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It is good to be shifty in a new country.
Solitude has been the north star for American imaginings. “In all my lectures,” Emerson wrote to himself in his 1840 Journal, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Most Anglo-Americans have sought the privacy and forgotten the infinitude. Individualism, as the social ideology for that particular pursuit of happiness, provided the new United States with a Protestant orientation toward hard work, self-confidence, selfreliance, and upward or outward mobility, while the underlying faith in competitive male dominance supported the task of mastering a continent.11 But this ideology was only the public aspect of a broader rebellion against inherited social authority. From Jefferson's agrarian ideal to our contemporary suburbs, the American experience has been shaped by thousands upon thousands of self-masteries seeking room—what Lewis Mumford has called “the collective search for the private life.”
This pursuit of the separate life was once socially functional, but now it victimizes millions without access to land. The social reasons for individualism have disappeared, yet the psychological gratifications linger on. No more does the individualist do battle against absentee oppression. Rather, dynamics in the patterns of