All "isms" are fraught with uncritical assumptions. Individualism in the US is no different. When I first arrived in the US , the notion of individualism as it related to individual rights was immediately marked off in my mind as problematic. I'd never really given it any further thought until just a couple of years ago.
My first encounter with this issue was listening to a (rabidly blue-collar, right wing AM) radio show where callers would call in and complain about this and that. One woman, however, made the mistake of calling in to complain about hunters hunting in the woods (legally) adjoined to her own premises. Apparently they would start shooting in the wee hours of the morning and wake her up. The response of the radio host surprised me: “it’s their right to hunt in those woods and you can’t infringe on their rights.” To which she immediately responded with, “what about my right to sleep?”
I’m not sure either of these “rights” are actually included in the Bill of Rights, but I know that at least in most parts of the US there are legal statements to the effect that no one is allowed to disturb the “normal” lives of those around them (whatever that may mean). For me, I tended to side with the woman, but noted no one was breaking the law. Although, if they were hippies having a party in the woods and playing music loudly, rather than exercising their “right to bear arms” by killing animals for fun, I’m sure the radio host would have had a different view.
On the surface this looks like an impasse: each person grabbing for his or her respective rights, but to do so requires the other one to surrender his or her rights.
This is where the notion of rights gets caught in the sticky “ism” part of individualism.
Neither of these are actually rights, but the “ism” allows us to cook up all sorts of ways to define individual rights which in the end amount to one person insisting that another person does or does not do what another person wants or doesn’t want that person to do.
Basically, the “ism” factor allows us here in the
US to act childishly but to coat that childish demanding behavior with a veneer of legitimacy. But it’s only apparently legitimate, it’s not actually legitimate.
Playing the “you’re infringing on my rights” card is actually just a way to make it sound like you’re not just in an argument with another individual, you’re actually challenging the history and cherished values of the entire United States of America.
But really, you’re likely not going to be in that situation unless you try to stop someone doing something expressly stated in the
US constitution and its amendments.
The pursuit of happiness is an idea stated in the US Declaration of Independence. Some people think therefore that anything they do, so long as it makes them happy, is in harmony with the founding ideas of the USA. But clearly, we already infringe upon that popular notion the moment we condemn a pedophile for raping a child. One person’s pursuit of happiness may cause harm to another. I think we should be thinking of this pursuit of happiness in broader terms: i.e., the national/social pursuit of happiness.
Along with that, I think it’s time for us to rethink our approach to the “ism” part of individualism. Not to get rid of it (can’t be done) but to rework it and produce what I personally believe (after reading through some early American lit) is something closer to what the early Americans were aiming for.
In a nutshell, we want to shift the idea of individual rights away from something we grab and make sure we get, to something we ensure other people get. That is, individual rights can only work as a popular system (an “ism”), if it’s about our making sure another person’s rights are respected and not about our making sure our own rights are respected. This is the Christian path to social peace and a well articulated New Testament ethic (Philippians 2:1-4 clearly says to consider other people as more important than yourself.)
The problem is that we tend to forget that an individual is always networked into a society. Promoting the well-being and interests of a society therefore promotes the well-being of the individual. To assume that we should pursue individual interests over and against society’s interests is to deny your own interests as a human being. America is what it is today because the early Americans thought in terms of the individual’s responsibility to society. The pursuit of individualism over and against that ideal is a recipe for social and thus national decline (why China is heading for a meltdown).
The sooner we make life about making it better for others, the sooner it will be better for us. If we then revisit the radio call above, the conversation should have been: “I respect your ‘right’ to shoot at defenseless animals for fun early in the morning and rouse me from my sleep,” or “I respect your ‘right’ to sleep without being woken up by my seeking personal enjoyment through killing defenseless woodsy creatures with my guns.”
