One can not address the many frailties of our modern civilization, using the term modern cautiously, but one can not address the failings unless one has considered the master child of those frailties, Individualism.
The rise of individuality I think we can already say has been attributed to the Greeks that asserted that a citizen could have a right over the idea of state. And later concretized by the Magna Carta and codified by the French revolution. The Jews who were the first to assert that there was only one god added a bit of certainty to the cause, there only being one god you didn’t need to go beyond the possibility that I could have a individual relationship with that God, instead of having to work through a system of communication based on religious hierarchy.
The world inundates itself with an idea and after that it is a bit difficult to get it out of it. Individualism wasn’t necessarily a bad idea it just wasn’t an idea that could work in a social context where interdependencies were the ruled of law. In short the rise of identity, personalized, individualized, the rise of the I, becomes a spectacle on the face of a genuine reality that could not hold on to the idea that I am me, me, me, and that anyone else can have an equal opinion to me, and not be at conflict with me, or my mother or my sister or my best interest.
Reality dictates that there are best case scenarios, worst case scenarios, and even cases where if everyone wins everyone loses. Pragmatism rises to neutralize individualism, it comes forth to say, yes your you, but wouldn’t it be better if there were others too, and if that is the case then there must be a middle ground. Politics are the land of compromise, the politician is nothing other than the person that can idealize everyone’s ideas and summarize them all in a jigsaw puzzle of compromises.
The Diplomatic Corps of any nation is really an international body defined to allow an entire nation to realize how valuable it is to be in agreement with other governments that might appear to have disparate aims, even as they are governments that must subjugate their peoples in order to collect taxes and form national unity and national ideals and a national defense.
The idea of the individual goes against the idea of state. The individual rises against the capriciousness of state and vice a versa. However neither entity can exist without the other, which implies that there is an inherent and natural value in both. I need the clan and the clan needs me. You don’t have to be to logical to realize that there are benefits to being a social animal and that there are benefits in acting as an individual. Individual action makes the state and the state replicates and aggrandizes individual interest. The state is not a human being and the individual is; though it is difficult to conceive an individual that procreated by itself, that is, in an autonomous condition, and the very replication of say a virgin birth, automatically implies society.
Once I was able to vote and once I was able to have a direct connection to a singular god instead of having to manage the Bull God, the Sun God, the Goat God, the Apollo God the Rain God, the Heart God, then I could solidify my relationship with just one code of rules, One God had only one set of rules, before the singular God of the Jews there were hundreds of thousands of Gods, after that, there was religious simplicity. One law, his law. The immediate oversimplification brought about by mono-deism, can not be overstated. It is complex enough for all of humanity to understand the interactions of civilizations and clans and ideas, but the multiplicity of gods does make things far more complex because to understand many gods, the god of rain and the god of fire have their own laws and attributes, they have their own internecine relationships between gods which one must understand in order not to piss them off, and further there has to be the relationship to nature, to the church and to the self, all so very complex that it was inevitable that religion would be summarized into one omnipotent god for all; just as science had to eventually seek a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.
But as all unifications aren’t necessarily nice, the unification all the gods into one mighty and all powerful god was not necessarily a good thing. There could be trouble there because then rather than seeing the idea of one god as being a unifying principle the peoples of the world begun to associate the idea with the possibility that there was only one me. That there was such a thing as a unique I, that the self was itself categorically unique. If god was real or an idea it certainly served humanity well for this real god or real idea to be global in its services, but to humanity the services provided by one individual do not have a private interest in mind, and so it would not serve humanity well to have individuals in it thinking that they were individual.
Again, the idea of individuality was inevitable, one god, one Grand Theory of Everything, then it stands to reason that the individual wants to be the individual for two possible reasons, one to standout in a universe that is seemingly controlled by singular unified structures, two to feel special against the masses which make up humanity and that to a large extent do not provide much positive added value to the idea.
