Culture Matters

I'm reading this book called Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress
which was a recommendation from David Brooks in this article. It's awesome.

In my two classes with Prof. Gilles, Social Change and Trends and now Global Perspectives and Realities, we have talked about why certain countries "succeed" and why some "fail" through multiple examples. We read the book Collapse by Jared Diamond for the Social Change class, which was fascinating.

However, there's an issue here. I'm feeling very postmodern by saying this, but, who defines success? Where one ethnic group or country might be very industrious and have a strong economy, another ethnic group or country might have a strong value for the family and community. Which is better or more desirable (because, often, they tend to be mutually exclusive)?

Here's a paragraph from Culture Matters:

"...it is first necessary to define our terms. By the term "human progress" in the subtitle of this book we mean movement toward economic development and material well-being, social-economic equity, and political democracy. The term "culture," of course, has had multiple meanings in different disciplines and different contexts. It is often used to refer to the intellectual, musical, artistic, and literary products of a society, its "high culture." Anthropologists, perhaps most notably Clifford Geertz, have emphasized culture as "thick description" and used it to refer to the entire way of life of a society: its values, practices, symbols, institutions, and human relationships. In this book, however, we are interested in how culture affects societal development; if culture includes everything, it explains nothing. Hence we define culture in purely subjective terms as the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientation, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society." (xv)

So, a culture, as used here, is the worldview, the zeitgeist, the what-makes-us-different-from-them.

Of course, some cultures can have more healthy traits than others and can love honesty, integrity, and charity more than other countries or groups. But most cultures tend to be a mixed bag. Is globalization (by the definition I learned from Thomas L. Friedman - free economies, free business trade - free, not necessarily fair) really the best thing for everyone? The guys in Culture Matters say yes, if it provides better health care and overall well-being for everyone. Of course, it is kind of undeniable that a group or country with the least deaths from preventable diseases wins. I don't know...

Articles & Fragments

• the celebrities in Nigeria are priests and generals. odd. BBC News: "Nigeria's new celebrity class"
• To read later: David Brooks' "The Segmented Society" and "Questions of Culture"
• From "Questions of Culture":

  · "Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences. The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches. The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of family and group. Alan Greenspan said that he once assumed that capitalism was "human nature." But after watching the collapse of the Russian economy, he had come to consider it "was not human nature at all, but culture.""

• What I want to study: "It all amounts to this: Events have forced different questions on us. If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition."
• My love for Sasha Frere-Jones is growing and growing. His look at artists on MySpace: "Full Exposure: Making it on MySpace"
• NYtimes on Facebook advertising: "The Evolution of Facebook's Beacon"
• To read next: Rajan and Subramanian's report: "What Undermines Aid’s Impact on
  Growth?"
• New book on my Amazon.com wish list: Culture Matters: How Values shape human progress
• "This collection of essays addresses a difficult question: Are some cultures better than others at creating freedom, prosperity, and justice? Although Culture Matters offers varying responses to this politically incorrect question, its editors, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, as well as the bulk of its contributors, answer in some form of the affirmative."

"Intimacy and Belonging" by David Brooks

I hardly ever read magazines. The two I do read aren't typical magazines: Lucky (a glorified catalogue), and the New Yorker (more short stories than anything). But I had to buy two at the bookstore for a Postmodernism class collage project. It's fascinating. I bought Adbusters and Flaunt.

In Adbusters they had a reprint of a David Brooks article. I love him. I liked Bobos in Paradise a lot and love his other articles. It talks about three songs that were on the radio this summer: "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood, "U + Ur Hand" by Pink, and "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne.

..."If you put the songs together, you see they're about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song ten, let alone 30 years ago. This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She's like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who's had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette. She's disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She's also, at least in some of the songs, about 16. This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups...When Americans face something that's psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner (I'm learning about this in my Victorian class too - the close of the Frontier made everyone freak out like there was no danger or real life left, just tamed cities). Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don't' get married until they're past 30. That's two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn't a transition anymore. It's a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They've been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cellphones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of 'friends.' that only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.
Young people still need intimacy and belonging more than anything else. But the pose is the product of something real - a response to this new stage of formless premarital life, and the anxieties it produces...We imagine we can overcome the anxieties of society by posing as romantic lone wolves. The angry young women on the radio these days are not the first pop stars to romanticize independence for audiences desperate for companionship."
(See the full article)

My Major

So I tell people that my major in college is Cultural Studies because that's the best way I can describe it. It's kind of a new field, and a thoroughly postmodern one at that. When I was working at a camp after my freshman year in college, my brother sent this article to me: "All Cultures are Not Equal" by David Brooks for the New York Times (read it here). In it, Brooks told me to "Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them." So I did.

However, a more descriptive definition of cultural studies (in this context as a Literary theory) came my way in a book assigned for class, Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory:

"Cultural studies is indeed so open in terms of what it studies and the methods that are employed, that even its adherents are not entirely clear (or united) regarding what cultural studies is. People who say they are "doing" cultural studies share, one could argue, a commitment to a radical or alternative political stance. That is, they seem to be exposing how culture works from an antagonistic or at least questioning perspective." (26)

Ha. Well, that's what my major turned into, at least. Now that I'm in upper-level sociology classes I'm beginning to question my major. Like every reasonable student with senioritis, everything is starting to seem absurd and far-fetched. It's not that I don't care, it's that I don't have the energy to radically shift my worldview anymore.

I'm starting to think that maybe social-psychology might have been the field for me, studying more about the individual needs of people and how they try to fulfill them in society. That sounds more like the cultural studies I was shooting for. Alas. There's always grad school.