The Individuals Who Changed Our World

Could you be one of them?

By William J. Byron, SJ

     I’ve often made the assertion, in print and speech, that there is no room for individualism in Catholic social teaching. But I was challenged on that point during a seminar on “The Individual and Society,” a no-fee, no-credit adult education course that attracted about 30 active and retired professionals and community-minded participants to a conference room at the Jesuit-run University of Scranton on nine successive Thursday evenings during the winter of 2006. At least one of the participants, a Jew, thought there should be a place for individualism in Catholic social thought and wondered why I hadn’t made room for it during the presentation I was making on the principle of human dignity.

     I explained that any “ism” throws a noun into italics, so to speak, or gives it a bold-face emphasis that almost always results in an imbalance. Racism, sexism, materialism are just three examples I offered to make that point. I indicated that the word I’ve come up with to describe the unique individual who is autonomous and socially responsible is “individuarian.” The word is not in the dictionary, I acknowledged, but it is one I employ to describe persons who are neither rugged individualists nor ideological communists, even though they are strong-minded individuals.
     I’m virtually certain that the term is original with me, although one can never be sure. To the best of my knowledge, I never heard it or saw it before in print. In any case, I employed it in my book Jesuit Saturdays (Loyola Press, 2000) to describe fairly and accurately, I thought, a somewhat common Jesuit personality type that I had observed over the years.
     Although Jesuits live in community, communism would be an inappropriate label for Jesuit life. And individualism is not a characteristic that fairly describes the Jesuit spirit and spirituality. The typical Jesuit simply does not fit into this description of an individualist offered by Mary Douglas and Steven Ney: “Individualists, as the name implies, are not trying to create a community but rather aiming to free themselves from the fetters of social restriction. They thrive in loose organizational structures, around which they can move freely without long term commitment, able to negotiate their own dealings with other individuals. Well being for them means the freedom to pursue self interested ends. It is the well being of the narrowly defined ego, the ideal of negative freedom from interference.” [Missing Persons: A Critique of Personhood in the Social Sciences (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998, p.122)].
     I’m not suggesting that no Jesuit ever fit or came close to fitting that description; I’m simply saying that most Jesuits have higher ideals, larger hearts, and wider horizons.
     Just as “communitarian” is a label that came into currency some time ago to describe a socially responsible, environmentally sensitive, resourceful and self-starting citizen, “individuarian” comes to my mind now as a useful, even necessary label to describe the innovators and enablers we need to offset the community-eroding effects of individualism in our world today. You’ll find them, although perhaps not enough of them, in all walks of life. They are the persons who, in my view, should be asserting themselves now if America is to find a balanced future somewhere between the extremes of individualism and what David Riesman many years ago called “groupism.”
     The question raised in the Scranton seminar prompted me to re-read a famous essay written by Riesman in 1954 titled, “Individualism Reconsidered.” The meaning of individualism, he said, depends on the historical setting. In America at mid-20th century, he saw newer varieties of what he labeled “groupism” becoming “increasingly menacing,” while there was a corresponding rise in a character orientation that he called “inner-direction” that was guided by values and ideals that made those who held them “appear to be more individualistic than they actually were.” Note well the “appear to be” qualification that Riesman made.
     To the extent that “capitalistic individualism has fostered an ethic of callousness,” wrote Riesman decades before Enron, “the result has been to undermine all forms of individualism, good and bad.”
     So I’ve come up with “individuarian” to describe a good form of individualism. It is needed now to protect the common good from the extremes of self-centeredness on the right or mindless groupism on the left.
     The letter “r,” tucked away there in the middle of the word “individuarian,” provides a key to search for other words, also embodying an “r,” whose meaning can help describe a genuine individuarian. Responsibility would be one such word; trust, transparency, solidarity and respect would be others. Toward the top of the list I would put character, courage and integrity. Veracity, fairness, participation, generosity, charity and humanitarian bring additional dimensions to a category that serves to classify the strong individual who is intent on contributing to a stronger and measurably more just society by protecting and advancing the common good.
     Society, through its families, schools, faith communities, voluntary organizations, and corporations, has to begin cultivating this personality type now, if society hopes to enlist such persons in what strikes me as a long-deferred societal self-improvement campaign. Although I’ll be restricting my examples to the United States, there are no national boundaries that limit the potential supply of individual catalysts-for-change that I choose to call individuarians.
     Several books that I’ve read recently spotlight three interesting individuarians—Abraham Lincoln, Milton S. Hershey, and Martin Luther King.
     Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster) ends with Leo Tolstoy’s question, “Why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all of the national heroes?” Tolstoy’s answer: “[H]is supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and his greatness of character . . . . Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world.” Nice bridge between the individual and the common good, which, for Lincoln was the preservation of the union as well as the restoration of freedom and dignity to enslaved human beings.
     I expected Michael D’Antonio’s Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dream (Simon & Schuster) to deliver a portrait of the quintessential individualist. But D’Antonio states, “If it’s a rule that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, M.S. Hershey was the exception.”

