The individual in community

As a South African I find myself perched on the confluence of two mighty rivers of culture and thought – Teutonic individualism and African communalism. This seems a common refrain among many of my compatriots, even if subliminal, who must constantly wrestle with the difficulties of living in the twilight zone of being neither fully African nor European in their cultural orientation.

The resurgence of the Black Consciousness movement is helping some of us to reconnect with our inner African[i], so mercilessly abandoned on the shrine of whiteness that has had so many of us, for so long, unthinkingly beguiled. By whiteness I refer to the idea that the white European is the necessary measure of true humanity.

It is important to emphasize that this is neither a commentary nor attack on white people of European descent per se but rather the rejection of a false albeit exceedingly powerful idea that has captured popular imagination over recent centuries. One that has been deeply internalised, many times subconsciously, by a wide spectrum of people all over the world, such that even Africans like myself only belated recognised its nefarious workings in us. The work of eradicating it has only just begun and will most likely continue for some time yet.

The idea of liberalism, even if not fully supported by how the most avowed liberals live, is predicated on the primacy of the individual over the collective. On the different end of the spectrum we find African communalism, gloriously captured by the famous Xhosa epithet: umntu ngumntu ngabanye[ii]; implying that our humanity is fully realisable only in community with others.

I use the word different rather than opposite because the two social paradigms are not necessarily polar antagonisms. Their difference rather is found in their emphases. Implicit in African communalism as captured in the Xhosa epithet, after all, is the affirmation of the individual, which it seeks to actualise albeit through the community.

My intention here is to explore these themes in very broad terms with reference to the Biblical Christian worldview, in hopes to ease the existential tension between individualism and collectivism that afflicts those of us entrapped in this vexing cultural dilemma.

There is certainly no doubt about the importance of the individual. After all the entire human family is traceable to an individual. Any question marks concerning the power of individuals to shape history for better or worse should disappear after a closer look at our collective ancestor - Adam. He is responsible for the advent of not only the entire human genealogy but, critically, the whole catalogue of human suffering that sprung from that ill-fated decision to disobey God.

Here we find, simultaneously, the refutation of the idea of the absolutised individual which is also known as individualism. Precisely as humanity we are collective participants in sharing in the consequences of the folly of one individual – Adam.  Thus we see indisputably just how much individual choices implicate the collective. Such that it is fair to question whether the idea of the sovereign individual exists anywhere else other than in theory.

It would nevertheless be ill-advised to dismiss the idea of individualism entirely. It carries, after all, enough truth not only to have survived this long but to have captured among the most powerful, successful and prominent cultures of the world. With good reason because the individual is immensely powerful and is evidenced by history and scripture to matter profoundly.

The next such individual we will look at is Noah, whose transcendent personal faith forms the basis of a post-apocalyptic world. The first apocalypse, that is.

Soon thereafter we meet Abraham, the patriarch revered by the world’s three great monotheistic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In our study of his life, it is easy to observe from the onset God’s solicitous interest him as an individual.

Indeed, God’s plan for “all the families of the earth”[iii] through Abraham is built on his personal dreams. God responds to his perennial longing for a son by not only promising him the fulfilment of this dream but that he would exceed it so much as  to make him the “father of many nations”[iv].

We then come to the great prophet, Moses, who encounters God while occupied with the humble duties of shepherds, at a place revealingly described as the “back of the desert”[v]; a place we might also call the graveyard of dreams. From our own personal experiences, it is not difficult imagining the disillusionment that must have accompanied this chapter of one who was once among the up-and-coming elite of Egypt. 

God’s encounter with him seems to hearken to a long-buried sense of destiny. Buried so long, in fact, that he almost exasperates God who must fan into flames anew a man who for decades, it seems, had become so crushed in spirit as to be consumed with debilitating self-doubt. God is revealed here as caring for his personal dreams long after Moses had despaired of them.

Truly we can continue to no end exploring the personal journeys, chronicled in instructive[vi] detail, of countless biblical figures whose individuality is shown to be unmistakably important to God. We come to discover in intimate specificity the personal aspirations, joys and sorrows of eminent figures like Joshua, Samuel and David as well as the colourful histories of lesser known people like Gideon, Ruth, Hagar and Rahab, in whom we see the full spectrum of our humanity, glorious and otherwise.

Thus it is difficult reading the bible without concluding that the biblical God is a God of individuals and that the individual is not only eternally significant but monumentally consequential in His historical and eternal purposes. Indeed, in our more sober moments we have a sense of our profound significance even when we may struggle to corroborate this with our lived experiences. In fact it is precisely this understanding that makes our dissonant lived experiences so disillusioning at times.

