Individualism: good or bad?

On the Colbert Report tonight, Stephen Colbert's guest was Dick Meyer, who has written the book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium.

Colbert's interviews are always funny, but sometimes it is hard to tell exactly what the interviewee is trying to get across because of Colbert's mock attack dog approach. But at one point, when Dick Meyer was trying to distinguish between good and bad outcomes of the era of the 1960s, he said this:

"There's a big difference between individualism and narcissism and selfishness. Individualism is terrific. I mean ... the idea of the self-made man [and] the self-made woman is the idea of America. But there's a difference between individualism and selfism [sic] and selfishness and narcissism. So if you're just in it for yourself and you're not thinking about the person next door, that's not what morality's about."

I have read a little bit about a relatively new sub-discipline in psychology called "Positive Psychology". It advocates doing good for others because of the positive effects it will have on an individual's personal sense of well-being and self-worth, which is really just a way of co-opting altruism into a supporting pillar of selfish individualism. By advocating the view that the real value in the doing of good deeds lies in the way they ultimately benefit the individual, it relates everything back to self in a kind of enlightened narcissism.

I'm curious if that is what Meyer is espousing without realizing it (or maybe he is realizing it entirely; I haven't read his book). I have no firm answers myself, but my question for us is this:

Is it possible to embrace a robust understanding of individualism without that including narcissism or selfishness as well?

And if not, doesn't that present an enormous problem for the church when it is forced to exist in a consumer culture like the one we've got in America?

The Ministry of Reconciliation

How easy is it for us to feel alienated and out of place in this world? I'd say that many of us carry around such a feeling a lot of the time. The world today only increases the sense of estrangement: Fast-paced, heavy on technology, increasingly individualistic ... is it any wonder that we feel like strangers in a strange land?

The world is a sinful place. There's just no getting around that. Our individual sin drives us away from the healing that relationship with God and neighbor can offer. We willfully seek out our own way, convinced that we know what is best for us (despite the fact that our human will leads us to unhappiness time and time again). In such a situation, Christian people are called to be in the church. We are called away from our isolation and loneliness and into the one covenant community that can truly sustain us.

Emily and I witnessed one such community this past Sunday. I write about it in this week's column in the United Methodist Reporter.

Have you witnessed a community of reconciliation and hope that was particularly powerful? I'd love to hear about it.