The rugged individual of American lore has taken a beating lately. Many people of my generation, who are not just individualistic but rebelliously so, have realized the worth of community and tend to look scathingly on the mythos we were brought up to believe in. On the other hand, collectivism — which is a sham version of organic community — has always been attractive to a certain set, usually those who cling to a Marxist mythos instead. But it’s my contention that as American individualism goes the way of dust, our community blows away with it. Or maybe it has already blown away, and here I am beating a dead horse (because, as everyone knows, mixed metaphors involving the winds of time can and should involve beating horses — but why would anyone beat live horses, anyway?! That’s cruel.) Individualism is a cultural value, but it’s cultural largely to pre-WWII era Americans. Now that eighty years have passed since the milestone of the 1940s shifted everything, I’m not sure we can go back.
What is the mythos behind the Rugged Individualist? From whence desert spring does it sally forth from? Now I’m bringing all my metaphors into a wonderful picture: dust in the wind, horses, and desert springs. The Rugged Individualist was the type of person who could uproot himself from a home in the east and travel to the west, where he had no roots, where there were quite likely no immediate water sources, where plains met deserts and everybody got just a little dusty on the trip. But let’s hope nobody beat his horses to keep them plodding. Communities formed around these rugged people; they could survive on their own, but it was much better with likeminded individuals surrounding them.
What happened in the 1940s to change things? Well, a large federal government rallied the nation to pull together as a unit and support the war effort. We already had a large federal government; we gave into that many years before the 1940s. But there wasn’t the push for working together like in the war years. Families rationed and went without; children collected things; women went to work in the factories. This sort of communalism probably also lent itself to socialism being more widely accepted. After all, not only was there a not-so-distant memory of the first world war, but also of the Great Depression, and socialist writers could subtly alter everyone’s memories with their propaganda. Yeah, I think I’ve written before about how much I despise writers like Steinbeck. I’ll give him a pass for now because there was an inspiration for this post, and it wasn’t The Grapes of Wrath. Not really. It was a glimpse of the odd changing times I witnessed last weekend.
Sometimes, my husband and I go to Lubbock for our anniversary. It just so happens to be one of the closest big cities outside of Roswell, where we live. Now Lubbock is the epitome of a ranching and oil town — a real western cowboy stop. I mean, yeah, we’ve got the history of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett in my county, but Lubbock has a similar culture, and it happens to be in Texas. Or I thought it had a similar culture but was more politically right than where I live. I do live in one of the only red areas of New Mexico, for the record, but there will always be the blue bleed-over, simply because of being inside the borders of a blue state. I thought Lubbock was culturally more red until I decided to visit one of their churches for Mass. The Lubbock diocese rules are astonishingly authoritarian and collectivist in nature. I was annoyed by even the modicum of rules in my own diocese, but these rules are much more extreme with pews still cordoned off, no allowance for individuals to socially distance themselves on their own, and no freedom of movement. By that, I mean the parishioners are forced to wait in line to be ushered to a seat, and they aren’t allowed to leave until they are ushered out. And despite that the governor had nixed the mask mandate, masks are still mandated inside the churches for everyone, regardless of vaccination status.
But this is an interesting conundrum, isn’t it? The Catholic church isn’t really collectivist; in fact, most Catholics are opposed to communism on principle, but it is communitarian in nature and has a hierarchical authority structure. So while I do believe the larger church culture will come into play, the local culture also influences how Catholic churches behave in a community. Parishes are both outside and inside the culture. It’s a balancing act, I think, the same way that Christians as individuals are supposed to be operating in the world but not of the world. But any church is going to operate as a microcosm of the people in the community and what they will accept. From my glimpse at Lubbock through the lens of the Catholic church, they are willing to accept a lot of collectivism. Actually, I saw this at the local mall, too, where the stores were operating very much like the church with long lines of people waiting to get in and masks required.
It was disheartening to me because I haven’t yet been able to reject the Rugged Individualist ideal — and there seems no place left where this is a reality. My husband and I keep looking and thinking — oh, maybe Wyoming is the last bastion or South Dakota or even Alaska. But I imagine even those places have been influenced by the long years since WWII. It really has been a long time, so much time to lose the good aspects of individualism, such as being able to repair your own roof and car, grow your own food, and sew your own clothes from cloth you wove yourself by the light of candles you also fashioned. Those were the days, right? I don’t know. I’ve never lived it. But I used to listen to my grandparents and great grandparents talk of people being able to do for themselves and somehow manage to have closer communities around them than we have now…when we wait in line with fifty people we don’t know and don’t care to know and later parrot on social media about it all being for the common good of those people whose faces are obscured by masks.
For the moment, though, I can be grateful that my diocese has pulled their toe from those desert spring waters of collectivism. I doubt very much that’s what it’s really about, though. Oh, maybe it is. Maybe I’m cynical and see the local cultural influence is simply sheer laziness at enforcing authoritarianism. In the past, this laziness has always made New Mexico surprisingly livable….
Jill Domschot 