Yet to absolutise this truth by crowning it as the ultimate rather than an important truth among a tapestry of others, is to take it out of its biblical context and thus to transmogrify it into error. When this is done, it gives rise to the multiplicity of problems associated with individualism. After all, it is individualism taken to its logical conclusion that accounts for much of the litany of tragedies whose crimson thread enwraps the catalogue of human history.

When the individual and its desires, preferences, conveniences and pleasures are seen as the ultimate end, we usually find therewith the worst in humanity; from greed to genocide. This highlights the problem with the belief that the individual and its pursuits tower above all.

After all righteousness or morality so-called signify our inescapable accountability to God and therefore to other human beings and creation. The existence of human jurisprudence in its multinational variants also corroborates this. Indeed, many of us have found through personal experience if not our own consciences that we are at our most emaciated spiritually and emotionally when we are at our most individualistic.

Thus we are obligated to take a closer look at individualism’s antithesis - collectivism.

Many of us know what it means to feel constrained by suffocating groupthink. This suggests that there is something about collectivism that diminishes our humanity at best or leads us down treacherous paths at worst. Collectivism referring here to the absolutised social collective.

The biblical narrative itself implicitly refutes absolutised collectivism as we see God calling individuals such as Abraham out of their social environments in order to steer them toward divergent and tacitly morally surer paths than those of their filial communities. Implying thus that the individual can be right and the collective wrong[vii].

Countless other biblical figures must go through a period of preparation that isolates them, even if temporarily, from their kith and kin and their social mores, whether by choice or by circumstance, in order to be reintroduced as transformative social agents. Moses is a good example of this, as are David, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Elijah, among many others, who experience some form of cultural isolation before their reintroduction thereto. There is a sense in which the path followed by the nation of Israel in relation to the rest of the nations of the earth replicates this very same pattern[viii].

In history we also see the dangers of economic collectivism that were displayed so catastrophically during the great Russian famine of the early 1920s with its millions of deaths, that resulted from the mistaken idea that individual freedom and agency can be successfully buried on the graveyard of the supposed collective good. After all, the story of the 20^th century seems to endorse the economic logic of individualistic Capitalism[ix] at least in contradistinction to that of collectivistic Communism. And thus we are brought again before the difficult choice between individualism and collectivism.

It seems the only way out of this conundrum is finding some union between individuality and community, which must simultaneously affirm both. The healthy community, that we all presumably crave, after all, consists of individuals whose unique views, aspirations and experiences are viewed as consequential enough to be protected and encouraged. Thus community cannot thrive without the affirmation of the individual.

As we have also seen, the inverse is equally true, the individual cannot survive, let alone thrive outside some form of community.  So, individual expressions, even if for pragmatic reasons, must reinforce survival of the community.

Modern society comprises thus a strained synthesis between individualism and collectivism, where individuals seem at times to uneasily coexist in some begrudging form of community, driven by no other reason than a selfish survivalist instinct rather than valuing community for its own sake. The quest for a more congenial union of the individual and community apparently still beckons.

African communalism seems a close match to this ideal, even if fraught with its own imperfections. When it operates as it should, it affirms individual choice and significance without undermining the interest of the community. Its distinction from communist collectivism is that the individual is raised to understand and embrace its role and responsibilities toward the community, thus reinforcing a felt sense of freedom. This is in contrast to the coercion and manipulation characteristic of communism. 

Umntu ngumntu ngabanye recognises and affirms the individual and its individuality but asserts that the full actualization of its humanity is to be found in community with other human beings.

Far from creating them, African communalism merely recognises the mystic bonds that connect us all. For one, none of us bring ourselves into the world. Our very conception is a communal project, as is our birth and rearing, spanning years of our formative existence. This formative communal environment gives us our culture, values and sense of belonging.

Even when our formative experiences are marked by neglect, privation or abuse, we have no way of escaping the indelible communal imprint on us. Even if that imprint is characterised by a quest for the transcendence of the difficulties our communal roots imposed on us, they still set and define the stage of our earthly purpose and trajectory by giving content to what we must transcend.

If that was not enough, our very physical appearance, biology, mannerisms and personalities so betray our filial ties that we can never quite succeed running away from our forebears and the community they bequeathed us, without achieving the impossible mission of running away from our very selves.  

As clearly as the bible affirms the significance of the individual, no clear minded reading of it can avoid inextricable individual ties to the community. This is true chronologically, culturally, covenantally, physically, vocationally, economically, emotionally and spiritually.

This seems scarcely a departure from the divine order. From eternity past God is revealed as existing in community.  This fact is apparently of such importance that we are left to figure out on our own how to reconcile the apparent linguistic anomaly of God, a singular being, speaking in plural terms in His series of proclamations, “Let us…”[x] It seems the fact of God being one (communal), yet existing in a community of distinct personalities is so important that it must be communicated to us, even if at the risk of messing with our logical and linguistic sensibilities.

