Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life – cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage, moral conherence, a sense of social responsiblity. As Walter Truett Anderson remarks, “It’s amazing how strongly the fashion has shifted – about 180 degrees from the celebrating of inner-directed individualism,... Read more

Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life – cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage, moral conherence, a sense of social responsiblity. As Walter Truett Anderson remarks, “It’s amazing how strongly the fashion has shifted – about 180 degrees from the celebrating of inner-directed individualism,... Read more

The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern politics is about the resurgence (in France in 1789 or thereabouts) and the retreat (in France in 1918 or thereabouts) of Horace’s poetic claim, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ( Odes , Book 3, Ode 2). The shift... Read more

In his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd , David Reisman divided humanity into three parts: the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed. The last were distinguished from the first by the fact that they looked to the present rather than to the past for direction: “What is common to all other-directeds is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual – either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and... Read more

Is solitide a prerequisite for the rise of individualism? If someone is never actually alone, can he ever conceive of himself as being defined in isolation and separation from others? This line of questioning might give some part of the explanation for the rise of individualism in the modern world. George Duby writes that in the middle ages “People crowded together cheek by jowl, living in promiscuity, sometimes in the midst of a mob. In feudal residences there was no... Read more