The Individual and Society

John W. Gardner

[An essay, slightly edited, taken from the symposium "On the Meaning of the University" (1976),
edited by Sterling M. McMurrin]

John William Gardner spent most of his life working for the common good. He was born in 1912 in Los Angeles, educated at Stanford and Berkeley (Ph.D., 1938), and began his career as a teacher of psychology at Mt. Holyoke College. He soon turned to government and public service, however, and worked successively for the Federal Communications Commission and the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation. From 1955 to 1965 he was president of the Carnegie Corporation and of the affiliated Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He then entered President Johnson's cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. On his resignation in 1968, he became chairman of the Urban Coalition, which unites leaders from all sectors of society in an effort to improve the quality of life of the disadvantaged in urban areas. In 1970 he founded Common Cause, a national citizens' lobby devoted to making the national and state governments more open and more accountable to citizens and to improving government performance. In 1981 he became chairman of Independent Sector, a group of corporations, foundations, and voluntary organizations promoting voluntary giving and personal support of health and welfare.

He received numerous awards for outstanding public service, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Among his books are Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too (1961); Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society (1964); In Common Cause (1972); and Morale (1978). William Silverman wrote of Gardner: "If a 'good guy' is a person who is moderate, idealistic, open to slightly unconventional ideas, fair-minded, and favorably disposed to changes in the society which benefit everyone, then Gardner is the very embodiment of the good guy.

We seek a society that has at its core a respect for the dignity and worth of the individual, a society that pursues fulfillment and growth for the individual. But we recognize that the deepest threat to the integrity of any community is an incapacity on the part of the citizens to lend themselves to any worthy common purpose, and we see the barrenness of a life that encompasses nothing beyond the self. As Tillich put it, the individual must have the courage to be himself and the courage to be part of something larger.

Gone forever is the unplanned, tradition-dictated submergence of the individual in the community that has existed throughout most of human history. But the balance we seek today is threatened from two sides. At one extreme, not only totalitarianism but some of the modes of large-scale organization present in our own society threaten to smother every trace of individuality. At the other extreme we see varieties of individualism that are destructive of community.

All complex modern societies, whatever their ideology, appear to be moving toward the beehive model. The intricate and precisely orchestrated organizational patterns that come so naturally to advanced technological societies are sooner or later destructive of individuality - unless extraordinary efforts are made to prevent that outcome. The trend is as evident in our own society as it is in explicitly totalitarian societies, although it is less advanced with us and is often retarded by our political guarantees of individual freedom.

The aims and consequences of political totalitarianism are well understood. Less well understood are the consequences of some of our own forms of large-scale organization, which have a clear tendency to dwarf the individual even though their purposes and methods may be authentically nontotalitarian in origin.

This is a crucial point because in our society today the individual moves in a world characterized by ever larger and more elaborately interlocking organization. It is not just that gigantic organizations - corporate, union, governmental - impinge upon the individual's life at every point. It is that the nation - and increasingly the world - has itself become one huge interlocking system. The actions of government have large consequences in the corporate and union world; actions by farm groups affect what housewives pay for groceries; the market strategies of foreign oil producers affect the American commuter; and the monetary decisions of the United States affect every nation in the world.

The advantages of large-scale organization are obvious. It brings us consumer goods, from automobiles to hi-fi sets, that would never have come out of cottage industry. It brings us kidney dialysis machines, "Sesame Street," cheap long-distance calls, efficient air transport. Some critics say they could live without those things, but very few do.

But no contemporary needs to be told of the disadvantages of large-scale organization. Too often it induces a sense of powerlessness, a loss of identity, and a feeling of anonymity. Too often it depersonalizes human relationships, erodes human communication, suppresses individuality. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways it induces conformity. The individual tends to be coerced by the system - and frustrated in ways that have a special capacity to baffle and madden.

These layered frustrations have produced a hostility and distrust that is directed at virtually all aspects of modern organized society. This hostility is directed against bureaucracy, hierarchy, administrators, monolithic institutions. In its more extreme manifestations, it is even directed against the rationality and functional efficiency that are essential to modern organization.

Multiple frustrations are not new to mankind. From the dawn of time man has been frustrated by forces and circumstances beyond his understanding. But apparently it is easier - or seems easier - to accept blows from an inscrutable fate, from natural forces or from the hand of God than to have one's life disrupted by an unknown bureaucrat presiding over an unseen computer. The hostility directed toward the administrator in an administered age is something to contend with. It has led to a kind of inarticulate rebellion that seethes in the breast of even the most conventional individual.

But indiscriminate hostility toward institutions won't help. We have to take the steps that will save us. We cannot do without large-scale organization - but we can demand that it be so designed as to serve humane purposes, and we are just beginning to understand some of the ways in which this might be done. We are beginning to understand how we might create human-sized units within large-scale organization - in factories, in higher education, in some of the newest housing developments. We must devise residential and working arrangements that enable individuals to live their lives as whole persons, not split into fragments by the requirements of a complex, impersonal society.

We must design many varying forms of participation, so that the individual can regain the sense of acting and initiating. This will involve the redesign of huge bureaucratic units to devolve more responsibility to lower levels. It will also require that we supplement the "top down" communication characteristic of large-scale organization with two-way communication that brings messages from the lower levels of organization to the top. Such two-way communication is not only sound democratic doctrine, it is a characteristic of all healthy systemic functioning. Yet most large-scale organizations sooner or later develop a severe breakdown in communication between the "grass roots" and the top.

Politically, participation requires improved citizen access to the political process, and that is not really possible until we cure politicians of their bad habit of doing the public's business behind closed doors. From the city councils and school boards up through the state legislatures to Congress and the federal agencies, elected and appointed officials find it all too convenient to do the public's business in secret. The effect on citizen awareness and interest is devastating. The citizen can't possibly develop an intelligent interest in matters that are totally hidden from his view.

Another measure necessary for the protection of the individual is the preservation of the guarantees of individual liberty written into our Constitution. There will inevitably arise from time to time, both in the public and private sectors, leaders who imagine that a huge and complex society could be far more tidily managed if those guarantees were abrogated. It is particularly important to strengthen - greatly strengthen - the protective measures that insure individual liberty and privacy. Modern forms of organization, media of communication, computerized information systems, and surveillance techniques vastly increase the capacity of the society to invade the privacy and curtail the rights of the individual. We must devise new protections against new dangers.

Yet another vital step that applies to both public- and private-sector organizations is the necessary creation of imaginative, sophisticated, and effective devices for the redress of grievances. Such devices would be directly responsive to the sense of individual powerlessness and frustration.

But the balance between the claims of individuality and the claims of community is threatened from another direction. We have considered the dangers posed by a vast, highly organized society. We must now look at the dangers posed by anarchic individualism.

Before doing so, let us remind ourselves of what is of value in the concern that we have for the individual. A concern for the individual - which entered Western history with the Renaissance - has contributed important ingredients to the best of contemporary social thinking, among them the idea that each person is of value; that all individuals are equally worthy of our care and concern; that the dignity and worth of the individual is not to be measured in terms of race, sex, status, or achievement; that society benefits in vitality as well as stability if there is wide opportunity for individual initiative and responsibility.

At every stage these ideas have had to be defended bitterly against old-style tyranny; against the constraints upon the individual intrinsic to' highly stratified traditional societies; and more recently against the all-too-successful thrust of modern totalitarian ideas. Those who have defended the individual in those battles want no retreat.

Unfortunately the idea of individualism has also been used to justify extremes of self-aggrandizing and antisocial behavior, whether the wanton destruction of the environment by an unconcerned industrialist or the buying and selling of hard drugs by a young person who scorns the laws of the community. From this point of view, individualism means that when my purposes and the purposes of the society collide, my purposes are of course paramount. A century from now social historians will look back with astonishment at the extremes of atomistic individualism that were celebrated in late twentieth-century literature and social philosophy. And then the historians may have formulated an hypothesis to explain the fact that these excesses of individualism seemed to grow more lurid at precisely the time when the very idea of individuality was under threat by modern technology and large-scale social organization.

