The Culture Was Abandoned

In Shenzhen, sometime in the mid-2000s, the founder of a Chinese battery company called BYD parked a brand-new Mercedes S-Class in front of his R&D center and told his engineers to take it apart. They hesitated. It was his car. It was new. Wang Chuanfu grabbed the keys and scratched a long line across the side of the paint. "Now you can start." They dismantled it piece by piece.¹

Two hundred and fifty years earlier, in Edinburgh, one of the most important philosophers in the history of Western thought kept a different kind of list. Not of arguments. Not of correspondents. A list of Scotticisms. Words and phrases to purge from his speech and writing. David Hume circulated these lists among friends. He published them. He joined the Select Society, which in 1761 brought an Irish elocution teacher named Thomas Sheridan to Edinburgh to instruct Scotland's intellectual elite in the proper pronunciation of English.²

A founder destroying the finish on a luxury car to overcome his engineers' reverence. A philosopher compiling words to eliminate from his own prose. The gestures are separated by centuries and continents. The mechanism is the same.

The list

Hume was not alone. James Mill, another Scot, deliberately purged Scottish pronunciation from his speech. He moved to England and raised his son John Stuart Mill and his other children as Englishmen who never heard him speak of Scotland.³ The Scottish intelligentsia of the mid-eighteenth century were, in Thomas Sowell's phrase, "conscious to a painful degree of their backwardness, their poverty, their lack of polish, their provinciality."⁴

What followed this painful self-awareness was the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith in economics. David Hume in philosophy. Joseph Black in chemistry. James Watt in engineering. Adam Ferguson in what would become sociology. Robert Burns in literature. The greatest intellectual flowering in Scottish history. It did not happen because the Scots celebrated who they were. It happened because they looked at who they were, found it insufficient, and systematically set about absorbing everything they could from whoever was ahead.⁵

Hume "urged his fellow eighteenth century Scots to learn the English language for the sake of their own advancement," Sowell wrote. "Which they did, and rose rapidly in many fields."⁶

Before this transformation, Scotland was a poor and backward country, like Wales and Ireland, and like the turbulent northern borderlands of England where Scots and English had committed atrocities against each other for centuries. The culture was marked by feuding clans, an aversion to systematic education, and a pride that had no foundation in achievement. "Touchy about their honor and dignity," is how one historian described the people from these regions, people who would "boast and lack self-restraint."⁷

What changed was not the people. It was the relationship to what they were willing to learn. Within a generation of Hume's pronunciation lists, Scotland had produced more intellectual breakthroughs per capita than any country in Europe. The admission preceded the transformation. The pronunciation lesson preceded the Enlightenment.

The delegation

Half the government

On December 23, 1871, a ship sailed from Yokohama carrying half the new Japanese government. The Iwakura Mission included forty-eight senior officials plus roughly sixty students. Their destination was everywhere. They would spend nearly two years traveling across the United States and Europe, studying constitutions, banking systems, military organization, factory methods, education, railways, postal systems, and agriculture. They visited shipyards in Britain, the Krupp steelworks in Essen, textile mills in Manchester, and schools across New England.⁸

A photograph from the mission tells the story. Four of the five principal members wear Western suits, ties, and top hats. Their hair is cut short. Only Iwakura himself still wears Japanese robes, his hair in a traditional topknot. By the time they returned, even that distinction would begin to dissolve.⁹

The admission of inferiority was explicit. Eighteen years earlier, Commodore Matthew Perry had steamed into Edo Bay with four warships. Japan had been in self-imposed isolation since the 1630s. It had no steam-powered navy. It had no railways. It had no telegraph. It had swords against cannons. Perry forced the country open in a single visit. The technology gap was visible in the harbor.¹⁰

The response was not to defend Japanese traditions. It was to systematically replace the ones that were not working. The Meiji government modeled its constitution on Prussia. Its navy on Britain. Its army first on France, then on Germany after the Franco-Prussian War demonstrated which was stronger. Its education system on America. Its legal codes on France and Germany. Its banking system on the United States. Its first railway, opened in 1872 between Tokyo and Yokohama, was built by British engineers.¹¹

The receptivity to Western methods "became extraordinary, approaching adulation."¹²

The speed was staggering. The first Japanese railway opened in 1872, one year after the mission departed. Universal compulsory education was enacted the same year. By 1889, Japan had a written constitution. By 1894, it had defeated China in a naval war. By 1902, Britain signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the first equal military treaty between a European and an Asian power.¹³

The Battle of Tsushima, fought on May 27 and 28, 1905, was the final proof. The Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed eighteen thousand miles from the Baltic Sea to reach the Pacific. Russia lost 21 ships. Japan lost 3 torpedo boats. It was the first time a modern Asian nation had defeated a European great power in a major war. The country that had been forcibly opened by gunboats fifty-two years earlier had built the navy that won the battle from methods it learned by studying the navies of others.¹⁴

The Japanese did not copy blindly. They selected. The constitution came from Prussia because the Prussian model balanced imperial authority with parliamentary structure. The navy came from Britain because Britain's was the best. The army shifted from the French model to the German model after the Franco-Prussian War proved which produced better outcomes. Every import was evaluated on function. Nothing was adopted for prestige. The method was the same one Hume practiced in Edinburgh a century earlier: look at whoever is ahead, admit the gap, take what works.

