Seán O Conaill identifies an elitist vein in present-day individualism and warns that the right response is not a return to the social and religious conformism of the past.
The extraordinary pace of change in our own time is closely related to the liberation of the individual human mind, one of the key developments in modern history. From Galileo and Newton to Einstein and Turing, from James Watt and Matthew Boulton to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, all key scientific, technological and entrepreneurial developments have arrived through individual insight and intellectual autonomy. Individualism is the key to understanding the exciting side of life today.
Self-absorption and indifference
But it is also a primary source of the specific evils of this period. In particular, it encourages the individual to be increasingly self-absorbed, indifferent to the needs of others. The logical destination of total individualism is a society in which no one bears responsibility for others. Our homes must become both Aladdin’s caves filled with personal technology and fortresses to protect this wealth from those less successful. Paradoxically, this means that all individuals will be at one another’s mercy, and more at risk than from a collectivist society in which the obligations of individuals to one another are enforced. To develop fully, we all need to live in a stable, safe community – but this seems to be collapsing around us as individuals pursue a selfish fulfilment in endless acquisition, in mindchanging chemicals or in casual sexual relationships.
The accumulation of technology by individuals is also environmentally unsustainable – because it establishes a target for the upwardly mobile individual in all societies that will eventually tax resources beyond the limit of what is environmentally viable. The faster the pace toward individual aggrandisement, the nearer we get to environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the casualties of modern individualism end up in our hospitals and prisons, or on cardboard boxes on the streets. Individualism leaves us emotionally isolated and vulnerable, and also undermines the spirit of service which leads some people to accept a poorly paid career in nursing or education. It also undermines the spirit of self-sacrifice that is essential for successful parenting, and corrodes the commitments men and women make to one another for the sake of family stability. Society’s capacity to nurture and educate well balanced children is seriously threatened.
Christianity sidelined?
The extraordinary material success of individualism has left institutional Christianity apparently dead in the water. We Catholic Christians seem to have been consigned to the historical scrap heap as ‘party poopers’ who try to spoil the fun by warning of a day of reckoning. In Ireland many of us look back with nostalgia to a time when we were basically a village and small-town society, in which the parish priest could typically regulate the public lives of the majority. Society itself buttressed our faith. Our sacramental lives were socially supported by those long queues for confession and by fear of what the neighbours would say if we missed Mass and Communion.
Yet much of this was mere unreflective conformity. I remember vividly growing up in Dublin in the 50s and 60s, aware of a strange duality in Irish culture. People typically inhabited two different mental worlds. One was Catholic and devotional, flourishing in the scent of incense and the harmonies of the parish choir. The other was the weekday world entirely thoughtless of the need for a complete integrity of life. It too was often selfish, hedonistic and secular. It hadn’t really worked out how our Christianity was supposed to affect our secular lives. Priests referred to this duality as ‘compartmentalisation’ – but had no solution for the problem, other than exhortation.
Thus, secularism is not an invention of the 1960s in Ireland. It was tolerated in the 50s and earlier, when it did not intrude on the sacred space into and out of which most of us walked on Sundays. It is now seen as the ultimate threat only because it has established social norms of religious indifference. But essentially the Irish disease – thoughtless conformity – has not really changed. Then we conformed to a Catholic social norm, now we conform to an agnostic one – but all conformity is a form of immaturity, a dangerous abdication of the need to grow into individual adult commitment.
Dangerous nostalgia
This is why nostalgia for ‘Catholic Ireland’ is so dangerous. The individualism of our time cannot be challenged by a reversion to Catholic conformity. Instead, Irish Christians of the third millennium will need to be fully developed, intellectually independent and competent, capable of explaining to anyone anywhere – without either prudishness or anger – why it is they cling to Christ. They will have closed that immemorial gap between Sunday pieties and the worldliness of the market society in which they live – a gap that ‘Catholic Ireland’ never fully closed.
To do this, they will need to understand the meaning of the incarnation in terms that can make sense today. In particular they will need to be able to explain, as individuals, what Christ has to offer the individualist. The essence of this is, I am convinced, a new understanding of heroism, of the perfect life – one that has always been, and will always be, relevant. Moreover, it is a heroic journey open to all, and one through which we can renew communities everywhere. And many Irish people, without knowing it, are already on this journey.
The heroism of the upward journey
The essential point of similarity in human society in all epochs is the tendency of men (rather than women!) to define success in terms of an upward journey to recognition by the world. By an upward journey I mean a process of climbing past others on the same route, to emerge above them in terms of wealth, fame and social prestige.
This is exactly the journey of the outstanding personalities in the world in which Jesus lived – of Augustus who, as Octavian, had avenged the murder of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar. The latter had posthumously been declared a God – the final summit of the upward journey. One of Caesar’s early rivals had been Marcus Licinius Crassus, who in BCE 70 had crucified 6,000 rebellious slaves along the Appian Way, from Padua to Rome.
The purpose of crucifixion was twofold: to destroy not only the body but the soul as well. Public crucifixion was a declaration that those who suffered it were worthy of total contempt. The crucified man was at the bottom of the social pyramid that Caesar and Crassus – and Augustus and Herod and Pontius Pilate – had successfully climbed. The rebellious slaves must suffer crucifixion because they had challenged this pyramid with their lives. Their freedom was a threat to the Roman pyramid, and particularly the upper tiers whose support Crassus needed.
Glory for the few
This upward journey to glory aims at making one man, or a few men, glorious in the eyes of the world. Glory – today we call it adulation – is the gift of the many to the few, so few can achieve it. It follows that most people must lead inglorious lives, and that many will become victims of those on the upward journey.
Is it a coincidence that Jesus was born in a stable during the reign of Augustus, the first Roman Emperor to become a God? Or that Christ would accept crucifixion at the hands of an empire whose rulers came automatically to be described as Gods?
I do not believe so. There are too many clues in the Gospels, and in the lives of Christian saints, that say otherwise. In Jesus Christ some presence – an intelligent and loving power that transcends the world of the upward journey – was setting out to redefine heroism, and to reveal itself through him. Through the journey of Jesus, our species was presented with an entirely new vision of the perfect human life – in terms of a journey downward, of total generosity and self-annihilation. This extraordinary journey was intended to honour not ‘great men’ but those whose inglorious lives support the cruel pyramids of dignity we humans build. It is this, I believe, that makes Christianity unique, an invitation to a journey downward, in the service of human need. And it is this that makes it relevant in this and in every other time.
This article by Sean O’Conaill first appeared in Reality (June 1999), a publication of the Irish Redemptorists.
