East and West

[Guessedworker]

Prof MacDonald has advanced a thesis on individualism and in-group/out-group altruism that, for my tastes, lacks a comprehensive analytic setting. Given Kumiko's formidable pair of intellectual eyes and the stone-cold certainty that in her daily round she will serially encounter the tendency towards individualism pulsing away inside Europeans, we at MR are surely in a unique position to explore the matter.

I wonder, therefore, whether it might be profitable to have a conversation about the distinctions and commonalities in European and East Asian traits of, and attitudes towards, (i) individualism <> conformism, and (ii) reciprocal and non-reciprocal altruism. By profitable I mean it might yield not just anecdote but insight into the sociobiology, and how that expresses in culture, and where, especially in Western liberal society, that expression gives way to acquired behaviours and values. How does this nature-nurture paradigm mesh with cognitive elitism, and with Christian feeling? Does it have a behavioural root in urban life and the effects of modernity generally? Etcetera.