New World Same Humans #31
How modernity invented, and then erased, the individual.
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This week’s essay is about a paradox. More specifically, it’s about how contemporary industrialised societies both cultivate and erase us as individuals. I think this phenomenon helps explain peculiar features of the societies in which we live. And we’re only at the beginning.
Remember, the Fast Download summary section is now the default read. It will allow you to absorb the core ideas quickly. If you want all the details, use the bold headers to find the relevant part of the essay.
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📥 Fast Download: Individualism and its discontents
🗓️ This week: a speech and a protest. This week, Obama implored citizens to vote in the November Presidential election. Meanwhile, students in the UK protested over algorithmically-generated exam results.
😇 Inside modernity the individual is sovereign. Modernity was a project to serve human needs. It was informed by the Enlightenment vision of humans as, above all else, free and rational individuals. Inside the consumer democracies that emerged, the individual is elevated to near-kingly status. As a result of this history, we tend to think of modernity and individualism as natural and complementary partners.
😱 But modernity also effaces us as individuals. In fact, though, there is a deep underlying tension here. As our societies become more advanced and interconnected, they become better at serving us as individuals. But they also increasingly efface us as individuals, by dwarfing us within a massive and complex social space in which it is impossible to feel that we really matter.
🏠 Humans used to live inside manageable social units. Palaeolithic humans lived in bands of around 25 people. Even inside the small villages or towns in which most pre-moderns lived, it was easier to feel that you mattered in the context of the social whole.
🔒 Now we’re trapped inside the paradox of individualism. The better a society is at serving our individual needs, the bigger and more complex it must be. The bigger and more complex it is, the more it renders the individual obscure. In the megacities of 2020, this paradox is writ large. This is a simplified model, but the phenomenon it describes is real.
👀 Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. People often say modern city living makes them feel lonely. Perhaps they really mean that it makes them feel meaningless: inconsequential in the context of the collective.
🤖 Bewildering complexity = total effacement. The Obama speech and the UK student protests both hint at this tension between modernity and individualism. But now we’re turning the entire world into one vast, unified social space. Our effacement as individuals will only grow more complete.
💡 Time to go small? We need to find ways to redraw our collective lives at scales that are smaller and more human. The pandemic represents a unique opportunity to realise this shift.
🗓️ This week: a speech and a protest
Two happenings:
At the Democratic National Convention Barack Obama asked citizens to vote in November. He fought back tears as he implored: ‘don’t let them take away your power’.
Meanwhile, school leavers in London protested at the algorithmically-generated exam results they’d been awarded. UK exams were cancelled this year, so instead grades were generated by a statistical model. But many students received lower marks than promised, and so were denied a place at university. They gathered outside the Department for Education HQ in London and chanted ‘f*ck the algorithm!’
Two seemingly unrelated snapshots of this unfathomable year. But I think there is a deep underlying connection. It’s to do with the way the individual is situated within modern societies.
😇 Inside modernity the individual is sovereign
Last week I wrote about modernity, and how it can be understood as a project to serve human needs. From the start, that project was tied to an Enlightenment vision of what humans beings are.
In short, the Enlightenment sanctified reason, and reimagined humans as, above all else, free and rational agents. This vision carried important moral implications.
If you believe that what makes us human, and what makes humans special, is our reason, then it follows that no one should prevent any other from living a life in accordance with her own free and rational choices. The modes of collective life that emerged out of these beliefs, including representative democracy and the consumer society, take free and rational individual choice as their core organising principle. They are individualistic modes of life.
In 2020, and in the global ‘west’ as traditionally defined, the individual is elevated to a near-kingly status. Brands compete to serve our every desire. Politicians promise to give us what we want. And our culture endlessly tells us the same story: that of the individual protagonist, guided by an inextinguishable light, which is their essential, rational, human self. The central western story is that of the heroic individual.
