There Is No Escape
Whether we like it or not, we cannot wholly abandon our inherited individualism
Since January, I’ve been pondering how the basic building block for society is not the individual, but the family. I’ve reflected on how our rampant individualism is an inherently masculine view of how to be human since it denies the life-giving aspect of womanhood. Men do not carry other human beings inside their very persons. None of the founders of modern liberalism, such as Locke, Hume, Mill, and co, were parents, and Rousseau famously abandoned his children in orphanages to pursue his individual life. That’s harder for women to do. More recently, I’ve also been reflecting on how our identity is not so much invented, as it is received. Our identities are formed by our relationships to others, by being a daughter of, a son of, a spouse, a friend of, etc. We are not individuals, islands, but parts of a community. To add to this, I’ve even been reflecting on how raising children is an ultimately communal activity, not just a nuclear family activity. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. Children need to be exposed to and spend time with a large number of responsible adults besides their parents. With this in mind, if I ever get married and have children, I would like my children to have at least somewhat regular access to a set of grandparents.
And I do not live like I believe any of this at all.
On August 1st, I moved from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area to Montana. This is the third time since I graduated high school that I’ve moved to a state where I practically don’t know anyone, and this is the second time I’ve moved to a different state pretty much because I just decided to move there. Each time I’ve moved to a new state, as my parents have lamented, I’ve moved farther away and farther away from my immediate family. I have zero desire to move back to the Northeast where my entire immediate family resides.
And all the while I’ve done this, I’ve persisted in doing whatever I’ve wanted. I have gone on multiple solo adventures, trips that have baffled my parents.
“Why are you going to Utah?”
“Because I can.” I’ve never been there, and neither have you.
Instead of adapting to the social situations I enter, I act like I expect the social situations to adapt to me. Freshman year of college, instead of waiting to see how people behaved on the swim team, I blazed in expecting people to accept me in all my weirdness. The life I live is the individualist’s dream, yet here I am insisting we are communitarian by nature. Of course, there is some nuance to this. College taught me how to form deep friendships, so wherever I’ve gone, I’ve focused on building community. I have often made it a practice to round up people to go out to eat after church on Sundays. The last two years I lived in Texas, I practically lived at my parish, attending weekday Divine Liturgies and singing vespers, matins, and Divine Liturgy every weekend. I spent a lot of time at the houses of two families in the parish. But then, as I had no real immediate family ties to the place, no husband or children to worry about, after I went through a lot of upheaval in a very short span of time, I up and left. I can just as easily do the same with where I am now. To what extent am I living the life a gyrovague?
Of course, the solution to getting me to actually practice what I preach regarding communitarianism instead of individualism would be for me to get married or enter the monastery. Then I would have to permanently settle down and live in intense community and interdependence, but I can’t just do that. I can’t just get married or just enter a monastery. As my poor dear mother has bemoaned, I’m really not much of a dater, and this is not just an obstacle in getting married, but an obstacle in discerning celibacy as well. Knowing my background and self, it is highly unlikely I’d be able to discern celibacy the right way unless I meet and date a man I could marry who also thinks he could marry me. Moreover, the process of entering a Byzantine Catholic women’s monastery is not the same process of entering a Roman Catholic active religious order that could ship me anywhere in the world. In the Roman Catholic active religious order, I could basically begin an aspirancy after a few “Come and See retreats” (although I’m under the assumption the contemplative monastic orders, such as the Carmelites and Trappists have a longer process of entering). If I want to enter a Byzantine monastery, the seven or so other women there and I need to deeply get to know one another, for these would be the women with whom I would spend the rest of my life. If I want to live life with them, I need to visit, and visit, and visit, and then do a three-to-six-week extended visit. Only then could I go through the very thorough application and interview process to potentially be accepted as a dokimos (basically a cross between a postulant and a novice). Still, no matter how well those visits go, if I cannot discern celibacy in a healthy way, then I cannot enter.
But dating is hard as a young devout twenty-first century American Catholic.
