I would like people to speak more openly about culture as a causal phenomenon. In addition to citing biological and socio-economic factors to help us make sense of the world, we could devise better solutions to complex problems by taking culture into account. Are public schools struggling because they lack funding, or is there a cultural issue within the school system in respect to how we learn and what we teach? Are all economic disparities between ethnic groups the result of either biological inferiority or systemic racism, or are there cultural problems within certain communities that cause disparate outcomes? Is political polarization the healthy result of genuine policy differences, or have opposing cultures developed, such that any attempt to find common ground is seen as a betrayal of one’s identity? The beautiful thing about culture is that no individual is to blame for it—yet it lies well within our ability to change.
But first we must establish what culture is and why it matters.
In practical terms, culture is the values, beliefs, habits, norms and underlying assumptions of a group of people at a certain place and time. It includes the judgments we make about the world around us, the aesthetic used to reinforce our shared identity, the status games we play to establish hierarchy, and the interpersonal struggles we undergo as we try to establish a common understanding of reality. In the words of James Baldwin, culture is the result of the long and painful history of a people.
Culture is about what it means to live in relation to other human beings. How do we reconcile ourselves to our surroundings and cultivate a way of life? Culture offers us a readily accessible toolkit which we can use as we navigate the wild world we encounter. It cloaks our nakedness. Culture matters because of its effects on human behavior and its role in shaping people’s social, moral and political sensibilities. It is the conversation we are collectively taking part in, and it matters because it can be changed.
Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson gives a concise definition of culture in the 1997 book Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress:
By culture I mean a repertoire of socially transmitted and intra-generationally generated ideas about how to live and make judgments. It is an information system with varying levels of specificity: on one level it is as broad as a set of ideas about styles of public presentation; on another level it is the micro-information system prescribing the best way to make bagels, curried chickpeas, or Jamaican jerk pork. The information system is more than what people must learn in order to be able to function acceptably as members of a social group. The culture concept must address not only what is formally appropriate, but also what is ecologically effective. Hence, culture is what one must know in order to act effectively in one’s environment. Although cultural continuities exist, people are not slaves to them. They use them and they can change them if they really want to.
The late ethnobotanist and psilocybin enthusiast Terrence McKenna has observed that culture is not your friend—by which he means that the purpose of culture is to stave off the amorphous chaos of individual experience, in order to allow us to cooperate within the social arena. In other words, human beings are far too raw and disorderly to contend with on an individual, private and personal basis. Cultural norms signal that we exist within the same ecosystem—and these norms often discourage individual difference. “You don’t have to be a victim of your culture,” suggests McKenna, “It’s not like your eye color, your height, or your gender. It’s fragile. It can be remade, if you wish it to be. And then the question is, how does one download a new operating system?”
Culture is a joint operating system that we unconsciously download in order to negotiate our environment effectively. If culture matters, and culture can be changed, then how we change culture also matters—assuming that there are aspects of culture that should be changed. As the culture wars continue to destabilize our collective identity, while we simultaneously endeavor to move towards a multicultural global society, the questions of what culture is and how to change it are becoming increasingly urgent.
Cultures can perpetuate themselves through imitation. Patterson describes cultural models as the sociological counterparts of stem cells. Just as stem cells are characterized by their capacity to differentiate and become a variety of different cells, which then divide to produce more of their kinds, cultural models are remarkably dynamic and self-modifying. Richard Dawkins draws a similar comparison when he suggests the meme as a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the biological gene. Just like genes, memes can replicate outside their original contexts. Environmental conditions form culture, but culture then spreads through time and space, independent of the conditions that originally shaped it.
Culture is an elusive concept. Social scientists might be inclined to steer clear of cultural explanations for sociological phenomena because of their political implications—but the rest of us refrain from judging the culture of our preferred in-group because of the threat that would pose to our sense of identity. There is little risk in formulating a critique of something as generic as American, western or black culture. It is more challenging to criticize the culture of the social setting in which we feel most at home. The attributes of this culture are often hidden in plain sight, because to identify with something literally means to feel that one is the same as that thing. As Clay Rutledge has argued in a recent Quillette piece called “Meaning Matters,” we champion cultural diversity and travel the world to sample other cultures, all the while imagining that we don’t need a culture ourselves, as if we were gods—when, in fact, we are all cultural animals.
It is rare to find someone capable of reflecting on the pathologies of her own culture, just as it is rare to find someone capable of reflecting on the pathologies of his own mind. We should not expect this of any individual. But one of the few ways to reliably correct harmful aspects of culture—or of our psychology—is to articulate them. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” writes Baldwin, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
To discuss a specific element of culture is not to assign credit or blame to any individual for the effects of that culture. Invoking cultural explanations of social phenomena is the opposite of blaming individuals for undesirable outcomes. Very few people wholly identify with their culture, even if they take the norms of that culture for granted. We don’t choose our culture; our culture chooses us.
To be most oneself is to be free from culture, which is not the same as being free of culture. It involves the imagination and desire to see ourselves outside of our social contexts, so that we no longer need to use culture to define ourselves. We can use culture, rather than letting culture use us—but, first, we must see what culture is and how it operates within us.
In sum, culture is key to understanding the complex interactions between human beings and their environments, and it matters very much indeed.
