Western Conformity, Eastern Individualism

As Robert Fulford once said, “anything that everybody knows is true almost certainly isn’t.”

Case in point: as everyone knows, individualism, good or bad, is the hallmark of the West. In Asia, by contrast, to quote a recent column by a friend, “the individual often takes second place to the family, the clan, the tribe. Their collective worth matters; the individual is merely a means to an end.”

But it just ain’t so. One crucial reason why “the West,” Britain, the US, Canada, and so forth, works so well, and the typical Third World country does not, is or seems to be precisely because Westerners are far more ready to sacrifice their individual interests for the good of the whole, and to cooperate with their neighbours. In most “non-Western” countries, it’s every man for himself. It seems impossible to get people to coordinate, to work together in groups.

One hears much about the American image of the lone cowboy. But similar images seem to appear in all cultures; there is nothing “Western” per se about this. In Japan, it is the lone Samurai—some classic Japanese samurai stories have in fact been easily adapted into Westerns. China has its classic stories of the lone Kung Fu fighter or the “outlaws of the marsh,” similar anti-social loners. India admires its bandit kings, and Europe its knights errant. Everyone admires the independence of the desert Arab, the bedouin.

As for religion, Christianity, as religions go, calls for a fairly high level of integration into the community. Even monasteries remain communities. By contrast, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism in the East have much stronger traditions of the solitary hermit—the ultimate individualist. In Vedanta, the solitary individual partakes directly of Godhead.

To my eye, personal eccentricity is very well tolerated in China or Korea; generally better tolerated than in the West.

Yes, families are stronger in Asia. But that could have less to do with philosophy than with necessity. The West’s prosperity and its ability to cooperate has given it a social safety net. In poor countries, families have to stick together, for they would starve apart. This is precisely because there is no support from the larger society.

As for the strength of the “tribe,” I simply see no sense in which East or South Asia is more “tribal” in nature than is Europe or North America.

I wonder: is this pervasive myth that Asians are “less individualistic” really a way of saying we are less able to see them as individuals? As in, “all Chinese look alike to me”? Is it really, in the end, a matter of seeing them as less human?