THE RISE OF INDIVIDUALISM
Imagine a hotel ballroom, filled
with parallel, white-cloth covered tables, ice-water pitchers, and celebrants,
facing one another, separated by game boards of 64 squares, with up to 32
pieces, a pretend-population of two “races” and of several castes: Kings,
Imagine, if you will, that White
opens with the Queen’s Pawn, apparently desiring a positional battle (“patzer
playing Queen Pawn”) and his opponent counters quickly in the center, accepting
an isolated Queen Pawn for quick mobility and ease of development. Is the pawn strong or weak? It is the individual heckler, battering ram,
self-promoter, yet it lacks the support of its teammates. Or, say, White has the two bishops. Does he open the position immediately, or
close it up temporarily so that it may be opened with greater effect
later? So it goes. When does a pawn center confer more space, and when does it indicate
over-extension? When is less really
more? Life itself is so much like that.
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Individualism, to me, amounts to the
notion that a person may live for his or her own purposes, become an influence
upon others, follow his own path and life, and break away from any station that
would be assigned by “society.” Yet,
individualism only makes sense when there is a surrounding civilization to
relate to. History presents centuries of
men’s attempts to learn to work together to provide a community that really
makes the pursuit of happiness meaningful.
For centuries, this amounted to setting up stable political states,
along with a monetary system, a matrix from which technological process can
emerge.
The role of the individual in
historical analysis is uneven, but it certainly began to emerge in ancient
times, especially with the Greek philosophers, most notably Socrates with his
absorption of the human mind.
Christianity, despite the apparently self-effacing appearance of some
its theology and moral teaching, contributed (especially when pitted against
the Roman society in which it had to survive) ideas which make the notion of
basic human rights take on a driving force in moral thought, even if early
Christians expected the end of time soon.
For example, in the book of Galatians Paul wrote explicitly about
freedom, and some of the parables of Jesus actually have a libertarian flavor.
Perhaps the same ideas can be found in Judaism and other faiths, although the
Old Testament often seems preoccupied with the idea of the Jews as a “chosen
people” who need a collective identity in order for future civilization to
develop around it.
During the Middle Ages, of course,
social progress stalled for hundreds of years, as men backslid in their efforts
to learn to live together productively.
Feudalism and manorialism produced a social structure in which most men
had little hope for better lives, either for themselves or their children. With
the Renaissance, this gradually began to change, as reflected in the great
characters of Shakespeare and other playwrights (although there had been great
individual characters—the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath--as far back as
Chaucer). With the American and French
revolutions around end of the 18th Century and leading into the 19th,
the cause of freedom for more “average” people would increase, even as horrible
abuses like slavery would continue (and even as inherited landed wealth and
patriarchy would persist for decades).
By the outset of World War I,
freedom had made quite a bit of progress, even if the process was exploitative,
abusive and painful, such as (after the Civil War) with the working conditions
in factories and coal mines. If World
War I was largely a fratricidal political war, it may have been exacerbated by
the tremendous tensions by then between rich and poor. Communism and Fascism would both follow,
horrible collective experiments that would have to be overcome or burned out,
by World War II and the ensuing Cold War.
The social progress from about 1776
through 1945 may have a couple of subtle explanations. One may be that the nuclear family took upon
a new importance. Marriage had always
been “important” but about the time of the “Age of Reason” the idea that one
man chooses one woman to have children and to care for one another “till death
do us part” took on new importance, as people started living longer. Moral thinking began to center around the
social institution of marriage and fidelity.
A man of unremarkable special talents would find a sense of himself as
an “individual”(when compared to his buddy-like ;relations with other men in
group pursuits like hunting or war) by marrying, raising children, and in some
way staking out a domain of property. At the same time, there was a hidden
intellectual development that would help men and women grow independently—the
romantic movement, in literature, painting, and most of all, music, with its
ability to program circuits in the mind.
As exemplified by the symphonic canvases of Viennese composer Gustav
Mahler, a big musical conception could become a universe of its own for the
individual mind.
