We had an interesting discussion about The West and the Rest yesterday. At one point, I got into a brief debate with Alix and Geoff about the question of whether we can appeal to a person or group’s culture to explain their actions. I would like to say a bit more about this issue, for a few reasons. The first is that, as I hope to show at the end of these remarks, this is an important issue for the larger question that was at issue yesterday. We can not properly frame or fairly discuss the issues raised by Huntington and Sen if we don’t have a more or less correct understanding of the proper place of cultural explanation in the political and social sciences. Second, none of us really had a chance to set out our views in detail. I objected to what I believe is a very wrong headed argument made by both Geoff and Alix. But neither of them made that argument in detail and I could only give a very brief characterization of what is wrong with it when I called it positivism 101. Third, in discussion with me after the public session, Alix made a number of arguments that are more plausible and get closer to the central questions concerning cultural explanation. I think it is a shame that we did not have a chance to consider these arguments in a public forum. Fourth, these issues are of some interest to me since a good part of my writing has been in the philosophy of social science.[1] Finally, in recounting this dispute I hope to summarize some of what was discussed yesterday, for the benefit of those who missed an interesting session.

If I understood it correctly, the argument to which I objected goes like this: Cultural explanations are really pseudo explanations. The only evidence for culture is the behavior of human beings. So what we seek to explain, the actions of human beings, is identical to that by which we seek to explain it, the desires and beliefs of human beings. There is, in other words, a logical connection between culture and behavior or, in other terms, between the desires and beliefs of people and the actions in which they engage. On this view, any so-called cultural explanation merely states a tautology and is thus no explanation at all.

If one knows the history of this argument, it is surprising to see it being made in this form. During the methodenstreit of the sixties, a variant of this argument was raised against positivism by those who defended what came to be called interpretavism or the hermeneutic view. Their claim was that, precisely because there is a logical connection between desires and beliefs, on the one hand, and action, on the other, the usual mode of explanation in the political and social sciences did not fit the positivist  (or, more properly logical empiricist) account of explanation. On that model, causes had to be identifiable apart from and, also, had to be logically separable from effects. And the connection between cause and effect offered by a scientist had to be based on a putative law of nature. Because the relationship between desires and beliefs, on the one hand, and actions, on the other, cannot meet these desiderata, interpretavists argued that there was a fundamental difference between the method of the natural sciences and that of the political and social sciences.

Logical empiricists, on the other hand, argued that if there is a logical connection between desires and beliefs and actions, then the former could not explain the latter. For them, explanation was always explanation in terms of some law. They did not defend the claim we heard yesterday, that culture generally, or human desires and beliefs, more particularly, could not be held to explain what human beings do. No party to the dispute held this view. Everyone took our usual mode of explanation of human action for granted. We explain why people act in a particular way, in the first instance, by setting out their reasons for actions, that is, the desires and beliefs that, taken together, given them a reason to act in one way rather than another.

Now, at first, I didn't know why Geoff and Alix doubted that this is one kind of legitimate explanation in the political and social sciences. In the past I have heard one argument to that effect: our reasons for action are not explanations of those actions because those reasons are plainly observable in our actions. But Geoff and Alix couldn’t be holding this evidently false view. People kill each other for lots of reasons. Why they do so—the reasons for their actions—are not always obvious. When we understand their reasons, we have an explanation of the actions.

As the interpretavists argued, we can deepen our understanding of the reasons people act in two different directions. First, we can look for the further reasons for our actions, beyond those that are most apparent (and, sometimes, there is no apparent reason at first look.) So, for example, we try to explain the attack on the World Trade Center by looking to the goals that the immediate attackers, or the organizations of which they are presumably a part, sought to realize by attacking the towers. Second, we can look to the cultural context in which people act. So, in this case, we try to understand the actions of the attackers by examining the radical Islamic beliefs that serve as a justification for an attack on the United States. Or, more broadly, we engage in the interpretation of what Charles Taylor calls the constitutitive meanings, the central ideals or aspirations in terms of which these particular beliefs are themselves defined and defended.