All our knowledge of human functioning, ancient or modern, primitive or civilized, tells us that unqualified individualism is an impossibility, an absurdity, a fantasy. By the time one is old enough to have any kind of independence, one is inescapably a social being. Total individualism isn't an option.

The individual can move toward the freedom available to humans only when he recognizes that he is not wholly free. He lives with the biological potentialities and limitations of a species that has not really changed significantly in fifty thousand years. He lives in a cultural context, some of which has roots that run back ten thousand years. He is part of history, caught in the play of social forces.

When he understands that, whether the terms of his understanding are religious or philosophical, when he admits that he is part of something larger, then the only freedom that is possible to man opens up to him. Freedom is not the fulfillment of whim. Nor is it the fantasy of personal control over events and nature and others and oneself.

Recognition of one's part in a larger drama may lead to various forms of retreat and passivity. But many wise and deep humans have continued to play their role to the hilt, knowing that they are not the authors of the great drama in which they act, but acting nonetheless, with courage and a sense of purpose.

One natural corrective both to anarchic individualism and to the hazards of mass society is a healthy sense of community - but communities are vanishing from the scene. It is increasingly hard to find coherent social contexts within which individuals can find membership, or to which they can give allegiance. For too many people there is no community that they can accept as defining, in part, who they are or what their values and obligations are. The extended family is virtually extinct, and communities in the geographical sense are disintegrating. The sense of membership and allegiance stemming from a common religion or class or economic background is fading. In short, practically every kind of human community is disappearing, and those that remain exercise little command over the loyalties, imagination or daily behavior of their members.

It is a curious fact that liberals and conservatives collaborated to produce the breakdown of community. Liberals, chafing under the old order, developed emancipated ways of thinking that contributed to the passing of traditional communities. But industrialists, particularly in the fields of transportation and communication - industrialists who thought of themselves as conservatives - probably did more to disintegrate the old-style communities than all the liberals who ever lived.

What can we do about it? If we make no effort we are, in effect, deciding to let the forms and patterns of human interaction be determined by the impersonal dynamics of large-scale organization, by the unintended consequences of technological advance, and by commercially motivated decisions.

First, we can face up to the fact that no society can wholly reject its past. Justice Holmes said, "Continuity with the past is not a duty, only a necessity." A discriminating regard for the past will lead us to think twice before destroying existing communities. At the very least, we can stop standing by passively while technological advances, large-scale organization, and random commercial forces destroy elements of community that we would wish to preserve. And we can discredit the extreme individualism that has wreaked such havoc on the whole concept of community.

But holding on to the best of what remains of traditional communities isn't enough. We must experiment with new forms of community, building necessary continuities into the new forms and letting the new wholes develop organically. To enable the individual to enjoy a sense of community, a sense of belonging, we must recreate communities within the massive agglomerations of humanity that characterize contemporary life, communities that will be wholly compatible with the concept of individual worth, dignity, and creativity. Within those communities, individuals must have not only the opportunity to participate, to have their say, they must have opportunities to serve, to be needed, to "connect."

In asserting the value of "community" one need not assume that we ever can or will have a tightly knit society. The United States has never had a tightly woven social fabric and probably never will. Compared with the web of European culture from which the American colonists emerged, the new American communities were loose and pluralistic. And from our beginnings, we've moved so fast and changed so swiftly that a highly coherent culture has never emerged.

It would be wrong, of course, to imagine that giving thought to social arrangements will solve all the problems of the individual and society. Quite aside from social arrangements, the individual must come to terms with himself or herself, which isn't easy today. Old communities and belief systems have broken down. With few exceptions a swiftly changing society has withdrawn from the individual the emotional supports of custom, tradition, family solidarity, religion, stable relationships, codes of conduct, and community coherence. The individual is acutely aware of the limits on his capacity to shape events and their consequences.

At the same time the disintegration of old contexts for the self has created the new problem of "identity." In a day when families and traditions were stable, when national and local loyalties were powerful, young people didn't ask "Who am I?" They knew. They knew where they belonged, what they believed, whom they were loyal to and what was expected of them. They were defined by family, social class, ethnic tradition, economic status, parental occupation, religion.

