RSSThis is what I've said before with regards 'conservation of ingroupness'. You often hear Arabs, for instance, marvelling at how Americans or Western Europeans can be so 'accepting' (I think they often mistake tolerance and indifference for acceptance) of foreigners and yet so relatively detached from their extended families.This isn't a contradiction, it is rather a pre-requisite. The same individualism that fuels the weakening of extended family ties will also weaken other forms of ingroupness. (Because what are individualism and collectivism than different amounts of responsibility a person assumes to those around them) The more ingroupness (Which is basically just collectivism) you have, the less tolerance for outgroups you have since you have more responsibility and loyalty to your ingroup. That's what I mean by conservation of ingroupness, you've extended your circle of loyalty (Or a promise to treat them as equally and fairly to those who once comprised your ingroup) farther to categories of people you may have no sense of social solidarity with, meaning you treat everyone with less intimacy or devotion. Contrast with say a Roma family which is extremely tight-knit but which also has a highly hostile attitude to other Roma clans, their host nations and the entire world with regards a sense of fairness, rather they cheat them without a second thought. There is only so much 'ingroupness' and 'fairness' you can give.The 'humility, reasonableness, realism, and/or self-loathing' that comprises white collective psychology in America is not too far from a perfect description of a 'nice guy' who treats everyone he meets with the same fairness. But what happens when the nice guy meets somebody who doesn't reciprocate? What happens when our nice guy meets a psychopath or narcissist?Replies: @ben tillman, @AceDeuce, @Sean L
White humility, reasonableness, realism, and/or self-loathing is a massive social factor in contemporary America, but it’s almost inconceivable in the Current Conversation.
Perhaps the most drastic socio-cultural difference I’ve noticed from my time in various African countries where the principal social unit is the extended family is the absence of a public realm; something we take for granted in European settled lands. In the African public sphere it’s very much every man for himself.
Not only no law as we understand it, but in spite of often elaborate displays of courtesy in some social situations, in public no sense of propriety or order at all. In Nairobi, for example, where there is tremendous traffic congestion, traffic lights are completely ignored. Sometimes a police officer will step in and direct the traffic, to avoid the inevitable snarl up, but he’ll be ignored also. And the squalor of public places is beyond the comprehension of one accustomed to European standards.
Europeans are supposed to be “individualist” but that’s premised on obedience to social norms ingrained in our culture but actually quite exceptional, certainly from an African standpoint. A fatal weakness of ours is to project our norms on to others rendering ourselves easy prey. I was told by a young Kenyan that “You people have no culture” – what he meant in large part was that we’re keener to ingratiate ourselves with others, their music for instance, than taking pride in what is ours.
What Europeans imagine to be “anti-racism” they see as weakness. They were also scornful of Africans who come to Europe and take advantage. More so of us for allowing them to do so. Africans in Africa can hardly credit that our governments could give free money to people, let alone single mothers even foreign ones.
Otherwise the pithiest expression of the theme here that I know of comes from the great truth teller
and recently departed French-American philosopher-anthropologist Rene Girard of Stanford: ‘Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West”.