I get to speak with a great variety of smart people, as a side benefit to a day job that is actually its true and most durable point. Anyway, I share.
Just recently, a conversation with a philosopher led in some interesting directions. He came of age in Thatcher-era Britain, when he began noticing things not present just few years earlier.
“Beggars on the street most notably. A great rise in homelessness, and great rise in public ugliness as well. It was something that called itself individualism but to me was a mistaken form of individualism, a supposed form of individualism where everything is just about possessing things.”
Real individualism, real individuality, is about being a unique person – it’s not about showing off the fact that you along with 45K other people have managed to afford a particular item, he said. My deeper attention had been gained. He continued.
“To me it was sort of a perversion of individualism, and in tandem with the ecological texts I was reading, the two things came together. It just seemed clear to me even back in the 1980’s that you can’t ultimately have a society based on infinite economic growth on a finite planet. On the one side we were prioritizing the wrong liberties and taking away a lot of people’s meaningful economic liberties at the same time in order to give extra ones for other people.”
“All of these things seem to be misconceived. Looking at the rise of liberalism in the broad sense, the rise of forms of society which placed the liberty of the individual first, and then you have the question of which liberties matter, how they are sliced up and how they are arranged.”
“Since that time, my core interests have been the concepts of nature in terms of freedom. And the flourishing of the individual. While I think of myself politically as being very left – people react to the word ‘individualism’ because it immediately conjures this 1980s concept of ‘greed is good’ because that language has been so thoroughly taken over.* But it doesn’t need to be like that.”
He brings up Oscar Wilde and his 1891 essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism. “Wilde says socialism will be of value solely because it will lead to individualism. What he means by that is if you make sure everyone has enough to begin with, people can actually express themselves as individuals when they’re no longer just scrambling for the basics.”
This is the road to any discussion about ethics. Can you imagine?
*There have been so many corruptions of language of this nature. Before we can take back the night, we’ll need to reclaim the day.