To be sure, there were those who deviated from what was expected of them, but even their rebellion was an expression of identity. They knew precisely what they were rebelling against.

It isn't that easy today. Part of the problem lies in a wrongheaded contemporary notion of what constitutes identity. If the young person has any marks of lineage, regional style, economic status or religious beliefs, our contemporary culture tells him to ignore them or rid himself of them. Presumably one couldn't possibly accept such "accidents" of background as one's "real identity."

So young people search desperately for an "identity" that has nothing to do with the boring realities of personal background. Not surprisingly, they often seize on the fads of the moment-clothes, slang, tastes in music, manners, and attitudes. So in the end his contemporaries - or the commercial interests that invent and exploit the fads of his contemporaries - determine what the young person comes to think of as his or her identity. Young people searching for an identity among the popular fads and postures of the moment are bound to believe that those exhilarating mannerisms they are trying on for size are more interesting than anything in their own history.

But the manufactured "self is never as interesting, never as unique as the real person hidden underneath the hastily acquired outer image. And the real person is a product of things pushed aside in the search for identity: family and family relationships, ethnic background, neighborhood surroundings during childhood, religion, and much more. All of these interact with the individual's unique combination of physical and mental qualities. Even if people have grown far beyond their points of origin, even if they have rebelled against their backgrounds, they bear the marks - as individuals - of their origins, of the paths they have traveled and of present realities. It's all a part of the same tapestry. And some figures in the tapestry - one's physical and cultural heritage - may reach back through thousands of years of history.

Another obstacle in the search for identity is the difficulty many contemporaries have in seeing that "identity" is inseparable from commitments, obligations, involvements, loyalties. One recognizes the charm of the contemporary fantasy of a life with "no strings." But identity flows in part from one's courage to commit oneself - to enduring relationships, to the service of chosen values, to membership in a community, to a way of life.

Among other things, adult commitments help in one of the great tasks of mental health: escaping the prison of the self. Self-preoccupation is not without its attractions. Selfishness pays dividends; self-indulgence has multiple rewards; self-pity is deeply satisfying; even self-castigation can yield pleasure. But they are toxic joys. Self-absorption is a prison. And that is something that every self-absorbed person finally knows.

The escape from the prison of the self may be through religion, through dedication to a social purpose, through loving relations with other human beings. Contempt for others, paranoia, exclusion and rejection of others are all paths to self-isolation. Love breaks down the walls of the isolated self.

And crucial to constructive relations with others is a healthy self-regard. If you don't like yourself, it is difficult to maintain loving relations with others. Self-contempt is a profoundly destructive emotion - destructive to the self and to others. Perhaps the only more destructive emotion is the pleasurable but deadly poison of self-pity.

Another step in coming to terms with one's self is the achievement of some measure of self-command. One encounters in contemporary thinking a variety of arguments - some of them valid - favoring self-indulgence, unlimited self-expression, and immediate impulse gratification. But the postponement of immediate gratification, the discipline of impulse, in the interest of later rewards is at the heart of civilized life. All the great civilizations in their periods of rising vitality have cultivated a measure of austerity, of self-discipline.

But the most crucial means of coming to terms with the self is yet to be mentioned. Our polity is built on the idea of individual moral responsibility, and the polity will only survive if the idea survives. It has been eroded by many features of the contemporary scene: the sheer size and complexity of our society, which diminishes the individual's sense of involvement; the reigning environmentalism which lets the individual off the hook ("Society's to blame; I have nothing to do with it"); the almost universal habit of self-exoneration and self-deception which eliminates the possibility of individual moral responsibility by preventing the issue from being posed.

A more subtle escape from individual responsibility is described by Hollo May. He points out that by denying our power many never face the moral and ethical issue of how we use our power. Expressions of helplessness become a way of evading responsibility - "What can I do?" May suggests a new "ethic of intention," which would assert that each individual is responsible for the effects of his or her actions.

There is much to be said for his view. Complete determinism deadens the impulse toward self-improvement, the sense of responsibility, and the moral impulse. Human choice is limited, but it is thus all the more crucial that we exercise what choice we have.