     Hershey was by no means perfect, but D’Antonio finds truth in the “florid terms” a local newspaper used in describing him in 1912, as “one man, inspired with acute foresight and shrewd business acumen, combined with a sense of justice—rare combination!—and recognizing the tremendous value of cooperation, raised a monument to himself by elevating the conditions of others.” The monument was indeed “to himself,” but it provided a town (planned but not patriarchal), a chocolate company that employed thousands (not without labor disputes), and a free school for disadvantaged children (2,000 now enrolled) that is better endowed than all but a handful of universities. “He was the good millionaire,” writes D’Antonio. I would call Hershey an individuarian.
     At Canaan’s Edge is volume three in Taylor Branch’s masterful series on “America in the King Years” (Simon & Schuster). “Like America’s original Founders,” writes Branch on the last page of this book, “those who marched for civil rights reduced power to human scale. They invested enormous hope in the capacity of ordinary people to create bonds of citizenship based on simple ideals . . . and in a sturdy design to balance self government with public trust.” King’s oratory “mined twin doctrines of equal souls and equal votes in the common ground of nonviolence. . . . To the end, he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism, and tribal retreat.” Not surprisingly, I would label Martin Luther King an individuarian.

     Grateful as we are for these giants of the past, it is now time to look to emerging individuarians who can move the nation toward a better future. The 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin produced one—Joey Cheek, who donated his speed-skating prize money (a total of $40,000) to a charity that helps disadvantaged children through sports. Then there is Cindy Sheehan, who has truth to speak to power as she mourns the death of her soldier son in Iraq. Congressman Jack Murtha (D-PA), moved by his weekly visits to wounded service men and women flown back from Iraq to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., managed to get his Congressional friends and foes alike thinking seriously about planned withdrawal. Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy has restored tone at the top of a near-bankrupt corporate giant and is now guiding it to prosperity while offering example and encouragement to female aspirants to positions of leadership in business. These and many others are, in my view, emerging individuarians.
     Readers of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) know that the empowerment of individuals to act on a global stage is the most important new feature of “the latest phase of globalization—the software revolution that enables an individual anywhere to become a player everywhere.” It will be important, in my view, for these players to be genuine individuarians.
     One way of encouraging the emergence of individuarians is to discourage toleration of conflicts of interest. Most energetic and talented individuals will have dualities of interest. Their jobs, ambitions and community-mindedness will have them engaged with numerous organizations whose interests may at times intersect. If at that juncture, self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement and other selfish interests are permitted to trump the common good, the conflict is real and the interest of the community is injured. If, on the other hand, the potential conflict points to a community need that can be met by cooperation and a longer-term outlook, sensitive individuals can choose to become individuarians and make their respective contributions to a better community.
     If motorists are more individuarian than individualist (i.e., car pool, reduced speed, correct tire pressure instead of solo flights, high speed, never-think-of-using-alternative-transportation), energy will be conserved. Similarly, to the extent that architects, builders, farmers, ranchers, miners and manufacturers self identify as individuarians instead of enclosing themselves in short-term, self-absorbed pursuits, the environment will be better served. As inventor or innovator, entrepreneur or manager, an individuarian will create employment and thus do good for others while doing well for him- or herself. Not to mention the contribution married individuarians will always make to the stability of marriage and family life.
     Although respectful of competition and fully capable of confrontation, the individuarian prefers cooperation as an instrument of change on the way to community improvement.
     To the extent that it is possible to monitor a nation’s “per-capita human impact” — what Jared Diamond calls “the average resource consumption and waste production of one person” — it becomes easier to see our need for individuarians. They’re the ones who, while scaling back on resources consumed and waste produced, lift the disadvantaged and enlarge the common good, thus enhancing the possibility of a fuller share in the development of human potential for all of us. Diamond’s most recent book is titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin Books). The subtitle suggests that although none of us can predict the future, we, if only we can get ourselves together to talk about it, can choose to have a better future. Individuarians can provide the imaginative leadership needed now to produce the wiser choices on which all else depends.
     Jesuits, as I indicated earlier, tend to be individuarians. That, in my view, is one reason why they decided more than 30 years ago to set a goal for themselves in their schools and colleges of educating “men and women for others.” Now there’s another good way of describing an individuarian!