David Brooks says today that we’re in a culture war that is currently manifesting itself in the fight over the immigration bill. But it’s not a war between Republicans and Democrats, he says, nor between rich and poor: It’s a war between people whose worldview exalts individuality, versus people whose worldview gives primacy to community.
Brooks’s sympathies seems to lie with the individualists (as mine tend to do also). It’s an obvious mistake, however, to put too much emphasis on the importance of either worldview.
Both individuals and communities are vital instruments of God’s continuing creation. It’s individuals, not communities, that come up with countless new ideas of how the universe could be “better,” and are driven to try to make their ideas happen. But it’s communities, not individuals —
- that hold humanity’s “distributed memory” of what has worked and not worked in the past to make things “better”;
- that eventually filter out really bad ideas, removing them from circulation; and
- that imitate and propagate the really good ones.
In automotive terms: individualism is the gas pedal, the community is the brake. If we want to get where we’re going without crashing, we need both.
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