The pattern

Zero out of forty

In 1912, in Istanbul, of the forty private bankers listed in the Ottoman Empire's capital, not one bore a Muslim name. Not one of the thirty-four stockbrokers was Turkish. Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms employing five or more workers, fifty percent were owned by Greeks and another twenty percent by Armenians.¹⁵

The Turks were the political majority. The Greeks, Armenians, and Jews were minorities. The minorities dominated the economy. The pattern was not unique to the Ottoman Empire.

The pattern was not unique to nations. It showed up everywhere an immigrant minority landed. The Chinese in Southeast Asia, roughly five percent of the population, conducted more than seventy percent of the retail trade across Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The Jews in Europe and the Americas. The Germans in Russia. The Lebanese in West Africa. Each group arrived with little. Each absorbed aggressively from the host culture: the language, the business practices, the social norms. Each kept what worked from home: the work habits, the family structures, the emphasis on education. The combination produced disproportionate outcomes that had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the willingness to import better practices from whoever had them.¹⁶

What these groups produced was anger, not admiration. "Examples of other groups who began in poverty and rose to prosperity have tended to produce anger rather than emulation."¹⁷

The group that absorbs outperforms. The group that insists on purity stagnates. The evidence is across centuries and continents.

The mirror

"We know our business"

In 2007, Nokia held more than half the global mobile phone market. The iPhone launched that year. Android followed in 2008. Nokia's identity was hardware. It made phones. The best phones. It had been making them longer than anyone. When the market shifted to software platforms, Nokia clung to its own operating system, Symbian, long past the point where the evidence was clear. In February 2011, its new CEO Stephen Elop wrote an internal memo comparing the company to a man standing on a burning oil platform in the North Sea. The platform was on fire. The options were to stay and burn, or jump into freezing water. Nokia jumped, but into a partnership with Microsoft's Windows Phone rather than adopting Android. It chose an alliance that preserved some version of its identity over the platform that was clearly winning. By 2013, it sold its phone division to Microsoft for $7.2 billion. At its peak, it had been worth over $250 billion.¹⁸

Chegg was worth nearly $12 billion in early 2021. The company helped college students with homework. That was the identity. When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Chegg's employees suggested building AI tools to compete. Leadership declined. They were not worried, they said, because the chatbot made mistakes. By May 2023, the stock had fallen 49 percent in a single day. By late 2024, the market cap was $191 million. A 99 percent decline. The company that knew its business discovered the business had moved, and the identity was the reason it could not follow.¹⁹

Studied everyone

The Mercedes that Wang Chuanfu keyed in Shenzhen was the beginning. BYD studied Tesla's direct sales approach, its software integration, its battery architecture. It studied Japanese lean manufacturing, then inverted it: unable to afford Japanese automation equipment, Wang broke the process into manual steps and cut battery production costs to one-fifteenth of Japanese competitors. It hired Wolfgang Egger, the former head of design at Audi and Lamborghini, to rebuild its design language from scratch. It partnered with Daimler for a decade to absorb German engineering, then bought Daimler out of the joint venture. There was no pride about where the methods originated. There was only the question of what worked.²⁰

In 2024, BYD sold 4.27 million vehicles. Tesla sold 1.79 million. Revenue reached 777 billion yuan, roughly $107 billion. The company that started by making rechargeable batteries in a Chinese factory, whose first car was widely described as a copy of the Toyota Corolla, had absorbed methods from every competitor it could find and surpassed most of them within a decade.²¹

The same pattern in fast fashion. Shein studied Zara's small-batch model and accelerated it. Zara produced roughly 500 new designs per week. Shein produced thousands. It studied Amazon's logistics infrastructure. It studied TikTok's social commerce. Revenue reached an estimated $38 billion by 2024. No cultural attachment to any single method. The absorption was the method.²²

Samsung studied Apple's design principles so closely that Apple sued. The lawsuit documented internal Samsung presentations dissecting the iPhone screen by screen. Samsung paid the damages and kept studying. It invested billions in design infrastructure and user experience. It now ships more smartphones globally than Apple. The absorption was so thorough that the legal record became the evidence of its own success.²³

The corporate version of cultural pride is five words: "we know our business." Nokia knew its business. Chegg knew its business. The knowing was the problem. The corporate version of the cultural cringe is the willingness to look at whoever is ahead, admit the gap, and import the method. BYD looked at Tesla and saw what worked. Shein looked at Zara and saw what could be faster. Samsung looked at Apple and saw what could be more widely distributed. None of them insisted they already knew how to do it. All of them are now larger than the companies they studied.

The distinction

Japanese spirit

The Meiji reformers had a phrase for what they were doing: wakon yosai. Japanese spirit, Western technology. The phrase encoded a distinction they understood intuitively and that the evidence confirms structurally.

