Why are we so committed to the idea that we are all unique and fundamentally free individuals? (Indeed, this collective belief in our discrete individuality is one of the things that makes us moderns so alike.) What is the source, and the rationale, of this belief in individuality? This dogmatic bias against authority is rooted in beliefs we have about the nature of the human as an agent. These rely on anthropological convictions, convictions about the picture of the human agent we assume. To dislodge them, we have to tackle their philosophical fundaments directly.
The forces encouraging and reinforcing this picture of the human are complex and manifold. On the surface, the problem may seem to be linguistic. Our language of “choice” offers no way to acknowledge our participation in, or vulnerability to, one another; it assumes that we are fundamentally separate from one another…. It seems incoherent, or at least improper, to attempt to wrest another’s choice out of another’s control; given the basis of such choice in the mysterious subjectivity of the agent (“there’s no arguing with taste,” as the saying goes), it seems almost a category confusion to imagine that one could exercise another’s choice for him or her. […]
But note here how we are already moving from problems in our language to some more fundamental philosophical presuppositions underlying that language, presuppositions about the human agent. A large part of our problem here—I do not say the whole problem, merely a large part of it—lies in the picture of human agency most of us unreflectively assume today, and in this picture’s depiction of the relationship between God, humans, and creation. This picture…assumes that human agency properly operates through radically unconstrained choice, which is modeled on the radically unconstrained, ex nihilo action of God in creation. It is, in short, a Promethean vision of the human—a vision that emphasizes the human’s capacity to act while ignoring or downplaying the constraints on the human’s dependency on forces and persons beyond the human. To be sure, it relies on and obeys real authorities…but it cannot explicitly acknowledge them as authorities. This ex nihilo picture cannot, that is, understand authority. It offers no way to acknowledge our enmeshment or participation in, or vulnerability to, one another; it assumes that we are fundamentally separate from one another. Here love appears as nothing but the negotiation of our individual, private happiness. See in this light, our perplexities about civic engagement are rooted in deeper philosophical perplexity about our self-understanding as agents, and indeed as humans: we talk, that is, as if we do not believe that love is the core of our being; as if we believe that the world is ultimately a matter of sheer power, of conflicting wills, without respite; as if we want to be left wholly alone. Beneath our latent Promethean idolatry is a deep existential despair, a sense of being alone, of being abandoned.
Andy Crouch’s definition of human persons would go some way toward remedying this deficiency: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” Imagine the political ramifications of taking that definition seriously. Crouch expounds,
We are designed for love—primed before we were born to seek out others, wired neurologically to respond with empathy and recognition, coming most alive when we are in relationships of mutual dependence and trust. Love calls out the best in us—it awakens our hearts, it stirs up the depths of our souls, it focuses our minds, it arouses our bodies to action and passion. It also calls out what is most human in us. Of all the creatures on earth, we are by far the most dependent, the most relational, the most social, and the most capable of care. When we love, we are most fully and distinctively ourselves.