In both cases explanation takes the form of finding more general phenomena—our deeper or broader desires and beliefs or the more general elements of our world view—that explain more particular phenomena—the variety of our actions. As in the interpretations of texts, in which we also go from general to particular and back again, our aim is to enlarge the heremeneutic circle, that is, to bring a broader range of particular phenomena under the cover of our general notions. This form of explanation does not rely on laws of nature. But, pace the logical empiricists, that does not disqualify it as explanation. There are, as the critics of logical empiricism have pointed out in the last thirty years, many satisfactory explanations of various phenomena that do not rely on general laws.

(Some philosophers do call this sort of explanation of human action into question. They think that human behavior should be explained by talking about the neurons in our heads and their effect on the movement of our bodies. But no social scientist could ever take this stance seriously. To do so would  be to put us all out of business. For the very reasons Alix and Geoff suggest, we cannot even identify the object of our explanation, human action, if we do not talk about the reasons we act.)

What made this argument even more curious to me was that Geoff gave us a splendid example of interpretative social science yesterday. His revealing account of the genesis of Huntington's argument pointed us to the cultural context in which Huntington developed his ideas as well as the particular target of his attack. It tells us a great deal about Huntington's work if we see it as an attempt to defend the central tenets of conservative realism in international relations—the view that the international sphere is always one of conflict and contention—in new terms. And we also learn a great deal by understanding that Huntington was responding to Frank Fukuyama's work. Fukuyama claimed that liberal ideals had already become the predominate form of political discourse throughout the planet and were likely soon to supplant all other traditions of political thought, thus bringing about the end of history (or, better, the End of History). Against this, Huntington argues that liberal notions of individualism, freedom, tolerance, the rule of law and so forth are distinctly a product of the West. Thus they are not likely to be dominant in the six or seven other civilizations that exists on the planet.

After the session, Alix and I talked for a while. And then it became evident that he was more inclined to a different, and more plausible claim, than he was to the philosophical argument I found problematic. His deeper argument was that, even if culture does explain something about what we do, it in itself needs explanation. That is to say, as social scientists we are concerned not just or primarily with the reasons people have for acting but, rather, with why they have certain desires and beliefs. And when we do come to the explanation of those reasons, we always are forced back to what we might call material rather than idealistic or ideological considerations. We look to how certain ideals, aspirations, goals, and ways of looking at the world are likely to seem plausible to people who live in certain circumstances rather than others. We often invoke some notion of basic psychological wants in these explanations. And we also invoke political and social structures that make certain kinds of responses to our circumstances more or less compelling than others.

One of the kinds of political and social science I most enjoy is the effort to explain cultural change and development. So I find Alix’s argument congenial. But, by the same token, it has certain limits. Let me mention three. (In discussing them, I don’t want to imply that Alix would reject my arguments. We did not have time to talk through all these issues.)

First, the explanation of cultural change presupposes that we have first understood the ideas of that culture in their own terms. We have to get the object of our explanation right. Structural or psychological explanation presupposes interpretative explanation. There are examples of bad cross-cultural research that show the consequence of the failure to adequately interpret the ideas and ideals of others.

Second, while understanding the source of our beliefs and desires is an important part of political and social science, we do not have to understand where a culture, or the beliefs and desires of people,  come from in order to understand what they do. To deny this is tantamount to accepting an essentialist notion of political and social explanation in which we privilege certain kinds of explanation over others. (Look, I can talk post-modern!) Explanation is a thoroughly pragmatic notion. The kind of explanation we need depends upon our aims and purposes in seeking knowledge. If we want to know what the terrorists have done and why because we hope to influence their actions in the future—say by using certain carrots and sticks in our interactions with them—it is more important to understand what they believe than to understand why they believe it. If, on the other hand, our goal is to stop the reproduction of Islamic radicals, then we do need to think more about why these appalling ideas are adopted by so many people.

