by David Brooks
The little speech didn’t stop all discussion. The uncles still thought she was wrong, and they still harangued. But the balance of forces had shifted in Erica’s head. Her mom had stood up for her in front of the family. Erica’s sense of conviction came back to her, and once she had dug into a position, there was no moving her.
The Club
Leaving was still not easy. Leaving your childhood home is never easy. In 1959, when the writer Eva Hoffman was thirteen, her family emigrated from Poland to Canada. Poland lingered forever after in the recesses of her mind. “The country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love,” she wrote years later. “It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured. No geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservation.”
But Erica did go, and in early September, she found herself in a dorm in Denver.
Elite universities are great inequality machines. They are nominally open to all applicants regardless of income. They have lavish financial-aid packages for those who cannot afford to pay. But the reality is that the competition weeds out most of those who are not from the upper middle class. To fulfill the admissions requirements, it really helps to have been raised in the atmosphere of concerted cultivation. It helps to have had all the family reading time, the tutors, the coaches, and the extracurricular supervision.
Denver gave Erica a chance to be around affluent people and to see how they behaved with one another. She learned how they socialized, how they greeted each other, how they slept with each other, what a guy in that culture said when he wanted to get into your pants, and what a girl in that culture said to keep him out. Denver was like a cultural-exchange program. She didn’t know the phrase when she got there, but at Denver Erica acquired what the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital”—the tastes, opinions, cultural references, and conversational styles that will enable you to rise in polite society.
Actually, it wasn’t the students’ wealth that shocked Erica and shook her confidence. She found she could easily look down on the guy who wrecked his BMW one day and had his family drop off a Jaguar the next. It was the knowledge. She’d worked hard at the Academy to prepare herself for Denver. But some of these kids had been preparing their whole lives. They’d been to where the Battle of Agincourt had taken place. They’d been to China and spent a summer in high school teaching kids in Haiti. They knew who Lauren Bacall was, and where F. Scott Fitzgerald went to school. They seemed to get every reference the professors threw out. A professor would make some reference to Mort Sahl or Tom Lehrer, and they’d all chuckle knowingly. They knew how to structure papers in ways that she had never been taught. She took a look at those kids and thought about her friends back in the neighborhood who were still working at the mall or hanging out on the street. Her friends back home weren’t just four years behind these Denver kids. They were forever behind.
Erica took econ, poli-sci, and accounting classes. She hung around the business school and sat in when visiting lecturers stopped by. She was very hardheaded and practical. But something bothered her about these classes. In many of them, Erica was taught by economists and political scientists who assumed that human beings are pretty much the same. You put some incentives in front of them, no matter what their cultural differences, and they will respond in predictable, law-governed, and rational ways.
This assumption makes social science a science. If behavior is not governed by immutable laws and regularities, then quantitative models become impossible. The discipline loses its predictive value. It’s all just fuzzy, context-driven subjectivity.
And yet Erica grew up among many people who did not respond in predictable ways to incentives. Many of her friends had dropped out of high school when all the incentives pointed the other way. Many of them made decisions that were simply inexplicable, or they had not made decisions at all because they were in the grip of addictions, mental illnesses, or other impulsions. Furthermore, cultural differences simply played too large a role in her life. What really mattered, it seemed to her, was self-interpretation. The way people defined themselves had a huge impact on how they behaved and responded to situations. None of this seemed to have any role in the courses she was taking.
So Erica was drawn, despite her well-laid plans, in a different academic direction. She didn’t abandon all the pre-MBA-type courses. But she supplemented them. She found herself drawn, of all places, to anthropology. She wanted to study cultures—how they differed and how they clashed.
It was, at first blush, a wildly impractical subject for an aspiring mogul to study. But Erica, being Erica, quickly turned it into a strategic business plan. Her whole life had been about clashing cultures—Mexican/Chinese, middle class/lower class, the ghetto/the Academy, the street/the university. She already understood what it was like to merge different cultures. In a globalizing world this knowledge would probably come in handy. At college she would learn how some companies created successful corporate cultures and how some failed at this task. She would learn about how global corporations handled cultural diversity. In a business world filled with engineers and finance people, she would know culture. This would be her unique selling proposition. There would always be a market for skills like that. After all, how many female Chinese-Chicana workaholics from the ghetto does anybody know?
