All cultures are not equal

Hmm. From Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture by Amy Wax & Larry Alexander. Their argument is pretty straight-forward:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Problem definition, root cause analysis, and problem solving.

This argument is the antithesis of the prevailing postmodernist critical theory prevalent on campuses (and in the media) so Wax and Alexander are to be commended for their courage.

They have the advantage in that the great preponderance of sociological research supports their hypothesis. Reeves at the Brookings Institution has been putting out a large volume of research along these lines. The Wax-Alexander hypothesis is true not only for individuals but for groups as well.

As Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld have documented in The Triple Package, the cultural script is true at the group level as well. Those immigrant groups with the strongest manifestation of the bourgeois norms do as well and better as native born Americans. It is really a quite magical and reliable script. You just have to choose.

But choosing means personal responsibility and taking ownership of one's own life outcomes is incompatible with the cult of victimhood. Victimhood is the necessary life-blood of postmodernist critical theory. No victimhood, no postmodernist critical theory.

The acceptance of the bourgeois script has some necessary consequences for the adherents of postmodernist critical theory.
All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

I'd put it slightly differently. Every person and group has a marginally (or significantly) different set of important goals. The goals may differ to a greater or lesser degree, the rank order priorities are likely to differ, the relative trade-offs to be made will differ. All cultures differ in the degree to which they are compatible with variable goals, ordering of goals and trade-offs between goals.

Postmodernist critical theorists love to insist that all cultures are equal. It makes a great bumper sticker but it is not empirically true. If maximal individual liberty, prosperity (group and individual), diversity, and progressive stability (slow evolution without sharp discontinuities) are your important goals, then bourgeoise culture is demonstrably superior. If repression, conformity, poverty and stasis/devolution are your important goals, then postmodernist critical theory marxism/socialism is the game for you. You choose.

The great deceit of recent decades has been the claim that you can have the benefits of bourgeoise culture without bourgeoise culture.

Predictably enough, the general public (judging by the comments to the original piece by readers) is quite positive about bourgeoise culture. Equally predictable is that journalists and academics are hostile to it.

The global Great Divergence began in Europe between 1700 and 1800 before spreading around the world. Everywhere that it has occurred, it has been accompanied by recognizable bourgeoise cultural values. Those areas of the world where bourgeois cultural values have not yet emerged as the norm remain mired in poverty. Those areas where bourgeois cultural values were the norm but were abandoned have regressed towards poverty.

UPDATE: Scandal Erupts over the Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior by Heather Mac Donald. Well worth a read. Mac Donald documents counter-arguments from a University of Pennsylvania graduate student group, a social justice victim group at the university and a group column by half a dozen university professors.

In each instance, they demonstrate their own lack of intellectual calibre by arguing against a set of straw-man arguments not made by Wax and Alexander and never once actually address the argument and evidence Wax and Alexander actually made. either the grad students, victim students and professors are incapable of reading comprehension or they are willfully deceptive. Neither position is admirable nor reflects well on the university.

University of Pennsylvania is my alma mater and many of their departments are top notch but this deceptive ignorance on the part of a vocal few does not bode well for the academic environment. I hope the university president responds appropriately with a ringing endorsement of evidence-based argument, freedom of speech, and high standards of civil argument. It would be nice if she also mocked the straw-man arguers but that is probably asking too much.