The Pathology Of Modernity: Individualism V. Individuality

Increasingly I am convinced the modern world's traditional Christian and liberal roots have withered so completely that its ethical foundations have collapsed. On this point I agree with some genuine conservatives, few as they are. But unlike these conservatives, I see traditional Christianity as being the root cause of this collapse. There is no going back because modernity arose due to the failings of Christianity to provide a coherent framework for religious life absent the sword, the stake, and the Inquisition.

America's Christian and liberal moral foundations have collapsed. I do not see them being rebuilt on their old foundations. This collapse manifests in some very interesting ways, particularly in the complete moral collapse of those who preach the most about "values."

Consider this example.

Mitt Romney claims Barack Obama said businessmen did not build their businesses themselves, others did. The 'quotation' Romney used to support this claim eliminated crucial parts of what Obama actually said: that no businessperson creates a successful business all by himself . But while Romney's campaign of lies is interesting, something else seems to me even more remarkable.

Romney also trotted forth a number of businesspeople claiming they built their businesses themselves, and owed nothing to anyone. Their claim was easily proved false for two reasons, one more notable than the other. First , his examples often benefited from low interest government loans and even depend on government contracts. This happens over and over again .

These businesspeople are either liars or incredibly obtuse. I think in at least some cases it is the latter, and this is the more critical issue. How could anyone think they created their business, or other major success, all by themselves?

This takes us to issues that point not only to the moral collapse of the conservative movement and a great deal more, it also takes us to why Pagan and similar approaches to spirituality might help heal a culture rapidly falling into nihilism and worse. By emphasizing the importance of the divine feminine as well as the sacred immanence of the earth, insights most clearly associated with Pagan spirituality (but also increasingly characterizing many mainstream traditions that have responded constructively to the spiritual challenges of our time) hold hope for our cultural renewal, if they can keep from being crushed in our current moral collapse into nihilism and the worship of power.

What Makes an Individual?

We are who we are in significant part because of whom we have met, when we met them, and the society and times within which we grew up. I imagine we all can name certain people and experiences that played a decisive role for good or ill in who we are today. Yet many people in their 'individualism' seem blind to this simple observation and its implications.

Western individualism is a secular echo of Protestant Christianity's powerful alienation of people from their world. From this spiritual perspective each of us is ultimately alone in seeking our salvation within a fallen world. As a nation of immigrants whose culture was initially defined in radical Protestant terms, we inherited a large dose of this viewpoint.

As society became increasingly secular this image of individual isolation remained as an unexamined fundamental attitude. Consider how many of our fictional heroes are devoid of lasting relationships. I think this attitude persists because, having learned to think of ourselves in those terms, it became difficult to recognize the importance of when they did not fit.

Yet if you think back, what makes you most individual, what helped create your individuality, are the relationships that helped form your life. What is lacking in the image of the individualist free from social entanglements or relations is precisely what is essential in creating their individuality. But denying what makes us individuals now struts about as individualism.

It Gets Worse

Since the Second World War this individualistic blindness to who we are has been reinforced in a particularly toxic way by the writings of Ayn Rand and her many disciples. Many of us, myself included, read some of her books as teenagers. I found a part of her message invigorating as I strove to get a better sense of who I was in a society that often seemed corrupt and hypocritical. At its best, Rand's writings encouraged us to follow our own drummer come what may, as with architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead . But when closely studied, Rand's message did not honor individuality so much as individualism, the ideology that each person was properly only concerned about their own "self," but without even an attempt to inquire what a 'self' was. Her most extreme literary statement of this view was Atlas Shrugged . In more spontaneous moments she made it clear that individuals did not matter, only those who conformed to her values did. As she said once at West Point:

[The Indians] had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you're a racist if you object . . . You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn't know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. . . . What were [the Indians] fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence; for their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched—to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent . . .

What Rand taught about native Americans could be applied to any who disagreed with her views; and though many might rebel at such a blunt statement, they incorporated elements of her perspective and poisoned their own understanding of what it is to be a person. Today we are reaping the unpleasant results of her Nietzschean nihilism reinforcing what was most blind in our cultural individualism, inherited from Protestantism.

Along the way many Americans forgot what it meant to be a member of society rather than just being out for themselves. It is symbolic that Americans are allowing the right wing, aided by cynical 'liberals', to destroy the most visible benign public institution that symbolizes us all as a people: the Post Office .

"I Am Because We Are."

Individualists like to brag of their competence. There is an irony here. The claim of individual competence is closer to the truth in hunting and gathering societies than today. A 12 th -century American Indian, dropped into a wilderness, would manage much more successfully by himself than a 20 th -century businessman, or even a typical farmer. And yet . . .

And yet these men and women, whose lives depended to a much greater extent than ours on their own personal abilities, were acutely aware they were part of a community, their tribe. From what we know of their lives, ostracism was the greatest punishment. Nor were these people simply interchangeable. Over and over those who have lived among hunter-gatherers have written about their individuality and resourcefulness. The drivel about Indians as collectivistic savages promoted by Ayn Rand and other poseurs of modern 'individualism' was never remotely true.

It is we moderns who are utterly dependent on a society that no human being can understand except abstractly. Those who know how a computer works are unlikely to know how the ingredients to build one are produced from the earth. And those who know parts of that do not know how to build an automobile, or raise wheat in large amounts, and on and on. The division of labor, and the division of knowledge, extends farther now than at any other time. Regarding most things we encounter in our world, we know how to push buttons or pay someone for knowing what we do not in order to help us.

This world expands the realm of choice and so the potential for individuality to flower, but it does so by immersing us within a society we do not understand, did not create, and currently are undermining, in no small part because of the poison of 'individualism' pushing aside genuine respect for individuality. Our individuality grows with our deepening dependence on a society in which our own sphere of competence is a smaller and smaller element of the whole.

There is a Pagan African proverb that I think gets it right: "I am because we are."

Individuality, the "I," is very real, but it is real in a way analogous to how a photon is a particle. Ask certain questions in an experiment and we get results suggesting photons are particles. Other questions suggest they are waves. In fact we cannot visualize what a photon is. And this is without even bringing in quantum entanglement.

Individuals are at least as complex and paradoxical as photons. Individualism is an ideology as wrong headed as believing that photons are only particles, despite the evidence to the contrary.

The worship of individualism explains why even honest people can believe they have accomplished everything that they are on their own merits. It blinds them to the social context that empowered their actions and gave them opportunities they had the insight to see. An American individual is as much a product of the American social ecosystem as a buffalo or coyote is a part of its natural ecosystem. And of course the American social ecosystem depends on the natural ecosystem on which it depends.

But individualism is blind to both the social and the natural ecosystem. As this society becomes more individualistic it becomes less and less capable of maintaining the social and natural ecosystems that make it possible. Hence our society's autistic relationship to the wider world, human and natural alike, and the autistic relationship of all too many Americans to their own society.

As a society we are starving education, undermining equality under the law, destroying democracy, and annihilating the natural world that supports us so that 'individualists' can think they owe nothing to anyone. Perhaps fittingly, autism is growing among our children. It is certainly symbolically fitting that the Republicans have nominated a man who in his inability to relate with other human beings and his propensity to say whatever is useful in the short term, embodies elements characteristic of both sociopathy and autism. And he and his handlers present images of 'independent' businesspeople who live in utter ignorance of what made their successes possible. Mitt Romney and all he stands for perfectly exemplify the Republican right and the final collapse of individualism into nihilism.

Here a Pagan sensibility with its emphasis on divine immanence and the sacred feminine can give us a far more balanced view of our relation to our society and how to think about the problems of the modern world. We depend more on the actions of people we do not know and knowledge that we will never grasp than has any member of any society from any time in the past.

The Pathology of Modernity: Individualism v. Individuality