Chapter 1 showed that national prosperity is dependent on the quality of governance and security, and Chapter 2 showed that the quality of governance and security hinges on the quality of leaders. This chapter addresses the most fundamental level of causation, showing that national differences in prosperity, governance, security, and leadership are all the result, to a large degree, of differences in civilization. Few of today's development experts have attempted to argue this case, either because they believe it to be erroneous or because they fear that its articulation will elicit condemnation from their peers. “It is much more comfortable for the experts to cite geographic constraints, insufficient resources, bad policies, and weak institutions,” Lawrence Harrison has noted. “That way they avoid invidious comparisons, political sensitivities, and bruised feelings often engendered by cultural explanations of success and failure.” In the broader intellectual community, however, can be found some highly persuasive arguments in favor of the proposition that civilization is the root cause of disparities in national performance.

CIVILIZATION AND THE INEQUALITY OF NATIONS

A long and distinguished line of thinkers have argued, with rigor and dispassion, that the inequality of nations is the result of differences in civilization and its core components of religion and culture. The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and the German Max Weber provided what remain the most famous expositions of this view, in the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively. During the middle of the twentieth century, renowned intellectuals such as Edward Banfield, David Donald, Will Durant, Gunnar Myrdal, and Lucian Pye spent decades analyzing the influences of civilization, culture, and religion on national strength, with particular interest in why the West had acquired greater wealth and power than the rest of the world.

Since the 1960s, however, this school of thought has been under attack by multiculturalists, Annalistes, and other academics, who have seen arrogance or even malevolence in any suggestion that Western civilization might be superior to others. To assert that non-Western peoples are less industrious or caring than Westerners, they have alleged, constitutes “culturism,” which in their view is nearly as bad as racism.