After World War II, technology would
become a driving force for the release of the potential of the individual. It
would be a subtle process because by now the prospect of both prosperity and peace
alone were a great elixir. Property, crops, and livestock (“real” and living
things) had always been the primary goods measured by fiat money, but gradually
information and aesthetic pursuits would become more important with technology.
This process was abetted by a surprising development: the way the federal
government responded to the Cold War.
Under President Johnson, married men no longer had a draft exemption
before college students and fathers. The
asocial nerd, if he could contribute to defense with his brains, was to be
spared as well as the father.
Concurrently, the Civil Rights movement, to be followed by
disenchantment with the War in
It is an irony, and perhaps no
accident, that the Stonewall Rebellion and the walk of man on the Moon would
occur about three weeks apart in 1969.
Society would turn on this before-and-after.
Technology, spurred by defense to be
sure, would progress through the next three decades, but not ultimately toward
the collective idea of voyaging the solar system in manned space ships (as once
thought) but to the power of the individual to obtain and publish his own view
of the truth on the Internet.
And society, while organizing
politically often enough around the idea of suspect-class minorities, would
discover increasing intellectual tension over the role of the individual and
ultimately begin to appreciate the subtlety of a whole polity (not just public
policy) based around individual rights rather than collective group political
barter.
In the gay community, this trend may
have been best expressed in the writings of Paul Rosenfels and the
The problems of increased personal
freedom and mobility would become manifest.
The oil shocks, urban financial crises, and economic stagflation of the
1970’s would raise the specter of a “fat, decadent” middle class living beyond
its means, with the added international tensions that religious groups
(especially Muslims) could claim that the Western world was living high on the
hog at the expense to people of faith.
The
In the 1990s we would learn to
manage our freedom better, largely because of our technological revolution in
information distribution. For gays, ideas unthinkable a decade earlier in
mainstream politics, like gay marriage and gays in the military, took on a new
moral urgency, let alone credibility.
The idea of no income tax would be proposed, and the possibility of
major constitutional changes would be contemplated even before the 2000
presidential election. We would, on the
day of George W. Bush’s inauguration, take some pride in how well our system
can work and begin to echo his words about civility and personal
responsibility.
Through all of this, the basic
significance of technology for advancing freedom becomes clear: technology
gives individual the opportunity to form their own aesthetic worlds, and, after
the philosophy particularly of Oscar Wilde, project this personalize aesthetics
to others. This can become as important
as personal relationships or other achievement in the conventional sense.
Even so, some would question,
sometimes destructively, whether this was good.
Some (the “Luddites”) would maintain that technology tied people to
hierarchal social and political chains that denied them the real freedom of
dealing with nature on their own terms.
We have gradually shifted our
political and moral debate—to some extent—away from categories of people to the
idea of personal accountability and freedom drawn into balance. A person is to be evaluated as a separate individual
by a separate event. One is to become
one’s own adult person before one is ready for a “relationship”—especially
marriage and family. Sexual freedom can be accepted when there is safer sex and
accountability. A person’s private life
is finally to be his own business.
Patriarchy and organizational success is to be replaced by
meritocracy. Sometimes, however, a moral
or legal system based entirely on deservedness and accountability can have
harsh, zero-tolerance consequences for those who slip off their pedestals even
slightly. So there will be pressures for
new emphasis on communitarianism.
There are endless perturbations of
this formulation of human rights, however, and one gets into troubling
paradoxes and complexities. At the very
least, rights sometimes have to be traded off.
Given that a sentient unborn child must have his or her right to life
recognized in a civil society, the mother may have to sacrifice some
privacy. A parent may have the right—and
responsibility—for his children’s education and moral direction, but then the
rights of the child are compromised by the neglectful parent, and in the most
extreme case, by the idea of cloning or genetic pre-selection. The right of a disabled elderly person to
life may confer upon adult children the obligation to make personal sacrifices
to care for them.
