On Independence and Dependency

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about how we feel about being dependent on people, or not being independent.

Our contemporary society values independence. The Declaration of Independence as the founding document of America, and that ideal of being free-standing, defines our history, influencing our values in ways that continue to the present. But many Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians believe everyone should be able to work and take care of themselves and don’t like the notion that some people might depend on the state for food stamps, Medicaid or other government services. They feel each citizen should be able to stand on their own, or so that kind of thinking goes.

And then there are people who don’t like being dependent on someone else, financially or emotionally, which in my experience are generally men since women too often acculturate to being the ones who nurture and serve. For example, there are people who avoid romantic commitment because they don’t want to be tied down. All these phenomena are part of something deep in our western culture, the ideal of the autonomous individual—independent, self-governing and free—which is an extension to our free, independent nation.

The autonomous, free-standing individual has not always been either the norm or an ideal, and still isn’t in many cultures. But a seismic cultural change occurred in the transition from the medieval to the modern worlds when we inherited the idea that we are or should be autonomous creatures. The Enlightenment, beginning with John Locke in the late seventeenth century, emphasized individual liberty and rights. But even Enlightenment ideas grew out of the earlier Protestant Reformation, which emphasized the importance of the individual and insisted that the individual believer be free to engage God and the Bible directly, rather than through priests, rituals and the institution of the church. As a result, we’ve come to consider ourselves autonomous, free and in control. But are we? Do we deserve to be? Is it even possible?

In one assertion of our freedom we try to control nature but it is more apparent with every “natural disaster,” whether it be flooding, tsunamis, fires, earthquakes, etc., that we are not in control, even as our actions affect nature, as in the human hand in “climate change.”  Even to deny our part in climate change is another assertion of our independency, our unaccountability.  Yet we live in a natural environment—and a social one, in which everything is interconnected. We are always necessarily involved with others, affecting them and being affected by them. As John Donne famously wrote in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), “no man is an island, entire to himself.”

And yet, how many of us like feeling dependent? As we move from being children to adults, isn’t our goal to become independent? We struggle to be on our own, to be free.  To be financially self-reliant and not beholden to our parents any longer, even if we love them.  I see my college students, pulled between loving their parents while longing to be independent, no longer needing help from them. But it’s harder and harder for adult young people to afford living on their own, to have their own apartments, let alone buy homes, without being financially dependent on their parents.

The twinned issues of independence and dependency hits close to home for me too.  I have been grateful to be earning my own money, though like many people I fear that money will run out. But I’m now a caretaker for my husband, riddled with neurological disease. For the last year and a half he has lost so much of his independence.

My husband is dependent on me—or someone—for virtually everything. I hire aides, so I can continue working and keep some of my independence. But the more he depends on me, I lose some of my freedom too and I struggle against this. But for my husband, the dependency is depressing. He says he feels as if he’s in a prison. Some people seem to accept dependency, gracefully.  I remember my mother, when she was ninety, bedridden and silenced by Alzheimers, but she found a place of calm. In the first years, she cried as she felt something happening to her, but gradually she accepted things, didn’t struggle. I’m certainly not like that. I’m fierce about my independence, which admittedly makes caregiving so hard for me.

Watching my husband struggle with his loss of independence has affected my teaching, most markedly in how I approach the figure of Satan in John Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost. He is glorious and strong in the first books of the epic. My students recognize that Satan is not really the hero of Paradise Lost, though the Romantic poets thought that he is. Yet there’s no ignoring that he’s much more “likeable” than Milton’s cool God— as my students say, he’s “relatable.”  What strikes me now more than ever is how he hates dependency. In his soliloquy early in Book 4, Satan confesses his inability to accept having “a debt immense of endless gratitude [to God], / So burdensome, still paying, still to ow” (ll 52-3). I ask my students: How do you like being dependent on your parents? They smile or shrug or frown. How do you feel about having an immense “debt” from college that you worry you may never be able to pay?  These are not abstract issues, but personal, and deeply worrying.

Satan hates the idea of being dependent on God, of not being self-sufficient.  In book 5 (line 860) he tries to claim that he was not “created” but “self-begot.” The ultimate fantasy of freedom! As Satan powerfully expresses the agony of interminable, forced dependency, Satan’s words hit home for my students.

Of course, all religions teach that we are dependent on a “higher power.” 12-step “recovery” programs insist that we must give up our dependency on alcohol or sex or food and instead put our trust in God. As some of my friends say, “let go, let God.” Yet isn’t there a pull between wanting to be taken care of and wanting to control how we live our lives—even how our lives will end?

Well, I too fear becoming dependent, having worked so hard to establish a certain independence even within the confines of marriage. Caring for my husband has taught me, above all, my personal limits, and that I would absolutely hate being in his position, always dependent on others.

I remember a nightmare I had twenty years ago, while my mother was confined to her bed in the nursing home: In my dream, I was sitting in a large, pale yellow padded high-chair, in the middle of a four-lane street, as the traffic swirled around me.  I was strapped in, unable to move. Even in my dream, I realized what the dream was about—my fear of being paralyzed, of being at the mercy of other forces and reduced to the point of being a large helpless baby in a diaper.