"What is the problem with individualism?" — The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner asks Robin DiAngelo.

From an interview titled "Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward/The author of 'White Fragility' discusses her new book, 'Nice Racism'":

Your book is a critique of individualism, by which you mean, as you put it, "Our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised, and our patterns of cross-racial engagement are not merely a function of our unique personalities." What is the problem with individualism? 

Individualism cuts the person off from the very society that the concept of individualism is valued in. That’s the great irony, right? If we were in a more community-oriented or collective-oriented society, we wouldn’t value being an individual the way that we do. We have been conditioned to see that as the ideal, that every one of us is unique and special and different, and if you don’t know somebody specifically you can’t know anything about them. 

She's saying that individualism is not individualistic at all, but something we absorb as part of a group that deludes us into not seeing ourselves as part of the group.

Andrew Sullivan explains why he's leaving New York Magazine and — sort of — reviving his blog.

From his final NY Magazine column (I've added boldface):

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me.... They seem to believe... that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here....

[I]f the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won’t bend the knee to critical theory’s version of reality, that’s their prerogative...  But this is less of a systemic problem than in the past... I was among the first to recognize this potential for individual freedom of speech, and helped pioneer individual online media, specifically blogging, 20 years ago.

Andrew Sullivan is returning to blogging???? You know, I'm a die-hard, dead-ender blogger, and I'll do this even if it's obsolescent and obscure, but I've been half predicting a big blogging revival. So I'm excited to see Sullivan write "And this is where I’m now headed." But wait, he's got a problem with blogging:

"Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?"

Jonathan Chait is asking what I think is the right question. Let's see if he answers "yes." I'm afraid the "just" provides weasel room, but I have been asking the same question and my answer is yes.

So let's read Chait:

[T]he anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether. Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity....

The ideology of the racism-training industry... collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes DiAngelo, whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy.

I want to make clear that when I compare the industry’s conscious racialism to the far right, I am not accusing it of “reverse racism” or bias against white people. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism....

Chait is talking about the way "the industry" characterizes written communication, rationality, science, hard work, and planning as white. Here's his last sentence:

[O]ne day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.

Is that a "yes" to the question in the post title? It's pretty close.

"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress..."

The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more. (via @RpwWilliams)https://t.co/k9X3u4Suas pic.twitter.com/gWYOeEh4vu

— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 15, 2020

ADDED: Titania McGrath comments:

According to the @NMAAHC, white culture is defined by independence, rational thought, hard work, respect for authority and politeness.

To emulate black culture we therefore need to be more subservient, irrational, lazy, disrespectful and rude.

THAT’S how you defeat racism. 👏

AND: There's also this:

I see a lot of people sharing that "White Culture" slide. Well, here's what New York City is teaching schoolteachers about how to spot "White Supremacy Culture." pic.twitter.com/Dpy4idF6s2

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) July 15, 2020

"It’s no disrespect to the list that was handed out to all the players. I commend anyone that decides to put something on the back of their jersey. It’s just something that didn’t really seriously resonate with my mission, with my goal."

Said LeBron James, quoted in "LeBron James explains why he won’t wear social justice message on jersey when NBA restarts" (WaPo).

The NBA is set to have “Black Lives Matter” painted on the sidelines of its courts at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex outside Orlando, and it will reportedly give players the option to add one of 29 social justice messages to replace their surname on the back of their jerseys.

Here's the list:

Black Lives Matter; Say Their Names; Vote; I Can't Breathe; Justice; Peace; Equality; Freedom; Enough; Power to the People; Justice Now; Say Her Name; Sí Se Puede (Yes We Can); Liberation; See Us; Hear Us; Respect Us; Love Us; Listen; Listen to Us; Stand Up; Ally; Anti-Racist; I Am A Man; Speak Up; How Many More; Group Economics; Education Reform; and Mentor.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said: "The league and the players are uniquely positioned to have a direct impact on combating systemic racism in our country, and we are committed to collective action to build a more equal and just society."

So it's a collectivity, and LeBron James is in it, but it didn't resonate with his mission.

The idea is to replace your name with a group slogan.

Speaking of collective action, what is "Group Economics"?

ADDED: I presume Silver is focused on the success of the basketball business, and that this slogans-replacing-names tactic is a defensive move, managing various demands. But he must know a great deal about the psychological rewards the audience wants from spectator sports. People have gone without watching sports for months now, and maybe they're so hungry for something in this category that they'll accept whatever is presented, but maybe they long to return to what they used to have, something that's more of an escape from politics and problems. I would think watching sports is about getting excited and mesmerized by the excellence of human individuals, grouped by teams, and representing particular cities. But I'm no expert on the psychology of spectator sports. I do think that watching sports is a completely unnecessary human activity. It would be much better to participate in sports — interact with people in real life and stay in shape. I know there's some benefit in sitting around relaxing and watching TV, but why choose sports?