Third, and most importantly, I would insist that one explanation of change and development in culture is the previous culture. Our beliefs and desires change in response to new circumstances, new opportunities and new constraints. But what we take to be an opportunity and constraint depends to a very large extent on the ideals, aspirations, and goals we already have. And the new views of the world we accept are evaluated in large part in terms of the views we already held.

Of course, the existence of old and traditional ideas and culture need explanation, too. And, the explanation of where they came from will invoke material as well as ideological factors. But, even though explanations can go on indefinitely in theory, in practice they all come to an end at some point. And there is no reason to assume, in advance of inquiry, that material rather than ideological forces are of greatest importance in explaining the rise of a certain culture or set of ideas. There is no reason to think that the answer to question, which is more important structure or culture, will be the same in all circumstances.

This is the fundamental point I want to make: there are no philosophical reasons for assuming that political and social structure or psychological propensities are more important in the explanation of new cultural formations than is the enduring impact of an older weltanschauung. (I write pragmatic philosophy of social science, seeking to diminish the importance of philosophy of social science.) As my eight year old daughter is wont to say, we have to look and see.

That brings us to the dispute between Huntington and Sen (and others.) Huntington argues for the primacy of ideology in the development of contemporary civilizations. He claims that the six or seven civilizations have been shaped to a much greater extent by the ideals that have long animated their institutions and practices then by changing material forces. And, more importantly, he claims that the introduction of modern science, technology, and industry will not dramatically transform the way of life in these civilizations. For, on fundamental issues of religion, morality, and politics, the cultural inheritance of these civilizations will call the tune. Modernity will take different forms in different places as Western techniques are swaddled in the particular cloth traditional to each civilization.

Huntington may be right and he may be wrong. But no philosophical argument is going to settle the issue. Instead, we are going to have to address his claims in great detail. That is one reason we are so inclined to look for quick and dirty philosophical resolutions to the issue. It is hard to imagine anyone with the knowledge to evaluate the questions raised by this dispute. (I certainly don’t have it, something you should keep in mind below. The claims found in what follows I make with the greatest trepidation. Read them only as examples of the kinds of arguments that can be made about the cultural distinctiveness of the West.)

There are a number of grounds for thinking Huntington’s argument is problematic. As Alix pointed out, Huntington tends to see cultures as hermetically sealed. He fails to recognize that civilizations usually have more than one strand. At least that is true for our own: Western civilization is as much an enduring argument among a number of different tendencies of thought as an agreement on certain central ideas. Huntington neglects cultural drift and syncretism. 

Despite these flaws, and other inadequacies in his argument,[2] it might seem that Huntington is on to something important, although he misstates his point by over emphasizing the classical and Christian sources of Western civilization. For the cultural tendencies that really distinguish the West are products of the Enlightenment. The centrality of the right to freedom and the notion that all men and women deserve equal rights is not found elsewhere. (Even the most tolerant of Biblical religions, Islam, is not willing to grant equal rights and status to other people of the book.) Our notion of a public sphere in which not just institutions, practices, policies and procedures but the claims of revealed religion itself all must come before the bar of public reason also seems to be a distinctively Western ideal. The exaltation of the individual in our civilization has few parallels.[3]

Sen has a reply to this line of thought, one that Alix alluded to: It is only our ignorance of the full range of ideas in other civilizations that leads us to insist on the distinctively Western character of our ideas of freedom, equality, public reason, and individualism. While Sen presents evidence that some of these ideas are found in the Indian past, I don’t find his argument fully convincing. It is one thing to find texts that support one or another Enlightenment idea. It is another thing to find these ideas more or less solidly embedded in the institutions and practices of a political community. Is there any reason to think that Enlightenment notions of a public space, for example, ever played a role in the history of India—prior to the influence of the British on the sub-continent—similar to that it has played in the history of the West? From what little I know of the history of India, I have my doubts.

