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Individualism and America: the news from L.A.

Article Excerpt
In my parting note to readers as editor of this magazine ["Note from a Worldwatcher," January/February 2005], I wrote that my wife Sharon and I were moving from the East Coast to southern California, where we planned to build a house. Putting to work an abundance of ideas accumulated through my years at Worldwatch, I envisioned erecting a structure of native stone and recycled wood, harnessing solar and wind energy, and flanked by shade trees for natural cooling and of course an organic vegetable garden.

Now, more than two years after buying a piece of land and drawing up our plans, we still do not have a building permit. Our efforts to get one have been an education in one of the most fundamental of human struggles: the tug-of-war between the very individualistic desires of people building their own families and homes, and the powerfully conforming forces we create as we build institutions.

That struggle has always been one of the central themes of American political life. Liberals want stronger regulation of air and water quality; conservative business owners want the Environmental Protection Agency to get off their backs. On the other hand, conservatives want tougher regulation of what you inhale (unless it's just polluted air), or what you do for sex, while liberals want the government to get out of our homes and bedrooms. The tension cuts both ways.

Individualism can go to pathological extremes (National Rifle Association members attending town council meetings with guns on their hips) and so can institutional co-option (young Americans following orders to invade and shoot up a country they know virtually nothing about, for reasons their leaders no longer seem to remember). In a polarized country in a polarized world, it's hard to keep one's balance.

In my efforts to get a building permit, this tug-of-war has given me the psychological equivalent of a badly separated shoulder. Pulling in one direction, there's a great urge to get to work with my own hands--a very individualistic desire that may nonetheless trace all the way back to when one of my Homo habilis ancestors first picked up a rock and stared at it briefly. With precious little frontal lobe under his sloped forehead, he'd have experienced no dawning epiphany at that point--but the long journey to "what I can do" would have begun.

On the other hand, there's the County of Los Angeles, which issues building permits and enforces encyclopedic building codes of a sort that never existed for the first 10,000...