Culture Matters

Along with Thomas Sowell, James Delingpole and Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite regular reads. This past week he contrasted Germany and Switzerland with messier places like Italy and Greece to explain why culture is important

I have developed an unscientific and haphazard — but often accurate — politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.

Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or do they scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 P.M.?

Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?   (Why Bonn is not Athens) 

I had to laugh knowingly at his observations. Been there, done that. I have fallen into an open manhole in Quito, and I did almost impale myself on a jutting piece of rebar in Iraq, although it wasn't Iraq's fault.  It was a result of our bombing.

He’s also right on about imperiled pedestrians, and honking and screaming drivers and the wild gesticulations. Ever seen a car wreck in Italy?  Or a traffic jam in Tegucigalpa?  Places that feature such amusements are basket cases.  If you've ever driven in Spain but have never almost lost your life, count yourself extremely lucky.

To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic — or is it characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism, and tribalism?

The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money, or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.   (Why Bonn is not Athens)  

He ends by skewering the multi-culti PC crowd:

There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the post-modern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and that to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but we privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.  (Why Bonn is not Athens)

Some challenge me on my dim view of Islam and Islamic countries. I’m not a natural bigot.  I’ve seen them up close with my own two eyes. And their cultural record over the past thousand years stinks, from number of books published to a paucity of benefits bequeathed to mankind. Who would want to live in one of their bigoted, constipated countries?  I don't begrudge them their lifestyle; it's just not my cup of tea.

Some have tried to make similar observations of Latin America, but they don’t murder one another over religion. Latin America can be dangerous, but much more often it is a place of happy wild abandon, dancing, laughing and drinking, and the women are much nicer.  And Panama, that place we cruelly ruled as a colony for 100 years (according to loony lefties who've never been there), is the only Central American country where you can drink the tap water.  Coincidence?

They do engage in bribery and nepotism in Latin America, which contributes to their tragedy of the commons, so pedestrians beware!