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Some aspects of culture are often left out of consideration. People talk about food, music, clothing as culture. But it also involves other things. For example, among my relatives the idea of self-reliance is big. None of them have ever taken a handout. They have started their own companies or been independent consultants (in addition to regular jobs). Maybe you take a second job. Self-reliance means you don’t look outside for someone to blame but rather try to solve problems.
Another aspect is how you raise kids. Do you talk to your kids? Do you teach them definite skills? My neighbor and his dad spent 5 yrs building a classic mustang from parts. Or do you just send them to watch TV? Is exercise a standard part of your life? Or not? All these things are culture.
Culture is the natural result of learning.
We are born anxious to learn and the job of parents, particularly mothers, is to culturally assimilate their babies into the culture they will one day be expected to join.
So our mom’s teach us “our-people’s” language. They teach is how “our-people” dress, the foods “our-people” eat, and the gods “our-people” worship.
The role of parents is not to create good children, but to create good-adults. That is, people ready to leave home and work shoulder-to-shoulder with others within the culture to survive and thrive.
BECAUSE WE ARE A GROUP WE CAN BE INDIVIDUALS.
If each one of us had to live on our own and find our own food and shelter we would be like tigers or squirrels. When you’ve seen one tiger, you’ve seen them all. They all have to do pretty much the same things. They have to be able to master 100% of all their requirements.
This is not true for people in groups who share a “culture.” We can be individuals. I can be a butcher, you can be a baker, and the other fellow can be a candle-stick maker and we can trade with each other and prosper. As long as we share some of the basics like language, habits of trade and honesty.
However, reality teaches us that the more wealthy a society, the more we tolerate cultural deviation.
When we were poorer and when the opinion of our neighbors mattered, we could not go around with hair dyed blue or tattoos on our faces. These were practices that deviated from cultural norms. They signaled to others that if we are not “culturally-reliable” in these ways – we might not be “culturally reliable” in other ways either.
Part of our culture is to NOT have sex with children, not walk down the street naked, to uphold the laws, etc.. If you prove yourself to be CULTURALLY UNRELIABLE in some ways, you signal to others that you may be “culturally unreliable” in these ways as well.
The wealthier the society, the more we tolerate cultural deviance, because the wealthier we are, the less we need to rely on others.
Poor societies are conservative ones. In poor societies your neighbors know you, and their own success often depends on the cultural-reliability of others
In modern rich western societies this is no longer the case, so every form of deviance and personal preference is presented as being just as good and just as valid as any other.
Everyone can do things as they please. Since times are easy old cultural norms seem like unnecessary restrictions from a bygone stifled era.
When (and if ever) times get hard again, we’ll see all this variety in personal expression diminish and we will again be forced to demonstrate that we feel that our personal whims can and should take a back seat to what has been established as “good for society.”
People are no longer being described as “Cultured” we hardly know what that means.
Who do you know that is “cultured?”
Now we are “individuals.” So we party. As we drive down the road we see stickers on the back of cars that read F**K YOU! or show a kid pissing on a flag.
Is this our new culture?
In a sense rich-western-society is adolescent society. We don’t have to grow up and act like adults. We no longer need to prove we are cultured.
Invariably, culture is associated with being civilized. It is to be domesticated. It is to be taught and trained how to put the needs of the group and of others before your own whims.
But again, we are rich, and those considerations seem a little out-dated.
I can be all that matters to me and you can be all that matters to you.
We are rich!
Cultures have to keep changing if they are to permit continued vigor. Idealising preindustrial cultures serves to ossify them as museum specimens. Both fear of change from within cultures and the idealisation of them lead to the kind of situation now in Canadian Indian Reserves. They want the modern convenience of running water, motorised transport, medical care, etc, but a communal culture without private ownership of anything means that individuals who want to get them by their own achievement – as opposed to subsidy – must leave the reserve. In addition, modern conveniences necessarily change the relationship with the Land, which they say defines their culture. Their culture also is based on small isolated groups with long traditions of hostility between groups. By idealising preindustrial culture, we condem them to mismatch between culture and environment.
“It is rare to find someone capable of reflecting on the pathologies of her own culture, just as it is rare to find someone capable of reflecting on the pathologies of his own mind.”
While this article clearly defines the scope of culture, it might have been useful to stress that it refers not only to traditional or national cultures, but to contemporary sub-cultures. With that in mind, we can see that some people are quite good at reflecting on the problems of their own culture, driven as they are to do so by a chosen sub-culture. Radical activists have no problem with critiquing the culture of their parents but, maybe it then becomes so much more difficult for them to take a hard look at the culture of their friends.
I worry that too many people, seeking to escape their conditioning by mass society, do not succeed in replacing it with something better, but rather overlay the old with a new form of conditioning, and find that both layers conspire to give them even more problems than they started off with.
I live within a “Western” culture and there are many people that criticize this culture, particularly capitalism, hence I find the statement highlighted to be incorrect as you have pointed out. The problem with living in a particular culture is that is consists of societal norms that are developed in order to navigate the culture successfully. Not everybody is able to do this, particularly Autistic individuals. If you do not fit within the perceived group of norms you are considered to pathological in some way. Samuel is correct in his summation that culture is extremely important, from my perceptive it is a matter of life and death for many people. There are so many structures and institutions that often squash our individual rights and for me this is the problem with western culture. It claims to provide freedom in the form of a democracy, however when you actually drill down into the laws and overall structure of society there actually aren’t that many freedoms when you take social norms into account.