The Scots did not stop being Scottish. Robert Burns wrote in Scots dialect during the Enlightenment. Scottish identity did not diminish. It flourished. What the Scots abandoned was functional. Provincial methods of science and commerce. Habits of education that left them behind the English and the Continent. What they kept was identity. The language. The literature. The sense of place. Hume practiced English pronunciation so that his philosophy could reach beyond Scotland. The pronunciation was functional. The philosophy was Scottish.²⁴

Japan did not stop being Japanese. Japanese art, spiritual practice, family structure, community life continued through the Meiji period and beyond. What Japan imported was functional. Military organization. Industrial methods. Constitutional structures. Education systems. What it kept was identity. The culture that survived the transformation was not weakened by the absorption. It was freed from the practices that had left it vulnerable to gunboats in the harbor.

South Korea followed the same path a century later. Park Chung-hee's industrialization program, beginning in 1961, systematically studied Japanese industrial models, American technology, and German engineering. Korean companies sent thousands of students and engineers abroad. GDP per capita rose from roughly $100 in 1960 to over $35,000 by the 2020s. Korean cultural identity did not diminish. Korean language, cuisine, film, and music became global exports. The absorption funded the identity.²⁵

Singapore, independent only since 1965, studied every successful model it could find. Housing from Scandinavia. Legal frameworks from Britain. Industrial policy from Japan and Germany. Financial regulation from the world's best-run systems. Lee Kuan Yew did not pretend Singapore had all the answers. GDP per capita rose from roughly $500 at independence to over $65,000. The country that absorbed from everyone became one of the wealthiest on earth.²⁶

The groups that failed made a different choice. They conflated the functional with the sacred. Practices that could have been replaced were preserved because they were "ours." The refusal to import better methods was framed as cultural loyalty.

China is the clearest test case. The Qing dynasty faced the same technological shock as Japan, at almost the same time. Britain forced open China in the First Opium War of 1839. Perry forced open Japan in 1853. Both countries saw Western warships in their harbors and understood the technology gap. Japan responded with the Meiji Restoration, sent half its government abroad, and rebuilt its institutions from Western models. China responded with the Self-Strengthening Movement, a program that amounted to "clinging to ancient ways in the face of both Western and Japanese armed aggression with modern weapons and modern methods of organization."²⁷

The difference was not capability. China had, for most of recorded history, been the more advanced civilization. Gunpowder, the compass, paper, printing, civil service examinations. China had invented many of the technologies that Europe later adopted and improved. The difference was the relationship to absorption. Japan acknowledged the gap and imported systematically. China acknowledged the gap and imported reluctantly, preserving the old examination system, the old military structures, the old hierarchy. The results were not close. Japan defeated Russia in 1905. China would endure revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, and famine before its own systematic absorption began under Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The loyalty to the old methods was the obstacle.

Deirdre McCloskey traced a parallel mechanism at the civilizational level. The Great Enrichment, the thirty-fold increase in real income per person since 1800, did not begin with capital accumulation or institutional reform. It began when the rhetoric shifted. When society stopped sneering at commerce and started granting dignity to the people who practiced it. The words preceded the wealth. In Scotland, the words were about inadequacy. In England and the Netherlands, they were about dignity. Both shifts, the admission of falling behind and the honoring of commercial innovation, produced the same outcome. The culture that was willing to change what it said about itself advanced. The one that was not, stayed where it was.²⁸

The admission

Sowell posed the comparison directly. On one side, cultural pride, the insistence on the value of what is already ours. On the other, what he called "the cultural cringe," the painful acknowledgment that someone else does it better. He asked which approach had the better track record.²⁹

Scotland. Japan. The overseas Chinese. The Jews. The Germans in Russia. The Lebanese in West Africa. Samsung. BYD. Shein. South Korea. Singapore. Across centuries and continents, in nations and in companies, the pattern is the same. The groups that looked at whoever was ahead, admitted the gap, and absorbed everything they could, advanced. The groups that insisted on the value of what they already had, stayed where they were. Nokia insisted on building its own operating system while the market moved to Android. China insisted on its ancient ways while Japan rebuilt from Western blueprints. The redneck culture of the Scottish borderlands was carried to the American South and preserved as identity long after the conditions that produced it had disappeared.

The evidence does not say abandon who you are. The evidence says know the difference between what is functional and what is sacred. Work habits are functional. Family structure is identity. Industrial methods are functional. Language is identity. Operating systems are functional. National character is identity. Pronunciation is functional. Philosophy is identity. The groups that knew the difference advanced. The ones that did not stayed where they were.

Hume died on August 25, 1776, the same year Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. James Boswell visited him near the end. The philosopher was calm and clear. Lord Monboddo, a contemporary, later quipped that Hume had died "confessing not his sins but his Scotticisms."³⁰ The list he could never fully purge from his prose. The vowels he could never quite get right.

He had spent his life trying to reach beyond Scotland. The pronunciation was the vehicle. The philosophy was the cargo. He knew which one to change and which one to keep. The greatest philosopher Scotland ever produced became the greatest philosopher Scotland ever produced by refusing to sound like one.