The solitude of our own heart

Modern individualism has brought us many good things, but it has gone too far. The premodern tolerance of community life can help us move forward. But how can we get more community spirit?

The previous episode was about a remote, pre-modern village in 1966 South Korea. The community was very much alive, its six hundred residents were intensively involved with each other, people cared about each other, they had time for each other. Even if you crossed the line you were not considered poison; the village prided itself on it insim: magnanimity. The anthropologist who had described the village returned twenty-five years later, and the village appeared to have sailed into modernity in a single generation. People no longer had time for each other, traditions had faded, it was now everyone for themselves and everything revolved around money.

What happened in that village in twenty-five years took us in Europe five hundred years. We have become individualistic. Individualism is part of the developments that have occurred over the past five hundred years, to which I referred under the term modernity. Our ethics are individualistic: all ideas are traced back to the individual. We have started to think individualistically, and that is exceptional. For premodern and Asian thinkers, the human community is paramount. But communities are evaporating in our culture. Modern man does not live in communities, but in a society, a society where hardly anyone knows your name anymore. Where the family, the church, the guild and the neighbours used to interfere with your morality, now it is only the government, the judge and at most your employer.

In that village in South Korea they had a different form of tolerance. People interfered with each other; people spoke to each other about tradition, family, the importance of the community and your well-being. The standards were fairly clear, but many turned a blind eye. No one was without sin, everyone knew that. Your reputation suffered if you misbehaved, but even with a questionable reputation you could still function well in the village, and there was no shortage of fun.

Our modern freedom is a different one. Morality and judgement of our equals play less of a role in our daily life; if we transgress a standard, the first question is: can we get away with it? After the banking crisis, the anthropologist Joris Luyendijk studied the moral culture in the London financial sector. The culture was not immoral, as many assumed. Most of the individuals who worked there had an okay moral compass. But competition lead to amorality. Stick to the letter of the law; ethics do not play a significant role in business. The law has replaced morality.

As a society we have become more indifferent. The good of others hardly plays a role anymore, and even if we cheat, cause a nuisance or disrupt society, there is little chance that we will be held accountable by third parties. Mind your own business. The chance of getting caught is low, and if you can pay a good lawyer, you can get away with a lot.

At the same time, governments and the judiciary can be excruciatingly harsh. Once you've been labelled a tax fraudster or potential terrorist, expect the worst. Leniency is then lost. Lex dura, sed lex: the law is harsh, but it is the law.

This series is about freedom and toleration. The underlying question in this article is: can we return to a form of fairness as an alternative model of toleration? The freedom of the human scale, where on the one hand we are not judged mercilessly, but on the other hand we have to accept that people hold each other accountable for their behaviour and do not keep their moral judgement to themselves. To answer these questions, we must delve into modern individualism and the disappearance of the sense of community.

Romantic individualism

There has always been individualism here. Initially as a result of the Christian theology of free will and of human equality. Furthermore, don't forget that