Some thought on the the We-I balance and Covid19 in the USA stirred by reading Individualism, and Collective Self Perception in the USA by Stephen Mennell.
Understanding what Norbert Elias brings to an appreciation of a national culture is really useful in trying to make sense of some aspects of America’s current predicament. In the balance between an individualistic response to the threat of Covid19 and the need for state intervention America seems unable to function. In his paper Stephen Mennell draws on work he did earlier with the great Eric Dunning and helps us to understand how the myth of rugged individualism and the sovereign individual has shaped what Elias calls the We-I balance :
In his paper (PDF here) Stephen Mennell “argued that American habitus has been formed during a very long-term, virtually unbroken, experience of the USA becoming more and more powerful vis-à-vis its neighbours. The USA’s overwhelming military, political, and economic power in the world today is a source of great national pride to most Americans, usually in a largely unreflective way. This abundance of power, so taken for granted, appears to distort American perceptions of themselves and others. In accordance with Elias’s model of established-outsider relations, Americans have tended to employ a sort of praise-gossip to construct a very favourable we-image, or collective self-image, a picture of their own virtue and superiority. It makes it especially difficult for them to understand why such a large proportion of the world’s population hates America and the wreckage it has made of the world order. Frederick Jackson Turner traced the individualism that is so often seen as a main characteristic of American national character, tending towards the “antisocial” and an “antipathy to control,” to the experience of the minority of Americans who pushed the frontier westwards in the 18th and 19th centuries. I have argued its foundations are broader than that. The USA’s growing power and wealth, along with the immense opportunities it has offered to its citizens over more than two centuries, have given them a sense of their own power and superiority. This long-term trend may be about to change for the first time since the beginnings of European settlement in North America. The military superiority of the USA will endure for at least several decades more, but its economic and political domination is no longer quite as unchallenged as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is generally expected that China, in particular, will in a relatively short time surpass the USA in the size of its economy. The future may bring unaccustomed national humiliations. Indeed, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 were, besides acts of mass murder, intended as such humiliations. In that light, it appears likely that the USA will become an even more dangerous force in world affairs than it has been in the first decades of the 21st century. For, as Norbert Elias pointed out,
the fortunes of a nation over the centuries become sedimented into the habitus of its individual members. Sociologists face a task here that distantly recalls the task that Freud tackled. He attempted to show the connection between the outcome of the conflict-ridden channeling of drives in a person’s development and his or her resulting habitus. But there are also analogous connections between a people’s long-term fortunes and experiences and their social habitus at any subsequent time. At this layer of the personality structure – let us for the time being call it the “we-layer” – there are often complex symptoms of disturbance at work which are scarcely less in strength and in capacity to cause suffering than the neuroses of an individual character. (Elias 2013, 24)
Moreover, in a remark that was prescient and piquant in light of Britain’s vote in the 2016 referendum to give up its membership of the European Union, Elias observed that “Britain in the recent past is a moving example of the difficulties a great power of the first rank has had in adjusting to its sinking to being a second- or third-class power” (2013, 6). There is no danger in the foreseeable future of the USA becoming a second- or third-class power, but all power is relative, and a relative decline vis-à-vis other powers may be experienced as humiliating by individual Americans. That is one significance of the success of Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” The danger is that, while his presidency may help the rest of the world to view America in a more realistic and less deferential way, it may also make it even more difficult for Americans, looking out, to see themselves as others see them.
O, wad some Power the giftie gie
us To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
– Robert Burns, To a Louse
Source: Stephen Mennell Individualism, and Collective Self Perception in the USA