THIS IS A PROBLEM.

This is a problem because individualism may not jive with environmental consciousness that elevates communalism, interdependency, and interrelationships over self-motivation, self-interest, and self-expression.

Until last week, I worried that our cultural allegiance to the concept of individualism would thwart the advance of environmental consciousness. I am less concerned this week because I just learned the history of the word ‘individualism’. It reveals that ‘individualism’ is not entrenched in human consciousness. It is a modern idea! Individualism was basically absent from ancient civilizations and medieval Europe. For most of human history, the well-being of the group mattered more than the well-being of an individual.

The word “individualism” wasn’t even coined until the early years of the nineteenth century. Joseph de Maistre used it to express alarm about the emergence of a new behavioral pattern that promoted the self over the well-being of the community. Maistre feared that the commonwealth would “crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality”[1]. He was not alone. Throughout the era, individualism was viewed as a new danger that would lead to economic exploitation, political anarchy, social fragmentation, and the dissolution of the family.

The word ‘individualism’ acquired an entirely new meaning when it migrated from France and arrived on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century. In the U.S., individualism was glorified as a social ideal that contrasted with socialism and communism of the Old World. It meant freedom and dignity. Citizens were honored for uniqueness and personal ambition.

As environmentalism becomes the new cultural norm, the word ‘individualism’ may revert to its original definition, signaling a precarious state because it neglects the interdependence of all organisms upon each other and upon the resources we share as co-inhabitants of planet Earth. Then, it may be replaced with ‘communalism’ as the social ideal.

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