Individual

Being or becoming an individual is a goal to which most people aspire. It means that we are not like everyone else, that we are different from the mass. Children are raised to be individuals in their own right. Advertisers lure us by their reference to some product containing an individual flavor, being the choice of discerning individuals or marking us out as being more individual. We prize the democratic system for the way it places such a high value on the individual, and criticize totalitarian systems such as fascism and communism for the way they subject individuals to the dictates of the state. When others try to make us conform to some viewpoint, standard or expectation, we complain about the danger of losing our individuality. As President Bill Clinton said in one of his national addresses: “In America to be an individual is our highest value.”

Yet for some time now our most acute social critics have been telling us that an overemphasis on the individual lies at the heart of what is wrong with American society. This is the main burden of the influential book by the well-known sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates, Habits of the Heart, which traces the effect of this on weakening levels of commitment in both private and public life. They chart the degree to which marriage, family and other personal relationships, including therapeutic ones, are subverted by this trend. It even affects local politics, civic volunteerism, citizenship and the wider implications of religion. According to Bellah and his group, though we often talk the language of community and are mindful of the welfare of others, we are primarily preoccupied with our individual selves. This is eating away at what little is left of community in our countries today.

Social commentators in other newer Western countries, such as Reginald Bibby in Canada (1987), find this analysis to be equally true, in even some respects more true, for their own societies. With their less communal and republican origins, there is even less sense of community to erode, making the effects of individualism on the public arena more noticeably destructive. Throughout the West our undue stress on the individual is fragmenting family life, diminishing our sense of friendship, isolating neighbors from one another, making the workplace increasingly competitive, involving us in court cases more often, reducing our involvement in civic affairs, diminishing our interest in politics and making religion a private matter. Unless we do something about this, they argue, our whole way of life is in danger of falling apart.

Origins

Where did this emphasis on the individual originate? The word individuum, from which our word individual and related terms comes, was coined by the Roman moralist Cicero in the first century b.c. to translate the Greek word atomen, meaning “the smallest building block of reality.” Over the course of many centuries the word came to focus on the basic personal, instead of material, unit. The term individualism first appeared in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville in his seminal analysis of American society in the early 1800s. If it was documented this early in our history, where did our modern understanding of the sacredness of the individual and right to think, judge and decide for ourselves come from?

First, our emphasis on the individual has roots in the Bible, with the dignity it accords to every person through their creation in the image of God and personal responsibility toward God and one another. In biblical communities, however, the individual is embedded in and accountable to the wider community. In Old Testament times this was the family, locality, tribe and nation; today it is the family, church and city. This understanding was reaffirmed and extended during the Reformation, among the Puritans and in Anabaptist circles.

A second basis for our modern individualism is the civic republicanism that emerged in the city-states of the Renaissance and was further developed in the early days of the American colonies. This highlighted the role and contribution of the individual citizen, but always in the context of wider moral, religious and political responsibilities.

A third source lies in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. These movements focused more strongly on the individual apart from personal relationships and public responsibilities and encouraged each person to work for whatever would maximize the good for the majority of people. Through the influence of nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century secularism, there was a move toward an expressive individualism which valued above all each person’s assertion of his or her identity and aspirations. It is this third source that now dominates, and without our being aware of it, colors the way many Christians think and operate.

Two Misleading Oppositions

We are in a Catch-22 situation: valuing the individual yet doing so in a way that results in the individual becoming an endangered species. We can understand this problem by looking at the way most people use the word and by considering what people define individual over against.

Individual Versus Society. When asked what is the opposite of individual, most people will say something like society. Any attack on the individual is generally regarded as making a case for a collective approach to life that squeezes out individuality, as if these are the only alternatives. This, it is argued, was the problem with fascism, communism and now a resurgent Islam. Many would add that it is the problem with even a democratic socialist approach to government. But individual and society should not be set over against one another as antitheses: the choice between them is not an either-or. Setting them up this way is like insisting that there is a polar opposition between people and their natural environment. While some have lived as if these two were at odds with one another, either loathing the created world or abusing it, in fact none of us can survive physically without it. The natural environment provides the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the sun that warms us, the food we eat (see Ecology). It is similar with society. Though some people have a negative view of it or seek to isolate themselves from it, none of us can become persons without it. It provides the language we use, the conventions we operate by, the supply lines we depend on, the structures that employ us and so on. Diminish any of these and we diminish ourselves. They are essential to our development and well-being.

Individual Versus Institution. In ordinary speech individuals are also often set over against institutions. The two are often spoken about as if they were inherently in tension. The more individual you are, the less likely you are to fit into an institution; the more you are identified with an institution, the less individual you become. Again we are in the presence of a false polarization. As with the relationship between the individual and society, in reality there is no such thing as an individual apart from institutions. Even a Robinson Crusoe or hermit still feels the effects of whatever institutional associations they had beforehand. From the moment of birth individuals are set in a web of relationships and structures. This begins with the family, which is itself a system or small institution (see Family System), the school, sports and leisure clubs, the church, work or profession, health-care and insurance systems, local and national bureaucracies.

