Personally, I find both individualistic and communitarian ethos to be extremely lopsided and have seen more than a few extremely individualistic persons that are extremely depressed. The problem in society lies in the juxtaposition of individual against community.

I have noticed the pattern that the most individualistic people I've met are the most likely to not do anything about the enviroment or any problem bigger than what they can handle by themselves. By definition, the individual must concern himself with individual problems. This observation seems to slant your argument differently.

Likewise the communal people who consider all individualism bad tend to emphasize that they have no control over their own behavior, but they are quicker to adopt solutions to things like the environment to pitch in a little. This is a problem that's workable, but their personal problems are really impersonal and insurmountable.

These are the ways I've tended to notice things in everyday life. Both approaches tend to lead to extremism, and evaluating it in this manner leads inevitably to the same conclusions and swinging of the pendulum.

Rather, a person is only a person as long as he exists in cooperation and union with other persons. If we become a true person through this union, and this is our goal, then we will lose sight of our own individual personhood or capacities less, but we also lose sight of others' personhood and impacts less also. We have to relate like the persons of the Trinity.

This also makes heroes natural, because the heroes show what a person's potential can be and can be striven for, and this is very human. It mitigates the overly egalitarian emphasis in our culture that is so dehumanizing. It also mitigates the individualism, because you must always look elsewhere for strength, because no man can ever be truly human in isolation, and the goal is to be truly human.

Using the individual vs. community antipodes, we set up the two concepts as contradictions. Not only are they in tension, but they become mutually exclusive. We cannot attain balance in that view without redefining it in a pre-modern way. In short, we cannot accomplish what you want by striving for either modern or postmodern ideals. They will inevitably and continuously flip one to the other :(.

Kenneth,

I think you're making a bit of a postmodern mistake : )

One of my points was that -- community and individual should be in balance. Within modernism, the community is not lost or considered inherently evil (and especially not in Christianity!). However, heroism cannot survive where there is not a defined concept of individuality apart from the community (which goes into the whole east/west problem).

The issue at stake is that the current generation tends to view individualism as unequivocally wrong, which tips the scales...

Undoubtedly, there are problems with unrestrained individualism, but that isn't the issue at hand (or the problem in the larger culture).  

You're right, I can't just go around declaring things like "individualism is bad", but I do tend to place a higher value on good done in community rather than good coming from an individual.  I think that I'll always be more likely to question the motives of an individual where I'll tend to give a free pass to a community's inspiriation for doing good.  I don't guess that matters much, though.

Kierkegaard was a pretty cool dude.  I think he said something about the crowd being untruth.

Maybe it's easier for a person to join in on a movement like the Nazis than it would be for an individual to do unthinkable evil acts on his own.

For me, though, I think I'm more likely to be inspired to play a seemingly insignificant part in something great than to set out to change the world on my own.

I don't know.  Ultimately I don't think it is either possible or even beneficial to attempt to totally eliminate individualism from one's impulses, but I think there might be something heroic in an ability to keep your ego in check and just strive to play your part. 

For me, it has been very beneficial to acknowledge my high level of dependence, and I tend to value that quality in others, but if another greatly values independence I don't think it would bother me any.

I guess loving Jesus and loving people is the goal.  If one person gets there as a part of a team and another person gets there by being a responsible individual, they both still get there.

Adam,

I'll have to admit I have a hard time with dependence -- in my own life, I value independence very highly. Therefore, in the past, I've tended to view dependence as an unequivocal weakness in me or in others. I'm trying to see that it is not, but some time it can be hard to unlearn those patterns set from childhood. Know what I mean?

I don't think you can balance things now. Once you define things as antipodes, it never achieves balance until that is jettisoned. You simply can't get balance when you hold the two necessities against each other. I understood the point, but I'm saying that your entire base will destroy what you want. The entire classification that you use necessitates imbalance and renders balance impossible

Remember, also, that very sense of individualism is exactly what killed the concept of the individual to begin with. It's like trying to go back to the fifties' families to avoid the problems of the sixties. Those kids were the problem of the sixties. Modernism is not the savior or benefactor of the concept of hero. It existed long before that.