It’s no surprise, then, that we tend to believe that modernity and individualism are by their nature related and complementary. And sure enough, until recently the most modern societies have been hyper-individualistic consumer democracies. Now, China is the rising exception to this rule. But faith in the natural partnership of modernity and individualism is so strong that many continue to believe that as China becomes more modern it will also become more individualistic, and must in the end become a democracy.
😱 But modernity also effaces us as individuals
In 2020, those of us in the global north are the inheritors of this legacy. Our societies are great, complex machines that spin furiously to serve the Sovereign Individual. For us, the project of modernity – to serve our individual needs, to make the world a better home for each of us – has been a great success.
But it’s via that success that we can view a deep underlying tension at work when it comes to modernity and individualism.
Here is the crux of that tension. As our societies become more advanced and interconnected, they become better at serving any given individual’s preferences. But they also increasingly efface us as individuals, by dwarfing us within a massive and dizzyingly complex social space in which it becomes impossible to feel that we really matter.
In the industrialised knowledge economies of 2020, that tension is more visible than ever. In London, NYC, Singapore or Sydney, millions have been elevated to the status of free and rational demi-gods. Chinese food at 1AM. A billion and more movies, always on demand. Two hundred different kinds of jeans to choose from.
These societies have cultivated the individual as never before. But to do so they have become huge, interconnected, and complex. So much so, in fact, that any individual feels herself only a microscopic dot inside a system on which she makes no meaningful impact, and cannot even really understand.
🏠 Humans used to live inside manageable social units
Palaeolithic humans lived in bands of around 25 people, which came together to form tribes of around 200. This was the extent of the socio-political-economic universe for early humans: 200 people.
These early societies were clearly not individualistic as we would define that term. For these people what mattered was not individual rights or preferences, but the survival of the group. On the other hand, the essential social unit was so small that each individual constituted a significant part of it. In a band of 25, you make a difference: for better or worse.
We mustn’t fall into simple-minded evolutionary storytelling. But it’s hard to believe that our origins within tribes of a couple of hundred people left no permanent imprint on our shared nature. Surely, then, this imprint helps shape our feelings about the massive, complex social spaces we now inhabit?
The same fundamentals are true when it comes to the small communities that most humans lived inside before modernity. The entire social space was smaller, less complex, and easier to delineate. It was far easier for individuals to feel that they were a significant component of the social whole.
🔒 Now we’re trapped inside the paradox of individualism
It’s hard to avoid a paradoxical conclusion.
That is, as our societies have become better at serving the preferences of each of us, and as they have cultivated in each of us a belief in our sovereignty as free and rational individuals, they have also effaced us as individuals by rendering us insignificant in the context of the social whole.
Crucially, those two processes are related. The better a society is at serving our individual needs, the bigger and more complex it must be, and so the more it renders us obscure and inconsequential in the context of the entire system.
This is a highly simplified model. The citizens of Ancient Rome lived in a pretty massive and complex social space. Today’s citizens of NYC and Singapore do not exist only within a social space comprising millions of people; they also have families and networks of friends, which are social spaces in which they can feel they make up a significant part.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the paradox of individualism is real, and important.
👀 Once you notice this, you see it everywhere
Having named this strange tension at the heart of individualistic modernity, I now hear it whispering to me from unexpected places. I think it gets at some of the unarticulated, uneasy feelings we have about modern life. And at some of the strange phenomena that are peculiar features of advanced, highly individualistic societies.
Take, for example, the long-standing association of urban living with loneliness. When you think about it, that association has never really made much sense. I wonder if the idea is a misnaming of the tension that I’m talking about. It’s not that people in cities feel lonely. It’s that they feel, in a strange way they can’t articulate, meaningless. They feel inconsequential in the context of the social whole.
In 1929 Sigmund Freud published Civilisation and Its Discontents. In that book, he argued that a deep tension was present in the very nature of civilisation itself.
