Individualism

Today in Common Dreams appeared an interesting and important article from the U.K., From Buses to Blogs; A Pathological Individualism is Poisoning Public Life, by Madeleine Bunting, and it was followed by, when I read it, a 68-message comment section that was just as curious as the article. The comments were generally more civil than those that I have seen usually following Common Dreams articles, maybe because it wasn't about the Democratic Party, or maybe because the subtitle read: Our shared spaces have become a bear pit. This ever-crumbling civility risks our wellbeing and points to a bleak future. People were more serious, and some of the comments were so long that they amounted to articles in themselves.

I wasn't as alarmed as the author and the commenters. You might think that the reason for that is that I can't possibly be in any position to notice a growing lack of civility, because things have so ordered themselves that I live in a situation of such surprising isolation,on a planet that we are told is teeming with over 6 billion other human beings. Every day even in cold winters I spend long periods outside in plain sight, yet there are so few people around that it's rare that anyone ever sees me except my wife, and nowadays even she doesn't lay eyes on me for weeks at a time, due to her mercy missions to Florida. This degree of solitude is amazing, when you think about it.

Actually, though, this isolation should put me in a better position than most to notice such changes in civility, during the infrequent and brief times when I have to enter the outside world. That would make the changes more abrupt for me, and those are easier to see than the gradual ones that everyone else is experiencing. Yet, whenever I do emerge, I never notice any kind of a shift in behavior, and instead everybody I see is acting the same as ever.

Could this be because I live in Virginia, and in backwoods Virginia at that, where certain codes of conduct, even if increasingly archaic, are still strongly in effect? I would not differ with the lady on this count, because I think civility depends on the person and the place, and right now I'm not in one of the places where uncivility is fashionable.

But it seems that I disagree with her on the merits of individualism. I think of individualism as being a virtue and almost never a fault, and I can go so far as to say that I personally value individuals much more than I do groups.

Maybe Britishers define "individualism" differently from Americans, or maybe it's just me. In the article the word seems to denote self-absorption, the "Me, me, me!" thing, and joining with impromptu mobs to get what one wants. But where I come from, "individualism" refers instead to self-reliance, and to a value system that places the achievements of lone persons above those of committees. It seems to me that the great "Eurekas!" in human progress have usually been the result of individuals sitting alone in small places and mulling over the problems at length and in depth.

The other case in which I part company from Ms Bunting is her criticism of weblogs, which she says contribute to the incivility in today's world, but again that could be a matter of definition.

To my eye a weblog consists of two parts: the posts written by the weblog's proprietor, and the comments added thereto by the readers. And the main point of weblogs is the freedom that they offer to allow people to express their points of view in any state of dudgeon that they choose and that is true to who they are. So I'm thinking the article's author should have distinguished between those two parts, and the criticism should've been directed mainly to the tailend comment sections. They can and often do get out of hand when it comes to common courtesy, a situation that is aided and abetted by the complete confusion and even chaos that results when there are a lot of comments, and they sail off in all sorts of directions.

But maybe she isn't referring to all weblogs. Maybe she just has in mind the big leaguers, the ones that have gotten so popular and the comments come in so thick and fast that they take over and become the weblog itself, with the proprietor's posts growing increasingly brief and becoming reduced to the same function as a short diving board at a very big pool.

Unsurprisingly I am not familiar with that kind of situation or even how it is reached. That is what another kind of "splendid isolation" does for you.