We Went From Tribal to Individual. Something Else Must Come Next.
We don’t yet have a great way to talk about a new spirit of collectivism
The beauty of living in a renaissance moment is that we can retrieve what we lost the last time around. Just as medieval Europeans retrieved the ancient Greek conception of the individual, we can retrieve the medieval and ancient understandings of the collective. We can retrieve the approaches, behaviors, and institutions that promote our social coherence.
Revolution alone won’t work. Neither will the blanket rejection of the values of the last renaissance, such as science, order, control, centrality, or even individuality. Instead, we should accept them as the context in which to bring forth their counterparts or, rather, complements. The ideals of the prior renaissance are the ground in which these lost ideals are retrieved.
We’re moving from one understanding of our place in things to another. The Renaissance may have brought us from the tribal to the individual, but our current renaissance is bringing us from individualism to something else. We’re discovering a collective sensibility that’s more dimensional and participatory than the unconsciously formed communities of the past. We had to pass through this stage of individualism in order to get there.
Children must learn to separate from their parents and experience themselves as ego-driven individuals before they connect to others and establish meaningful relationships or intimacy. Likewise, human beings first needed to emerge from the ground and become figures: the subjects of our own stories. This was a dimensional leap — from one big blob to discrete individuals, each with our own intersectional identities. And now it’s time for yet another leap.
We don’t yet have great ways for talking about this new spirit of collectivism. The relationship between individuals and society has always been framed as a necessary compromise: we are told we must sacrifice our personal goals for the sake of the many. But what if it’s not a zero-sum, either/or? Humans, at our best, are capable of embracing seeming paradox. We push through the contradiction and find a dynamic sensibility on the other side.
We can think of our newly retrieved collectivism as a way of being both figure and ground at the same time. This is the idealized artistic community envisioned by Burning Man; it’s the politics of consensus that informed Occupy; and it’s the distributed economy aspired to by the open source and blockchain movements — to name just a few.
Each of these movements depends on our comfort with what we could call a fractal sensibility, the notion that each tiny part of a system echoes the shape and structure of the whole. Just as the veins within the leaf of a single fern reflect the branches, trees, and structure of an entire forest, the thoughts and intentions of a single individual reflect the consciousness of the whole human organism. The key to experiencing one’s individuality is to perceive the way it is reflected in the whole and, in turn, resonate with something greater than oneself.
This was section 83 + 84 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.
