The political incorrectness of cultural explanations

“I am convinced that the luckiest of geographic circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in despite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavourable circumstances and the worst laws to advantage. The importance of mores is a universal truth to which study and experience continually bring us back. I find it occupies the central position in my thoughts: all my ideas come back to it in the end”.

Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”

 

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself”

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

 

“Why is it that social scientists are so averse to explanations that advance culture as a possible explanation. Are they all secret Marxists still influenced by Marx’s shopworn and too-simple ideas about substructure and superstructure? Are they still, as a legacy of the Nazi regime and World War II, concerned that what were then called “national character studies,” will lead to ethnic stereotyping and, hence, to mass extermination of Jews, gypsies, and others? Or are they so PC that, having mistakenly conflated culture and race, they fear above all—the unpardonable sin—of being labeled “racist.” One can legitimately argue the degree of importance of culture as an explanatory factor but, in considering cultural explanations, it has become clear to me that something more than “mere” science is at work here. Something else, something deeper, is afoot. Is it ideology; is it psychological; is it political correctness; what is it?”

Howard Wiarda intro to “Political Culture, Political Science and Identity Politics – an uneasy alliance” (2014)

Moynihan’s statement turns up in title of Lawrence Harrison’s 2006 book The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture and save it from itself in which he asserts a view which is no longer acceptable in these politically-correct days. It is one, however, with which I find myself in strong agreement - 

The influence of cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes on the way that societies evolve has been shunned by scholars, politicians, and development experts, notwithstanding the views of Tocqueville, Max Weber, and more recently Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, David Landes, Robert Putnam, and Lucian Pye, among others.

It is much more comfortable for the experts to cite geographic constraints, insufficient resources, bad policies, and weak institutions.

 

That way they avoid the invidious comparisons, political sensitivities, and bruised feelings often engendered by cultural explanations of success and failure. But by avoiding culture, the experts also ignore not only an important part of the explanation of why some societies or ethno-religious groups do better than others with respect to democratic governance, social justice, and prosperity. They also ignore the possibility that progress can be accelerated by (1) analyzing cultural obstacles to it, and (2) addressing cultural change as a remedy.

There is compelling evidence, for example from Geert Hofstede’s comparative analyses of cultural differences in IBM offices around the world,18 and the World Values Survey, which assesses values and value change in some 65 countries, that meaningful patterns exist in the values, beliefs, and attitudes of nations, and even “civilizations,” that make generalizations both valid and useful. 

This field is so rich in understanding that I am amazed how social scientists avoid it like the plague. In its absence, they are left only with geopolitics as an explanatory factor…