No Escape

Bruce Robbins

• Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress edited by Samuel Huntington and Lawrence Harrison
  Basic Books, 384 pp, £12.99, April 2001, ISBN 0 465 03176 5
• Culture/Metaculture by Francis Mulhern
  Routledge, 198 pp, £8.99, March 2000, ISBN 0 415 10230 8
• Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account by Adam Kuper
  Harvard, 299 pp, £12.50, November 2000, ISBN 0 674 00417 5

Why are some nations so poor and others so rich? Two Harvard professors recently revived an old-fashioned answer to this unsettling question, and it sits plainly as the title of their book: ‘Culture Matters.’ Anyone who has ever agreed with them that culture does indeed matter will want to look at what they take this statement to mean. Adding so-called ‘Asian values’ – a more public-spirited, Confucian version of the Protestant ethic – to the 19th century’s self-congratulatory belief in the West’s ‘civilising mission’, Huntington and Harrison have discovered that the West can keep on congratulating itself – not this time on its exportable civilisation, but on its particular culture. The disparity between the misery of others and our relative well-being has nothing to do with colonialism or the IMF. Should you be told that the average life expectancy is 78.2 in Sweden and 39 in Sierra Leone, remind yourself that some cultures are cut out for success and others aren’t. Which culture you are born into is not something for which you are responsible. Neither are you responsible, therefore, for the likelihood that you will benefit from forty more years of earthly existence, or that while doing so you will benefit from an obscenely disproportionate share of the Earth’s resources.