Critiques of individualism are as legion as critiques of modernity in theological circles. But anymore I’m not even sure what a critique of individualism is supposed to do. Ostensibly authors of books lodging theological critiques of individualism are hoping to somehow reshape society or at least generate some substantive sub-cultures that don’t fall prey to being “individualistic,” however that be defined.
But what would that even look like? What makes today’s world so particularly individualistic in a way that is different from the rest of history up till now? The only thing I can think of is that today people (in the West anyway) have more power to make choices about how to live life. So a few hundred years ago most people probably didn’t have the option to pick up and change the way or place where they were living life. They were embedded in something stable, or at least hard to disturb without significant trauma on many levels. Now that level of trauma has been significantly reduced. Human bonds are more fragile, less likely to be permanent.
Hence “rampant individualism”?
I kind of don’t think so. In the first place, I don’t think all that many people today are actually going to seriously argue that it is wrong and bad for people to be able to make decisions about how and where to live. The radical discomfit that people seem to have with individualism is that they don’t like the modes of life many people choose and so they start launching polemics about the horrors of individualism, often with a nostalgic reference to how things used to be more given, more stable, more solid. Romantic references to “place” and “land” tend to come up a lot here.
But, here’s the rub: those lodging this critique certainly don’t think that they should have to give up or be denied their ability to shape the course of their life. The most ardent critics of individualism are remarkably mobile and nomadic fellows from what I’ve see. They go where the university posts take them with little regard for “place” or “land” or “community.”
Now, I’m not that interested in just pointing out a potential inconsistency between some intellectuals’ published positions and their actions. My point is more basic and more important than that. It seems to me that the people who most ardently criticize individualism are people who are concerned about a loss of power to shape society (or the church) towards their understanding of the good. Put concisely, “individualism” is only scary to those who want to control the social lives of others. Honestly I don’t think it can possibly be a coincidence that the folks most virulently critical of individualism are white males who have significant university posts. Indeed I’m hard pressed to think of a single female scholar who has attacked individualism in ways akin to say Robert Bellah or Zygmunt Bauman.
It seems to me that critiques of individualism invariably come beset with a totalizing vision of “the good society” that, ostensibly should be actualized whether people like it or not (because obviously they don’t like it or they’d be doing it already). In short, I don’t know how critiques of individualism, as such, avoid the charge that they are simply instances of the will to power. They are always animated with angst, fear, and revulsion towards the current shape of social life and deeply desirous of reshaping society in accordance with their own vision. Its hard for me to image that not being ultimately fascist (Milbank is perhaps the most sophisticated example of a theological fascist writing today).
If there can be a non-ideological mode of critiquing individualism I have yet to find it. Mind you I’m not saying that I think all the modes of life that characterize modern life are all fine and dandy. I manifestly do not. But, the impulse to structurally change and shape the conditions of social life in order to bring about one’s own vision of the good society is totalitarian. All despots believe that they are doing what’s ultimately good for the populace while insisting that the choosing and interpretation of that good must be out of the hands of the people themselves. They cannot be trusted to choose it so it must be imposed on them by a stable life, rooted in a particular place where things just “are” the right way. You know, my way. They way where I have power. Because at least that’s not individualistic.
It is the pathos of modern philosophy and theology to try to figure out the nature of modernity and late modernity on the basis of which mythological Greek figures things correspond to. Nietzsche’s notion of Dionysus against Apollo (and “the Crucified”) has become a standard way of talking about the matter. Also common is to talk about the movement way from Promethean modernity into Dionysian postmodernity.
I continue to be struck by how prescient J.C. Hoekendjik’s work is in regard to the nature of Christian mission and modern culture. One could even argue that he diagnoses the much joked about condition of the modern 
There are two basic narratives that are generally proffered today by various theologians. The first is what could roughly be called the Free Church position. In this narrative, the primary shift in the church’s history occurred through the complex series of events which led up to and followed Constantine’s establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome. The collusion of the church with imperial power slowly altered and reshaped the church’s self-understanding as the apocalyptic ecclesia of God on pilgrimage through the present age. The church instead came to understand itself as the guarantor of the right ordering of civilization, the spiritual guide and priest of a whole cultural, political, and economic order which was, in some sense, Christian. The Free Church narrative decries this shift in the church’s self-understanding. What is important is not that the church continue to find ways of shoring up the project of Western civilization, but rather to return to its own particular narrative and practices as a way of sustaining a communal life within the fragments of Christendom and modernity. Thinkers in this vein would include John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and others.
The first thing that is interesting about these two narratives is that they both call the church to very similar sorts of postures in the current state of global capitalism and modern fragmentation. Whether we think the church went wrong at the inception of Christendom or at its dissolution, all are agreed that in the state of modern alienation and nihilism what is needed is for the church to return to its particular narrative and practices, seeking to sustain a common life oriented towards its telos as the people of God. The difference of course comes in terms of what each side expects this to accomplish.
In his superb book, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, David Toole argues that there are three possible responses to the horrors that have taken place in modernity: Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse. He frames his discussion using the rather incredible story of the staging of Samuel Beckett’s play, “
However, one of the largest problems with how such issues are approached theologically has to do with the way in which theologians often assume that “modernism” and “postmodernism” stand for philosophical ideologies and their attending effects on culture. In other words, when people talk about “the culture of modernity” or the “postmodern culture” most of them are talking predominately about ideas and their impact on culture. What is assumed in discussions that take up the grammar of modernism versus postmodernism is that the perceived shifts in cultural and philosophy are predominately intellectual shifts that trickle down as it were into the culture. Perhaps we can call this way of narrating contemporary culture and thought as philosophical Reaganomics (or Thatcherism, if your a Brit).
It seems to me that a more fruitful way to think about the cultural and philosophical shifts that have been taking place since the later 20th century is to view them under the rubric of (as suggested above), economics. What are commonly identified as modernism and postmodernism are better understood as early and late capitalism. In early capitalism, emerging as it does with the breakdown of Christendom and the rise of the Enlightenment self we have the beginnings of the creation of the capitalist subject: the isolated individual who produces and consumes. The notion of the self that is informed by the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is precisely the nascent self of capitalism. This is the birth self-contained individual whose goal is to secure happiness, flourishing, and safety through production and acquisition of capital, making social arrangements by means of a social contract.
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