政治经济学领域确实有人鼓吹一个国家的文化决定其未来经济发展，比如国内被吹上天的马克思韦伯的新教的优越性，国内公知吹的儒家文化优越性。其实文化是可以随着生产关系变化和经济发展而变的。至少文化和经济发展是因该互为内生变量。盲目迷信文化定命论是不可取的。下面来看看19世纪末-20世纪出的世界强国英国的学者怎么描述当时德国和日本文化的。照版主的想法，德国因该和现在的中国一样，不可能有那么牛逼的工业的。下面是 bad samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism这本书的摘录： 6park.com
来看看英国大人则么评论德国人的文化的

……Before their economic take-off in the mid-19thcentury, the Germans were typically described by the British as ‘a dull and heavy people’.‘Indolence’ was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote in exasperation after a particularly frustrating altercation with her German coach-driver: the Germans never hurry’. It wasn’t just the British. A French manufacturer who employed German workers complained that they ‘work as and when they please’.
 The British also considered the Germans to be slow-witted. According to John Russell, a travel writer of the 1820s, the German were a ‘plodding, easily contented people . . . endowed neither will great acuteness of perception nor quickness of feeling’. In particular, according to Russell, they were not open to new ideas; ‘it is long before [a German] can be brought to comprehend the bearings of what is new to him, and it is difficult to rouse him to ardour in its pursuit. No wonder that they were ‘not distinguished by enterprise or activity’, as another mid-19thcentury British traveller remarked. Germans were also deemed to be too individualistic and unable. to co-operate with each other. The Germans’ inability to co-operate was, in the view of the British, most strongly manifested in the poor quality and maintenance of their public infrastructure, which was so bad that John McPherson, a viceroy of India (and, therefore, well used to treacherous road conditions), wrote, Tfound the roads so bad in Germany that I directed my course to Italy’. Once again, compare this with a comment by the African observer that I quoted above; ‘African societies are like a football team in which, as a result of personal rivalries and a lack of team spirit, one player will not pass the ball to another out of fear that the latter might score a goal’.

 
British travellers in the early 19thcentury also found the German dishonest—‘the tradesman and the shopkeeper take advantage of you wherever they can, and to the smallest imaginable amount rather than not take advantage of you at all. . . This knavery is universal’, observed. Sir Arthur Brooke Faulkner, a physician serving in the British army.
Finally, the British thought the Germans to be overly emotional. Today many British seem to think that Germans have an almost geneticemotional deficiency. Yet talking about excessive German emotion, Sir Arthur observed that ‘some will laugh all sorrows away and others, will always indulge in melancholy’. Sir Arthur was an Irishman, so his calling the Germans emotional would be akin to a Finn calling the Jamaicans a gloomy lot, according to the cultural stereotypes prevailing now……

再来看看英国大人则么评论日本人文化的： 6park.com
…….In his 1903 book, Evolution of the Japanese, the American missionary Sidney Gulick observed that many Japanese
‘give an impression . . . of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time’.  Gulick was no casual observer. He lived in Japan for 25years (1888–1913), fully mastered the Japanese language and taught in Japanese universities. After his return to the US, he was known for his campaign for racial equality on behalf of Asian Americans. Nevertheless, he saw ample confirmation of the cultural stereotype of the Japanese as an ‘easy going’ and ‘emotional’ people who possessed qualities like ‘lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present’. The similarity between this observation and that of today’s Africa, in this case by an African himself—Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian engineer and writer—is striking: ‘The African, anchored in his ancestral culture, is so convinced that the past can only repeat itself that he worries only superficially about the future. However, without a dynamic perception of the future, there is no planning, no foresight, no scenario building; in other words, no policy to affect the course of events’.
After her tour of Asia in 1911–1912, Beatrice Webb, the famous leader of British Fabian socialism, described the Japanese as having ‘objectionable notions of leisure and a quite intolerable personal independence’. She said that, in Japan, ‘there is evidently no desire to teach people to think’. She was even more scathing about my ancestors. She described the Koreans as ‘12 millions of dirty, degraded, sullen, lazy and religionless savages who slouch about in dirty white garments of the most inept kind and who live in filthy mud huts’. No wonder she thought that ‘[i]f anyone can raise the Koreans out of their present state of barbarism I think the Japanese will’,.. ……..

贴主:菲克于2021_05_05 10:25:06编辑

贴主:菲克于2021_05_05 10:30:15编辑
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