PINKER

Many novels from the mid-18th to the early 20th century played out the struggles of individuals to overcome the suffocating norms of aristocratic, bourgeois or rural regimes. These include works by Samuel Richardson, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Theodor Fontane, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Hardy, Anton Chekhov and Sinclair Lewis. After urbanized Western society had become more tolerant and cosmopolitan, the tensions were played out again in popular culture’s treatment of small-town American life, such as in songs by Paul Simon(“In my little town I never meant nothin’ / I was just my father’s son”), Lou Reed and John Cale (“When you’re growing up in a small town / You know you’ll grow down in a small town”) and Bruce Springsteen (“Baby, this town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap, a suicide rap”). It was played out yet again in the literature of immigrants, including works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud and then by Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

Today we enjoy a world of personal freedom these characters could only fantasize about, a world in which people can marry, work and live as they please. One can imagine a social critic of today warning Anna Karenina or Nora Helmer that a tolerant cosmopolitan society isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that without the bonds of family and village they’ll have moments of anxiety and unhappiness. I can’t speak for them, but my guess is they’d think it was a pretty good deal.

As people become better educated and increasingly skeptical of authority, they may feel unmoored in a morally indifferent cosmos.