Our Century’s Most Challenging Project
The forces of culture and interaction between cultures are not always attributed to the West’s failures in business and politics. However, it’s quite common to use cultural explanations, e.g. inherent cultural fatalism, to describe failure in other parts of the world. The Cross-Culture Blog has recently posted a very thoughtful, yet critical essay on this.
The message it sends is simple: to make progress in the 21st century, the West must ramp up its understanding of culture and implement this understanding to effectively exist on the global playing field. The essay’s theme is geared towards socioeconomic development and modernization. It refutes the historical attempts at advancing the developing world by having them copy what has been done in the West. Because of cultural differences, this method is like mixing oil and water, as mindless duplication does virtually nothing for a countries’ progress. The writer favors leveraging indigenous ways of learning and encourages the promotion of these cultural institutions by understanding them and working within a framework that developing areas can relate to. The stipulations that accompany foreign aid have not worked up to now, which can surely be related to a lack of cultural sensitivity.
Image: the UN Human Development Index for 2007, dark green being the most developed and red being the least developed nations.
