Getting Serious About Creating Better Subcultures

To Create a Cultural Renaissance

Photo by Anna Shvets

The most promising means of improving social mobility and well-being for all children is to allow for the creation of a parent-driven market in positive social norms.   Minimally restricted education choice, in which parent satisfaction is the only accountability mechanism (beyond basic health and safety standards), is the surest way to create a positive market in social norms and distinctive subcultures.  Indeed, there are reasons to believe that cultural norms are more powerful than formal education in determining life outcomes.  We need to allow parents to identify those they trust to develop such subcultures and we need academic departments which openly research positive subcultures and how to grow them.

Beyond Systemic Racism and Genetic Determinism

Even as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across our society are promoting Ibram X. Kendi’s perspective that racial disparities are necessarily the result of systemic racism, genetic explanations of disparate outcomes are gaining ground.  Because the most vocal discourse communities, on the left and the right,  respectively, are almost entirely focused on these two explanations as the source of disparate outcomes, the role of culture is obscured.

In the past year, two prominent leftist authors have acknowledged the reality and power of genetic explanations of behavioral outcomes.  Though they are careful to note that they do not believe differential racial outcomes are the result of genetics, both Marxist Freddie deBoer’s The Cult of Smart and Katheryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery attempt to bring the science of genetics to their fellow travelers on the left (who have previously denied the impact of genetics on behavioral outcomes).   

In Quillette, Damien Morris, while reviewing The Genetic Lottery, summarizes Harden’s view regarding the state of genetic research:

“Genetic differences between people account for around 40 percent of the variation we observe in the years of education they obtain and in their lifetime earnings. Differences in our DNA also account for around 50 percent of the variation in violent criminal behaviour.”

From here it is a short leap for many on the right to Steve Sailer’s perspective, taken from a review of Charles Murray’s recent book, Facing Reality:  Two Truths About Race in America,

“Today, after 55 years of vast spending to eliminate the race gap on tests, the optimistic centrist education reformers of the “All We Have To Do Is Implement My Favorite Panacea” school are finally out of fashion, leaving Ibram X. Kendi and Charles Murray as the last men standing. One or the other must be right: either Murray (blacks, unfortunately, have problems because they tend to be less smart and more violent) or Kendi (any disparities demonstrate that whites are evil and therefore must pay).”

Sailer’s perspective is frequently encountered in comments on right-leaning blogs.  

The fact that Harden and Freddie De Boer now largely concede genetic determinism from the left leaves the woke movement defending an untenable Kendi position that disparate outcomes are always due to racism.  Economist Glenn Loury’s summary of Kendi is appropriately scathing,

“I don't know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. . . . Kendi’s formulations are sophomoric. They don't bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He's not standing on any literature. He's not citing any intellectual development that has any deep roots in anything. It's pablum. It's froth on the intellectual surface of our life.”

There is indeed systemic racism.  There may always be evidence of systemic racism.  But there is no evidence that Kendi-inspired initiatives will provide a substantive improvement in the well-being of African-Americans (or anyone else).

Katheryn Paige Harden and Freddie DeBoer imagine a world in which their genetic fatalism leads to more support for redistribution.  But even if the U.S. developed a welfare state to rival that of Denmark, children raised in families with less positive cultural norms will be less successful and less happy than those raised in families with more positive cultural norms (see relevant research by Nobel laureate James Heckman here).  Moreover, redistribution will not provide disadvantaged Americans with the dignity that comes from achievement.

As a nation, we have tried public school reform for 55 years and have made little progress.  Therefore the conclusion, increasingly believed on both the right and the left, is that disparate outcomes are largely genetic.  We can either redistribute income ( deBoer and Harden) , or keep out low-IQ immigrants while writing off African-Americans (Sailer), but the faith in education that arose during The Enlightenment has reached a dead end.

What remains?

The Neglected Option:  Getting Serious About Better Subcultures

Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success explains how the global dominance of Homo sapiens is not due to individual cognitive powers but rather due to social learning. We are distinctive among all animals in the extent of our ability to learn through culture -- the practices and behaviors of other human beings.

Young learners all the way up to adults … automatically and unconsciously attend to and preferentially learn from others based on cues of prestige, success, skill, sex, and ethnicity. From other people we readily acquire tastes, motivations, beliefs, strategies, and our standards for reward and punishment.

