A question that rightly comes to the mind of a curious and objective observer is why one sees such profound disparities among people within a nation and between nations worldwide. Why are some people affluent while others are impoverished? Collectively at scale, why are some nations affluent, technologically advanced, and politically stable, while others remain poor, technologically backward, rife with political instability? What accounts for these differences within and between societies? The essay focuses on international inequality, although intranational effects can not be ignored. They are connected.
For many decades, sociology attempted to answer the cross-national (or cross-regional) question using theories associated with the school of structural functionalism, what came to be known as modernization theory. According to this school of thought, societies could be understood as existing at different stages of a broad process of social development. The cultural systems (worldviews) and institutions that characterize the modern West are understood as products of a long historical process, through which societies gradually become more rational, technologically sophisticated, economically productive, and politically democratic. What explains these developments is ideas.
The modernization theorist did not work from a crude idealism. Historical developments shape ideas, and economic systems and technological advances drive these developments. At the same time, systems are fashioned by men with ideas. The ideas associated with modernity are crucial to modernization. History is properly understood, then, as the fashioning of civilizational responses by thinking men whose thought is shaped by the results of collective action.
The functionalist piece enters because ideas that work for whatever purpose men set before them are retained and elaborated. Sometimes these ideas and their realization in cultural and material life yield benefits, such as opportunities for personal self-actualization, which thinking men rightly consider good. Other times, ideas explain impoverished societies that fall short of man’s potential. Such matters are studied empirically, and the inequality between societies is proof of the impact of different ideas.
Useful to understanding this view are what structural-functionalists call pattern variables, a set of five pairs of opposing value orientations that explain how societies organize social action and distinguish different types of social relationships. The five variables are affectivity vs. affective neutrality (whether behavior is guided by emotion or restrained by expectations of emotional neutrality), self-orientation vs. collectivity-orientation (whether people pursue their own interests or the interests of the group), universalism vs. particularism (whether people are judged according to general rules or based on tribal affinity), achievement vs. ascription (whether status is based on what someone accomplishes or on qualities or statuses they are supposedly born with or in), and specificity vs. diffuseness (whether a social relationship is limited to a specific role or encompasses many areas of life).
For the structural-functionalist, pattern variables explain how different institutions and social systems establish attitudinal and behavioral expectations and maintain social order. The question is whether and why the path is progressive, regressive, or stagnant. Modern societies tend to emphasize universalism, achievement, specificity, affective neutrality, and self-orientation, whereas traditional societies tend to rely more heavily on their opposites. This difference explains the intergroup and international/regional inequality. For example, what explains Israeli Jewish success over against Arab Muslim’s backwardness is that Jews are one side of the pattern variable binary, while Muslims are on the other side. Antisemitism is driven by envy and resentment of those whose culture holds them back. They cannot blame their culture, so they blame Jews.
Beginning around the middle of the 1950s, and increasingly during the 1960s and afterward, sociology shifted toward a substantially different explanation for global disparities. It sought to generalize the scapegoating inherent in antisemitism. Modernization theory was portrayed as ethnocentric and even as an expression of white supremacy. The assumption that Western societies, the Global North, represented a particular stage of social development that other societies might eventually—or should—reach was increasingly regarded as an ideology in the service of exploitation and oppression rather than an objective description of historical development and determination of the relative benefit to man in the results. The Global South is not poor because it is on the bad side of the pattern variables, the argument goes, but because those working from on the good side of those variables impoverished the Global South.
The alternative explanation came to be associated with a group of theories concerning development and underdevelopment, in some circles known as Social Change and Development (the old name of my academic unit, which before that was called Modernization Processes), a rather innocuous-sounding school of thought. One of my graduate seminars carried that name. So did the core text.
From this perspective, which is substantially rooted in Marxist-Leninist nd Maoist thought (which informs black nationalism, as well), the condition of what was then commonly called the Third World could not be understood simply as the result of its societies occupying an earlier stage of a universal process of modernization, or the fruit that inferior cultures yield. Instead, their condition was understood as the consequence of historical relationships with the developed world, particularly colonialism (and internal colonialism) and imperialism. In this explanation, the undeveloped nation or region was better classified as underdeveloped, and the reason for its underdevelopment was that the imperialist countries—the Global North—extracted wealth from the colonial subjects that comprised the Global South.
The argument suggests that colonialism deprived many civilizations and nations of the opportunity to develop along their own trajectories. But even this is problematic. The argument presumes that, but for imperialism, these countries and regions would look very different today. This is something of a teleological argument, which is paradoxical given that a major criticism of structural-functionalism is that social scientists of that school substitute teleology for a historical explanation in the abstract model of the social system. Moreover, it begs the question: What would these nations and regions look like if the West had not interfered?
To get around this, the critique of modernism also involved a critique of modernity itself. Why should it be assumed that the way of life in the Global North is good? Aren’t the so-called primitive cultures good in themselves? Here, the teleology is rejected (cultural anthropologists helped with their notions of cultural and moral relativisms). Is poverty a bad thing? Humans lived for millennia in what today observers regard as poverty. Sociology students are taught to distinguish between absolute and relative poverty. In the end, it is all relative.
In the final analysis, contradictions notwithstanding, the poverty of some parts of the world and the relative affluence of others are not independent historical developments. They are interconnected outcomes of a world economic system. And, from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, the world economic system must be altered. Capitalism must be replaced by communism.
There is obviously something to the analytical piece of the argument. It would be absurd to argue that colonialism and imperialism had no consequences, or that the wealth of the industrialized nations can be understood without taking their imperial histories into account. Yet, we are many decades into the post-colonial period, and several societies that escaped direct colonial rule long ago remain poor and technologically underdeveloped. Are we to rationalize this as relative poverty? The critics of the West suggest we not do this. I agree, but for very different reasons.
The upshot is that facts of colonialism and imperialism cannot, by themselves, explain all of the continuing disparities between nations. Plenty of wealth remains in the Global South—now organized as sovereign nation-states. Yet they remain backwards. To return to the previous example, how are the conditions of Muslim Arab countries explained by the success of Israeli Jews? They can’t; the Jews are self-sufficient. Jewish success is explained by Jewishness. It is an idea system—one that other peoples would do well to emulate rather than to resent. If envy is to play any role, it should be to model one’s society after the successful one, not seek to destroy it.
There are also complicating factors on the other side of the Marxist-Leninist formulation. The globalization and industrialization that produced extraordinary wealth in the Global North have also generated significant social and economic problems within those societies. It is not as if everybody in the West is rich and self-actualized. One need only travel through the Rust Belt or the Black Ghetto to see the devastating effects of deindustrialization and progressive social policy. Ideas lie behind societal ruin, as well.
Furthermore, a fact that mustn’t be ignored is that, while it is indeed true that capitalists extracted wealth from the periphery of the world capitalist system, those firms mobile enough to do so also invested capital in the Global South—and they did so to undercut workers of the West. Moreover, investment in the Global South created wealth in those countries, at least for local elites (which Marxist-Leninists characterize as “colonial collaboration”).
Imperialism provided developing nations with the pattern variables necessary for modernization. They left those countries with advanced productive capacities. Why has this not led to widespread prosperity? Any adequate explanation therefore must take into account transnational corporate power and the class structures internal to nations. The majorities of those countries are not poor because of wealth extraction. They are poor because the cultural and political systems maintained by elites and out of ignorance keep them poor. And the opponents of modernization justify their poverty.
What is particularly significant for our own situation is not simply the change in the explanations themselves, but the ideological transformation underlying that change. The movement from modernization theory toward theories of development and underdevelopment was not merely an academic exercise. It reflected—and in turn reinforced—a broader shift in intellectual attitudes and sensibilities toward the West and the Enlightenment.
One must wonder why those concerned with the global poor did not advocate for the widespread adoption of the left side of the pattern variables identified by the structural-functionalists. If affluence was associated with this, then why should societies across the globe not incorporate affectivity, self-orientation, universalism, achievement, and specificity into their attitudinal and behavioral responses? Why diminish or overthrow those societies in which these values prevailed? Would that not result in the impoverishment of the entire globe?