In the news — the attack on individualism.

Having created a tag "the attack on individualism" — for reasons stated in the previous post — and gone back to find that subject in my archive, I wanted to look at the present and see how much of this topic was in the current news.

Here are a few things I found:

1. "Big Data Analytics Shows How America's Individualism Complicates Coronavirus Response" (UVa Today):

Painstakingly, and with tremendous amounts of data processed by 97 advanced computers, Jingjing Li, Ting Xu, Natasha Zhang Foutz and Bo Bian went county-by-county to track levels of individualism – measured by the amount of time each locality spent on the American frontier from 1790 to 1890 – and correlate individualism to social distancing compliance and COVID-19-related crowdfunding.... “We were astounded by the large magnitude of those numbers, because they suggest that variations in individualism could account for almost half of a policy’s effectiveness,” said Li, an assistant professor of information technology in the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce.

2. "Andrew McCutchen criticizes Yankees' hair policy: 'It takes away from our individualism'" (CBS Sports):

The Yankees' "appearance policy" has been in force since not long after George Steinbrenner purchased the team in the early 1970s. As the story goes, Steinbrenner didn't care for Thurman Munson's appearance during one singing of the national anthem, and he put in place the following mandates: "All players, coaches and male executives are forbidden to display any facial hair other than mustaches (except for religious reasons), and scalp hair may not be grown below the collar. Long sideburns and 'mutton chops' are not specifically banned."

3. "How Individualism Spreads Racism" by Jackson Wu (Patheos):

That last post finally pushed me over the line to create a tag I've been thinking about for a while...

... "the attack on individualism."

The pressure was building after yesterday's post about Seattle's effort to teach its employees about their own "Internalized Racial Superiority," which is "defined by" — among other things — "individualism."

What pushed me over the line into new tag creation this morning was a criticism of women who fall into the "trap" of talking about their individual struggle with motherhood.

I went back into the archive and added the tag to a few old things:

June 19, 2020 — This is a quote from a review of the book "White Fragility": "'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'"

November 29, 2015 — I quoted the Tom Wolfe essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening":

I'm trying to read "Urban Baby fell into a trap all too common of our time"...

... by Helaine Olen (at WaPo). I'd never heard of Urban Baby, but it was "the seminal mothering forum of the aughts" owned by CBS Interactive, which just shut it down and isn't preserving the archive. You get to a dead end if you go to UrbanBaby.com (but there's always the Wayback Machine). I had to look up exactly when it started — "the aughts" being an annoyingly vague factoid. It was 1999. And why did CBS close it? Because it "fell into a trap all too common of our time" — whatever that is? Or was it for some other reason, and Olen just wants to accuse it of falling into some trap she's going to tell us is too common?

Urban Baby, born shortly before the millennium...

Oh, okay, she did more nearly approximate the date. My annoyance was getting out ahead of itself.

... was, in the words of New York magazine, “the collective id” of upper-middle-class professional urban mothers. It was wild, it was raunchy, it was no-holds-barred. People — all anonymous — talked about breastfeeding and strollers, sex and infidelity, money and schools, and crazy encounters with other moms, family members or even strangers.... Urban Baby was part of the first wave of confessional Internet women’s writing about parenting... and the simultaneous ratcheting up of expectations of what makes for good mothering.... This new world of parenting was challenging and liberating, but, most importantly, optimistic. There was the almost-always unspoken assumption that the Internet was going to change the world of mothering for the better.

But that did not happen. For all the delights of the mom blogosphere, its members fell into a trap all too common to our time: We might kvetch about our problems jointly, but we struggle, for the most part, alone.

All right. There's the "trap all too common to our time." Individualism. Failure to do collective action:

[V]ery few connected their struggles to the greater society and economy causing their woes....  [T]he mothering blogosphere and forums lost ground to social media, to Instagram posts by neighbors and celebrity influencers alike about the wonderfulness of their parenting lives....

The "wonderfulness" Instagrammers were not uncovering the woes of motherhood, so they were even worse individualists. They propagandized for their individualized selves and gloried in their superior prestige.

[T]he little organizing done by moms connected via online communities often revolved around such things as convincing stores that banned strollers to change their policies.... [F]or all their complaints, all too many of the people doing the talking on sites like Urban Baby still believe that they can individually surmount the ever-increasing challenges of American life rather than changing the system that underlies them. 

