Individualism in Western Society

I would like to devote a blog post to the concept of individualism as it affects Western society.  I believe that the desire to be set apart from one's surroundings is the aspect of Western culture that fundamentally differentiates it from the rest of the cultures in the world.

Evolutionarily, individualistic behavior is illogical.  If we were to perform a test in which several small human populations were put into self-contained environments with natural-style ecosystems, then only the populations who best exhibited the group mentality would survive.  Why would this happen?  Because they would respect the Common Property Resources.  No one would overfish, or overgraze their cattle, or take more than their share of any resource, knowing that the continued availability of those resources depended on responsible, respectful use.  They would see themselves as a part of a whole ecosystem.

However, groups rarely inhabit totally isolated places.  Apparently, Western culture emerged from  a situation in which a group of humans realized that they could save energy by draining their environment of its resources, using them, and then moving on to a new location to repeat the process, rather than working the land for subsistence (I'm no expert on early human behavior, so this is entirely speculative).  This type of behavior leads to a mindset in which the surroundings are the "enemy" to be bled for resources for the self.  The outside becomes "bad" and the inside becomes "good."  This mindset is extremely apparent in the Westernized world: we build cities so that we don't have to deal with nature--so that we don't have to adjust.  We say, instead, that nature must adjust to us.  We love cowboys and samurai and mavericks and astronauts.  We have sayings like "Life's a bitch."  We build skyscrapers because the ground apparently isn't good enough, so the sky must be better.  This can also be extended to much of Western religion.  We have constructed the concept of Heaven as if life on Earth were not good enough.

Why do we feel as if there is somewhere else that we ought to be?

This is the concept of individualism: I, the self, am good, and you, the outside, are bad; I am different from you and I do not belong with you.  It has become so ingrained in Westerners' brains that it is impossible to avoid.  It's part of our ancestral memory, our collective unconscious.  I am even motivated right now by a desire for individualism to seek objective understanding of the world, as if subjective understanding were inferior.  Westerners invented objectivity, which is the ideal of totally separating oneself from the observed thing, in order to understand it from an outside perspective.  It is, of course, impossible, and only reflects our strange desire to be outside of our bodies.

It is quite ironic that our rational, objectivity-seeking thought patterns have eventually led us to see that this very thought pattern causes the destruction of the natural habitat.  Western science is finally admitting that the knowledge of indigenous peoples is, in fact, often quite comprehensive and useful (see Fairhead and Leach 1995 for an interesting example of this).  We've already permanently changed our planet as a result of our hubris, however.  It's possible we will meet an untimely and uncomfortable end as a result.  In fact, it's hard to imagine any way for us to sustain the population explosion we're currently experiencing for much longer.

My uninformed, impractical and purely theoretical advice is that we need to do all we can to reverse our instinctive desire to be individuals.  There's nothing wrong with being different--in fact diversity breeds resilience--but there is no need to be different just for the sake of being different.  We need to think of how our actions affect the greater group.  This is true now more than ever, because in the globalized world, our actions (or failures to act) can affect everything.  Humanity is one big community, so we had better start acting like one.

Since I am coming from such a purely theoretical standpoint, I would love to hear other views on this.  Please, leave a comment letting me know what you think about individuality and global society.

-Casey