The Extended Mind
Millions of years ago, animals roamed the earth. As Michael Tomasello has argued, smarter animals such as apes are actually pretty good at coming up with innovative solutions to common problems. What they are not good at is passing down their discoveries to future generations. Nonhuman animals don’t seem to have the impulse to teach. You can teach a chimpanzee sign language, but the chimp won’t teach sign language to his fellows or to his children so that they might talk to one another.
Humans are different. Humans begin life far behind other animals. Humans have a diffuse set of genetic instructions, so when they are born, and for years afterward, they can’t survive on their own. As the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, man is an “unfinished animal. What sets him off most graphically from nonmen,” Geertz continued, “is less his sheer ability to learn (great as that is) than how much and what particular sorts of things he has to learn before he is able to function at all.”
Humans succeed because they have the ability to develop advanced cultures. Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life. Culture transmits certain practical solutions to everyday problems—how to avoid poisonous plants, how to form successful family structures. Culture also, as Roger Scruton has observed, educates the emotions. It consists of narratives, holidays, symbols, and works of art that contain implicit and often unnoticed messages about how to feel, how to respond, how to divine meaning.
An individual human mind couldn’t handle the vast variety of fleeting stimuli that are thrust before it. We can function in the world only because we are embedded in the scaffold of culture. We absorb ethnic cultures, institutional cultures, regional cultures, which do most of our thinking for us.
The human race is not impressive because towering geniuses produce individual masterpieces. The human race is impressive because groups of people create mental scaffolds that guide future thought. No individual could build a modern airplane, but modern companies contain the institutional knowledge that allows groups to design and build them.
“We build ‘designer environments’ in which human reason is able to far outstrip the computational ambit of the unaugmented biological brain,” the philosopher Andy Clark writes. Unlike other animals, he continues, humans have the ability to dissipate reasoning—to build social arrangements that contain the bodies of knowledge.
Human brains, Clark
believes, “are not so different from the fragmented, special-purpose, action-oriented organs of other animals and autonomous robots. But we excel in one crucial respect: We are masters at structuring our physical and social worlds so as to press complex coherent behaviors from these unruly resources. We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace! Or, to look at it another way, it is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind. Looked at that way, we are smart after all—but our boundaries extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed.”
Cultures That Work
Erica took courses in sociology, psychology, history, literature, marketing, and behavioral economics—anything she thought might help her understand the shared scaffolding of the human mind.
All cultures share certain commonalities, stored in our genetic inheritance. Anthropologists tell us that all cultures distinguish colors. When they do, all cultures begin with words for white and black. If the culture adds a word for a third color, it is always red. All humans, for example, register the same basic facial expressions for fear, disgust, happiness, contempt, anger, sadness, pride, and shame. Children born without sight display emotion on their faces the same way as children born with sight. All humans divide time into past, present, and future. Almost all fear, at least at first, spiders and snakes, creatures that threatened their Stone Age ancestors. All human societies produce art. They all disapprove, at least in theory, of rape and murder. They all dream of harmony and worship God.
In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness.
But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not.
Researchers from the University of Florida observed couples having coffee in different cities around the world. In London, couples rarely touch each other. In Paris, 110 touches were observed per coffee. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, it was 180.
As Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler report in their book Connected, 10 percent of working-age Americans report suffering back pain, but 45 percent of the people in Denmark do, as do 62 percent of the people in Germany. Some Asian cultures have very low back-pain rates, but many people there do suffer from koro, a condition in which men become afflicted by the feeling that their penises are retracting into their bodies. The treatment involves asking a trusted family member to hold the penis twenty-four hours a day until the anxiety goes away.
If you bump into a man on the street in the American North, the testosterone level in his bloodstream will not rise appreciably. But if you bump into a man on the street in the American South, where a culture of honor is more prevalent, there will probably be a sharp spike in cortisol and testosterone production. Cities in the South are twice as likely to have words like “gun” in their names (Gun Point, Florida), whereas cities in the North are more than twice as likely to have words like “joy” in their names.
