Against Individualism in Ethics

And so Saint Paul continues, ‘I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging symbol. I may have gifts of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing.’ (1 Corinthians 13.1-2, NEB). In reading these familiar words we must be alert to the context of discussion in which they are situated: the greatest achievements which Paul thinks meaningless without love are gifts of the Spirit, vocations, particular callings to which one is summoned individually, which will distinguish this man’s service from his neighbor’s and will mark his history out as a unique and personal history. It is not that Paul deprecates the individual and personally distinctive; it is not that he suspects all striking manifestations of it a secret hypocrisy.

His point is simply that a life considered solely as the fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working-out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’, so the variety of forms of life are unified within a common form of life according to God’s order, the life of love.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 222

Individualism is a pretty attractive idea. We tend to admire people who manage to achieve some sort of individualism against the odds. We admire people who think for themselves, who refuse to be defined by the society or tradition they are a part of. Rogue figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Marcel Proust (or Elizabeth Bennet) insist on not fitting into any predefined role society may have had for them, and of not letting any group, institution or one perspective tell them who they really are, or tell them what they ought to aspire to. As Samuel Coleridge once said, heroes invent the terms and categories by which their life will be judged.

This leads to the question – what is the opposite of individualism? If the Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House who leaves and slams the door is a heroic individual, what would we say of the Nora that stayed?

The quote above from O’Donovan suggests that the opposite of individualism need not be ‘conservatism’, ‘submissiveness’, ‘resignation’ or ‘ordinariness’. He suggests that the opposite of individualism is seeing your life not as the subjective expression of a unique take on life, but as the subjective expression of something universal. If individualism is the subjective expression of the particular, the contingent, the unique, the self-constructed then it’s opposite is the subjective expression of the universal, the fixed, the necessary, the received. Construing things this way shows that it is not the moment of subjective ethical expression which is under threat, but the source of this expression.

O’Donovan argues that all Christian ethics needs to be an expression of love. Christians are free to perform ethical action and engage in ethical reasoning and to still call what they are doing Christian so long as it seeks to be an expression of love, particularly the kind of love that God displayed on the cross. The person who speaks in tongues of angels, does so from love. The person who prophesies, does so from love. The person who lives in faith, does so from love. The Christian who buys only Fair Trade chocolate, does so from love. The Christian who befriends someone who is utterly different to them, does so from love. The Christian who takes a position on abortion, war, torture or sexual ethics, does so from love.

This quote from O’Donovan draws attention to an important and unique characteristic of Christian ethics. Christians hold that the ethical life has a certain shape – the life of love. Amongst all the complexity and subjectivity of contemporary life Christians hold that ethical living is living which is built on and shaped by a particular non-negotiable – love. Henry David Thoreau once said that living well, living ethically, is a matter of ‘dwelling as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ Christianity replies, there is only one channel. Life which aspires to fulfill a personal destiny is vacant abstraction, and morally speaking is neither here nor there. Life which attempts to embody something universal, is good.

To many, this idea of subjectively expressing something universal is much more attractive than subjectively expressing something of your own making. Which idea are you more attracted to as the task of ethical living?