Does culture matter?

The Soul of Latin America
The Cultural and
Political Tradition
Howard J. Wiarda
Yale University Press, $35, 417 pp.

Among the international-affairs chattering classes, culture is king. Last year, Harvard University luminary Samuel P. Huntington coedited a major volume titled Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, with high-profile contributors ranging from Francis Fukuyama to Jeffrey Sachs. Moreover, since the end of the cold war, intellectuals around the world have decried the spread of American movies, music, and food as an insidious force that destroys local customs and warps the hearts and minds of global youth. And the recent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil only revived the notion that a conflict between Western and Islamic culture--a "clash of civilizations" as Huntington might call it--will be the defining struggle of the twenty-first century.

Cultural explanations are intuitive, straightforward, almost comforting. Nations and peoples behave differently simply because they are different. Look at their clothes, their customs, their beliefs--in a word, their culture. Yet the problem with culture is precisely its all-encompassing nature, its nearly tautological explanatory power. In their zeal to explain everything, cultural critics risk explaining nothing at all.

Howard J. Wiarda's The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition offers an instance of cultural analysis run amok. Wiarda, a political scientist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, purports to explain no less than "why and how Latin America differs from the United States, why its politics, society, and economies are at such variance from the American."

To understand Latin America today, Wiarda contends, we must first consider the cultural and intellectual traditions that Spanish conquerors brought to the New World in 1492. Apparently, in addition to their swords, horses, and diseases, the Spaniards also lugged some heavy cultural baggage across the Atlantic: ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and medieval Christianity. Even Thomas Aquinas was a stowaway, as the Spaniards smuggled his scholasticism and rigid conceptions of social hierarchy into the Americas.

Wiarda depicts Latin American cultural development in remarkably linear terms. Spain's principal cultural influences (Greece, Rome, the Bible, Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine) and its key historical experiences (the seven-hundred-year occupation by the Moors and the gradual reconquest of Spain) produced a unique political culture, markedly different from that of the rest of Western Europe. It was more medieval, top-down and authoritarian, statist, and exploitative. Through the discovery and subsequent conquest of the Americas, "these traits were then transferred to Latin America, in which setting they not only persisted for centuries but actually received a new lease on life."

Not content to absorb one set of institutional and ideological fixtures from abroad, Wiarda's Latin America has cycled through various new foreign political ideologies since the end of Spanish colonialism. First came liberalism, which served as the impetus for the independence movements of the early 1800s. Wiarda is quick to note, however, that these were "conservative revolutions": The elites clamoring for independence simply wanted freedom from Spain, not true freedom for Latin America's lower classes. By the mid-nineteenth century, the region's intellectual and political leaders had embraced positivism, which derived from the writings of French philosopher Auguste Comte and emphasized order, group rights over individual liberties, and a society in which all members knew their correct place or "station." Nationalism and Marxism soon followed as the region's ideological trends du jour, enduring in moderate form to this day.

Yet despite the coming and going of various ideological fads, claims Wiarda, Latin America remains unable to shake free of its original political culture. Latin American democracy today remains "top-down, organic, elitist, centralized, statist, nonparticipatory, patrimonialist, executive-centered, and group--rather than individual--oriented." In other words, the culture Latin America inherited from Spain proved to be a curse from which there is no escape.

Wiarda may well be right in his bleak view of the prospects for democracy in Latin America. But the pesky question that Wiarda never answers--indeed, he wastes much ink skirting it--is how much weight cultural traditions carry compared to other factors. "To me and to most readers," explains Wiarda, "the continuing importance of cultural differences is so obvious as to be almost irrefutable." Perhaps, but defining a position as true doesn't make it so. On the few occasions in which he qualifies his argument, he does so to the point of rendering it useless, unwittingly proving the limitations of cultural analysis. "But that is not to say that cultural factors alone explain national development. Economic, class, institutional, and dependency elements need to be factored into any explanatory paradigm. So do chance, accidents, geography, and perhaps, sociobiology."

Wiarda frequently reminds readers of the valuable service his book provides by disabusing them of Latin American stereotypes they've picked up in New Yorker cartoons or in movies like Bananas and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (Mired as he is in dusty historical treatises, Wiarda would do well to visit his local twenty-first-century video store and pick up Traffic or Amores Perros to learn how most movie-going gringos perceive Latin America these days). Yet the only service--or disservice--that Wiarda gives readers is an intellectual rationale for all the old Moon over Parador-style stereotypes. Indeed, he endorses the stereotypes. "Even today in Latin America," he argues, "society seems to be made up of stock types: the oligarch, the priest, the military officer, the bureaucrat, the labor leader, the student, the peasant, and so on."

When he cannot marshal the evidence to support his positions, Wiarda simply speculates on how Latin Americans really think. "Deep down," the author tells us, "the oligarchies of Latin America do not believe that Indians and people of African descent are fully equal." His probe of the Latin mind goes deeper: "I am not convinced that those rich, white Latin American aristocrats--although they cannot say so publicly--are even now entirely convinced that Indians, blacks, and lower-class persons really have souls..."

Wiarda frequently contrasts the racism and social hierarchies of Latin America with the equality and social mobility of the United States; indeed, explaining this difference is the very purpose of his book. Yet his presentation of the United States is stunningly benign. He treats racism in the United States like a statistical aberration, barely meriting parenthetical references, as if America's racial divides were limited to those unfortunate few years during the 1860s. He glosses over inequities at home, simply arguing that "a society that is inegalitarian is one thing, but one that is unabashedly so is quite another." And he largely disregards unsavory U.S. policies toward Latin America during the cold war, which did much to retard democracy in the region. Ultimately, The Soul of Latin America may reveal as much about cultural self-perception in this country as it does about the cultural traditions of our neighbors to the south.

Carlos Lozada is associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine.