Culture Matters
Mini Teaser: As unacceptable as the notion is to many in a relativistic age, culture is a--if not the--determining factor in the economic progress of countries.
The decades-old war on poverty and authoritarianism in the poor
countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America has produced more
disappointment and frustration than it has victories. The deprivation
and despair that prevailed in the mid-twentieth century persist in
most of these countries, even a decade after capitalism's ideological
triumph over socialism. Where democratically elected chiefs of state
have displaced traditional authoritarian regimes, a pattern most
notable in Latin America, the experiments are fragile, and
"democracy" often means little more than periodic elections.
What explains the persistence of poverty and authoritarianism? Why
have they proven so intractable? Why have no countries in Africa,
Asia and Latin America other than the East Asian dragons made their
way into the elite group of affluent countries? The conventional
diagnoses that have been offered during the past half
century--exploitation, imperialism, education and know-how
shortfalls, lack of opportunity, lack of capital, inadequate markets,
weak institutions--are demonstrably inadequate. The crucial element
that has been largely ignored is the cultural: that is to say, values
and attitudes that stand in the way of progress. Some cultures, above
all those of the West and East Asia, have proven themselves more
prone to progress than others. Their achievements are reiterated when
their peoples migrate to other countries, as in the cases of the
British in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and
the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, who have flourished wherever they
have migrated.
The conclusion that culture matters goes down hard. It clashes with
cultural relativism, widely subscribed to in the academic world,
which argues that cultures can be assessed only on their own terms
and that value judgments by outsiders are taboo. The implication is
that all cultures are equally worthy, and those who argue to the
contrary are often labeled ethnocentric, intolerant or even racist. A
similar problem is encountered with those economists who believe that
culture is irrelevant--that people will respond to economic signals
in the same way regardless of their culture.
But a growing number of academics, journalists and politicians are
writing and talking about culture as a crucial factor in societal
development, and a new paradigm of human progress is emerging.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan captured the shift recently
when he said, in the context of economic conditions in Russia, that
he had theretofore assumed that capitalism was "human nature." But in
the wake of the collapse of the Russian economy, he concluded that
"it was not human nature at all, but culture"--a succinct restatement
of Max Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism.
A Dismal Record
In the 1950s, the world turned its attention from rebuilding the
countries devastated by World War II to ending the poverty, ignorance
and injustice in which most of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin
America lived. Optimism abounded in the wake of the stunning success
of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe and Japan's ascent from the
ashes of defeat. Development was viewed as inevitable, particularly
as the colonial yoke disappeared. Walt Rostow's hugely influential
book, The Stages of Economic Growth, published in 1960, suggested
that human progress was driven by a dialectic that could be
accelerated. The Alliance for Progress, John F. Kennedy's answer to
the Cuban revolution, captured the prevailing optimism. It would
duplicate the Marshall Plan's success, and Latin America would be
well on its way to prosperity and democracy within ten years.
But as the century ended, that optimism had been displaced by
frustration and pessimism, the consensus on market economics and
democracy notwithstanding. Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore and the former British colony Hong Kong have followed
Rostow's trajectory into the First World, and a few others--for
example, Chile, China, Malaysia and Thailand--have experienced
sustained, rapid growth. Spain and Portugal finally opened themselves
to the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Western
values that had driven the modernization of their neighbors in
Europe. And like Japan before them, the East Asian dragons rode the
Protestant Ethic-like features of Confucianism and export promotion
policies to success.
But the vast majority of countries still lags far behind. Of the six
billion people who inhabit the world today, fewer than one billion
are to be found in the advanced democracies. More than four billion
live in what the World Bank classifies as "low-income" or "lower
middle-income" countries. The quality of life in those countries is
dismaying:
* Half or more of the adult population of 23 countries, mostly in
Africa, is illiterate. Non-African countries include Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Haiti.
* Half or more of the women in 35 countries are illiterate, including
not only those countries just listed but Algeria, Egypt, Guatemala,
India, Laos, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.
