Question
What are the elements of successful cultures?
Answer
A successful culture is not the same as a better culture. American consumerism is a very successful culture. Not even Americans argue that the McDonaldization of the world is a particularly good thing, or that the Big Mac is better than the food it tends to replace.
Better is a long argument. I'll make a brief comment at the end about it.
More successful is some combination of rich initial conditions, path dependence and a basis in ideas that are good at spreading, not ideas worth spreading. Memes in fact, which work the same way as genes.
On planet earth it is impossible to talk about "more successful" in general terms, so you need to talk about it with reference to 2 classes of relative success: global and local.
The "success theory" is different in the two cases.
Global
Global success theory is necessarily strongly path dependent and initial conditions dependent. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches help illustrate why. There are also strong positive feedback loops at the global level that turns small successes into runaway successes.
There is enough room at this level for orders of magnitude differences, given comparable base populations. So "success" theory at this level is necessarily a matter of interpretative history. There is really only a single story, not a set of comparable data points.
Local
Local success theory however, lends itself to some generalization. You can talk about abstract factors like whether a culture values education, self-promotion, family values and so forth, and talk about the correlations of those factors to success. In this sense, Max Weber's Protestant Ethic is fundamentally a "local" theory, specific to Christian cultures. Though it has been extrapolated beyond, that extrapolation is not convincing.
The more local and fine-grained you get, the more data you can collect and turn the argument into a quantitative one. If you want to compare Europe vs. China vs. India vs. Africa, you are reduced to storytelling. But if you want to talk about (say) Jewish Ethnicities and People versus Irish Ethnicity and People, you will likely be able to make useful comparisons to (say) South Indians vs. Punjabis in India, or different regions of China (I don't know enough to propose a specific comparison).
This is still pretty tricky though, because you have to adjust for narrative historical factors (the Jews being oppressed in Europe, Punjab being on the invasion border of India while the deep South has mostly been protected ...).
Defining "Better"
Since Jane Huang asked about defining "better" in the comments, I'll offer a brief comment.
Memetic success is easy to measure. English is obviously the most important global language of money and power, whatever you might say about its actual quality as a language (the French probably have a lot to say). Chinese is obviously the most important language in terms of raw number of human minds you can reach with it.
The harder problem is talking about "success" in terms of absolute civilizational value. Is one culture "better" than another, irrespective of whether it is more successful?
Francis Fukuyama and his cohorts for example, believe liberal democracy is the "best" political culture in some sense, and its global success is both a memetic success and a "real" success in that sense. Buddhists might believe that the lack of success of "mindfulness" culture is a memetic failure while remaining a civilizational success, as a high-water mark of human development or something.
If you are a conservative, you will be comfortable with such definitions of absolute success (with accompanying exultation or whining about the state of memetic success of the stuff you consider successful in the sense of "better").
If you are not a conservative, it does not necessarily mean you are a moral relativist. Liberals can be just as conservative about certain value schemes.
Arguments about "better" are hard, possibly pointless, but nevertheless valuable among people who are interested in using them as a means to deeper insight, rather than as a contest. Forcing ourselves to talk about whether English or Chinese is the superior language is useful, though any actual conclusion is almost certainly worthless.
Better is a long argument. I'll make a brief comment at the end about it.
More successful is some combination of rich initial conditions, path dependence and a basis in ideas that are good at spreading, not ideas worth spreading. Memes in fact, which work the same way as genes.
On planet earth it is impossible to talk about "more successful" in general terms, so you need to talk about it with reference to 2 classes of relative success: global and local.
- Global: the success of Western Culture against every other culture.
- Local: any of a gazillion examples: Hutus vs. Tutsis, Turks vs. Arabs, Punjabis vs. Biharis...
The "success theory" is different in the two cases.
Global
Global success theory is necessarily strongly path dependent and initial conditions dependent. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches help illustrate why. There are also strong positive feedback loops at the global level that turns small successes into runaway successes.
There is enough room at this level for orders of magnitude differences, given comparable base populations. So "success" theory at this level is necessarily a matter of interpretative history. There is really only a single story, not a set of comparable data points.
Local
Local success theory however, lends itself to some generalization. You can talk about abstract factors like whether a culture values education, self-promotion, family values and so forth, and talk about the correlations of those factors to success. In this sense, Max Weber's Protestant Ethic is fundamentally a "local" theory, specific to Christian cultures. Though it has been extrapolated beyond, that extrapolation is not convincing.
The more local and fine-grained you get, the more data you can collect and turn the argument into a quantitative one. If you want to compare Europe vs. China vs. India vs. Africa, you are reduced to storytelling. But if you want to talk about (say) Jewish Ethnicities and People versus Irish Ethnicity and People, you will likely be able to make useful comparisons to (say) South Indians vs. Punjabis in India, or different regions of China (I don't know enough to propose a specific comparison).
This is still pretty tricky though, because you have to adjust for narrative historical factors (the Jews being oppressed in Europe, Punjab being on the invasion border of India while the deep South has mostly been protected ...).
Defining "Better"
Since Jane Huang asked about defining "better" in the comments, I'll offer a brief comment.
Memetic success is easy to measure. English is obviously the most important global language of money and power, whatever you might say about its actual quality as a language (the French probably have a lot to say). Chinese is obviously the most important language in terms of raw number of human minds you can reach with it.
The harder problem is talking about "success" in terms of absolute civilizational value. Is one culture "better" than another, irrespective of whether it is more successful?
Francis Fukuyama and his cohorts for example, believe liberal democracy is the "best" political culture in some sense, and its global success is both a memetic success and a "real" success in that sense. Buddhists might believe that the lack of success of "mindfulness" culture is a memetic failure while remaining a civilizational success, as a high-water mark of human development or something.
If you are a conservative, you will be comfortable with such definitions of absolute success (with accompanying exultation or whining about the state of memetic success of the stuff you consider successful in the sense of "better").
If you are not a conservative, it does not necessarily mean you are a moral relativist. Liberals can be just as conservative about certain value schemes.
Arguments about "better" are hard, possibly pointless, but nevertheless valuable among people who are interested in using them as a means to deeper insight, rather than as a contest. Forcing ourselves to talk about whether English or Chinese is the superior language is useful, though any actual conclusion is almost certainly worthless.