Family values pose a certain paradox
about individualism. Women typically have a natural incentive towards
childbirth, and men typically are induced to provide for them with sexual
investment. A man often says that the event of fatherhood is the most important
and self-fulfilling moment that he has ever known, to a psychological extent
that shocks him. Finally, the sense some concrete evidence of his own imprint
on the world neutralizes all the group prowls in the past. Yet, fatherhood
implies a certain conformity to community, and at least a temporary and rather
long-lasting psychological sacrifice of expressive interests, which may or may
not be regained with the sequel of parenthood.
Political calls to strengthen families may be viewed narrowly, in terms
of protecting children already born, or they may be used more broadly to set
social standards as to how people are to form and keep attachments (and to put
those who do not conform—such as gays—at a cultural and maybe financial
disadvantage); it is not always easy to understand the difference, and many
people who have traditional families don’t understand that there are those who
don’t have them.
The notion of sacrifice used to go
beyond largely family matters. Up
through the Vietnam war, we expected young men to offer themselves to the draft
before they had the legal right to their own lives. Today, the possibility of a
draft renewal is sometimes mentioned, as well as broader proposals for not so
voluntary community or national service.
Individualism, then, drives the point of a person proving that he
“deserves” what he has, that he has “paid his dues.”
And behaviors consisting largely of
private choices do have effects on others.
Public health is obviously one problem (and many other examples may be
given besides the facile link between AIDS and male homosexual behavior).
Tension exists between artistic creativity and free speech and the effect that
this speech has on vulnerable people, especially those raised by parents with
much less than optimal resources.
Tension, accompanied by a surprising intellectual naiveté, grows between
those with heavy family responsibilities and “free spirits,” and resistance to
undermining the old idea that a man gains credibility by performance (and
sexual persistence) within the family remains.
Indeed, one of the most difficult controversies of the individualism
revolution comes back to the question, whether one should become one’s “own
person” before “marrying” a significant other.
There is, in unfettered
individualism, a risk of progressive personal devaluation. People may come to
be viewed as “in the way” when they can no longer please or excite others. An
extreme end-result of this may be “body fascism,” by no means limited to gay men. There is a frightening reminder of what life
may have been life for the typical middle-class Gentile German under Hitler,
where both apparent prosperity and the pursuit of some kind of collective
aesthetic glory [certainly not possible in Stalin’s contemporaneous communist
society], reinforced by music and imagery, gave individuals an unjustified
sense of their own destiny and importance (with a Nazi leadership which was
both homophilic and aggressively and viciously homophobic). Political liberals want to find “freedom” by
turning over the responsibility for care for the disadvantaged to public or
government dole, relieving the rest of us of “burdens”—and eventually such a
process may, while seemingly benign in a democratic society, start to undermine
other individual liberties in subtle ways, an observation that leads
conservatives back to the nuclear family as the primary granule of
individualism.
So liberals and conservative
moralists alike are justified in looking for social justice and moral restraints
upon at least the most predatory or narrow exercises of individualism. Perhaps one formulation would be to define
“personal responsibility” as incorporating an obligation to show that one can
take care of others besides oneself, even when this sometimes requires
sacrifice. Indeed, it is a paradox of
individualism that sometimes one expresses oneself by what one forsakes or does
without—and this may range from unhealthy self-handicapping to a sense that one
is best off when one places oneself where one can contribute the most, even if
this means accepting some apparent “discrimination” related to one’s
performance in meeting the needs of others.
This would help us aim towards an idea of “personal responsibility with
civility.”
Another way to formulate all of this
philosophical evolution is to suggest that we have gradually developed the idea
of a free society as a collection of individuals, both cooperating and
competing, but each with a personal agenda or a purpose. Previously we had
viewed many social functions, especially those having to do with “family
values,” from a communitarian perspective, that there are some processes in the
civilized world (like parenthood) that are so basic and immutable that they
should never be analyzed in terms of individual motives. Hence, it had been all right to “favor”
families at the “expense” of singles, and it had been all right to pass some
laws (regarding sexuality) to protect these global values: from an individualist’s
perspective this must be questioned.
