So which is an accurate portrait of Confucianism? A culture that values ‘thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline’, as Huntington put it in relation to South Korea, or a culture that disparages practical pursuits, discourages entrepreneurship and retards the rule of law?
Both are right, except that the first singles out only those elements that are good for economic development and the second only the bad. In fact, creating a one-sided view of Confucianism does not even have to involve selecting different elements. The same cultural element can be interpreted as having positive or negative implications, depending on the result you seek. The best example is loyalty. As I mentioned above, some people think that the emphasis on loyalty is what makes the Japanese variety of Confucianism more suited to economic development than other varieties. Other people judge the emphasis on loyalty to be exactly what is wrong with Confucianism, since it stifles independent thinking and thus innovation.
It is not just Confucianism, however, that has a split personality like the protagonist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We can perform the same exercise with any culture’s belief system. Take the case of Islam.
Muslim culture is today considered by many to hold back economic development. Its intolerance of diversity discourages entrepreneurship and creativity. Its fixation on the afterlife makes believers less interested in worldly things, like wealth accumulation and productivity growth.[23] The limits on what women are allowed to do not only wastes the talents of half the population but also lowers the likely quality of the future labour force; poorly educated mothers provide poor nutrition and little educational help to their children, thereby diminishing their achievements at school. The ‘militaristic’ tendency (exemplified by the concept of jihad, or holy war, against the infidels) glorifies making war, not money. In short, a perfect Mr Hyde.
Alternatively, we could say that, unlike many other cultures, Muslim culture does not have a fixed social hierarchy (which is why many low caste Hindus have converted to Islam in South Asia). Therefore, people who work hard and creatively are rewarded. Moreover, unlike in the Confucian hierarchy, there is no disdain for industrial or business activities. Muhammad, the Prophet, was a merchant himself. And being a merchant’s religion, Islam has a highly developed sense of contracts – even at wedding ceremonies, marriage contracts are signed. This orientation encourages the rule of law and justice[24] – Muslim countries had trained judges hundreds of years before Christian countries. There is also an emphasis on rational thinking and learning – the Prophet notably said that ‘the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr’. This is one of the reasons why the Arab world once led the world in mathematics, science and medicine. What is more, although there are conflicting interpretations of the Koran, there is no question that, in practice, most pre-modern Muslim societies were far more tolerant than Christian societies – after all, this is why many Iberian Jews escaped to the Ottoman Empire after the Christian reconquista of Spain in 1492.
Such are the roots of the Dr Jekyll picture of Muslim culture: it encourages social mobility and entrepreneurship, respects commerce, has a contractual frame of mind, emphasizes rational thinking, and is tolerant of diversity and thus creativity.
This Jekyll-and-Hyde exercise of ours shows that there is no culture that is either unequivocally good or bad for economic development. Everything depends on what people do with the ‘raw material’ of their culture. Positive elements may predominate, or negative ones. Two societies at different points in time or located in different geographical locations, and working with the same raw material (Islam, Confucianism or Christianity), can produce, and have produced, markedly different behavioural patterns.
Not being able to see this, culture-based explanations for economic development have usually been little more than ex post facto justifications based on a 20/20 hindsight vision. So, in the early days of capitalism, when most economically successful countries happened to be Protestant Christian, many people argued that Protestantism was uniquely suited to economic development. When Catholic France, Italy, Austria and southern Germany developed rapidly, particularly after the Second World War, Christianity, rather than Protestantism, became the magic culture. Until Japan became rich, many people thought East Asia had not developed because of Confucianism. But when Japan succeeded, this thesis was revised to say that Japan was developing so fast because its unique form of Confucianism emphasized co-operation over individual edification, which the Chinese and Korean versions allegedly valued more highly. And then Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea also started doing well, so this judgement about the different varieties of Confucianism was forgotten. Indeed, Confucianism as a whole suddenly became the best culture for development because it emphasized hard work, saving, education and submission to authority. Today, when we see Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand and even Hindu India doing well economically, we can soon expect to encounter new theories that will trumpet how uniquely all these cultures are suited for economic development (and how their authors have known about it all along).
So far, I have shown how difficult it is to define cultures and to understand their complexities, let alone finding some kind of ideal culture for economic development. But, if defining culture is difficult, trying to explain something else (say, economic development) in terms of it seems to be an exercise fraught with even greater problems.
All this is not to deny that how people behave makes a difference to economic development. But the point is that people’s behaviour is not determined by culture. Moreover, cultures change; so it is wrong to treat culture as destiny, as many culturalists are wont to do. To understand this, let’s go back for a moment to those puzzles of the lazy Japanese and the thieving Germans.
One reason why Japanese or German culture in the past looked so bad for economic development is that observers from richer countries tended to be prejudiced against foreigners (especially poor foreigners). But there was also an element of genuine ‘misinterpretation’ due to the fact that rich countries are very differently organized from poor countries.
Take laziness – the most frequently cited ‘cultural’ trait of people in poor countries. People from rich countries routinely believe that poor countries are poor because their people are lazy. But many people in poor countries actually work long hours in backbreaking conditions. What makes them appear lazy is often their lack of an ‘industrial’ sense of time. When you work with basic tools or simple machinery, you don’t have to keep time strictly. If you are working in an automated factory, it’s essential. People from rich countries often interpret this difference in sense of time as laziness.
Of course, it was not all prejudice or misinterpretation. Early-19th-century Germans and early-20th-century Japanese were, on average, not as organized, rational, disciplined, etc. as the citizens of the successful countries of the time or, for that matter, as people are in today’s Germany or Japan. But the question is whether we can really describe the origins of those ‘negative’ forms of behaviour as ‘cultural’ in the sense that they are rooted in beliefs, values and outlooks that have been passed on through generations and are, therefore, very difficult, if not necessarily impossible, to change.
My short answer is no. Let us consider ‘laziness’ again. It is true that there are a lot more people ‘lazing around’ in poor countries. But is it because those people culturally prefer lounging about to working hard? Usually not. It is mainly because poor countries have a lot of people who are unemployed or underemployed (i.e., people may have jobs but do not have enough work to occupy them fully). This is the result of economic conditions rather than culture. The fact that immigrants from poor countries with ‘lazy’ cultures work much harder than the locals when they move to rich countries proves the point.
23
Based on their analysis of the World Value Survey data, Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro argue that Muslims (together with ‘other Christians’, that is, Christians that do not belong to the Catholic, the Orthodox or the mainstream Protestant churches) have exceptionally strong beliefs in hell and after life. See their article, ‘Religion and Economy’,
24
It is said that, of the nine names of Allah, two mean the ‘just one’. I thank Elias Khalil for relaying this point to me.