Given such an automatic system for learning one might have thought that we would have developed an education system that is aligned with these genetically programmed mechanisms.  But instead of designing an education system in which young people “preferentially learn from others based on cues of prestige, success, skill, sex, and ethnicity” we have an education system where, from the perspective of our biology, socially irrelevant adults “teach” us.  A middle aged woman teaching English does not stimulate the spontaneous biological desire of a young man to emulate her.  That is not how human beings have been genetically programmed to learn.  No magnitude of school spending, no amount of research on learning can transcend that fact.  Instead, all of their biologically-implanted capacity for learning is focused on emulating the cool and popular kids in their communities - occasionally for the better, but often for the worse.

Judith Rich Harris’s book No Two Alike provides an explanatory framework for why identical twins can have dramatically different personalities.  She estimates the genetic contribution to personality is somewhere between 30-60%; We need an explanation for why there remains such a substantial difference in personalities even between genetically identical human beings.   Harris is acknowledging the fact that even with genetic influences held constant (i.e. identical twins), there is significant variation remaining.  

Damien Morris, cited above, goes on to claim:

“ . . . much of the remaining variation for these traits and outcomes is not explained by the family environment (‘nurture’ as we normally understand it) but from idiosyncratic environmental influences. . . .”

But Morris’s claim that the remaining differences are “idiosyncratic” makes them sound as if they are random and unknowable.  This obscures the mechanisms for explaining the differences, which are articulated by Harris,

- A “Socialization System:  ”acquiring the social behaviors, customs, language, accent, attitudes, and morals deemed appropriate in a particular society.”

- A “Status System”:  the working out of  a long-term strategy of behavior to optimize status given the particular constraints, opportunities, and social status niches available to that particular individual.

The “Socialization System” amounts to enculturation.  In addition, while the “Status System” is highly idiosyncratic, it is not random:  Each of us seeks status within a particular culture.  Thus at least with respect to personality differences, even when genetics are identical there is significant variance that includes a cultural component.

Because peer cohorts, rather than adults a generation or more away, are typically the competitors for mating and status for any given individual, peer learning is especially powerful.  Harris’s The Nurture Assumption, while emphasizing how little impact parents have on a child’s outcome, emphasizes the power of peer culture.  Whether it is a matter of smoking, choice of language, or a wide range of other outcomes, children are more heavily influenced by peers than parents or educators.

Voluntary Cultural Change Rather Than Educational Policy

Emerson said, “You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him.”

Since the Prussian model inspired Horace Mann and the common school movement in the 1830s, education has been conceptualized as a matter of state-trained and -certified teachers teaching curriculum to students.  Indeed, this model of education-as-schooling has been so firmly ingrained in the minds of most people that education = schooling.  Indeed, when economists study human capital formation, they typically use “years of schooling” as a proxy for investment in human capital.  When people discuss “education reform” it invariably means tweaks in schooling policy.  When Bryan Caplan writes “The Case Against Education,” all of his arguments pertain to evidence on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of formal schooling.  When Freddie de Boer writes, “Education Doesn’t Work” he means schooling doesn’t work.  Even “school choice” has primarily been focused on variations in structures that remain “schools.”

But for anyone who takes enculturation seriously, enculturation is obviously a more powerful and effective means of learning than schooling.  Children who are immersed in a new language rapidly learn the language of their peers with no formal education.  They grow up speaking the language of their peers more fluently than the language of their parents.  Conversely, countless students who “study a foreign language” in schools are completely incapable of speaking it and rapidly forget all they’ve “learned.”  A cynic might regard schooling as “learning theatre.”

Certainly Prussian-model state schooling, in which state-certified teachers “cover” curriculum, bears no resemblance to how human beings have been programmed through their biology to learn.

An implication of the insight that enculturation may be more important than schooling to education is that such enculturation requires voluntary association in specific communities that share cultural commitments.  This may include traditional religious commitments.  It may also include communities of parents who wish to develop new sets of norms in their children.  It would certainly include educators who support and exemplify the target virtues for such a community.

But it also is inconsistent with the framework of government schooling as controlled by education policy and academic experts.  State mandated curriculum, standards, and teacher certification would bear no relationship to the salient characteristics of education-as-enculturation. 

Latter Day Saints (LDS) as an Example

While Weber’s thesis on the Protestant work ethic has yielded abundant controversy, persistence of cultural traits related to work ethic remains a vibrant theme.  Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World summarizes evidence that perhaps the “Protestant work ethic” should be regarded as a Cistercian work ethic (the Cistercians were a break away group of the Benedictines),

“To assess whether the Cistercian presence influenced people’s work ethic after 1300, we can use contemporary survey data (2008-2010) from over 30,000 people spread around 242 European regions.  The survey asked whether ‘hard work’ is an important trait for children to learn. . . . The results show that the higher the density of Cistercian monasteries in a region during the Middle Ages, the more likely a person from that region today is to say that ‘hard work’ is important for children to learn.”

It should not be terribly controversial that culture, and in particular religious culture, may be an important influence on behavior and outcomes.

Utah has the highest rate of social mobility in the U.S. while having the lowest per capita spending on education.  Latter Day Saints (LDS) males average approximately a year more in educational attainment relative to the average American male.  There is an international propensity for LDS membership to be associated with success,

“LDS members in the four countries (where data are available [Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and the Philippines]) are more likely to be employed, more likely to be in white-collar occupations, and less likely to be farmers . . . Measures of income and wealth indicate that Mormons are better off than the average person in Mexico and Brazil, but comparable to the average person in Chile and the Philippines.”

Mormonism is a clear case of a cultural causal factor rather than a genetic causal factor.

LDS uses various specific “social technologies” that create peer- to-peer relationships focused on self-improvement.  This is from an LDS guide for self-reliance groups,

This group will help you follow the counsel the Lord’s servants have given about seeking more education or training to get work that will help you become self-reliant. Specifically, you will create a self-reliance goal, choose a job that provides the income you need to reach that goal, choose the education or training you need to get the job, choose how to pay for your education or training, and prepare to be successful in your education and career. Each group meeting lasts about two hours.

In addition to weekly meetings, there are “action partners” who check in on each other throughout the week to support each other in fulfilling commitments.  The entire structure combines laudable goals and practical steps towards achieving self-reliance within a carefully designed set of social interactions. These support the real world actions and changes in habits and attitudes required for success.  

Religion and African-American Academic Performance

Might immersion in a religious subculture in the U.S. be a relevant factor in African-American performance?

Consider first a sample of 2,637 students randomly awarded a voucher to attend private Catholic schools. A study of the results found,

“The impact of the voucher offer we observe for African American students is also much larger than the impact of exposure to a highly effective teacher. Raj Chetty and his colleagues (see “Great Teaching,” research, Summer 2012) report that being assigned to an elementary school teacher who is 1 standard deviation more effective than the average teacher boosted college enrollment for students in a very large city by 0.5 percentage points at age 20, relative to a base of 38 percent, an increment of 1.25 percent. If one extrapolates that finding (as those researchers do not) to three years of highly effective teaching, the impact is 3.75 percent. The 24 percent impact we identify for African American students is many times as large.”

Next consider a study on “Black Male Success” published in 2012, the first study of its kind, in which 219 black male college “achievers” from diverse backgrounds were followed:

The national study included 219 Black male undergraduates who had earned cumulative grade point averages above 3.0, established lengthy records of leadership and active engagement in multiple student organizations, developed meaningful relationships with campus administrators and faculty outside the classroom, participated in enriching educational experiences (for example, study abroad programs, internships, service learning, and summer research programs), and earned numerous merit-based scholarships and honors in recognition of their college achievements.

Given that religiosity was not in any sense a criterion for selection, the religiosity of this sample, relative to American college students as a whole, is striking:

“The majority of achievers attended church during their time in college, though doing so was difficult amid their academic and campus leadership commitments.

 . . . On the one hand, they recognized that certain choices they made (for example, studying instead of partying all weekend) influenced their outcomes. Yet, on the other hand, they attributed their success to God’s favor and plan for their lives. . . .They credited God for their high GPAs, scholarships and honors, leadership positions to which they had been elected, and the unusual opportunities they had been afforded.”

Among college students as a whole, religious belief and attendance has been dropping dramatically, with only about a quarter attending religious services regularly by junior year.  Meanwhile out of a sample of 219 black male achievers most are religious.

Separately, The Journal of Negro Education in a 2010 special issue on the role of spirituality, religion, and the African American church on educational outcomes noted:

“Using a national sample of 6,795 eighth and tenth graders . . . the study found that Black students who participated in more religious activities and who had stronger religious convictions were more likely to report higher grades in school, had a positive self-concept, positive feelings about school, parents involved with their education, and fewer disciplinary referrals.”

With data points such as these, one might have imagined that those who are committed to social mobility for African-Americans might have supported extensive educational choice programs that would allow such students to attend religious schools.

