A little while ago I was given a copy of an essay that reexamined Ralph Waldo Emerson in the light of his preaching the value of individualism. In our old hymnal we have a quotation by him which I shall not translate into modern language as I do when I use it as opening words for a church service:
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity; self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not reality and creators but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
That last line is one that I would like to see blazoned on our walls, hung over our entrance and engraved in our souls. Indeed, I would suspect that the last is already true. That is, for many of us, the reason that we are here - because we believe beyond all discussion in the truth of that statement. "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." We cannot, at another's behest, believe, or even pretend to believe, things that we suspect are not true. We require the freedom of individual conscience, and we take responsibility for our own beliefs and choices. That is what individualism is about, and to deny its value is to deny the value of the individual conscience in issues of justice and mercy, and even the smallest change in the development of human civilization. If all of us heeded only the pressures of conformity, we would still be living in caves, if we were living at all. It is the questing human spirit which lives beyond the boundaries of cultural strictures which fosters change and growth.
Nevertheless, everything does have the flaws of its virtues, and the sudden turning from honoring the concept of individualism is based in certain realities. It does seem as if the sense of responsibility, not just for oneself but also for the communities in which one lives is sometimes hard to find these days. To argue for that responsibility is necessary if civilization is to survive - that is, after all, the only way there can be true civilization, if members of the community take responsibility for the well-being of the whole community, rather than for themselves alone. If they do not, the consequence is descent into savagery. We have seen such descent in tribal wars in Africa and the Balkans. We have seen it in our own inner cities.
When I talk about these issues it is sometimes argued that the issue is merely a semantic one. When the pundits argue against individualism surely they don't really mean the kind of individualism I have been talking about which makes the difference between freedom and slavery, stagnation and change. Yet, perhaps they do. Certainly those who misunderstand Emerson to mean that individuals should not take responsibility for matters outside their own personal concerns, have misunderstood what he meant by non-conformity and self-reliance. If we are going to communicate with one another at all we must be sure that we are careful to express the concepts we are discussing as accurately as we can, or such misunderstanding will surely ensue. In such a case we cannot say that the argument is merely a semantic one. The semantic argument may be one of the most important we will make.
I have been searching, then, for the correct words to describe what those who rightly worry about the state of our society have been naming individualism. In the past I have suggested that it might be simply unenlightened self-interest. However, I think it is more than that. Although unenlightened self-interest may do a great deal of damage to others, it will not, at least in the short run, harm the self. What they and I are really talking about, then, is narcissism which is a self-love, a self-absorption, which is as damaging, or perhaps even more damaging, to the self than it is to others.
Much in our society over the last generation has encouraged narcissism. I am always embarrassed when I find myself saying unpleasant things about the new technology. I have never been a Luddite. I believe that not only can you not go back to a time before technological advances occur, but that in general, they are more good than bad. Although there are temporary disruptions, as there were at the time of the Luddite riots in the north of England when there was a great smashing of the new automatic looms which put so many weavers out of work, ultimately the good that new technology does is usually greater than the harm. You do, however, have to learn how to make it work well for you, and until you do, it can cause a great deal of suffering. That is the preface to my pointing to much of modern technology as increasing the tendency to narcissism - perhaps even creating it. It seems as if every advance in technology in the past generation, and beginning even before that with the telephone and the automobile, has increased our ability to isolate ourselves from one another. We do not need to meet our neighbors, we need have no personal contact even to greet our friends, and we can get just about all the pleasure and education we want without ever leaving our own homes. We don't even need groups to find our mates any more. Consider the huge increase in personal ads and computer aided singles match-up facilities.
Working in tandem with our isolation is the commercialism of much of the new technology. We believe in capitalism and entrepreneurship. It is a part of our individualistic heritage, as those who are concerned about our individualism never cease to point out. And, as they hammer in, it feeds our tendency to think in terms of ourselves first and others hardly even second. When people are isolated, the only selling you can do is to individuals, and you will pander to the natural bent toward greed. (If there is any one failing that is the lot of all human beings, I suspect it is greed as a probably natural desire to place a buffer between ourselves and want in order to increase the likelihood of survival.) When you have few others to compare yourself to or feel concern for, it is not surprising that you begin to feel that you are entitled to those things that you are assured everyone needs or wants.
In its commercialism, too, the new methods of communication seem to pander to the lowest that is in us. Although there are unprecedented opportunities to raise us to new heights of education and understanding, we are given only those things we wish to hear, the reflections of our own desires, the echo of our own voices. Echo can only repeat what we say ourselves. It cannot carry us to a higher level or a wider commitment. This becomes most obvious in the reporting of the most important ritual of a democratic society, a general election. Instead of telling us about the important issues of the day and how candidates stand on those issues so that our votes can mean something, we are told only poll results, the echo of our own voices, and those things which are likely to titillate us, the echoes of our own desires.
