed by such advocates states: "Guns Don't Kill People; People Kill People." That of course is true-so far as it goes. The fact is that people kill people-and in the United States, especially, they do so mostly with guns. To argue that the group-the larger society-has no prerogative to impose restrictions on individual behav– iors is clearly silly, if not absurd. Quite likely each of us can remem– ber some occasion in our youth when we thought up what we were con– vinced was the invincible argument against what we were equally con– vinced was an unjust parental demand: "I don't have to do that (whatever it is) because I didn't ask to be boml " What we were proclaiming, of course, was that the family's rules didn't apply to us because we had never agreed to belong to the family group and therefore their rules were not binding on us. But, of course, each of us quickly found out how wrong we were ... and how wrong we ultimately are when we try to assert that argument. French sociolo– gist Emile Durkheim provided a very instructive name for this fundamental characteristic of those groups into which we are born. He called it "the uncontracted contract." The shrewdness of both Cooley and Durkheim is in their recognition that we are both individual and social at the same time. In fact , Durkheim reversed what so many of us in the West see as the usual-and thus presume to be the "natural"-relationship between the individual and the group. It is not the individual's existence but the group's existence that is primary, Durkheim claimed; only after the group's version of reality is established are the group's members then granted whatever degree of individualism the group deems appropriate. Durkheim would explain the emphasis on individualism in America as much more the result than the cause of American society; in the U.S., indi– vidualism is a primary group value. Here is a fine irony which we may not be particularly keen in appreciating. Yet we actually acknowledge this causal sequence when we claim that our group-we Americans-really believe in the value of the individual. So we are forced to concede Cooley's observation: an individual is an abstraction-there is in reality no such thing as an individual conceived of as separate from others. The sociological perspective argues for a much more