MARKETING MIX

WHY ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM NEEDS SCRUTINY

In the bulk of this work I have been spelling out various elements of a form of individualism I have called “classical.” I have made the point in various places that this individualism may be traced to a view of human nature that emerges out of Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology, one that respects the idea of “the nature of X” in a fashion that avoids the difficulties associated with the Platonic essentialism of the theory of forms or ideas.

What I wish to do here is address directly some of the criticisms of individualism that have been aired over the years, some ancient, others modern and most quite contemporary. This may involve some repetition of arguments and points but it will be useful to have before us these responses all under one roof, as it were. One reason is that anti-individualism is still very popular and despite the setbacks suffered by collectivists in the wake of the demise of the most prominent standard bearers, namely, centrally planned socialist political economy, there are renewed efforts to suggest that the individualist system of capitalism, of the regime of natural individual rights, is ill conceived and neglects what is supposed to be the essentially communitarian nature of human life.

Even by those who reject Marxism in all of its varieties, many versions of socialism, in particular democratic-socialist and market-socialist visions, are still widely championed. And all non-Marxian socialist views share this feature of the Marxian version, namely, that human beings are primarily if not exclusively social parts, with society, the class, or some other large collective as the significant entity to be considered as we organize our lives. Not that every communitarian champions the abolition of individualist type constitutional rights and liberties. Rather, many favor diluting those rights with measures that stress the solidarity or cohesive nature of various communities that we ought to consider of prior importance, of value over and above the individual’s rights and liberties.

Communitarianism has been gaining prominence, particularly because its endorsement of the group is not linked explicitly to the term “socialism.” The communities that stand above individuals in importance can be families, tribes, nations, races, or all of humanity. The main point here is only to note that in rejecting individualism of any kind, one is usually going to opt for one or another of these collective beings. (The term “collective” is, of course, problematic because it must refer back to the individuals who comprise it.

At that point it becomes interesting just what the status of these individuals turns out to be.)

INDIVIDUALISM UNDER ASSAULT

Because individualism, as understood by a great many social-political theorists, has such a bad reputation (for example, Mary Midgley accused it of “willingly sacrificing all other human values so as to cultivate…a particular group of virtues—notably independence, courage and honesty”1), so does, as we have seen already, capitalism. This appears to give collectivist political systems and economies a clear moral advantage. As Susan Mendus puts it, the “liberal commitment to independence—to achieving things on one’s own…is [factually] false…[and] morally impoverished.”2

Individualism is, to repeat the point once again, taken to be an antisocial, atomistic, hedonistic, morally subjectivist account of human life, much of which is traceable to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But the charges against individualism are open to serious criticism. To start with, often, the tone in which much of the criticism of individualism (as well as its broader social-political philosophy, classical liberalism) is articulated is reminiscent, in fact, more of political propaganda than of scholarly exchange. Some very harsh words roll off the lips of people who find fault with individualism and classical liberalism. Marx, for example, referred to it as an “insipid illusion”3—not exactly a kind term. Alasdair MacIntyre regards liberalism itself, in the broadest sense of that tradition, as vile, nasty, and very harmful:

[T]he Marxist understanding of liberalism as ideological, as a deceiving and self-deceiving mask for certain social interests, remains compelling…. Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships. Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied.4

MacIntyre has argued5_{that individualism is an invention and that individual rights are}

artifacts based on it with no enduring, substantive moral significance. This historicist approach—one that claims for ethical and political ideas no more than the temporary validity of being well received by certain social forces in certain historical epochs— consigns individualism and classical liberalism to the status of ideologies that arose at some point in history to serve some specific historical purpose—in the view of Marx, the

purpose of facilitating social productivity.

To put it differently, what is wanted in moral and political philosophy is an identification of norms, principles of personal or community conduct, that can be established as sound, true, rather than arbitrary, a function of some people’s preferences or otherwise arbitrary choices. MacIntyre and others have argued that individualism as a putative political theory rests on no more than such arbitrary preferences that happen to have been expressed in a given epoch of Western history. We have already seen Marx putting this point succinctly when he spoke of the fact that in earlier epochs

the individual, and, therefore, the producing individual seems to depend on and belong to a larger whole: at first it is, quite naturally, the family and the clan, which is but an enlarged family; later on, it is the community growing up in its different forms.6

So prior to the seventeenth century, presumably, the individual as a choosing entity, one who is seen as having the right to choose his social relationships—via the principle of the “consent of the governed”—did not exist.