My doubts about Sen’s critique of Huntington do not, however, lead me to think that Huntington is fundamentally correct. Once we recognize that cultural developments can have material as well as ideological causes, another kind of critique of the Huntington thesis comes to the fore, one that was implicit in most of the arguments Alix presented yesterday. Leave aside the mistaken philosophical claim that material explanations are the only ones; the case for the great importance of material factors in the origin of the Enlightenment is, I think, overwhelming. And that is true even though I am by no means sure what those material factors are. Think again about the extraordinary transformation of Europe from, say, the 15^th to 18^th centuries. We certainly can’t explain this kind of transformation by pointing to cultural continuities. And whatever the genius of Machiavelli, Luther, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, these acknowledged legislators of modernity could not have found ways to transform our self-understanding if their ideas did not find some purchase in the lives of thousands of men and women.

As I suggested, there is little consensus among historians about the structural or psychological sources of the Enlightenment. Some theorists point to the changing relationship of different classes, either in the pre-modern or early modern eras (Marx, Barrington Moore). Others talk about the distinctive form of family life in Western civilization and the unusual forms of property in pre-modern England (James Q. Wilson). These, and others explanations of the Enlightenment, are interesting ideas, ones that we need to consider when we think about the likely future of other civilizations. But these are not the most important considerations. Of far greater importance is the implication of the adoption by other civilizations of Western scientific, technological, economic, and military practices.

There is no part of the world that does not wish to adopt some of these practices in order to benefit from what they have achieved. Now it is not the case that these achievements can account for origins of the distinctive ideals of the West. These ideals largely predate the enormous economic and military triumphs of the West. It is likely, though, that the prospect of such achievements added to the attractiveness of early modern political ideas. And the reality of these achievements helped solidify support for Enlightenment ideals. But, for other civilizations, the appeal of the West starts with our successes in science, technology, economic growth and military prowess. Thus the key question is what will happen to other civilizations that try to match these successes.

We have no good idea what the answer to this question will be. There are some reasons, articulated by Fukuyama, to think that Western scientific, technological, economic, and military practices lend support to individualist ideas and to a desire for the kinds of freedom unavailable in traditional communities. Scientific and technical progress as well as economic growth requires some intellectual freedom and the creation of some kind of labor market. Thus various kinds of mobility—class, educational, and geographic, in particular—are a common result of modernization. Mobility enables men (and, in most places, women) to step out and away from their family and clan. As they take advantage of new opportunities granted (or thrust upon) them, they take responsibility for their own lives in a way that was not possible before. They have to make new kinds of choices and thus must exercise a new kind of reflectiveness about their lives. Given these consequences, it certainly seems that some kinds of autonomy and individualism are deeply embedded in the Western practices we have been discussing.

Huntington’s response to arguments of this sort is that Western scientific, technological, management, and military practices can be enveloped in very different political and moral ideas. It is not so farfetched to think that this is true, at least to some point. Ten years ago, talk of the difference between Asian and American economic practices, especially with regard to their labor markets, was all the rage. And we know from our own experience that people who value free labor markets can support fundamentalist religion. Yet, one can still ask whether the long term tendency of modern scientific, technological, economic, and military will not gradually wear away these and other differences. Fundamentalism may be, like Michael Walzer said of Puritanism, a transitional ideology that helps people new to the modern world master their own fears and uncertainties. Asian capitalism turns out, on deeper examination, to be less different from our own than we initially thought.

We can leave this fascinating debate here. Let me conclude by saying that the questions I have been raising in the last few pages cannot even be addressed if we adopt either a wholly materialist or wholly idealist point of view. If culture is epiphenomenal, then military, market, and other structural forces should ultimately make for a great degree of uniformity across civilizations. If culture is all in all, then the six (or seven or eight) hermetically sealed civilizations will accept only those aspects of modernity that can be swallowed without indigestion. We can avoid these silly alternatives, and think hard about the fascinating question of what the world will look like in fifty and a hundred years time, only if we turn from philosophical argument to empirical inquiry. Then we can look more closely to the variety of traditions of thought in each civilization and the various ways they react to structural opportunities and problems.