Can we set society on a sustainable path to human flourishing by learning to breed healthy cultural attitudes?
By Annie Tubadji
Attitude, whether you want to do something, whether you love or hate doing it, is the most crucial determinant for what will follow from one’s behaviour, and from the behaviour of groups of people too. Everyone acts strongest on one’s love, but sometimes what we come to love is harmful to us. Cure from addiction to alcohol starts with acknowledging you have a problem to solve. Couple therapy can help you save your marriage in many ways, but only provided that both partners are willing to work on it genuinely so. The success of decisions and interactions between people depends on the healthiness of the loving attitude that underlies the behaviour. And so are many other socio-economic choices, such as whether you consume a pork steak and whether you can find a peaceful resolution with your neighbouring country or not, regardless of your cultural differences or proximity concerning the consumption of pork steaks and many alike behaviours.
Attitudes are a complex, dynamic thing
They change under the influence of how we have been raised and bred, and what and whom we have encountered in our life, and how we have allowed this encounter to further shape and modify us as agents. The amalgam of all our attitudes is often closely similar to the attitudes of the people born and raised in the same way as ourselves. However, we always have the free will to deviate from the standard. We do so depending on our economic standing among peers and the number of positive interactions we have had during our lifetime with agents carrying attitudes different from ours. This, in short, is what is termed ‘culture’ in my book Culture Based Development: Modelling Cultural Bias in Economic Choice. Culture, according to the CBD paradigm, is this amalgam of attitudes, existing outside of the individual, which offers a code of valuation of the reality and each element of it in a way consistent with the environment where the individual feels safe and protected from the existential uncertainty of one’s life.
Many disciplines have tried to understand culture: sociology, social psychology, cultural theory and even economics (with off and on episodes in its evolution from moral philosophy through value-free economics to the modern empirical rediscovery that ‘culture matters’ period). Yet, none of these disciplines has systematically looked at: (a) how attitudes emerge as a result of the context and (b) how they change when the context changes. This is a must-know that will add an actionable incremental element to our current knowledge about how attitudes change when the aftermath of having the attitudes is learnt, i.e. the cultural learning about the optimal attitudes and their consequences for the socio-economic flourishing of people and places.
Culture Based Development (CBD) offers such ‘economics of why’ rendering of the emergence of culture – i.e. an economic systematisation of the process why cultural attitudes emerge at the levels of valuation that they do. Resembling a public choice handling of the question of voting, CBD handles the emergence of cultural attitudes by representing it as a perfectly competitive market of demand and supply of valuation-of-uncertainty-harm-related behaviour towards the world – a market for what you commit to treat as harmful (or helpful) to your survival in your behaviour and choice.
To methodically address culture as the main source of attitudes in human behaviour, CBD prepares the path to handling culture according to the top economic criteria for handling an element of choice that matters. Economists are concerned with accurately defining the factor that matters, identifying where it plugs accurately in the decision-making process and then quantifying it precisely in order to be sure that the economic model is unbiased, i.e. trustworthy and reliable for academic and practical use as a source of evidence base for policy making.
The first five chapters of the book deal with defining culture (Chapter 1), measuring it precisely (as a stock of capital, Chapter 2 on cultural capital), and as a difference between stocks (i.e. cultural distance, Chapter 3) and as a dynamics (what CBD terms cultural entropy, Chapter 4). Chapter 5 explains the place of culture in the choice model – why culture defines the permissible set that every choice is sieved through and can become bounded by no matter how rational a decision mechanism it follows. This part of the book provides the definition and measurement of culture. It handles the complex dynamic entity that culture represents with complexity theory approaches fit for handling complex dynamic entities. It also pools all the literature and explains how there are multiple ways for quantifying culture – through stated self-reported attitudes, through revealed consumption of cultural goods and cultural participation or through the use of language as a marker for the thoughts that dominate the behaviour of people (a mode of measurement of attitudes which has a huge relevance in the age of AI and large language models development). CBD demonstrates why the linguistic dominance of one language or the linguistic loss of another language in a society amounts to a profound cultural loss with aftermaths for those suffering the loss directly and indirectly for everyone else in the society where this loss has been experienced.
Once defining culture and identifying its place in the choice model is done (accompanied with detailed care for the precise quantification of culture), the book moves towards using the CBD paradigm for testing the role of culture in the organisation of society towards a sustainable path to human flourishing. CBD shows that culture sits at the beginning of the decision-making process and is therefore the cause for the outcome. Culture predetermines every outcome following the chain rule of causality. Put differently, every choice is driven by the attitudes culture breeds in the decision makers. But CBD provides a map to identify whether these attitudes are healthy enough to lead society to organise towards flourishing. CBD provides a map about understanding what the attitudes shaped locally can lead to (demise or sustainability and progress), when (at what levels of culture locally) and most importantly – how this level of attitudes can be handled, changed and maintained in the zone where it is beneficial for the flourishing of every human in a diverse society.
