notes from a commonplace book...

     I've heard that there is an excess of individualism in the modern west. Don't you fall for that. 

     'How were bourgeois values inculcated? In a discussion of the requisites for social stability, John Stuart Mill gave principal emphasis to the need for "a system of education, beginning with infancy and continued through life, of which, whatever else it might include, one main and incessant ingredient was restraining discipline." The key to stability was the subordination of individual interests and whims to the needs and ends of society. Although formal schooling was only a modest part of Mill's wider vision of education, western Europe had achieved through the institution of compulsory primary education almost universal literacy by the end of the century, and it is generally agreed that secular schooling, which was inclined to play down religious training and stress civics and national history, was a major instrument in developing national pride and loyalty. Socialization was also furthered in the second half of the century by a newspaper ress that became available and geared to a mass reading public. Compulsory military service, the idea of a "nation in arms," a cry harking back go the revolutionary wars at the end of the eighteenth century, this, too, made a contribution in France to the socialization process. But most important in the process was the general breakdown of individual self-sufficiency in a mass industrial society, in which the division of employment and labor became the hallmark, and in which the individual came to be enveloped by the institutions and instruments of the state - the schoolteacher, the tax official, the gendarme, or the justice of the peace. The arm of the state was becoming longer and longer and more embracing, and the agens of the state were essentially middle class, whether of a higher or lower echelon. They embodied the middle-class notion of virtue. Thus, most soldiers functioned within the bourgeois world, but so too, of course, did most strategists and military leaders. The Channel ferry that bore George Sherston (Siegfried Sassoon) to France "was happily named Victoria," Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, pg. 186.