Conquests and Cultures -- Freedom Book of the Month from Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network

Conquests and Cultures

Freedom Book of the Month for November, 1999:
Conquests and Cultures
by Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 493pp., 1998, $16.00 ($10.16 from Laissez Faire Books)

What is "culture?"

On what traits does a culture establish -- or fail to establish -- itself as an enduring and worthwhile center around which a people will rally?

Thomas Sowell has distilled his answers to these questions into three volumes. The latest, "Conquests and Cultures," examines societies in the throes of political death: the invaded, the conquered, and the colonized societies of history.

In previous installments of his grand trilogy, Sowell examined the relationships of race and immigration patterns to culture. In this volume, he traces the impact of the conqueror and brings to light a surprising result. A culture strongly based in habits which promote industry and productivity will prevail and continue to function even when its military defenses are overcome. A culture which has no such basis will slide once again into decay when its more industrious invaders withdraw, to the extent that the invaders' culture has not transformed theirs.

Across the millennia, some cultures have spread mayhem on their road to empire, and some have spread law and planted the seeds of superior technologies in fertile populations. This is just one side of the equation, though; the society engulfed, whether by Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar, has had to make the choice between sticking to its cultural norms or adopting new ones. The healthy culture has rebuilt itself after the flight of vandals; the sick one has refused to digest and benefit from the Peace of Rome.

This, according to Sowell, has made all the difference between stagnant cultures and healthy ones. Despite the "three steps forward, two steps back" course of history which gave us the Dark Ages and assorted other unhealthy intervals of pause in progress, the western cultures were prone to adopt progressive ideas and technologies. The eastern cultures stubbornly refused to benefit from them, choosing instead to rest on the laurels of tradition.

Ultimately, the ability of cultures to survive, prosper, and recover from the depredations of the conqueror has depended in large measure on the degree to which that culture recognizes the free and productive individual as its most basic and necessary component; on the degree to which the culture has fostered individual effort, individual accountability and the objective authority of law -- as opposed to the arbitrary edict of custom; and on the degree to which the culture has allowed forward movement and maintained its integrity in the face of barbarism.