A large number of Americans, leading good lives in most ways, believe the United States is and always was a champion of justice and charity towards all nations when we really believe that the only good life is one ordered to the individualistic tendencies so attractive to those descended from the residents of northwestern Europeans. These tendencies were sharpened into truly dangerous weapons, used to sunder the individual from his communities, by a host of thinkers from Hobbes through Voltaire through Mill, father and son, through the classical liberals of the late 1800s and on to various barbarians home-grown in the hothouses of the modern West, no longer describable as Christian and not unified nor coherent nor complete enough to even be described as a civilization.
Oddly enough, the basic principles of the radical individualists were set in concrete as the evidence started coming in that they were wrong. In particular, the work of evolutionary theorists and historians and anthropologists and geneticists has tended to a rich and complex, and as-yet partially ordered, view of man not so much different in outline from that found in the Bible and in the great literary works of the ancient and Medieval and modern world. Men of the West, especially the Anglo-American regions, tend strongly to think, in a peculiar fit of self-righteous bigotry, that our ways of living are appropriate for and desired by all human beings when our ways are in a state of disorder as individuals, once the source of the creativity and energy of the West, have been set loose from their communities and have run amok, having broken the ties to Western tradition which once nurtured that creativity and that energy and guided them toward good goals.
I’ve stated the problem in terms more or less forged by traditionalist critics of the modern West, but much of my work, in nonfiction writings and novels, is aimed at showing our situation is far more dire and the problems go even more deeply into our individual selves and our communities.
There is a conflict which is part of the evolution and development of human being, individual and communal, which is obvious in the 20th and 21st century in a particular and concrete manifestation. The West in recent centuries has been dominated by Northwestern Europeans who are now known be strongly individualistic due likely to co-evolution of their genes and culture. A long history, including the response to Mao’s policies, would indicate the Chinese have traits leading to the opposite problem of communal human being threatening to swallow the individual human being.
Those who know a little of modern geometry and topology can think of it in the terms I’m trying to develop into an appropriately rich and complex model, quantitative and qualitative, of human nature and maybe of all concrete created being. I’ll present imagery in terms of a vague and necessarily simplistic model in two dimensions–the surface of a sphere with a bit of raggedness going into the third dimension.
Individual human beings can be seen as sheets—think of us as more or less flexible pieces of sheet metal. We are to be found on the surface of a sphere and making contact with other sheets in ways good or bad or mixed. We have to think of the surface of globe as truly being formed as the individuals form. We also have to bear in mind that this is one level of community and also one level of individual as he could develop in his primary communities of family and other local communities. We also have to bear in mind that we might sometimes have to imagine the globe’s surface as being too small for the individuals and more local communities trying to find space and sometimes too large so that we can visualize isolated individuals or communities. Keep these complications in mind but I’ll speak mostly as if we’re dealing with simple and fully-defined individuals (being tangent to the globe’s surface at a point which `locates’ the individuals) and just one layer of community. [The stuff about `tangent’ is very sloppy language and needs to be refined by use of some sort of qualitative limit process which are similar in some sense to the epsilon-delta limits of calculus. Some of this language has been developed in modern physics where `small-enough’ regions of spacetime do have separable space and time and follow the dynamics of Newtonian physics. These small-enough regions are tangent to surfaces like that of a hypersphere but attach to that hypersphere in a way defined by the business of small-enough. In physics, the hypersphere of interest usually has spacetime rather than space and time and follows the dynamics of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.]
In terms of this physical image, groups of human beings which are excessively individualistic make bad contact with others in their community and with their community or even nearly no contact in the extreme case of some mental or emotional disorders. Groups of human beings which are excessively communal make contact too easily in a way that produces smooth boundaries and uncertainty as to the start and stop of the individual.
There are two major groups of tasks for those who feel a calling to help the Body of Christ to better form in this mortal realm or for those who simply wonder, “What the hell is this guy up to?.” First, philosophers and scientists and creative writers and others must develop this sort of a model (or maybe different but with similar potential descriptive power) so that we can understand what we human beings are and what our possibilities really are—as we can currently see them. I think I provided a solid introduction, though no explicit model in my freely downloadable book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. The second group of tasks is the practical task of working towards some goals in various communities and with various degrees of certainty and pure hope. Experimentation would seem to be much in need in the upcoming generations and that experimentation might proceed along with or even ahead of efforts to understand and describe.
In these terms, excessively individualistic groups of human beings, seem to be bad in a clear way but excessively communal groups of human beings seem not so bad in any clear way. I’m sure I’ve been biased in my discussions because I come from one of those excessively individualistic peoples and I’m trying to work my way to an understanding which might produce a better balancing, one equivalent in many ways to the views found in the Bible and in the works of some great thinkers, certainly the Jewish sages so deservedly beloved by Jacob Neusner who saw, in particular, the disciplined emotions of men as being the binding forces of human communities—see Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?.
Strong individuals, who remain separate selves even as they become fully their communities, are needed as a Christian would assume from Trinitarian theology where Father and Son and Holy Spirit remain fully their individual selves even as they are fully God. These sorts of statements communicate some important core truth but they are too simple even for the reality of human being, individual and communal; certainly too simple for the large and complex human communities which have emerged in recent centuries. Yet, they are a starting point for the beginning of an effort to understand human being more exactly and more accurately, in appropriately rich and complex terms. To a Christian, the Body of Christ in its perfected and completed form must have an exact and accurate self-understanding and human beings, Christian human beings and perhaps others, who will have a future as part of the Body of Christ when it fully shares the life of God must play their role in all of this by proper development of powerful individual and communal minds, hearts, and hands which will lead to that self-understanding.
I’ll also suggest that the major cause of the often violent turmoil in human communities of our age is caused by this particular imbalance. I can see the possibility of moving forward, of realizing an overarching community—a civilization or prefiguration of the Body of Christ—on the great Eurasian landmass, reaching from China and her sphere of direct influence through Central Asia and Russia and perhaps other parts of Eastern Europe and perhaps even ending at the British Isles. Other regions of the world may participate to various degrees, perhaps even the United States once it is taken down a few notches and the juvenile leaders of the various political and economic and cultural and religious communities are replaced by adult leaders who are willing to take on the Augean stables of a promising country sunk into moral and cultural rot. But, a people gets the leaders it deserves and the American people will have to develop some true moral character before they could get any leaders with true moral character.