Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress [ペーパーバック]

Multiculturalism is a lie. It is a lie not because it says we should tolerate minorities (we should), but because it says every culture presents an equally valid way of looking at the world (they don't). This lie has consequences. The most significant being that educators in America and Canada have abandoned teaching Western culture for fear of offending minority cultures. Policy makers in the West take our culture for granted. They don't recognize that rational thinking is not natural, and it took a 1500 year battle with the Catholic Church, culminating in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, before rational thinking became a fixture in Western culture. In the Arab world today, that battle is still waiting to be fought.

Consider the following thought pattern

1. a terrorist attack kills scores of people

2. muslims would never kill innocent people

3. therefore, the killers could not have been muslim

4. since they were not muslim, they must have been CIA or Mossad.

A person schooled in Western culture - the language of Aristotle and Socrates - will recognize the fallacies in this thought pattern: the false premise (#2), circular reasoning and logical quadruped (#2->#3), and non sequitur (#3->#4). And even Westerners without a classical education will almost instinctively recognize those fallacies, even though they don't know the technical terms of logic. Yet to a person in the Arab world, the above thought pattern seems eminently reasonable. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk, search for "Iraq shrine blast: Your reaction"). Rational thinking, then, is an important difference between Western culture and Arab culture. Not because Westerners are inherently smarter than Arabs, but because Western education has taught European history and philosophy (Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, and Mill, among others) and in doing so given students the tools of logic.

There is currently a movement among "multiculturalist" educators to take the European classics out of North American education. Their motive is good - exposing a multiethnic student body to a multiethnic curriculum - but the result would be disastrous. A whole generation of students will come up using the same flawed thinking patterns so common in the Arab world today, and the society those students build will likely come to resemble the violent, repressive theocracies of the Middle East. Indeed, by denying Western culture to our students, we are doing a grave disservice to immigrants who come here precisely because they want a better life for their children. That better life includes a Western education.

This book is therefore quite right to say culture matters. If we want to preserve our way of life, then we have to preserve our way of thinking, and the way we think is a direct product of our education in European history and philosophy.

Culture Matters is a good starting point to familiarize yourself with the arguments relating cultural factors to development. The high quality of most of the authors and the variety of topics provides a solid exposure to the several angles of the issue.

However, the book falls short of a) offering a structured and compelling argument for the relationship between cultural factors and development and b) offering enough evidence that it is not only relevant, but relevant enough to be in the mainstream debate.

It seems to be a reflection of the stage of development of this "school of thought". One finishs the book with the feeling that this school has yet to accomplish two things a) reach a much stronger logical and factual explanation of the causal relations between a society's culture and its level of development; and b) show how much culture matter compared to other variables, such as geography, natural resources, educational system, etc.

I just started reading the book and I finished the Culture and Economics section. This book is a collection of essays by prominent sociologists and economists written in an easy to understand language (except for some sections in one essay where the authors wants to foist technical terms on you to impress or cajole you into seeing things their way but you will know and identify such people and make your own judgements about what they have to say) and it presents both point of views (the extremes as well as the middle ground).

Although there is one bad thing about the book (you cannot tell clearly which author will argue which side until you are in the middle of the essay : this is particularly the case with people who wish to state that Culture Does NOT Matter. They almost sneak up their arguments on you and beat around the bush for pages before getting there; which probably reflects on their essays).

If anything, reading this book has told me A LOT about every manner of culture including African and Latin American cultures. These are deep insights that only an observant student of that culture can deduce. It is enlightening to read them at times while at other times you go "Ok, so these people have problems, maybe I can do something about it, maybe I may not, but I would like to know more about the culture good and bad, and particularly the parts that every culture tries to hide or gloss over".

This book is a good read for all future politicians, economists, businessmen and anyone who is curious about how to interact with various cultures and what are the motivations behind the actions of various cultures. Fabulous, simply fabulous. What is amazing is the media attention a book like Guns, Germs and Steel received as opposed to this book which is simply sublime. I read passages of it to everyone I know.