Bruce J. Malina
Why is it that in the game of chess, if the piece called the King is captured, then the game is overāeven if there are still many other same-colored chess pieces on the board? Why cannot some other piece take up the Kingās role and carry on? One might say, those are the rules of the game. Yet why are those the rules of the game? In what sort of social system does the capture of the King mark the end of the contest and the submission of the Kingās forces?
At the Beijing Olympic games in the summer of 2008, when hurdler Liu Xiang took to the track with a pronounced limpāhe had an ankle injuryā the announcement that this nationally admired athlete would not compete triggered an outburst of weeping both within the stadium and throughout the country. Such behavior is typical of collectivistic societies, and it is the rules of collectivism that are replicated in the game of chess and the national weeping of the Chinese.
Collectivism and its opposite, individualism, are somewhat technical terms to describe in general how people think of themselves and others. Collectivistic persons think of themselves primarily as part of a group, for example as a member of a family, an ethnic group, a team, a gang. In their āoff the top of the headā judgments, group members come first, and what counts above all is the needs and concerns of group members. Single persons always represent the groups in which they are embedded. Collectivists take their clues for what to do and think from the values and attitudes of the members of the group in which they are embedded. They feel their best when their group and its members succeed in the face of competing groups. It is groups that are unique and distinctive, not individuals.
Individualistic persons, on the other hand, think of themselves as having to stand on their own two feet, as having to make it by themselves, on their own terms. They believe they have to think for themselves and make their own choices alone. They are willing to use other people who support their goals. Their parents are very happy with their successes on their own behalf. Individuals are unique and distinctive, not groups.
In general, some 80 percent of the people on our planet today are collectivistic. The far smaller percentage are individualists, mostly northern Europeans and northern European immigrants in the US, Canada, and Australia. The significant fact for those individualists who read the Bible is that biblical writers and the people they depict were collectivists, including Jesus. There are no statements in the Bible directed to individualists. This essay considers that state of affairs.
Individualists and Collectivists
Whenever we observe people interacting with each other, whether in a shopping mall, on the street, on TV shows, or in films, we invariably interpret what is going on in what we see. What sort of criteria or norms are available to us to judge what people are doing? I would presume that we invariably judge others in terms of what we have learned from our parents concerning the ways in which people interact in our society. What parents teach their children are the norms of behavior acceptable in our society. This parental socialization process would have us learn and live in terms of the norms and meanings of social interaction that prevail in our society. We learn literally thousands of āproperā ways of behaving in shopping malls and supermarkets, in crossing streets and respecting the space of our fellow pedestrians, ways of interpreting what is happening on TV shows or films, ways of understanding the various sections of newspapers, and the like. In each scene that confronts us, we invariably interpret what is going on in terms of the behaviors of single persons who, presumably, are much like ourselves. The same is true, of course, of the way we interpret the persons we encounter in reading, whether the sports pages or biblical books. We tend to believe that all individual selves are much like we ourselves are. And it is on the basis of our self-understanding that we empathize with the people depicted in the various scenarios that we observe on TV, for example, or that we imagine in our reading of the Bible, or novels, or newspapers.
The question I wish to pose here is whether our judgments in this regard are accurate or fair. To judge other persons in our own society according to the social norms we have learned is usually quite accurate and fair since without shared social norms, mutual understanding of language and other behaviors would be impossible. On the other hand, to judge other persons in alien societies according to the social norms of our own society would be quite unfair, pregnant with misunderstanding, and the source of much unnecessary conflict, to say the least. It would seem that there really is no entity like a neutral, universal āself.ā Rather every person we might meet or read about is a socialized or enculturated self. And since not all social systems or cultures are the same, it follows that not all individually socialized or enculturated persons are the same.
Even though all people on the planet, as far as we can verify, use the word āIā and equivalents, the meanings invested in that word in the various social systems of the world are often radically different. By āIā and equivalents, I refer to the āself.ā
The way people conceive of and deal with the self can be plotted on a line whose extreme points are individualism (awareness of a unique and totally independent āIā) on the one hand, and collectivism (awareness of an āIā that has nearly everything in common with the kinship group and its spin-offs) on the other.
Individualistic cultures are a rather recent phenomenon in recorded history (sixteenth or seventeenth century CE at the earliest; see Duby 1988, for antiquity see Veyne 1989). Consequently, the Mediterranean selves we read about in the Bible could not be individualists. Rather, they were all group-oriented selves, very concerned to share the viewpoints of the group members whose fate they shared.
Individualists believe that single persons are unique and distinct relative to other persons. Collectivists on the other hand believe groups are unique and distinct relative to other groups. The unique and distinct groups to which persons belong through no choice of their own are groups into which a person is born and socialized: parents and family by birth, place by location of the kin group, gender by patriarchal gender roles. Genealogy, geography, and gender serve to define single groups as unique and distinct. It is group features that then define single group members.