And that leads me to the main issue of why I cannot escape from practicing individualism: because I am a twenty-first century post-modern American, and there’s no escaping that fact and all that comes with it. I’ve been inhaling American independence and modern liberalism since I was born. I’ve been inhaling post-modernism and the culture of self-invention since I was a teenager. Our times and places form who we are, how we think, and how we behave, and that is just how it is. As one of the hosts said on an Orthodox podcast I enjoy, “If you had been born in sixteenth century France, that would be a different person…There’s no way in which that person would be you.” If this were me, I would have an entirely different framework for thinking about the world, and as consequence, would behave very differently. But instead, I was born at the tail end of the twentieth century, and here I am, moving to Montana and restarting my life just because. I would not have been able to do this if I had not spent my whole life internalizing an individualistic way of thinking about myself.
Yet, there are individuals out there who seem to think they can jettison the modern way of thinking and try to live in the sixteenth century. There are American Catholic and Orthodox Christians who are monarchists (Like what?!). I must admit I did use to pretty seriously follow the British Royal Family, but that was because I thought Kate Middleton was the epitome of class and because, as a citizen of a nation that literally fought a war to not have a monarchy, I thought it was absolutely silly to follow such an institution. Yes, silliness was part of the appeal for me. We are never going to have a monarch in the US. Furthermore, considering the fact that even in certain parts of the US in the twentieth century, if people wanted to build a Catholic church, they had to post guards to keep people from burning it down1, we most certainly would never have the monarch Catholic and Orthodox monarchists want.
But we cannot jettison a modern way of thinking without jettisoning a modern way of doing, and no one wants to do that. Our actions and ways of life inform the way we think, behave, and go about the world. No one wants to go back to an era without modern medicine, electric lights, cars, flushable toilets, and sanitation. Certain aspects of the way pre-modern people lived would disgust us. According to Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, English renaissance etiquette books advised against showing off of excrement found on the street for a companion to smell. The fact that behavior had to be written against implies people were doing it. It was a privilege to see the king dress (Take a tour of Versailles. The tour guides will tell you all about it) and not seen as inappropriate to witness him use the pre-modern equivalent of the toilet.
Most of us enjoy living in houses with our own private bedrooms. We lock the door when we go to the bathroom. We read silently in our heads instead of reading aloud, for the ancients read everything aloud. These actions prescribe a more individualistic framework for thinking about ourselves. As I’ve written about before, those who attempt to be anti-modern by doing modernity’s opposite are just as modern, for they are using modernity as the standard to dictate their actions. Radical traditionalist Catholics who idolize their idea of the sixteenth century are modernists.
At the same time, however, we can attempt to reject modern society’s drawbacks without rejecting our time and place. Though we need community, we need to recognize first the fact there are certain benefits of individualism. Besides a lack of modern conveniences, there were some drawbacks to living in more communitarian societies. As Yuval Noah Harari described in his book Sapiens, having family and community form the basis of society prior to the industrial revolution instead of state and market was “far from ideal” (358), for if one was to lose one’s family and community prior to modern times, then there went one’s social support and lifeline. Also, since people are sinners, families can, unfortunately, violently oppress their members. We do not want that.
Many of us are now noticing the drawbacks to living in an individualistic technocratic modern society. If we were not, we probably would not have phenomena in Catholicism such as radical traditionalism. We are lonely. We are isolated. We suffer from mental illnesses. We spend all day looking at screens and lose a sense of incarnate community. We lose any sense of a received identity. Although there is no going back to a pre-individualistic society, we can take steps to have happier healthier lives in the times, places, and ways of thinking we have. We can turn off our phones for a time (I need to get better at this). We can ask people whom we run into regularly but do not actually know out for coffee. We can delete our social media accounts or highly limit the amount of time we spend using them. We can spend time outside in nature. We can spend time outside with others in nature.
An individualistic society may have enabled me to wander around the country as a single young adult, but when this stage of life ends, I can take steps now with the people in front of me and around me to live in a deep intentional community.
Robert Barron and John Allen Jr., To Light a Fire on the Earth (New York: Image, 2017), 2.
Very nice