George Rupp ’67 B.D. is a leading advocate for refugees, an author, a teacher, a former university president, a wide-ranging humanitarian, and a world citizen. He is also, for the record, an individualist.
Individualism has great advantages, Rupp notes. It protects freedom of expression. It’s the basis for modern civil society.
However, he says, we underestimate its limitations, and our lack of self-criticism about it is hurting us. Our easy assumptions about individualism cause us trouble at home and difficulties abroad. We need to have a serious national conversation about this, he suggests. His new book, Beyond Individualism: The Challenge of Inclusive Communities (Columbia University Press) hopes to give that conversation a push.
“The problem we have is we assume everyone else in the world agrees with our idea of individualism,” Rupp said in a recent interview.
“Our assumptions are unconscious. But I think we could strive to be more self-critical, less arrogant. Individualism has great strengths. But we need to see its limitations too. Let’s be aware of how unusual it is in human history—and how much it is resisted in other parts of the world. For some cultures, the idea that the individual has priority over the community is diabolical.”
In October at the annual YDS Alumni Awards Dinner, Rupp’s humanitarian, academic, and religious work was honored with the Lux et Veritas award for applying the compassion of Christ to the diverse needs of the human condition.
“Yale Divinity School understands the power of community and the public good,” he said. “But in the present climate, the arguments for those values have to be made again and again.”
Self-criticism about individualism is no easy thing in America, he acknowledges. To raise questions about individualism is to risk sounding unpatriotic. After all, individualism is foundational to the nation’s dynamism and inventiveness. It infuses entrepreneurialism, the market place, and representative government.
But, by giving priority to the self over against the community, the nation is underinvesting in public goods, Rupp says. Infrastructure is in decline; the U.S. spends about half the European level. The percentage of science research funding is falling; the U.S. no longer leads the world in that category. Income inequality is intensifying, in part because of regressive tax policies, hurting trust in democracy and each other.
In U.S. foreign policy, he says, a presumption that American-style individualism and consumer values would be embraced unreservedly in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East has contributed to a protracted war and damaged American prestige.
Rupp calls for a pragmatic new communitarianism in a crowded 21st-century world. Individualism and community must learn from each other. The challenge to individualism is to recognize the human need for community traditions and the necessity of the public interest. The challenge to communities is to become more inclusive, more open to change and self-criticism.
“It’s not a matter of one or the other, community or individualism, where one must be a threat to the other,” Rupp says. “In a pluralistic world, communities must be in partnership with individuals.”
Rupp knows something about the dynamics of other cultures and the power of community life. From 2002 to 2013 he was president of the International Rescue Committee, which works to resettle thousands of refugees who struggle in the wake of war and disaster. With 12,000 on staff, the IRC provide health care, infrastructure, and support to people in the U.S. and 40 other countries.
Over a five-decade career, Rupp’s vocation and activism have focused the work of community life and civic virtue. He received an undergraduate degree from Princeton, a B.D. at YDS, then a Ph.D. at Harvard. He’s an ordained Presbyterian minister who also studied Buddhism in Sri Lanka. In 1979, he was appointed dean of Harvard Divinity School—at age 36 the youngest dean in the school’s history. From 1985 to 1993, he was president of Rice University. He led Columbia University as president from 1993 to 2002.
In Beyond Individualism, Rupp reminds readers in the secular West of the value of communal and religious bonds as humane solutions to income inequality, climate change, and other global threats. The book’s wide-ranging essays include lessons learned from his travels to South Sudan and Liberia and insights culled from his reading of Locke and Kant.
A recurring theme is the problem of American self-centeredness in foreign policy.
“While negative views of the United States no doubt also reflect such less admirable qualities as envy and resentment, the decline in our international standing in the first years of the 21st century is in significant part the consequence of an extended series of bad judgments,” he writes in a chapter called “The Challenges of American Provincialism,” which was originally an address he gave to a gathering of university administrators under the auspices of the Council of Independent Colleges.
“These judgments are more often than not a product of insufficient knowledge, a lack of curiosity, or an incapacity to view issues from more than one perspective; of an unquestioning assumption that everyone the world over admires Americans; or of an uncritical presumption that our position is right and good. I would applaud mightily if our colleges and universities could guarantee that such mistakes would never again be made! But I propose that we focus instead on a more tractable challenge that our colleges and universities have substantial resources to address—namely, the provincialism that too often shapes our public policy deliberations.”