The Role of Culture in Determining Outcomes

Thomas Sowell writes on how cultural differences lead to disparate outcomes, with particular ethnicities associated with particular crafts,

“ . . . German minorities have been dominant as pioneers in piano manufacturing in colonial America, czarist Russia, Australia, France, and England. Italian fishermen, Japanese farmers, and Irish politicians have been among many other minority groups with special success in special fields in various countries, without any ability to keep out others.”

Cultural differences in professions and expertise, leading to differential social roles and economic outcomes, have been the norm around the world and throughout history.  

Sowell is not the only African-American who has focused on the importance of culture.  Glenn Loury is scathing in his critique of the pathologies of African-American ghetto culture.  John Ogbu, a Nigerian-American sociologist, observed in 1986 that African-American students who focused on academics were accused of “acting white” by some of their black peers.  More recently Roland Fryer estimated that  norms against “acting white” are responsible for about one third of the test score discrepancy between black and white students at high achievement levels.  He has also suggested that this issue is greater at more integrated schools than at more racially homogenous schools.

Consider Africa:  neither the genetic determinists nor systemic racism advocates can explain the discrepancy in admissions standards for different ethnic groups within Nigeria:

The cut-off mark for a male pupil from Yobe State in the 2018/2019 session is two. It is four points for the male candidate from Zamfara, while the male candidate from Taraba State only needs three points out of 300 to be a proud student of any of the federal government colleges he so chooses. But the minimum score is 139 for any male or female pupil from Anambra State nursing the hope of getting a place in a unity college.

Yes, it may be the case that the Igbo, a Nigerian tribe who are known as the “Jews of Africa” for their disproportionate performance intellectually and economically, might have genetic advantages (Anambra State is predominantly Igbo).  But it is unlikely they are sufficient to explain such a score discrepancy.

Yet cultural explanations for disparate outcomes are regarded with almost the same hostility as are genetic explanations for disparate outcomes. Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, of University of Pennsylvania and University of San Diego Law Schools, respectively, wrote in 2017,

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks . . .

Wax was immediately condemned for being a white supremacist engaged in hate speech.  

But if scholars are discouraged from a frank and open examination of cultural differences, while theories regarding behavioral genetics proceed apace, Sailer’s position will increasingly be regarded as the only credible option. 

Screaming “racist” every time someone discusses how cultural traits lead to success will never improve lives.  There are diverse sets of “positive social norms.”  Cistercian, Mormon, Igbo, and Jewish cultures are very different from one another, yet they all disproportionately lead to success.  The weaponization of “racism” as an accusation is actually increasing racist beliefs by preventing an open exploration of how to nurture better cultural traits in all sorts of young populations.  There are unlimited potential positive sets of social norms to be developed.  Academia needs to welcome the debate of cultural traits and their benefits - while supporting a parental choice system that allows parents to determine which educational culture parents believe is best for their children.

My Personal Socratic Experience

It is much easier to transmit an existing culture than to create a new one.  The re-introduction of Hebrew was a much bigger lift than is the spontaneous transmission of language that takes place constantly.  Thus schools focused on existing positive cultures, such as religious schools, are easier; though note that both the Mormons and the Cistercian cultural examples were new cultural initiatives, less than 200 and 900 years ago, respectively.  Montessori and Waldorf schools, misleadingly regarded as forms of pedagogy each created roughly 100 years ago, both create distinctive micro-cultures, which is a part of their enduring appeal.

For the past thirty-five years, my primary work has been the creation of intellectual peer subcultures in environments in which they had been absent.  I very much focus on Henrichian mechanisms,

“automatically and unconsciously attend to and preferentially learn from others based on cues of prestige, success, skill, sex, and ethnicity.”

As an educator, my focus is almost entirely a matter of shifting adolescent social norms from environments in which it is not cool to discuss ideas to environments in which students love to discuss ideas and support their peers in doing so.  Changing the status hierarchies of peer culture is the entire ballgame.  My explicit goal as an educator is to increase respect in the peer community of the more thoughtful and intellectually focused peers, while simultaneously working to win the most popular students over to intellectual engagement.  I focus on winning over the most popular kids first to think about ideas:  Win over the football captain and the head of the cheerleading squad, orchestrate a conversation in which the cool rebel dazzles with his insights.

