Ubuntu: I Am Because We Are

There is a kind of idea that seems too simple to require much explanation.

Ubuntu is often expressed in English as something close to: “I am because we are.” The phrase is short enough to fit on a poster, which makes it easy to treat as either obvious wisdom or pleasant sentiment and move on.

I think it's more interesting if we resist doing either.

The phrase draws attention to something that individual stories can make surprisingly easy to forget. None of us begins alone. We arrive in a world where other people have already built the language we learn, the institutions we encounter, the tools we use and much of the knowledge that allows us to function. Even the ways we understand ourselves develop partly through interaction with people who recognize us, challenge us, misunderstand us and sometimes change because of us.

That doesn't mean the individual is an illusion or that the group is somehow more real. It means the boundary between what we call individual achievement and what made that achievement possible is often less clean than the story suggests.

Consider something as ordinary as competence. We may eventually become capable of doing something alone, but that ability usually has a history. Someone taught us, wrote the book, built the tool, made the mistake we learned from or maintained the institution where the knowledge accumulated. By the time the capability appears to belong entirely to us, much of the relationship that produced it has become invisible.

The same is true in the other direction. Communities aren't independent creatures floating above the people who compose them. They persist because particular people keep doing particular things. Someone opens the building, remembers the procedure, repairs the equipment, teaches the newcomer, shows up for the funeral, keeps the account or notices that somebody hasn't been around lately.

The “I” and the “we” aren't competing explanations. Each reveals something the other can hide.

That matters because appeals to community can go wrong very quickly. If “I am because we are” becomes “therefore you owe yourself to us,” a description of relationship has been turned into a claim of authority. Families can do this. Institutions can do it. Governments, employers, religious communities and movements can do it. The fact that we depend on relationships doesn't establish that every relationship deserves obedience.

Dependence and domination aren't the same thing.

Neither are independence and isolation.

A useful boundary doesn't require pretending we have no obligations to other people, and belonging doesn't require surrendering the ability to say no. In fact, relationships often work better when the people inside them can remain distinct enough to disagree, leave, return, contribute differently and notice when something has gone wrong.

This is one reason I no longer like describing Ubuntu as a hidden structure underneath everything. The analogy is tempting. Cells have membranes, networks have nodes, communities have members, and people develop through relationships. From there it is easy to conclude that all of these are manifestations of the same deeper pattern.

Maybe.

The resemblance doesn't establish that.

What the analogy can do is give us questions worth carrying back into the domain we actually care about. What can this person do alone? What depends on other people? Which dependencies are healthy, which are merely unavoidable, and which have become dangerous? What does the relationship make possible that neither participant could produce independently? What happens when one side gains enough control that the other can no longer revise the arrangement?

Those questions make Ubuntu more useful to me than declaring that everything is relational all the way down.

They also make it easier to see why independence remains valuable. A person who can cook, repair things, earn money, think critically or survive a period without institutional support has more room to choose relationships rather than simply endure them. Capability can protect relationship because it reduces the amount of coercion required to maintain it.

Community can do something similar. Neighbors who know one another, local institutions that retain useful knowledge, businesses with durable relationships and organizations capable of coordinating during a disruption give individuals options they wouldn't have alone.

These aren't opposing forms of resilience. They can reinforce each other.

The person who has prepared for an emergency may be able to help a neighbor. The neighbor may have a tool the prepared person forgot. A local organization may know who needs assistance. A larger institution may provide resources the community couldn't produce locally. Each scale can carry something the others cannot.

The interesting question isn't which level is the real one. It's what each contributes and what happens when one disappears.

This becomes especially visible when a community loses something that had quietly been doing more work than anyone realized. A newspaper closes. A volunteer retires. A local business disappears. A family member who remembered everyone's history dies. At first, what has been lost may look like a single service or person. Only later do the secondary effects become visible because other relationships had been passing through that point.

Sometimes another institution replaces the missing function easily. Sometimes several people divide the work. Sometimes we discover that what looked indispensable was merely familiar. Other times we learn that a small, ordinary relationship had been carrying information nobody thought to preserve anywhere else.

That is one place where “I am because we are” earns its keep. It reminds us to look for the relationships hidden inside apparently individual outcomes.

It doesn't tell us what those relationships should be.

A community can support people and also punish difference. A family can provide belonging and reproduce harmful expectations. An institution can preserve knowledge across generations and preserve obsolete rules for exactly the same reason. A tightly connected group may coordinate beautifully while excluding everyone outside it.

Relationship isn't automatically good merely because it is relationship.

This also changes how I think about trust. Trust isn't something a group can demand by invoking community. It develops through observations made over time. Someone says they'll show up and does. An institution makes a mistake and corrects it. A person is given authority and doesn't use it to make disagreement dangerous. Repeated experience gives the people involved evidence about what the relationship can carry.

That evidence can change too.

Someone we've trusted for years can betray that trust. Someone we distrusted can behave differently from what we expected. An institution can improve or decay. History matters because it gives us something to work from, but the present still gets to provide new information.

This makes community less romantic and more practical.

If we want durable relationships, we have to enact them somewhere. Somebody has to answer the message, maintain the shared resource, tell the truth when a convenient lie would be easier, document what the next person will need, accept correction or make room for somebody else to contribute.

None of those acts proves the existence of some larger relational order. They simply produce consequences.

Over time, those consequences accumulate.

People learn where they can ask for help. They learn who keeps promises and who doesn't. Institutions acquire memory. Cooperation becomes easier in some places and harder in others. A newcomer enters an environment partly shaped by interactions that happened before they arrived, just as their own participation may alter what the next person encounters.

In that sense, “I am because we are” doesn't have to mean that the group creates the self or that the self disappears into the group. It can point to the simpler observation that becoming a person happens in a world already occupied by other people, and our actions become part of the conditions under which other people become themselves.

That is enough to take seriously.

It also leaves room for solitude. We sometimes need distance from other people in order to hear our own thoughts, reconsider an inherited expectation or discover that a relationship has been asking us to play a role we no longer accept. Stepping away from a particular “we” can be necessary precisely because relationships participate in shaping us.

We don't escape relationship altogether by doing that. The language in which we think, the experiences we're reconsidering and many of the capacities we use while standing alone still have histories. Yet those histories don't get to dictate what happens next.

The past participates without receiving a veto.

Perhaps that is the version of Ubuntu I can carry without asking the phrase to explain too much.

I am not self-originating. Neither am I merely the product of a collective. I have capacities that are mine to exercise, boundaries that matter and choices for which I remain responsible. At the same time, much of what makes those choices possible arrived through relationships I didn't create, and what I do with them changes the conditions encountered by other people.

“I am because we are” doesn't finish the argument.

It reminds me not to begin with the fiction that I got here alone.