August 9, 207--Cultural Intelligence

What an irony. The U.S. is by far the most religious of Western countries and thus most guided by these and related kinds of cultural forces. But when it comes time to assert ourselves in the larger world we over and over again forget the power of culture and as a result blunder into situations where we do not belong and once there wind up making a mess because we ignore the very kinds of things that characterize us as a people.



There is a dissonance between what our policy and media elites see to be motivating people and the actual ways in which Americans behave. These elites, which by and large are secular children of the Enlightenment, distrust emotion and belief and thus argue that people and societies will behave "rationally" if only given the opportunity to do so. "Rationally" to them means that all people will aspire to be like us--to have our values and seek lives similar to ours--if they are freed to make that rational choice. This in spite of the evidence that most contemporary Americans, by this definition, opt not to do so and instead choose to lead belief-driven lives.

So when we find ourselves frustrated with our nation-building efforts in Afghanistan or Iraq we do not know where to turn to understand the sources of our failures or what to do in order to behave more sensitively or effectively. Many (most by now) would likely say we shouldn’t have embarked on these misguided adventures. But here we are, and thus what to do?

In the past, when we were at war with people from cultures very different than ours we turned to anthropologists for their help in understanding the enemy. A classic case is Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study she was commissioned to undertake during the Second World War when our troops were seeking strategies that would work against Japanese soldiers who behaved in ways that confounded our notions of “rational warfare.”

We would do well, then, to listen to what scholars today might tell us about the peoples we are ostensibly attempting to liberate. For example, part of our ineffectiveness in bringing some form of democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq is impeded by the fact that both of these countries are populated largely by descendents of nomads for whom the customs and institutions of family, clan, and tribe are the governing cultural realities. To not take this into consideration when working to impose centralized governments on people who are fiercely independent dooms our efforts to failure.

As one telling example, Michael Frachetti of Washington University has been studying nomadic traditions in Kazakhstan and contends that contemporary policy makers who ignore the importance of “cultural intelligence,” the critical roles that the cultural echoes of that ancient way of life play in contemporary society, will fail in any effort to simply graft onto these traditional institutions our notions of nation-state, parliament, a judicial system, and other kinds of governmental agencies. (See NY Times article linked below.) He says, “Some of our foreign policy complications [in Afghanistan] derive from our inability to locate a nomadic dynamic within contemporary political structures.”

I know well that scholars helped get us involved in Vietnam (remember “the best and the brightest”?), but perhaps if we are careful about who we listen to some of them can help rescue us from ourselves.