And what of our own societies in the West? Should we not ask whether those in the American Black Ghetto remain trapped in poverty because of attitudes and behaviors that prevail there? Those attitudes and behaviors include support for those very forces that keep them trapped, so it is a necessary question. The vast majority of blacks vote not for the party that fosters entrepreneurship and class mobility but for the party that established and entrenches the welfare state.
Modernization theory is indeed grounded in a broadly pro-Western and pro-Enlightenment conception of history. Rationalism, scientific inquiry, technological development, individualism, and democratic institutions are regarded by the theory as positive achievements. But this is true and good. The historical development of Western civilization can be understood as a process that has produced institutions and intellectual traditions with universal significance. Yet Western Civilization is under attack, and those who do not share its values—indeed, who resist them—are being welcomed into the West.
It is not that the Global North should necessarily be hegemonic, but that Western ideas should prevail globally for the sake of the Global South. One should want the Third World to enjoy the First World life, and that can only happen with the hegemony of Western values—free thought, free speech, property rights, and all the rest of it. That means that China and other anti-Western forces must be marginalized in the world economy and the United States should reassert itself as a world power. We can no longer count on Europe—it has been lost to globalism—so the US will have to take the leading role. Indeed, a major reason why this should happen is to save Europe from itself. After all, Europe is where the superior ideas associated with modernity emerged.
The new intellectual framework dominating today’s university is, to put it charitably, skeptical of the assumptions in modernization theory. I frame it that way in approaching the problem in the classroom. But one cannot be charitable in the end. Moreover, the conclusion one rationally arrives at reframes the premise and methodology. It exposes the new approach as anti-Western ideology.
Influenced by Marxist and, later, postmodernist theories, the scholarly Social Change and Development approach treats the Enlightenment and Western values not as universal achievements but as vehicles for domination, colonialism, and white supremacy. To avoid teleology, it must reject the developmental path taken by the West as desirable. In rejecting the assumption that Western civilization represented a desirable or advanced form of social organization, the ideology elevates the primitive cultures and social systems of peoples who had historically existed outside the Western intellectual tradition. The truth is that they are backwards because they lie outside the tradition. This truth is dismissed as ethnocentrism.
This transformation in academic thought has had consequences extending well beyond the university. It has influenced the way subsequent generations have understood history, capitalism, colonialism, race, culture, and the West itself. Academic theories provide an intellectual framework through which political arguments acquire legitimacy, and the spread of these theories through academic institutions—and increasingly through primary and secondary education—has meant that their assumptions have been transmitted to successive generations. The new approach is a Trojan horse ushered inside the city walls by globalists who smuggle in communism and Islamism as culturally destructive weapons to disorder the left side of the pattern variables.
Theories of development and underdevelopment are not simply a change in sociological terminology brought about by greater scientific precision. Popular acceptance of the ideology represents a fundamental change in the way Western society understands its own historical development. A worldview that once regarded the Enlightenment, rationalism, scientific inquiry, and Western political institutions as achievements with potentially universal significance has increasingly been replaced by one that views those same traditions through the lenses of power, colonialism, race, and domination.
We see this, for example, in critical race theory with the new binaries of “oppressor-oppressed” and “perpetrator-victim.” Advanced values are depicted as oppressive, while those adhering to backwards values are portrayed as victims. We see it, as well, in queer theory, which conceptualizes gender and gender roles as the oppressive constructions of cisnormativity—a construction of a praxis explicitly focused on transgressing the normative systems that sustain Western civilization.
Consequently, a generation—several generations by now—has been raised within an intellectual framework that is at least deeply skeptical of the Western and Enlightenment traditions from which modern Western society emerged. This deep skepticism yields a population susceptible to destructive ideas. Those who fully embrace the framework are adamant that their worldview is the truth of history. Thus, what began as a change in sociological theories concerning development and underdevelopment has become part of a much broader transformation in the political and cultural worldview of the West itself.
I confess to my role as a sociologist in spreading skepticism about Western Civilization. I am not proud of that. It took several years of self-criticism to finally recognize that I had been indoctrinated in anti-Western propaganda. Socialization in what amounts to a total institution is a powerful force. The purpose of Freedom and Reason is to, in a public way, undo that indoctrination to model a path out of it. I was wrong about structural-functionalism and modernization theory. Talcott Parsons was right. My sociology professors were wrong.
freedom and reason 