Website review: Begley: Blame the Bugs | Newsweek V...
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laodan discovered 5 weeks ago- You Can Blame the Bugs in Newsweek by Sharon Begley
For years scientists have scratched their heads over why collectivism declines with distance from the equator, and why living in colder regions should promote individualism (you'd think polar people would want to huddle together more). The answer seems to be that equatorial regions breed more pathogens. How might pathogen-fighting customs and attitudes arise, or fail to? Maybe people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity. Or maybe there are genes for behaviors that, at the level of a whole society, manifest themselves as collectivism or individualism, and genes for individualism get wiped out in disease-plagued regions. But when East Asians move to the West or Westerners go East, says Nisbett, they begin to see, think and behave like people in their adopted society. That would be hard to do if they were in the grip of collectivist or individualistic genes. You Can Blame the Bugs "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently - and Why" Individual atoms left to themselves are nothingness. Their being is given by their being part of an assembling. In H2O each atom has a specific place in the assembling. When H, for example, is extracted from H2O it does need to be contained by an outside force to remain H. Without this containment the H atom would readily assemble with other atoms present in its near environment. The same goes for individual humans. They readily assemble with other individual human atoms present in their environment. Left to themselves they rapidly die. What all this means is that atoms (individual) and the assembling they are a part of (collective) are inseparable. Indeed the combination of the individual and collective form results in the existence of a constitutive unity. When H combines with O into H2O we have the atomic and collective forms combining in their constitutive unity that we know as water. The same goes for human atoms and their societal collective forms that are giving the constitutive unity that we have the habit to call humanity. The atomic and collective forms are inseparable they are the polarities of any unity. The one depends on the other and vice-versa. But the weight of each polarity within any given unity is variable. That means that sometimes one of the polarities is stronger than the other and so it exerts a stronger influence on the being of the unity. The relative weight of the polarities results from a complex web of interacting factors: - factors that are internal to the constitutive unity. - factors that are external to the constitutive unity, for example, bugs are forming individual demands for more or less collective relations. "... people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity."
- You Can Blame the Bugs in Newsweek by Sharon Begley