Society had become like an object-oriented system, whose components
could enjoy debatable levels or privacy, protection or friendliness. For example, it is totally unacceptable to
confront someone about his adult sexual interests, yet it still seems appropriate
to many people to nudge these interests into socially useful directions (the
family) with global policy. (And,
unfortunately, “attractive” people sometimes have an easier time making sexual
harassment claims believed.) Well-founded concerns about egalitarianism and
social justice may be balanced by reassessing the notion of family
responsibility as well as by conventional ideas about disadvantaged minorities
or economic “exploitation.” Again, the idea that everyone should learn to take
care of others beside oneself may produce a resolution point.
You could cast all of this in the
terms of the “sexual outlaw” paradigm.
Gays in particular, as well as “me generation yuppies” have apparently
separated sexuality from the socially adaptive goals of family, parenting, and
even eldercare. Gays (men in particular)
may have compelling psychological reasons to “deviate” and in modern society
find opportunities to use sexuality for self-expression. But then all of this
can make “fitting in” to important social functions—family, common defense—a
“burden” for themselves and others.
There was no tension over “family values” until technological
“industrial” society made traditional family values a credible “lifestyle choice.”
Religious people sometimes tell me
that the attempt to reduce all of these philosophical paradoxes to a logical
paradigm is bound to fail. Man should
accept “natural law,” they say, and accept the idea that some private choices
are not legitimately given by God.
Science fiction is filled with accounts of galactic societies where the
“group mind” predominates and where individual aims are sharply channeled. New
Age and Rosicrucian literature is filled with oblique suggestions that true
“understanding” (or “cosmic consciousness”) of the world beyond the usual
senses and the observed limitations of physics (and the speed of light) require
a certain surrender of personal deliberation, to be replaced by receptive
concentration—prayer. All I can say here
is to note this a fundamental paradox in epistemology.
We have moved from the old-fashioned
struggle over class and race to a newer one, a psychological gulf between those
whose adult lives are built around the social responsibilities that grow out of
procreative sexual intercourse, to those whose lives are more self-expressive.
We have three basic paradigms for resolving all these tensions: (1) the liberal
one, where freedom and social justice may be advanced democratically by legal
means and by redistribution of wealth, with the responsibilities for
care-taking reduced on the individual, (2) the socially conservative one,
centered on a psychological humility before religion and family, where the
family is the only legitimate context to define the individual, and (3) the
“libertarian” one, where self-ownership, tied to personal accountability, is
advanced, and where the consequences for personal stumbles (or even inborn
problems) may become unbearably harsh indeed until tempered by agreements to
take care of others, too.
There has been much discussion of
government assistance and bailouts of industries (airlines, insurance) and
individuals affected by the tragic terrorist attacks. Indeed, there is some justification in this
inasmuch as the attacks were partially targeted at government itself. Furthermore, the attacks heighten the need
for debate about civil liberties in a society in which government is going to
play a much larger role in protecting citizens (as is the case already in
Europe).
Furthermore, no one wants to
undermine the relief efforts for direct victims of the attacks. However, there is a legitimate question about
how much help should be targeted towards individuals who must deal with sudden
employment and investment losses due to the attacks. This is particularly disturbing in a society
where financial independence and well-being has become associated with
successful interpersonal relations with others.
It is also upsetting because we must deal with the fact that for the
foreseeable future we collectively (and to some extent indirectly) will have
less total wealth because some has been taken from us by force by terrorists.
There is a paradox, that individualism requires a readiness to accept
sacrifice, and to take bad luck when it comes one’s way. There is a saying in the military, “that’s
the breaks.” The proper way to deal with
this is well-structured insurance. Overzealous efforts to insulate persons from
the unfavorable financial outcomes of risks that they have taken (however
remote at the time they are taken) undermines the freedom of everyone in the
long run.
ãCopyright 2001 by
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