What cultural roots for the difference

Latin Europe Lumbers, Latin America Lunges: What are the cultural roots for the difference?

While Latin Europe lumbers along, trying to keep the best pieces of its world from falling further apart, Latin America lurches forward into the future. A number of recent economic reports argue that the reasons for the difference are possibly economic: Brazil, for example, over the past five years has done a complete 360 in terms of economic policies that allow for increased direct foreign investment, while Spain and Italy, as examples of Latin European torpor, struggle with skyrocketing unemployment and teetering economies.

Or perhaps it’s political: Most major Latin American political systems have become significantly more democratic over the last five years, according to generally accepted criteria used to measure such, while Italian, Spanish and Portuguese politics have swung wildly between paralysis and collapse. However, we here at The Culture Prophecy blog believe that the fundamental reason for this current Latin phenomenon is neither economic or political, but cultural, economic and political policies merely being superficial expressions of the deeper cultural root causes. Once again, the headlines highlight the fact that culture plays a powerful seismic role in determining the fate of nations, and with the case of this current Latin phenomenon, we also have the opportunity to understand more deeply how to effectively work with “Cultural DNA©”, something that Latin America apparently is doing successfully, while Latin Europe is not. Let’s take a closer look.

In The Culture Prophecy, we often speak of “Cultural DNA©”. Our DNA determines us human beings biologically, but humans are more than just biologic beings: we are social beings as well. And it is our culture which functions as our “social DNA”, determining much of our behavior, in conjunction with our biological DNA. Social DNA, like biological DNA is invisible in our day-to-day activities: while it serves as the fundamental determinant on the social side for how we behave, we don’t see it, the same way that biologic DNA has in the past remained invisible in determining our biologic selves. However, every aspect of our social lives, from the way individuals interact with each other, organize ourselves into businesses and families and neighborhoods, including the way that nation-states behave, can be seen as a result of our culture, the “Cultural DNA©” at the invisible heart of our social selves. Once we decode the social or “Cultural DNA”© of any given culture, we can understand better why it does what it does, whether we are looking at the behavior that exists between individuals, in organizations, or between nation-states. And, much like biologic DNA,although “Cultural DNA©” determines much of our social behavior, we need not be prisoners of it: once we are aware of it, we can control it, and choose alternative ways of behaving, organizing and living with others on this increasingly fragile planet. In many cases, the DNA of any particular culture is complex, presenting us with many possible choices, so while we cannot change our cultural programming, much like biologic DNA, we can be aware of it and the tendencies it produces, and then make choices about which tendencies we want to emphasize and which ones we want to minimize.

In the case of Latin America and Latin Europe, both share a similar Latin cultural legacy, written deeply into their respective cultural codes; in fact, it has been observed that Latin America, culturally, is in many ways an extreme expression of many Latin European cultural traits. On the other hand, Latin America, through the development of its own unique “American”—as opposed to “European”—history and experience, has also created its own unique coding which in some other ways minimizes the impact of certain traditional Latin European legacies. For example, a cultural “gene” on the unique Latin strand of “Cultural DNA©” that appears in both Latin Europe and Latin America is the strong orientation toward subjective or particularist interpretations of reality; meaning that (independent of universal rules, processes, procedures, or even commonly held notions of right and wrong), decisions and their resulting behaviors are more often determined by particular individuals (often empowered through rank, contacts, position, class, etc.), based on their subjective interpretation of the immediate situation. Historically, both Latin America and Latin Europe have struggled with this issue, putting energy and resources again and again into attempting to insure the establishment of impartial, democratic and objective societies (read: democratic governments and socially progressive economic policies), only to watch the best of these intentions collapse under the weight of imposed, subjective authority, or be manipulated by political forces, both left and right, for their own personal ends.

However, the recent disparity between Latin Europe and Latin America indicates that Latin America is having greater success at managing this cultural programming than Latin Europe, and the reason may be found in other cultural genes that distinguish the regions. Specifically, I am referring to the very strong cultural programming of “fate” or “external control orientation” in Latin Europe, the result of a confluence of history (hierarchical political control, going all the way back to the days of the Caesars) and religion (the relinquishing of one’s very personal and ultimate fate to a Roman Catholic hierarchy), as compared to a much mediated sense of fate, a greater eagerness for personal control and accountability, and even a pervasive optimism about an unknown future, that is one of the Latin American cultural genes, a result of the uniquely “American” experience in Latin America. Latin Europe seems more focused on holding onto what it has already achieved, while Latin America seems positioned to seize the moment, make a clean break with older Latin European traditions, which mired the region in a continuous cycle of economic and political turmoil, and look to the future with hope and a sense of possibility. It would be difficult to find such an ethos today in Latin Europe, and anyone evidencing such beliefs in Italy, Spain or Portugal today would be deemed naïve at best, and at worst, a fool to be taken advantage of. On the streets in São Paulo, Mexico City, Santiago, LaPaz, Bogota, and even Caracas, such an ethos today is palpable.

As mentioned, cultural coding is complex, and contradictory, in that there can be a code in the “Cultural DNA©” that allows for contradictory behaviors, with an emphasis more on one than the other. Over time, however, if we understand this, we can turn such coding into an advantage, in that we can choose to create public policy that highlights or emphasizes one value over the other. So, for example, Latin American “Cultural DNA©” includes the contradictory coding of particular subjectivism, as does Latin European coding, but the cultural coding for external control and a deeply held sense of fatalism, still so strongly programmed in Latin Europe, is significantly weaker in Latin America, and in fact, co-exists with a coding for individual accountability and a sense of future control (the national motto of Brazil is “Progress and Order”), which is generally nonexistent in Latin European cultural coding. This can become the stuff of a cultural “tipping point” for Latin America, pushing through social, economic and political decisions, behaviors and policies that might actually allow for the implementation of such policies, in turn fulfilling the cultural aspirations—or, as we would like to think of it, the cultural prophecy of Latin America, as it is becoming written large in the headlines today.