In defence of individualism

It’s the funniest scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. A parable-seeking mob gathers outside Brian’s home. They think he’s the messiah and will dispense some wisdom they might live their lives by. Instead he tells them to think for themselves, because ‘You are all individuals’. ‘We are all individuals,’ the mob intones, robotically. ‘I’m not,’ pipes up a lone, individualist voice, only to be shushed by the unthinking crowd.

Observing the current political debate about individualism, I often feel like that dissenting bloke in Life of Brian. Today, we’re surrounded by politicians, thinkers and hacks who chant that, for the worse, we are all individuals now; that we live under a ‘cult of the individual’, which has elbowed aside communitarian values and replaced them with a secular religion of self-satisfaction. I want to cry, ‘No we don’t!’ We are not all individuals, sadly. In fact, individualism, the exercise of individual autonomy and the expression of individual thought, has never been weaker than it is today. And that is a very bad thing. We live in a society not beset by individualism, but bereft of it.

The belief that individualism is rampant, and is a highly destructive force, unites politicos of every stripe. From the right, David Cameron says ‘selfishness and individualism’ are the big scourges of our age. On the left, Labour leader Ed Miliband has recently snuggled up to a new intellectual guru: Michael Sandel. A prof, author and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sandel is best known for chucking intellectual hand grenades at the modern West’s worshipping of aggressive individualism. He fulminates against the ‘unencumbered self’ of our age, against the idea that the individual should be left alone by states and do-gooders to ‘choose his own values and ends’. Apparently it would be better if the self were encumbered, ideally by the values of his -betters.