February 28, 2007

Dear Colleague:

    I understand that every language has pronouns, and that the pronoun most commonly used is "we," and that it is only in modern times, say from the sixteenth century onward, that "I" becomes more popular. A striking exception in pre-modern times was the way Jesus favored "I." Unlike the Hebrew prophets who always spoke to the whole people and for the whole people, Jesus spoke as an individual to individuals. "I say unto you" was an expression he used over and over again.

    Jesus was the prototype of the individual. He spoke with authority, unlike the other scribes, who had to draw on the authority of the collective "we," that is to say, on the authority of a past, a tradition, and a group. As the story goes, Jesus came down from heaven not to save a people, not even a chosen people, but the individual. The individual is worth saving because he is a child of God, made in the image of God, each one of whom captures, however dimly, a facet of God's infinitely varied glory. Human beings do not themselves recognize this honor, so conscious are they of their weakness as individuals, so eager are they, therefore, to be part of a group, gaining whatever strength and warmth there is in the group, in the "we." Human progress amounts to this: over time, more and more people came to recognize that they, each one of them, had the dignity of being a child of God, in some sense divine. How few individuals there were in the past! In ancient Egypt, only the pharaoh was an individual and divine. In pre-modern Europe, it was the monarch, the feudal lord, a member of the nobility. A hint of divinity was extended eventually to the wealthier members of the bourgeosie, whose corpses might be chopped up and sent to favored communities for their divine healing powers.

    How wonderful it would be to say that by modern times, every human being is recognized as an individual of infinite worth, with the right and the self-confidence to say "I." Although this view of the individual lies at the foundation of Western democracy, in actuality, few of us see ourselves as possessing that sort of dignity. As an individual, one still feels powerless and one still understands that power lies in group membership; and that, moreover, human warmth also lies therein. Not surprisingly, the world is more than even divided into groups. St. Paul's prediction that, in the new covenant, there will be no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, proves—alas—false. More than ever the world is divided into Jews and Greeks, and all other sorts of ethnic, religious, and gender groups. The elites of Western society are giving up their Christian and Enlightenment traditions, both of which promoted the individual rather than the group. The university is an elite establishment. Rooted in Christianity and the Enlightnment, its mission is to create the free-standing individual, a young person capable of thinking for himself or herself, even if it should go against the communal grain. This ideal begins with admission to the university. A student is admitted on the basis of individual merit. Of course, reality is often otherwise, but at least the ideal is there. In a surprising turn, today's university proudly boasts the opposite. UW has recently declared that race is to be a factor: if the student's eyes are blue rather than brown, he enjoys an advantage. As for the blue-eyed students, they have been driven to understand that, although individually they may not mount to much, as a group having blue-eyes they contribute to the university's educational goals. Is it any wonder that few of them dare to use the word "I," seeking instead the anonymity and security of "we"?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu