Western individualism versus the Eastern spirit of community
eurasianaffairs.net
eurasianaffairs.net
The reality is that at both the micro and macro scales you find both approaches.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum
To me that's not putting rights over duties, that's actually assuming responsibility. And it doesn't have to mean arrogance and shrinking the world to what oneself is:
> When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain in me, and what I do I know of yours. And if I threw myself to the ground before you and cried and told you, what would you know more of me than of hell, if somebody told you that it is hot and terrible. For that reason alone we humans should should face each other so reverend, so thoughtful, so loving as if facing the gates of hell.
-- Franz Kafka
"To live solitary and free like trees, and brotherly like a forest, that is our desire", as Nazim Hikmet wrote. That doesn't mean people stop living in communities, it also doesn't mean they're just loyal to their friends or family. Someone of "my tribe", however one might define it, who kicks a dog, is less my brother than that dog, in that moment. Individualism doesn't have to mean being selfish, but simply extending compassion to all living beings, as what they are -- not as "examples" of a species or a tribe or a "type of person".
> I often warn people: "Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.
-- George Carlin
To say that only exists in the West as if it was fluke is silly. Even if it was true: so far as we know so far, as far as what practically matters, intelligent life only exists on Earth -- does that mean we strive to become like something less, because that's "more common"? Might doesn't make right, numbers don't make greatness, and you can find conformists in the west just like you can find strong-willed individuals in the east. And when indiviual judgement was suppressed is when we had our darkest moments.
> As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.
-- George Orwell
I would say individuality is what happens naturally if you give a person the means and the permission to develop it. Yes, it can be suppressed, people can, instead of developing their own identity, identify with tribes and skin colors and professions and programming paradigms and soccer clubs. It's like drugs can dock to receptors, that doesn't mean it's what those receptors are for.
> To state it in slightly different terms: in those critical years [roughly from age 17 to 20] I learned how to be alone. This formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. [..] By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lyé and at the university, that one shouldn't bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like "volume", which was "obviously self-evident", "generally known", "unproblematic", etc. I'd gone over their heads, almost as a matter of course, even as Lesbesgue himself had, several decades before, gone over their heads. It is in this gesture of "going beyond", to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one - it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. [..] It's to that being inside of you who knows how to be alone, it is to this infant that I wish to speak, and no-one else. I'm well aware that this infant has been considerably estranged. It's been through some hard times, and more than once over a long period. It's been dropped off Lord knows where, and it can be very difficult to reach. One swears that it died ages ago, or that it never existed - and yet I am certain it's always there, and very much alive.
-- Alexandre Grothendieck
Being able to be alone does not mean being unable to be with others any more than being able to drink means being unable to eat.
> If the teacher, if anyone, is to be an example of a whole person to others, he must first strive to be a whole person. Without the courage to confront one's inner as well as one's outer worlds, such wholeness is impossible to achieve. Instrumental reason alone cannot lead to it.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum
People who are afraid of that project a lot onto those who are not.
> The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings. The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil.
-- Arno Gruen
I find it funny, in a sad and slightly scary way, that people are so quick to despise individualism, as if being a whole, responsible, independent person precludes you from being a part of a community, as if you must then be antisocial. It's like, if your thoughts and actions are in any way not completely governed by what the "community" thinks, suddenly you're a dangerous person. Weirdly, this is a sentiment I hear a lot even in a liberal, freedom minded and individualistic place like the US.
I honestly can't figure out why people think like this, with such overt reactions to stated individualism. (Note that if you don't state you're individualism overtly, no-one says anything, so far as I've seen). Why can't you have free individuals interacting voluntarily form a community? Why do we need social groupthink and force...?
To make an intellectual leap here, and one that I'm not sure of at all, this attitude reminds me of the "democratic" attitude. People who are proponents of direct democracy and say that democracy is actually an ideal system, not just a least-worst with needs for checks and balances, tend to believe that of the majority of people believe something is right, then it is right--- that the number of people who want or believe something give it moral and even practical legitimacy. It's like the people who fear you going against their social ways and thoughts (or your capability to do so), yet on a grander scale. Both believe that if the greater part of their "group" thinks it's right, it is, and anyone ready or willing to go against it is dangerous. It's just a question of which group they're talking about.
Do we need it? I agree with most people I know that stealing from a blind beggar would be wrong, but I don't think this is just socialization and fear of being punished for wrongthink. It's something I might have at first just "believed", but then found to be something I agree with my own mind, my experiences, how I would want to be treated etc.
From an interview, translation mine:
> Kants whole morality means, that every human has to consider with every action if the maxim they are acting on could be a general law. That means.. it's pretty much the opposite of obedience! Everybody is law giver. No man has the right, according to Kant, to obey. [..] We obey in this sense, as long as we're children, because it's necessary. There obedience is very important. But this should end with age 14, 15 at the latest.
-- Hannah Arendt
This is from 1958, and most of it is still timely IMO:
> Because, what is common to both societies is the development into a managed mass society, with big bureaucracy, managing people. The Russians do it by force. We do it by persuasion. I appreciate the tremendous difference, that we can express ideas without being afraid of being killed or imprisoned. But I think the Russians might do away with the terror in twenty or thirty or years, when they are richer, and when they don't need these repressive methods so much. What we have in common is a mass men, a mass bureaucracy, and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly, but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.
-- Erich Fromm, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...
In a way the video of the interview is really depressing to me, because it's such in stark contrast to our intellectual culture today, this spirit of just letting someone speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU
At any rate, insofar what he says there is correct, this kinda automatically follows:
> There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
-- Hannah Arendt
It's my impression that it's not just about having the "proper" thoughts, but also aquiring them "properly", by obedience. Because someone who even marches in total lockstep today, because they fanatically agree with the correct ideas, in their own mind, might rebel tomorrow for the same reason, and may be less desirable than someone who is not fanatic, maybe even begrudgingly obedient, but obedient nonetheless.
Yet we need critical thought for many jobs, to operate and invent complex machinery, so the obedience is what makes it all work -- as long as a person applies autonomous thought to the "right" things, and completely turns it off others, for when they're just to fall in line, it's okay.
> People who are proponents of direct democracy and say that democracy is actually an ideal system, not just a least-worst with needs for checks and balances, tend to believe that of the majority of people believe something is right, then it is right--- that the number of people who want or believe something give it moral and even practical legitimacy.
I often have to think of pointers in that context... say, someone states opinion A, and you ask, why do you think that, and the reply is just a variation of "many people agree"... well, they're referencing other people. But do they know if those other people aren't just referencing other people, too, and if yes, how deep that goes? How do they know there is actually a memory location that holds more than nonsense down the chain of references, so to speak?
(I am aware of the irony of me quoting a lot.. but the way I see it, I could say it less eloquently and accurately in a lot more words, or share good quotes, among which some might find some keepers)
> Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenon, and one characteristic of our modern mass age. It destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact that we are different by nature and by conviction. To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from Godlike certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap. A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria. In contrast to agreement, unanimity does not stop at certain well-defined objects, but spreads like an infection into every related issue.
also
> Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.
-- Hannah Arendt
> At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
-- George Orwell, Proposed Preface to "Animal Farm"
And while this is even more of a leap, when I read the following passage I was just thunderstruck, because it seemed "vaguely important", yet I can't authoritatively put my finger on it. I won't even claim I understand half of it, I just want to show it to everyone. Since it's kinda on-topic and you like quotes too, I guess it's okay:
> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.
> As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"