Vulgata XVIII Editorial Neil Patterson

Norman Davies, in his epic history of Europe makes the astonishing claim that the sixteenth century saw “the emergence of the modern concept of the family as made up of distinct individuals.” My first reaction was bewilderment. Of what else could the family be constituted? Surely this can be relegated to the trash-heap along with similar ideas that still get taught in High School sociology classes, such as the bizarre notion that mothers before the Twentieth Century didn’t love their children because so many of them died. And yet there is assuredly something quite different in the modern understanding of both the family and the individual. Every person possesses very fundamental assumptions about his own identity and his relationship to those around him and these assumptions are not shared across cultures and centuries. They are so fundamental, that, speaking for myself, I find it a very taxing mental exercise to really understand how anyone could think differently from me on so basic a level. I would have given up the project as a mere curiosity, but I have discovered it to be not merely taxing but also spiritually necessary.

These fundamental assumptions are implicitly derived from the answer to the question, “what is the most basic fact of my existence?” I think nearly everybody in North America and a very many other people around the world would focus, in formulating their answers, on the brute fact of individuation. That is, I can easily distinguish myself from every other object in the universe, therefore, I am an utterly unique and discrete entity and all other facts about me, my nationality, ethnicity, family relations, religion et cetera, no matter how important they are, are sequent to that. And yet, to return to Davies’ claim, many people from diverse cultures, both contemporary and historical, do not see things this way, or at least have not behaved as if this were the case. Now the only way to deny this assertion of individuality, which seems to me so obvious that I can hardly understand how it could be otherwise, is to suppose that some group of individuals to which I belong is ontologically prior to the individuals in it. Premodern family and tribal structures are an excellent example of this. Of course no one before the Greeks approached metaphysics in a rigorous way and most people still don’t, but a lot of ontological assumptions can be inferred from behaviour.

The excerpt from Davies hints at the fact that the family or tribe is the first place we should look for the basic identity of individuals. We all have heard of the ancient Greek paterfamilias, who demanded the absolute obedience of every member of the household, and there is the Roman practice of naming all the daughters of one family identically. What about the Mosaic injunction to marry your brother’s widow for the sake of continuing his name? Is there not the implication that the brother, though dead, is in a more important way alive by the continuation of his line, even by means of a stand-in. There is evidently some kind of fungibility between family members foreign to the modern mind. Nor is this practice isolated to the ancient Hebrews. Genghis Khan murdered his half brother to prevent him from marrying his mother after their father died. Such a marriage was expected by tribal custom. Another example is the Chinese, famous for their Confucian filial piety. Of course, in the west we believe (or say we believe) in respecting our families and elders, but there are a number of practices proper to Confucianism that confound the individualist outlook. Firstly, when his father dies, a man is expected to observe a two year period of mourning. He retires from his work and lives a quiet life in his home. This is not an emotional recovery period or a time to offer prayers for the dead (Confucianism offers no clear teaching on the afterlife). Similarly the practice of reverencing deceased ancestors is not with a mind to praying to or for them. Confucianists do not practice ancestor worship nor do they have any firm belief that their ancestors are in any way still alive. To the Western mind, this makes the practice quite puzzling. The 16^thth Century Jesuit missionaries to China, led by Matteo Ricci, saw this practice for what it was and allowed their converts to continue it. The Church authorities in Rome, however, were unable to see the distinction and lumped it in with everyday paganism, causing many difficulties for the young mission. But who can blame the Church authorities? What a strange idea: you bow before your ancestor even though you don’t expect any supernatural benefit to accrue to either of you as a result of the transaction. There’s no explicit metaphysics behind this, but clearly the Chinese of past centuries had a radically different notion of family than I do. It’s difficult to say exactly what that notion was and I don’t have the expertise to say for certain, but could it have been one in which a man’s position in the family was more important than his status as living or dead? Such an idea, or one equally as strange, seems to be at work here.

