Introduction:
In October 2018 a journalist walked into a foreign consulate in Istanbul to obtain some papers relating to an upcoming marriage to his fiancée. His fiancée waited outside, as he had asked her, for many hours, but the man never returned. The man of course, was Jamal Khashoggi. We now know he was murdered, cut in pieces and his body removed from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul. It appears this murder was ordered from the top leadership in Saudi Arabia. You would hardly believe that such a thing could happen.
This incident illustrates our title perfectly, that All Cultures Are Not Equal. During this series we will examine this issue and we will attempt to answer the questions, “What Constitutes a Good Dignified Life?” And a “Decent, Legitimate State?”
The theme of these presentations is why some cultures are far superior to others, and how you can organise your life to create the very best personal and family culture for you and your loved ones. It can make all the difference in your life.
I was watching the Australian ABC news service detail the state of the refugee crisis unfolding in Syria and Iraq in late 2015, when I saw a young Syrian man who was carrying nothing but a water bottle and a handful of clothes. He was asked why he was so desperate to enter Europe. His answer laid bare the plain truth at the bottom of the huge movement of people from Syria and Iraq to Europe.
In response to the question of why he wanted to get to Germany he said, “I want a better life, a good country to live in. Everyone in Asia (Asia Minor), wants to move there.” This man was an accountant who previously held a good job in his home city, and who told the reporter he was from a well-off family. He had left behind his family, planning to send for them later.
But it is not just anywhere in Europe these people were happy to go. They headed straight through Greece, Italy, Croatia and Hungary, in a determined attempt to reach Germany, Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, countries that have a reputation for a high standard of living, available jobs, good security and relative freedom.
In 1905 Max Weber penned The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which made a very bold claim that Western civilisation had advanced a long way ahead of the rest of the civilised world on account of the peculiar ethos of Protestant Christianity in particular. In the words of the English translators of his most important essays,[2] Weber’s claim was,
...that religious forces, not simply economic ones, paved the way for the mentality characteristic of modern, Western capitalism. On Weber’s account, our secular and materialistic culture is partly indebted to a spiritual revolution: The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. (Weber 84)
Weber located the origins of modern freedom not in the Enlightenment, but in the Puritan Anglo-American tradition; ...The vanguard of that struggle were the Protestant sects—Baptists, Quakers, and others... (Weber 98)
The heartlands of radical individualism, Weber claimed, were to be found in England and America, nations that created not only free institutions, effective parliaments, and responsible and dynamic leaders but also the capacity for global power politics. (Weber 108)
Weber quotes Montesquieu who said of the English:
“This is the people in the world who have best known how to take advantage of each of these three great things at the same time: religion, commerce, and liberty.” (Esprit des lois, bk. 20, chap. 7)
I will challenge Weber’s particular isolation of the Anglo-American Protestant superiority later, as I feel there are additional reasons for the superiority of the West in relation to the “Rest,” and we will look at the evidence of the superiority of other Protestant cultures, like those of Germany, the Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands, and others, as well as recognising the equal preeminence of Jewish culture throughout its long history.
What Will This Mean for Me and Mine?
It’s all very well to propound a theory and stack it with irrefutable evidence, but inevitably people want to know what is in it for them? Even if I can establish that Protestantism as a culture is superior to other systems, how can that benefit me as an individual, and my family, especially if I can see that I do not live in such a culture?
I am suggesting that this idea is absolutely applicable to you as an individual. Of course the culture and the country we each live in is important for our success. It is very important that we have as a foundation a just social and economic order, a decent and legitimate state behind us for a successful life for ourselves and our families? None of us live in a vacuum. Humans are indomitably social creatures. It is extremely difficult to fight the whole system to gain success in life.
This series we will present can help you and your family understand how your individual future can change, can improve; how you can advance your prospects and those of your family beyond those around you. This is the vision we want to open for you.
The Sources
Niall Ferguson is a Scottish historian who is today a respected professor of history at Harvard University,[3] and he endorses Weber’s basic thesis in his book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest.
In this presentation I will be using the claims of Weber and some material from Ferguson, combined with other sources to set the backdrop of how you can benefit yourself and your family in the struggle to make the very best of life. There are two reasons I will take this route of using some material from Weber and Ferguson. These two men develop the argument and put forward their evidence carefully and compellingly. Weber argued from his premise and worked outwards, extrapolating the basic connections between a Protestant ethos and doctrine and then to their practical outworking. Ferguson on the other hand concentrates largely on the external evidence demonstrated in the cultures as a whole down to the present day, to substantiate the premise.
