Race and Culture: A World View. - book reviews

OFFERING instruction from examples culled from the whole range of human history, in a prose magisterially discursive and confident, Thomas Sowell has produced a book that will compel every careful reader, and not just those on the Left, to rethink their most confident views on matters of race and culture. Even where he does not command assent, Mr. Sowell provokes gratitude, if only for the opportunity to resist. Of how many books can one say nearly as much?

"Culture," not "race," is the basal notion here. Indeed the title of his book is a bit misleading, for Mr. Sowell sees "race" not as a rival or parallel concept but entirely under the aspect of "culture," as he defines it. It is primarily "culture"--including the "culture" of self-styled and socially styled "races"--he says, that most fundamentally explains the ubiqitous fact that some groups--and the individuals of which they are composed--are decisively more capable and effective than others in performing "the vital economic activities" that, to Mr. Sowell, are the soul of civilization.

In societies composed of multiple cultures, he argues, the general level of prosperity has everywhere and always depended on the superior functioning or cultural influence of peoples who come sometimes as conquerors--as the Romans did to England--but also as migrants--Scots, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Germans, Jews--and succeed in mastering the material challenges of their alien situation better than the natives, often overcoming scorn, persecution, and hostile public policy in the bargain. He offers even the case of enslaved groups whose skills surfaced and flowered because they--the slaves and their skills--proved to be indispensable and irreplaceable. And he offers, as well, copious examples of groups around the world and throughout history which with equal or superior "opportunities" pale in comparison to the culturally superior minorities in their midst, when economic competency is taken as the standard. When these minorities leave, he shows with pointed examples from contemporary Africa but also several from distant times, the abandoned societies decline. It is hard to imagine a more sweeping argument for the proposition that in the ultimate historical analysis, peoples are decidedly unequal, and equal economic results cannot be engineered without serious detriment to general prosperity.

Clearly, Mr. Sowell's definition of "culture" is special and quite narrow. He attends singularly to a culture's ability to secrete values, aptitudes, and traits of character that, he argues and richly illustrates, everywhere and always have led to material triumph: hard work, rationality, talents for organization and abstract conceptualization, the propensity to save, educability which includes an openness to the lessons of superior "cultures," an attitude toward life void of collective self-pity, undaunted by challenges and the need for personal sacrifice. Other aspects of "culture," as that term is conventionally understood, are typically presented here as subversive of those material-centered virtues: fixations on cultural "identity," ethnocentrisms, jingoisms, prides and pieties of nearly every sort (except the pieties of the free market), status obsessions, merely traditional ceremonies and rituals.

In a startling discussion of nineteenth-century Western imperialism, he argues that it was driven not by sound rational economic logic but by cultural obsessions and for that reason proved transitory in contrast to other of history's grand imperialisms. Similarly, he argues that racial segregation in this country would have been far less severe, though never eliminated, if the rational logic of the market, and not, as was too frequently the case, cultural obsessions about race, had been the source of the discrimination. He is particularly contemptuous of the culture of politicians and bureaucrats, especially those trained in the "soft" liberal arts, which he says, over and again, have little to contribute to economic performance. Clearly, for all his respect for "culture" as a primary contributor to the wealth of nations, many of the peoples he offers for emulation here are not representative of rounded, deeply rooted cultures--most aspects of which Mr. Sowell disdains as counterproductive--but cultural cosmopolites who take economic instruction well, overcome spiritual distractions, and are capable of abandoning their home culture when they meet one that is demonstrably superior. Indeed, some of the most competent examples that Mr. Sowell presents, for admiration and presumably emulation, seem to be not the most thoroughly acculturated of peoples, but the least.

Nonetheless, his central contentions --that culture, or aspects of it, explains individual performance and that human performance, "cultural capital" as he terms it, is a major factor behind the wealth of nations--can withstand these reservations, and from them cultural relativists, egalitarians, legislative quick-fixers, and would-be totalitarian social engineers will recoil. Material progress, sheer worldly competency and potency, Mr. Sowell eloquently argues, are universal and unambiguous standards against which all peoples may be measured, and should be, for these are matters of paramount human consequence. And when these measurements are made and compared, many peoples will be found irreducibly wanting. Most "stereotypes," Mr. Sowell unflinchingly submits, are valid--not all (he certainly does not deny the presence of irrational bigotry), but most--and because the realities that provoke these stereotypes are deeply rooted in cultural habit, they cannot quickly be conjured away by environmental tinkering or linguistic deconstructions.