A Common World: Is the Age of Individualism Coming to an End?
To coincide with the upcoming Night of Ideas (2017), we invited francophile, philosopher and successful author Michael Foley to ruminate on the prescribed theme of 'A Common World'.
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The revelation came in the popcorn queue of a multiplex. Looking around at the posters it suddenly occurred to me that movie heroes used to be singular, the lone private eye going down those mean streets or the lone stranger riding down those main streets, but that the lone hero has been largely replaced by the buddy pair or the team. Even those ultimate individuals, the superheroes, now prefer to fight evil in groups. And then this connected with many other cultural developments to suggest that the age of individualism, which seemed so permanent, may instead be temporary, an overreaction against constraint and repression that is now correcting itself.
Individualism, the idea that individual freedom and rights are paramount, has become so entrenched that it seems like a universal, absolute and eternal truth. In fact the idea is not universal but largely confined to the West, not absolute but a contingent development, and far from being eternal, may be losing its appeal.
The creation myth of individualism is that in eighteenth-century Europe a few courageous champions of reason broke the shackles of religious repression and set the individual free to find, express and fulfil a true self. But the development of individualism began much earlier and was much more gradual and complex. Many factors, religious and material, as well as intellectual, contributed. Along with the intellectual demand for liberty, the growth of commerce created a middle class of merchants, prosperous farmers and urban craftsmen who believed in private property and unhindered individual wealth accumulation. So individualism was a partnership of ideas and business, such as contemporary universities dream of. But underlying both factors in the revolutionary development was Christianity’s even more revolutionary idea, a shocking novelty in the classical world, that all human beings are of equal value and subject only to the dictates of individual conscience. This was an idea that had never occurred to philosophers and, given the hunger of Homo sapiens for hierarchy and distinction, need never have occurred to anyone. So the demand for political and personal liberty turned the founding belief of the Church against the Church, a development neatly summarised by the historian Larry Siedentop as, ‘Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world’.
In the nineteenth century the commercial and intellectual strands separated into capitalist entrepreneurism and romantic individualism, a rejection of the materialist herd in favour of solitary communing with sublime nature on rugged coastlines and mountain tops, and, at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, this morphed into bohemian individualism, which recolonised the city, or a limited area of it, as a refuge from the morals, conventions and conformities of bourgeois society. All these overlapping and intermingling developments remained elitist, influencing mostly artists, intellectuals and political radicals, until, at the end of the 1960s, they combined in a youth culture that spread around the world to produce expressive individualism, which added to the rejection of authority and conformity the need to discover your true self and do your own thing.
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This was the prevailing mood of the times, and scientific and political theories, while believing themselves to be objective truth, usually reflect the zeitgeist. So the high point of individualism was probably the 1970s when it was ratified by two influential theories, the first Neo-darwinism, which interpreted evolution as a competition for survival won by the strongest and/or most cunning individuals, and the second, Neo-liberalism, which drew on the first to argue that markets should be free to develop like nature in an unhindered competition between individuals.
But the zeitgeist has changed and both these theories have now been challenged. Many evolutionary theorists argue that cooperation is as important for survival as competition, if not more so, and many political theorists argue that the free market has produced a widening inequality that is damaging to winners as well as losers.
And individualism has been undermined at its very source by neuroscientists who claim that the individual sense of a unitary fixed self is an illusion created by the brain to provide the comfort of stability and continuity. The self is not an essence to be discovered but an ongoing process of interaction with the environment, and according to the theory of ‘extended mind’ is at least partly in the environment. Philosophers such as Charles Taylor support this by arguing that the most important environmental influence is other people, and that personal identity is developed, not so much by looking inwards to find a true self, as in acceptance of, or resistance to, the identities others attempt to impose. ‘We are expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, such as the definition of our identity. We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter – our parents, for instance – and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.’
So Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that there is no such thing as society has been matched by the opposite claim that there is no such thing as the individual self.
Even physics, which believes itself to be the most objective of disciplines, has altered its theories on the nature of reality to suit the changing mood. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an atomistic approach understood reality as consisting of elementary particles that created relations with each other, but by the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first, this had completely reversed to an interpretation of reality as a field, a swarm of continuous interactive process that creates and destroys particles. Now the relations are believed to create the particles rather than the other way round. The contemporary physicist Carlo Rovelli: ‘there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn’t things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of ‘thing’.’ This is Taylor’s view of individuals applied to elementary particles.
The decline of individualism is evident in practice as well as theory, in the proliferation of social networks, urban tribes, friendship groups, festivals (still spreading faster than Japanese knotweed), cosplay and gaming conventions and all kinds of group activity including group dancing, singing in choirs, team games and themed parties. The trend is apparent even in restaurants with the fashion for communal tables and benches and sharing plates. Even reading, the most quintessentially solitary practice, has become a communal endeavour in reading groups.
