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.
10 comments
In my April 15, 2020 reply to ccscientist’s August 15, 2019 comment on Samuel Kronen’s “The Case for Culture,” I mentioned a distinction I’ve sometimes made between “serious” or “values” versus “fun,” “colorful,” or “touristic” aspects of cultures–e,g., between work attitudes, proper gender roles, or childrearing practices versus food, music, dances, holiday customs, etc. I noted that in modern multi-ethnic societies like the contemporary United States, there seems to be a growing tendency for third- and fourth-generation members of immigrant ethnic groups to stress the “fun” or “colorful” aspects of their grandparents’ “old world” ethnic cultures while downplaying more “serious” aspects that might conflict with contemporary “mainstream” attitudes and practices. I gave the example of a contemporary college-educated Greek-American professional woman who charms and entertains her friends and co-workers, and makes herself a more colorfully intriguing potential sexual or romantic partner, by cooking them Greek meals and dancing Greek dances, while ignoring her grandparents’ views on girls’ proper role and behavior.
I’ve just found that a number of sociologists studying the assimilation of American ethnic groups have made a very similar observation. The Columbia University sociologist Herbert J. Gans devoted an often-cited 1979 paper to what he called “symbolic ethnicity” among third- and fourth-generation Irish-, Italian-, Jewish-, Polish-, Greek-, etc. Americans–an observation further developed in two 1990 books by Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters, who also called it “optional ethnicity,” and by the CUNY Graduate Center sociologist Richard D. Alba. “Symbolic ethnicity” as described by Herbert Gans, Mary Waters, and Richard Alba is basically individualistic rather than communal, involves little cost to the individual and little interference with other aspects of life, and does not seriously conflict with an ordinary “mainstream” American life-style or pattern of family life. It essentially consists of leisure-time activities, based on family traditions and focused on the voluntary enjoyable aspects of being ethnic.
Gans, Waters, and Alba see symbolic or optional ethnicity as appealing to people who choose to keep a tie with an ethnic identity because of the enjoyable and voluntary aspects to those identities, along with the feelings of specialness they involve. A typical example of symbolic ethnicity would be individuals who identify as Irish, for example, on occasions such as Saint Patrick’s Day, on family holidays, or for vacations–but who usually also do not belong to Irish American organizations, live in Irish neighborhoods, work in typically Irish jobs, or marry other Irish people. Most people, Gans and Waters noted, look for easy and intermittent ways of expressing their identity, ways that do not conflict with other ways of life. They thus refrain from ethnic behavior that requires an arduous or time-consuming commitment, either to a culture that must be practiced constantly, or to organizations that demand active membership. Ethnic culture becomes mainly a leisure-time activity with little or no relevance to earning a living or regulating family life. It no longer necessarily involves active membership in ethnic organizations or the practicing of ethnic cultures to a degree seriously influencing daily life.
I’d just like to add to my remarks on ccscientist’s 8/15/2019 comment that cultural values, like his own example of self-reliance, involve may involve more alternatives than just simple acceptance or rejection, observance or disregard. For example, he noted, the “idea of self-reliance” is “big” among his relatives, none of whom have “ever taken a handout,” who “don’t look outside for someone to blame but rather try to solve problems”–which seems to implicitly suggest a binary of either being self-reliant or else just completely ignoring or despising that value. I myself rather think that you easily may either (1) practice self-reliance yourself and automatically condemn or disparage anybody who seems to lack that virtue, or (2) be self-reliant yourself but also understand that there may well be valid reasons why some other people might find it truly difficult or impossible to survive as self-reliantly as you yourself do or did, or (3) indeed truly just plain lack that virtue. All too many of us, I fear, are blind to alternative (2), simplistically or hastily assuming that everybody must be either (1) or (3). This is the root of a lot of prejudice and bigotry against the poor, and against racial or ethnic groups perceived as largely poor.
Anonymous (August 14, 2019, at 2:56 AM) criticized Samuel Kronen’s article for neglecting to sufficiently stress that “culture” refers “not only to traditional or national cultures, but to contemporary sub-cultures,” going on to add 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.” He then observed that “[r]adical activists” have “no problem with critiquing the culture of their parents,” but thus might have found it “so much more difficult…to take a hard look at the culture of their friends.” He concluded by worrying 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.”
Yes, complex modern industrial societies indeed are not simply “cultures” like the culture of some Australian Aboriginal, Papuan, Amazon rain-forest, or Kalahari Desert Khoi-San tribe, but rather very complex mosaics of almost innumerable partly overlapping subcultures. Thus, today’s American society includes, e.g., the subcultures of immigrant ethnic neighborhoods, of religious sects and cults, of communities like the Old Order Amish or the Satmar Hasidim, of various occupational and professional groups, of radical activists, of white supremacists, of UFO enthusiasts, of parapsychologists, of Bigfoot hunters, of video game addicts, of comic-book collectors, of body-builders, etc., etc., all simultaneously both fragments of general contemporary U.S. culture and also distinct cultures in their own right. Back in 1970 sociologist Andrew Greeley even published a half serious, half satiric *New York Times Magazine* article on “Intellectuals As an Ethnic Group!”[*N.Y. Times Magazine*, July 12, 1970]
Now, before I continue any further here, I’d first just like to confess my own hunch that I’m probably not quite so totally critical of the radical activists and the so-called “politically correct” and “social justice warriors” as Anonymous seems to be–though I’m also very far from being totally uncritical! I see them myself not so much as totally misguided with no redeeming qualities whatsoever as rather honestly well-meaning but quite excessively over-zealous. I see them as very sadly misguided friends rather than as total enemies I think (though of course I may be wrong) that Anonymous seems to regard them as.
