Education Frontlines
John Richard Schrock
Individualism versus Community
R.F.K. Jr. again asserted that he would let parents decide for themselves whether to vaccinate their child. This will lead to dramatically more deaths from measles and other childhood diseases as more and more states are now removing the requirements for vaccines for school attendance.
While flu and the coronavirus have low rates of contagion (one person could transmit it to perhaps two or three), measles has a super-high contagion rate of transmitting to 12-18 others. To protect the rare child in a classroom who cannot be vaccinated due to an immune deficiency or having had a transplant, well over 90 percent of the class needs to be vaccinated against measles. And it worked to drive measles from the U.S. ---Until clueless anti-vaxers recently dropped the percent vaccinated. R.F.K. Jr. is clueless too. This basic knowledge is also ignored by the Florida head of health who expanded opt-outs for parents providing no legitimate science reason. Similar science-ignorant actions in other states are expanding “opt-outs.” The increase in diseases preventable by vaccination is already well underway.
A large portion of the world is appalled at the high level of U.S.
“individualism” that demonstrates how Americans have less concern for other people around them. This provides the question of how did the U.S. population come to so greatly value single individuals in history?
The term “individualism” did not really exist in the Middle Ages, a time when a person’s status was based on birth. The vast majority of folks were very poor. In the feudal system, survival depended on belonging to a family or clan. It was difficult to survive alone. But this changed during the Renaissance, the era from the 14th to the 17th century. The rise of a middle class rewarded individual success and ended feudalism.
However, the concept of individualism in crowded Europe did not expand as far as it would in wide-open North America. The huge amount of land and the small number of people changed American society. Many pioneers lived and died as unique individuals and not as members of a group. Individuality, autonomy and independence-from-others became America’s extreme individualism.
While European languages translate “individualism” as limited individual responsibilities, Confucian-heritage Asian cultures lack the word. Confucius stated the golden rule to treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves many centuries before it appeared in Western religious culture. And this duty to care for extended families and others remains central to Asian nations today.
Simply, “individualism” just doesn’t translate. In Chinese, the closest phrase to individualism is gèrén zhǔyì [个人主义] which literally means “single-man-ism” or simply: “selfishness.” Even when a person speaks of themselves with the equivalent of “I” or “me”
[我, “wo” in Chinese], they are often careful to not emphasize they are being selfish or self-centered.
Therefore, in this cold winter season, across Asia you will find that everyone in the city crowds in Shanghai, Tokyo, etc. are wearing face masks, as they have done for decades. It is part of their language and culture to not be selfish, but to work together with others to prevent the spread of seasonal diseases. And for one year in the U.S., face masking did work to substantially reduce the transmission of flu during the first year of COVID-19. But today, flu and other contagious diseases are circulating in even higher numbers. And the vast majority of the American public fails to care for others by masking up.
Therefore the bulk of the U.S. population see their right to live their lives as they see fit, even though it results in the sickness and death of others.
In writing American individualism into our founding documents, both Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall relied heavily on the writings of John Locke who stated: “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”Simply, individualism has limits. And letting mask-less folks spread deadly COVID-19 to others, or letting parents allow their unvaccinated children spread measles to classmates who cannot be vaccinated, takes individualism too far.