An American Story

When it erupted last month, it seemed like yet another example of two oversized egos colliding. Los Angeles Lakers’ guard Kobe Bryant was telling the media that his game has improved and that he wasn’t going to contain himself to soothe the bruised sensibilities of his teammates, especially center Shaquille O’Neal, the reigning most valuable player in the National Basketball Assn. When asked by coach Phil Jackson to turn down his game to help the team, Kobe snapped that he was going to turn it up instead. Meanwhile, O’Neal was snarling. Last season’s dominant force on the Lakers championship team, O’Neal was insisting that teammates continue to “feed the big dog”--meaning himself--if the Lakers hoped to repeat as champions. At one point, Jackson said of his two stars, “I don’t even want them in the same room together right now.”

Essentially, Kobe was saying that showing off his skills was more important than his team winning another championship, while Shaq, certainly no selfless Gandhi, was saying that the team came first so long as it rode him to victory. (“It’s all about the team,” said Shaq, “ ‘cause I know marketing. If the team wins, then everybody looks good.”)

Posed this way, the Kobe-Shaq battle wasn’t just one of egos in the sports world. It was a conflict with deep roots in American culture generally. Whether you side with Kobe and think that a young man has a right, even a duty, to use his talent to the utmost, or whether you side with Shaq and think that his .571% field-goal shooting percentage is reason enough to give him the ball instead of Kobe, with his .462% conversion rate, the two are enacting a classic struggle between the individual, who wants to demonstrate his excellence, and the community, which often demands that an individual subordinate himself for the greater good. That Kobe not only feels emboldened to take on his team’s biggest star, his coach and the successes of the past, and hasn’t suffered much criticism for it, says a great deal about how contemporary America is reframing that age-old conflict to fit modern mores.

Every society has had to wrestle with the issue of individual rights versus community good, but America, born during the Enlightenment when individual rights were being espoused and forged on the frontier where individualism was a premium, has always been a special case. In virtually every previous society, state power took precedence. The individual served the system, be it civil or religious. But Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke changed that. New theories posited that individuals have rights, not just obligations, and they form compacts with their fellow citizens to protect those rights, even while sacrificing other rights to achieve that end. Once one acknowledges that individual rights form the basis for society, life becomes a negotiation between the individual and his community--an attempt to balance individual freedom with communal needs. America was the experiment that put such theories into practice.

America was not only born into this tension; it quickly institutionalized it in its major political parties. Though it grossly oversimplifies matters, the Republicans of Thomas Jefferson were essentially Kobeites, dedicated to the primacy of the individual. Jeffersonians constantly sought to check the federal government’s powers, even when those powers seemed to serve the larger public interest. For their part, the Federalists of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were Shaquites, dedicated to the primacy of the nation, though not as a separate entity with power over individuals, but as the aggregation of individuals from whom it derived its legitimacy. In sports terms, Jeffersonians believed that the team was never bigger than its parts, the Federalists that a winning team served the interests of its parts.

Once established, these two forces, in different guises, continued to battle throughout the 19th century right up to the present in everything from the Civil War, in which the South asserted its right to hold slaves against the North’s desire to maintain a union, to CBS’ “Surivivor,” in which participants constantly scheme on how to use community to advance their individual goals. Depending on the political climate, the country would list this way or that--either toward a more individualistic orientation, as in the 1920s and 1980s, or toward a more communalistic one, as in the 1930s and 1960s.

But over the last 20 years or so--and with a vengeance over the last five--the terms of the struggle have changed as the definition of individualism has changed. Individualism was traditionally defined in terms of rights. Politically speaking, there were certain things upon which society could not trespass--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being the most basic of these--and the individual was the person who preserved his prerogatives against social pressure, which, in effect, meant being left alone. Even as interpreted by the popular culture in movies, novels and TV shows, individualism meant holding oneself above society, lest one be corrupted by it, or exercising one’s individualism for the sake of society, usually grudgingly, as cowboys and private detectives did. In no other culture are the heroes as reluctant as ours or so eager to retreat once the job is done.

By the end of the 20th century, however, individualism was no longer the product of a set of political rights so much as it was a form of cultural assertiveness. Fed by a constant emphasis in the mass media on personality, exceptionality and celebrity, the individual wasn’t the person who reserved certain inalienable rights to himself; he was the person who got the most attention, which is why people like Donald Trump or Puff Daddy or Dennis Rodman or Madonna have all been cited as examples of individualism when they were really examples of exhibitionism. Whereas once individualism meant protecting oneself from the incursions of society, now it was an incursion on society--a kind of showing off. That, naturally, affected the balance between the individual and the community.

It is nearly 20 years since historian Christopher Lasch, seeing this change in our concept of individualism, declared America a “culture of narcissism,” but what Lasch said then has only intensified with time. The forces of consumption and advertising, the emphasis on personal psychology and the obsession with the here and now that Lasch cited, as well as the various results of these forces--increased promiscuity, drug use and other forms of self-gratification, the growth of the self-awareness movement, an increasing trivialization of personal relations and a new callousness--have all contributed to a new way of seeing ourselves not as parts of a whole, but as the whole.

In this environment, subordinating oneself to the community is actually stupid and self-defeating. Individuals generally regarded as successful are those who don’t subordinate themselves. They jump from the anonymous pack. The social consequences of this new individualism are all around us. In his recent study, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” political science professor Robert Putnam found that over the last four decades, there has been a decline in civic engagement and a concomitant retreat into the self. Participation in voting, service on committees, church attendance, social gatherings, philanthropy, even the number of dinner parties--all have dropped. As Putnam makes clear, this is truer of younger Americans than of older ones. Though Putnam wouldn’t put it this way, it all leads to an inescapable conclusion: Selfishness is on the rise.

But one doesn’t need statistics or theories to demonstrate the point. One has Kobe and Shaq. Last year, the Lakers did what championship teams usually do. They found what worked and stuck with it. Shaq, an implacable force in the low post, was the first offensive option. Kobe, not without a struggle and a lot of sideline hollering by Jackson, accepted the role of second option, complementing Shaq’s game by hitting the outside jumper or slashing to the basket. Everyone on the team knew his role and played it. The community functioned. The team won.

This year, however, Kobe discovered that winning isn’t everything, if by “everything” you mean getting the attention and the accolades, as well as the hardware. Sometimes, showmanship is better, which is one explanation for why the Laker guard has suddenly anointed himself the team’s first offensive option and its main man, even as the team’s losses exceed last year’s. Jackson, chalking it up to youthfulness, has said that Kobe sees Toronto’s Vince Carter and Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson outscoring him, and he chafes. He wants to be considered the best in the game. And in this society, as Kobe well appreciates, the best isn’t necessarily the one who fits himself into the team. By the laws of the new individualism, the best is the one who creates the most excitement and entertainment, the one who can perform a tomahawk or windmill dunk while racking up the points. That’s Kobe’s game now. He is the new individualist extraordinaire.

In this, Kobe’s dust-up with Shaq becomes a parable. You can be an individualist or you can be a team player, but it is awfully difficult to be both, and most athletes, most people, would likely opt for Kobe’s solution to be a star--and to hell with the team--given that stardom is so richly rewarded. It is an attitude that may well cost the Lakers another championship. But the attitude is costing us even more: a better, stronger sense of community with which to face the world.