* Life expectancy is below 60 years in 45 countries, most in Africa,
but also Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos and Papua New Guinea.
Life expectancy is below 50 years in 18 countries, all in Africa. And
in Sierra Leone it is just 37 years.
* The mortality rate for children under 5 is greater than 10 percent
in at least 35 countries, most, again, in Africa. Other countries
include Bangladesh, Bolivia, Haiti, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan and Yemen.
* The population growth rate in the poorest countries is 2.1 percent
annually, three times the rate in the high-income countries. The
growth rate in some Islamic countries is astonishingly high: 5
percent in Oman, 4.9 percent in the United Arab Emirates, 4.8 percent
in Jordan, 3.4 percent in Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan.
Furthermore, the most inequitable income distribution patterns among
countries supplying such data to the World Bank--not all do--are
found in the poorer countries, particularly in Latin America and
Africa. The most affluent 10 percent of Brazil's population accounts
for almost 48 percent of its income. Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe
are a fraction of a point behind.
Democratic institutions are commonly weak or nonexistent in Africa,
the Islamic countries of the Middle East, and in the rest of Asia.
Democracy has appeared to prosper in Latin America over the past
fifteen years. Argentina, Brazil and Chile seem headed toward
democratic stability after decades of military rule. But the
fragility of the democratic experiments is underscored by recent
events in several countries: in Colombia, where left-wing guerrillas,
often cooperating with drug traffickers, control large parts of the
country and threaten to topple the government; in Ecuador, where
ineptitude and corruption in the Andean capital of Quito have
contributed to a deep recession and to separatist sentiment in
coastal Guayaquil; and in Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez, an officer
who attempted two coups in the early 1990s, is now president and
conducting himself in ways that leave one wondering whether he, and
not Fidel Castro, may turn out to be the last Latin American
caudillo. And there remains a weighty question: Why after more than
150 years of independence has Latin America, an extension of the
West, failed to consolidate democratic institutions?
In sum, the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is far
poorer, far more unjust, far more authoritarian than most people half
a century ago expected it would be, and the anticipated fruits of the
post-Cold War democratic-capitalist consensus have, with a few
exceptions, yet to be harvested.
Explaining the Failure: Colonialism and Dependency
As it became apparent that the problems of underdevelopment were more
intractable than the development experts had predicted, two
explanations with Marxist-Leninist roots came to dominate the
politics of the poor countries and the universities of the rich
countries: colonialism and dependency.
Lenin had identified imperialism as a late and inevitable stage of
capitalism that reflected what he viewed as the inability of
increasingly monopolistic capitalist countries to find domestic
markets for their products and capital. For those former colonies,
possessions or mandate countries that had recently gained
independence, imperialism was a reality that left a profound imprint
on the national psyche and presented a ready explanation for
underdevelopment--particularly in Africa, where national boundaries
had often been arbitrarily drawn without reference to homogeneity of
culture or tribal coherence.
For those countries in what would come to be called the Third World
that had been independent for a century or more, as in Latin America,
"imperialism" took the shape of "dependency"--the theory that the
poor countries of "the periphery" were bilked by the rich capitalist
countries of "the center." These countries allegedly depressed world
market prices of basic commodities and inflated the prices of
manufactured goods, enabling their multinational corporations to
extort excessive profits.
The injustice of dependency was popularized by the Uruguayan writer
Eduardo Galeano, whose phenomenally successful book, The Open Veins
of Latin America, was first published in 1971 (it has since been
republished sixty-seven times). The following lines capture its
essence:
"Latin America is the region of open veins. From the discovery up to
the present, our wealth has been taken from us first by European
capital and then by American capital and has accumulated in those
distant centers of power. . . . The international division of labor
consists of some countries that specialize in getting rich and some
in getting poor."
