Is Individualism Petty?
Why Small Doesn't Always Mean Smallminded
I’ve written before that I consider myself an individualist, and so occasionally I feel the need to defend what I believe to be a deeply principled stance against the common critiques leveled at it. This essay is one such defense.
Is individualism petty? It can be. Are individuals smallminded when they pay attention only to their own self-interest and concern themselves solely with their own lives? They can be. I think any defender of individual liberty needs to acknowledge that.
But today, I’d like to show why that isn’t simply the case. There is more to the story of individual human life.
My scope will be somewhat narrow:1 merely a demonstration of the dignity of individual human beings, and a defense of self-interest against the charge that it inevitably leads to pettiness and division.
The place to begin is to make a distinction – a distinction between individual self-interest and solipsism. The critics who say that individualism is petty confuse the two. But so do many individuals who revel in their solipsism in the mistaken belief that there is something virtuous about it. In doing so, they give fuel to the critics who can say, “See? Is this not proof that individualism is smallminded?”
Most humans, myself included, are occasionally guilty of solipsism. This is not something to be proud of, but something to be avoided and corrected. The antidote to navel-gazing and self-obsession isn’t simply that people should “spend more time with other people,” because some groups encourage solipsism, and there are many group activities (for instance, gossiping) that are similarly petty.
But self-interest isn’t necessarily solipsism. Nor does the existence of many things outside of one’s self that are greater than the self (such as the family, the nation, the church, etc.), mean that all things that are outside of one’s self are greater than the self. If everything outside of the self was greater than the self, then individual human beings would be the lowest creatures in the world, fit for nothing better than slavery.
But we are not fit for slavery. There is something good inside a person, despite our many flaws and foibles. There is something good about human life, and about the desire of human beings to be happy, and about the idea that human beings should have the liberty to order their own lives as they see fit. The United States of America was founded upon this notion.
In Roya Hakakian’s Beginner’s Guide to America, she lampoons a little the American tendency to educate our children to believe they are unique and special. Certainly, the idea that everyone is unique is an easy target for derision. And yet there is some literal truth to the idea that each individual person isn’t exactly the same as any other person alive today or any other person who has ever lived. Moreover, there is something good about teaching children that their life has value. For most of human history, most human beings were told the opposite.
What is good about teaching children that their lives have value? Won’t it simply encourage them to self-indulgence and arrogance?
No. That isn’t quite it. The lesson isn’t that everyone is destined to live an extraordinary life, but that there is something extraordinarily good about living an ordinary life. The message to America’s children isn’t that everybody deserves a cake on his or her birthday. It’s that individual human beings don’t deserve to have their lives taken from them by other people. They don’t deserve to suffer. They don’t deserve to be slaves. They don’t deserve to be discounted or ignored or manipulated. Their lives matter, not in some grandiose way, but in small and dignified way that is no less worthy for its being small.
Individual Sacrifice and Institutions:
When individuals make a sacrifice for a cause, for other people, for an institution worthy of sacrifice,2 or for religion, that is (almost always) a very noteworthy thing.3 It is important for individuals to make sacrifices for something other than themselves.
However, when institutions force individuals to make sacrifices against their will, it is almost always a terrible thing.4 And when individuals force a sacrifice upon other individuals for a cause (i.e., murdering innocent people to further a political goal), that is almost always a terrible thing.
Is it wrong of individuals to prioritize their own lives and happiness over the needs of an institution? Sometimes. But not always.
Just as individuals can sin, institutions can sin – and they often sin against individuals. But when a woman puts her own gain ahead of her employer’s, or a man puts his own wealth ahead of his church, they don’t moralize about their actions. When institutions crush individuals, they often tell us they’re doing the right thing (and that the victims are being selfish for not wanting to be crushed). At least when individuals do something self-serving and narrowminded, most of them don’t try to pretend other people are evil for pointing it out.5
Let’s look at some examples:
- Kanakuk Camp has long been a popular sleepaway camp for Christian families. For over a decade one particular counselor of theirs was sexually abusing young boys, and the leadership of the camp turned a blind eye. Victims likely number in the hundreds. Not only did the camp leadership turn a blind eye, they actively worked to cover up the abuse – threatening, cajoling, attempting to bribe, and extorting victims’ families (among other things). They claimed that the camp was doing such good work (which these allegations might negatively impact), that they had to cover up the crimes. And they even had the gall to insinuate that victims, their families, and journalists who worked to uncover the abuse, were the ones who were doing wrong, because they were supposedly destroying an important institution (and standing in the way of the Lord’s work).
