From man’s earliest beginnings to modern times, we have always considered ourselves as being in relationship – in relation to each other, to community and to God. Modernity has reversed this natural bedrock relationship by isolating man, creating the cult of the individual. Now man stands alone, beholden to no one.
To be modern is to believe one’s individual desires are the locus of all authority and the basis of self-definition. In so doing, man has become alienated from his fellow man, denying that he is primarily a creature in relationship, thus generating fear of the other. Beginning with Nietzsche through Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Liberalism, Modernity has transferred man’s inherent fear of God to fear of other men.
Darwinism has pitted man against man in the quest for the survival of the fittest. Marxism has pitted man against man in the material struggle to obtain goods, services and surplus value. Nietzsche declared the cult of the superman, in which the individual stands alone and is beholden to no one. Freudianism developed an obsession with mental disorders resulting from social interaction. Liberalism sees the world as a vast collection of individuals, joined together by social contract, to satisfy individual material needs.
Within the liberal world view, which is the dominant social theory of the day, the individual is a separate, free actor who can believe anything he wishes and do whatever he chooses as long as his action does not negatively interfere with another. The liberal holds that only individuals possess rights; society possesses none!
Modernity obscures the true reality of man’s basic nature. We are not automaton individuals, but rather mutually interdependent beings, knit together by family and community. Human nature is animated by the desire for mutual recognition and a meaningful connection with others. The Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, describes in his classic tome, “I and Thou,” that the “I” aspires to exist solely in relation to the “Thou.” This completed union creates the “We,” which is never in danger of dissolving into solitude or mistrust or fear.
The “We” is not a fusion or an erasure of the individual person, but rather a realization and completion of a social being. Man reaches his fullest potential when love, concern, and human recognition of the other permeates his world view.
Buber holds that we do not really exist as individuals, but rather as merely one pole in need of correspondence to another. The central longing of our life, imminent to our very existence as social beings, is to be fully recognized by the other in an embrace of love and concern. To quote Martin Buber, “Without a Thou there is no I.”
The cataclysmic revolution that is Modernity, spawning Individualism cannot, by its very nature, be institutionalized. Modernity negates the possibility of community because it lacks basic communal truths, which transcend the individual. It, therefore, remains incapable of establishing a stable, social order. Anarchy becomes the new standard culminating eventually in dictatorship.
--Xavier Rynne
