In service to others

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. Men for Others. If you went to a Jesuit Catholic high school, then those are two phrases that you, like me, heard often in your teenage years. First, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, "For the Greater Glory of God" in Latin, is an admonition to let all one's actions serve to glorify God. Second, "Men for Others" -- "and Women" is added at coed institutions -- is a call to live a life of service to our communities, local, national and global.

Together, these phrases say that we are here to serve one another and something greater than all of us combined. For people of faith, that something is God, but taken together with Jesus' charge, "Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me," that something is also certainly our community.

This is a radical notion in a culture that exalts individuality above all else. At least since Horace Greeley's command to "Go West, young man," there has been an American belief in the power to remake ourselves in the image of our choosing. We also hold a near-mythic conviction in the ability to lift ourselves up "by our bootstraps" and control our own destiny. And with such an emphasis on individual success, it is hardly surprising that we raise leaders to pedestals and credit them with the work of nations.

I take issue with this cult of rugged individualism. I propose that we define neither our own identity nor destiny beyond the people with whom we choose to associate. Rather, communities impart our identities and shape our futures, and it is service -- not superiority -- to communities that defines true leadership. Simply put, we rise and fall with our communities, and we would be wise to remember that reality.

First, community is identity. I do not only mean that our birth communities are formative, though they certainly are. We all have multiple facets to our identity: our ethnicity, gender, politics, religion or lack thereof, sports fandom, etc. However, all of these aspects are not equally salient at any given time, and being around others with prominent aspects of their identities will prime those same aspects within us. Being around political types, for example, will cause my politics to be particularly salient in how I define myself. Who we associate with shapes who we are.

Community is also destiny. The fact that "lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps" is literally impossible is far too often lost on politicians. From the values we are taught in our homes to the skills we are taught in our schools, our future success is in large part a product of our origins. Furthermore, we generate social capital in our communities. How many Penn students use connections to find summer internships? Finally, particularly in a globalized world where the American economy is increasingly service sector-driven, individual prosperity is dependent upon the success of our communities.

It is of course better for our community to rise than fall, and such success requires strong leadership. However, we cannot lead by being better than our community, only by serving it humbly. There are as many types of service as there are vocations: nurses, engineers, politicians, teachers, journalists, soldiers, bureaucrats and yes, even investment bankers. Service is not what you do but rather how you do it and for whom; to work only for one's own betterment and glorification is to lead a hollow life indeed.

Over the past two years I have endeavored to show how the value of community must be reflected in our policies and politics. I have argued against abandoning the collective insurance of Social Security for private accounts. I have argued that students have responsibilities to our collegiate community to drink responsibly and that our community has a responsibility to help our peers to do so. I have argued that student government should be accountable to the student community. I have argued that it is fundamentally immoral to cut taxes for the wealthiest individuals while cutting funds for food benefits, water quality, and veterans' health care.

It is my hope that in writing these 54 columns I have served you -- the Penn community -- by changing your mind, by making you think or perhaps just by offering the consolation that someone else out there shares your beliefs. However, I am now moving on to serve in another capacity. For that and other reasons, this will likely be the last time you read my writing in these pages. So I leave you with the idea with which my high school community left me:

Be men and women for others, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.

Kevin Collins is a junior Political Science major from Milwaukee. ...And Justice For All appears on Tuesdays.

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