In our introduction to the first human being - Adam – we find him overcome by a debilitating sense of aloneness and incompleteness[xi]. This occurs and persists regardless of evident unfettered fellowship with God. Crucially, it also precedes the visitation of sin and its consequent ravages upon all dimensions of humanity. It does so until our first encounter with Eve, who seems a visceral answer to this primal sense of alienation that had hitherto afflicted Adam. And thus we find the origins of human community. God explains this situation by proclaiming a truth for all ages - It is not good for man to be alone!

The progression of chronology finds the rapid numerical and geographic expansion of the human race that seems to coincide with a curious clustering into households, which further develop into clans and ethnicities or tribes so-called, then city states and finally nation states.

Far from taking a detached view on this development, we see God demonstrating a curious ratification if not adoption of it, as if to confirm that this is the natural if not eternal order of things. For one, we hear Him calling Himself the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, heads of a transgenerational household[xii]. On another occasion we observe our Lord Jesus referring Himself as the Lion of tribe of Judah[xiii]. We also know of God’s self-reference as the God of Israel, a nation state[xiv].

The arrival of Jesus at the grand hinge point of history is certainly about redeeming individuals but this is not where it seems to end, families and nations are also expressly included. This is the culmination of a towering multigenerational project in which Abraham played no small part. He had been hitherto promised to be an instrument through which all the families of the earth would be blessed[xv].

On His grand peroration that immediately precedes His earthly departure, Jesus instructs His apostles to make not just disciples of individuals but of nations[xvi]. Indeed, at the conclusion of history as we know it, judgment will be assigned not merely to individuals but to nations[xvii].

Finally, at the denouement of the ages, the book of Revelations makes specific mention of tribes, peoples and nations, along with their languages[xviii].  This seems to suggest that Christ came not to obliterate communities but to redeem them[xix].

Certainly, there is no disputing that we can come to faith in Christ only as individuals[xx]. Everyone must personally appropriate the redemptive work of Christ on the cross to have any part in it. Yet no honest reading of the New Testament will conceal the indispensability of the Christian community in the earthly journey of faith. So much so that the community of believers is called the body of Christ[xxi]. Highlighting intrinsic and unescapable mutual dependence.  As with the natural pattern, we are born alone but we grow in community.

In fact the intrinsic communality of the human project is emphasized by its two most consequential figures – the first and the second Adam. To the former we owe our shared depravity and to the latter our deliverance from the very same[xxii]. Indeed, without the mystic bonds that connect us, Christ’s death on the cross is utterly meaningless. After all, why should His death apply to me as an individual if I am not effectively bound to Him by the fact of our shared humanity?  

Herein lies a powerful argument for collective responsibility, which is worth pointing out here. There is a very real sense in which we have some share in the sins of our families, tribes, nations and ultimately the entire human race. The fact that we seem powerfully predisposed to ratify some of those same sins, by our own attitudes at least, if not by our conscious beliefs and actions, sometimes despite our best intentions, seems resounding proof of the profound mystery of our connectedness[xxiii]. This is apparent whether we talk of our first ancestor – Adam – or our own fathers[xxiv].

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[i] Excuse me for borrowing from cheesy new age terminology, it seemed an elegant way of driving a point home!

[ii] Direct translation: a person is a person through others

[iii] Genesis 12:3

[iv] Genesis 17:5

[v] Exodus 3:1

[vi] This points to the fact that individuals and their stories are more than passing details of history, they matter profoundly.

[vii] History instructs us on countless occasions just how true this can be

[viii] Deuteronomy 7:6

[ix] This is by no means an endorsement of Capitalism which is a very flawed system, I merely contrast it with communism

[x] See Genesis 1-3

[xi] Genesis 2:20. We might infer here a lesson that community works best when it is by choice rather than compulsion. It seems God waited for Adam to recognise for himself the abnormality of social isolation and then to provide community at Adam’s own request.

[xii] Exodus 3:6

[xiii] Revelation 5:5

[xiv] Exodus 5:1

[xv] Genesis 12:3

[xvi] Matthew 28:18

[xvii] Matthew 25:13

[xviii] Revelation 5:9

[xix] 1 Peter 1:18

[xx] Romans 10:9-10

[xxi] Romans 7:4

[xxii] 1 Corinthians 15:22

[xxiii] The same is true of our more redeeming qualities as well

[xxiv] In Hebrew the word Adam means human race. Thus signifying that when Adam sinned all sinned. And indeed history proves this was no injustice as all of us have ratified Adam’s sin. The same logic seems applicable to tribes, nations and families. We seem bent towards ratifying both the good and evil of our social environments. Christ does bring redemption but that redemption does not occur in a vacuum, it is redemption from specific practices “inherited from our forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18).