For example, if ancient persons had family or second names as we do, it would be the family name that defined the group and all of its members as unique, such as all family members of the Williams family. If you meet one you meet them all, since they are really all the same. Furthermore, the familyās location further defines the group. For example, all the members of the Chicago Williams family are quite the same. In their patriarchal system, the males of the Chicago Williams family would be all quite similar, as would the females of the Chicago Williams family. What is unique about them all is the group, its location, and gender, the patriarchal Williams family of Chicago. All members of this unique and distinct group form a primary ingroup. The term āingroupā refers to a collection of individual persons who perceive themselves to be members of the same social category, sharing some emotional involvement in this common definition of themselves, and achieving some degree of social consensus about the evaluation of their group and of their membership in it. Single persons who realize that their values and attitudes are defined by their unique and distinct primary ingroup are said to be collectivistic persons.
There are additional features of this primary ingroup that can make it expand like a set of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes. Since the Williams of Chicago are located in Illinois, in turn located in the United States, the expanded group of all who live in Illinois and/or all who live in the US form a sort of expanded, if secondary, ingroup, for example, fellow Americans. These secondary ingroups come into play in contexts where ingroups of the same level of abstraction are set in comparative situations: state versus state, country versus country. Since the American government gratuitously attacked Iraq and killed nearly a million Iraqis, all of America and each of its citizens is the enemy of Iraq and worthy of revenge killing in the eyes of collectivist Iraqis.
Note that all these ingroups have their memberships determined by ascription. That is, people are situated into their groups by no choice of their own. As collectivists, they are not expected to have a choice about belonging to such birth-dependent groups. Birth-dependent groups are kin groups, immediate or expanded kin groups consisting of members whose situation has been determined by birth. Collectivists find it difficult, if not impossible, to leave such groups or to deny these ascribed features. To leave the group is much like divorcing family, or oneās lands, or rejecting oneās gender orientationāall the features that define a human being as a person. Since Jesus calls for a discipleās self-denial, the self that is denied is the group self. A person has to leave āhouse or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my [Jesusās] sake and for the gospelā (Mark 10:29ā 30). It is the household, kin group, and lands that constitute the self of the (male) person in question.
The birth-dependent House of Israel (literally: children of Jacob/Israel) at the highest level of abstraction consisted of people called Judeans, Galileans, and Pereans, places named after the groups and their members inhabiting them. For collectivists, groups give their name to places; wherever group members are, they always bear the name of their group/place of origin. Judeans are Judeans no matter where they are located in the Roman Empire, and no matter how long they have lived away from the original group birth locations. For individualists birthplaces do not give their name to individualists; in individualistic societies, wherever individualists are, they take on the name of their new place of residence. Chicagoans become New Yorkers by living and working in the new place for a prolonged period of time and the passing of time away from the original group birth location. In ancient collectivistic societies, exile from the group/place of origin is considered the most terrible of punishments. In individualistic societies, such āexileā from group birth location may simply mean searching for new opportunities.
In collectivistic societies, one might join a secondary group that is birth-dependent in a broader, mediate way. For example in the house of Israel, there were a number of secondary groups apart from the primary domestic birth and place related groups. Birth-dependent secondary groups include political groups such as the Herodians, political religious groups such as the Pharisees or Sadducees or Essenes, as well as groups founded by John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth. All the secondary groups form Israelite birth-dependent groups, open only to members of the House of Israel. The secondary group takes on a secondary identity based on some fictive birth rite, thus constituting a fictive kin group of brothers and sisters.
Individualists
American mainstream individualism is characterized by internal control and identity as well as internal responsibility and worth. Clifford Geertz tried to develop a somewhat precise and specific definition of the āindividualā as found in current, mainstream US behavior. He tells us that the individual here is āa bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.ā And he goes on to note that this way of being human is, āhowever incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the worldās culturesā (Geertz 1976: 225; see also Augsburger 1986: 85ā7).
This sort of individualism seems rooted in a social contract of discrete individuals. Individualism as a lifestyle favors doing over being, actions over reflection, equality instead of hierarchy, informality rather than formality, and functional friendships above long-term loyalties or obligatory commitments to friends. Group membership is by renewable contract, with rights and duties defined by oneās own goals. Achievement and competition are seen as motivational necessities and norms. The worth of a person is measured by objective, visible, social achievements (education, appointments, memberships, certifications) or material possessions (wealth, property, status symbols). Personal accomplishments are more important than birth, family prestige, heritage, or traditional prominence. Achieved status is valued over ascribed status.
Collectivists
Ancient Mediterraneans and nearly 80 percent of people today live in collectivistic cultures. Collectivism may be described as the belief that the groups in which a person is embedded are each and singly an end in themselves, and as such single persons in the group ought to realize distinctive group values notwithstanding the weight of oneās personal drive in the direction of self-satisfaction. In collectivistic cultures most peopleās social behavior is largely determined by group goals that require the pursuit of achievements which improve the position of the group. The defining attributes of collectivistic cultures are family integrity, solidarity, and keeping the primary ingroup in āgood health.ā
Individualism stands radically apart...
