Questions Of Culture
By DAVID BROOKS
741 words
19 February 2006
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
12
English
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved. Once,
not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences.
Human
beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward
reasonableness. As societies grew richer and more modern, it was
assumed, they would become more secular. As people became better
educated, primitive passions like tribalism and nationalism would fade
away and global institutions would rise to take their place. As
communications technology improved, there would be greater cooperation
and understanding. As voters became more educated, they would become
more independent-minded and rational.
None of these suppositions turned out to be true. As the world has
become richer and better educated, religion hasn't withered; it has
become stronger and more fundamentalist. Nationalism and tribalism
haven't faded away. Instead, transnational institutions like the U.N.
and the European Union are weak and in crisis.
Communications technology hasn't brought people closer together; it has
led to greater cultural segmentation, across the world and even within
the United States. Education hasn't made people moderate and
independent-minded. In the U.S. highly educated voters are more
polarized than less educated voters, and in the Arab world some of the
most educated people are also the most fanatical.
All of this has thrown a certain sort of materialistic vision into
crisis. We now know that global economic and technological forces do
not
gradually erode local cultures and values. Instead, cultures and values
shape economic development. Moreover, as people are empowered by
greater
wealth and education, cultural differences become more pronounced, not
less, as different groups chase different visions of the good life, and
react in aggressive ways to perceived slights to their cultural
dignity.
Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond
straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social
sciences.
The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of
theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know
this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches.
The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like
self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of
family and group. Alan Greenspan said that he once assumed that
capitalism was ''human nature.'' But after watching the collapse of the
Russian economy, he had come to consider it ''was not human nature at
all, but culture.''
During the first few years of life, parents, communities and societies
unconsciously impart ways of being and of perceiving reality that we
are
only subliminally aware of. How distinct is the individual from the
community? Does history move forward or is it cyclical? How do I
fulfill
my yearning for righteousness? What is possible and what is impossible?
The answers to these questions are wildly diverse, and once worldviews
have been absorbed, they produce wildly different levels and types of
social and cultural capital. East Asians and Jews, for example, seem to
thrive commercially wherever they settle.
It turns out that it's hard to change the destinies of nations and
individuals just by pulling economic levers. Over the past few decades,
America has transferred large amounts of money to Africa to build
factories and spur economic development. None of this has worked. As
the
economists Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian demonstrated, there is
no correlation between aid and growth.
At home, we spend more money on education than any other nation. We
have
undertaken a million experiments to restructure schools and
bureaucracies. But students who lack cultural and social capital
because
they did not come from intact, organized families continue to fall
further and further behind -- unless they come into contact with some
great mentor who can not only teach, but also change values and
behavior.
It all amounts to this: Events have forced different questions on us.
If
the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market
economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding
how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital
can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be
turned to healthy cultural competition.
People who think about global development are out in front in thinking
about these matters. (I'd recommend rival anthologies: ''Culture
Matters,'' edited by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, and
''Culture and Public Action,'' edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael
Walton.) But the rest of us will catch up soon.
*** *** ***
a friend sent me this article a couple of weeks back... a pretty interesting read that offers no answers but only more questions to the questions raised...
my two cents
Although he doesn't bring sociologist Max Weber up in this column, Brooks basically touches on weber's ideas of disenchantment and re-enchantment..
Personally speaking, there is nothing new here but this is still a perennially (usage?) provocative thread of discussion. It's been done over and over throughout history, different details, same concept of how civilizations peak at a golden age and that the tools that helped create that stage or led to it would ultimately
be the tools for its very unraveling.
upon further reading....
History is cyclical.
I'm quite tempted to agree with the theory that history seems cyclical
cos generations of human beings act out their inability to remain
either totally disenchanted or enchanted with life/the world... generations of
pple travel collectively through the spectrum...back and forth in a
spiral of time.... cos of our innate inability to handle the extremes.
This would be a great discussion piece for a sociology class.
Wish I were back in school
