Race and Culture: A World View.

At a professional meeting that I attended last spring, a consultant on "workforce diversity" gave a presentation that purported to explain by a kind of crudely simplified anthropology the differences in working "styles" of various broad groupings in the modern American labor force.

White males, for example, had been forced to wring a livelihood out of the cold, forbidding geography of Europe and to protect their hard-earned resources from members of other tribes intent on taking them. As a result, they had become cold, unemotional, and intensely competitive--attributes that characterized their working style in the modern corporate office.

Black males, by contrast, had gotten their livelihoods amid the warmth and relative abundance of Africa and, as a result, had developed a much more relaxed, less cutthroat approach to the business of getting a living--an approach that persists among them even in modern corporate circumstances.

There were similar explanations for the supposedly distinctive working styles of women, Asians, and other groups. And the thrust of the presentation was, in simple terms, that there is something of value in the style of each group and they all must learn to accommodate one another if America is to be productive and competitive in the modern global economy.

This example of dime-store anthropology came to mind when I read Thomas Sowell's assertion, in the preface of Race and Culture, that his book "challenges many dogmas of so-called 'social science.'" It may well be that, somewhere in the vastness of American academia, there are holdouts to Sowell's central notion: that culture matters, that some cultures have been more successful and effective economically than others, and that the people who evolved those cultures have more to teach the rest of us than others.

There may be holdouts to that idea, but I am hard-pressed to think of one that I have encountered in the workaday world in more than two decades as a journalist. The diversity consultant is far more typical.

Where Sowell parts company with the diversity consultant and others who might be called cultural levelers is in his willingness to name names and give grades. The fact is, he says, that Western European culture is where the action has been and is. It is the Western Europeans--and their cultural "offshoot" societies in America and, more recently, Japan--who earned the knowledge, created the technology, and fostered the attitudes that created our modern world culture, based on scientific empiricism. Everybody else is an also-ran, even if some others--the Chinese, for example--have had glory days in the past. And some, he suggests, like the Africans, have hardly even been in the game.

But Sowell has a polemical point in addition to an informational one. He is probably America's most famous black opponent of affirmative action, and Race and Culture really is an extended argument against affirmative action, largely on grounds that it is doomed to futility.

There are no shortcuts to advancement, Sowell says, and no substitutes for the hard work of developing the skills and talents and attitudes--the "human capital"--that allow individuals and peoples to succeed. "Even if all races all over the globe have identical innate potential," he writes, "tangible economic and social results do not depend upon abstract potential, but on developed capabilities."

There is very little of deep interest in the early chapters of Race and Culture because, with a few minor exceptions, most of what is there is self-evident. To summarize: Every people has "its own particular set of skills for dealing with the economic and social necessities of life--and also its own particular set of values as to what are the higher and lower purposes of life."

"Much of the advancement of the human race has taken the form of...cross-cultural borrowings and influences," these being the result of migrations, conquests, and other such events which result in a shattering of "cultural insularity."

Where the argument gets interesting is where Sowell begins applying his economist's mind to various of the "dogmas of so-called social science," in chapters on race and economics, race and politics, race and intelligence, and race and slavery. He truly does mount a frontal challenge to many such dogmas, for example, to the notion that black housing "segregation" is always and everywhere the result of malign, invidiously biased behavior on the part of whites and, unlike the residential clustering of other ethnic groups, never the result of rational economic factors or even--God forbid--choice on the part of blacks.

Even as he makes sound arguments and scores legitimate points, however, Sowell occasionally lapses into tendentiousness. For example, in the course of arguing that discrimination is more a tendency of government than of the private marketplace, he observes: "One of the crucial areas of discrimination by government has been in the quantity and quality of education made available to different groups, for this can have lasting effects on their productivity and career potential in the private sector as well." (As one of several examples of this, he notes that in the antebellum American South it was a criminal offense to educate blacks, even at private expense.)

To most people this would suggest that, where governments have owned up to discrimination, some compensatory educational effort ought be made on behalf of that group or groups subjected to such a disability. Sowell, however, simply slides by that point and notes that "governmental discrimination in education may so handicap particular racial and ethnic groups as to make private discrimination difficult to detect or estimate, because groups end up with such different productivities as a result."

At some points, Sowell's polemical argument just breaks down completely. Such is the case when he addresses the issue of reparations for slavery.

He begins with an economist's quibble. "If the purpose of reparations is to share equitably the economic contributions of slavery to the present economy, then it would first be necessary to establish that there were in fact net benefits." Having previously asserted that there were no net benefits, however, Sowell can simply declare this point won for the antireparations side.

"A more plausible case for reparations," he acknowledges, "is as compensation for the suffering and degradations of millions of human beings during the centuries of slavery. Tempting as it may be to glide from uncompensated sufferings in the past to reparations to descendants in the present, the heritability of guilt is a principle without foundation and dangerously divisive in any society."

But who said anything about guilt, much less anything about inheriting it? The issue in the reparations debate is responsibility--the nation's responsibility to try, as best it can, to help descendants of slaves overcome the disabilities under which, plausibly, they labor as a result. The issue is not guilt; it is affirmative action.

It is here that Sowell becomes almost maddening. He speaks, for example, of the enduring "cultural headstart" enjoyed by "free people of color" and how it persists even to the present. He speaks of how cultural characteristics of peoples endure over centuries and through lengthy migrations.

But when it comes to disabilities of modern blacks that some people consider a "legacy of slavery," he is dismissive: "Whatever may be the real causes of the very different patterns among blacks in the world of today must be sought in the twentieth century, not in the era before emancipation." But he never convincingly explains why this is so.

The most useful part of Race and Culture may be Sowell's discussion of race and intelligence. Not because he refutes the Charles Murray-Richard Hernstein argument that blacks are inferior in IQ to whites and Asians. The best he can do in that regard is to chastise those who have attempted to suppress discussion of the issue and note the unintended result: "The taboo against discussing race and IQ...has had the perverse effect of freezing an existing majority of testing experts in favor of a belief that racial IQ differences are influenced by genetics. No belief can be refuted if it cannot be discussed."

Sowell's real contribution here is in suggesting that in the continuing nature-nurture debate, the "environment" that influences mental development needs to be more broadly conceived.

Environment is not so much an answer as a gateway to further questions....In particular, "environment" cannot be confined to immediate surroundings, whether home, school, or neighborhood....To salvage the environmental theory of IQ differences would require a much broader conception of environment, including cultural orientations and values going far back into history.

That's an idea with real merit. Even here though, Sowell can't resist making his anti-affirmative argument: "But this broader conception of environment, reaching well beyond immediate circumstances, offers correspondingly less hope of substantial change by social engineering, such as remedial programs or the racial integration of schools."

That's Tom Sowell. Ever vigilant.

I have always been interested in theories of Christian mission since such reflections, inevitably, bring to the fore fundamental theological questions: the nature of salvation; the relationship of Christian revelation to non-Christian religions; the uniqueness of Christ; etc. Timothy Yates's history of modern Christian mission theory gives ample scope to those and cognate issues as he sketches out the evolution of Christian (largely Protestant; Catholics do not even get consideration until he reaches the 1940s) theories about mission in this century. His story reaches back to just before the now famous Edinburgh Conference of 1910 (which would be so formative for the modern ecumenical movement) and forward to current debates about the uniqueness of Christ and contemporary approaches to understanding Christian faith vis-a-vis the world's religions.