They didn't go big and demand more and take to the streets. Okay, I get that Olen thinks complaining and working through personal problems by writing on line isn't showy and disruptive enough and that what "our time" needs is big collective action. But that doesn't mean that the mothers in these forums were in a trap. That just means they didn't process their problems into the kind of politics that a lot of us think is — to use Olen's awkward phrase — "all too common of our time."

And I still don't know why CBS ended the forum! I don't think it was because the participants fell into the "trap" of talking about life as they experienced it as individuals.

"The City of Seattle held a racially segregated employee training session aimed at White staffers and instructing them on 'undoing your own whiteness'..."

"... in order to be held accountable by people of color, according to documents obtained by a public records request... According to the documents, the Office of Civil Rights hosted a two-and-a-half-hour 'Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.' In the email invitation to the event, the office asked 'city employees who identify as white to join this training to learn, reflect, challenge ourselves, and build skills and relationships that help us show up more fully as allies and accomplices for racial justice.'... Diversity trainers instructed White employees in 'practicing self-talk that affirms our complicity in racism.'... In order to be considered 'accomplices,' White employees must give up 'comfort,' 'guaranteed physical safety,' 'expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,' 'control over other people and over the land,' and 'relationships with some other white people.' White employees were also urged to give up 'niceties from neighbors and colleagues,' 'the certainty of your job,' and 'accepting jobs and promotions when we are not qualified, including racial equity jobs.'... Employees were taught how to 'interrupt' their whiteness by being 'honest and implicate yourself either in the moment or in past experiences in which you acted or thought similarly.' 'Don’t blame others. Don’t distance. Don’t make yourself seem "better." None of us is,' a handout said. 'You are also white and what someone else did today you may do tomorrow.'... 'Internalized Racial Superiority,' was defined by perfectionism, individualism, imposition, arrogance, paternalism, silence, intellectualization, control, violence, comfort, appropriation, cognitive dissonance, objectivity and 'anti-blackness.'"

Fox News reports. It's not clear from the article, but I think these sessions were voluntary. If they were required, it looks as though they were only for people who "identify as white." A possible loophole. Is it like gender, where you can apply your own standards and go by how you feel and not be stamped permanently by what you were assigned at birth? Probably not! I'm just guessing I could be cancelled just for asking that question.

Anyway, isn't it awful to think that you could be accused of white supremacy if you're into individualism and objectivity?! You're going to get leaned on now for silence and for wanting comfort. And God forbid you should buy into "intellectualization," but hey, wait a minute, isn't this whole presentation of "whiteness" and "internalized superiority" an intellectualization? I know, just asking the question, has me putting myself above that which I'm calling intellectualization — that is, I'm intellectualizing on the intellectualizers. And I'm being arrogant — and arrogance is on the list of attributes of "Internalized Racial Superiority." I'm in big trouble!

"White fragility is the sort of powerful notion that, once articulated, becomes easily recognizable and widely applicable.... But stare at it a little longer..."

"... and one realizes how slippery it is, too. As defined by [author of 'White Fragility' Robin] DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable; any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point. Any dissent from 'White Fragility' is itself white fragility. From such circular logic do thought leaders and bestsellers arise. This book exists for white readers. 'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'... Progressive whites, those who consider themselves attuned to racial justice, are not exempt from DiAngelo’s analysis. If anything, they are more susceptible to it. 'I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color,' she writes. '[T]o the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived...'... It is a bleak view, one in which all political and moral beliefs are reduced to posturing and hypocrisy...."

Writes Carlos Lozada in "White fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed," reviewing the book "WHITE FRAGILITY: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism" in The Washington Post.

"Jon Dovey writes about how reality-TV programming affects the way we understand the very concepts of truth and authenticity."

"With the rise and dominance of reality television over the last twenty-five years comes the concomitant belief that humanity is knowable via the investigative camera, the first-person essay, and the webcam confessional. Dovey writes, 'Statements about the world no longer have any purchase unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalizing, general and unified.' Indeed, MTV traffics in the self—it rolls out a seemingly endless list of personal stories, unique identities, which are, nonetheless, ultimately generic and universalized."

From Amanda Ann Klein's "Thirty Seasons of 'The Real World'" in The New Yorker, which doesn't identify Dovey or link to his writing. I'll guess that he's this professor of screen media. I couldn't Google to more context for that quote.

I was interested in those ideas because they meshed with something I just read, the old Tom Wolfe essay,  "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" (linked yesterday in this post). That was written in 1976, which was 16 years before "The Real World" even got started (in 1992, the year of the first Clinton presidential campaign). That Wolfe essay is about the vitality of American individualism and ends quite profoundly:

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!

Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes... Me... Me... Me... Me....

ADDED: Isn't it funny for The New Yorker to be brooding about the effects of reality TV on the American mind and not to mention the most dominant reality TV character of our time: Donald Trump?

"Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism."

"It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that."

So writes Firmin DeBrabander, who is a philosophy prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the corner of the NYT called "The Stone," which calls itself "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."

I'm not familiar with Firmin DeBrabander but I would like to know if he extends his principle generally to all of the individual rights currently protected in the various interpretations that have emanated from the Supreme Court.

Does our abortion culture/free speech culture promote a fatal slide into extreme individualism? Do abortion rights/free speech rights foster a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another. Would Professor DeBrabander say that abortion rights and free speech rights are not freedom but the opposite?

Let me offer a bonus literary reading to sharpen the question. It's from a famous book. I've added some boldface to stress things relevant to DeBrabander's philosophy:

"You are thinking... that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?...

"We are the priests of power.... God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone— free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body— but, above all, over the mind....

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation— anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to...."

Clarence Thomas on Ayn Rand.

From page 62 of "My Grandfather's Son," in the chapter about law school and his ideological shift from left-wing radicalism to conservatism:

It was around this time that I read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Rand preached a philosophy of radical individualism that she called Objectivism. While I didn't fully accept its tenets, her vision of the world made more sense to me that that of my left-wing friends. "Do your own thing" was their motto, but now I saw that the individualism implicit in that phrase was superficial and strictly limited. They thought, for instance, that it was going too far for a black man to do his thing by breaking with radical politics, which was what I now longed to do. I never went along with the militant separatism of the Black Muslims, but I admired their determination to "do for self, brother," as well as their discipline and dignity. That was Daddy's way. He knew that to be truly free and participate fully in American life, poor blacks had to have the tools to do for themselves. This was the direction in which my political thinking was moving as my time at Holy Cross drew to an end. The question was how much courage I could muster up to express my individuality. What I wanted was for everyone -- the government, the racists, the activists, the students, even Daddy -- to leave me alone so that I could finally start thinking for myself.

"Democrats claim to be more community-minded but act like radical individualists..."

E.J. Dionne diagnoses Democrats. They can't get organized, unlike "Republicans, who defend individualism in theory, [but] act like communitarians where their party is concerned." He calls this "odd" but does he even attempt to explain why this should be? He calls it a "self-image problem," without saying what the wrong image is, and he blames them for only caring about isolated issues and not the party itself, which to me just suggests that people who vote Democratic aren't really Democrats at all but just people who get the feeling they're voting in a referendum on some highlighted issue. He cites the Democrats' dependence on "a handful of wealthy donors," which keeps them from needing to develop the support of a broad group of party loyalists. Really, talk about organization! Is this column organized at all? He even drags in Karl Rove and says he's "spooked Democrats about themselves."

And let me just mock the title of the column: "A Gap In Their Armor." First, if an old cliché contains a word that you think you can't use anymore, why not just retire the cliché? It is a cliché anyway! Why are you bending over backwards to preserve a cliché? And why wave it in our faces that you think we're too dumb to understand language? Second, the Democrats have armor?

One more thing, do Democrats really want to disown individualism? Openly?

A profound encounter with individualism.

Kim Young Ok was trained to be a singer in North Korea. The NYT reports:

She and the other student singers spent years perfecting the same movements and voice, so that the group would perform as "one mind, one body."

"The ideal," she said, "was to see one million people in a chorus singing the same song without a mistake.

"I think it's possible only in North Korea because we were trained since such a young age. It takes years to learn to smile the same way, to tilt the head the same way."

She escaped to South Korea, where she found a small ensemble to perform with ( "It's impossible for any North Korean artist to perform alone"):

In the North, her audiences were captive and she performed, she said, for honor. In the South, a foreign element - money - came into the equation.

"If our group is to survive here, we can't do anything without money, though, of course, money can't be our objective," she said before the concert here. "It became a crisis for me. I thought that only when our group is good enough will audiences pay to see us. So I felt I have to make extra efforts to survive." ...

"In South Korea, the audiences are spontaneous," she said. "If they don't like it, they'll just walk out. It they like it, they'll show their emotions. In North Korea, the audiences are mobilized, so they will clap systematically. They won't show their individual feelings, since to do that in the North is considered chaotic. In the South, the audiences show exactly what they are feeling at the moment. So I prefer performing here."

This is a very profound encounter with individualism. According to the article, though, the performing North Koreans, singing their traditional songs, seem quite strange to young South Koreans. A teenager--sounding like a character in Ghost World--comments: "It's funny ... This is hilarious."