Which came first: the me or the we?

Crises bring into relief tensions easy to ignore in more normal times. Any thoughtful person recognizes that the individualism that is not just taken as a given but celebrated and even raised to a virtue in contemporary liberal capitalistic societies lives in an unstable relation with the idea that we have positive moral obligations to others. In normal circumstances, however, when we aren’t asked to do too much for one another, when the pursuit of our individual interests has no negative effect on others, and when Mandeville’s praise of private vice as contributing to public good seems just about right, the relation is more or less peaceful and of only theoretical interest. These are not normal circumstances.

So, I am asked to stay home in order that the curve of the pandemic might be flattened. Businesses and parks are closed. Churches don’t meet. We’re dissuaded even from being outside much, unless it is in our own yards. Those of us who have no yards are to stay indoors as much as possible. 

Already in week four (where I am) people are starting to bristle at the not-very-stringent conditions under which we are living. Some of this is a desire to see people again and to return to routine. I feel the same things. I want to joke around at the gym, I want to go out dancing, and I even want to go to a bar. One of those I would normally do daily, one only once or twice a year now, and the last almost never since I stopped tending bar myself.

Some of it, too, comes from a different place. People are saying that they’re willing to risk it, so why shouldn’t they be allowed to gather or party or open their businesses or patronize those of others? Those who are most at risk can opt to stay at home. Beyond the assumption that we can know who is most likely to become infected or whom is most likely to be seriously affected, this is the voice of the individual. We can, it says, each look out for ourselves and, really, that is the only responsibility we have. I’m not saying I’m immune to this voice, either.

The response to this individualism is to talk of our obligations to the community, but such talk is dissonant to our ears. I think this is so because of the way we have resolved the tension between the individual and community through a peculiar metaphysics of community.

At least since Locke in the English-speaking world—maybe it’s Hobbes in his state of nature—we’ve taken society or the community to be metaphysically and conceptually posterior to the individual. Individuals exist first and then they come together voluntarily to make up societies and communities and states. Those groupings have whatever value they do only because of the service they are able to offer the individuals who make them up. So, the metaphysical priority leads to an ethical one. Even Locke’s account of the rights of parents and obligations of children makes it appear that the family exists for the production of more individuals.

That the causal and historical direction goes from community to individual is obvious. There was a different we before there could be an I. We’re born into and raised by communities. They form us, for better or worse. They sustain us. Whatever some survivalists and perpetual adolescents may think, we are not the kinds of beings that can survive without communities. Of course, we leave some kinds of communities behind us, too. Our actions profoundly affect what those communities are like, so that we are  at least causally responsible for them.

Those facts lead some to reverse the metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical priorities. There can be no individuals without communities in which they come to be, they say,. Individuals inherit all the good that exists within their communities and leave traces in the communities they inhabit. It is the community that is most important; it is the community that transcends. So, communities have rights to which individual rights are subsidiary.

That latter approach is so foreign to our way of thinking to appear self-evidently wrong. I don’t put much weight on what is self-evident, but I do think the solution lies somewhere else.

The individualistic observation that communities are made up of individuals and must be evaluated in terms of the good they do to individuals is correct. This is why we can talk of bad and good societies, of nourishing and toxic communities and groups. The communitarian insight that there are no individuals without communities and that individuals benefit from them and owe something for that benefit and to the community that will succeed them is as correct. This is why we can see people as ungrateful and why we excoriate the anti-social.

There is no priority, but only mutuality. The individual and the community are together in their birth, the individual is an individual only within a community and the community exists only because of the individuals who make it up. The community owed nourishment and nurturing and support to the individual and the individual owes concern and respect and effort and even resources to the community, both conceived as a collection of individuals and something that transcends those particular individuals. A community is something for which it makes sense to sacrifice, but only if that communities feeds and makes possible the flourishing of the individual. 

It’s this lack of metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical priority that makes so difficult questions about what I owe to my community in times of crisis and what is owed to me. As this crisis deepens, those questions are only going to become more difficult, but recognizing the tension as necessary—unable to be definitively resolved in either direction—is essential to arriving at the right answers and right balance. 

Against a return to normal

What we all want right now is a return to normal. That makes total sense, but I think it’s partly a mistake. Of course, I want to be able to see my students again. I don’t want to have people avoid getting within six feet of me. I want grocery stores with food in them. I want to see Violeta to get my hair cut. I want to shoot the shit with my colleagues in person. I very much want to go to the gym. I want local stores to open back up and survive. I want people to keep their jobs. I want people not to be sick or be afraid of getting sick. I want people not to die.

A crisis like this, though, can be an inflection point and we shouldn’t come out of it without staying focused on what was wrong with normal and what we shouldn’t return to. 

