By: Greyson Clark
Question: Contemporary culture in America emphasizes being an individual as more important than being a citizen. Do you agree or disagree?
I have been explicitly exposed to the concept of self-interested rational choice dozens of times, from high school economics to nearly every social science course at this university. The concept permeates personal and political rhetoric, underpinning a one-dimensional conception of human nature. Yet my personal experiences and my understanding of the motivations of others strongly dissent from this reductionist description of human nature. From my vantage, it is easy to understand human nature as purely self-interested and rational only when the individual remains anonymous, an undefined entity. Aside from a sense of reservation and occasional contact with religious discourse on subordinating myself to the greater good, only once have I been exposed to an explicit academic theory challenging self-interested rational choice: Putnam’s description of social capital. My personal misgivings on completely accepting self-interest are directly paralleled in American society’s struggle with reconciling individualism and citizenship. Among other qualities, citizenship encompasses group identity and belonging, whereas individualism requires adherence to personal beliefs and standards. This tension is partially due to the conflict between self-interested rational choice and social capital. Although the tensions between citizenship and individualism are more complex than the conflict between rational choice and social capital, they share a core feature: individualism maximizes choice while citizenship requires accepting external ideals.
In American discourse, rational choice is clearly dominant, which explains the emphasis of individualism over citizenship. Rational choice portrays individuals as making decisions according to cost-benefit analyses, leading their daily lives much as an economist or businessman would run models. As challenges rose to this interpretation of motivation and experiments repeatedly failed to uphold strict rationality, a revised, bounded rationality was espoused. Bounded rationality maintains the cost-benefit style of human behavior, upholding the self-interest axiom, while modifying how effectively humans can be expected to actually compute complex scenarios. While rational choice has many important applications, it does not provide a complete description of human nature.
Standing in opposition to self-interest and individualism is social capital. Fundamental to social capital are qualities widely regarded as core democratic principles: citizenship, involvement, social trust, trust in government, cooperation, personal sacrifice, strong communities, collective gain, and self-improvement. Whereas many contemporary observers portray these as idealistic, Leave it to Beaver qualities, it was only after the 1950s that Putnam laments the measurable and swift decline of social capital. The concept of social capital is an underrepresented codification of important human qualities, not integrated into rational choice theories.
To explain why contemporary American culture prioritized individualism over citizenship, it is necessary to examine shifting values, as explicit theories of self-interested rational choice emerged to challenge long-standing traditions of social capital. Despite the importance of both to complete understanding of human behaviors, in their current ideological iterations, the two concepts cannot coexist. The decline of social capital and citizenship from their 1950s levels coincides with rising support and internalization of self-interested, rational individualism. Miller argues that the norm of self-interest reinforces and reproduces itself. As society internalizes self-interest as a norm, all other behaviors become either rationalized or less reasonable, less acceptable. This has benefited contemporary justification of individualistic choices at the expense of citizenship, group identity, and group values. Cost-benefit analyses became the standard operating procedure for all rationally organized entities and individuals. For example, agriculture reflects this rise as it internalized quantitative analysis and reorganized along business-style lines. The use of quantitative testing in academia became much more common, as is reflected in the transformation of social science methodology in the past half century. It should not be surprising that society harbors mistrust of the political system when it is steeped in accusations of self-interested politicians, worried only about reelection and campaign contributions. While these changes are not necessarily negative, they do reflect ideological reorientation. Internalizing rational values by reducing human nature to one-dimensional self-interest subordinates social capital, citizenship, and community values while increasing corruption, individualism, and the rejection of external ideals.
As much as hegemonic individualism may challenge an identity of citizenship, social capital and citizenship are still present in American culture. Individual choices often reflect a deep interest in community. Others maintain profound conviction in support of democracy and patriotism. Others attend church, making sacrifices for a community with no guarantee of a satisfactory marginal return. These types of behaviors spurred the revisionist bounded rationality argument. Scholarship challenging the hegemony of the self-interest axiom retains intellectual currency. Many intuitively revolt at the notion of individualistic self-interest as the most “natural” human behavior. In fact, what many laud as the qualities that truly separate us as humans from what we identify as animals are the underpinnings of citizenship and social capital.
While American society may currently accept individualism at the expense of citizenship, these two concepts need not be eternally antagonistic. Both cooperation and self-interest exist within the individual and within society. Society supports a business when it makes profit, but also when it invests in its employees and community. To understand ourselves and to understand society, we must examine them holistically. In scholarship, in public discourse, and in the personal quest for identity, rational choice and social capital, considered together, deserve treatment. Hegemony of one concept at the exclusion of the other will forever produce disheartening and incomplete results. It is not possible to understand the whole identity of a society and of the self without addressing its constituent parts, including internal contradictions. An enlightened understanding of society and self, of individualism and citizenship, stems not from their antagonistic qualities, but from a collaborative synthesis of traits, an understanding that seemingly contradictory processes often exist in balance within systems. Just as better understanding of social capital and rational choice would come from non-exclusionary study, so too can individualism and citizenship come to be recognized as part of a single society and a single individual, not as zero-sum games, but as an understanding between group values and individual liberty.