While theory of clubs deals with how one club can win over the others in the fight for limited common resources, CBD engages with how all clubs present locally can maintain the common human flourishing of all clubs avoiding conflict and ensuring optimal use of the resources for the good of the entire population, while it is still organised in cultural sub-clubs. In other words, CBD offers a theory on how to achieve the win-win existence of cultural clubs in togetherness.
Namely, in part two of the book, the following four chapters show how the aftermaths of attitudes would differ depending on their local cultural entropy level. When cultural entropy is between 0 and 1 (between its extreme levels, mathematically speaking), then there is some cultural bias. This cultural bias deviates the local decisions from their optimal level for the desired result by as much as the cultural difference between the cultural clubs currently is. When, however, one of the local clubs dominates the others, and thus cultural entropy is close to or equal to 0 (in dictatorship), then the cooperation between people and the entire socio-economic system can collapse due to their extreme inefficiency in shielding the individual from uncertainty.
These effects from the cultural entropy level are divided into direct and indirect effects of culture, depending on whether culture is part of the decision making model as a determinant of the choice (as when one decides whether to go to a locality as a migrant or whether to buy a pizza with someone else) and indirect (when the choice itself does not contain the cultural element but includes an element dependent in its availability on cultural characteristics – such as the decision to employ an excellent engineer in a country that has not allowed people from India who happen to be more often excellent engineers but are not found in its territory where you are currently employing because they were not allowed to immigrate in the country; or trying to cooperate with people whom you threaten to exterminate).
How does CBD intend this knowledge (on the cultural entropy dependence of the cultural bias and its effects) to be used for nurturing healthy attitudes for a flourishing society? Is it by leading people in their choices, is it by patronisingly nudging them while they do not look? No. It is by taking the respectful route of delivering education for all, which is the route we take for delivering cognitive intelligence to our society. Only CBD recommends aesthetic education as the education for all that breeds emotional intelligence in society. The healthily balanced attitudes of emotional intelligence. By calibrating the aesthetic education curriculum in a way that it exposes the students to a balanced diet of engagement of their minds with both their inherited and their surrounding identities, alternative to their inherited ones, as a living culture reality of theirs, the CBD aesthetic education approach rebalances the menu with which the minds of people are fed in order to produce the most flexible form of their brain able to learn with healthy curiosity and adaptivity to the best of its cognitive potential to be rational. This works similarly to the way a balanced food menu provides a flexible and agile body able to be used for any tasks the person will face in their chosen walk of life. The key to how aesthetic education (an idea as old as the world) is used here is innovated by the recommendation to balance the menu of what is taught in terms of introducing the mind to knowing oneself and also knowing others with equal familiarity and confidence, so fear of uncertainty is minimised in their behaviour. This is a rational way of minimising the negatives from our emotional susceptibility to fear of what is different from us. The optimal complete freedom from fear might be as unattainable as a perfectly competitive market. Still, we could do much better than the often collapsing empires in our history if we learn how to maintain our minds open to each other and in balance with our emotions of fear so that we manage to achieve together a sustainable future of flourishing in our diversity indeed and in practice. The book engages with aesthetic education at the end of each chapter to clarify the policy-relevant nexus of each subtopic it covers.
Seeing beyond good and evil
The final chapter of the book emphasises why CBD postulates that value-free analysis of values is the only evidence-based way to study cultural bias in economic choice, why no virtues are intrinsic, and no self-righteousness can be a sustainable way to human flourishing. Because the correct answer all depends on an ‘if’, it all depends on the target we choose. What is good for helping you slim down is bad for helping you gain weight. It all depends on if you want to lose or gain weight. The ability to see truth and human fairness requires seeing beyond good and evil as defined by some, as Nietzsche put it in philosophy. Still, many disciplines have failed to translate it into their language so far. CBD translates Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” recommendation in its CBD value-free analysis of values (VFAV). VFAV is the CBD approach to studying cultural bias through the CBD paradigm for defining and measuring the effect of the cultural differences and their internal balance on the flourishing of the full population of all cultural clubs.
That is, in a nutshell, my advanced introduction to culture as the main source for human development. I encourage you to take a look at the CBD book, and I hope that you find it a useful synthesis of the prolific literature in many disciplines on the many and varied aspects of culture and its impact on human behaviour and human wellbeing and welfare. A useful stepping stone to find the golden thread that can lead society to a sustainable path of human flourishing based on intelligent cultural management of individual and social emotions of fear, hate and love.
Dr Annie Tubadji is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Swansea University’s School of Social Sciences and specialises in regional and happiness economics.
Culture Based Development: Modelling Cultural Bias in Economic Choice is out now.
Read a sample chapter on Elgaronline