Sunday, September 7, 2014
One of the themes that continues to show up in Wandering Home is "hyperindividualism." McKibben describes it as an extreme selfishness which includes an inherent disregard for not only other people but the natural environment; McKibben also refers to hyperindividualism as being new or "of our time" (21). This made me think about selfishness and even broader about human nature. I found myself disagreeing with McKibben's concept that hyperindividualism is novel or unique to modern times. I argue that selfishness or hyperindividualism is something innate and inherent to human nature and man's will to survive. As such, I argue that hyperindividualism has persisted in mankind since the dawn of time, but what has changed in the last 50 years is the scale at which selfishness can be expressed. The scale can been seen early in Wandering Home when McKibben talks about the gigantic house that he passes in the quaint town of Lincoln that looks like it was dropped down by a "spaceship" (21). When you multiply this ability to flaunt one's selfishness at an unprecedented materialistic scale by the millions of people that live in a capitalist society based on continuous growth and an economy that can provide these people with the extravagant materials to flaunt themselves, you get a level of collective hyperindividualism that explains mankind's destruction of the natural world and of each other. In Wandering Home, McKibben is very critical of the destructive power of collective hyperindividualism and I like that about his writing.
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The idea of "hyperindividualism" has also stuck with me since reading Wandering Home. I completely agree with your point that self-interest has been a driving force in human action throughout the entirety of history and not just the modern world, although it is certainly more apparent today. This reminded me of the early history of the Adirondacks that Terrie delves into in Contested Terrain. The main reason that Europeans began looking at that land was to exploit the resources. Nature was first and foremost a source of wealth. So, in a sense the Adirondacks were initially established to be a source of income. While this doesn't fully address the idea of hyperindividualism, it does make me wonder if capitalism and the wilderness are irreversibly intertwined in the Adirondack's past, present, and future.
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