The Marxist-Leninist roots of dependency theory are apparent from
another popular book published in the same year with the title
Dependency and Development in Latin America. The authors were
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, today the president of Brazil, and Enzo
Faletto, an Argentine. The book, in stark contrast with President
Cardoso's centrist, democratic-capitalist policies since 1993,
concludes:
"It is not realistic to imagine that capitalist development will
solve basic problems for the majority of the population. In the end,
what has to be discussed as an alternative is not the consolidation
of the state and the fulfillment of 'autonomous capitalism' but how
to supersede them. The important question, then, is how to construct
paths toward socialism."
Neither "colonialism" nor "dependency" have much credibility today.
For many, including some Africans, the statute of limitations on
colonialism as an explanation for underdevelopment lapsed long ago.
Moreover, four former colonies, two British (Hong Kong and Singapore)
and two Japanese (South Korea and Taiwan), have vaulted into the
First World. One rarely hears dependency mentioned today, not even in
American universities, where not many years ago it was a conventional
wisdom that brooked no dissent. Contributing to dependency theory's
demise were, among other factors, the collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe; the transformation of communism in China into
conventional, increasingly free-market authoritarianism; the collapse
of the Cuban economy after Russia halted massive Soviet subventions;
the success of the East Asian dragons in the world market; the
decisive defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections;
and theretofore stridently anti-Yanqui Mexico's initiative to join
Canada and the United States in NAFTA.
And so an explanatory vacuum emerged in the last decade of the century.
Explaining the Failure: Culture
Largely unnoticed in U.S. academic circles, a new, inward-looking
paradigm that focuses on cultural values and attitudes is gradually
filling the explanatory vacuum left by dependency theory's collapse.
Recently, Latin America has taken the lead in articulating the
paradigm and contriving initiatives to translate it into actions
designed not only to accelerate economic growth but also to fortify
democratic institutions and promote social justice. The culture
paradigm also has adherents in Africa and Asia.
Of course, many analysts who have studied the East Asian economic
miracles over the past three decades have concluded that "Confucian"
values--such as emphasis on the future, work, education, merit and
frugality--have played a crucial role in East Asia's successes. But
just as the flourishing of the East Asians in the world market--so
inconsistent with dependency theory--was largely ignored by Latin
American intellectuals and politicians until recent years, so was the
cultural explanation for those miracles. Latin America has now for
the most part accepted the economic policy lessons of East Asia, and
it is confronting the question: If dependency and imperialism are not
responsible for our economic underdevelopment, our authoritarian
political traditions, and our extreme social injustice, what is?
That question was posed by the Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel in a
book published in the mid-1970s, The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate
Relationship with the United States. Rangel was not the first Latin
American to conclude that traditional Ibero-American values and
attitudes, and the institutions that reflected and reinforced them,
were the principal cause of Latin America's "failure", a word he
contrasted with the "success" of the United States and Canada.
Similar conclusions were recorded by, among others, Simón Bolívar's
aide, Francisco Miranda, in the last years of the eighteenth century;
by the eminent Argentines Juan Bautista Alberdi and Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento and the Chilean Francisco Bilbao in the second half of the
nineteenth century; and by the Nicaraguan intellectual Salvador
Mendieta early in the twentieth century. Anticipating similar
comments by Alexis de Tocqueville twenty years later, Bolívar himself
had this to say in 1815:
As long as our compatriots fail to acquire the talents and political
virtues that distinguish our brothers to the north, political systems
based on popular participation, far from helping us, will bring our
ruin. Unfortunately, those qualities in the necessary degree are
beyond us. We are dominated by the vices of Spain--violence,
overweening ambition, vindictiveness, and greed.
Rangel's book earned him the enmity of most Latin American
intellectuals and was mostly ignored by Latin American specialists in
North America and Europe. But the book has proven to be seminal. In
1979 Nobelist Octavio Paz explained the contrast between the two
Americas this way: "One, English-speaking, is the daughter of the
tradition that has founded the modern world: the Reformation, with
its social and political consequences, democracy and capitalism. The
other, Spanish and Portuguese speaking, is the daughter of the
universal Catholic monarchy and the Counter-Reformation."
One finds strong echoes of Rangel in Claudio Véliz's 1994 book, The
New World of the Gothic Fox, which contrasts the Anglo-Protestant and
Ibero-Catholic legacies in the New World. Véliz defines the new
cultural current with the words of the celebrated Peruvian writer
Mario Vargas Llosa, who asserts that the economic, educational and
judicial reforms necessary to Latin America's modernization cannot be
effected
"unless they are preceded or accompanied by a reform of our customs
and ideas, of the whole complex system of habits, knowledge, images
and forms that we understand by 'culture.' The culture within which
we live and act today in Latin America is neither liberal nor is it
altogether democratic. We have democratic governments, but our
institutions, our reflexes and our mentality are very far from being
democratic. They remain populist and oligarchic, or absolutist,
collectivist or dogmatic, flawed by social and racial prejudices,
immensely intolerant with respect to political adversaries, and
devoted to the worst monopoly of all, that of the truth."
The recent runaway bestseller in Latin America, Guide to the Perfect
Latin American Idiot, is dedicated to Rangel by its co-authors,
Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza; Vargas Llosa's son, Álvaro; and
Cuban exile Carlos Alberto Montaner, all three of whom identify
themselves as "idiots" of the far Left in their younger years. The
book criticizes those Latin American intellectuals of this century
who have promoted the view that the region is a victim of
imperialism. Among them are Galeano, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara,
pre-presidential Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Gustavo Gutiérrez,
founder of Liberation Theology. Mendoza, Montaner and Vargas Llosa
strongly imply that the real causes of Latin America's
underdevelopment are in the minds of the Latin Americans:
"In reality, except for cultural factors, nothing prevented Mexico
from doing what Japan did when it almost totally displaced the United
States' production of television sets."
In their 1998 sequel, Manufacturers of Misery, the authors trace the
influence of the traditional culture on the behavior of six elite
groups: the politicians, the military, business people, the clergy,
the intellectuals and the revolutionaries, all of whom have acted in
ways that impede progress toward democratic-capitalist modernity. A
year later, a prominent Argentine intellectual and media celebrity,
Mariano Grondona, published The Cultural Conditions of Economic
Development, which analyzes and contrasts development-prone (e.g.,
U.S. and Canadian) and development-resistant (e.g., Latin American)
cultures. Among the differences noted was a stronger emphasis on
creativity, innovation, trust, education and merit in the former.
To be sure, Latin American values and attitudes are changing, as the
transition to democratic politics and market economics of the past
fifteen years suggests. Several forces are modifying the region's
culture, among them the new intellectual current, the globalization
of communications and economics, and the surge in
evangelical/Pentecostal Protestantism. Protestants now account for
more than 30 percent of the population in Guatemala and 15-20 percent
in Brazil, Chile and Nicaragua.
The impact of these new-paradigm books and Montaner's weekly columns
(he is the most widely read columnist in the Spanish language) has
been profound in Latin America. But in the United States, Canada and
Western Europe, they have gone largely unnoticed. A generation of
Latin Americanists nurtured on dependency theory, or the less extreme
view that the solution to Latin America's problems depends on the
United States being more magnanimous in its dealings with the region,
finds the cultural explanation indigestible.
However, one American of Mexican descent, Texas businessman Lionel
Sosa, has contributed to the new paradigm. In his 1998 book, The
Americano Dream, Sosa catalogues a series of Hispanic values and
attitudes that present obstacles to achieving the upward mobility of
mainstream America:
* The resignation of the poor--"To be poor is to deserve heaven. To
be rich is to deserve hell. It is good to suffer in this life because
in the next life you will find eternal reward."
* The low priority given to education--"The girls don't really need
it--they'll get married anyway. And the boys? It's better that they
go to work, to help the family." (The Hispanic high school dropout
rate in the United States is about 30 percent, vastly higher than
that of white and black Americans.)
