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On the Cultural Sources of Prosperity
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20001 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,724 Words |
| Author
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Brigitte Berger
Brigitte Berger is a professor of sociology at Boston
University. Among the books she has authored or coauthored,
the following relate to issues of the family: Societies in
Change, The Homeless Mind: Modernization Consciousness, Child
Care and Mediating Structures, and The War over the Family:
Capturing the Middle Ground. Her most recent book, The Culture
of Entrepeneurship (a book in which the family figures
prominently), will be published in October 1991 by ICS Press
(Institute of Contemporary Studies), San Francisco. |
The core proposition of this article is that the family is the culture-creating institution par excellence and has contributed more to the creation of prosperity than is commonly assumed. In fact, a good argument can be made that the family as an institution is perhaps the ultimate and only institution sufficiently dynamic to engender those social processes making for modernization and economic development that lead to prosperity.
At the same time, it has to be remembered that culture is a living and vividly human process. For prosperity to continue and to flourish in those lucky few societies of the West and the Pacific Rim, it is exceedingly important to recognize that families, along with the communal structures in which they are embedded, continue to play an instrumental role in the maintenance of all social institutions that make for prosperity, including those of the polity and the economy.
To be sure, modern industrial society has been shaped by a series of other powerful processes as well--some political, some economic, and some a mixture of both. But available evidence from disparate fields of scholarship compellingly suggests that underlying all of these are those potent forces flowing from patterns of interaction originating in a particular type of family, namely the nuclear family, which revolves primarily around father, mother, and their children.
Reinforced by factors of religion that gave shape and meaning to the actions and hopes of vast numbers of ordinary people, the nuclear family created a moral system embedded in a web of social networks and institutional structures that allowed for the unleashing of the productive dynamics of the capitalist economies of the West. The past three centuries bear witness to the history, the vagaries, and the ultimate triumph of this civilizing form, including the organization of its productive economy, the compelling power of its political institutions, and the lasting attractiveness of its liberalizing culture.
Out of a tangled web of cultural and ideational influences, complemented and at times, driven by demographic, legal, technological, and material forces, these societies alone succeeded in putting into place a social system that, along with a historically unmatched degree of freedom, provided for a fundamental improvement in the living standards of their general population, not just of a privileged few.
This way of looking at prosperity may well be unfamiliar for most
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