These organizations help shape who we are as a person, in enabling as well as disabling ways. Whatever their weaknesses or even destructive tendencies, most people can point to specific education, benefits, challenges and opportunities that belonging to these institutions provided. So individual and institution can be partners: individual and institutional growth occur most powerfully when each is assisting the other. Belonging to a church should have convinced us that this is the case, for most churches are institutions or contain small organizations within them. Voluntary associations have also often provided great benefits for their members and provided an impetus for their personal growth. The mutual benefit for both individual and institution is also demonstrated in the most exemplary and highly regarded businesses today.

Two Unfortunate Confusions

Individual and Individualism. It should be clear that a proper understanding of being an individual is not antithetical to relating connection with a wider group or involvement in an institution. Behind these misleading oppositions lies a confusion in our understanding of individual and individualism. In my experience most people cannot tell the difference between the two. Any criticism of individualism is taken to be an attack on being an individual. It is as if a critique of consumerism—a way of life in which shopping is a mentality rather than an activity, so that everything, including relationships and religion, is shopped around for—were understood as an attack on doing any shopping at all! Individualism is a view of self that divorces us from others except where involvement with them is instrumental to our own advancement or growth. This itself is not identical with the ideal of the so-called rugged individual, for, as the sociologist Robert Wuthnow has pointed out, part of the latter involves a degree of concern for others and altruistic actions, or at least does not regard these two as in contradiction. The younger generation, who tend to describe themselves as individualists, to some extent also view themselves in webs of relationships, especially with family and peers.

It is a more self-centered, at times narcissistic, form of individual preoccupation that is growing like a cancer in modern societies. We see this between spouses as marriages become more contractual in nature, with children who are increasingly viewed as an impediment to adult fulfillment, among friends when they see the relationship in terms of its usefulness rather than just being-ness, in small groups which are valued so long as they provide therapeutic benefits for their members. In all these ways, individualistic attitudes destroy from within the relationships and institutions individuals need in order to develop and flourish. The individualist does not understand the difference between self-centered behavior, which is present even when one is focused on the best part of oneself, and the self-regarding behavior in which everyone needs to be engaged as part of their proper self-care—physically, emotionally, relationally, intellectually, culturally and spiritually. The latter is compatible with and nourished in the company of others and in well-functioning institutions; the former is not.

Individual and Community. The possibility of an individual and a network of significant others, or community, belonging together has already been raised. One example of this is the loving bond between a man and a woman in marriage where this is understood covenantally rather than contractually. Genuine love between two people, involving mutual giving and receiving, does not diminish the individuals concerned but enhances them. For love is not a scarce resource to be divided such that if one gets more the other gets less. What happens is that the more two people give to one another the more love is generated and the more each gets in return. There is a paradox here. The more two people give themselves to each other and interpenetrate each other’s lives, the more individual they become. It is a considerable tragedy at present that the search for individual actualization by two people in marriage is leading not only to a greater incidence of separation and divorce but to a lessening sense of selfhood and fulfillment in the partners themselves. From this example we can see other possibilities for community between people that enlarges rather than contracts them and also creates a vital corporate force that has its own value and impact on those who come in contact with it.

This is the missing third alternative to the two choices available—the individualist and collectivist approaches to life. While this third alternative is not totally lacking in societies uninfluenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview, it is more in the background and less influential there. Pre- and non-Western societies tend to subsume the individual too much at the expense of the group; secular Western societies tend to devalue the group in favor of an emphasis on the individual. But individual and community really belong together: you cannot have one without the other. It is precisely through relationships, with God and others, that our identity is chiefly formed. The higher the quality of their relationships, the more of a unique individual we tend to become.

A good example of this is the early Christian view of the church. The family of God or body of Christ is at one and the same time a model of the individual-in-the-community and of community-in-the-individual (see Church-Family). One aspect of this is beautifully captured in Alexandre Dumas’s motto for the Three Musketeers: “All for one and one for all.” Another is enshrined in the way God is conceived as sharing aspects of divine truth and love with various people in the church so that only as they come together and share these does everyone understand God fully. As individual Christians we should also be involved in bringing the spirit of community into the institutions of our society, and in doing this our churches should play a supportive and modeling role. One form this takes today is the growth of a communitarian approach to social life. This too is the way the Spirit ministers to people, transforming them into the likeness of Christ and equipping them for God’s purposes.

Other aspects of this subject including individual rights and privacy are explored in separate articles. In conclusion, it is well to remember the biblical portrait of both the original creation as well as the final re-creation. It is man and woman as a unit who are made in the image of God, not two separate individuals. It was God’s intention that they should live together as “one flesh,” in communion with God and in harmony with the world God had made. In the last day it is a transfigured and resurrected community, not just a collection of individuals, that appears before God to worship together and enjoy a common life in God. In the church at present we do not seem to be preparing ourselves too well for that prospect. What is happening in our wider society is even more questionable. A genuinely Christian understanding of the individual, as a communally formed and communally oriented person, would help us deal with these situations.

» See also: Church

» See also: Church-Family

» See also: Community

» See also: Privacy

» See also: Rights

» See also: Society

References and Resources

Y. Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); R. N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986); R. W. Bibby, Fragmented Gods (Toronto: Irwin, 1987); P. E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1982); C. N. Kraus, The Authentic Witness: Credibility and Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979); C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); P. Leinberger and B. Tucker, The New Individualists: The Generation After the Organization Man (New York: Harper, 1991); A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); B. A. Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); C. Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

—Robert Banks