* Fatalism--"Individual initiative, achievement, self-reliance,
ambition, aggressiveness--all these are useless in the face of an
attitude that says, 'We must not challenge the will of God.' . . .
The virtues so essential to business success in the United States are
looked upon as sins by the Latino church." At least in California,
the Hispanic rate of self-employment is well below the state's
average.
* Mistrust of those outside the family, which contributes to the
generally small size of Hispanic businesses.
At least one African has come to similar conclusions about the slow
rate of progress on his continent. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle is a
Cameroonian who holds a doctorate in economics and planning from the
Sorbonne and who heads a prominent consulting company that operates
throughout Africa. In 1990 he published a book in France entitled
Does Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment Program?, in which he
attributes Africa's poverty, authoritarianism and social injustice
principally to traditional cultural values and attitudes. The book
evokes the new-paradigm literature in Latin America.
Etounga-Manguelle's analysis of African culture highlights the highly
centralized, vertical traditions of authority; a focus on the past
and present, not the future; a rejection of "the tyranny of time"; a
distaste for work ("The African works to live but doesn't live to
work"); the suppression of individual initiative, achievement and
saving (the corollary is jealousy of success); a belief in sorcery
that nurtures irrationality and fatalism.
For those, particularly in the international development community,
who see "institution-building" as the way to solve the problems of
the Third World, Etounga-Manguelle offers an insight: "Culture is the
mother; institutions are the children."
Etounga-Manguelle concludes that Africa must "change or perish." A
cultural "adjustment" is not enough. What is needed is a cultural
revolution that transforms traditional authoritarian child-rearing
practices, which "produce sheep"; transforms education through
emphasis on the individual, independent judgment and creativity;
produces free individuals working together for the progress of the
community; produces an elite concerned with the well-being of the
society; and promotes a healthy economy based on the work ethic, the
profit motive and individual initiative.
How Culture Influences Progress
The idea of "progress" is suspect for those who are committed to
cultural relativism. Some anthropologists view it as an idea the West
is trying to impose on other cultures. At the extreme, cultural
relativists may argue that Westerners have no right to criticize
institutions and practices like female genital mutilation; suttee,
the Hindu practice for widows to join their dead husbands on funeral
pyres; or even slavery. Some Western anthropologists opposed the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But after a half century of the communications revolution, it is
clear that progress in the Western--and East Asian--sense has become
a virtually universal aspiration. I am not speaking of progress as
defined by the affluent consumer society, although an end to poverty
is clearly one of the universal goals, and that inevitably means
higher levels of consumption. Over the almost two decades that I have
been studying and writing about the relationship between cultural
values and human progress, I have identified ten values, attitudes or
mindsets that distinguish progressive cultures--cultures that
facilitate achievement of the goals of the UN Declaration --from
static cultures, which impede their achievement:
1. Time orientation: The progressive culture emphasizes the future,
the static culture the present or past. Future orientation implies a
progressive world-view: influence over one's destiny, rewards in this
life for virtue, and positive-sum economics in which wealth
expands--in contrast to the zero-sum psychology commonly found in
poor countries.
2. Work and achievement are central to the good life in the
progressive culture, but are of lesser importance in the static
culture. In the former, work structures daily life, and diligence,
creativity and achievement are rewarded not only financially but also
with satisfaction, self-respect and prestige.
3. Frugality is the mother of investment--and financial security--in
progressive cultures; a threat to the egalitarian status quo in
static, zero-sum cultures in which one person's gains are at the
expense of others.
4. Education is the key to advancement in progressive cultures but is
of marginal importance except for the elites in static cultures.
5. Merit is central to advancement in the progressive culture;
connections and family are what count in the static culture.
6. Community: The radius of identification and trust extends beyond
the family to the broader society in the progressive culture, whereas
the family circumscribes community in the static culture. Societies
with a narrow radius of identification and trust are more prone to
corruption, nepotism and tax evasion and are less likely to engage in
philanthropy.
