Individuality

By Matt Newcamp
November 10, 2002

Reading #1:
He “said the trouble with me was that I didn’t go to church or anything. He was right about that, in a way. I don’t. In the first place, my parents are different religions, and all the children in our family are atheists. If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk” (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 100).

Reading #2:
“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land. . . . . For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.
. . .
“There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white. . . .
“You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face the facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experiences and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth” (Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 346-347)

This sermon is dedicated to my mother, Susan Newcamp, and to the professor with whom I most clashed and from whom I learned the most, William Coles.
“Individuality”

Imagine you’re a teenager.

Now, imagine you’re in a library.

Someone, maybe a friend, maybe a teacher, or something, maybe a book or a magazine article, has planted a title in your mind: The Catcher in the Rye.

As if searching for the Holy Grail of adolescent literature, you move silently through the fiction shelves. As you locate the “S” section, you notice you’re holding your breath. Sabatini, Safire, Sagan, Saki, ah!, Salinger. You’re in luck! The only available copy sits silently on the shelf. (Later, you learn the other copy was stolen long ago, in the ‘60s.)

You spirit the book to a table in the far back corner, where no one ever goes, behind the album collection, and you begin to read, quote:

IF YOU REALLY want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them (endquote). (Salinger 1)

You don’t need to know anything about Charles Dickens’ particular brand of Victorian fiction to get it. You don’t even need to know, more generally, about the confession genre of autobiography to get it. All you need to know, really, is how good it feels to withhold information. It is empowering. It is intriguing. It is annoying. It is the adolescent’s primary pleasure.

Consider the following authority-to-adolescent dialogue:
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
“Who are you going with?”
“No one.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Nothing.”

Holden Caulfield, the fictional narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, epitomizes adolescent antiauthoritarian surliness. If you [red] read this book at the right age, and under the proper circumstances (for example, it was slipped into your hands, cover mysteriously missing, the giver of this gift whispering something like, “The truth will set you free!”), if you read this book at the right age and under the proper circumstances, not only did you marvel at how Salinger, via Holden Caulfield, put his finger on how you thought, you also sighed admiringly at how he expressed what you felt, in your heart, so much more precisely than you could have ever hoped to do yourself. “Yes! Authority figures make my skin crawl,” you realized, but you could never say why. Holden Caulfield gave you the perfect word to describe them: ‘phony.’”

Like some of us, perhaps, Holden spends a great deal of time telling us what he is not. He spends a great deal of time telling us how he is not phony. This is his preferred way of asserting his distinctness, his individuality.

For example:
“Phonies care only about the beautiful people. (I, in contrast, do not.)”
“Phonies have dirty secrets. (I, in contrast, do not.)”
“Phonies speak in an affected way. (I, in contrast, don’t.)”

Phoniness is not limited to those in authority. Holden is also quick to point out and deride its presence in most of his peers’ mannerisms and behaviors. I don’t know about you, but I can relate.

I spent most of my adolescence telling people what and who I was not. I was no posturing poseur. I was a true, guts-and-glory skateboarder. I was no hoity-toity, clean-cut prep. I proudly bought my clothes fifteen sizes too big and second-hand and wore my hair distressingly long. If the alternative musical groups I listened to became too popular, I accused them of being sell-outs and turned to more extreme alternative musical groups. I was no Republican, and no Democrat either. I was not even a Libertarian. I was an Anarchist.

I was distinct, an individual, and I was blind to the fact that I looked like every other supposed individual in my particular peer group. I was just as media-manipulated as my mainstream foils. To be slightly anachronistic, the major difference was that my media was underground, and instead of asserting my individuality via a unique cell-phone ring, I did so with a unique earring. My peers ignored the fact that they all had cell phones, and we ignored the fact that we all had piercings.
Since we always had each other, we also overlooked how distressingly alone Holden Caulfield’s behavior and attitude make him. True, he is a rebel, a loner. True, he is a rugged individualist. He is so self-reliant he has no friends and no role models. He is so cut-off he has no feelings, other than angst. In fact, he is lucky to end up in a mental hospital and not in jail at the end of The Catcher in the Rye because there is a dark side to Holden Caulfield.

In many ways, he is like Robert De Niro’s character in Martin Scorsese’s film, Taxi Driver. He is also like Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon. He is like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. He is like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the two teens who killed thirteen of their classmates and then themselves at Columbine High School in Colorado. He is like John Walker Lindh, the young American who joined the Taliban. He is like all of these people who committed heinous acts in order to stand out or to be distinct, in order to prove their individuality. And you know, any one of these people, including Holden Caulfield, could have been raised in one of our homes, and in this our congregation.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not insinuating that Unitarian Universalists pervert young minds, or that Unitarian Universalists are to blame for America’s problems. However, at the risk of sounding slightly like one of our fundamentalist brothers or sisters, I would like to offer that Unitarian Universalism, like Holden Caulfield, represents modernism par excellence. Modernism, in case you haven’t noticed, is far from perfect. There is a dark side to modernism. True, we have thrown off the shackles of tradition, but only to replace them with the shackles of power and influence. True, we have thrown off the shackles of orthodox religion, but only to replace them with the shackles of shortsighted science. True, we have thrown off the shackles of family and clan, but only to replace them with the shackles of anonymity and self-reliant stress.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being a Unitarian Universalist. And, unlike our fundamentalist brothers and sisters, I don’t want to go back to being pre-modern. That’s as impossible an illusion as Marxist Communism (or the day when we are all equal) and the Anarchist state of nature (or let’s destroy industry and go back to good ol’ hunting and gathering). I don’t even want to go back to this country’s childhood, to try to reclaim Jeffersonian, little “r,” republicanism, or to try to rescue it from its current state of two-party degradation. Holden Caulfield couldn’t let go of his childhood, and he wound up broken-down and disillusioned. An adolescent country can go the same way as an adolescent boy or girl. We want to grow; we are growing; we must continue to grow, but how?

