False Choice: Individualism Vs Collectivism

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The Second World War had ended and the Cold War had already begun. The public was exhausted from grand ideological struggles. The notion that the United States would embark on yet another global campaign seemed implausible. And yet, there was Harry Truman in 1948 warning about the new threat: the Russians.

The Republican Party was in no mood for this. The sense was captured by Senator Robert Taft’s book “A Foreign Policy for Americans” (1951). It passionately argued that America needed to focus on rebuilding this country rather than unleash global military campaigns.

The same year, a new intellectual star emerged on the scene. He was William F. Buckley, Jr., a new graduate of Yale University. His debut book left a huge impression: “God and Man at Yale.” Even now, it is a wonderful read, and a reminder that campus struggles over politics, with the establishment forever tilting left, is nothing new. Eventually, he would take a position as the intellectual head of what came to be called American conservatism.

Buckley’s book documented two main sectors of teaching on campus: economics and religion. In economics, the bias was always toward top-down planning. Keynesian economics was the rage at the time, and it enticed a generation of intellectuals to believe they managed macroeconomics the way engineers built and managed large machinery. Buckley, for his part, was a partisan of the free market and classical economics.

Then there was the matter of religious faith. Then as now, it was rather unfashionable to be a theist on campus. As a devout Catholic, Buckley revealed how people of faith are made to feel wholly excluded in the upper reaches of campus culture. They are second-class citizens while a sniffy atheism dominated the culture of the campus.

“I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” he wrote in his most famous passage.

“I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

The critical language here is to pit individualism against collectivism. Here is where the language that would dominate the Cold War was mapped out. In Buckley’s view, this was a battle of systems: one which centered on individual rights and action and one which treated the human population as a uniform blob to be pushed and molded by the state.

Buckley was of course referencing the economic model of the Soviet Union, WWII allies with the United States against Germany and Japan that would become the foe of focus for the next 40 years. It so happened that the Soviets also backed an official policy of atheism that would be consistent with Marxian philosophical postulates.

This language of individualism versus collectivism was not unique to Buckley (the sources were likely Ayn Rand and Buckley’s friend Frank Chodorov) but it was he who popularized it on the right side of the political spectrum. Such language stuck for decades.

I can see the attraction of methodological individualism. Only individuals think and act. Only individuals have rights under law. Groupthink and group action are inconsistent with the idea of freedom. Every central plan focused on the status of whole groups overriding individual choice. There is always something wrong with a policy that purports to act on behalf of whole groups as if individual minds are not at work: workers, investors, the rich, the poor, women, blacks, and so on. Such aggregate thinking can be dangerous.

That said, there are grave limits associated with a strict philosophical individualism. We all come from families and seek to build them. We associate with groups in the form of civic community and religious associations. We have friend groups, family responsibilities, loyalties to others in commerce and faith, and live in nations with traditions and aspirations.

Freedom requires community. It lives as part of it. The deployment of a raw individualism ignores these complexities.

Indeed, a peculiar feature of Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) is how she posits a society made up of only adult individual actors, mostly unmarried, none with children, none with elderly parents who need care, none with disabled people who need attention, and none who are part of some religious group to which they feel an attachment. Marriage itself comes across as oppressive, something to escape, while child-rearing makes no appearance at all.

The book is a fascinating and sometimes inspiring read but once you see these holes in the narrative, you cannot unsee them. Yes, it is a book about individualism but it is not a book about society as we know it in real life. The oversight here is undoubtedly deliberate: a philosophy of strict individualist ethic will necessarily pretend as if a whole class of normal human struggles simply do not exist.

This is why the term individualism is too limited to describe how freedom works. It was a fine slogan for Cold War purposes but it does not work as a defense of the kind of society in which we want to live.

The new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani stated in his inaugural address that he would reject the “frigidity of individualism” for the “warmth of collectivism.” His comment revived this old language and led to a flurry of memes about the terrible history of communist and socialist experiments. He got a grilling for that remark but what troubles me most is the language here.

The alternative to collectivism is not frigid individualism but the infinitely complex social arrangements that come with freedom itself, which involves not just individuals but a multiplicity of spontaneously evolved community relationships and mutual responsibilities. Indeed, in the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville, that is the essence of what America is all about.

The sociologist Robert Nisbet explained further that a freedom that depends solely on individualism is not likely to survive an assault by the state and other powerful institutions. Rather, we need what are called mediating institutions to serve as a kind of bulwark against the encroachments of power. We need schools, churches, civic relationships, coherent communities, robust families, as well as a thriving commercial sector that combines heroic individuals and group relationships.

Nisbet warned that individualism without community leads to alienation, psychological insecurity, and the growth of an overweening state—precisely the opposite of genuine liberty. “It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century … unless we see the close relationship that prevailed … between individualism and State power.”

“The abstract, autonomous individual does not exist nor can he ever exist,” he wrote. “True individuality thrives within social relationships and groups, not in a social vacuum.”

It’s even more than what he says. The individual inhabits a vast ocean of social mores, traditions, deep philosophical assumptions, technologies, cultural contexts, and presumptions about law and the expectations of others, and an entire world around us that far outstrips our individual capacity to comprehend it all. There is no such thing as an isolated individual actor.

This is why I offer this point of caution. Just because Mamdani rejects something does not mean his opponents should embrace it. Buckley’s use of the term individualism worked in his time as a way of framing up existing debates. But it does not work to describe what a free society requires to retain its freedom. Yes, we need heroic individuals but they come from somewhere and leave something behind that is necessarily larger than the individual.

There is no warmth in collectivism but neither does it exist in atomized individualism as such. It is community we are going for—and that includes the nation as an entity too—one that is naturally evolves from a society of aspirational people who appreciate acting as, and on behalf of, both individuals and as part of groups.