Page 256 - Cultures and Organizations

What Is Different Is Dangerous 229

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positions (see Chapter 5). The correlation with uncertainty avoidance is
easy to interpret, as the Catholic Church supplies its believers with a cer-
tainty that most protestant groups lack (apart from some of the smaller
sects). The Catholic Church appeals to cultures with a need for such cer-
tainty. Within the Protestant nations the dominant cultures have equipped

people with a lesser need for certainty. Those who do need it find a spiritual
home in sects and fundamentalist groups.
Both within Islam and within Judaism there is also a clearly visible

conflict between more and less uncertainty-avoiding factions, the fi rst dog-
matic, intolerant, fanatical, and fundamentalist (“There is only one Truth
and we have it”), the second pragmatic, tolerant, liberal, and open to the
modern world. In recent years the fanatic wings in all three revelation
religions have been active and vocal. In history fanaticism has always led
to its own undoing, so there is some hope that the excesses will not last.
What holds for religions applies also to political ideologies that can
become secular neoreligions. Marxism in many places has been an exam-
ple. When East Germany was still solidly communist, the facade of the
University of Leipzig was decorated with an enormous banner reading
“Der Marxismus ist allmächtig, weil er wahr ist!” (“Marxism is all-powerful
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because it is true!”) In strong uncertainty- avoidance cultures, we fi nd
intolerant political ideologies; in weak uncertainty- avoidance cultures, we

find tolerant ones. The respect for what are commonly called human rights
assumes a tolerance for people with different political ideas. Violation of
human rights in some countries is rooted in the strong uncertainty avoid-
ance within their cultures. In other countries it is rather an outcome of a
power struggle (and related to power distance) or of collectivist intergroup
strife.
In the area of philosophy and science, grand theories are more likely
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to be conceived within strong uncertainty- avoidance cultures than in weak

uncertainty avoidance ones. The quest for Truth is an essential motivator
for a philosopher. In Europe, Germany and France have produced more
great philosophers than Britain and Sweden (for example, Descartes, Kant,
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre). Weak uncertainty- avoidance cultures
have produced great empiricists, people developing conclusions from obser-

vation and experiments rather than from pure reflection (such as Newton,
Linnaeus, and Darwin).
In serving as peer reviewers of manuscripts submitted to scientifi c
journals, we notice that papers by Germans and French writers often pres-