- Similarly, it’s well-known by now that the Catholic Church covered up decades of sexual abuse by priests, during which time they also moved predatory priests around, allowing them to prey upon new victims. This, too, was seen as a necessary evil.
- In that vein, last year, it came to light that the Southern Baptist Convention had a similar a scandal of sexual abuse (mostly of adult victims) that was horrific in scale and which was covered up by leaders who felt that covering it up (and sometimes attacking the victims) was necessary for the good of the organization.6 It makes sense that the abusers would attack their victims out of their own self-interest. It does not when church leadership does so in the name of protecting the church. Maybe some of them were masking their self-interest in high-minded institutionalism. But I doubt they all were.
- In the movie Scent of a Woman, administration officials at Baird preparatory school attempt to extort one of their students, Charlie, into divulging details about a student prank (which Charlie witnessed but was not involved in). While this story is fiction, it is illustrative of something that can happen in academic institutions. While the administrators are clearly being petty and vindictive themselves, they cloak their bribery in high-minded language. They know well the role their school is supposed to be playing: forming individual teenage boys into young men of good character. But they abuse that role and in doing so seek to destroy an individual student.
- Likewise, there are schools that arbitrarily restrict students’ ability to buy and sell snacks. While it is true that students entrusted to the charge of public schools must obey the rules of the institution in which they find themselves, that fact is not a license for arbitrariness on the part of school authorities. Institutional power and authority – in this case, that of a school over its students – exist for a purpose. All uses of said power and authority aren’t justified, in fact some uses are arbitrary and some are abusive – especially when said uses are unrelated to, or run counter to, the mission (purpose of the institution). We can have a debate about whether or not students should be allowed to buy and sell snacks in school. But the burden of proof should be on the school to prove this serves a useful educational purpose, not on the individual students to prove they have a need to engage in trades and mutual exchanges of value. Interestingly, these schools probably have classes claiming to educate students about entrepreneurship.
In each of these cases, we see examples of good and legitimate and worthy and important institutions abusing their power to harm individuals, and then blaming the individuals.
The students selling snacks are “just greedy and selfish” (an interesting message for an institution that probably also at least purports to teach students about economics and personal finance). The victims of sexual abuse “are thinking only of their own narrow lives and they aren’t thinking of the grand purpose that the church/camp/organization serves.” Charlie is resisting the efforts of his elders to make him into “a Baird man.”
All of these are really the same message, “the purpose of this institution is noble and worthy, and upholding that purpose requires putting aside the narrow interests of self-interested individuals” and therefore anything is justified so long as the institution goes on and the harm is localized to a few isolated victims.
Some will tell you that in each of these examples above, self-serving individuals in power within these institutions are abusing their authority and dressing it up as institutional loyalty – they mistake their own good for the good of the organization, and therefore these examples I’ve given are still just about the evils of selfish individualism. In some cases (Scent of a Woman), that might be true. In others, (Kanakuk) that case is extremely hard to make.
I listed several examples, but I could have listed a thousand. There are far too many for it to simply be a case of bad individuals serving their own private interests. Many of these people in leadership thought they were ultimately doing the right thing. I think many of them could have passed a polygraph – even if they were doing the wrong thing, they believed they were doing the right thing. It can’t all be selfish individualism. Sometimes, “the greater good” is really the greater evil.
Individual Sacrifice:
Individualism is the belief that – contrary to high-minded claims about sacrifice for the greater good – individual interest does matter, and that while it may not always outweigh higher causes, the decision of whether or not it does should belong to the individual (or at the very least, he or she should get to have a say in the matter). Supposedly, the Aztecs used to sacrifice children for the good of their nation, and for various religious purposes. But all the noble claims about the good of sacrificing for the collective can’t erase the monstrous evil of that practice.
While the good of the individual shouldn’t always outweigh the good of society, sometimes it should. Many would argue that – in the larger scheme of things – the good of society is far greater and more important than the good of a single person. And there is a lot of evidence to support that thesis.
But as easy as it is to mock the good of that single person as being small and insignificant, there is also something noble and beautiful about a single person’s life and happiness. As controversial as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is to some people, there is a moving scene towards the end of that book that illustrates this nobility better than almost any other.
