Western Modernity and Rugged Individualism
Someone posted a picture on a social medium recently, I think it was Twitter, which seemed to me to encapsulate the spirit of Western Modernity, and the ideal of rugged individualism.
A few years ago Hillary Clinton was said to have quoted an African proverb to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child. I have no idea what she was trying to communicate by saying it, or of the context in which she was quoting it. What I was made very aware of was the storm of protest it aroused. God may have said, after making Adam, "It is not good for man to be alone", but clearly Western Civilization disagreed, loudly and vociferously. To a large and vocal segment of American society, the thought of human community was clearly abhorrent.
Western Civilisation since the Enlightenment has fostered this notion that one can be fully human without real human relationships, and those that can make their way without the help of other people are to be admired. The "self-made man" is the ideal, and in the dog-eat-dog Darwinist society of the survival of the fittest, those who don't make it don't deserve to survive.
On another social medium someone noted that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work hader if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less. And someone else responded to this "It's a matter of whether you are rewarding contribution or rewarding idleness. Make welfare dependent on working, with exceptions only for those truly incapable of working. ".
On the other hand, I recently finished reading Salman Rushdie's book Midnight's Children, in which the protagonist says:
Who what am I? My answer? I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being in the world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone that would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now six-hundred million plus of us, contains a similar multitude. . I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
John Donne, in the Early Modern period, wrote that no man is an island, but in late modernity the prevailing creed is that every man is and ought to be an island. Premodern society was characterised by a belief in human community, and in some ways postmodernity is rediscovering the need for it. But modernity despises it.
For more on this see Individualism, Collectivism and Communitarianism.
A few years ago Hillary Clinton was said to have quoted an African proverb to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child. I have no idea what she was trying to communicate by saying it, or of the context in which she was quoting it. What I was made very aware of was the storm of protest it aroused. God may have said, after making Adam, "It is not good for man to be alone", but clearly Western Civilization disagreed, loudly and vociferously. To a large and vocal segment of American society, the thought of human community was clearly abhorrent.
Western Civilisation since the Enlightenment has fostered this notion that one can be fully human without real human relationships, and those that can make their way without the help of other people are to be admired. The "self-made man" is the ideal, and in the dog-eat-dog Darwinist society of the survival of the fittest, those who don't make it don't deserve to survive.
On another social medium someone noted that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work hader if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less. And someone else responded to this "It's a matter of whether you are rewarding contribution or rewarding idleness. Make welfare dependent on working, with exceptions only for those truly incapable of working. ".
On the other hand, I recently finished reading Salman Rushdie's book Midnight's Children, in which the protagonist says:
Who what am I? My answer? I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being in the world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone that would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now six-hundred million plus of us, contains a similar multitude. . I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
John Donne, in the Early Modern period, wrote that no man is an island, but in late modernity the prevailing creed is that every man is and ought to be an island. Premodern society was characterised by a belief in human community, and in some ways postmodernity is rediscovering the need for it. But modernity despises it.
For more on this see Individualism, Collectivism and Communitarianism.