It is challenging to shift adolescent norms from those indifferent or hostile to intellectuality to peer cultures that are favorable to intellectuality.  In order to do so, all faculty must be fluent in and committed to intellectual dialogue, and all families must be supportive as well as we introduce the new “language.”    

At one point I created a charter high school in northern New Mexico, a region with among the lowest academic standards in the U.S. By its third year it was ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S. on Newsweek’s Challenge Index (AP tests taken/number of graduating seniors).  Our students scored a “3” or higher on AP exams at more than double the national average in a region where a local college admissions director said point blank, “Students in northern New Mexico can’t pass AP exams.”  

More recently I’ve created small private schools where students averaged annual SAT verbal gains higher than average, but with small cohorts we haven’t had sufficiently large sample sizes to qualify as serious evidence.

An erudite rabbi visited one of the Socratic classes I was leading at one of the schools I had created.  He noted, “This is exactly what we did in Talmudic school,” and went on to describe his experience of endless hours of debating the meaning of Talmudic texts with peers as his core educational experience.

As a teen, I attended rural public schools in which geeks would be made fun of or beat up.  Going to college, where intellectuality was welcomed, was the first time I felt at home socially.  While I never experienced the social opprobrium of “acting white” that young black intellectually minded students no doubt feel, I was certainly aware that in rural public schools there were some who bully the smart kids.

I was flabbergasted when I read about this girl’s Jewish upbringing.

On Sundays, I spent four hours learning ancient Jewish legal texts at a program for teenagers at a rabbinical school in New York . . . I read works of Jewish philosophy for fun, tracking medieval and modern arguments about the nature of God.

Genetics aside, such a teen had an immense advantage over me - and this advantage had nothing to do with “the quality of schooling.”  It had to do with being raised in a peer culture in which studying Jewish legal texts and philosophy was a normal thing for a teenager to do.

I shamelessly regard such Jewish intellectual teen cultures as educationally superior to the rural hick culture I was raised in -- one that required me to pretend to be less serious about learning than I should have been.  I would have been significantly more intellectually developed by eighteen if I had been raised in such a peer environment.

From Civil War to Renaissance

An educational choice movement based on developing more positive cultures will not be restricted to curriculum coverage nor will it be evaluated by test score performance.  Instead, it will be an opportunity for culturally aligned parents to join together with culturally aligned educators to create distinctive cultures that successfully instill more positive peer norms.  Some of these may be religious.  Some might teach creationism rather than evolution.  Some may teach a 1619 version of US history and others a 1776 version.  Some might not teach science or history at all.  Others will be Montessori, Waldorf, Acton, Sudbury, Socratic, IB, classical, and a thousand other possibilities.

The educational choice movement has been mistaken to focus on test scores as the primary benchmark for educational success.  Parent satisfaction is a far more relevant metric of success.  Parents will care about the peer cultures of the schools in which their children are enrolled - and they are right to do so.

Academic education experts will lose clout as our society gains a renewed respect for the judgment of parents.  Teachers unions are aggressively against school choice.  These special interests will argue and lobby against respecting the judgment of parents.  But consider where the experts have taken us (all pre-COVID data):

• 300% increase in teen suicide since the 1950s.

• 20% increase in teen suicide during the school year, declining again every summer.

• 75% of high school students are unhappy in school.

• 67% are not engaged in school.

• 39% are seriously depressed.

• 19% are suicidal.

Is this a cultural milieu any parent would choose for their child?

Compulsory public high school has been an unrecognized public health catastrophe since it was instituted in the mid 20th century.  Meanwhile, academic outcomes are largely flat despite a 3x increase in spending since the 1970s.  

The education experts who have created and reproduced this system have failed.  It is time to liberate all children from their control.  We need to liberate thousands of entrepreneurs of happiness and well-being to replace this system.  Parents will seek out those educational entrepreneurs who are more likely to provide their children with a positive experience which prepares them for a happy and successful life.  The potential for greater well-being and higher rates of social mobility for all demographics are more important.

As we begin to have serious conversations about the benefits of specific cultural norms, while also allowing for an innovative ecosystem of schools, churches, support groups, mentors, coaches, and other entities devoted to developing various positive norms, the acrimonious debate between the genetic determinists, on the one hand, and the Kendian froth that is ripping the U.S. apart will gradually fade into the distance.  The absurdist woke Cultural Revolution that has nearly destroyed the U.S. will be replaced by thousands of initiatives in cultural innovation that will launch a new renaissance.  Let parents lead the way.