Still, I also quite definitely agree that Anonymous has a quite valid point in observing that while the radical activists “critiquing the culture of their parents” are “seeking to escape their conditioning by mass society,” they still nevertheless “do not succeed in replacing it with something better, but rather overlay the old with a new form of conditioning.” Yes, they ARE sadly misguided in their intolerant, obsessive, narrow-focus fanatical zeal, albeit in a good cause, or at least a better cause (at least in my own opinion) than that of the white supremacists, the MAGA-hat wearers, or the Ayn Randians. Yes, they do indeed “overlay the old with a new form of conditioning,” in a new form of conformity and “groupthink,” in a still continuing failure to think for themselves or to become true individuals.
HOWEVER, I myself don’t think the cure necessarily involves a conversion to political conservatism, or to traditional religious orthodoxy as preached by the “Religious Right.” I think they could still remain left-of-center political liberals, as long as they gave up their fanatical intolerance of other viewpoints and their obsession with politics as the only legitimate, worth-while interest or activity! I myself, for instance, personally feel that a lot of them would be much happier, much less obnoxious, and much easier to get along with, if they allowed themselves to spend part of their time and energy to reading, thinking, and talking about things like Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the possible common origin of all languages, or the true linguistic identity of ancient Crete’s “Linear A” script, or the history of calculations of the value of pi (3.14159265358973….], or the possibility of life on Mars, or the possible warm-bloodedness of the dinosaurs, or Hegel’s paranormal interests, instead of obsessing “24/7″ over politics and social injustices!
Samuel Kronen’s excellent article stressing and defending the importance of culture as a major causal phenomenon, in addition to biological and socio-economic factors, reminded me for one thing of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber’s classic 1917 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST essay on “The Superorganic.”
Kronen’s article also reminded me, as well, of my own pet “meta-historical” hypothesis (my attempt to compete with Giambattista Vico, Georg Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, T.H. Buckle, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Michel Foucault, and Ernest Gellner, so to speak!:=>) of Western intellectual and culture in recent centuries as a succession of what I call “Theospheric,” “Physiospheric,” and “Sociospheric” periods or stages (a little bit analogously to Comte’s scheme of successive “Theological,” “Metaphysical,” and “Positive” or scientific stages of human intellectual evolution. I see Western thinkers in the past few centuries as successively preoccupied first with the “Theosphere” of religious beliefs and concepts (as in the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and Puritan New England), then with the “Physiosphere” of natural laws (from the 17th century Scientific Revolution and 18th century Enlightenment onward), and finally with the “Sociosphere” of human social, interpersonal, and cultural relationships, attitudes, and beliefs. Human beings have been mainly seen in these three stages or phases first as wayward children of God in need of redemption, then as natural creatures in a natural world subject to natural laws, and finally as social beings very largely or even totally governed in their thoughts, feelings, and behavior by social and cultural relationships, beliefs, and attitudes all the way from the nuclear family to the worldwide capitalist economy. “Physiospheric” thinkers have seen human behavior as largely or even totally determined by biology, especially heredity, while “Sociospheric” thinkers on the contrary have stressed the great importance or even the total omnipotence of culture. Kronen’s article struck me as a wonderful expression of the “Sociospheric” outlook.
Very much like Samuel Kronen, I myself also feel that we could probably devise better solutions to complex social, economic, and educational problems by taking culture more into account. Like Kronen, I strongly doubt that all economic disparities between ethnic groups are necessarily the result either of biological inferiority or of systemic racism, but rather am willing to suspect that there may be cultural problems within certain communities that cause those disparate outcomes.
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.
ccscientist argued (August 15, 2019) that culture consists not only of things like food, music, and clothing but also of values like self-reliance (or its lack), child-raising, skills, exercise. I myself a few years ago, in some e-letters to friends commenting on a couple of books on modern nationalism by the Czech-English social philosopher and cultural historian Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) that I’d just read, remarked that national and ethnic cultures might be divided into “fun” or “touristic” versus “serious” components. On the one hand, I observed, ethnic and national cultures included typically “colorful” aspects like cuisine, folk-songs, folk-dances, traditional costumes, and holiday customs. On the other hand, they also had more serious aspects like attitudes toward child-raising, work and play, gender roles, sexual behavior, religion, expression versus stoic denial of pain, and other ethnic, national, racial, or religious groups.
In modern multi-ethnic societies like the 20th/21st century United States, I argued, there has been a growing tendency for members of various ethnic groups, such as second- and third-generation Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, German, Greek, etc. immigrants, to preserve or even revive and accentuate their “fun” or “colorful” elements but also to soft-pedal, modify, or abandon more “serious” aspects, such as “old-country” attitudes toward gender roles or sexual behavior, religious practices, or relations with other groups, that are perceived to clash with “mainstream” American values. For instance, as I wrote my friends, a contemporary college-educated Greek-American professional woman may charm and entertain her friends and co-workers by cooking them Greek meals and dancing Greek dances, but ignore her grandparents’ Greek-village views on the proper role of girls and on the everlasting need to hate the Turks! Or, as one Orthodox Jewish writer complained some years back, the Jewishness of all too many American Jews basically just amounts to a fondness for Eastern European food, a few Yiddish phrases, and warm feelings toward Israel, while kashruth, halacha, and shabbos-observance are totally ignored!
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.