“the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth”

While working outside of the United States I was having dinner one evening with colleagues and, through a fault completely of my own, I became engaged in a conversation about “values”. I considered myself an experienced traveller at the time and always tried to avoid conversations that might in any way compare the goodness and badness of the way people from different cultures lived. Not only did I find such conversations condescending I also found they invited disagreement, something that usually doesn’t go well with an evening meal.

Regardless of my defenses against value-laden conversations with people from different cultures I found my self, stupidly, offering my opinion on what I thought was a society or culture which had what I considered “good values”. Without enough hesitation or at least enough thought I impetuously said, I found societies that valued “the dignity of an individual human being” to be in the best interest of all.

I thought I was expressing a universally held value and wasn’t really expecting any objection but it took only seconds for one of my colleagues to say something to the affect,

“you westerners! you’re all so selfish, thinking only of yourselves. Individuals are of no importance compared to the importance of the group!”

which in the case of the colleague who was speaking meant the “tribe”. He was from an African country and the more I worked in Africa the more I learned of the importance of “the tribe”. Without it people, especially young people, very often don’t survive”. In what can be a very violent environment individual human beings become completely dependent on others for their survival, including their nourishment and physical protection from animals who can often see humans as nourishment.

To a large degree this is why the tribe or group is seen as more important than an individual. The tribe can survive without an individual but an individual cannot survive without a tribe. I suspect this is also why most governments on the African continent have been ruled by some type “stongman” or authoritarian form of government since their independence from colonial rule.

Needless to say, the strenuous rejection of my thoughts on the dignity of individual human beings was startling to me. It made me realize that we do indeed live in a very complex social world. It’s a world in which beliefs and customs arise for very different reasons and causes…