Our civilization is doomed, part CCXVIII
Every time a society is doing economically well, someone emerges to suggest that that success is based on innate differences that go back thousand of years. Meanwhile, when a society is doing poorly, someone argues that it is being dragged down by forces that have been pending since the beginning of time. The most notorious example was the preening that the West engaged in during the 1800s – Asians and blacks were naturally lazy, whereas white people were biologically superior. The grotesque reality is that such attitudes were used to justify genocide.
Anyway, now China is doing well and America is doing poorly, so David Brooks starts writing a eulogy for the US:
David Brooks: Asians place emphasis on context while Westerners place more emphasis on individuals. This seems like a gross generalization but it is robustly supported by hundreds and hundreds of studies. Richard Nisbett’s book, “The Geography of Thought” summarizes some of the evidence.
If you show Americans a fish tank, they’ll talk about the biggest fish in the tank. If you show Asians a tank they will make, on average, 60 percent more references to the context and the features of the scene. Western parents tend to emphasize nouns and categories when teaching their kids, Korean parents tend to emphasize verbs and relationships. If you show Americans a picture of a chicken, a cow and grass, they will lump the chicken and the cow, because they are both animals. Asians are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass. They have a relationship.
The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed.
For my part, I think the hype about China is over done. The problems in the US economy were created by forces internal to the US, and they can be fixed by internal forces as well.