INDIVIDUALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Hyper-individualism characterizes our society. It has led to the disintegration of organizations and a plague of loneliness. We need to rediscover our bond to others, its richness and obligations.

I am a uniformitarian. In other words, I believe that the laws of nature are the same everywhere, from the realm of the smallest particles to the outer reaches of the most remote galaxies. Laws that govern physical and chemical activity here on earth are the same ones that are operative throughout the universe. Those that pertain now are the same laws that pertained in the past.

The concept of uniformitarianism emerged in the nineteenth century out of the field of geology. But what can be understood as a scientific concept is also a metaphysical one. Reality, though highly complex, is uniform. No miracles, no supernaturalism, no interceding deity to change the course of nature. So I believe. I have long felt that this view of reality is both true as well as elegant.

But what pertains in the natural world does not necessarily apply to the social realm and to the values we hold. What comes to mind are the views of the historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin explains in his book of essays, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, that he once believed in the coherence of values, what he frames as the Platonic ideal. He defines it as follows:

“...all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path toward the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another – that we knew a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. In the case of morals, we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe.”

The underlying assumption is that the uniformity of the natural world and its laws are applicable to the realm of values and morals. But Berlin came to the conclusion that this view is false. He moved away from the structured compatibility pertaining to morals when he came upon the thought of Nicolo Machiavelli. Living at time when the rule of Italian princes was precarious and they were readily dethroned, Machiavelli described the character traits the ruler must possess if he were to retain power. The prince, Machiavelli wrote, needed to be resourceful, courageous and ready to seize opportunities. He needed to be an exemplar of pagan, manly virtues. He must possess what Machiavelli referred to as virtú.

Berlin further notes that Machiavelli contrasted the virtues he espouses for the prince with Christian virtues. The latter include humility, acceptance of suffering, unworldliness, and the hope of salvation in an afterlife. Machiavelli came to the conclusion that there can be no compatibility between virtǘ and Christian virtues. Though Machiavelli knew which values he himself favored, there is no overarching criterion that would determine which set of values was better than another. One simply had to choose.

Berlin found Machiavelli's conclusions compelling and so do I. There is no ultimate, grand uniformity that pertains to conflicts of values; however this conclusion shatters my yen for coherence.

One area wherein this incoherence plays itself out in my life and thought pertains to the concept of individualism. In my younger years I was a staunch defender of the individual and individualism. This commitment found expression, most of all, in the my defense of individual rights and civil liberties. Long ago, I became a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and was actively engaged with the organization in defending free speech and freedom of religion. I retain my membership in the organization to this day.

In the 1970s, I discovered human rights mostly through the work of Amnesty International (AI). I saw the work of that organization as transposing the ideals I defended domestically to the international sphere. As the ACLU rooted its work in the Bill of Rights, AI viewed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the foundational source of its principles.

Human Rights became a mainstay of my life's work. I became a member of Amnesty International and for twelve years was the chairman of one of its adoption groups, a group that I had founded. Such groups were dedicated to winning the freedom of those termed by AI as “prisoners of conscience,” i.e. those men and women imprisoned because of their ethnicity, religion, or political ideas, provided they had not advocated violence. Propelled by my activism, for 20 years I taught human rights in the graduate division of Columbia University and at Hunter College. On at least four occasions I traveled to Costa Rica to teach human rights to graduate students at the University for Peace founded by the United Nations.

The critical point is that rights are vested in the individual. The human rights regime does incorporate the idea of rights possessed by groups, but would maintain that such group rights are not technically human rights and need to be understood from an aligned but different set of values. By definition, liberal democracy is grounded in the rights of persons as individuals.

Each individual is the center of his or her own life experience. The political centrality of the individual is almost self-evident. It is we as individuals who experience and interpret our world. When pain is inflicted on us, it is we, as individuals, who suffer it. It is our own subjective, individual experience that makes all the difference, and it is our own individual life, with perhaps a few extraordinary exceptions, that we value more than anything else. Moreover, we understand the individual to be a free, autonomous agent who possesses the liberty to direct her or his life as she pleases. Each person possesses freedom and agency, uncoerced by the state, by others or by society. And in this freedom is vested the person’s dignity. As the 19^th century philosopher of liberty John Stuart Mill so eloquently put it, “each man should be free to pursue his own plan of life.”

