Tapu Misa: We must face up to cultural negatives

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes a convincing case for the importance of cultural legacies. Culture, he argues, is behind the success of the Chinese: that dogged perseverance and hard work comes from centuries of ekeing out an existence from tiny plots of rice paddies.

It's also behind the once high crash rate for Korean Air.

A hierarchical and excessively deferential culture meant that first officers were too polite to challenge pilots they knew were about to fly them into the side of a mountain.

It was only when the airline changed its culture, with the help of an American hired gun, that its safety record improved. The American's first culturally imperialist move was to insist that Korean Air crews become fluent in English.

Gladwell writes that this gave the pilots an alternative identity.

"Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles and language was the key to that transformation. In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy."

It isn't the done thing to blame culture, or even to admit to its possible influence. But it's clear that not all cultures are created equal.

Gladwell points out that in 1994, when Boeing first published safety data showing the correlation between a country's plane crashes and a measure showing how reliant that country was on rules and procedures regardless of the circumstances, the company's researchers "practically tied themselves in knots trying not to cause offence".

"Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge?

"Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from - and when we ignore that fact, planes crash."

But suggesting that culture may play a role in persistent social problems is a more controversial proposition.

The recent release of the State of Black America report by the National Urban League in the US - blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed, three times as likely to live in poverty, and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned as whites - has reignited the debate about whether black poverty and crime are the result of culture or racism.

Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson in his book More Than Just Race makes a more nuanced case.

Of course, culture matters. It would be strange if growing up in a social environment of drug dealing, intergenerational welfare dependency, absent fathers, single mothers, and poorly performing schools didn't produce certain cultural responses.

But the reality is more complex than just blaming the victim for his troubles. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle.

In his new book, In Search of The Friendly Islands, newspaper publisher and editor Kalafi Moala paints a bleak picture of the state of Tongan people and culture.

Instead of the "abundant mildness", "good nature" and "peaceable disposition" Captain James Cook waxed lyrical about in the 1770s, Moala describes a culture with high levels of violence, hypocrisy, deception, and skewed values. Moala believes that Tongans have lost their way, led by modernity and so-called progress into a spiritual wilderness where traditional values have been replaced by materialism, the extended family unit has become more a war zone than a refuge for comfort, and religion is practised without any real connection to God or spirituality.

"Our young people are known for their drug dealing and gang associations, their organised crime and violent assault on their victims," he writes. "Our people are out there among some of the most vicious criminals of any society."

Such is the obsession with status that some Tongans will go to fraudulent lengths to keep up appearances.

Moala has even been fleeced by his own relatives - one lied about the death of his mother to extract money from him, another deceived him and her parents about her success at medical school.

Moala believes Tonga needs a culture change. He doesn't see culture or traditional values as sacred and unchangeable.

"Who wants to bring back slavery, cannibalism, and the indiscriminate slaughter of people at the whim of an angry chief?"

Cultural tradition has been used as an excuse to prop up the current Tongan social structure, which is "elitist in nature and hierarchical in structure, giving rise over the years to an often oppressive social order".

But what is worth preserving, says Moala, are the values that underpin culture: respect, maintaining relationships and social obligations, loyalty and passionate commitment, and humility.

Moala is pro-democracy but knows that change can't come from government reform alone.

"Too often in our island kingdom, I have seen political, economic, or social solutions being devised for problems that must have a spiritual solution as well.

"And the results have not only been disappointing - they have been devastating.

"Much of the debate has largely been limited to cleverly altering systems here and there, changing staff, and so on.

"But nothing is said, let alone done, to confront change or change the 'spirit' or 'soul' behind a person, a family, a village, a church, a business enterprise, or an institution.

"It is still the human heart that must first be altered ..."

* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com