Well, modern society is organised round a combination of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market.
Athens and Jerusalem: There is perhaps no more concise way of understanding the political tradition of which we see ourselves the inheritors: democracy and individualism, human rights.
Not only do most of these religions predate Christianity, Eastern cultures show much greater flexibility with regard to individualism, human sexuality, loyalty, and ethics.
Against that, many people hold that only individual human beings can be of ultimate value a position that might be described as "value-individualism" (Hartney 1991; Ellis 2005; Kukathas 1992, 112; Narveson 1991, 329, 335 45).
Much of political modernity, with its ideas of democratic rule, individualism and human rights, actually represents a triumph of classical liberalism.
A few well-respected academics carried this argument further by suggesting that the failure of democracy to emerge in the Muslim world was due in large part to Muslim culture, which they claimed was intrinsically incompatible with Enlightenment values such as liberalism, pluralism, individualism, and human rights.
His dissertation, "Moral Realism of the Postwar Japanese Intellectuals," explores how Japanese social scientists conceptualized individualism and human rights within the context of postcolonial liberal internationalism, national security, and economic development.
They argue that the hostility to rights concepts encountered in many African contexts has its roots in strong community-based understandings of entitlements and responsibilities that are in tension with the perceived individualism of human rights discourses.
In other words, such a regional subset of the cosmopolitan order may be strong normatively as it can draw on a far-reaching consensus on moral individualism and human-rights protection.
And his denouement, in which Michel lays the foundations for a wave-theory based scientific breakthrough which destroys human individualism, indeed humanity, and replaces us with a new order of being - a more social species who have set aside the 'monstrous egoism, cruelty and anger' of humans - is a genuine page-turner.
Similarly, I think that familiar assumptions about human individualism are oversimplified.