What this implies is that rather than being absorbed into society, the individual in her freedom stands somewhat apart from society, outside of society, and has the freedom and agency, as Spinoza stated at the dawn of the modern era, “to think what he wants, and to do what he thinks.”

These ideas need to be cherished, upheld, and defended with the greatest militancy. Because it is in this idea of the individual and individual rights that our freedom and democracy rests, as well as the derivative values such as justice and equality. It is the basis of our civil liberties. If we lose the defense of the individual in the political sense, then we are paving the way for oppression and tyranny.

Perhaps no society, no nation, has appropriated this modern invention of individualism and taken it to greater extremes than the United States. It lies at the heart of the American spirit and presupposes a particular way of life, one that implies a whole set of values.

But there are derivative values that can devolve from this political understanding of the individual and his or her relation to society. They begin to shade into a different understanding of individualism, which, if brought to an extreme, may conflict with very important values and may not be so attractive.

Let me give some examples. The idea of the individual does imply, to varying degrees, that the individual person stands outside of society and, in a certain sense, stands against society. This can be construed as a zero-sum game. What society gains comes at the expense of the individual and what the individual gains comes at the expense of society.

Such a notion of the individual can imply that I am totally sovereign over my own life and I can do as I please with it as long as I am not doing harm to anyone else. In short, my sole allegiance is to myself, and if this idea is taken to an extreme, I owe nothing to society or to anyone else. This concept of the individual is the basis of libertarianism.

When it comes the heated issue of abortion, I conclude that many advocates of a woman’s right to choose would adopt the position that a woman’s body belongs to her individual self alone and not to the society, the state or the fetus. Many would support the law enacted by New Jersey and eight other states that allows for physician assisted suicide under certain stringent conditions. At bottom, the right to suicide is based on the notion that the individual’s life and her choice to end I belongs to the individual alone and not to society, the state, her family, or to God. Likewise, we invoke individual rights when it comes to speech, (with few exceptions) religious conscience, freedom from slavery or torture, and a range of other immunities that individuals hold against society and the state.

Here many of us would concur with the libertarian position rooted in a stark and absolute, or almost absolute, sense of individualism. As a matter of rights, the person is accountable only to himself or herself.

But I suspect that when it comes to issues pertaining to the economy, we very same people begin to have lots of problems with the unfettered, sovereign individual whose only allegiance or accountability is primarily or solely to himself. We know through painful experience where this application of individualism, as it pertains to the market, leads. It leads, inevitably, to a privileged few becoming extraordinarily wealthy and powerful, while the vast majority grow increasingly impoverished. Free market, laissez-faire capitalism, which places individualism at its center, is a powerful engine in creating wealth, but it inevitably kills around the edges.

This reality opens the door to what I refer to as individualism in a social sense. It also brings to the fore the previously mentioned conflict of irreconcilable ideas: the jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces to not come together in place.

While we need to defend individualism as a basis for individual political rights as militantly as we can, individualism in the social sense, what I would call “radical individualism,” or “hyper-individualism,” is very problematic. True enough, America often glorifies the individual. The classic example is the icon of the stoic cowboy, who rides alone and often engages in heroic adventures. Or Americans often point with pride to American genius, creativity and inventiveness that emerges from the freedom vested in individuals to pursue their dreams, although, I would contend, that this praise of individual creativity is often based in fiction in the sense that American individual accomplishment often rests on social contributions made by others. Barack Obama eloquently pointed to this fiction, and the social nature of ostensible individual achievement, when he stated the following during his first run for the presidency:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

But the negative side of radical individualism becomes clear by invoking several extreme cases. If I am a radical individualist and thereby feel that I am accountable to no one but myself, this might lead to a situation, for example, in which I am walking along, see a small child drowning in a shallow pool and do absolutely nothing to save him on the grounds that we are all individuals who owe nothing to anyone but ourselves. If I walk on by and do nothing, so be it. In a legal sense, I may be within my rights in that there is no law that forces me to be a Good Samaritan. But in a moral sense, we would conclude that such a person was morally deficient or depraved to let the child drown because he felt no accountability to the welfare of the child or because he just had his pants dry cleaned and didn’t want to get them soiled.

