One blog that I keep up with regularly is called The Mahablog (in other words, as Buddhists will recognize, "The Great Blog"). It is primarily about politics; the writer also blogs about Buddhist thought and practice. Yesterday she did a fabulous job of writing about one of the most fundamental aspects of Buddhist thought: the interconnectedness of all being, and how it is related to politics and culture. She is responding, beautifully, to an editorial in the NYT that trots old the old, tired, and superficial thinking about Asian people/culture being "communal," or "collectivist," and Western people/culture being "individualistic." Here's an excerpt:

[The editorial writer says that] Asians don’t value rights and privacy as much as we Westerners do — [when they see an aquarium], Westerners focus on the largest individual fish... But fixating on the biggest fish is not necessarily a sign of individuality, IMO. It more likely indicates that the observer identifies with or admires dominance.

Awhile back I complained that right-wingers don’t see the interconnectedness of things. One of the differences between progressives and non-progressives is that the progressives perceive how the lives and personal fortunes of individual citizens interconnect, and how events and issues connect to and impact other events and issues. Righties, on the other hand, have rigidly linear thought processes and cannot see beyond their own personal interests. Does that make them more “individualistic”? or just more “selfish”? And “narrow minded”?

Years ago I stumbled into a virtual nest of Objectivists. These are Ayn Rand culties who have made a religion of individuality...
One guy in particular, who kept going on and on about how he didn’t need anyone else, finally got to me. Do you realize, I said, that your entire environment is a web of interconnection with other people? The roof over your head, the chair you’re sitting in, the utilities you use, the food you eat, your bleeping Internet connection are all the creations of other people.

He snapped back, I paid for these things. Of course. An economy is a facilitator of interconnection...

Righties make a big show of loving liberty even while they support giving the Bush Administration unlimited power to violate individual rights and bully anyone who dares disagree with them. So much for “individualism.” As with the Objectivists, they like to fancy themselves rugged individuals when most of the time they are just tools, believing what they think they are supposed to believe.

The three major philosophy-religions of China — Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism — all in different ways emphasize interconnection... [One] Chinese school of of Buddhism called Huayan came up with the metaphor of Indra’s Net. The net extends in all directions without end, and in each “eye” of the net is a multifaceted jewel. Each jewel, although existing separately, also reflects every other jewel in the net. And the jewels in the reflection reflect all other jewels in the reflection, to infinity. This represents how beings and phenomena exist. Simultaneously, we are individuals and not-individuals.

Yes, China has a totalitarian government. The form of that government is based on an economic and political philosophy originally dreamed up by Europeans, as I recall....

I’ve come to appreciate more and more than “social harmony” and “individualism” are not opposites. When kept in balance, they enhance each other. When only one is valued, too often you have neither.

Thanks, Mahablog! Beautifully put.