Thinking as “We”

“Community” is all the rage at Harvard. It's a buzzword. To foster a close-knit residential community is one of the high ideals of this university. It's why we live in the same dorms and eat the same meals. It's the very spirit of collegiality.

Yet, so often Harvard is a lonely place, and talk of “community” seems uncertain and hollow.

Often we use “community” to refer to a group of like-minded people interested in pursuing a common goal. That is the model around which social life is generally structured here. We organize ourselves socially around extracurricular activities—producing  publications or theatrical performances, participating in service projects, hosting speaker events—whose primary aim is to get things done. The fact that there are other people around who are similar to me and want to get the same things done is a happy accident which allows me to get more and better things done than I would have by myself.

But getting things done, while a perfectly respectable and worthwhile goal, is awfully inadequate as the basic structure of community life. Social life begins to look (and feel) rather pitiful if it is just an extension of my resume.

What if people are not merely a more efficient means for me to get things done?

Perhaps community would start happening if I did not think so much of myself. Yes. I should be more selfless. I should invest more in the people around me. That is the basic moral vision necessary to build up a community. We should care about others more than we care about ourselves.

But bugger it all! In talking about “my” selflessness, my personal individual virtue of selflessness (or lack thereof), I'm talking about myself again. While it's not exactly selfish of me to think about my own efforts to be selfless, there remains something uncomfortably oxymoronic about this situation.

This paradox is probably why the “V” word—virtue, that is—is so unfashionable nowadays. Insofar as virtue is a property of individuals, it sounds like obsessive navel-gazing—even though the highest of virtues is selflessness.

Selflessness is a difficult moral vision to achieve. The me me me always creeps right back in.

What's all the fuss about? Isn't it a perfectly normal, inevitable, banal fact that I happen to be at the center of my own thoughts, because, well, I'm me?

Perhaps so. But the me me me runs very deep, and it takes many forms besides hubris. There's a place near the beginning of Notes from Underground where the unstable narrator diagnoses himself with the disease of too much consciousness. Excessive self-consciousness is another, quite different kind of me me me problem. It's another way of ending up isolated and lonely—cringingly, ashamedly so.

Here at Harvard, we are scarily effective at reinforcing our own isolation in a thousand subtle ways. Like triumphantly packing our schedules with getting things done so as to enjoy the power trip of saying “No” to people who want to spend time with us.

And this is another kind of obstacle to achieving community.

How can we possibly escape the predicament of me me me?

I hope that someday the first thought to pass through my head when I wake up in the morning will not be “What shall I do today?” but rather, “What shall we do today?”

Thinking as “we” makes all the difference.

Thinking as “we” means that the first thing on our minds would be the wolf-pack of people to whom we belonged and to whom we were committed, prior to any particular plan, activity, or goal. People are not merely a means towards getting things done.

Thinking as “we” means that we aspire to be less like a committee of separate persons and more like a living, breathing, organic unity. The life of the community as a whole becomes our aim. We break out of isolating self-consciousness.

Thinking as “we” opens up moral possibilities that are unrealizable if I am thinking as “I.”

This, incidentally, is why the church is so important in Christianity.

Yes, organized religion is uncool. But, pace the “spiritual, but not religious,” Christianity has always stubbornly insisted that the communal life of the church is central to the faith. Christianity is no solo sport.

And when Christians think and live as “we”—however imperfectly—boy, does it look beautiful.

Campus ministers at Harvard have risen to the challenge of living as “we.” The home of Nick and Kasey Nowalk is virtually never without guests—typically filled with students in need of a place to crash for a few months—whilst Mako and Ming Nagasawa's experimental urban living community has now expanded to include three houses and a community garden.

The Church has its many flaws. But thinking as “we” means we don't give up on the pack, even when they seem to be insufferably stupid, petty, snivelly, weird, prejudiced, homophobic, hypocritical… Well, you get the idea.

Thinking as “we” means that when things go wrong with our dumb-ass Church, we try (with God's help) to fix them. Fixing dumb-ass, broken relationships is, after all, the very essence of redemption.

The Christian vision, both for this life and the next, is a beautiful community, a holy city, Zion. They say it this way in the Russian Orthodox Church: “One can be damned alone, but saved only with others.”

Et gloria in excelsis Deo.

Stephen G. Mackereth '15 is a joint mathematics and philosophy concentrator in Mather House.