The Tension Between the Individual and the Community
By Wade Lee Hudson
The exercise of free will, personal responsibility, and individual agency are powerful. Enhancing self-determination is important. Individuals can dedicate themselves to self-development, prepare themselves for more effective collective action, and engage in moral actions that ripple through society in unpredictable and unknown ways. Once again, it’s not either/or, but both/and. Strong communities need strong individuals and strong individuals need strong communities.
Evolution produced individuals with differences, which aids survival. Communities need distinct individuals. As Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society author Nicholas Christakis says, “We use our faces to communicate our unique identity…. You don’t want someone to fail to feed you when you’re an infant and feed some other child.” Community members need to know who they can trust, who has certain skills that can help the community, and who they want to interact with. Communities must cooperate to thrive, and cooperation requires individuation.
Individuals conform to justified limits imposed on them by the community. But tension emerges when communities make unjustifiable demands—or individuals violate justifiable norms and harm the community.
Forming agreement on what is just is often difficult. Some of these decisions are clearcut, but others are not, and some shift over time. Nevertheless, they’re necessary and require individuals who are committed to ethical action and can engage in rational debate and decision-making. Such deliberation generally requires maturity, which can manifest itself at any age.
In Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, Jacqueline Novogratzas argues “in order to be social, we have to be individual.... Teaching and social learning [give] us knowledge that can be a form of power to exercise free will.... When you are cooperative or loving or show concern for your community, these effects are magnified.” She insists we have an obligation to think about people who are less fortunate than we are, though we’ve been living in a system that prioritizes money, power, and status. “What we need to do is shift that to put humanity and the Earth at the center,” she says.
Each one of us is part of the System. We reinforce it with our daily actions. Ethical action calls us to work on our self-development, relieve others’ immediate suffering, and address the root cause — the System. How much time we focus on each is a personal decision, but each task demands our attention.
Individuals can only consult their conscience, their God, or some other spiritual power and do their best to “do the right thing,” remembering that rights imply responsibilities, opportunities imply obligations, and advantages imply duties. As Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed it: “Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.... Truth and goodness, and beauty, are but different sides of the same All." Our calling is to promote truth, justice, and beauty.
Imagine a large picnic next to a river. An enormous monster upstream is throwing babies into the river. As the babies float by, some picnickers jump in and save as many babies as they can, but they can’t save all of them. So some picnickers join together and go upstream through the thick underbrush to try to stop the monster. They know it’ll be difficult and risky. They don’t know the odds of success. They may die. But they resolve to do what they can to address the root cause.
That is our situation, and the root cause is the System. Each one of us is part of the System. We are the monster’s legs. We reinforce it with our daily actions. Ethical action calls us to go after our inner monster, and save babies, and go after the monster upstream.
Novogratzas says we can only “start to develop a shared moral compass,” build character, and cultivate “the moral imagination,” especially by strengthening the ability to listen. We can “go from thinking of ourselves just as consumers, to citizens, and focus on sustainability rather than celebrating selfishness.” She calls us to “remember to accompany those who are struggling, those who are left out” and reminds us that “when you do it best is when you’re not asking for thanks in return.” Character is destiny, but character is not fixed. It can be cultivated. We can steadily become better people.
A focus on others helps us to set aside our inner “monsters”— our insecurities, fears and shames — which demagogues prey on and manipulate to get us to do “terrible things to each other.” In this way, we can liberate our inner angels.
Not everyone suffers from the same weaknesses, but most of us are often burdened with many of the same problems. Though most people are good people and want to do what is right, far too often, we experience these problems:
Arrogance/Self-Satisfaction
Are arrogant.
Are convinced we have the complete answer to specific questions.
Fail to acknowledge mistakes and resolve not to repeat them.
Minimize our own responsibility and scapegoat others.
Assume some one person must always be in charge.
Gain meaning for our lives by assuming we are superior human beings and do not appreciate everyone’s essential equality.
Are rooted in an identity based on how well we climb social ladders.
Believe we pretty much have it all together, have matured as much as we can, and are coping well enough.
Avoid critical self-examination and do not work enough on our self-improvement.
