Individuality

Journalist Derek Thompson is lamenting the decline of church attendance in America. As an agnostic, one would think he would be pleased. In a piece for The Atlantic, he writes: "Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence."

Thompson paraphrases social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation:

Many Americans have developed a new relationship with a technology that is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. (To) stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. Digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals put us in our body, requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews pray. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people.

I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

The Bible teaches us that it is not good for us to be alone, we need others. Researchers now know that we are wired to be with and interact with others.

Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms. Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump), or preparing a spreadsheet for a sales meeting (anticipating the boss’s reactions). Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.

Two researchers have found that success comes with a trap: It can cause teams to rely more on their “stars.” This makes the team less adaptable and more likely to get stuck in old ways of doing things. And, ultimately, it increases the chances of failure the next time around.

They started their research by looking at pro basketball teams. They examined teams in the NBA across more than 60,000 games, spanning 34 years. Leveraging motion-tracking-camera data, they looked at how teams’ passing patterns and shot distributions changed after wins and losses. Here’s their conclusion:

We found that after winning, teams became more reliant on their star players. Teams passed the ball about 6% more to the stars, and their shot distribution skewed 15% more toward the big performers. Although doubling down is intuitive (“We want to exploit what worked before”), it ended up decreasing teams’ chances of winning the next game. The increased reliance on the star players made teams more predictable to the next opponent and easier to defend—and therefore less likely to win the game … Our studies suggest that success threatens teams.

Their recommendation? Focus on the whole team, not just the stars. The researchers concluded, “When teams succeed, the credit is less likely to focus on specific performers, but rather on the team. Likewise, blame is less likely to be attributed solely to the stars, so the team can get a clearer picture of what went wrong.”

Sounds like the body of Christ!

In Oprah Winfrey’s lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, she said, "What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have."

“Your truth.” Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of "your truth" destroys families when a dad suddenly decides "his truth" is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It's a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person's truth will go to battle with another person's truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.

"Your truth" also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. "Live your truth" autonomy is as exhausting as it is incoherent. Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”

NBA Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley popularized the term the “Disease of More.” Riley has noted that many championship pro teams in the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL don’t repeat. The main factor is that the team is defeated from within, not from without.

The players want more. At first, that “more” was winning the championship. But once players have that championship, it’s no longer enough. The “more” becomes other things--more money, more TV commercials, more endorsements and accolades, more playing time, more plays called for them, more media attention, etc.

As a result, what was once a cohesive group of hardworking men begins to fray. Egos get involved. Gatorade bottles are thrown. And the mental attitude of the team changes and their perfect chemistry becomes a toxic mess. Players feel entitled to ignore the small, routine tasks that actually win championships, believing that they’ve earned the right to not do it anymore. Then what was the most talented team ends up failing.

What they didn’t realize is what they were trading off. They were no longer able to focus on the nitty-gritty of basketball. And as a team, they suffered. Ultimately they were dethroned, not by other, better teams, but by forces from within themselves.

Every little girl dreams of the day she gets to walk down the aisle in a white dress toward her "Prince Charming." But when a "Prince Charming" didn't come along for Italian fitness trainer Laura Mesi, she decided to forget that piece and move along with her big day anyway. In a ceremony that was not actually legally binding, the woman said "I do" to herself, in front of bridesmaids, 70 guests, and a 3-layer wedding cake. "I firmly believe that each of us must first of all love ourselves," said Mesi. "You can have a fairytale even without the prince." Her near-lavish wedding seemed to prove it. But she went on to admit, "If one day I find a man with whom I can plan a future I'll be happy, but my happiness does not depend on him." Proponents of the growing trend (dubbed "sologamy") say it is not necessarily about feminism, but about celebrating and embracing those who have not found the social affirmation of marriage.

Potential Preaching Angles: While it may be possible to have "a fairytale without a prince," how mistaken we would be to forget that we already have a Prince in our love story. Indeed our happiness cannot depend on other humans, but neither can it depend on ourselves alone. Love for oneself and love for others both come from something much, much greater—God's immeasurable love for us.

In his TED Talk, "The Paradox of Choice," secular psychologist Barry Schwartz claims that many of us live by this unspoken but "official dogma": maximize your happiness by maximizing your individual freedom. And according to Schwartz, "The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice."

Schwartz points to his local supermarket as an example—a place that offers 175 different kinds of salad dressings. Even our personal identity has become a matter of choice. "We don't inherit an identity," he says. "We get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be."

Schwartz ended his talk by pointing to a picture of two fish in a fishbowl as he said:

The truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction … Everybody needs a fishbowl … The absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster.

Possible Preaching Angles: This would also work well as an object lesson illustration with a real fish in a fishbowl.

Few Americans today say they know their neighbors' names, and far fewer report interacting with them on a daily basis. Pulling data from the General Social Survey, a recent report found that a third said they've never interacted with their neighbors. And only about 20 percent of Americans spent time regularly with the people living next to them. That's a big drop from four decades ago, when a third of Americans hung out with their neighbors at least twice a week, and only a quarter reported no interaction at all.

Public Policy expert Marc Dunkelman noted, "There used to be this necessity to reach out and build bonds with people who lived nearby." Dunkelman added, "[From the 1920s to the 1960s] there was this sort of cohort effect, in which people … were more inclined in many cases to find security that existed in neighborhoods. They depended on one another much more." Little wonder that his book on this subject is titled The Vanishing Neighbor.

The New York Times featured an article exploring our current confusion about friendship. "Ask people to define friendship—even [experts who research friendship]—and you'll get an uncomfortable silence followed by "er" or "um."