Individualism, seen from this perspective, concludes that we are, as individuals, totally separate from other human beings, we are exclusively responsible only to and for ourselves and we survive or thrive based on individual power, privilege, luck, and perhaps our cunning, aggression, ruthlessness, competitive instincts and unbridled egoism.

Such radical individualism portrays the individual person as standing alone in a world and society which are essential hostile and combative. What the philosopher Thomas Hobbes referred to as a “war of each against all.” Moreover, it is also a formula for isolation and loneliness. Raise this portrayal to the level of society and, in my view, we get to see where America, in the current era, has ominously moved. Loneliness has become a plague in American life. It contributes to “deaths of despair” with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. But it also has led to the shredding of institutional life, a phenomenon that the political theorist, Robert Putnam, analyzed thirty years ago but has greatly escalated in our time. And as Hannah Arendt theorized, people alone create fertile ground for the emergence of authoritarianism.

It is a philosophy of the individual and society which I personally reject, even as I defend the rights of the individual in a political sense. Rather, I see the individual as not standing alone, but as deeply embedded in social environments - within families, communities (both those into which we are born and those which are created), and institutional frameworks that are integral to society, such as the workplace, schools, and other organizations which we are part of or chose to join. In short, we live in web of social relations and we are profoundly dependent on other people and society as a whole, including those generations that came before us.

Examples of this dependence are endless. No individual had to invent the language that he or she speaks. It was handed down to us as an endowment or gift from the linguistic culture into which we are born. We are proud of the values we hold and espouse, and cherish them as a product of our experience, our intelligence and our original thinking. But this conclusion is, in great measure, a product of blind egoism. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the values we hold are greatly molded by the culture we inhabit, the family we were born into, and the values of those we are exposed to. If we were born into a different culture and in a different time and place, we would think very differently. Socially speaking, our individual selves are like the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface is the funded endowments of society we receive and rest upon, and what is distinct to us as individuals is, for the most part, taking what comes from others and perhaps rearranging it in somewhat distinctive ways. Much of who we are is an internalization of others. We are individuals, yes, but we are also social creatures at the same time - biologically, culturally, psychologically and in many other ways. That which is individually unique to us is to be cherished and respected, but I would argue it constitutes a small fraction of what makes us up. As the poet John Dunne remarked, “No man is an island…” And I believe this is pervasively true.

Rather than see the individual as separate from society, I would argue, that without community, without others, there can be no individual. It is my view that our individuality is forged out of active engagement with others and active engagement with communities. Becoming who we are is a dynamic, social activity.

Likewise, I would argue that while in the political sense the individual is free, in a social sense there can be no freedom outside of society and the conditions within which the person lives out his or her life. Being free has a great deal to do with my ability to exercise my capacities. But if society has relegated me to poverty, or deprives me of education, my freedom is greatly curtailed. My freedom exists within society and not aloof or independently from it.

When it comes to the question of to whom am I responsible, to whom am I accountable, I would argue that, by virtue of our social natures, just as we inhabit a web of social relations, so we morally inhabit a web of moral obligations. I believe in what the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel refers to as "the encumbered self." I believe in what I would refer to as associative obligations. In other words, every relationship I inhabit comes with incumbent duties to others. Parents have obligations to their children, children to their parents; employers to their employees and coworkers; friends to friends, government to its citizens and citizens to their government. And in the widest circle, human beings have an obligation to human beings, both known to us and to strangers. And even beyond the human realm, especially urgent in our times, I believe we have a responsibility to nature and the natural environment which gives us life, sustains us and on which we are dependent. This may take us into dabbling with a spiritual sensibility of sorts, but that, I don't think, is necessarily objectionable. In fact, recognizing and acting on our obligations to others can deepen and enrich our lives.

At a time when society is badly fractured, when organizations are shredding, when families are under stress, and loneliness is a contemporary plague, we need to rebuild social relations. We need to rediscover the importance of obligation, and those restraints that enhance life and life's meaning.

This will come, not as a result of a grand revolution, but by the daily decisions we make in the smaller arenas of life. It will come as we gain a clearer awareness of what we owe to others with whom we share society and act upon it.