When we are so isolated we miss the human contacts that keep us grounded in reality and which teach us empathy. When children are brought up not by others but by television, they have no real way to learn that others feel pain and joy just as they do. Empathy is not a natural feeling. Children don't understand that when they hit or pinch or bite, their victim will feel pain just as they would do. They cannot learn it by watching the unreal and exaggerated emotions of television. They recognize the unreality, but they become so used to it that the real also seems unreal. There have been many studies, which indicate that the more violence children watch on television the more callous they become to real violence. It loses reality in the world outside of our self-absorption.
Even our understanding of psychology has been increasing our tendency toward narcissism. We have learned that there can be no real mental health without an idea of one's own self-worth. That is clearly true, but somehow we have tried to treat the symptoms rather than the disease by telling our children that they are worthy rather than by giving them the opportunity to achieve their own worth. They know better than that. When my eldest son was about eight years old, he came home from school one day with a small problem. He had seen a poster which stated, "You are the only me in the world!" He agreed that on one level that was true, but, he argued, so was everybody else. Admittedly he was precocious as a philosopher, but he got it right, and I'm quite sure that the mere statement of one's own uniqueness neither adds to one's sense of self-worth (after all, uniqueness isn't valuable in itself, particularly when it is a universal trait) nor tells us anything of lasting importance about our place in the community.
Children are also not fooled by any of our well-meaning efforts to impose an unearned sense of self-esteem. They can tell when they are being told that shoddy work is wonderful, but if they can get away with shoddy work, they're human too, and they'll do it. If achievement is no better than non-achievement in the rewards it gets, then why try to achieve? A real sense of self-worth cannot be given. It must be earned, and it is earned by the recognition by oneself and others of real achievement. If we wish children to learn self-esteem we must give them real opportunities to achieve things of real value. To tell them that they are wonderful when they are not it seems to me may help to increase the incidence of narcissism because you have given them an unrealistic sense of their own self in isolation from the reality of others, and therefore the sense of entitlement is increased as well. When you feel that the world owes you all the good things that it has to offer and you do not have them and have no reasonable way to get them, you quite reasonably feel victimized. This turns to despair and hopelessness - the endemic illness of much of our non-privileged youth.
We have not ignored the increasing isolation of our populace, but instead of dealing with the real issue of narcissism, we have miscalled it individualism and believed that the answer to it is to transfer the narcissism from individuals to groups. Groups can be narcissistic as well, and we have not recognized it because the fact of the existence of groups seems to us a step in the right direction of decreasing the loneliness of modern civilization. It can be, of course, but not when the narcissism we have learned is simply moved from the members to the group as a whole. It seems to me that this is what the ideas of multi-culturalism and a simplistic communitarianism do. It becomes not self-absorption but group-absorption, and again the only thing that can be heard is the echo of one's own voice. This time, of course, it is a voice in chorus, but it must be a single voice. Only the ideas and desires of the group are of any importance, and an empathy with others outside the group is not an understandable concept. Indeed, we are even informed that we can never understand anything about someone who is defined by a different group from our own. The conformity that Emerson deplored is rigorously enforced because the singleness of the voice is necessary for the group's continuation. Entitlement now belongs to the group as well. It too is isolated; it too becomes narcissistic.
Narcissism has always existed. After all, the ancient Greeks named it. However, only now does it seems to be becoming a real danger to all of society rather than a mental quirk of the few. It grows in isolation and in another phenomenon which is also fed by our new technology of communications with its blitz of sound bites, its ignorance of context, its pandering to the lowest rather than the highest, and that is the inability to discover some unifying and transcendent idea which can give meaning to our existence. We are buried under data, under incident, under disconnected and unevaluated ideas. How can anything seem more significant than anything else? How, therefore, can anything be more important than we are ourselves? So we turn inward to destruction in our self-absorption or our self-contained groups that have no connection to a greater good, and which may ultimately destroy us as they have destroyed those countries in which narcissistic groups have felt justified in destroying others simply because they were other.
Victor Frankl, in his investigation of the factors which enabled victims of the Nazi holocaust to survive wrote perhaps the most important sentence of the modern era. "What is important," he said, "is not what we ask of life, but what life asks of us." This understanding is what allowed the victims to survive. It is the opposite of narcissism. If we are doing the asking, all we hear is our own voice echoing our demands. We can discover or create nothing better, nothing beyond ourselves. If we respond instead to the transcendent voice which demands our commitment to something greater than ourselves we can find a way to make the world a better place and ourselves better people in it.
I think, too, that we Unitarian Universalists have a special obligation with our strong history of supporting the rights of individual conscience to recognize the dangers both of disparaging individualism and failing to recognize the cause and increase of narcissism with its terrible destructiveness. We must struggle against the isolation of individuals and of groups and seek together a wider community of free individuals who understand the need to listen not to the echo of their own voices or even that of their own nation or tribe but to the voice which calls them beyond themselves to serve the good of all.