Uninformed-Sweeping-Generalizations-About-Cultures Blogging

Posted on January 28, 2013 by reflectionephemeral

Busy times here at PYM HQ, so I’ll refrain from trying to back up my opinions with anything like facts and data. Rod Dreher writes of an airport trip with a 50-something Haitian cab driver:

He said that the light-skinned blacks have been cruel oppressors of the dark-skinned Haitian majority (like him). “The white man, at least he will give the black man a chance. These mulattoes, forget about it. They hate the black man worse than anything. They keep everything for themselves.”

He explained also that Haitians badly mismanaged the land, causing terrible erosion. Also, he said, vodou religion has been a catastrophe for his country. He said that he is a practicing Catholic, and wants nothing to do with vodou, but this primitive religion has a lot to do with the country’s economic and cultural misery. The driver said people who accept voodoo do not believe that anything can be done without the influence of the gods. Everything becomes irrational and fatalistic. You cannot plan for the future, because anything could happen, depending on the will of the vodou gods. These ideas have consequences. …

“A French man will spend all he has in his pocket on having a good time,” said the driver, “but he will not plan for the future.”

Anyway, I walked away with the idea that this French-speaking Haitian immigrant is a very big fan of Anglo-American culture, because of the rule of law and the cultural values.

Now, I think the driver’s view of Christianity isn’t at all unlike Gibbon’s view on the influence of Christianity on the decline and fall of Rome– that Christianity led to more of a focus on the hereafter, making civic virtue & empire-building seem less important. (If I understand correctly, most modern scholars don’t think that’s a good argument– the Eastern Empire lasted until the 1400s, after all).

As suggested by the cabbie’s range of factors, it’s always a little dangerous to attribute a state’s success to cultural factors. Max Weber, I think, wrote that Chinese culture precluded the development of capitalism. But, here we are, and it all seems to work just fine together.

It’s always hard to see what flows from what, in the interplay between liberal Enlightenment values like the rule of law, valuing science, a market economy, with other factors like cultural traditions and economic growth. And, of course, cultures change over time.

I could be completely mangling what Gibbon & Weber wrote, though, so, there’s that, too.

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  • vicomtepicabia

    “Culture” explains nothing until you’ve explained the origin of the culture. Until then it has no more explanatory power than “chance.”

    • http://poisonyourmind.com reflectionephemeral

      Could you spell that out? For example, I heard that people in the US are much more eager than people in Japan to become Internet-famous. Do you think it’s objectionable or unhelpful to say, “well, we don’t know exactly why, but it seems like there’s a difference here between these two cultures”? If we could explain the origin of the culture here, what would that explanation look like?

      • vicomtepicabia

        If one restricted oneself to that sort of statement, that would be fine. You can describe things, and differences between things, but descriptions are not explanations. The problem is they’re often taken as such. One so easily moves from description to explanation. When we say, “That politician is charismatic, he has many devoted followers,” we’re fine, but when we move to, “That politician has many devoted followers *because* he is so charismatic,” when charismatic mean nothing more than having many devoted followers, then we’ve stumbled in a trap. An inference *from* an observed fact is now being used as an explanation *for* that fact. The “because” that has slipped in allows many people to believe something valuable is being said about the causes of his followers’ devotion, when really nothing is being said beyond pointing out that they follow him devotedly. The charisma becomes reified. Gibbon’s explanation for the decline of Rome, or Weber’s for the rise of the West, are really just descriptions masquerading as explanations. If one posits that Christianity caused both those things, even if it were true, it just changes the question from “What caused the fall of Rome or the rise of the West?” to “What caused Christianity (and its postulated concomitant behaviors) to arise in Europe rather than India, China, etc.?” In most cases, this results in substituting a question we could potentially answer by looking at objective things with one we must attempt to answer by looking at thoughts, feelings, ambitions, fears, and other mental states, and I do not think this represents an advance in understanding or makes the question easier to answer. If voodoo is bad for Haiti, does Dreher offer any explanation for why voodoo developed there? If you’re saying, “Something we don’t know gave rise to a particular culture, and this culture then caused economic growth, empire-building, etc.” all you’re really saying is, “Something we don’t know caused economic growth, empire-building, etc.” The latter is more honest, but many people prefer to simply ignore the 1st part of the equation and go with “Culture caused economic growth, empire-building, etc.” and imagine they have thereby solved the problem. If you want to talk about culture as a mediator between the environment and the behavior of the organisms in that environment, or about culture as a product of chance (i.e., the “no answer” answer), that’s fine, but that’s all it is, a mediator; it is no type of true cause. I don’t think it’s objectionable or unhelpful to say, “We don’t know why behaviors are different in different places,” but that’s not what Dreher or Gibbon or Weber are saying. They’re saying we *do* know. But their explanations are internal to the organism. Dreher says Haiti has a bad economy because it has a bad religion, but both economic behavior and religious behaviors are behaviors, so he’s really saying the Haitians’ behavior in one aspect of life is causing their behavior in another aspect, but if he believes their economic behavior demands an explanation, why not their religious behavior? He believes a people’s religious behavior can adequately explain their economic behavior, but is there any reason the equation couldn’t be turned around and the economic behavior used as an explanation for the religious behavior? That a people have a certain religion is not an answer, it is only another part of the puzzle. William James asked if, instead of running away because we feel afraid, maybe we feel afraid because we run away. An interesting inversion of conventional wisdom, but you’ll notice than in neither formulation is there any antecedent event–no reason why we both feel afraid *and* run away. Part of the problem is the extremely deep-seated conviction that human behavior requires no antecedents. But if you have an independent variable (a “cause”) in some kind of functional relationship with a dependent variable (an “effect”), the one thing you absolutely can’t do is put the same thing in both the IV and DV boxes. But that’s what one does when one seeks explanations for human behavior strictly in terms of human behavior. One single thing (e.g., the behavior of ancient Romans) is being used as both the cause and the effect: both the puzzle to be solved and the solution. That’s not right. Explanations have to be sought in the external environment, and if they can’t be found there, then we can either attribute things to chance or simply say “We don’t know” (both of which are really just “no answer”).

        I would add, though, that I think “no answer” is a legitimate answer to many questions. When we roll a die and get a 5, we don’t look for an explanation for why it wasn’t a 3. Explanations have to stop somewhere.