We humans, said Freud, have a deep need of civilised forms of life: to keep us safe, and serve our needs. At the same time, though, these forms of life demand that we crush certain crucial and deep-running aspects of ourselves, such as our boundless desire for power over others. Civilisation, then, is paradoxical. It serves us while it enslaves us. We both want it, and don’t want it. My argument about the paradox of modern individualism is a kind of analogue of Freud’s larger argument.
As a side note, perhaps this tension helps fuels the compulsive obsession with fame that we see in highly individualistic societies?
Fifty years ago we thought people wanted to be famous for something: singing, painting, whatever. But it turns out that it is just fame, devoid of any content beyond itself, that is the real elixir. Perhaps the reason is that in massively complex and vast social spaces, fame becomes the ultimate – or the only? – way to undo the effacement that individuals feel. The only way to repair this peculiarly modern psychic injury, and to matter in the context of the entire system.
🤖 Bewildering complexity = total effacement
In the pictures of Obama imploring people to vote, and of students protesting against algorithmically-generated exam grades, we see two practical incarnations of individualism and its discontents. And we also glimpse something of its future.
As Obama well knows, advanced consumer democracies are plagued by voter apathy. There are all kinds of reasons, but it’s not hard to see that the paradox of individualism could underlie many of them. In a socio-political space as vast as the US – or any modern nation-state democracy – it’s hard to make yourself feel that your one vote makes a difference.
Meanwhile, the UK students who protested this week have grown up inside a system that teaches them they are unique and valuable individuals. But come results time, an algorithm reduced them to faceless points on a statistical trend line. Algorithms are proliferating through advanced societies: they are a part of how these societies become ever-better at serving a plethora of individuals. At the same time, though, they efface those individuals in particular and often troubling kinds of ways. We’ll see many more ‘f*ck the algorithm’ protests in the years ahead.
And in that truth, the broader picture becomes visible.
Today, the modern project to serve human needs – to serve us all as free and rational agents – is reaching a kind of end-point in the creation of machines that reason on our behalf. We’re building thinking machines, and handing ever-greater power to them. In the decades to come, AIs will make decisions – to give you a mortgage, to allocate resources in our health system, to deploy a certain foreign policy – and we won’t really understand how or why.
We are layering complexity upon bewildering complexity. And coming to live inside a single, global system that is beyond the control not only of any individual, but of the entire human collective.
Via our project to create and serve the Sovereign Individual, our effacement as individuals will soon be even more complete.
💡 Time to go small?
So what to do?
The broad outlines of an answer are clear. Faced with ever-greater scale and complexity, we need to find ways to redraw our collective lives. We need modes of life at scales that are smaller, more manageable, and more human.
A much-overlooked thinker could serve as a guide to this new age. Leopold Kohr was part of the generation of middle-European intellectuals that also included Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter. Kohr believed that the tendency of human collectives – bureaucracies, businesses, nations – to grow is at the heart of many of our deepest problems. ‘Whenever something is wrong, something is too big’ said Kohr, who argued that humans cannot live well inside the the modern nation state simply because it is too big a social entity to be meaningful, or comprehensible, to us.
In contrast to Hayek and Schumpeter, Kohr’s ideas made little impact during his life. Recently, though, he’s been rediscovered.
And at this moment of coronavirus, troubled democracies, and AI-fuelled complexity, his ideas seem downright prophetic. The year 2020 has reminded us all of the systemic risks associated with a globalised world. And of the importance of local communities and resources. For millions, it has reconfigured central relationships: with their city, place of work, local public services, networks of friends, and even wider family.
Can the pandemic be the push we need to a reimagine our societies at a more human scale? Can we build new modes of life that serve our individual needs and empower us to feel that we have a meaningful place within the social whole?
No one has answers to those questions yet. But we all know that chances for systemic change don’t come around often. As we rebuild in the years ahead, the paradox of individualism should be much on our minds.
Let’s dance
Thanks for reading this week.
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David.