To further my point, your assertion that we must have a clearly defined sense of individualism to retain the concept of hero over against the I had outlined really isn't very strong. Not least because it isn't postmodern, but very, very Greek. We got the word hero from the Greeks (the concept was more widespread). However, they regarded the polis as their mother and believed they weren't fully human without interaction with other humans. I pulled my concept almost verbatim from the ancient Greeks. That fact, in itself, shows that we can have a concept of heroes without some sort of modernist individualism.

I'm not going to oversimplify things. There were people who had conflict (Plato would be antiheroic on many levels), but this was the understanding at the time and the way it worked out.

Medieval Christianity and Ancient Christianity worked the same way. They had no clear distinction between individuals and the community. In fact, the whole concept was that people were persons in a divine bond of community together, that none of us were whole without the others. It didn't kill the concept of heroism in the slightest. Look at how the saints' were glorified and venerated.

I think, then, that I can stand by my points (and I made no mention of Rome or other such sources). My point wasn't postmodern but represented one strain of premodern thought (unless those ancient Greeks and Christians were postmodern). I can line out passages of heroes and passages on the nature of man. The concept worked very nicely. Both of us have postmodern tendencies, but this isn't one of them.

While this is overlong, I think the modernist concept you appeal to is just as fatal to the concept of hero as is postmodernism (look at how heroes were toned down with the advent of modernism). Postmodernism, as it does with so many other things, is working modernism out to its logical conclusion.

I'd love to see it :).

Kenneth,

I think you're trying to see this in too much of a modern vs. postmodern sense. I never even mentioned modernism in my original post -- only in response to your comment.

Now, I would say that my value of individualism is influenced by modernism (in the same way that your community views are influenced by postmodernism), but the issue of the Greeks supports what I'm saying -- the community is not downplayed, but the individual has worth -- and a voice (as the Athenian democracy asserted in principle, though not always in actual practice -- then it was more like the aristocracy had a voice).

Now, concerning the vastly more important matter: Spiderman 3. We were thinking about the late show on Friday, is that doable for you?

On the important concern, yes, it is doable.

I brought modernism up, because a). you say yourself in person that you draw on the modern concept of these things. You call yourself a modernist (even though we are all postmodern, whether we like it or not). b). Your divisions are modernist and postmodernist divisions. They don't date back before that, and cognates don't often appear.

That leads me to point out why your division can't be a part of Greek culture (you're reading into the Greeks the same way you said the Marxist author was). The Greeks didn't talk about "individual responsibility" or "individual" anything of the sort (that's why "individual rights" is a purely modern concept with no ancient correlary). Without a developed concept of the individual, then it is impossible to have a tension between the individual and the community, much less the balance you aim at. Where words and classifications do not exist, the concept dependent on them doesn't exist. There is more support for class struggle in the ancient world than there is for modern individualism and the categories thereof (including individual vs. community).

The ancient Greek worldview, frankly, was more like something in Hinduism or Buddhism than in the modern west or postmodern west. That is why Platonism and Stoicism are so similar to Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies, right down to the cause of our suffering. The individual was an illusion imprisoned in a material body (which was itself either a pale shadow or illusory), and freedom was accomplished when we shattered this and rejoined the Eternal Mind whereupon we lose our individuality, and we will be reincarnated until we achieve this. All the presuppositions for the far Eastern view were there, and they were there as far as Rome. To them, the single isolated individual was an illusion, and they could never think in those terms, much less in terms of "individual vs. community." That would, to them, sound like sophistry (with the exception of the materialists). There is no way the ancient Greeks could support your view. They couldn't even understand it. They lacked the cultural and social vocabulary to understand it.

Likewise, the Medieval and ancient Christians wouldn't understand it. They still hadn't singled out the individual apart from the Church. The barrier between the individual and the community was fuzzy at best. To them, at least, both were possible (enabling the development of modernism), but they weren't clearly divided by any stretch. Other people and demons could put thoughts inside your head. Salvation was communal. You, though, were held accountable for your actions both good and bad. They believed the very air breathed by others could transmit things pertaining to the soul (hence some early theories on the Black Death).

