Lawrence E. Harrison

I kept wanting to write a review, but couldn't because I'm trying to be classy these days and come up with something to say about this book and author that doesn't begin with "So this dumb muthaf---- right here...."

I kept trying to finish this book, and limped along for months, scanning the last hundred pages in those odd moments when I got tired of watching paint dry or y'know, reading actual good books.

I finally powered through it. For science. And because apparently I don't like myself as much as I thought.

This is a terrible book.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, WHY is it so terrible? The author describes himself as a Jewish chauvinist and a proud product of assimilation into America the Great and identification as White. The last chapter seems to consist primarily of the author recounting experiences of being invited to join or consult with major cultural organizations based on his reputation as a scholar of cultural relativism and USAID worker, and then being fired as soon as the people in charge of these organizations discovered what his actual cultural opinions are. This, of course, is the fault of those organizations for not being visionary enough, not looking at the facts, and believing that their own cultural values may contribute to success.

What the author actually is, is a racist, and not a particularly clever one at that. He reels off statistics (with a special fondness for OECD scores, oddly broken down into racial as well as national categories) and elevates Jewish, white Euro and American Protestant and East Asian "Confucian" cultures to paragon status, the pinnacle of human societies with very few internal problems or challenges. He exhibits very little understanding of interactions between cultures and gives no reasons, aside from a mysterious innate cultural inferiority and false sense of victimization, for why Nigerian Protestants are not as "successful" in his view as white ones. Or why a mostly Hindu and Muslim India is as successful as a Confucian China. Or how this book, a steaming pile of pseudo-intellectual racist tripe, manages to be used as a textbook in cultural studies classes in universities that still largely pretend that history begins and ends with the Boston Tea Party and somebody's Irish great grandmother.

He cherry-picks rather curious examples to back up his assertions. The only successes that matter to him are those that are unchallenging to a 1950s Protestant American white/white-appearing/white-aspirational stereotype, ignoring the successes of Irish Catholics, African Americans(who he derides in an entire chapter dedicated to our "sense of victimology" because clearly history counts for nothing--after all, look at the Jews *eye roll*), Latino politicians--basically, if you aren't Jewish, East Asian, or white, your culture's successes count for nothing. And if they do, it's because at some point Jews, Confucians or European Protestants ran the culture at some point. All of this is done with no discussion of any negative cultural issues that may exist in "high value" cultures or positive factors within "low value" cultures. There's no realistic viewpoint of culture as the self-expression of a people here, only as a tool to make money and get higher test scores. How backwards.

This book is disgusting, hateful, outdated and peculiarly misanthropic at times, but because it's prettied up with carefully selected facts and statistics and is not overtly anti-minority--just overtly anti-non-assimilating minority--it's taken seriously as a text on serious cultural solutions in the modern age. In doing so, it perpetuates some pretty foul stereotypes--Latinos and Blacks are lazy and stupid, Asians are a "model minority"(even though last I checked, there are more Asians in the world than anyone else) and white people are inherently hard-working with superior values. Long, anecdotal lists of successful people are trotted out for each high value culture, ignoring the fact that such a list can be made for ANY culture, poking a neat hole in one of his most commonly used proofs.

What's missing from this book is any appreciation of humanity. Culture is a human thing, a means of connection and creativity, not a tool for soulless financial success or a problem to be fixed. Adopting one culture does not always mean rejecting another and history and systems of oppression and economic equality matter a LOT in the way that cultures have developed and continue to develop. Also, there are more ways to be successful than passing tests and working in fields rampant with nepotism and cronyism, then pretending that you got there by pure ability.

I could type another ten pages about this, but I won't. I'll simply say, DON'T READ THIS BOOK. The ideas within aren't worth the paper they're printed on.… (mere)

Culture Matters provides readers with a variety of arguments on different arguments on the question of development, and to what degree behavior changes outweigh technological or political factors. Personally, I find that Culture Matters, written at the height of Globalization, may be slightly outdated in its meta-argument, but this is probably due to the fact that there hasn't been enough global continuity to establish another such text. This is also my opinion on Thomas Friedman: Culture Matters may have that one drawback, but the usefulness and overall quality of the text greatly outweighs this. I highly recommend reading.… (mere)