"Friendship is difficult to describe," said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, who in his book, "On Friendship," spends almost 300 pages trying to do just that. "It's easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental." It is not a means to obtain higher status, wrangle an invitation to someone's vacation home, or simply escape your own boredom. Rather, Mr. Nehamas said, friendship is more like beauty or art, which … is "appreciated for its own sake."

Ronald Sharp, a professor who teaches a course on the literature of friendship added, "It's not about what someone can do for you, it's who and what the two of you become in each other's presence … The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other's company has, in a way, become a lost art. People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend."

In 1957 a graduate student at Columbia University named Gordon Gould had been working with "pumping" atoms to higher energy states so they would emit light. As Gould elaborated his ideas and speculated about all the things that could be done with a concentrated beam of light, he realized he was onto something. In his notebook he confidently named the yet-to-be-invented device a LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

Nearly seventy years later, we are still seeing the impact of this remarkable tool. Very recently, Lockheed Martin boasted about their new laser, a ground-based prototype system that burned through an entire car engine in seconds. From a mile away. The company called this laser system the most "efficient and lethal" version on the planet.

From a spiritual perspective the laser represents the ultimate expression of the impact we can have in a world in need of light. If we are able to understand the stunning power of unity expressed in a laser beam and translate it into our own lives, we might have a greater impact on those around us than ever before.

The newest addition to the grand list of Coolest Things Ever was first unveiled in New York City in 2013: the Lego X-Wing, the largest Lego model ever built. The model of the classic Star Wars fighter has a wingspan of 44 feet and comes complete with R2-D2 and a full range of sound effects. It's a super-duper-sized version of Star Wars Lego starfighter set #9493 and was made with 5,335,200 Lego bricks. That, according to Lego, makes it the largest model ever built, eclipsing the Lego robot at the Mall of America by some 2 million bricks.

The X-Wing was built at the Lego Model Shop at the company's facility in Kladno, Czech Republic. It took 32 "master builders" and 17,336 man-hours to construct the X-Wing. Plans for the model were created using Lego's proprietary 3-D design software, and the construction team had to work with a team of structural engineers to ensure that the model was safe, master builder Erik Varszegi told Wired magazine. Once completed, the model—which weighs 45,980 pounds—was eventually shipped to Legoland California.

Editor’s Note: This Lego model still holds the record in 2024

Possible Preaching Angles: True leadership and community requires lots of vision (the design stage) and then teamwork and unity (the construction stage).

A few years ago, a researcher asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, they wrote down the decisions in life they would like to make for themselves. On the other, they wrote the decisions they would like to pass on to others. The Americans filled up the side for decisions they want to decide for themselves. Where to live. What job to take. The other side was almost blank. The only "decision" they commonly wanted to hand off to others was, "When I die."

The Japanese filled up the back side of the sheet with things they wanted others to decide: what they wore; what time they woke up; what they did at their job. The Americans desired choice in four times more domains than the Japanese.

Based on this experiment, New York Times columnist David Brooks claims America is experiencing "a choice explosion." Brooks writes, "Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history. We can choose between a broader array of foods, media sources, lifestyles, and identities." In some ways this is a positive trend, but Brooks also cautions that it is "becoming incredibly important to learn to decide well."

MIT used to have a famous office building simply called Building 20. This structure, located at the intersection of Main and Vassar Streets in East Cambridge, and eventually demolished in 1998, was thrown together as a temporary shelter during World War II, meant to house the overflow from the school's bustling Radiation Laboratory. As noted by a 2012 New Yorker article, the building was initially seen as a failure: "Ventilation was poor and hallways were dim. The walls were thin, the roof leaked, and the building was broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter."

When the war ended, however, the influx of scientists to Cambridge continued. MIT needed space, so instead of immediately demolishing Building 20, they continued using it as overflow space. The result was that a mismatch of different departments—from nuclear science to linguistics to electronics—shared the low-slung building alongside more ordinary tenants such as a machine shop and a piano repair facility. Because the building was cheaply constructed, these groups felt free to rearrange space as needed. Walls and floors could be shifted and equipment bolted to the beams. For instance, a scientist working on the first atomic clock removed two floors from his Building 20 lab so he could install the three-story cylinder needed for his experiments. In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace. When the building was finally demolished to make way for a new $300 million office space many at MIT mourned the loss of Building 20. As a matter of fact, the new building includes boards of unfinished plywood and exposed concrete with construction markings left intact.

Possible Preaching Angles: Body of Christ; Church; Community; Fellowship—In some ways the church is like Building 20—people from different backgrounds and walks of life are thrown together in the "household of God," an imperfect place where we can all grow, serve, and create for the glory of God.

In an article having to do with the socializing of Supreme Court justices Justice Scalia shared some of his wisdom: Ruth Bader Ginsburg fondly recalled her closest friend on the court, who always gave her roses on her birthday and shared her reverence for the law. Scalia was once asked, she told the audience, how they could be such dear friends with such different views. Justice Scalia answered, "I attack ideas. I don't attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. If you can't separate the two, you'd better get another job."

After analyzing a new Pew survey, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat claims that we're in a new and deeper "age of individualism." In a riff off 1 Corinthians 13, here's how Douthat described our tendency to disconnect from each other:

In the future, it seems, there will be only one "ism"—Individualism—and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide—and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook.

Consider a tuning fork. It delivers a true pitch by two tines vibrating together. Muffle either side, even a little, and the note disappears. Neither tine individually produces the sweet, pure note. Only when both tines vibrate is the correct pitch heard.

The more seriously one takes religion, the more one should recognize that its claims are directly on the individual conscience, and only indirectly on collective behavior of any sort, including politics.

It is the continual assertion of individuality that hinders our spiritual development more than anything else; individuality must go in order that personality may emerge and be brought into fellowship with God.