HT Mockingbird: Rethinking Individualism with David Brooks

http://www.mbird.com/2011/04/rethinking-individualism-with-david-brooks/

It’s almost too common to read op-ed columns or hear sermons about how individualistic Americans are. Yet a brief remark in David Brooks’ recent book, “The Social Animal”, has implied to me the real absurdity of these diatribes. He said:

The United States is a collective society that thinks it is an individualistic one. If you ask American to describe their values, they will give you the most individualistic answers of any nation on the planet. Yet if you actually watch how Americans behave, you see that they trust one another instinctively and form groups with alacrity.

I agree. It's easy to talk about the problem of American individualism and consumerism without realizing that this critique can become too easy and too inaccurate. Todd's money quote comes in this simple observation about pop culture:

We may esteem personal autonomy yet most pop songs are about love.

This has not been lost on me over the last twenty years. There are an awful lot of pop songs about romantic love, more so than about the love between father and son, mother and daughter, and so on. Songs about friendship tend to be rare and even songs that ostensibly "could" be about friendship tend to get mutated into songs that are about "something more". And so like turns into like-like and like-like turns to love

Even in church culture there have been any number of times where, when a man and a woman decide to marry, the little speeches about "redemption" come up and how this man or that woman has found great redemption in the arms of another by virtue of marrying. Maybe this is something I could understand if I were married but the idea that there is some kind of redemptive power in romantic love puts me immensely ill at ease. When a certain important person in my life remarried it eventually had plenty of redemptive activity connected to it but it had a few nasty bumps along the road, too.

But I want to playfully reverse the conclusion that Americans are collectivists who think they are individualists. My reversal is this, that most of the Christians who speak about the dangers of individualism and promote community are actually the most individualistic thinking Christians I have met. They pay lip service to community but I never really see them unless there's something important enough to warrant a house meeting or a church event or something like that. While they talk the talk of community they often keep to themselves.

I have not thought of myself as placing a very high priority on "community" and have even had moements where I think I dislike it. But I realize I find it easier to plan meals if there's more than just me involved. I find it necessary to bounce ideas off of people. I don't compose music in a vacuum at all. I frequently create music that has a strong social element. I write for musicians I know, I explore musical ideas that of necessity involve placing a guitarist with a non-guitarist and interacting as much as possible with non-guitar literature. For a man who has often considered himself a musical hermit with a lot of nerdy interests in theology that people don't care about I care more about community than I consciously tell myself I do. In fact in some respects I might care more about community and discussion than my "community" associates. It's not that they don't care about community ... it's that they seem to see community as something they will contribute to or something they should be part of.

At the risk of going out on a limb here, there are people who participate in "community" because they want to be part of something bigger as individuals. A lot of us who joined Mars Hill Church Seattle did so, I'll venture to guess, because we believed we were participating in something different, something that mattered. We were into the community thing but there is a sense in which we were into that community thing for what we as individuals could both get out of and bring to things. When we did get what we wanted and gave what was considered useful we were happy. When we stopped getting what we wanted or maybe never got what we wanted we became cranky. If we had gifts and ideas that weren't useful or lacked a certain leadership pizazz in this or that realm we began to be less useful.

As I wrote long ago at this blog there is a social functionality to how and why individuals get into community. Someone who is socially and financially upwardly mobile in a community, someone whose cultural capital is increasing, finds plenty of reasons to invest in the community. He or she thinks this is because community is important but that's not the real reason. The real reason is that he or she is still getting as much out of it as he or she puts into it and synergy works favorably at the moment. In this respect the "community" person is simply an individualist who has fooled himself or herself into thinking the main objective is community when it's not.

Conversely, a person who is aspiring to live individually and amass influence or fame is striving toward an identity within a community and the most adamant free-thinker is still looking for disciples despite protestations that every man and woman of age should think for themselves and be reasonable. I hesitate to say that this makes everyone a hypocrite, it means that we can paradoxically consciously affirm this or that as our value while being completely oblivious to the reality that the lives we actually live do not conform to these values. Someone may protest about the importance of family but not value family connections so much as family as a source of affirmation of personal worth.

There are people who need to be needed and for them family becomes crucial not so much because they value the family or its members in the way they tell themselves they do but because they have a desire met through that connection. A single guy or gal may talk obsessively about how much he/she wants to be married for emotional connection but will pass over various candidates who have hearts that are generous enough but who don't fit a social, economic, or physical criterion that goes unexamined because it is not consciously observed. This is an ever relevant example of how we crave community (i.e. all those pop songs extolling love) and yet paradoxically crave it for individualistic reasons.

And yet when we critique the "rampant materialism" and "cult of individualism" in culture we're actually just going along with the herd. Even the people who dare to promulgate what they would call the virtue of selfishness are paradoxically herd animals, too. The heart is deceptive above all things, who can understand it? We must consider that this observation must first be recognized as true of our own hearts before we dare to apply this principle to the hearts of others (which is not to say we should even do that most of the time).