Brother, Can You Paradigm?

David Brooks' talent, or at least his shtick, is taking some common idea and turning it into a paradigm of universal significance. Not uncommonly, there is more than a bit of Procrustean adjustment of the facts required.

In yesterday's episode, our hero takes on the subject of individualism versus cooperation, or, as he prefers to style it, "collectivism." He asserts that the West in general, and the US in particular, is the bastion of individualism, while the East, epitomized by China, is collectivist.

Noting that Americans tend to prize individual accomplishment, while Chinese and Japanese tend to celebrate subordination of the self to the group is not exactly discovering America, so Brooks needs to conflate some likely independent notions.

Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists have theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, you’d want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.

About 95% of this paragraph is bullshit. It's true Greeks had a freer society, but their military might was built on an immensely disciplined conformity. The Persians gave almost unlimited power to one individual, and little to anyone else. Humans are social animals, and heroes are universal, so both elements are present in every society.

Brooks wants to attribute collectivism to tribal societies, but that's absolutely backwards. Hunter gatherers are largely dependent on self and family, but everyone in a complex society depends on thousands or millions of others. China and Japan may be tropical in Brooks's imagination, but geographically, not so much. Tropical societies, by contrast, have until recently often been primitive, lawless and hence individualistic to an extreme.

Brooks does like to bring science into the mix, and he does so here with his usual cluelessness:

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

Whether this is true or not, I won't guess. When I heard this story, it was civilizations who took the set theoretic approach and primitives who emphasized the functional. As it turns out, both these conceptualizations have proved central to mathematics - they reflect the fundamental operation of the human mind. The set theoretic (chicken + cow) approach was central to nineteenth and early twentieth century mathematics, and indeed it was very powerful, which might have translated to more societal prestige for such notions. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, it became clear that the functional approach was even deeper and more powerful. In the form of Category Theory, it has become a central and unifying principle of modern mathematics. (Confusingly, Brooks uses the notion of category in the opposite sense above). Both types of reasoning are integral to our thinking, and associating one or the other with individualism versus collectivism is a stretch too far.

Brooks being Brooks, a few factual errors are in order too.

Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.

Too bad the narrative is so at odds with the facts. For most of the last 2000 years, China (Brooks poster boy for collectivism) has been the most prosperous and advanced country in the world. The last 200 years or so have been an exception, but capitalism was neither a the whole show nor a Western invention. It was the combination of capitalism with stable governmental institutions and international competition that fueled the Western expansion and dominance.

Even that is far from the whole story, of course. China's current explosive growth shows that new chapters in economic development are still being written.

The aspect of individualism that I value most is freedom. Allowing individuals to be free is easy enough in a primitive society, but in a civilization there are all sorts of threats that need to guarded against, including tyranny, oligarchy, and peonage. Arranging a society so that the wealthy and connected are relatively free is fairly easy. Arranging so that most people are free is harder.