The Discipline of Place
Caleb Stegall
January 1, 2003
Commencement speakers sum up the wisdom of the age, and last May Pulitzer Prize–winning author Anna Quindlen did so with particular clarity. "I have seen your salvation, and it is you," she told the graduating seniors of Sarah Lawrence College. "Custody of your life belongs in full to you and you alone. Do not cede it to anyone else," she warned. "Why should you march to any lockstep? Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse … because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its tympani is saying." For Quindlen, conformity of any kind is our original sin, and salvation comes when we discover and express an authentic self unencumbered by the demands of others.
But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the more intensely and dogmatically our culture has embraced the freedom to march wherever our hammering hearts take us, the less free we have become. John Adams wrote that should the citizens of this country surrender "for any course of time to any one passion, they may depend upon finding it, in the end, a usurping, domineering, cruel tyrant." For most of Quindlen's audience the realization may dawn too late that they are not, in fact, a triumphant phalanx marching together for their rights, but a confused assortment of individuals cut off from family, community, and every other meaningful connection.
In fact, one has to wonder why Quindlen herself has not noticed that unrestrained individualism is on the defensive. Alarmed by individualism's less appealing fruits—corporate fraud, sensationalist television, sexual licentiousness, and voter apathy, to name a few—everyone from communitarian activists ...
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