Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id DAA16873 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 4 Sep 2000 03:21:17 +0100 Subject: Fwd: SURPLUS VALUES Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 22:18:22 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "Memetics Discussion List" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20000904021824.AAA8290@camailp.harvard.edu@[204.96.32.105]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Here's the whole review of what looks like an interesting book
memetically speaking- the first one that is- and, if anyone wants to
know, the archives at the Boston Globe are free for the month of
September, but they require a sign-in.
- Wade
______________________
SURPLUS VALUES
THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND CULTURE GET A GOOD WORKING OVER
Author: By Thomas C. Palmer Jr.
Date: 08/20/2000
Page: C1
Section: Books
BOOK REVIEW
CULTURE MATTERS
How Values Shape Human Progress
Edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington.
Basic Books. 348 pp. $35.
THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN CULTURE
By Morris Berman.
Norton. 205 pp. $23.95.
Thomas C. Palmer Jr. is a member of the Globe staff.
Know why in a certain cannibalistic foreign country economists' brains go
for $2.39 a pound but anthropologists' cost $15? The answer is the only
punchline in "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress," because
that's the only joke in this serious, challenging, and ultimately
enlightening book exploring why there are haves and have-nots in the
world.
In 22 chapters, various scholars and authors debate whether the cultural
aspects of a people make a difference in their level of economic
development. But chapters with titles like "Cultures Count" and "Why
Culture Matters," as well as the book's title itself, give away the
overwhelming conclusion.
Though there are a few dissenters - Jeffrey Sachs with an "it's
inconclusive" view, and a couple of anthropologists who still cavil at
drawing any conclusions based on a population's values, for fear of an
odor of racism - the vast majority of contributors agree cultural values
shape futures. They're just not sure how much - in relation to political
or geographic factors, for example - or how at all to determine cause and
effect.
As co-editor Lawrence E. Harrison, of Harvard University's Academy for
International and Area Studies, notes up front, increasing numbers of
those who study the jaggedly uneven development patterns worldwide are
following paths forged by Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw American culture
as particularly friendly to democracy; Max Weber, who put religion at the
root of capitalism; and Edward Banfield, who studied poverty and
authoritarianism in southern Italy and contrasted that region with the
more prosperous north.
"Culture Matters" could be a valuable textbook, though its individual
chapters are for the most part easily digestible and even entertaining,
only occasionally dense. In an apparent gesture to political correctness,
a couple of chapters on women were included, one not by an academic but
by a journalist, and they seem a bit off the topic. A section on
anthropology - apparently there for diversity's sake, because
anthropologists are the skeptics on this topic - is also uneven. One
scholar argues weakly that parenting practices are not to blame for low
achievement. Yet the University of Chicago's Richard A. Shweder offers a
lively and inviting rebuttal to others' arguments (it's his joke, above;
punchline found in Chapter 12) and provocatively notes that developed
countries where abortion is prevalent should be placed in the most
child-unfriendly group on the planet.
The other co-editor, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, notes that
this book and a 1999 symposium called the Cultural Values and Human
Progress project were largely the work of Harrison. Harrison's overview
sets the world stage, as it were: Only 1 billion of our 6 billion fellow
men and women live in advanced democracies, and 4 billion live in what
are classified as lower-middle-income countries or worse.
George Mason University professor Francis Fukuyama, while emphasizing the
importance of virtues like truth-telling and meeting one's obligations in
building a successful society, acknowledges that really understanding the
relationship between values and progress, "providing an empirical map of
the sources of actual cultural rules, is a project for the future."
No solutions are contained herein. Nevertheless, a lot is agreed on.
Mariano Grondona, a Buenos Aires journalist-professor-author, identifies
20 "cultural factors" that determine where a nation will rank. They
include religion, "lesser virtues" like tidiness and respect, how people
view time and dissenting opinions, their level of general optimism, and
competitiveness.
Other authors prefer six or 10 identifying cultural measures, but the
point is the same: Traditional values and habits determine, at least
heavily influence, outcomes.
David S. Landes, an economic historian at Harvard, says the values that
pay off "may sound like a collection of cliches - the sort of lessons one
used to learn at home and in school when parents and teachers thought
they had a mission to rear and elevate their children. Today, we
condescend to such verities, dismiss them as platitudes. But why should
wisdom be obsolete?"
He strikes on a point that could have been made even more forcefully: If
economics were not so shoddily taught, little respected, and widely
misunderstood, there probably would not be as much of a debate about
culture, and about politics for that matter. As Landes puts it, a
"zero-sum worldview is central to the theory of a universal peasant
culture."
A wickedly refreshing, slashingly honest assessment of Latin America and
its elite groups is offered by Carlos Alberto Montaner, identified in the
book as "the most widely read columnist in the Spanish language." He may
want to hide out for a while, after identifying "politicians, the
military, businessmen, clergy, intellectuals, and leftist groups" as
being overwhelmingly responsible for poverty and injustice on the
continent.
And Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, Cameroon-born head of a development
institute, does sort of the same thing for Africa, suggesting that,
rather than another economic adjustment plan, the continent may need a
cultural adjustment program.
As usual, Orlando Patterson has a clear and sensible critique of some of
the current, foggy thinking on the subject. "The liberal mantra, still
frequently chanted, that cultural explanations amount to blaming the
victim," he says, "is sheer nonsense." In fact, Patterson proposes that
cultural factors, affecting children from the instant of birth, can even
explain the controversial findings of Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell
Curve," which found that intelligence varies among races.
Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard,
reviews the ups and downs that cultural explanations have had as useful
measures of people's ability to prosper, but he's cautious. As is
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lucian W. Pye, who says: "We are
dealing with clouds, not clocks, with general approximations, not precise
cause-and-effect relationships."
Morris Berman's "The Twilight of American Culture" has something in
common with "Culture Matters": They both use that seven-letter word in
the title. Similarities end there.
It's hard to know whether Berman, who teaches part time at Johns Hopkins
University, is serious in this brief screed on how stupid he thinks
Americans have become (alas, people riding buses aren't reading books).
My grandfather, back in the 1950s, used to say, "The country's going to
hell in a handbasket," and that just about sums up Berman's view.
Except that, utopian at heart, he blames commercialism and corporate
culture for ruining a great country. And he proposes what at first
appears to be a bizarre remedy: We all become monks and ignore the
poisonous influences around us.
Only toward the end do we find out that Berman is really just talking
about thinking independently, being true to your own beliefs, and the
kinds of things that he suggests only he and a handful of others do - but
that in fact more millions of Americans practice daily than he knows.
This grumpy baby boomer lives in Washington, D.C., and he listens to a
lot of National Public Radio. His heroes are Lewis Lapham of Harper's
magazine, perhaps the nation's premier cynic; author Don DeLillo; and
lefty filmmaker Michael Moore - though at least he eschews political
correctness and has no use for France's Jacques Derrida. Excerpt: "The
whole statist configuration of hierarchy, specialization, and bureaucracy
emerged fairly recently - about six thousand years ago - and has to be
constantly reinforced and legitimized."
There are a couple of amusing thoughts on science fiction and the history
of technology amid the gloomy predictions. But just when it seems Berman
might want to literally blow it all up, you find him saying, "Before I
start to sound like the Unabomber, . . . ."
Oops, too late.
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