In my review of Kingdom of Survival the day before yesterday, I made mention that I found Sasha Lilly's arguments against individualism less than compelling. And a commenter on the post asked this great question:

I'm curious about Sasha Lilly's anti-individualism perspective you find so uncompelling. I often find that in conversations about living life outside of the mainstream, it is women who come back to our communal needs. Perhaps this is because women are oft saddled with the obligation of caring for offspring which is perilously difficult to do alone? I wonder to myself at times if the impulse to limit individualism comes from people whose individualism has been limited due to biological reasons…females, the disabled, etc.?

So I've been thinking about that, and I thought I'd try to type something coherent about it. But first I thought it best to bang out a short transcript of what Lilly actually said so's I couldn't misrepresent it entirely. So here goes. It's rough, but hopefully not too inaccurate.

I'm skeptical of individual solutions, situated as I am in the United States. Where there's a very deep strain of individualism historically. Often times when society feels oppressive to people they withdraw and take individual action. The joke is that in the United States you can find fifty people doing anything you can think of.  Y'know, whatever it is, fifty people somewhere in the US are doing it.  And I think actually, although this tendency runs very strongly throughout US history, I think its become particularly pronounced over the last quarter century, a bit longer too. Because in the last period of real collective social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s there was a sense that you could change society together.  And yet at the same time there was a very strong ethos of the importance of individual freedom, of self expression, and so on.

But I think the way that kind of unfolded – I mean, it's no surprise that social movements ebb and flow, that there are moments of upheaval and then moments of entrenchment – but unfortunately what we've seen in the last quarter century in this country is a quarter century of entrenchment.  And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that although there was this collectivist spirit in the 60s in the new left, there was also this very strong individualistic strain that I will define freedom myself, I'll find my own personal freedom, I'll go off and do my own thing.  And unfortunately I think that ended up giving heft and momentum to the new way that capitalism reorganized itself starting in the 1970s, which, y'know, often times gets turned to neoliberalism.  Very much based on the free marked, on individuals maximizing their self interest leading to the greatest satisfaction for everyone.

What someone should do now when they feel the oppressive boot of society upon them is to resist that impulse to pull into one's self.  To go off and join that fifty other doing their one esoteric thing, and think about social change in collective action.

What I rankled at there is, well, I'm a writer. And I don't believe in collective actions when it comes to writing. I once heard one of my favorite writers, Jeffrey DeShell, comment that a community of writers is impossible, and that really struck me.  I'm thankful for all the folks I've met recently through writing, but the fact remains it's only a community in that we'd all like each other to do well at what we're individually doing.

Nick Mamatas, another writer who I have a world of respect for, wrote a great piece recently arguing against craft that includes a line I've had on my mind a lot lately: "Writing . . . is a matter of deploying a relatively small number of tools from a toolkit of infinite size in order to solve problems that don't exist until they are solved through the use of the tool."

I think that's as good a definition of the process of fiction writing, at least how I do it, that I've ever heard. And it follows that the problem at stake is solely one writer's problem. As are the tools to be used or ignored. If there's any kind of real community it comes only from other books. As Cormac McCarthy once said, "The ugly fact is books are made out of books." But that doesn't make that community of other books anything like a collectivity. In fact, if you're anything like me, other books do nothing but help construct the problems you end up with.

Now maybe Lilly and I are talking about two entirely different things. Writing novels ain't necessarily about creating social change — though they can do so, and I often use Melville's books, particularly White Jacket, as an example — but even then, the writer has to withdraw into individual action to write the book. Because that's what writing is.

When it comes down to it, I have to be one of those fifty people Lilly talks about, else I can't do what I do. Maybe other people can do it differently, and God bless them for it, but there are no other options for me. That may be entirely my problem. And it may make me a selfish prick. (In fact, I'm pretty sure of it.) But I spend almost all my free time alone in a small space, either writing, staring at walls, or reading. And I can't do it any other way.

That's why I buck at arguments against individualism. And why I have no interest in any kind of collective action that precludes individual action. Because pretty much everything I do is contingent on individual action.

I hope that makes sense. And I hope it doesn't sound like I'm taking much exception with Lilly at all. Hell, I think she's probably right in everything she says. But because of who I am and what I do, I find her argument against individualism uncompelling. Not wrong, not even unconvincing. But something I absolutely can't live with.