We might also recall, once again, John N.Gray’s virulent frontal attacks on individualism. He attributes the following sentiments to J.A.Schumpeter, although they are clearly his own, given how he makes use of them: “[I]ndividualist cultures devour their own moral capital and slide into debt-ridden stagnation as individualism corrodes family life and long-term planning and investment.”7

In less harsh but equally damaging terms, Richard Rorty maintains that individualism is a mistaken ideology that our age has come to accept. As Rorty puts it:

[His own pragmatist-communitarian alternative] takes away two sorts of metaphysical comfort to which our intellectual tradition has become accustomed. One is the thought that membership in our biological species carries with it certain “rights,” a notion which does not seem to make sense unless the biological similarities entail the possession of something non- biological, something which links our species to a nonhuman reality and thus gives the species moral dignity.8

Rorty’s point is that if his especially radical pragmatic approach to politics is right, such that principles of social organization are a function of what a given community has chosen, collectively, to embrace, then rights, specifically those of the individual human being, are unfounded. They lack cognitive significance, so when one claims that one has such rights and no one should violate them, there is no basis for that claim. All such claims tell us is that the view is one that some groups of people have embraced, while other groups have decided to accept some other view.

thinkers of our time, about how the polity of individual rights fares, let us first restate what individualism amounts to. Then, let us look at the views of some particular critics of individualism. Finally, we shall distinguish between two types of individualism, which I call “naughty” and “nice,” and proceed to show that the nice version is, of course, superior to collectivist alternatives.

ESSENTIALS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Mary Midgley makes the point that “our own culture, in particular, has grossly exaggerated the degree of independence that individuals have, their separateness from other organisms, and also their degree of inner harmony.”9 However, she goes on to add:

But these exaggerations do not affect the more modest facts that underlie them. Whenever people have to make decisions, the language of agency has to be used, and the reasons why it had to be invented constantly become obvious. The language of impersonal process, by contrast, can scarcely be used at all for many important aspects of human behavior and, when it is used there, it often serves only for fatalistic evasions.10

What are those modest facts that underlie an exaggerated individualism? They are few but vital for human existence. These facts may be distinguished, though not separated.

One such fact is a certain indispensable level of separateness of every person. A human being is an individual in part insofar as he or she experiences a measure of separateness—for example, that his or her death does not require the death of another human being. One dies by oneself. Insofar as that involves the extinction of one’s identity in some important respect, one is an individual with some sort of separate identity.

Another component is an element of self-directedness. This lies in the social- psychological dimension of human life. Self-determination and free will are a part of individualism insofar as an individual is someone whose initiative—choices, decisions, and actions—is instrumental in who he or she is and will become. Individualism regards everyone as something of a self-made person, even if only in a minimal respect, culminating in no more than acquiescence. Individuals, according to the individualist tradition, do have a determining, decisive influence on their own lives, on who and what they will become over their lifetime of development. The idea is that how human beings develop is not reducible to the influence of other people, of history, or even of their parents.

Furthermore, the capacity for self-generated rationality is a part of the individualist conception of the human being. Every human being is capable of engaging—and, within different individual conceptions, more or less responsible to engage—in creative reasoning, figuring things out, learning of the world, understanding the world to some

perhaps minimal but essential extent. Cognition, at least at the conceptual, idea-forming level, has to be generated by the person—it cannot be imposed. A person is not a container into which ideas are funneled or poured, or something that responds to various stimuli passively. There is an element of self-generated understanding, however minimal, on the part of the individual, according to the individualist social-philosophical tradition.

Individualism also upholds moral autonomy for human beings, in the sense that it identifies the individual as the source of moral choice. The point is not, as Steven Lukes argues, that individualism involves the sort of subjective autonomy that “will eventuate in ethical individualism, the doctrine that the final authority of ethical behavior, values, and principles is the individual alone.”11What individualism requires is that the initiative to do what is right or wrong must come from persons and cannot be wholly explained by reference to external or structural causal forces (for example, cultural or genetic forces). It is neither others nor one’s DNA or environment that is held responsible for what the individual does.

