“The master trend in recent Western culture has been to emancipate the individual from the group, and now we are paying the social and spiritual price.”   David Brooks, New York Times

It is as if a meteorite just hit North America and the catastrophe goes by the name of our current President. This meteorite nearly wiped out an entire species called the “the courageous, thoughtful, conservative“.  To this writer, David Brooks was and is a courageous thoughtful conservative who has deftly survived the extinction event. He has been and is one of my points of reference in balancing an ever more challenged point of view.  The few remaining thoughtful conservatives in America such as Brooks and Stephens  serve a critical role in the overall ecology of political thought. As our own Secretary of Defense discretely promotes the end of freedom of religion In America by supporting a national religion, it becomes even more important to separate the important threads of conservative thought from the thoughtless emotional  morass of the far right authoritarians.

Brooks makes this point in a New York Times opinion piece by quoting a Gallup pollster.  “People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community. They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning, he adds, is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.”  If this nation were to mandate a single religion, this pollster’s  statement would feel like another nail in the coffin of democracy.  In free democracy though, we might learn from this same statement that overarching individualism can be toxic to the human spirit and destroy the social connective tissue that is experienced as thriving. In a free country, the questions of what is a religious service can be a matter for your individual conscience.  A single religious tradition cannot be mandatory national requirement, ritual or prayer. In a thriving democracy the ‘we’ of it competes equally with the “I” of it and the particular nature of religion resides within the borderline of the person.  Yet, in a democracy, we boost ourselves  beyond the line of the personal pronoun “I  and my religion” to meet the more complex needs of “us and our religions”.  Anything else is a recipe for violence, tragedy, and chaos. 

A Modest Proposal for Good

The Good Decision Project is a method for moving beyond the personal pronoun of “I” into the democratic virtues of “us”.  This writer does not see the movement to the collective good as a binary but rather as an essential process in our capacity to contribute to our democratic government.  And yes, our culture  has been nearly frozen at the level individuality not only in the right wing thought process, but also the left. Individuation is a national disease. For any reactionaries reading this column “the collective good” has nothing to do with the Communism of the 20th century which was largely and often authoritarianism cloaked in sheep’s clothing. Good can be gathering at the local level, and even the family level to try the discover the dialectic of the third point of view; the one view discovered after the “I” gives over to the “Us”.