What would it take to build a world in which each of us earns enough doing work that matters?
One shift that seems to me to be necessary, if not sufficient, is to nudge our culture a little further away from thinking of ourselves as completely free individuals, and a little more towards seeing that we are all inextricably connected.
I first came across this tension as a child growing up in a Western country to Eastern parents. (For a fabulous and more recent example, watch The Farewell.)
“Blood is not always thicker than water”, I would assert to my parents, as we had yet another lively discussion about some controversy in the extended family, and even as I would refer to the relative in question by their specific label which would convey to any outsider exactly how they were related to me (e.g. husband of my mother’s second oldest sister).
“Why should we help so-and-so? Haven’t they shown themselves not to be deserving of help?”, I would continue. (Forgiveness is, ahem, not one of my top character strengths.) My parents would proceed to explain to me how people do not act in isolation but as a function of their social context (a concept I would later relearn through the prism of social psychology). That different cultures have different social norms and that it’s important for us to balance the two. In this case, balancing independence, widespread in today’s Western culture, with interdependence, still prevalent in most Eastern cultures.
As one of my favourite social scientists Hugh MacKay puts it:
So here’s the classic human quandary: we are individuals with a strong sense of our independent personal identity and we are members of families, groups and communities with an equally strong sense of social identity, fed by our desire to connect and belong.
He then advises us on how to embrace the tension between the two:
Every community has its differences of opinion, its social divisions and its cultural tensions, which is simply to say that every community is both diverse and, inescapably, human. If you want to master the art of belonging, you’ll need to accept the imperfections, the complexities and the tensions and deal with them. And the best way of dealing with them is to overlook them. There’s a lot of tolerance – a lot of forgiveness – in the art of belonging.
(I clearly have my work cut out for me.)
Where do you sit on the spectrum between independence and interdependence?
PS: The title comes from my favourite alternative Australian anthem.