The second reason I refer to these men is that they are pushing no private or religious barrow of their own. Although raised by a Protestant mother, Weber never claimed a personal attachment to any Protestant church, nor a personal belief or practise in Protestantism. His English translators say that,
Weber liked to describe himself as “religiously unmusical,” but he never said that he was tone-deaf. ...Marianne Weber tells us that her husband, the secular ascetic par excellence, strongly identified with the Puritans of his most famous essay, whose faith and heroism produced a “new type of man...” (Weber 145)
Niall Ferguson, on the other hand, is a self-proclaimed atheist. So it suits my purpose particularly well to note that neither man personally claims to be Protestant, nor were they even religious, and so the thesis takes on a stronger claim to objectivity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson)
Protagonists to the Protestant Thesis
The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism has been described by the sociologist Daniel Bell as “probably the most important sociological work of the twentieth century...” (Weber 529)
Weber’s thesis has been challenged by different thinkers down through the years, nevertheless it has stood the test of time better than any other, in my view, simply because it has the strongest and most conspicuous evidence firmly on its side. This is quite remarkable, since in most of the West the number of practicing Protestants has now fallen dramatically, for a whole host of reasons. We will return to this particular issue towards the end.
One man who had an alternative theory to explain historical and cultural development was Karl Marx. He came up with the theory by which he sought to explain the past and predict the future of social, economic and political development. Marx applied these methods to the study of history as though it were one of the natural sciences, but his so called “objective laws” turned out to be extremely subjective and vague, and not open to testing in any scientific sense. His “scientific” research has been shown subsequently to be so much rubbish, and of course the communist experiment in different parts of the world, based on his theory, has been a dismal failure. Marx said,
If one imagined its prohibitions removed, then one could choose any woman who took one’s fancy as one’s sexual object, one could kill without hesitation one’s rival or whoever interfered with one in any other way, and one could seize what one wanted of another man’s goods without asking his leave. (Ferguson 5268)
This little paragraph is from the man who fathered a child through his wife’s chambermaid and was funded largely by the largess of his sponsor, Engels.
Speaking about Marx reminded me of a humorous story I heard about a young boy in a socialist state who walks to a nearby market after school, on his mother's instruction. The young boy says to the shop keeper: "Hello, my mother was in here yesterday and said you had no butter, is this still the case?" The shopkeeper replied to the young boy, "I’m sorry, this shop has no toilet paper, the one with no butter is across the street, next to the one with no meat."
Sigmund Freud too was somewhat incensed by Weber’s theory and set his course to counter it with his own theory to explain historical development. Freud was a renegade Jew who decided on the basis of his particular psychoanalysis that Christianity, like all religion, was a ‘universal neurosis’ that kept humans from their natural sexual desires and destructive animal aggression. I will allow Freud to continue,
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Ferguson 5294
But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. ...And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of. (Ferguson 5301)
One man said that Freud’s psychoanalysis was ‘the disease of which it pretends to be the cure’. (Karl Kraus, Viennese satirist)
Speaking about psychiatrists,
A man goes to see his psychiatrist. He says, "Doctor, I've been having suicidal tendencies. What should I do?"
The psychiatrist replies, "Have you paid your bill today?"
Time and clear evidence has enlightened us that the theories of these two opponents of Weber are bankrupt. But the evidence for Weber’s thesis remains robust.
Another more recent attempt to explain the clear superiority of Western culture over others was the book, Guns, Steel and Germs: The Fates of Human Societies, by anthropologist Jared Diamond. Diamond postulates a largely geographic answer to the question. His thesis is that the east-west orientation of Eurasia benefited Caucasian peoples more than others in Africa or South America by allowing exchange of crops and other supposed advantages that allowed a superior culture to emerge over time.
However, the evidence for this thesis is very weak. If an east-west orientation were the criterion, why didn’t Aboriginal culture in Australia develop to the same extent? Recent archaeological evidence in Australia shows that Aboriginal people reached Australian shores from Indonesia at least 65,000 years ago. The first Australians set foot on Terra Australis 20,000 years before any human set foot in Europe, giving them a 20,000 year jump on Western Europeans. The supposed advantage of an East-West orientation of Australia has obviously not helped this culture out-compete modern Europeans in any measurable way (Clarkson et. al. The Conversation).
The same is true of Indian culture in North America. They had the possibility of exchanging all manner of food and techniques from South America, but it didn't elevate them in any material way. And with the ability to exchange crops and benefit from other technologies down through Africa, why didn’t the oldest cultures on the planet come to ascendancy? Diamond’s thesis fails on so many levels it is hardly worth pursuing.
A more recent attempt places the raison d'être of all modern progress in the crucible of the Renaissance, and is that of Steven Pinker, a Harvard University psychologist. His book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, attempts to sidestep the Reformation to explain modern progress. But this attempt does not explain why north-western European countries, the countries that benefited most from Protestantism, outshone and continue to outshine the rest of Europe. The question Ferguson poses still stands.
[1] This presentation has used Niall Ferguson’s, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (noted in-text by Kindle position numbers) knowingly. I want to make it clear that I am using this source for parts of what I am presenting because he not only presents the material very well, but also because Ferguson is an atheist and therefore is not pedalling his personal faith. Likewise, Weber, although he seemed to lean towards a Protestant mentality, did not accept Protestantism in a committed or certainly a personal way. Ferguson is largely reiterating Weber’s thesis and bringing it up to date.
[2] Weber, Max (2002-04-30). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. Numbers following quoted text refer to Kindle positions from this source.
[3] In 2004, he was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.
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