This essay is the fourth in a ten-part series being
published in successive issues of The American Spectator
under the general title, “The Pursuit of Liberty: Can the
Ideals That Made America Great Provide a Model for the
World?”
Also in The American Spectator’s Pursuit of
Liberty series: James Q. Wilson’s “American
Exceptionalism,” James Kurth’s “America’s
Democratization Projects Abroad, Norman Podhoretz’s “A
Masterpiece of American Oratory,” and Roger Scruton’s “The
Nation-State and Democracy,” with more to
come.
American exporters of democracy should never ignore
them.
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. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan
CULTURAL VALUES, BELIEFS, AND ATTITUDES powerfully influence human
behavior, and since those cultural attributes are widely shared in
a society, they also powerfully influence the political, social,
and economic evolution of the society, of the nation. Foreign and
domestic policy makers, academics, and World Bank (among other)
development specialists are reluctant to confront culture. But the
failure to do so can be enormously costly for foreign policy, be it
in the abortive imposition of democracy in Iraq or in efforts to
accelerate the agonizingly slow pace of development in Africa, much
of Latin America, and the Islamic world.
Virtually all the most successful countries in the world today,
including those in Western Europe, North America, and East Asia,
and Australia and New Zealand, practice democratic capitalism. All
these countries have benefited from religions or ethical codes that
nurture democratic politics or economic development, or both:
Christianity, particularly the Protestant sects; Judaism; and
Confucianism. The three share, among other values, the belief that
people can influence their destinies and a related emphasis on the
future; a high priority for education; the belief that work is
good; and celebration of achievement and merit.
These values do not receive comparable emphasis in other
religions/cultures, for example Islam and, to some extent,
Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Such cultures tend more
toward fatalism and focus on the present or the past. They attach
lower priority to education — in the case of the Islamic
countries, particularly for women; are ambivalent about the value
of work and achievement; and often award status based on family,
clan, or class rather than merit. The lag in the movement of these
societies toward the goals of democratic governance, social
justice, and prosperity enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration
of Human Rights is in large measure the consequence of their
progress-averse value systems.
MOYNIHAN’S OFT-REPEATED aphorism, which underscores the mutability
of culture (it’s not in the genes), challenges a concept that is at
the root of the failure to confront culture: cultural relativism,
an anthropological theory popular in the academic world that argues
that one culture is not better or worse than any other — it is
merely different. The theory may make people feel good,
particularly if they live in poor, misgoverned, unjust countries —
or egalitarian and righteous if they are First World
anthropologists who adopt, in whole or in part, a poor,
misgoverned, unjust country. But the theory is patently erroneous,
at least when it comes to political, economic, and social
progress.
Some cultures are prone to democratic politics, while others
resist it. In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de
Tocqueville made an observation in the 1830s that is relevant
today: “Mexico, as happily situated [geographically] as the
Anglo-American Union, adopted these same laws but cannot get used
to democratic government. So there must be some other reason, apart
from geography and laws, which makes it possible for democracy to
rule the United States.” For Tocqueville, that reason is culture:
“…the habits of the heart… the different notions
possessed by men, the various opinions current among them and the
sum of ideas that shape mental habits.”
Many economists would like to ignore culture. As the former
World Bank economist William Easterly, author of
The White Man’s Burden, wrote in reviewing my 1992 book
Who Prospers?, “Maybe there is a lot to be said for the
old-fashioned economist’s view that people are the same everywhere
and will respond to the right economic opportunities and
incentives.” Easterly’s view ignores a salient fact: in
multicultural countries where the economic opportunities and
incentives are available to all, some ethnic or religious
minorities often do much better than majority populations, as in
the case of the Chinese minorities in Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, and Thailand — and the United States. Why has the
“Washington Consensus” prescription of free market economics, e.g.,
fiscal policy discipline, trade liberalization, openness to foreign
investment, and privatization, worked well in India and poorly in
Latin America? Cultural factors are not the whole explanation, but
surely they are relevant.
Alan Greenspan got it right when he said, after the collapse of
the Russian economy in 1998-99, “I used to assume that capitalism
was human nature… it was not human nature at all, but
culture.”
If culture matters, then, what are the implications for a
foreign policy a fundament of which is, “These values of freedom
are right and true for every person, in every society”? In the long
run, Francis Fukuyama argues in The End of History, all
human societies will converge on the democratic-capitalist model
because it has proven to be the most successful way of harnessing
human nature to produce progress. I agree. But what about the short
run? What are the chances of consolidating democracy — not just
elections but also the full array of political rights and civil
liberties — in Iraq, an Arab country with no experience with
democracy, and with two conflict-prone Islamic sects, Sunni and
Shia, and an ethno-linguistic group, the Kurds, seeking
autonomy?
To assess the possibilities of a successful promotion of
democracy in Iraq by a U.S. occupation, we might start with an
assessment of the condition of democracy in Arab countries more
generally. The table below [sic] lists (1) Freedom House’s 2006
rankings for 15 Arab countries in which 1 is best and 7 worst; and
(2) adult literacy rates by gender from the UN Human
Development Report 2004.
By contrast, most First World countries are ranked 1 in each
column by Freedom House. (Israel is graded 1 for political rights
and 2 for civil liberties, overall “free.”) While stable democracy
may not depend on high levels of female literacy, as India, where
female literacy is 48 percent, demonstrates, it must surely be
enhanced by literate women, particularly since women play the lead
role in child rearing. The data on gender literacy underscore the
subordination of women to men in contemporary Islam.
