Question: Which is worse, collectivism or individualism?

One or Many?

By Joseph Wood 

Question: Which is worse, collectivism or individualism? 

Answer: Yes. 

Collectivism and individualism, while not exclusively modern, have characterized modernity. Both reduce or dismiss God in favor of the supremacy of group or self. Without God, modernity, as fancy as it looks, reverts to paganism.

Consider the news out of Syria: tens of thousands of deaths, cannibalism, and rape used by rebel forces to subdue government supporters. The rebels, at least some of them, thus prove themselves capable of matching the tactics of the Assad regime.

Americans know that we are capable of atrocities ourselves, witness My Lai and Abu Ghraib.

But as a cultural trait, we find atrocities like those in Syria unfathomably horrible. David Goldman explains this revulsion as the result of the Judeo-Christian rejection of paganism:
The Christian West summoned the pagans out of pre-history on the authority of a God whose love extends to every individual, so that as individuals they might abandon the collective identity of tribe and instead embrace an individual identity as Christian converts. The bright line that separates pre-modern collective identity from the covenantal identity of the Western individual is nowhere clearer than in the matter of atrocity. Pagan tribes feel no compunction about torturing and desecrating the cadavers of members of another collectivity; Western societies cannot abide such acts without going mad. We cannot even observe them from afar without feeling a touch of madness.

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