In the last post, I gave a historical overview of America’s path from the self-centered sentiment of the Gilded Age to the egalitarian and socio-centric sentiment and activism of the Progressive Era all the way to the 1970s and then the slide to a “me-first” attitude under the wave of individualism that has prevailed in the last 40 years.
Striking the right balance between the interests of the individual and those of the community has always been one of the greatest challenges of human societies. Individualism ensures basic personal freedoms that enable each person to pursue self-actualization and preserve self-dignity. Dedication to a communitarian ideal ensures the preservation of the social norms and institutions that enable individuals to thrive within a system of shared values, reciprocity and pooled resources. It is ultimately about the balance between rights and responsibilities.
When the French diplomat Alexis Tocqueville traveled through America in the first half of the 19th century, he noticed that Americans exercised rugged and resourceful individualism that, at the same time, was mindful of what was good for their communities. He called that ethos “individualism rightly understood.” After the excesses of the Gilded Age had shuttered this compact, the Progressive Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.” But “We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”
Today, we are hardly entitled to argue that we live up to Tocqueville’s description of Americans or Teddy Roosevelt’s admonition. The living example of our failure to understand individualism the right way is the reckless refusal of large segments of Americans to take precautions (like wearing masks and socially distancing themselves) in the midst of a pandemic that rages uncontrollably because, to a great extent, of this attitude. And we fail to see that the inordinate accumulation of wealth persists while millions of Americans go by with high rates of morbidity, subpar health insurance and care, uneven educational attainment, unfulfilling jobs, and the scourges of homelessness, drugs, opioids, and suicides.
So how did we arrive at this disconnect between the interests of the individual and the interests of the community. I would point my finger to a two-faced suspect. The exultation of individual achievement along with a gradually diminishing awareness about the importance of the community and society at large.
Common-knowledge examples will suffice to make the point of our society’s excessive attribution of success to individual achievement instead of to collective effort. CEOs are upheld as singularly responsible for their corporation’s success as if all others do not matter. And yet, we often observe that corporate success and CEO compensation (a metric of their value) do not coincide. Famous actors and actresses are lavished super-generous contracts as if all that matters is their performance and not that of the ensemble. Individual players in soccer, football, baseball, basketball are remunerated at stratospheric salaries without necessarily leading their teams to championships. All these examples are indicative of a cultural attitude that awards a premium to individual effort and performance but ignores the collective body.
Once this attitude has taken hold, we are not far from the point that each one of us starts to believe in our unique value supported by personal talents and meritorious effort, beholden to no one else’s help or to a stroke of luck. As Ayn Rand’s Atlas, we “shrug off the feckless takers,” in this case, society’s weaker members, those undeserving “takers.”
What we ignore is that without successful clans, tribes, villages, societies we would not be here today. The truth is that our distant ancestors, those, often disrespected, hunter-gatherers are the unsung heroes of the human species. We exist because of their wisdom to develop group survival attitudes. They came to understand that without pooling and sharing their limited resources, and especially food, they had very little chance of surviving. They realized that one individual’s fitness to survive their very harsh and hostile environment depended on the fitness of everyone else in the group. Better to have more good hunters than fewer. Better, therefore, to share food with others and nurture all around strength than hog all of one’s kill.
Thankfully, our distant ancestors responded to our specie’s strong pro-sociality instinct that fosters cooperation. Research has shown that our species’ success does not lie in our raw intellect or reasoning powers but in our capacity to learn from one another and then spread our knowledge to others as well as to future generations. Therefore, affording every member of a society the opportunities and means to remain engaged in the common effort gives a society the advantage to improve holistically and advance to the benefit of everyone. Societies with high degrees of inter-connectedness and cooperation based on trust and mutual reciprocity create a larger social capital and produce a greater social premium shared by all.
If social capital and social premium are recognized as beneficial to all, the individual as well as the community, then it is not difficult to make the leap from a culture of I to a culture of We. But this is not going to be easy. There are political, corporate and individual interests that see no benefit in this cultural transition. Beyond being merely reluctant, these forces are outright hostile to the idea of sharing control, status and wealth in order to support the investments and communitarian effort needed to serve the common good. To overcome their entrenched power, we need a grass roots political movement reminiscent of the one that gave us the Progressive Era 120 years ago.
Despite all the mischaracterizations and disinformation, there is today a Progressive movement that offers hope. It centers around the issues of fighting climate change and environmental decay, and reversing inequalities in economic rewards, health conditions and health care, educational attainment, and the enjoyment of full citizens’ rights independent of race, ethnic background, sex, and gender choices. The challenge for this movement is to translate its concerns into a political message that convinces a decisive majority of citizens that we must again make American individualism to be rightly understood and become the driving force for the renewal of social trust and the recapture of the social premium we all deserve.
Let's Reason 