IN HIS BOOK Community and Growth, Jean Vanier explains that for any community to thrive, there must be more members who can say “me for the community” than those who say “the community for me.”
That simple contrast—me for the community vs. the community for me—captures the heart of the dilemma facing modern Western culture and, by extension, the expressions of the church that are sustained in its midst. The Enlightenment and the models for political, social, and economic life that it spawned in modern Western culture freed humanity from oppressive, authoritarian rule governing thought, religion, and political structures. The role, rights, and agency of the individual became paramount. This revolutionized the philosophical framework for how society should be governed.
In contrast to individualism, what generally can be termed “collectivism” begins by asserting that realities of social groups are the primary reference point for understanding how societies should be organized and governed. In a nutshell, individuals don’t really have a meaningful identity apart from their belonging to a social group. Participation in a collective group, in this view, is both a more realistic understanding of how society functions and is the context that makes individual life possible.
For political philosophy, the question becomes where the starting point is: Does society find its moral foundation in the rights of its individual members, who then make agreements and social contracts for how best to preserve these rights? Or does society begin by recognizing we are social beings, and collectively we decide—through various political processes—how best to secure the rights of all who belong to a shared community? Normally this becomes a healthy political dialogue between the primacy of individual freedom and the responsibility of upholding the common good of society.
But ideas can be pushed to extremes, at times with frightful consequences of enormous social evil.
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