fallows on brooks
James Fallows is unhappy with a David Brooks column about China that says things like this: “Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.” Or this: “Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.” Or this, the thesis of the column: “The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.”
Fallows replies, surely with some justification, “This is the kind of thing you can say only if you have not the slightest inkling of how completely different a billion-plus people can be from one another. . . . The very most obvious thing about today’s China is how internally varied and contradictory it is, how many opposite things various of its people want, how likely-to-be-false any generalization is.”
Okay, fair enough. But what he calls, mockingly, Brooks’s “pensées“ are in Brooks’s view the results of a great deal of research into cultural difference. “These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern.” He then names one such experimenter, Richard Nisbett. So Brooks is claiming here to be a reporter rather than a penseur. So if Fallows is going to refute Brooks he needs to address the terms on which Brooks is writing: He needs to say that there is no such research, or there is but it’s mistaken, or there is better research than what Brooks quotes, or Brooks has cited the right research but has misunderstood it.
The experiments Brooks refers to do seem to be painting with a very broad brush indeed, and I’m skeptical about the usefulness of such comprehensive categories: individualist/collectivist, Western/Asian, individuals/contexts. But I’d like to have more substantive ground for my skepticism than what Fallows offers.
Brooks is always good for a chuckle.
“The ceremony drew from China’s long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one — drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We’ve seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present”
I should take him to an Ohio State football game. God knows what he’d think after seeing Script Ohio.
— Steven Donegal · Aug 12, 09:59 PM · #
my review from years ago
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000922.html
‘s ok, but he’s not the only one, and there are various angles to this. but the reality is yeah, these generalizations between anglo-americans and chinese are very robust….
— razib · Aug 12, 10:12 PM · #
Fallows, at least in this comment, seems to be suffering from an inability to move fluidly between high and low levels of abstraction. All Brooks is saying (in the relevant part) is that there is a statistical tendency for people raised in different societies to have signifcantly (both in the statistical and natural language meanings of “significantly”) different responses to replicated experiments and that a reasonable interpretation across many experiments is that this can be usefully summarized as “more collectivist” vs. “more individualist”. Saying that there is lots of variation in the Chinese population doesn’t really go to Brokks’s point.
Shorter form: Ditto, Alan.
— Jim Manzi · Aug 12, 10:19 PM · #
I think the counterexamples at a low level of abstraction, that Fallows highlighted, do point to something in the high-level as well. For example, Taiwan has developed (in the last two decades or so) a very rowdy democratic and capitalist culture, and so has south korea (all those people in Seoul protesting against their president). So, then, this along with all those Chinese billionaires making money on real estate suggest that, to the extent that Nisbett’s studies are accurate, the range of ‘outputs’ from these societies with ostensibly different psychological makeups can often mimic those of western societies in terms of boisterous politicking, embracing of capitalism, and even tendencies towards individualism.
So, the thing that bothers me about the column’s general theme is that it seems fatalistic about these cultural/psychological trends (whether they are generally true or not) necessarily producing authoritarian, non-democratic societies. Which is, incidentally, dangerously close to parroting the so-called Lee-Kuan Yew thesis that democracy is ‘not Asian’ (an argument that Amartya Sen has demolished rather well). But there are strong East Asian and Asian (hello India) counterexamples. Not to overstate it, but this read to me like a work of asian authoritarian apologetics; ie: it is innate in our psychology/culture to be collectivist; this thus justifies our authoritarian state.
(Also, hm, there are some silly-sounding parts of the column with pretty strong counterexamples though: “Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes.” — one will note that marxism arose in the west, and that it was a very cold soviet russia that was the pre-eminent example of modern authoritarian collectivism. Similarly an England prone to outbreaks of the plague, cholera, dysentry managed to produce a lot of tracts from Locke onwards that were not collectivist. I should hope that this particular claim is not the product of actual research since it seems pretty pseudo-scientific.)
— jackal · Aug 12, 10:57 PM · #
I think what ticked Fallows off was mainly the casual invoking of the Olympic ceremony in support of the collectivist/individualist thesis — something I agree on — if merely displays of individuals acting in concert together are indications that a culture is collectivist, there are plenty of events (cheerleading, and the events before games, for e.g.) here in America that one can use to make the contention that America has a collectivist ethos. Also the almost casual grouping of everyone to the East as “Asians”.
Personally what irritates me the most about Brooks columns is his lofty Olympian tone (his columns, usually have something interesting to say though he generalizes like crazy). He often reminds me of an uncle who’s telling me the truths of life…
— scritic · Aug 12, 11:11 PM · #
Fallows’s reply sounds about right. His own voluminous posts while a resident of China leave one with the impression that Fallows himself hasn’t got much of a clue, if any, as to what is going on around him, and probably wouldn’t report it if he did.
— Randy · Aug 12, 11:21 PM · #
Nisbett’s book is very interesting and well worth reading.
On the other hand, I would suggest that the kind of society you would expect to see from Nisbett’s cognitive model looks a lot more like Japan than contemporary China. There are striking differences between the two cultures, especially in levels of politeness.
— Steve Sailer · Aug 13, 12:06 AM · #
Well, I read that piece and I, American from birth, thought cow and hay went together better than cow and chicken so I guess that makes me Chinese. I think both of them paint with a broad brush.
— jjv · Aug 13, 12:24 AM · #
Sorry, but I don’t think referring to one guy constitutes “research.” I have a certain affinity for Brooks’s flightiness – “cultural geography is the discipline of the future!!!…no neuroscience holds the keys to understanding our world!” – and I like big ideas type essays with little regard for particularities, but as Donegal points out, Brooks is never really rethinking his assumptions.
It’s bizarre to read him here, simultaneously, oppose individualism to collectivism and then go on about the cultural/traditional/perhaps-even-evolutionary sources of individualism, without noting the disconnect.
— berger · Aug 13, 12:47 AM · #
“There are striking differences between the two cultures, especially in levels of politeness.”
singaporeans complain about the slovenliness of mainlanders. people from hong kong and tawain also complain about it. probably a condition of such quick wealth creation without social/cultural capital to buffer the shock.
— razib · Aug 13, 02:34 AM · #
Painting with a broad brush, and not staying inside the lines (much more difficult to stay within lines drawn with any care when a big brush is used).
The lines in question are called ‘science’ and Brooks blurs and smudges them such that his painting is pure abstraction; based, that is, on imagination (sometimes called ‘intuition’) with no reference to the observable world.
I refer you to Mark Liberman’s post in Language Log “David Brooks, Social Psychologist”. A key bit for your purposes: “…I traced Brooks’ assertions to their sources. And even I, a hardened Brooks-checker, was surprised to find how careless his account of the research is.”
And his final sentence: “And we should be wary of following David Brooks too far down that road, given that he can’t be bothered to keep straight who did which experiments, or whether the subjects were Chinese or Japanese, or whether it was the Americans or the Asians who more often mentioned the focal fish, or essentially any of the evocative details that he loves to use to bring his ideas to life for his readers.”
Case closed, in my book. Liberman’s analysis is as usual, detailed and scrupulous; the polar opposite of the op-ed ethos exercised by Brooks.
— felix culpa · Aug 16, 10:35 PM · #