7. The societal ethical code tends to be more rigorous in the
progressive culture. Every advanced democracy except Belgium, Taiwan,
Italy and South Korea appears among the 25 least corrupt countries on
Transparency Internation-al's "Corruption Perceptions Index." Chile
and Botswana are the only Third World countries that appear among the
top 25.
8. Justice and fair play are universal, impersonal expectations in
the progressive culture. In the static culture, justice, like
personal advancement, is often a function of whom you know or how
much you can pay.
9. Authority tends toward dispersion and horizontality in progressive
cultures, which encourage dissent; toward concentration and
verticality in static cultures, which encourage orthodoxy.
10. Secularism: The influence of religious institutions on civic life
is small in the progressive culture; their influence in static
cultures is often substantial. Heterodoxy and dissent are encouraged
in the former, orthodoxy and conformity are encouraged in the latter.
Obviously, these ten factors are generalized and idealized, and the
reality of cultural variation is not black and white but a spectrum,
in which colors fuse into one another. Few countries would be graded
"10" on all the factors, just as few countries would be graded "1."
Nonetheless, virtually all of the advanced democracies--and
high-achieving ethnic/religious groups such as Mormons, East Asian
immigrants, Jews, Sikhs and Basques--would receive substantially
higher scores than virtually all of the Third World countries.
This conclusion invites the inference that what is really in play is
development, not culture. The same argument could be made about
Transparency International's corruption index. There is a complex
interplay of cause and effect between culture and progress. But the
power of culture is demonstrable--for example, in those countries
where the economic achievement of ethnic minorities far exceeds that
of the majorities, as in the case of the Chinese in Thailand,
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and even the United States.
The ten factors I have suggested are not definitive. But they do at
least suggest which elements in the vastness of "culture" may
influence the way societies evolve. Moreover, the new-paradigm
writers in Latin America and Africa attribute the slow modernization
of their countries in large measure to just such traditional values
and attitudes. Their views evoke the seminal culturalists Alexis de
Tocqueville, Max Weber and Edward Banfield. Tocqueville's Democracy
in America is particularly relevant for those who would adduce
geographic or institutional explanations for democratic development:
Europeans exaggerate the influence of geography on the lasting powers
of democratic institutions. Too much importance is attached to laws
and too little to mores. . . . If in the course of this book I have
not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to
the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, opinions,
and, in a word, their mores, in maintaining their laws, I have failed
in the main object of my work.
Changing the Traditional Culture
In part because of the influence of the new-paradigm writers, but in
some cases because of life experiences that have brought them to the
same conclusions, a growing number of Latin Americans and others have
initiated activities that promote progressive values and attitudes.
Octavio Mavila was for three decades the Honda distributor in Peru. A
burly self-made man well into his seventies, Mavila has visited Japan
numerous times over the years. He came to the conclusion that the
only significant difference between Japan and Peru was that Japanese
children learned progressive values while Peruvian children did not.
In 1990 he established the Institute of Human Development in Lima to
promote "the Ten Commandments of Development": order, cleanliness,
punctuality, responsibility, achievement, honesty, respect for the
rights of others, respect for the law, work ethic and frugality. (In
The Americano Dream, Lionel Sosa presents a similar program for
success based on "the twelve traits of successful Latinos.") More
than two million Peruvian students have participated in courses
sponsored by the institute.
The Ten Commandments of Development are being preached outside Peru,
too. Humberto Belli, Nicaragua's minister of education in two
administrations, viewed them as central to his program of educational
reform. Ramón de la Peña, rector of the Monterrey campus of Mexico's
prestigious Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, has
also promoted use of the Ten Commandments.
The effectiveness of the evangelizing approach to cultural change
needs to be evaluated. As Luis Ugalde, a Jesuit who is the rector of
the Catholic University of Caracas, has observed, if children learn a
progressive ethic in school and find it irrelevant to their lives
outside of school, the impact may be scant. That is why Ugalde, who
is convinced that values and attitudes matter, is promoting
anti-corruption, pro-merit campaigns in government, business and the
professions.
