Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

February 3, 2026

Dear David,

Thank you for all your writing, and for sharing authentically from your own experience. I like the way you write, and particularly the way you reflect. You have helped me into the bountiful and beautiful garden of classical conservativism. Your decades of writing have consistently pressed us to examine how we live, not merely how we think. That’s a rare and valuable contribution.

I read with deep interest your recent farewell column in The New York Times and your reflections on American culture and moral life, although I was left feeling slightly uneasy. As I reflect on your exasperation with American culture, especially your diagnosis of “hyper-individualism.” You wrote:

“We’re abandon­ing our human­istic core. The ele­ments of our civil­iz­a­tion that lift the spirit, nur­ture empathy and ori­ent the soul now play a dimin­ished role in national life: reli­gious devo­tion, theo­logy, lit­er­at­ure, art, his­tory, philo­sophy. Many edu­cat­ors decided that because West­ern powers spawned colo­ni­al­ism — and they did — stu­dents in the West should learn noth­ing about the lin­eage of their civil­iz­a­tion and should thereby be rendered cul­tural orphans.

The most griev­ous cul­tural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told mul­tiple gen­er­a­tions to come up with their own indi­vidual val­ues. This privat­iz­a­tion of mor­al­ity burdened people with a task they could not pos­sibly do, leav­ing them mor­ally inar­tic­u­late and unformed. It cre­ated a naked pub­lic square where there was no broad agree­ment about what was true, beau­ti­ful and good. Without shared stand­ards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle dis­putes; it’s impossible to main­tain social cohe­sion and trust. Every healthy soci­ety rests on some shared con­cep­tion of the sac­red — sac­red her­oes, sac­red texts, sac­red ideals — and when that goes away, anxi­ety, atom­iz­a­tion and a slow des­cent toward bar­bar­ism are the nat­ural res­ults.”

I’m compelled to respond. My brother and I have had recent dialogues about the necessity of the death of self. I feel like in much of the conversations surrounding the death of self, many people have meant the complete submission of the individual to higher concerns. But some mystics have understood the death of self to mean the destruction of the false self. If it were my choice, we should also follow the latter. However, I have this nagging doubt you might prefer the former.

I believe your exasperation arises from grieving what was without fully understanding what individualism is and can be. More specifically, I think a richer understanding of individualism is available to us all. While your hyper-individualism is primarily caricatured as “me, self-interest, me” it depends on an ideal that is monologically generated and understood. The individual has always been dialogical. The individual offers a deeper account of the good life than the dualistic framework of “first mountain” and “second mountain.”

In The Second Mountain you articulate a powerful narrative of moral development: a first mountain of ambition and self-realization, steeped in ego and independence, eventually giving way to a second mountain of commitment, community, and relational depth. This metaphor resonates precisely because many of us have experienced periods of life shaped by ego-driven ambitions that feel hollow in hindsight. Your critique of a culture that valorizes resumé virtues over eulogy virtues captures something real about contemporary malaise.

Yet, in framing the problem so sharply in terms of individualism versus community, this account inadvertently depends on a mischaracterization of individualism that obscures its true potential. By painting individualism primarily as the cause of social isolation and moral fragmentation, your analysis implies that the good life lies beyond a certain conception of individuality in which the self is first a locus of self-oriented desires to be shed before one can truly belong to something greater. That formulation risks nostalgia for a communal past and a reduction of individualism to a narrow caricature of egoism and atomization.

This is where a richer philosophical conversation about individualism can deepen both diagnosis and prescription.

Consider the insights of philosopher Charles Taylor, particularly as elaborated in The Malaise of Modernity (in the USA, The Ethics of Authenticity) and related work on authenticity and identity. Taylor recognizes that modern individualism, in its Lockean and post-Enlightenment form, is often critiqued as fostering narcissism and social atomization. But he also insists that individualism, properly understood, contains within it vital moral resources and that the self is never a solitary, self-sufficient monad but always formed through dialogue with others and with cultural horizons.

