Reviews and Comments

I think this is an important topic yet horrendously treated by people who really should work harder at it, given their tenure and wide readership. You always need to be careful with a premise like Nisbett investigates in this book. One litmus test: “what does the author mean by Asian and Western?”

For Nisbett, “Asian” appears to mean Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. “Chinese”, in turn, means Han. All other nationalities and ethnicities within each modern nation state are ignored.

Likewise, “Western” primarily means Anglophone. Nisbett starts with a tepid discussion of “Greek thought” — better described as Athenian and Aristotelian thought as received through the Italian Renaissance and English Premoderns, again ignoring hundreds of distinct ideological lineages — and jumps to the Italian merchant states and then again into the late 20th century.

So, it seems Nisbett means, by the words “Asian” and “Western”, those stereotypes that already have a prevalent hold on armchair psychology. There’s nothing revealing here, all bias reinforcement, and literally billions of other peoples cultural and psychological experiences are completely ignored.

I do NOT mean to indict Nisbett for being insufficiently woke. He had a good opportunity in this book to highlight some important cultural differences and compare them with a common human description of psychology— but he went pretty hard down the boring old, meaningless road of “Westerners are individualist and Asians are collectivists” instead

I wish I could write like Sowell. His prose is so incisive, exact, and deceptively simple. Of course I do not agree with him on all points—yet that’s really the purpose of his essays. You’re not expected to agree, you’re expected to think critically and question what preemptive conclusions you bring into any sociopolitical discussion.

Here’s the spoiler that many readers trip over: Thomas Sowell is a Black American. Left-leaning readers who know no better often accuse him of racism and “White Privilege” only to be caught embarrassingly tongue tied by this simple phenotypical fact. And because (1) Sowell is so damn smart and (2) solidly conservative/libertarian, Sowell tends to hide his racial identity with the apparent intention of catching his ideological opponents in a rhetorical trap. On this point, I think he’s right. Read his comments about being a child during the Harlem Renaissance and how all that changed after the 1968 riots. You’ll realize there’s more deep scars in history than you realize, and it’s practically pointless to label good and bad actors.

My favorite essay in this collection is “The Fallacy of Fairness”. I think it’s technically a polemic, but the criticisms are so well nuanced that it perfectly cuts short the knee jerk reactions we’ve become accustomed to and actually makes you think, “well, what do I think would be ‘fair’?” There is no perfect answer, and I think on this Sowell exposes a critical flaw in Americans social discussion over the past half century.