In that scene, the industrialist Hank Rearden comes upon Tony, a young government worker assigned to monitor Rearden’s steel mills, lying in a ditch near death following an uprising at the mills. The formerly-cynical anti-capitalist kid has grown fond of Rearden and, in the end, refuses to join the revolt and instead tries to warn his boss. For this, the mob attacks him and leaves him to die, where Rearden finds him. Rearden, who has grown fond of the young man through their intellectual sparring, picks him up in his arms. The young man – who has lived a rather short and cynical life – says to Rearden as he is dying that he used to believe what his professors taught him in school – that his life didn’t matter because he was just a bunch of atoms. And he says that now, at the end of his life, he realizes that, “it does matter. To me.” And then he dies.
The fact that each of our lives matters to us is neither insignificant, nor petty, but actually quite profound. Tony spends much of his life with a sneering attitude towards the world, an attitude which he believes makes him seem smart. It is only when he dies that he realizes how valuable his own life is.
Your life matters to you. And my life matters to me. That is self-interest, but there is nothing wrong with that. It is perfectly natural to want to be happy and live a good life. Unlike Rand, I’d argue that selfishness is a corruption of healthy self-interest, and that self-sacrifice is a virtue. But not all self-interest is selfishness, and much of it isn’t. It is self-interested to want a good life for yourself and the people closest to you. And it is a good thing.
Selfishness:
Sometimes we define self-interest too narrowly. We think that it’s very short-term and often at odds with other-regarding behavior, or with doing the right thing or following the rules.
I’d argue almost exactly the opposite. In the long run, it’s in (almost) everyone’s self-interest to make friends, do the right thing for other people, deal honestly in business, and live with integrity. However, there are also much better reasons for doing all of those things, too.
However, when we say that individual self-interest is narrow and petty, we often mean that selfishness, or self-centeredness, or self-absorption, or antisocial behavior is narrow and petty. Ayn Rand was right that there are many things in life that are dressed up as selflessness that are selfishness in disguise. She was wrong that selfishness is a virtue (even her version of selfishness, which in fairness to her looks quite different from the conventional definition).
It isn’t self-absorbed to say, “I have a self and self-interest and there are things that I want out of life.” It is self-absorbed to refuse to recognize that the same is true for everyone else. It is self-absorbed to care only about your own self-interest.
It isn’t selfish to care more about your own life than you do about the life of someone on the other side of the world whom you have never met. It is natural for human beings to feel that way.
It is selfish to take that natural feeling as the end of all truth and morality, and to decide that that person’s life on the other side of the world doesn’t matter at all. After all, he cares just as much about his life as you do about yours.
When individualism is improperly understood, when it is construed to mean caring only about one’s self, it can lead to pettiness and worse. When it is instead construed to mean treating other people as individual human beings, each with their own concerns and pains and loves and hopes and desires (just like you), it is anything but petty. The commandment isn’t “love your neighbor and hate yourself,” but “love your neighbor as yourself.”
The problem with saying that individualism inevitably leads to pettiness is that this is a misunderstanding of what individualism and self-interest mean. The problem with saying that individualism is petty, or that individuals are by their very nature petty,7 is that it justifies the belief that if the harm is localized to one single, small individual (or a small collection of a few individuals) then any evil and suffering is permitted. But, to paraphrase Shylock from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, that small individual might say, “if you prick me, do I not bleed? If you poison me, do I not die? If you wrong me, do I not desire to be avenged?” Evil done to one single individual may be smaller than evil done to ten thousand, but that doesn’t make it right.
Small, But Not Insignificant:
Human life may be small. When one person dies, the world goes on. But as we saw in that scene in Atlas Shrugged, to that one person, the world ended.
Sometimes a human being’s life is small and his or her world is narrow. But smallness isn’t necessarily small-mindedness. Just because someone’s world is small doesn’t mean that their life matters any less than other people’s lives.
In the large scheme of world events, some people’s lives (ex. world leaders) matter more than others. But to each individual person, his or her own small world is filled with joys and hardships, pleasures and sufferings, happiness and sadness, fulfillment and frustration, terror and love, and ultimately meaning. To each person, that small world matters.
There is something beautiful and noble about that fact, which is why it is important to recognize that – though we do not always understand other people’s lives, or feel their pain, or know why they want what they want – their small world matters to them just as much as our small world matters to us.
Individualism begins with the recognition that individuals don’t have to be great or famous or noteworthy to deserve to be alive and to be free to pursue their own happiness – whatever they believe that happiness to be.
