Madonna performing in the video for
her 1989 single 'Express Yourself' [1]
"Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling
and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realised." [2]
I.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that individualism as a moral and political philosophy is intimately connected to capitalism, which is why Marx spoke of it as a bourgeois form of abstraction, heaping scorn on liberal thinkers who conceived of men and women existing prior to, outside of, or free from social relations and insisted that these individuals had a fundamental right to express themselves and their desires.
Of course, one needn't be a Marxist to find such an idea problematic. Indeed, there are many on the right of the political spectrum who oppose such thinking, arguing that if you deny or dissolve the bonds that hold a people together by sanctioning individual rights
and modes of conduct over and above their duty to (and kinship with)
others, then you threaten social stability.
Nietzsche, for example, brands liberal capitalism as political degeneracy; a form of anarcho-nihilism in disguise [3]. For Nietzsche, the sovereign individual is the supreme product of culture and society, like a beautiful (but quickly fading) flower. Without the latter providing nourishment and vital support, the former would never blossom.
Further, it's worth recalling that Nietzsche values the individual for their power of self-stylisation and self-mastery - i.e., not the fact they express an authentic, pre-supposed self, but, rather, that they create and shape out of chaos an identity via discipline and cruelty. This is what he designates as a great and rare art [4].
II.
As
one might suspect, individualism vs. collectivism is a common dichotomy
in cross-cultural research.
Comparative studies have found that the
world's cultures vary in the degree to which they value personal freedom
over conformity to social norms. Since, as we have indicated, individualism is strongly
correlated with liberal capitalism, the cultures of more economically
developed regions tend to be the most individualistic in the world.
Despite this, there are still some on the radical left who insist -
like Oscar Wilde - that only with the abolition of private property and
the triumph of socialism, will we witness the emergence of a true, beautiful, and healthy individualism.
In his famous essay, 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism',
Wilde went on to equate individualism with art, arguing that the
crucial value of such is that it disturbs the "monotony of type, slavery
of custom, and tyranny of habit" and saves man from being reduced to
the "level of a machine".
Many other artists and philosophers have also argued in favour of individualism - indeed, as a youth, I was all for a punk form of anarchic individualism too. But that's a long time ago and now and I'm no longer quite so seduced by those who insist on their absolute right to lead an aberrant and unconventional lifestyle regardless of how this impacts on others.
Thus, for example, when presented with Joseph Brodsky's proposition that the "surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism" [5], I would now ask what protects us from the latter when it has itself become malevolent?
And surely there is little doubt that we are now living in an age of what we might term toxic individualism; i.e., a form of individualism in which self-expression has given way to narcissistic (and solipsistic) self-obsession.
I don't quite want to say that TikTok threatens the future of civil society, but it's undeniable that a culture's understanding of the notion of selfhood and individual rights has broad (ethical and political) implications and is at the heart of many of the issues being contested today.
My concern is, if you raise a generation in which each individual is convinced of their own uniqueness and their absolute right to live how they like (in the name of authenticity and in accord with their feelings), then that's probably not going to end well (unless you think the atomisation of society a good thing).
In sum: this is obviously a large and complex topic - one way beyond the scope of a post such as this. However, the all-pervasive spread of toxic individualism and the consequences of this (i.e., the dissolution of traditional institutions and structures) are increasingly obvious. As Marx predicted long ago, with the triumph of bourgeois modernity all that is solid melts into air ... [6]
Notes
[1] The music video was directed by David Fincher. The single was taken from the album Like a Prayer (Sire Records, 1989).
In an interview, Madonna explained what the ultimate message behind her song was; namely, that if you don't express
yourself, you will remain "chained down by your inability to say what
you feel or go after what you want". See Mick St. Michael, Madonna 'Talking': Madonna in Her Own Words, (Omnibus Press, 2004), p. 59.
If interested in watching the video and listening to the song on YouTube, click here.
[2] Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart, (University of California Press, 1996), pp. 333-334.
[3] See the post entitled 'Nietzsche and Capitalism' (4 Oct 2013): click here.
[4] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §290.
[5] Joseph Brodsky, speaking in his commencement address at Williams College (1984), quoted by Robert Inchausti in Thinking through Thomas Merton: Contemplation for Contemporary Times, (SUNY Press, 2014), p. 110.
To be fair to Brodsky, he came to this conclusion after living for thirty odd years in a regime in which individual rights were not exactly top of the agenda. In 1963, his poetry was denounced as pornographic and anti-Soviet. This resulted in continuous state harassment until he finally left Russia for the United States in 1972. Not only were his papers confiscated, but he was twice confined in a mental institution, and eventually charged with social parasitism. For this latter crime, Brodsky was sentenced to five years hard labour, although his sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by prominent cultural figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Little wonder then that he became such a strong advocate of individualism.
[6] This is a famous line from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (1888).
