A couple of newspaper items caught my eye this week, both making the point that culture matters-whether we’re talking about scientific creativity, economic competitiveness, the spread (or non-spread) of democracy, or almost anything else.
You’d think this point would be blazingly obvious to everybody, but apparently not. On the left, it regularly gets denounced as being elitist, racist, blame-the-victim, and so on. Just remove the exploitation and oppression, and the poor will prosper, etc. And on the right, especially among “hard-nosed” neocons of the Rumsfeldian stripe, it tends to get dismissed as being touchy-feely claptrap. Just remove the commissars and Russia will become a flourishing free-market economy and model democracy. Just get Saddam out of the way and give Iraqis the vote, and they will become a model democracy.
I don’t intend to debate these objections here (although I welcome comments), other than to note that recent history hasn’t been kind to either one. Witness Vladimir Putin’s newly autocratic Russia, the ongoing Iraq War, or the persistence of inner-city poverty 40 years after the launch of the Great Society. In any case, Washington Post reporter Shankar Vedantam made the argument far better than I could in last Monday’s edition of his always-fascinating Department of Human Behavior column: “One Thing We Can’t Build Alone in Iraq” (29 Oct 2007, p. A3). Vedantam starts out talking about how New York hotel doormen get their jobs, but then quickly moves on to his real topic: social capital. A key passage:
“Most people in America get their jobs because of who they know, not what they know,” said Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s not nepotism — one person knows me and another person finds out and someone says, ‘Did you hear there is a new job at the bank?’ or they say, ‘Do you know a good lawyer?’ ”
The example of the doormen highlights the importance of something that Putnam calls social capital: a measure of how closely people in the community are interconnected. Levels of social capital predict everything from the quality of schools and local government, to the risk a country will go down in corruption or blow up in civil war.
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So what exactly is social capital? Putnam, the author of the 2005 book “Bowling Alone,” said it describes how much people in a community feel responsible for each other.
It turns out that social scientists have devised ways to measure this supposedly touchy-feely quantity, and find that social capital is a strong predictor of very practical things like village prosperity in India, a community’s ability to recover from a disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami-or a nation’s receptiveness to democracy. Vedantam again:
It is social capital, [Putnam} added, that seems to create the right soil for democracy, not the other way around. This is why Putnam predicted many years ago that democracy was unlikely to flourish in Russia: Social capital levels were extremely low.
And in Iraq, after decades of Saddam’s brutal rule and half a decade of post-invasion chaos, social-capital levels are abysmal. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that social capital is virtually impossible to build from the top down; it has to come from the people themselves.
This analysis is hardly unique to Putnam. Francis Fukuyama, for one, made much the same point in his 1995 book Trust
And so did Robert J. Samuelson in his column on Wednesday: “The Global Poverty Trap.” As he puts it:
It’s nature vs. nurture. One of the big debates of our time involves the causes of economic growth. Why is North America richer than South America? Why is Africa poor and Europe wealthy? Is it possible to eliminate global poverty? The World Bank estimates that 2.5 billion people still live on $2 a day or less. On one side are economists who argue that societies can nurture economic growth by adopting sound policies. Not so, say other scholars … Culture (a.k.a. “nature”) predisposes some societies to rapid growth and others to poverty or meager growth.
Samuelson’s column is framed as a review of a new book by UC-Davis economist, Gregory Clark: A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
Capitalism in its many variants has been shown, he notes, to be a prodigious generator of wealth. But it will not spring forth magically from a few big industrial projects or cookie-cutter policies imposed by outside experts. It’s culture that nourishes productive policies and behavior.
By and large, nations have either lifted themselves or have stayed down. Societies dominated by tribal, religious, ideological or political values that disparage the qualities needed for broad-based growth will not get growth. Economic success requires a tolerance for change and inequality, some minimum level of trust — an essential for much commerce — and risk-taking. There are many plausible combinations of government and market power; but without the proper cultural catalysts, all face long odds.
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One Comment
Mitch:
You provide a pithy summation on the importance of the cultural mesh underpinning societies. This mesh determines levels of progressive, innovative, and prosperous outcomes across short or long histories. To your point, cultural bearings often go unnoticed like the air we breath, or worse, actively dismissed or constrained beginning with the rhetoric of particular groups.
Culture is perhaps most often expressed politically. Your left and right poli-positional parsing is a unique perspective that I had not thought of in cultural innovation terms, but it succinctly illustrates the active and unfortunate dismissal of cultural contexts in order to reinforce established cultural and political norms.
In this sense, culture becomes a weapon with which to attack, or defend against attacks. The embrittled rigidity of this logic always exposes the fatal weaknesses in the seeming strength of myopic or xenophobic actions. Addressing the cultural impedance consciously is only commonsensical for achieving political progress.
No doubt most of us are most comfortable in the world-views incumbent to our native cultures and we act accordingly whether ethnically or regionally. Our politics are usually the extensions of our backgrounds into the generations we influence – accepted without question and defended without thought. The need to be in the right supersedes the need to be astute.
Civilization’s greatest examples of beneficial progress and innovation have happened when cultural barriers are negotiated positively among different cultures. Certainly technology innovation has been dependent on these exchanges, from the cross-cultural adoption of the first tools to the vast knowledge generation systems of today.
Indeed, success comes from the blended acceptance of our best intercultural traits towards economic development in its fullest definition. Call these traits our weapons of mass benefit.
Thank you for your thought-provoking post!
Randy Burge