Thus, quite independently of whatever moral stance is applicable to guiding individual conduct—whether utilitarian, altruist, egoist, hedonist, Buddhist, Christian, or whatever—it is an essential point of individualism that it is the individual free agent who makes the moral choice, whose input is the most vital for whether that person takes the morally right or wrong action. Indeed, all bona fide moral blaming and praising are implicitly individualist. Those, for example, who are very concerned with recent legal developments whereby people are able to plead as an exonerating condition that they could not help themselves—where the defense of mental incapacitation comes in—are understandably associating this with the demise of individualism and the rise of “group thinking,” where the notion reigns that “I” do not do anything; rather, “we” do things or things happen to us.

Also associated with individualism is the idea of the political sovereignty of the human being, the idea that in a polity, ultimately it is the individual members of that polity who are sovereign—not the polity itself, not the leaders of the polity, not some representative crook of the polity. It is you and I, as citizens, who are sovereign, who are not subjects of some other sovereign whose natural position or superiority or divine selection has come to entitle him or her to power over us. The political individualism that this sovereignty notion is associated with is, I think, very much a part of the American political tradition. Indeed, those of us who come to the United States from outside, from the very beginnings of our stirrings as Americaphiles, have kind of associated America with this individualism precisely for that reason; we always thought that when you come within the borders of the United States, you are not anyone else’s master and neither is anyone else your master; you are sovereign. This is a form of individualism for which America is well known and also often criticized.

Finally, there is the idea that individual rights, negative rights to life, liberty, and property, are by nature to be ascribed to every adult human being.

I think individualism can be pretty much characterized by these six conditions (a certain level of separateness of every person, an element of self-directedness, the capacity for self-generated rationality, moral autonomy, individual political sovereignty, and

individual rights to life, liberty, and property). I might have mentioned a seventh, but it takes us into the realm of metaphysics and is probably beyond the debate that I am participating in here. There was a hint of it in the first one—separateness. There is a metaphysical form of individualism that maintains that every being is a particular in an essential respect. There are no general or concrete universal beings. There is no such thing as society. There is no such thing as family as a concrete thing. There is no such thing as the team, or America, or blacks or whites, or women or men; there are beings and there are all beings; they can be of a specific kind, but in their actuality, they are individuals.12 This form of individualism is slightly distinct from the one with which I am concerned here, although the two forms are often mixed up.

THE PLATONISTIC CRITICISM

We have seen a sketch of the nature of individualism. Let us now examine a few of the more severe criticisms of individualism. To begin with, here is another brief look at the most traditional, anti-individualist thesis, namely, a certain understanding of Platonism.

If one takes Plato’s dialogues to actually spell out a philosophical viewpoint (which many authors and teachers do, although there is dispute about whether one should), then I think one comes to the conclusion that Plato favors the reality of concrete universals over concrete particulars or individual beings.

According to Plato, particular beings, you and I as we manifest ourselves in this actual, visible world, are in some sense inferior, imperfect versions of the perfect rendition of this being in a concrete universal. This can be taken on analogy to the way a perfect circle, as defined in geometry, is superior to any actual circular being. Thus it is human nature—the form of humanity—that has the elevated or noble status. We who imperfectly participate in this form are always inferior, and lamentably so. It is, accordingly, no accident that Western civilization has always had something of a disdain toward the body, whether it be in connection with work, sex, business, or material possessions. There is this legacy of the pure idea as superior to the actual approximation of it here in this world.

This is anti-individualist in that the individual is always an inferior part of reality. The truly elevated part of reality is the universal, the ideal. The criticism of individualism derivative of this Platonistic outlook is obviously embodied in a very comprehensive, philosophical point of view. In response, one would have to deal with at least some aspects of that point of view, which I will do below.

ARISTOTLE AS ANTI-INDIVIDUALIST

the human being can be realized only as a part of the whole. We considered it briefly at the outset of this work and even indicated reasons why taking Aristotle to have embraced it might be seriously misguided.

The whole, as Aristotle’s communitarianism is usually conveyed, does not have to be all of humanity, as is implicit in a certain reading of Plato, but something like the family, the polis, or some other group. Because Aristotle identifies human beings as essentially social, it is said to follow from his view that no individual can flourish apart from the realization of this communitarian good.

Aristotle himself seems to have been ambivalent on this matter, for the self-sufficiency he associates with living in the polisneed not deny an essential individuality to every human being. One can be essentially both individual and social, given a certain understanding of these notions. But in histories of political theory, it is often claimed that Aristotle’s much revered and highly influential position implies the rejection of individualism, mainly because everyone does best in life when belonging to a community.

There are many echoes of this view in our own time, what with the reemergence of communitarianism in the writings of MacIntyre, Rorty, Robert Bellah and colleagues, and