When I began to realize this fact, from these examples and many others, I couldn’t help but think myself the poorer for it. Camus famously found himself trapped in his own subjectivity and indeed, where else could I be if I am at the bottom of myself? What happens when we embark on the great existentialist quest to find ourselves, but only to discover that we are really pretty uninteresting and, moreover, contingent and ephemeral?

My experience of individualism is that it highly deficient in many respects and so I have tried to understand a more collectivist outlook, but this collectivist outlook, and all the misery it causes in its own right, is what gave rise to the enlightenment intuition of individualism in the first place. When most of us think of collectivism, we think of a list of horrors that extends from the Red Menace to arranged marriages and domineering husbands. Yes, individualism is supposed to remedy a great many problems. These problems seem to be exacerbated when this putative greater subjectivity of which I am only a junior partner is expressed in a particular individual person. Thus Shaka Zulu can order an entire squad of soldiers to jump of a cliff just for the sake of impressing a foreign journalist. We see something of this in the SS and the kamikaze pilots. Fascinatingly, what I might call, if you will allow me the phrase, the collective subjectivity of the Japanese people was distilled in the person of the Emperor, even though the Emperor himself held very little real power. However, I would not call him a figurehead; he was more of a focal point or personification of a deeper reality that the Japanese felt themselves a part of. The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who was somewhat of a political dissident in his younger days during the war, recalls the day Japan surrendered to the Americans. The Emperor himself made a radio broadcast to the entire nation, but no one knew if the Emperor was going to order the nation to surrender or “the death of the hundred million”, that is order everyone to commit ritual suicide. Kurosawa, although not a supporter of the government, confessed that he probably would have killed himself if that had been the order.

In Japan we also see this kind of family/tribal structure, the ie, to which individuals are subordinated. Michael Zielenziger explains in his book Shutting out the Sun, in which he makes a thorough critique of Japanese collectivist thinking, how the ie were once extended families which would dedicate themselves to a particular occupation or trade. The influential members of the ie arranged marriages and ensured that everyone had employment. In modern Japan, when families became smaller and more nuclear, the ie became associated with corporations. Even though the Americans tried to destroy the concept of ie after the war, out of a belief that it was too feudal, it persisted. And so a Japanese might say “I belong to the Sanyo ie,” or “I belong to the Toyota ie.” Zielenziger quotes eminent Japanese psychologist Hayao Kawai as saying, “[Individualism] is quite contrary to the traditional Japanese way of thinking, so it seems quite selfish. Their [Japanese youth’s] understanding of individualism remains quite shallow. In your country [the United States] individualism is at first really based on Christianity. Even though you do what you like, you never forget about your God. God is looking down, like an ego, judging you. But in Japan, there is no god but the ie.”

Zielenziger’s book is difficult to read for a confirmed Japanophile like myself, but it is ultimately quite convincing. His basic argument is that Japan, although on the surface a modern industrialized country, never went through the Enlightenment and so does not understand individual freedom and responsibility. He illustrates this with numerous examples. Office workers are diagnosed with stress-induced depression, but who literally can’t understand what the doctor is talking about when he tries to explain it to them. Samurai ritual suicide is still a common response to personal failure. Most shocking is probably the estimated million young men who, not finding themselves able to communicate with others or fit in with the crowd, refuse to go to school and lock themselves in their rooms. These men often don’t leave their rooms for years (or ever) and rely on their families to leave food outside their doors.