Neither of these were capable of supporting the division and tension central to your approach to balance, or for postmodernism's view of "the individual is bad." It simply didn't exist, and that's why the uniquely (post)modern problems in the area didn't exist.

They also demonstrate that the concept of hero can thrive outside of the modern classification. If it couldn't, then it couldn't exist and thrive where such classifications did not exist. In fact, they thrived far better than they did in modernism or do in postmodernism. Those two, with their categories of thought, have been steadily killing the concept.

It also brings to bear the chief criticism I actually made of your argument: you have placed the two on antipodes. It is individual vs. community in tension and conflict on a philosophical level (as opposed to a particular). That tension caused the flip-flop into the opposite in a number of people's minds, and it'll remain until it flops back. You can't achieve balance until you get rid of the tension altogether, and to do that, you would have to abandon the classification scheme.

This is one place where I think you've misclassified my philosophy. I am certainly not postmodern here anymore than modern. I am one or the other in other areas, but not here. I drew my philosophy from a different well. :)

"The individual was an illusion imprisoned in a material body" That was stupid. I meant "The individual was an illusion, a soul imprisoned in a material body..." I started to scan that, and I noticed that. I'm not going to proofread any further. That was a humiliating typo *bangs head*

But what about the "more important matter?"

Kenneth,

Methinks thou dost protest too much : )

Anyway, you seem to be misunderstanding me -- then writing how you are not misunderstanding me despite what I say that I am not saying what you think I am saying.

The only place that I set up community and individual as antipodes was in the title -- in order to draw people in to the discussion. Evidently, it worked (*wink*).

I said the more important matter was doable :).

If I'm misunderstanding, sorry (neither was I angry; I just wanted something to discuss lol). I don't think you were understanding my point either, especially how you classified the position (In this case, it is not postmodern in any way).

Spong's work may be controversial, but what I'm reading is his autobiography.  Whether he's a heretic or not, he's lived an interesting life.  You should give Here I Stand a chance sometime.  I think you'd really enjoy it.

Wish I was there so I could join you guys for your more important matter.

I don't think this generation views individualism as an evil; that's more a case-by-case personality thing, in my experience. From where did you derive that claim?

I also don't know if a communitarian would sit on a log, never notifying the community of a problem. Doesn't seem an exclusively individualist idea to get the other members of a community involved in a solution to a problem.

Perhaps you are confusing communitarianism with co-dependency?

Group responses --

Kenneth: I don't know what I did, but I completely overlooked your comment about "doable"-ness. Concerning the postmodernism, I was mainly trying to get your goat -- and it seems to have worked : P

Adam: If you're talking about Here I Stand by Roland Bainton (biography of Martin Luther), I have read it, and it was a wonderful read (although Kenneth would definitely not like it).

Brandon: I was basing my claim on what Adam said in an earlier comment. I wasn't so much trying to issue it as a blanket statement (even as indicative of his thought), as following the line of thinking that it raised. I admit that my examples were a bit extreme, but extreme examples often make for better discussion. Concerning the respective responses of the communitarian and individualist, I was also talking about extremes. In an extreme sense, the communitarian would pass the buck, and, in an extreme sense, the individual would try to do everything himself. The best path is a balance, which is something Kenneth and I were agreeing on -- that is, before we got derailed on modernism and postmodernism.

I'm a sucker for any sort of discussion. :)

re: nope, Here I Stand by and a about Spong

Ah. That's why discussion is so much easier in person. I don't know what it is about in-person discussion, but you understand people more. At least, it's faster to ask questions and clarify statements in person.

It's easy to get derailed on modernism and postmodernism -- the surprising truth is, I think I'm realizing, that it doesn't apply to nearly as much of society as it may seem. I wonder if there's only a portion of the world, even of Western civilization, that you can safely categorize as under the influence of either philosophy.