Corruption is in significant part a cultural phenomenon, linked to
factors like limited radius of identification and trust that
translate into a limited sense of community and an elastic ethical
code. Corruption has become a high-profile issue in Latin America. In
1998 the Organization of American States adopted the Inter-American
Convention against Corruption. Few expect that the Convention itself
is going to dramatically reduce the incidence of corruption--five
Latin American countries (Paraguay, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela and
Ecuador) appear among Transparency International's ten most corrupt
countries. But it is clear that corruption is today receiving far
more attention than it once did, by, among others, the World Bank.
The gender issue has also come to the fore, challenging the traditional machismo culture. Latin American women are increasingly aware of the gender democratization that has occurred, particularly in First World countries, in recent decades, and they are increasingly organizing and taking initiatives to rectify the sexism that has traditionally kept them in second-class status. In several countries, laws concerning parental and property rights and divorce have been liberalized in favor of women, and nine countries have established obligatory quotas for women candidates in elections. While these electoral laws are not uniformly effective, they are a reminder that the gender revolution, and all that it implies with respect to transformation of traditional values, is reaching Latin America.
Integrating Values and Attitudes into Development
WITH the notable exceptions of East Asia and Iberia, human progress during the half century since World War II has been disheartening. The principal reason for this has been the failure to take into account the power of culture to thwart or facilitate progress. It is, for example, the cultural contrast between Western Europe and Latin America that chiefly explains the success of the Marshall Plan and the failure of the Alliance for Progress.
This is not to say that addressing culture will solve all problems. Culture is one of several factors--others being geography and climate, ideology, policies, globalization, leadership, the vagaries of history--that influence progress. The limits of cultural explanations are obvious when one considers the striking contrasts in progress between North and South Korea, and between East and West Germany. But particularly as we view the longer run, culture's power becomes more apparent.
At a 1999 Harvard symposium entitled "Cultural Values and Human Progress", Nathan Glazer observed that people are made uncomfortable or are offended by cultural explanations of why some countries and some ethnic groups do better than others. But the alternative--to view oneself or one's group as a victim--is worse. As Bernard Lewis recently observed in a Foreign Affairs article about the Islamic countries, When people realize that things are going wrong, there are two questions they can ask. One is, 'What did we do wrong?' and the other is 'Who did this to us?' The latter leads to conspiracy theories and paranoia. The first question leads to another line of thinking: 'How do we put it right?'
A consensus emerged at the Harvard symposium that we need to understand a good deal more about the intricate relationship between culture and progress and what can be done to promote progressive values. A research agenda has been developed, the end product of which would be guidelines for governments and development institutions. The agenda would 1) define, analyze and weight the values that most influence development; 2) enhance understanding of the complex relationships among values, policies, institutions and development; and 3) enhance understanding of the role of agents of cultural transmission, e.g., parents, peers, schools, television. The research agenda would also extend the World Values Survey, which now covers sixty-five countries, further into the poor countries and tailor it to the results of the research on values. Finally, an evaluation would be undertaken of activities already under way that promote progressive values and attitudes, particularly through education, more effective parenting, pro motion of entrepreneurship, promotion of civic responsibility, reduction of corruption and expansion of philanthropy.
Culture is not the only force that shapes the destinies of nations, particularly in the short run. Moreover, culture changes. An observation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan is apt: "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."
But I believe that David Landes is right in concluding in his recent book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, "If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference." I believe that the same is true of political and social development. Yet the role of cultural values and attitudes as obstacles to or facilitators of progress has been largely ignored by governments and aid agencies. Integrating value and attitude change into policies and programs will assure that, in the next fifty years, the world does not relive the poverty and injustice in which most poor countries have been mired during the past half century's "decades of development."
Lawrence E. Harrison directed USAID missions in five Latin American countries between 1965 and 1981. He is a senior fellow at Harvard University's Academy for International and Area Studies, and co-editor of Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (Basic Book, 2000)
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