ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND PRISONS

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a visitor from France to American soil in 1831, along with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. His stated mission was to observe and document the state of American prisons and penitentiaries. It was an odd subject and quite circumscribed in nature. What resulted from his visit was a book titled Democracy in America, published in 1835. This work was a wide ranging set of observations about a nation that had been populated and settled over a relatively short period of time compared to the country from which he hailed. Tocqueville was attuned to the issues of social consequence in his country and abroad. He was involved in the turmoil that rattled French society in the mid-eighteen hundreds and held posts in government at high levels. He seemed to be attuned to the effects of governmental transitions, violent or otherwise. It was this interest as well as an interest in the freedoms government promoted or curtailed that occupied him and to which he turned his prescient critical eye. What he was able to describe about the American character has been passed down to us even today as a legacy of his keen observations. I am not certain that his book on democracy influenced Frederick Jackson Turner in his descriptions of the passing of the frontier in American settlement, but I see it as the nucleus of Turner's portrait of the American character and “rugged individualism.” Both historians drew some conclusions about American society based on the characteristics of its citizens and these, in turn, were further elucidated and updated by Robert Bellah, et. al., in 1985 in their book, Habits of the Heart, a reference to Tocqueville's observations about American mores. That is still quite a long time ago as our history has unfolded. In many ways we are still a “new” country and always will be when compared with other nations and cultures. We seem to be in a continual state of growing pains, experiments, and restructuring. We resemble all other nations and cultures, however, in that we are always in the process of redefining our hopes and our progress, or lack of it. I believe that a way out of the confusion I experience when I examine current events is provided by a look back at sources like the works of Tocqueville, Turner, and Bellah which paint a broad picture of a nation always in flux. The seeds of American culture and character are still present in the soil of our lives together. Some of the seeds become weeds and some become more useful plants that sustain us. It isn't always easy to discern which is which. I believe that the agricultural/botanical/biological metaphor is useful because it can be used to better understand our complicated and often contradictory lives as a national community. The biological reference also allows us to borrow the idea of ecosystem as a way of teasing out what we can observe and understand from what we can't explain but which is part of the overall structure of autopoiesis (a word meaning self-regulating), and homeostasis (biological balance).

I have often thought of American culture (which includes our history) as a collage but I now see that as insufficient to understand the deeper levels of commitment and engagement that characterize us now in the early years of the 21^st century. A collage is a superficial arrangement pasted together and it is easy to portray American life that way, to paste together headlines and short stories about what we do and how we think. But our collective lives are much, much deeper and more profound than that and it takes some hard work to make it more of a sculpture or a defined entity. It takes intention and attention to carve away from the raw block of material what our character is not and to get to the three-dimensional form inside. Our lives are complicated and it isn't always possible to fit all the pieces together to see how it holds together. The idea of an ecosystem suggests that we have a system that does hold together in ways we can observe and in other ways we can't understand, but which are still within the system. As we mature as a nation, we are learning more about who we are and what our character looks like—and what we envision becoming over time.

I think it is as true for a nation as it is for an individual that we can create open spaces as well as prisons for ourselves. Tocqueville came to America with the intention of investigating prison systems but eventually defined aspects of national character (some universal and some particular to the United States) that translated as imprisoning forces for its government as well as for its individual citizens. For instance, he noticed that individualism and pragmatism were part of our character. Among our cultural traditions he also wrote about public-private tensions, the importance of personal success, the insistence on freedom and justice. But he also noted, as with all things, that there were some darker aspects to the loftier attributes of national character. Freedom granted to all was sometimes curtailed in the interests of some individuals whose freedom was borrowed from others. Economic acquisitiveness (greed), freedom from governmental interference, freedom to govern one's own course, and freedom from conforming values and from the past didn't necessarily translate into ideas about cooperation and community. Tocqueville noticed that for all the emphasis on this radical individualism there was an attendant isolationism for individuals who segregated themselves from others in their attempts to express their own freedoms. This tendency often led to a dispersion of effective communal action when it became important to resist authoritarian, administrative despotism or the call for greater social cohesion to protect against the threats of natural disaster or security threats. Individualism, in other words, opened up a vacuum into which more aggressive individuals with personal agendas were able to move and consolidate authority. I think we can see versions of this on the national and international political stages even today.