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There is also evidence from religion, with the growing popularity of Pentecostal churches which reduce the emphasis on doctrine and individual conscience and encourage instead group participation in singing and dancing. And in the politics of both right and left there has been an even more dramatic rejection of the assumption that democracy is based on the liberal ideology of individual rights. The rise of rightwing populist movements has been based on a renewed belief in nationalism and/or religion and is expressed in mass rallies that provide the same reassurance as a congregation of ecstatic believers. While on the left there is a new form of anarchism involving group humour. The philosopher Simon Critchley: ‘In my view, anarchism – what we might call ‘actually existing anarchism’ – is a powerfully refreshing and remotivating response to the drift and demotivation of liberal democracy. In particular … it is the carnivalesque humour of anarchist groups and their tactics of ‘non-violent warfare’ that have led to the creation of a new language of civil disobedience and a recovery of the notion of direct democracy’. And Critchley specifically rejects an individualist anarchism for something more social. ‘The conception of anarchism that I seek to defend … is not so much organised around freedom as responsibility.’
Here Critchley identifies the problem that has caused individualism to lose its allure. Personal freedom, the essential feature of individualism, is not the universal gift it appeared to be. Back in the heady sixties and seventies, the era of demands for liberation and rights, it seemed that being free was all that was needed to enjoy a fulfilling life. But, as the populists have noted, full freedom is available only to the few who can afford it. And many of these fortunate few have discovered that freedom is not liberation but a new kind of burden. Infinite choice is thrilling in theory but exhausting in practice, requiring every decision to be worked out from first principles, often by those without any first principles. And that even more thrilling possibility, of refusing obligation and commitment to live by and for one’s self, has also turned out to be less than fulfilling.
The evidence was already there in the lives of the founding fathers of individualism - Baudelaire, the most influential modern poet, Flaubert, the most influential modern novelist and Nietzsche, the most influential modern thinker. All three lived alone, were vehement in their insistence on solitude and freedom, rejection of marriage and democracy and contempt for what they described as ‘the common herd’. As Flaubert put it: ‘I have built myself a tower and let the waves of shit beat at its base’.
The free solitary life should have provided peaks of creative exaltation on a plateau of serenity - but it seems instead to have provoked rage. The three individualists were constantly seething. Nietzsche, the most detached, living alone in Turin, with no social life whatever, was also the angriest, blaming all his problems on his home nation and upbringing, writing abusive letters to his family and friends, quarrelling with his loyal publisher, and demanding to have the Kaiser publicly executed.
The problem is that exaltation encourages contempt for the ‘waves of shit’ beneath the tower and a growing certainty in the superiority of one’s own convictions, which the world in its stubborn stupidity fails even to acknowledge much less accept. The result is rage.
A more recent example of the syndrome is the poet Philip Larkin who refused to commit to any of his lovers or to engage in any social activity that did not suit him. He lived alone and for himself alone, yet described himself in later life as ‘boiling with rage’. The irony is that Larkin protected his freedom to have time to write but succeeded so well he had nothing to say and dried up.
It seems to be necessary to preserve a tension between the need for individual freedom and the demands of others. The constraints of traditional society were impossibly binding but the opposite extreme of refusing all constraint has not been the answer. Once we suffocated in the prison of conformity, then we drowned in the ocean of choice.
Nietzsche understood the necessity of maintaining dualities of every kind, but especially between Apollo, the symbol of social order and limit, and Dionysus, the symbol of freedom and intoxication. Keeping contradictory forces in tension can be a source of strength: ‘Let us suppose a man who deemed it impossible to resolve this contradiction by destroying the one and completely unleashing the other power; then, the only thing remaining to him would be to make such a great edifice out of himself that both powers can inhabit it, even if at opposite ends; between which are sheltered conciliatory powers provided with the dominant strength to settle, if need be, any quarrels that break out’.
Nietzsche failed to take his own advice – but there now seems to be an unconscious rebalancing between individualism and social life, a rejection of the excesses of freedom as well as of traditional conformity. The key is involvement in new types of group that are chosen rather than imposed, transient rather than lasting and informal rather requiring official membership.
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As with many forms of social change, the waning of individualism provides reasons to be fearful (the rise of populism and nationalism) as well as reasons for hope (the more benign small-group ethos), and it effects most of us, albeit unconsciously. I realise that I’m too much of a twentieth-century individualist to join any organised group - but at least I have come down from the tower to the street and the urban crowd, no longer the ‘common herd’ despised by Baudelaire, Flaubert and Nietzsche but a group of sorts, albeit the most fluid and transient, and offering a sense of belonging, albeit the most tenuous. As well as the proliferation of new group activities there has been a steady proliferation of new public spaces where people can see and be seen – the communal open-plan eating areas of malls, the outdoor tables colonising pavements and squares, and the continuing spread of coffee shops. In Baudelaire/Flaubert/Nietzsche mode I have interpreted this as evidence of narcissistic attention-seeking, but it is also possible to see it as a new form of togetherness, a new form of community – a paradoxical community of strangers. There is something oddly fulfilling in looking on as people, mysterious, unknowable and seething with deep forces and passions, go about their urgent but inscrutable business. It is the urban equivalent of watching the sea.
Michael Foley is a Northern Irish author who lives in London and writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He has published four novels, four non-fiction books, five collections of poetry and a collection of translations from French poetry.
To find out more about Michael Foley, visit: http://www.michael-foley.net/