Zielenziger has diagnosed a social sickness, but I balk at his prescription. For Zielenziger, the solution to Japan’s ills is western individualism, which he (and many others) claim is a uniquely Christian phenomenon. He argues that the individual, tempered by his responsibility toward God and neighbour is the key ingredient missing in the Japanese psyche. But here I am trapped in my own subjectivity again. And this entrapment not only affects me, but you also. For, as I see it, if I am only I, then you are only you and there is no fundamental connection between us. Yes, we may be part of the same family, church, nation, and certainly we are part of the same human species, but these facts are secondary to our more fundamental aloneness and discretion. In C.S. Lewis novel ‘Till We Have Faces (which, by the way, is the greatest thing he ever wrote and is sorely underread) a Greek philosopher tries to convince a barbarian king that all men are of one blood. “’Of one blood?’ says the King with a stare and a great bull-laugh. ‘I’d be sorry to think so.” Jean-Luc Picard faces similar problems when negotiating a peace-settlement with a group of especially hostile aliens. He makes one of those classic Star Trek speeches about how the Federation believes that all beings have a fundamental right to exist, to which the aliens respond, in a malevolent basso, “an interesting notion, which we do not share.” The very basis of the best of western moral philosophy, from Socrates right through Jean-Luc Picard, is the value and responsibility of the freely acting individual. If this proposition is flatly denied, it is very difficult to argue for. We see this in war atrocities all the time. To get one group of people to kill another en masse you have to dehumanize them. When the Hutus killed the Tutsis they called them “cockroaches” (among other things), but none of the Hutus really believed that their Tutsi neighbours with whom they had lived and worked their entire lives, weren’t actually human. They were just outside of the group, and that’s the point. The same is true for Stalin’s CPSU, but no one was really sure who was in and who was out and so this great vanguard of the people that one supposedly belonged to, even before one’s family or, to some extent, oneself, is the very thing that threatens you with the most danger. Only some individuals have a right to live, not all: that is the implicit claim behind so much mass- and small-scale human misery.

In an effort to limit misery, we design moral philosophies that deny this proposition. We have framed it as divine command, virtue, categorical imperative, rational self-interest and what have you. And moral philosophy is not bunk by any stretch and this is not a manifesto for some great new philosophical revolution. Nonetheless I am dissatisfied with the claim that my moral responsibility to you lies in the fact that we are two individual things that happen to belong to the same category of thing, that is, the human race. At least in collectivist thinking there is some metaphysical basis for claims of responsibility toward the other. The most fundamental fact of my existence is my membership in this tribe or family; therefore I serve the community before I serve myself. Is there a similar claim I can make that universalizes the tribe? What is the most fundamental fact of my existence?

This question raises some very pressing issues about religion. What about prayer? If we are two discrete individuals that are each the ground of our own being, what does your prayer have to do with me or mine with you? God knows what you need more than I do and he is in a much better position to confer blessings on you that I am, so why should I pray for you? The same goes for the Incarnation. Okay, so Christ became a human being, died and rose. Somehow this also confers resurrection on us. How? As far as I can see, the whole Christian religion fails to make any sense unless Christ is seen as the unifying principle of human life—of all life. “I live not, but Christ lives in me.” You and I have everything to do with each other in the same way that parts of a body have everything to do with each other. Through the Incarnation, Christ has united himself with the whole human race. He has become the human archetype and we are his image. This is especially true for the baptized, who are united in the Church and participants in the Paschal mystery. Prayer is a participation in the divine life. Prayer for another person is a real participation in his or her life through Christ. Readjusting our thinking on this level, to really believe that this is true and behave as though this is what we believe, as I said before, is very difficult, but absolutely necessary to making any sense of the Christian spiritual life. By virtue of the Mass, I am more fundamentally one with my brothers and sisters in China, whom I have never met, than I am alone. The ties of natural kinship, which many have considered, if my suppositions are correct, to be stronger than unifying principle of the individual, suddenly seem brittle in comparison to the Church, the family of Christ extended through all time and space and into eternity. In this sense there is nothing Christian about individualism at all.

I see the problems of tribalist collectivity and yet I cannot help but see something deeply true in it; something that makes me wonder whether Christianity is much more about the divinized tribe than the deified individual. Is our faith universalized tribalism, not merely responsible and mature individualism? These are tentative and vague conclusions, of course, but if nothing else, I hope I have convinced the reader that much can be learned by removing the mantle of the enlightenment from our shoulders, even in an experimental and temporary way, and looking to distant times and places for a fresh perspective on the human mystery and maybe even a workable set of metaphysical assumptions.