The French revolution failed in its initial public offering when it became evident that Imperial Rule was dead, Napoleon returns to make the special moment last, but then collapses against the systematic Wellington. That was a crucial defeat for especial privilege. And while Wellington was certainly privileged and special he really belonged to a clan that had formidably managed to create identity not though individuality but through the immensity of imperial power. Napoleon, not surprisingly for France, held an individual charm, when Napoleon died, the true Republic was born. A world void of individuality!
You can count that as a victory or a loss, in reality it was a win for the forces of community. Far from understanding the concept of taking rule from royalty and handing it to the individual what the republicans never understood is that they were handing power to the state! To a none entity. A king was a king! There was blue blood behind the Crown. The King represented genuine personal interest which could have foolhardily represented the interest of the peasant class, but the Republic, The Republic represented not a blood line, not a subject person, but instead a magnificent system beast, a non entity. The position of president could be filled by anyone, by anyone!
And so it was that the republic gave birth to position that wasn’t based on a last name that wasn’t based on a family connection, that for the first time could genuinely give rise to a political entity because they had the best interest of society at large, even as that in itself could have been an accidental return of their true intentions. By creating the Republic the French created the first genuine symbol of non entity representation. Thus with that could rise the ephemeral, though concretize concept, of the individual voter, with his vote in his hand, instead of a gun in his hand, the voter became a powerful human being, armed with the laws formulated on constituently enabling principles, and endorsable through a technically independent system of justice. The Republic was no one in particular and so equally served all.
The problem with any republic is that if it truly attempts to serve all, as did the Republican in Spain, then it is held captive by individual interest, which even as individual interest might amount to the interest of a particular faction, the rabbit farmers, the fisherman or the hunters, the lawyers and so forth, and in such cases the aims of a republic will collapse, as to have a very open mind can only mean that the mind will collapse.
Everything would have been lost but for one very interesting thing that happened along the way, America, The United States of America. America was born out of the need for the world to come to terms with the idea of individualism! Individualism was running rampant throughout the world, no one had a clear solution to it, dictators like Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin rose to tell us all that individuality rested on their will, but the world didn’t buy it, there are a thousand reasons to fight a war but that doesn’t mean that they are the reasons that the war is fought. The emperor of Japan entered the war, why did he feel obliged to enter the war? Was it because it was a war that would determine if individuality was sustainable. I argue that such was the case, even as the Emperor of Japan might not have himself known it.
America enters the war, here is a place that can take us away from the idea of individualize individuality, here is a place where the individuals have united to work cohesively as one, here is a place where you can still vote and not be at conflict with your fellow men. This is the place where your vote counts, collectively but it counts. And that is precisely what Americans and America bring forth, a unique understanding that individual effort without collective action can not be summarized in the annals of human history. America is a world power, a productive, technological and economic might, but it is not due to individual action, it is the result of collective action as decided by individual will power.
Rather than abuse the individual, America takes the lead from the rest of the world in recognizing that the individual, by virtue of their own fragility, will invariably surrender to social and grander causes. To attempt to circumvent the individual when their own interest serve society is foolish. If in the Soviet Union the coerce the individual to be patriotic in America they will let the individual decide, the difference in approach is fascinating, the results not much the same, over eighty percent of any population segment is loyal to the place, to the family, to the culture, to the country, to the politics of origin. We are creatures of habit, all of us individuals.
In a sense what America accomplishes is the institutionalization of the individual for the betterment of the social cause. The individual is still being served, but of course by the individualism of the individual.
In conclusion we should be aware, though not necessarily in the negative sense, that democracy appeals to the individual while serving the greater cause. Duty and a sense of honor and pride in how one accomplishes the idea of self, are themselves functional aspects of society. The Knight might have only cared about the Knight, Don Quixote De La Mancha was perhaps only out for his own disproportionate fantasy, and today’s citizen might be searching for his own identity when he serves the state, the church, the educational establishment. It is the selflessness of the action that matters to society, the dream of individuality is the free cash that the state may use to purchase individuality.
RC
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