Similar tensions evolved in public vs. private life, in economics, in the spiritual life of individuals vs. communities of faith, in marriage and family life, in work vs. leisure, in the abandonment of rural life and the move to cities, in the “trigger” issues of personal choice, race (the persistence of slavery's legacies, for instance), gender, and moral values that have come down to us even today as important cultural and societal aspects of the American ecosystem. A biological ecosystem conforms to certain characteristics: dynamic interactions among elements, interactions that are non-linear (small changes can create large effects), modulation of local interactions within the system, feedback of interactive elements, unpredictable behavior of the whole system when compared to the behavior of individual elements, hard to define system boundaries, activation far from equilibrium (implying energy needs to sustain the system as a functioning whole), operating in the present as a result of adaptation to an evolving history, and various elements operating under the influence of local stimuli rather than from the system as a whole. When examined with a culture or society in mind, these same characteristics might also describe social vectors and influences which to my mind are very complex and difficult to understand and difficult, too, to put into a cohesive picture.

The fact that a complex system exists means that we might not understand all its necessary requirements but we can rely on its adaptive vigor for self-maintenance. Systems that don't maintain themselves in ways described above will not persist. And so when I think about how dysfunctional our form of democracy seems at times, I think that it is an ecosystem following an evolution of autopoiesis that can sustain its life. It doesn't mean that its elements won't change, that they will be predictable, and that all the elements will be discernible. It is a source of some psychological discomfort to accept levels of uncertainty in a system that we think should be more transparent and understandable, but we are living now in a time of great uncertainty and we are aware of structures of governance evolving (is dissolving too strong a word?). Our knowledge of change is based on a history of what seemed predictable and at a slower pace of change than what we are now experiencing. But our challenge is to define the changes in terms of a complex adaptive system and rest in the fact that if the changes cannot maintain the health of the entire system with all its different parameters, then the system will no longer exist and another complex system will appear with its own vectors and forces.

I am not sure that thinking about complex adaptive systems in reference to governance will bring any comfort of mind. But this is a different way to see the world as it changes and it allows for hope and possibility of new structures that may, in the process, be more useful and of greater service to the commonweal. I find that thinking in this way also applies to so many other sticky issues that confound us as a society, issues that have existed in one form or another for all of our history and as issues particular to us as human beings. I see challenges in the realms of interpersonal relationships, of status and privilege, of economic imbalances, political partisanship, of gender rights, of race, of social isolation, and the role of women in society, to name just a few. I see each of them as a complex adaptive system interacting with American society as a whole. Each is not isolated from the rest and all are somehow interwoven in the human psyche. They persist in our lives because they have autopoietic mechanisms and forces that give them life. They are continuing to evolve and sometimes at a pace that makes them seem exaggerated and overwhelming. But that is the nature of systems within systems that are given the nutrients they need to survive. Are we able to investigate and explore them deeply enough to understand them better? Do we have the perspective to allow this to happen? To whom do we turn to guide us in this search? Do we do this as a community? Is it even possible for one person (the rugged individualist?) to manage this exploration alone? What elements of the system aid us in our inquiry?

I began this entry with the idea that we often find ourselves imprisoned by boundaries we impose on our lives in one way or another. We would not need prisons if there were a different set of assumptions about what constitutes right and wrong behavior. A different set of “habits of the heart” would lead to different possibilities. I think we can see ourselves in a limited and imprisoning way or we can see how complex our lives are and seek new and different ways of understanding them. Tocqueville and his heirs (and maybe their predecessors at the founding of the republic) make a good case for individual freedom and also for communal engagement, all of which free us from a variety of prisons. No one gets everything and that is a good thing. We are complex beings living in ever more complicated times and knowing more about our capacities for adaptation makes us more resilient and healthier. But, like all healthy complex adaptive systems, this requires energy and the work of self-regulation.