A cultural construct like language can change the way people see the world. Guugu Yimithirr, an aboriginal tongue in Australia, is one of the world’s geographical languages. People don’t say, “Raise your right hand” or “Step backward.” They say, “Raise your north hand” or “Step east.” People who speak geographical languages have amazing orientation senses. They always know which way is north, even in caves. A speaker of the language Tzeltal from Mexico was blindfolded and spun around twenty times. He still had no trouble pointing, north, south, east, and west.
In this way, culture imprints some patterns in our brains and dissolves others. Because Erica grew up in the United States, she had a distinct sense of when something was tacky, even though she couldn’t have easily defined what made it so. Her head was filled with what Douglas Hofstadter calls “comfortable but quite impossible to define abstract patterns,” which were implanted by culture and organized her thinking into concepts such as: sleazeballs, fair play, dreams, wackiness, crackpots, sour grapes, goals, and you and I.
Erica learned that a culture is not a recipe book that creates uniformity. Each culture has its own internal debates and tensions. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that each vital culture contains a continuity of conflict, which allows divergent behavior. Furthermore, in the age of globalization, cultures are not converging. They seem to be growing farther apart.
She also learned that not all cultures are equal. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think this. She had been at Denver long enough to know that she was supposed to think all cultures were wonderful and they were all wonderful in their own unique way. But she wasn’t some rich kid from a suburban high school. She couldn’t afford that kind of bullshit. She needed to know what led to success and what led to failure. She looked at the world and at history, looking for clues and useful lessons she could use.
She came across a Stanford professor named Thomas Sowell, who wrote a series of books called Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures that told her some of the things she needed to know. Erica knew she was supposed to disapprove of Sowell. All her teachers did. But his descriptions jibed with the world she saw around her every day. “Cultures do not exist as simply static ‘differences,’ to be celebrated,” Sowell wrote. They “compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done—better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life.”
Erica had noticed that some groups seemed to outcompete their neighbors and peers. Haitians and Dominicans share an island, but the Dominicans have a GDP per capita that is nearly four times higher than that of their neighbors. They have life expectancies that are eighteen years longer and literacy rates 33 percentage points higher. Jews and Italians both lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the first half of the twentieth century, but the Jews rose out much more quickly.
She noticed that some groups made themselves winners wherever they settled. The Lebanese and the Gujarati Indians became successful merchants in different societies with different conditions all around the world. In Ceylon in 1969, the Tamil minority provided 40 percent of all university students in the sciences, including 48 percent of all engineering students and 49 percent of all medical students. In Argentina, 46 percent of the businessmen in Who’s Who were foreign born. In Chile, three-quarters of the heads of large industrial enterprises were immigrants or the children of immigrants.
In American schools, Chinese American kids raced ahead. By the time they enter kindergarten, Chinese Americans are four months ahead of Latino children in letter recognition and other pre-reading skills. They take more demanding high-school courses than the average American student. They do much more homework each night. T
hey are more likely to be punished at home if they earn a grade lower than an A–. Roughly 54 percent of Asian Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine have graduated from college, compared to 34 percent of native-born white Americans.
These cultural differences can produce stunning inequalities. Asian Americans have a life expectancy of eighty-seven years compared with seventy-nine years for whites and seventy-three years for African Americans. In Michigan, a state with a struggling economy, the Asian American life expectancy is ninety, while for the average white person it’s seventy-nine and for the average African American it’s seventy-three. Income and education levels are also much higher. The average Asian American in New Jersey lives an amazing twenty-six years longer and is eleven times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.
Erica also noticed that some cultures are more corrupt than others. In their study, “Cultures of Corruption,” Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel took advantage of a natural experiment. Until 2002 diplomats in New York City could avoid parking fines. Fisman and Miguel analyzed the data from 1,700 consular personnel and their families to see who took advantage of their immunity and who didn’t. They found that diplomats from countries that rank high on the Transparency International corruption index piled up huge numbers of unpaid tickets, whereas diplomats from countries that ranked low on the index barely got any at all. Between 1997 and 2002, diplomats from Kuwait picked up 246 parking violations per diplomat. Diplomats from Egypt, Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Mozambique, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Syria also had incredible numbers of violations. Meanwhile diplomats from Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel, Norway, and Canada had no violations at all. Even thousands of miles away from home, diplomats still carried their domestic cultural norms inside their heads. The results were not influenced by salary, age, or any other of the measured controls.
