The Primacy of
Culture
By George F. Will
Conservatives say of compassion what
liberals say of passion: it should be kept private.
Progress has become puzzling. When
history was thought to be cyclical, progress seemed
impossible. However, a few centuries ago there was
an outbreak of cheerfulness: progress seemed not only
possible but inevitable. At least it would be if
governments applied social learning, which is cumulative,
through wise policies.
But recently the prerequisites of
progress have become less clear. Consider the United
States, which is flourishing, and Russia, which is
(literally) sickening. The trajectories of both nations
underscore the importance of culture—customs, mores,
traditions, values, institutionalized ideas—rather than
just legal institutions and economic policies as agents of
progress.
Russia is remarkably resistant to
progress, material and moral. Its imploding economy is now
smaller than Denmark's, and public health is
calamitous. Demographer Murray Feshbach reports in The
Atlantic Monthly that radioactive and chemical
contamination is rife. Russia's government reports that
76.5 percent of the children in one town are mentally
retarded because of lead emissions, which nationwide are
50 times those in the European Union. Tuberculosis is
widespread, and even basic pharmaceuticals are scarce.
Some analysts expect mortality from this disease to
increase 70-fold in the next few years—90-fold among
children—and to exceed Russia's toll for heart disease
and cancer.
AIDS and other infectious diseases
(there has been a 30-fold increase in syphilis cases among
girls 14 and younger), parasitic diseases, malnutrition,
alcohol and violence continue to produce a horrifying
anomaly in the industrial age: declining adult life
expectancy. In America, says Feshbach, 83 percent of
16-year-old males will live to the age of 60. Only 54
percent will in Russia. One hundred years ago in European
Russia the figure was 56 percent.
Can Russia take heart from Western
Europe's—and America's—rapid progress from
19th-century conditions that today seem astonishingly
primitive? Not necessarily.
Charles Dickens was, and still is,
criticized for the number of children's deaths in his
novels. Well. Dickens's biographer Peter Ackroyd notes
that in 1839 almost half of London's funerals were for
children under 10. The average age of death in London was
27—22 in the working class. London's air reeked of the
putrescence of decomposing bodies erupting through the
surface of overcrowded graveyards, and the stench of human
excrement. It puddled in gutters in the middle of muddy
streets, and in "cess lakes" scattered through
congested neighborhoods, such as the one where 2,850
people lived in 95 dilapidated houses. Families of eight
in a single room were not unusual. Brown water, for
washing and cooking, came unfiltered from the Thames. In
November and December 1847 half a million of London's 2.1
million residents had typhus fever.
In late-19th-century France, milk, when
not diluted by polluted water, was cut by plaster, lime,
chalk, white lead and dried ground brains, according to
historian Eugen Weber. In "France: Fin de
Siecle" he writes that even among the middle and
upper classes, "washing was rare and bathing
rarer," partly because of the cost of getting water
above ground floors. Those who could afford to, bathed
once a month. Toothbrushes were rarer than
watches. Outside Paris, living was less
refined. Rennes (population 70,000) had 30 tubs and
two homes with private bathrooms. Clothes were
cleaned rarely and people who wore underwear changed it
rarely. "No wonder pretty ladies carried
posies," writes Weber of the days before deodorants.
Material betterment came in a rush,
produced by economic and moral advances that were related
in complex ways. However, as early as 1800 the
economic welfare of Western Europe and North America was
improving much faster than that of Eastern Europe, Russia
or Latin America. The reason, argues Christopher DeMuth,
head of the American Enterprise Institute, can be put in
one word: culture.
Much meaning must be unpacked from that
word, but the conclusion is: The spread of democracy, free
markets, technology and information is not enough to
rescue Russia, and many other nations, from the
consequences of their cultural deficits. Such deficits,
although not incurable, are intractable. Representative
and limited government, freedoms of press, association and
religion, all protected by an independent judiciary—these
are necessary for rapid, sustained material and moral
progress. But they are not sufficient.
DeMuth argues that any culture is the
product of lengthy social evolution, and its "gross
and essential characteristics" cannot be successfully
modified by government interventions. However, the history
of 19th-century Britain and America is replete with
examples of social movements, often religious, that
improved marriage, child rearing and schooling practices
and promoted temperance, all of which contributed to
cultural vitality.
In 1990 Herb Stein, drawing on 50 years'
experience making and analyzing economic policy, told some
visiting—and probably perplexed—Russians that
"the basic reason for our prosperity is that 120
million Americans get up in the morning and go to work to
do the best they can for themselves and their families and
previous millions did the same thing for two
centuries." Which is why DeMuth believes that, in
spite of the current talk about compassion as the saving
social value, and all the recommendations of a feminized
conservatism, "the hard, competitive, masculine
virtues—assertiveness, willingness to take risk,
stoicism, cussed determination to prevail—are receiving
much less attention than they should."
"Conservatives," says DeMuth,
"should not be afraid to say of compassion what
liberals say of passion: that it should be kept largely a
private matter." And there is another lesson to be
drawn, one pertinent to the current unpleasantness in
Washington:
Government cannot revise culture,
wholesale, but government has—it cannot help but have—cultural
consequences. Thus those people who say government should
be judged solely by its laws and economic policies, and
not at all by its embodiment of morality and its example
of personal conduct, do not understand the primacy of
culture as a determinant of social health.
Newsweek, January 18, 1999