I have already said that Unitarian Universalism represents modernism par excellence. Along with its inevitable flaws, modernism has some valuable advantages over that which has come before it. Chief among these is the ability to self-critique. Every time I am critical of these modern times, I am thankful that I can be so honest. However, as many post-modernists (and, perhaps, a few Unitarian Universalists and even some of us) have yet to learn, constant self-critique is meaningless if it doesn’t lead to something greater, something creative, something transcendent. It is not enough to say, “Since there is no objective truth, since the mapper is always a part of the map, there is no true morality, no right, no wrong. Power is all, and whoever holds power controls language, which in turn determines ethics. It is a vicious, inescapable circle.” As I have noted in the Davies on-line chat room, this was the philosopher Nietzsche’s lament. It led him to quit, to give up. He died paralyzed and insane.

However, to move forward, I must borrow one of Neitzsche’s favorite techniques, philology, or historical linguistics: the study of the ancient meanings of common words.
You don’t have to do too much digging to discover the Latin roots of the word “individual.” In means, “not,” and dividuus means “divided.” Thus an individual is one who is not divided. What, then, if the distinctness implied by individuality is one of authenticity, one of integrity, rather than one of reactivity or one of oppositional defiance? What if Holden Caulfield’s adolescent individuality is the opposite of true individuality? What if Holden Caulfield’s individuality is in actuality the opposite of individuality, a projecting onto others and the world of his own phoniness, rather than true individuality, or a search for the person behind the mask?

Imagine you’re back in the library again. You’re a little older now, a little wiser now. You’ve just watched Spike Lee’s masterpiece, Do The Right Thing. You couldn’t help but notice the full-screen quotation of Malcolm X. You want to know more about this man who inspired such a profound work of art.

You’re excited as you look for X’s autobiography, but you’re not holding your breath. You’ve been disappointed too many times to waste your air. You find the book sitting silently on the shelf, collecting dust.

Your favorite back corner is no longer so isolated. (It seems that, somehow, albums have been rediscovered.) It doesn’t matter to you anymore anyway. You no longer want to hide. You no longer want to keep things to yourself. Now you want to talk, to share. As you settle in to read, you find yourself hoping, wishing, that someone would approach you and start a conversation.

If anyone was divided, you soon learn, it was Malcolm Little. He was born black at a time when this country automatically and unashamedly labeled African Americans “second-class citizens.” He grew up into a fine hustler, or, should we say, an entrepreneur? His actions landed him in jail, where he was introduced to and eventually converted to a specific brand of Islam, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. He entered prison a product of the system. He left it a minister, and eventually a prophet. As is usually the case with prophets, Minister X’s outspokenness soon got him into trouble. After a few misplaced comments about the Kennedy assassination and other assorted personality conflicts with Elijah Muhammad and his sons, X was silenced.

At the urging of his sister and his wife, he took advantage of this forced time off to make the required Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the holy city of Islam. He lacked the proper verification of his Muslim status, which left him stranded in the city of Jedda, alone, for three days. Imagine being stuck, alone, in a strange land, a land where you don’t know the customs or the language. X’s was no self-imposed isolation, no simple choice not to fit in. This was the real thing. Listen again, though, to X’s reflection on his trip:

[Read Reading #2]

I am struck by the last sentence, quote: “I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.” Endquote. Unlike Holden Caulfield, who thought he had everything figured out ahead of time, Malcolm X went to Mecca with few, if any, preconceived notions. X had strong opinions, but he was aware that they were opinions, and he held them in tension with the reality he was able to observe. His identity came from more than his rational mind. His identity was about more than simple belief. It was deeper than that, more complete than that. This, my brothers and sisters, is a post-adolescent identity. It is self-definition by careful inclusion rather than by guarded exclusion. It is a self-definition that owns its illusions and seeks to replace obsolete ones with ever better illusions, ever more resonant ones. This is individuality. This is not-dividedness. This is hard to attain.

Fortunately, we don’t have to go it alone. Unlike Holden Caulfield, who pushed everyone away, Malcolm X accepted help and guidance when it was offered. He may have disappointed many of his teachers and role models, but this was only because he had the vision to take their teachings one step further than they had ever realized possible. While this is a painful thing, it is not a bad thing. It may be dangerous (it got Malcolm X killed), but it is the only way societies change. It is also the only way churches change.

I’m glad we can come together like this, in community, and think and talk and feel about things together. I’m glad we’re not alone. I’m glad we keep a watchful eye on one another. I’m glad we have traditions to learn and then to rewrite. I’m glad we have role models from which to learn and then to let down when we go our own, individual, not-divided ways. I’m glad that adolescence, even cultural adolescence, even spiritual adolescence, is only a phase from which to go forward. I’m glad for the open mind and the open heart. I’m glad that we’re always seeking to grow, in knowledge and in love. This process is painful, even dangerous, but it is also beautiful and revolutionary.

Let it be so.

Works cited, consulted or influential

Carroll, Jackson W. Mainline to the Future: Congregations For the 21st Century. Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2000.
Fowler, James W. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for
Meaning. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1981.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York:
Penguin Books, 1985 (1902).
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.
Whissen, Thomas R. Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature. New
York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala, 1996.
X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley. New York: Ballantine
Books, 1999 (1964).