I was once at a party with some drunken philosophers. Two of them, a conservative and a liberal, were engaged in a heated argument. “Do you really think it individual should be central?” the conservative bellowed. “Yes, because who else should take center stage?” said the liberal, waving his wine glass in the air. “The community?!” They didn’t get any more concrete, and yet they both seemed to experience the exchange as stimulating.
Since the launch of Pieter Omtzigt’s party I regularly have flashbacks to this party. Omtzigt does not focus on the individual, but on the community!, you read everywhere. Indeed, the ‘foundation document’ of the New Social Contract states: ‘We do not put an autonomous individual first’, and also: ‘The human community’, consisting of ‘relationships, families, family, streets, neighborhoods and associational life’, forms ‘the basis of living together”.
This contrast works, because we are used to thinking in binary terms: city versus countryside, woke versus wappie, cargo bike versus barbecue. This way of thinking is especially popular in the self-help corner, where people are either introverted or extroverted, optimist or pessimist.
The American journalist Sophie Haigney recently subscribed The Paris Review about the self-invented game Dichotomies. Haigney and her friends invented all kinds of dichotomies to classify themselves and others: thunder or lightning, France or Italy, glamor or charisma, sexy or funny. “I am fed up with ambivalence and ambiguity, even though I tend to be,” writes Haigney. “The magical thing about Dichotomies is that you have to draw a line in the sand.”
The nice thing is that the categories are often not really opposite and are not mutually exclusive. This applies to many so-called contradictions, including Omtzigt’s individual and community. After all, it is not as if he wants to erase the autonomous individual. Personalism, the 1930s movement to which he refers, wanted to save the individual from collectivist ideologies. In personalist thinking, communities such as the church and associations were “in the service of human welfare so that the individual could thrive,” noted historian James Kennedy last week in Fidelity.
I don’t want to mansplain Omtzigt’s own ideas, but I think he wants to empower the individual, to put it in a contemporary way. The individual must be seen as a human being again, for example in healthcare and education. It must be given more say in the workplace and in politics, because it is now “effectively sidelined” there. It must again be able to take responsibility for and ‘make a meaningful contribution’ to the immediate environment. In short, it should be taken for granted again.
Precisely in neoliberalism, the movement that Omtzigt opposes, the autonomous individual disappears. It has no real autonomy, because it has no say in many aspects of its life. Nor is it a real individual: it is a bundle of data points in the systems of government and industry. If his individual story does not fit within the logic of the system, then the individual must bend. Precisely Omtzigt has stood up for these individuals in recent years.
If you still want to think in terms of opposites, the better one seems to me to be between the data person and the embodied person, or between the patron and the person. But I wouldn’t dwell too long on these kinds of abstractions. They are nice as a starting point: of a game, a theory, a thought exercise. But if you want to come to a real understanding, you will have to think beyond the dichotomy. As Sophie Haigney writes of the Vermont–New Hampshire dichotomy: “Most of us have a bit of both, and even Vermont and New Hampshire itself have a lot of both.”
If a dichotomy is to be more than a point of discussion at parties, it will also have to be made concrete. After all, what new choices does a party make that does not prioritize the autonomous individual? Do people no longer receive home care because they have to scrape together the care in their own community? How do citizens feel when ‘every person counts’? And does that also apply to the more than three million single people in the Netherlands, or do people without a ‘relationship, family, family’ count less?
That leaves the question of how Omtzigt actually sees himself. Is he part of a political community? Or is he more of an egomaniac, or in other words, an autonomous individual?
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on September 2, 2023.