Tunnel Vision
Fail to adequately empathize with others and do not try to better understand those who disagree with us.
Are unable to see many sides to the same issue.
Live in issue silos and echo chambers.
Do not recognize the advantages we have had.
Stereotype people who live elsewhere.
Short-Sighted/Selfish
Engage in too much short-term thinking and not enough long-term thinking.
Do not care enough about what is best for the nation, the planet, and all humanity.
Do not relentlessly pursue the truth, “connect the dots,” and fall victim to ignorance.
Are too selfish and too concerned about our self-interest or our family’s.
Are too ambitious and care too much about winning at any price.
Low Self-Esteem
Lack self-respect, feel we must prove ourselves, and believe that being widely recognized as very successful is terribly important.
Proceed with lives of quiet or not-so-quiet desperation or find a comfort zone and choose to stick with it.
Lack Spirituality/Feelings
Focus on the outer world and neglect the non-material, or spiritual, world.
Dwell in ideas and abstractions, are not pragmatic, fall into dogmatism, neglect our feelings, are not present, and fail to develop our emotional intelligence.
Fear
Are afraid to fail.
Are not ready to pay the price required for personal transformation.
With our social interactions, far too often we experience these problems:
Submission
Follow leaders because when we do so we have fewer decisions to make.
Defer to those who have more status, power, education, or income.
Identify with and respect members of our “tribe” and demean “the other.”
Are blindly loyal to and submit to some people, dominate others, and relate to few as equals
Since challenging top-down structures can cause conflict, lead to frustrating failure, or subject rebels to punishment, we choose to avoid the risk.
Judgmental
Are judgmental and disrespectful toward others and ourselves.
Objectify people and the environment.
Are unwilling to compromise.
Are unable to agree to disagree and still communicate fruitfully.
Bias
Allow unconscious bias to lead us to react to others based on their skin color, gender, or other arbitrary physical characteristics.
Discriminate against people who have less education or income.
Label others, place them in boxes, and keep them there.
Insensitive
Are insensitive to how our actions offend others.
Alienate people with shrill rhetoric, too much lecture, and by not really listening.
Are dishonest and hypocritical.
Care too much about building our own organization and neglect cooperating with like-minded organizations.
Anger
Let our anger get the best of us.
Are mean to friends as well as foes.
Inflame emotions, distort reality, and undercut rationality.
Demonization
Demonize opponents with abstract labels and debate the accuracy of those labels rather than focus on concrete actions and the impact of those actions.
Resort to name-calling and personal attacks, ignore our common humanity, and forget to “love our enemies.”
Fail to empathize with our opponents and acknowledge that if our parents raised us in similar ways in similar conditions, we too would likely act in similar ways.
These weaknesses, which undermine community, demand our disciplined attention — with each individual setting their own goals when they conclude these issues apply to them. People need help. How much we can accomplish by ourselves is limited. But each of us can resolve to steadily learn how to overcome, or at least control, these tendencies.
SOLUTIONS
Internalized oppression is deep-seated and habitual. Admitting mistakes helps avoid repeating them. Acknowledging bias, for instance, helps avoid allowing it to shape behavior. This self-awareness can be enhanced by taking the confidential online Implicit Association Test, which can enable individuals to better understand their unconscious biases on matters such as weight, skin-tone, gender, race, sexuality, and age.
As recommended by Stephen Belton, Whites can improve their understanding of Blacks if they: “Go small; start now; Select a Black neighborhood as your primary destination for personal commerce: groceries, pharmacy, hair care, hardware, etc.; Worship at an African American church, mosque, or other & tithe there; … Develop personal friendships with African Americans who reside in a Black community. Not mentoring, but a real relationship.” In addition, of course, Whites can use books, movies, TV programs, the internet, and other media to strengthen their knowledge of other cultures.
To deal with others who have different values and beliefs, Glenda Eoyang suggests replacing: “Judgment with curiosity; Assumptions with questions; Disagreements with shared expectations; Defensiveness with self-reflection.”