On Taylor’s view, the self is misunderstood as ontologically isolated. Rather, our identities are shaped socially through deep recognition. While you start to address this in How to Know a Person, this “dialogical self” emerges precisely through interaction, mutual acknowledgement, and shared commitments. On your better days, you acknowledge this. Our individual projects are meaningful not because they are detached from community. Rather, the best projects are undertaken in conversation with others whose voices shape our own. This sense of mutual recognition expands beyond mere affiliation with others; it means that our individual aspirations and moral choices are embedded in networks of shared meaning.

What distinguishes Taylor’s understanding of individualism from caricatured “hyper-individualism” is that he does not reject individuality. On the contrary, he sees authentic individual self-realization as a moral ideal. We do not become fully human by renouncing ourselves; we become fully human by discovering who we are in relation to others. This is the heart of the dialogical self: identity as a conversation, not a fortress.

If we take this philosophical insight seriously, we can see that the real problem in American culture isn’t individualism as such; rather, it is a flattened or impoverished individualism that lacks robust dialogical engagement. What you call “hyper-individualism” often reflects not genuine individuality of depth and mutual recognition, but a fragmented version of selfhood shaped by commercial imperatives, technological distraction, and superficial expressions of autonomy. But this isn’t the only form individualism can take. It is, rather, a distortion of individualism, from which we should distinguish a rich, dialogical individualism that enables community rather than undermining it.

Your own moral concerns about loneliness, about a lack of meaningful commitments, and about the fracturing of social trust resonate deeply with the idea that something in our culture has gone wrong. Yet, we risk overshooting in diagnosing individualism at the root of the problem if that term is taken to mean any strong conception of personal agency or self-direction. The problem is not agency itself, but agency untethered from mutual engagement and shared moral horizons.

Indeed, the formation of individual identity through dialogue is not a nostalgic return to premodern communal bonds; it is a recognition that community and selfhood are mutually constitutive. A moral life does not require us to abandon the first mountain of self-discovery and ambition, nor does it require we pit individualism against community. Rather, it invites a more integrated view: one in which autonomy and interdependence are not opposed but entwined.

This leads to a critique of the dichotomy between the first and second mountains. In your metaphor, the first mountain aligns with independence, self-achievement, and self-definition, a stage that you imply must be transcended. Yet, this suggests a kind of linear progression in which the self must be left behind before true moral life can begin. A dialogical individualism, by contrast, sees elements of both mountains present throughout life. We never fully outgrow ourselves; we only deepen ourselves in relation to others.

Instead of viewing the first mountain as a stage to be abandoned, we might see it as the experimental phase where we come to understand and exercise meaningful commitments. Interdependence properly understood as something which generates resilient, authentic individuals nurtures relationships of mutual recognition and shared purpose. The dialogical self: i.e., the self that forms through relationships that nurture authenticity, offers a richer foundation for community than one premised on antithetical stages of self-negation and self-sacrifice.

This understanding also reframes your critique of American culture’s moral disorientation. What is failing is not individualism itself but a culture of recognition and meaningful dialogue that can sustain individuals’ aspirations while anchoring them in shared moral projects. What we need is not a turning away from individualism, but a reimagining of it.

In closing, I want to affirm the power of your moral sincerity. Your call for deeper connection, meaningful commitments, and moral joy is one that resonates with many across the political and cultural spectrum, including myself. Your writing, your contributions at the Aspen Festival, and to PBS Newshour has made America better. Yet, I urge you to consider that the good life is not found by leaving one peak for another as though self and community stand opposed. Rather, it is found in the ongoing dialogue of self-formation. My hunch is that in the end, the dialogue of self formation is not so much an elevation of the ego, but of finding oneself in God, to borrow a phrase from the late Catholic monk, Thomas Merton. This conversation weaves individual agency into the fabric of shared meaning and purpose and vice versa. And God becomes manifest again. You are already aware of this, though perhaps unconsciously, when you wrote in The Second Mountain, “We can help create happiness, but we are seized by joy.” This dialogical individualism does not renounce individuality; it enriches it and, in doing so, strengthens the very communities you rightly seek to renew.

With respect and gratitude,
Ray Klassen