We have a healthcare system that is inadequate to our society’s quotidian needs—let alone those that arise in a pandemic—and that is inaccessible to too many of us. 

We’ve become inured to the fact that people live on our streets, in our canyons, under bridges, becoming visibly shocked by this only when we can score a partisan point, but all the while ignoring that these are people with as much dignity as we have, but whom we allow to live in ways we would find too horrible for our pets.

We have an economy that serves the most well off, who are quite happy to accept—that is, demand— the help of government but are unwilling to do anything for society absent their direct benefit. As the phrase has it, they socialize risk and privatize profit. We’ve come to accept that we live for the economy, rather than believing the economy exists to serve all human flourishing.

We’ve internalized the lesson that we are all and always in competition. We’ve created an all-encompassing Hobbesian—or, is it just capitalistic—mindset whereby what matters most is that I have more than enough toilet paper or food or money or space or cars or whatever even if it means that others basic needs go unmet.

We’ve all but killed off any sense of a community, of an us. We complain about social distancing not because we lose the kind of social contact that we need to thrive, but because we can’t do the things we really like to do. 

We take no responsibility in either the sense of blame or that of obligation, but instead look to blame and vilify others—Others—and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. After all, no one’s luck is my fault and I pulled myself up by the bootstraps that I myself fashioned out of nothing.

We admire and celebrate the shallowest of celebrities and confuse fame with depth and integrity and wisdom. We treat wealth as if it were virtue.

We confuse our own worth and that of others with what they have.

We engage in politics that is little more than ressentiment. We’re happy enough if we see the right people hurt, even if there is no benefit to us.

Of course, we aren’t all or always like this. I know that, at least sometimes, I am. I hope when this is all over and things return to normal that we can leave those parts of normal behind. 

Festina lente

In one of the essays he composed in the paralysis that preceded his death, Tony Judt described himself as a conservative because he was a leftist. That has stuck with me since I first read it. His idea was that radical changes are often worst for those at the bottom of society. Those with means can usually weather them. Even in a revolution, they are able to emigrate. Justice can never wait, but in every advance and every seeming progress, we should be aware of what may be lost and who may be harmed.

I think about that partly because we have spent several decades worshiping disruption and innovation as if they were good things and as if those harmed by the new were responsible for not having kept up and now would just have to learn to live in the altered landscape. Learn to code!

I’m thinking about it particularly these days because I think we are on the cusp of the kind of massive disruption that changes everything. If COVID-19 is as bad as the models predict we are going to come out the other side into a very different world as different, I think, as the world of 1920 was to the world of 1914. 

If that happens—or even if it doesn’t—those of us who come out relatively unscathed have an obligation to look out for and take care of those who are not well fit for what follows. It may well be a wild ride; we need to make sure everybody gets to the end. 

Just a minute, I'm checking my phone

We went to one of our semi-regular places this morning for our semi-regular practice of a weekend breakfast out. While I waited for my fully-regular order, I noticed the booth across the aisle. A mother sat there with her two young boys. 

One of the boys was probably around four or five and had brought a toy car to the diner with him. The other boy was young enough to be in a highchair (and the cutest onesie I’ve seen in a long time). Both boys were well-behaved, but the older one went from booth to booth looking for people to talk to and other children to play with, while his younger brother looked around for someone to make eye-contact with. 

While she waited for her food, their mother was fully engrossed with her phone, texting, reading emails, checking various social media platforms, looking at pictures. A few times the older boy called out unsuccessfully for her to notice something. She couldn't be pulled away from the phone.

When the food came, the phone went to a position by her plate, so she could keep looking at it while they ate their food. The phone remained at the center of attention, the very focal point of her time in the diner.

I’m in no position to judge her. I have no reason to believe she is a bad parent or a bad person. And, except when I babysat decades ago, I have never had to sit through a meal shared only with children. I have no kids and the world of the future is probably better off for that. 

I am also no better than she; it is a difficult thing for me to go through a meal without checking my phone. I can’t walk the dog in the morning without it. I check it immediately before sleeping and immediately before rising. I have it with me when I watch a show or a movie in the evening.

Watching her instead called to mind something I have thought about, if not personally addressed, many times before. We live in a time when the virtual too often trumps the real. We’d rather text with someone far away than talk to the person in front of us. We’d rather read about someone else’s life on Facebook than live our own. We would rather edit our experiences for Instagram than fully live them. Hell, much of the time we’d rather sext or use a hookup app than actually have  real, human-contact-involving sex.

Maybe part of the reason some among us dream of achieving immortality through uploading themselves into computers—and are satisfied that this would be a good existence—is that many of us already cannot imagine a life lived any way other than virtually.