Or, at the very least, even if they do not deserve those things, nobody else deserves to take them away from them.
In Conclusion:
Individualism is often small, in the sense that each person has his or her own small sphere. Within that sphere, there are things that matter to him or her, and those things loom very large. To others who are further removed from that person’s context, those things may seem silly or narrow or petty. But they don’t matter any less to that person.
Some people will say that it is inherently petty for each human to have his or her own sphere. We must, they say, concern ourselves with all of the human race, or at least with something beyond our own narrow horizons. Of course, it is good to do so. No man or woman is an island, and autarky shouldn’t be the end goal of human life (or of individualism).
But they go further. We have a duty, these people say, to make ourselves useful.
Duty is good and usefulness is good, but it is wrong to suggest that the personal sphere is unworthy, or that it should be banished, or that it should be subsumed into some larger whole (the political and the social). It is good when humans concern themselves with that which is beyond their own narrow horizons, but it is wrong to say that they shouldn’t do anything else.
Do we have a duty to make ourselves useful? Perhaps, but to whom? To God, yes, but God does not need us to justify ourselves to Him – in fact he directs us not to try.
A human being does not need a reason to be alive. A human being does not need to justify his or her own existence. That we are alive is enough.
Human life is intrinsically valuable, in and of itself. I’ve remarked before that there is something good about exercise for exercise’s sake, art for art’s sake, reading for reading’s sake, learning for learning’s sake, literature for literature’s sake, music for music’s sake, philosophy for philosophy’s sake. Each of those things has a telos (purpose) in and of itself, and needs nothing outside of itself (i.e., no external uses), nor any other purposes.
The same is true for human beings. Human life is inherently good, not good because it serves some grander collective purpose. The telos of human life is living itself8 – that is, human life does not need to be for anything. The child is his or her parents’ reason for having a child.
It isn’t a crime to be happy. It isn’t a crime to enjoy oneself, to enjoy one’s leisure time, to take care of one’s personal needs. Naturally, we shouldn’t exclusively enjoy ourselves in leisure, or attend solely to our own needs.
But just because our needs are small, and the things that we enjoy aren’t immensely meaningful beyond our own personal spheres doesn’t mean the things that matter to us don’t matter enough. That they matter to one person is enough. And just because our spheres are small doesn’t mean they’re bad or unworthy or foolish. Not all self-interest is selfishness.
That’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Entire books have been written defending self-interest and the dignity of the human person. But I will attempt leave out broader discussions of politics (i.e., the organization of political life and the means by which humans govern themselves) or economics or other areas that often come up in discussions of individualism.
Not all institutions are worthy of sacrifice. For instance, the Gestapo and the Royal Air Force were both institutions, but clearly the latter was deserving of sacrifice while the former was evil and deserving of destruction.
I say, “almost always,” because sacrificing for an evil institution (ex. the Taliban) or an immoral cause (ex. human extinction) is a bad thing. Sacrificing usually isn’t good if the object of the sacrifice is bad.
Again, you can think of counterexamples. For instance, an invasion might make it both necessary and proper for a national government to levy a draft.
I want to pause on this point, because it is important. My inherent distrust of groups is in part due to the fact that groups (including in institutions) will often do petty and vindictive and terrible things and then pretend that those things are good and right. At least when an individual does something petty, he or she usually knows. Read this short story I wrote for an example of how a group can destroy an individual’s happiness for no reason other than that she was different from them (and that made them uncomfortable) and then proceed to say that it was good for her and that anything bad that happened was her own fault.
My point is not to implicate Christianity or churches. If anything, of all institutions on this Earth, churches should be held to a higher standard, because they are the institutions that have the highest mission. Also, I’m not foolish enough to believe that sexual abuse is any more prevalent in churches, or Christian organizations, than it is anywhere else. If anything, these scandals should make us wonder about institutions we haven’t heard about yet.
Actually, individuals are naturally petty. And they are also naturally loving, generous, magnanimous, and even brave. Not all that is natural to human beings is bad, but neither is all of it good. As Solzhenitsyn said, “the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.” Humans do terrible things out of their own sinful natures, but we also desire to do good. As Adam Smith said, we desire “not only to be loved, but to be lovely” – that is, deserving of love.
By which I don’t mean hedonism. Frankly, much of what passes for hedonism involves things that distract from the activity of living and the experience of being alive. It is strange that we even confuse the two. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure, but much of living isn’t pleasurable and there is more to life than pleasure.