I am launching a new series of blogs on false dichotomies, encouraging my readers to think in terms of both/and rather than either/or. As I work through my list, I invite your comments and responses and stories to augment my own reflections, reading, and research for what will eventually be a book (I hope!).
We start with a classic from my own area of intellectual inquiry, economics (supplemented by ethics). That binary is the tension between the needs and desires of the individual and the needs and demands of the community. “The” community consists many overlapping communities from the family to the neighborhood, the nation, and the earth. Individual people or organizations (such as a corporation) can choose to satisfy only their own needs, wants and desires without regard to others or to the impact on the larger community. In an individual, that narrow-minded focus on the self alone is diagnosed as sociopathy. In law, that same focus, maximum profit for shareholders is the sole obligation of a business corporation. Regulations forcing them to consider the harm done to others (including the environment) are the only and often a weak constraint.
Unlike corporations, most humans have a moral sense and a social dimension to their overall well-being. They seek companionship, shared pleasures,and mutual respect as essential to their own life satisfaction, even if it means going without a big screen TV, an expensive house, a luxury car, or other extravagant forms of consumption. If they care about what other people think of them, of if they have an active inner conscience, they will be inclined to ask themselves “What is the right thing to do?” more often that “what would be the most satisfying thing to do?” Like a physician, they may feel called to “first do no harm,”
Parents, schools, churches and other groups try to socialize children to strike a reasonable balance between their own needs and those of others, to develop empathy, compassion and generosity. At the same time, we teach them a fairly strong version of individualism, that the world out there is a competitive environment, and your goal is to be a winner in whatever competition you choose engage. Each of us must parse those two divergent directives and figure how to live our lives while honoring both.
Success is the goal of individualism. Harmony I s the goal of society. We need not choose between them, but rather seek the right balance between them. Aldous Huxley once described the “merely muscular Christian” as a person who attempts the impossible task of continuously ladling from a bowl that is never replenished. We need tot sustain ourselves in body, mind and spirit, not instead of ‘ladling,” but as the nurturing that enables us to ladle.
In my faith tradition, s in many faith traditions, two core values are “respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person” and “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” There are no self-made men (or women). We are all nurtured and sustained by a larger community of people and the earth itself. It is our grateful task to contribute to sustaining communities and, as we approach Earth Day, the earth our mother.