Individualism as Exile

We are all born somewhere. Place. Time. 

That birth puts us in the midst of a group of people. Culture. Worldview.

We do not go to school to learn worldview. We assimilate it from the people – the tribe - into which we were born. 

Worldview is like eyeglasses that shape how we see the world. It undergirds our values. It is the “meaning making” water in which we swim. We might not be aware of it, or even be able to describe it, but worldview shapes everything we think, feel, do, emote, and assume.

I like the Arabic proverb “if you want to understand the water, do not ask a fish, ask a frog.”

Frogs can know the water because they have something to compare it to – the land. If a fish is out of water he is in trouble. For the fish, water just is. It is his worldview.

Likewise, as humans we do not often become aware of our worldview until we interact with a different worldview that challenges our baseline assumptions. And the great thing is that worldview, though it saturates everything about us, is not static. It can change as new information comes into view through new exposures and new experiences.

Let me explain from my own journey. I did not realize how much I swam in the waters of individualism until I lived in Mali, which is primarily a group culture. 

As an American, I was born into an individualistic world. Individualism has been a part of the core ideology of my people since the influences of Puritanism of New England, Jeffersonian political philosophy, and the rugged idealism of the “go west” generations of American conquest. 

To be American, was to embrace the “rugged individualism” that Herbert Hoover reified as core value of our tribe in his 1928 presidential campaign.

Worldviews are not conceived over night. They marinate over centuries.

So we need to be clear in noting that individualism was not completely an American born commodity. The humanism of the Renaissance set the foundation for an expanded expectation of individualistic human capacity. Romanticism gave portrait to individualism by unleashing artists to free expression and the rejection of exterior “artificial” rules. 

Religion played its part as well. Protestantism shunned collectivism of faith in favor of a more radically self-determined movement. In fact, it is possible that in the same way Protestantism was a significant driving force behind Democratic Capitalism, it was a major promoter of individualism.

It was rooted right in our distinguishing doctrines – one being the priesthood of all believers. True doctrinally. We have direct access to God through Jesus and we do not need other intermediaries – saints and angels to get to God. But it was an open door toward a long walk towards aggrandizement of the self.

The over-expressed self-priesthood led to a corroding of corporate authority and accountability to the group.

The most widely used discipleship tool of the church was an allegory with individualist assumptions.

Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, is ranked as the second most read book in Western society after the Bible. It is the story of “Christian” who is in a dramatic pilgrimage toward the Celestial City. It reads more like warfare than pilgrimage. 

I hadn’t thought about the role of Bunyan’s classic in promoting individualism until recently when reading Richard Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In.

“Bunyan portrays the Christian life as a very ‘individual’ affair. Christian is often alone in his struggles with beasts and monsters and human detractors he meets along the way, aided only by his sword or by a well-chosen pious phrase. True, sometimes he is rescued by the likes of Piety and Charity and Hope; but these ‘companions’ represent very personal qualities of heart and mind.”

Mouw goes on to say that there is so much true in the allegory. The problem is that it is incomplete. Pilgrimage is a group activity not an effort of self-achievement and self-effort. Discipleship is apprenticeship. Apprenticeship implies more than one.

Over time our life as “individuals” became the norm. Eventually it became the water we swam in. 

Assumed reality. Worldview. 

French Philosopher Michel Foucault described the development of the self  as “the normalization of the individual;” a process of being molded into an identity by the people around us. 

I was born an individual. I was nurtured into values of individualism. I was discipled into a Good News reality that was far more individual than corporate. I was even given a vision of utopia that was individual. 

Now here is the challenging part. Individualism as a worldview value has some blind spots.

Sure, individualism was birthed in a response to totalitarian governments and oppressive religious systems. Individualism took a moral stance emphasizing the worth of the individual in the face of oppressive systems. It tried to correct the misuse of power.

As a result, there are some real strengths in a worldview of the individual.

Dignity – every person has worth.

Initiative - don’t be lazy.

Faith – it is personal and not just religion.

Responsibility – step-up and do your part.

However, at the same time, there are some real weaknesses in a worldview where the individual is first and foremost. The pendulum swung to far to the other side.

In time individualism took on overexpressed forms of independence and self-reliance. The well-being of the group got lost in self-initiative and self-promotion.

This has grown at a slow pace to the point that we are now living isolated lives. Note the sociological work a few years ago by Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

It was not always this way.

Alexis de Tocqueville, French political philosopher of the 19thCentury conducted an observational tour of American to better understand Democracy. He described individualism in terms of a moderate selfishness potentially causing individuals to be only concerned with their own circle of family and friends. However, he noted that it worked in American because of a counter balance of extreme volunteerism in the community. It was strong individual initiative for the sake of the other.

I would add – there was a religious corrective to that individualism in ecclesiastical authority.

But in time the self turned in on itself. The effort of the individual became for the sake of the self. What was once self-initiative for the sake of the group, the community, became self-for-self.

Augustine exposed this danger centuries earlier. He used the Latin phrase incurvatus in seto warn us of the danger of a life turned in on itself.

“Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.”

Unchecked individualism. It forms a new idolatry. And the idol is me.

Some of the results are easy to see all around us today. It has become a movement and the dominant value of the day.

Developmental self-sufficiency – “I can do it myself.”

Ethical egoism – “it is not hurting anyone.”

Entitlement – “I have it coming to me.”

Authenticity – “as long as I am being true to myself.”

Narcissism – “and what do I get out of it.”

All those statements of independence are a denial of the fact that we were born dependent and die dependent. Unless a mother or father (or proxy) feeds their baby it will die. It will not and cannot forage for itself. Unless a son or daughter (or proxy) lowers us in the grave and cares for us up to the grave we will rot under the sun. No dead carcass ever gave its own eulogy. 

Of course we all know the danger of overexpressed dependence. The Marxist project failed miserably with this underlying values that undercut initiative.

True maturity is not co-dependence, expressed in “you do it for me” communism. Nor is it in expressed in “I can do it myself” individualism. It is a process of self initiative and vulnerability that develops into a relationship of interdependence.

Un-critiqued individualism has become a form of Western exile. 

This frog has a challenge for you. Get out of the water and take a look around. There is a better way. It is called accountable community – at the cost of the individual. But also at the flourishing of the individual.

On exile with you in a long tradition of exiles.