This work is a synthesis incorporating the ideas of many historians and philosophers to whom I am much indebted, as well as excerpts from the original writings of the chapter subjects as they apply to cultural evolution. It is focused on one of the key debates in modern Western society—how did we become so focused upon ourselves and our individuality?
One of the pillars of modernity is the privileging of the individual and the self in society. The modern West, perhaps more than any other culture, has made the focus on individuality, individual freedom, and self-identity central to its self-definition, and I argue Christianity has crucially shaped this debate. The notion of persons as synonymous with reasoning individuals with inherent rights has become thoroughly woven into Western society, and many people attribute these ideas solely to the Renaissance or the Enlightenment without realizing the long evolutionary path that started much earlier and was, as I contend, dependent on the Christian worldview for its genesis. The focus of this book will be on the shifting historical and societal contexts as individualism slowly evolved. Religion itself, as David Sloan Wilson has pointed out, is “a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units,” and being culturally based, it can modify that culture and pass on new features to descendent groups.1
Christianity , with its characteristic inwardness, was fundamental in the development of a sense of self as it affirmed the importance of the everyday man and everyday life. It shaped both the outer person (behavior) and the inner person (soul ) and exhibits a clear evolution of individual self-awareness through a sense of firsthand participation in the divine.
It was in 1860 that Jacob Burckhardt’s famous The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy debuted, but his book shaped perceptions for generations. This work will outline why Burckhardt’s thesis, and others like it, which argue that medieval persons were aware of themselves only through some general category and individualism spontaneously erupted during the miracle of the Italian Renaissance , is not accurate. I argue that the idea of an individual is historically evolved and is culturally relative and was the product of a long progression of cultural adaptations starting with the revolutionary paradigm shift that was Christianity . While the Renaissance was indeed a great period of progress in many aspects, which are covered in this book, it was by no means an abrupt turning point where the individual suddenly discovered himself, as it is often portrayed. As Patrick Deneen points out, “protection of rights of individuals and the belief in inviolable human dignity , if not always consistently recognized and practiced, were nevertheless philosophical achievements of premodern medieval Europe.”2
I contend the characteristic traits of that individualism can be mapped using a framework of a cultural genome. As Nicholas Christakis points out in his book Blueprint, “culture itself can evolve over time in a process that follows a logic similar to that of natural selection… superior ideas can outperform weaker ones and be selected for.”3 Using this framework will allow us to examine selected authors and writings demonstrative of specific cultural ideas or memes to show how they adapted over time. The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from ancient Greek μίμημα pronounced mīmēma, “imitated thing”) and was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the dissemination of ideas and cultural phenomena. His premise is that certain ideas and beliefs are successful and spread or replicate because they are useful to society, sometimes irrespective of their truth.4 So while the term cultural evolution is a metaphoric description, it is analogous to the biological processes in genetic evolution, which obeys the laws of natural selection using human forms of communication to provide transmission of these ideas or memes , and provides a useful mechanism for us to look at the evolution of individualism .
There is an important distinction that must be acknowledged in using this approach. While Darwin was clear that the appearance of purpose or teleology in biological evolution was an illusion, the transmission of cultural ideas does indeed have human intentionality and purpose through the mind of the transmitter.5 Additionally, as Christakis points out, cultural ideas can be spread using lateral transmission of ideas between individuals in the same generation, not just subsequent generations as in biological evolution, and also can be explicitly directed by an influential leader.6 In the first sense then, memes are like viruses, since they replicate better than their competitors. As Daniel Dennett says, our brains can actually be hijacked by infectious ideas that in some cases subordinate our genetic interest to other interests as in the example of ideas to die for, such as religion, ideology, and country.7 The memes that are identified within the following chapters were selected based upon modern value concepts of what being an individual means.
This book aims to trace the evolution of individuality from the late antique era, as Christianity was just gaining momentum, through the Enlightenment and into the modern era. The goal is to outline the development of various memes characteristic of individualism including: Augustine of Hippo exhibiting the inner-self, Peter Abelard and Heloise displaying the intentional-self, Dante Alighieri manifesting the responsible-self, Pico della Mirandola and the self-made man meme, Michel de Montaigne presenting the subjective-self, Martin Luther with the autonomous-self meme , and John Locke presenting the natural rights meme . The supposition is not that these historical figures necessarily invented these concepts; but rather, due to a confluence of events, timing, and just as in biological evolution, chance, the idea they wrote about reached a critical mass of acceptance and “stuck,” thereby mutating the prevailing social culture from both a historical and linguistic point of view.8 In some cases, the total oeuvre of these authors reveals deep self-contradictions, but the focus of this book will be on that one idea or concept that gained a foothold and more importantly, just as in natural selection, reproduced, causing a progression toward our modern view of individuality.
Defining Terms and Indicators
Individualism is a problematic term because in our modern parlance it has become a political rather than a philosophical or spiritual, metaphysical definition. By contrast, in Christianity the focus of individualism has been on the concept of the soul as the self. The Roman Catholic catechism I learned taught that the soul is separate from the body, having reason and free will, although acknowledging that the term “soul ” often refers to the entire human person. But “soul ” also refers to the innermost aspects of humans, that which is of greatest value in them, that by which they are most especially in God’s image: “soul ” signifies the spiritual principle in humanity.9
In the modern West however, the favored form of respecting the dignity of the individual is in terms of rights or a legal privilege, which are seen as the possession of the agent to whom it is attributed.10 This is the most prevalent definition, but modern notions of individualism also include a number of personal freedoms or civil liberties. These are mediated through social interactions and social media, as well as laws, which form the basis of our enforcement of individual rights and freedoms, and are based on language and values.
Human individuality, in the larger sense, is as Reinhold Niebuhr eloquently said both the product of spirit and nature.11 A person is at once an individual and a human being, both uniquely different than anyone else and significantly the same as everyone else in the human race. Or as Arthur Schopenhauer put it, a...