The fortunes of nations have been explained for a long time now by two competing conceptions of human identity--"economic" man and "political" man.
Beginning with Karl Marx, the economic model has assumed that human beings are guided primarily by the desire for material satisfaction; that we are purposeful calculators of economic costs and benefits and conspicuous consumers of the latest gizmos and gadgets flowing from science and technology.
The contemporary expression of this determinism, although with a decidedly non-Marxist outcome, is "globalism," the idea that the world is moving toward a single global marketplace based on the free movement of goods and services across increasingly porous nation-state borders. The future will move in whatever directions profits and trade do and we could end up saluting corporate rather than national flags.
The competing model, the political, assumes that we are motivated by more than simply a desire for self-preservation and material goods; that we struggle for rights and freedom whatever the cost. Politics define us because it is political ideals from which come human fulfillment and happiness. This is the common interpretation of the American founding, when men of status were willing to risk their lives and fortunes to sign a document reclaiming the "rights of Englishmen" from the usurpations of the tyrannical King George.
Perhaps the most influential recent version of this model was Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, which posited democratic government and individual liberty as a common human desire across nations and peoples. Because we all demand the kind of dignity and respect that only self-government can provide, all human societies were converging around the democratic ideal (the "end" of history itself).
In concise fashion, Brexit nicely captured the distinction between these models--economic man would have stayed because leaving was too costly, political man voted to leave because some things (freedom and independence) matter more than money.
No one really doubts that economic factors and political ideals play powerful roles in human development, but what was left out of these models, and out of our exploration of human motivation for far too long as a result, has been "culture," which the late Samuel Huntington referred to as the essential underpinnings of human identity: "ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions."
As Huntington put it in his seminal study, The Clash of Civilizations, "culture counts and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people." More important, it is cultural differences that divide rather than unite people and therefore play a crucial role in human conflict.
The most influential theorist of the cultural school was German sociologist Max Weber, who argued that the uneven industrial development visible throughout Europe at the end of the 19th century was largely a consequence of the different attitudes toward capitalism displayed by Protestants and Catholics (with the Protestants being more accepting).
Such cultural explanations, which focus on values, race/ethnicity, language and, especially, religion, fell out of favor over time because they elided too easily into crude "national character" interpretations, with their hints of Western ethnocentrism and even racism.
But the denigration of cultural analyses in favor of purely economic or political frameworks (or some fusion of the two, as in post-World War II "developmental theory," which posited multi-party democracy as an eventual outcome of economic development) has also left us at a loss to explain certain important 21st century phenomena, most conspicuously the trials and tribulations experienced by what is referred to as the Islamic world.
Recent events in Nice, Orlando and Istanbul are difficult to explain via reference to the economic and political variables that social scientists have long relied upon.
The global democratic revolution has indeed swept the world. Except for the Islamic part--few, if any, of the 50-plus Muslim-majority nations is at present a stable, multi-party democracy. Virtually all are riven by high levels of oppression, corruption, and political violence.
Turkey was long held up as the exception, but one which still directed us back toward the idea of Islam as a cultural obstacle to democratization, given that the modern Turkish republic was founded explicitly by Ataturk on a secular basis. It was, alas, an exception that proved the rule.
And now the exception is no longer even an exception: The political stability and secular foundation are gone in Turkey, as the recent military coup justifies, in Reichstag fashion, completion of the Islamist makeover of the state by Recep Erdogan.
In the end, not everyone is motivated by economics or politics--those committing the 9/11 attacks apparently weren't interested in bigger paychecks or the right to vote.
Our understanding of rationality drives us toward what we can more easily grasp, the political and economic, and thus away from the cultural, the most important element of which is religion. And it is also an important part of our own political culture--tolerance and the desire to be nonjudgmental, in particular--that makes us recoil before the possibility that certain religions (and thus cultures) might reject man-made law, otherwise known as democracy.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 08/01/2016