The difference between right and wrong is not a matter of personal opinion. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men.” All of the world’s religions affirm principles similar to Christianity’s Golden Rule, which is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The Charter for Compassion synthesized these principles into a declaration that has been signed by millions worldwide. Novogratzas proposes her own, additional maxim: “Give more to the world than you take from it.” A commitment to do the right thing nurtures ongoing transformation, a never-ending process.
This inner work is spiritual work. It addresses the invisible, the immaterial. Emotions, thoughts, intuitions, and dreams—the conscious, the semi-conscious, and the unconscious—can’t be measured or confined. Others can’t see or experience what you’re experiencing. Human beings aren’t a machine controlled by cause-and-effect dynamics. The soul is more than the body. The mind is more than the brain. Physical properties combine to produce a spiritual reality that is greater than the sum of the parts.
Nevertheless, at times biological factors do operate on the mind in a cause-and effect manner. Powerful sedatives put people to sleep. Going without sleep for three days can lead to hallucinations or delusions. Strong doses of psychedelics are mind-altering.
And short of causation, biological factors often exercise great influence on inner experience. Infants seem to be born with particular dispositions, for instance, and some people may be predisposed toward certain conditions such as alcoholism.
The material and the spiritual are not separate. They’re integrated, whole. Spirit is always enfleshed and flesh is always spiritualized. Matter and spirit, body and soul, nature and nurture, will power and the environment, all are equally important. A society’s political and economic structures have direct and indirect impacts on the inner experience of its people.
Spiritual realities are essentially mysterious, beyond full comprension. They induce humility. Scientists still don’t know how life first emerged, nor can they create life in the laboratory. When they pause to reflect on it, individuals are left awestruck at the beauty of the universe. That’s why music and poetry are so important. Humans are constantly trying to express the inexpressible, to communicate spirit more fully, to share inner experience more completely.
Human beings sense that the universe is not completely chaotic. It has structure, order. An essential harmony prevails. Patterns persist. Life forms die and new life appears, carried forward by evolution over time.
These realities lead humans to desire harmony with this life force, to be at one with the universe. Multiple situations induce this spiritual connection, including communing with Mother Nature, joining in worship services, and listening to music.
These experiences are essentially nonverbal, or pre-verbal. They can’t be fully captured by words. They celebrate life itself. Nevertheless, humans need to talk about these experiences as well as they can. So they’ve communicated with myths, poems, songs, paintings, sculpture, architecture, and other art forms. But all of these expressions fall short. No set of words, no single word, nor any object can capture the essence of life.
Ultimately, however, each individual must come to their own conclusions. They must interpret and reinterpret myths with language that makes sense to them. Doing so leads most people to commit to:
Pay attention to, control, and strive to change thoughts and feelings that lead to oppressive or counterproductive behavior.
Acknowledge mistakes and resolve to avoid them in the future.
Become a better human being.
Talk about these efforts with close friends.
Listen to, learn from, and better understand others.
Avoid fundamentalist worship of certain words as icons.
Support the development of social structures that nurture personal and community empowerment.
Help transform their nation into a compassionate community.
Reflecting on Seneca, Firmin DeBrabander comments, “In America, we fancy ourselves eminently free. We tell our children they can be anything they want, that they can achieve their grandest dreams.” This programming is pervasive, in schools, families, and political speeches. But DeBrabander says that Seneca would consider this encouragement “secretly oppressive” because the truth of the matter is that “we can’t be anything we want, nor should we try, because dreams are imprecise, and wants are insatiable. It is far better to focus on what we can do, where we can help…,” and remember “we have many callings. There is not only one path to fulfillment, but many.”
Albert Camus recommended, “Make no effort to gain either reputation or obscurity. Accept either.” The Baghdad Vita says, “The work is yours but not the fruits thereof.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said Truth, Justice, and Beauty are three sides of the same reality, the Holy Trinity. If we pursue them and go deep within ourselves, we discover the Ground of Being and become aware of our connection with all humanity and all life. This awareness calls us to channel our anger, acknowledge our sadness, pursue Truth, promote Justice, and experience Beauty each day, each moment, with gratitude for being alive, knowing we’ll die some day, determined to make the most of each moment.
Notes
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK361016/#
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4970636/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteria_(psychiatric_treatment)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/opinion/should-work-be-passion-or-duty.html