We forego freedom too, for example, we are not allowed to murder, we are penalized for driving too fast, and we can be sued for breach of contract. That is not the issue. The issue is to what extent we rely on voluntary arrangements to create social order, and to what extent we rely on force, implicit in the sanctions available to governments to enforce their edicts, but also less formally employed by communities with aspirations to rule. When Muslim fathers use "honor killings" to enforce chastity, or the Muslim community uses ostracicism, and therefore the danger of being without family and community, to enforce customs like the wearing of the veil, it is not a matter of "social norms" in any innocuous sense, but a matter of "collectivizing" tendencies.
I realize that the American concept of individualism is not universal. But the very rise of modernity entails "problematizing" traditional relationships and norms, and offering choices that would have been unthinkable in a more settled society. By disturbing traditional arrangements, affording the individual new opportunities, and forcing decisions about how one will live that could not have been anticipated in the traditional order, some form of "individualism" is an inevitable result of modernization and its concommitants: the rise of the scientific point of view, the tolerance and interest in competing world views, urbanization and contact with diverse ethnicities and classes, and so forth. |
