How Does Culture Change?

John Seel

The Hunter Thesis

What is the difference between Esperanto and E*TRADE? You may never have heard of the first, but you recognize—and perhaps use—E*TRADE. The founder of Esperanto failed to follow a well-worn path from innovation to realization, where an idea becomes part of the woof and warp of life. E*TRADE’s founder, on the other hand, did. Today, it’s one aspect of the greatest cultural change in the last fifty years.

Ludwik Zamenhof invented Esperanto in 1887 to be a universal second language. But it lacked a landing gear and so it stayed stuffed away in academia. Esperanto is only used by a few hundred thousand geeks on the Internet.

E*TRADE, on the other hand, can trace its inception to Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle. He theorized what are called “first principles,” of which the principle (or law) of non-contradiction is the firmest. This laid the groundwork for binary systems. Researchers such as Gottfried Leibniz replaced the more cumbersome ten-digit decimal system with binary as far back as 1666, while John Atanasoff, a physics professor at Iowa State College, built a prototype binary computer by 1939. It was a short step down the path to David Ewing, founder of E*TRADE. There is little debate that the advent of computers and the information revolution that followed are one of the main drivers defining reality and forming culture in today’s world.

There is a debate today over the dynamics of cultural formation. One’s strategies and tactics are significantly shaped by one’s understanding of these dynamics. Here are the basic contrasts:

University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter argues that the common view of cultural change is sociologically ill-informed and consequently ineffective. Good intentions and increased activity are no substitute for an accurate understanding.

Winston Churchill said we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Culture formation works in the same way: it’s a historically informed dialectical process. Culture is both socially constructed and socially constraining. We make culture and are, in turn, made by it. Culture is the frame or story through which we live our lives. Everything is seen or explained through its lens. Culture includes the ideas, images, and institutions that shape a given society’s understanding of what is thinkable, sayable, and doable in a given time and place. It serves as an invisible matrix.

Culture is a public reality maintained by public institutions. Hunter writes, “While everyone participates in the construction of their own private worlds, the development and articulation of the more elaborate systems of meaning, including the realm of public culture, falls more or less exclusively to the realm of elites. They are the ones who provide the concepts, supply the language, and explicate the logic of public discourse.” Those individuals or gatekeepers that have decision-making authority within the culture industry have a disproportionate influence in society. The culture industry is the academy, arts, media, advertising, and entertainment. They function as the creators of the collective ideas and images of a society.

The power of culture is its ability to create an unconscious matrix of ideas and images. Hunter writes, “The power of culture is not measured by the size of a cultural organization or by the quantity of its output, but by the extent to which a definition of reality is realized in the social world—taken seriously and acted upon by actors in the social world. In modern society religious elites have an existence that is essentially meaningless to the economic, political, and cultural dynamics of advanced industrial society—a sideshow to the ‘real’ issues of the day.” Religion in a post-Christian society has been relegated to the private subjective realm of individuals and families, rather than the public objective world of business and politics. Sunday is disconnected from Monday.

Cultural change is top-down, not bottom-up, diffused through culture-forming institutions rather than the mass mobilization of individuals. Market populism—the combination of consumerism and egalitarianism—masks this process. Culture formation does not function as a mass consumer market. Culture is not the aggregate of atomized individual choices. It cannot be correctly thought of in the language or categories of politics or business. Consequently, changing individuals will not ultimately change culture—even if every individual in a society were included.

Instead, the gatekeepers of the reality-defining institutions frame the public metaphors and shape the collective imagination. These institutions, in turn, set the parameters for the private behavior and consciousness of the masses.

It is this failure to acknowledge a role, not to mention a disproportionate importance, for institutions and elites that constitutes a major problem in current thinking about cultural change. One reason for this blind spot is that to acknowledge the power of institutions is to seemingly relinquish one’s own agency. But agency is always mediated—by the past that we inherit and the present we confront. Individual agency—while critically important in local settings—is largely an illusion at the societal level. It is institutions, such as the church, that give cultural traction to individual agency over time and in society at large.

Moreover, there is a food chain in cultural innovation and diffusion, beginning with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible to those whose work is most concrete and visible. With the advent of digital communication and the Internet, there is a proliferation of information and an acceleration of its cultural diffusion. Intellectual innovations that once took decades to filter into the cultural mainstream now happen immediately and globally.

Each of these linkages is strategically important. Lasting change doesn’t happen unless there is a constructive strategic partnership between academics and activists, between theorists and practitioners, scholars and businessmen.

Cultural influence thus requires a long-term commitment of intellectual effort and financial resources that are strategically placed. Changing the cultural direction requires reshaping the taken-for-granted assumptions about reality, which necessitates gaining access to the reality-defining spheres of cultural influence and establishing strategic linkages to the channels of cultural diffusion. The aim is to reframe the collective imagination. There are no short cuts or quick fixes to lasting cultural change.

But understanding the difference between Esperanto and E*TRADE is a good first step.  

John Seel, M.Div., Ph.D., is a cultural renewal entrepreneur, establishing projects and institutions that equip emerging influentials to be effective change agents in a been-there done-that world. John is a Partner in Donegality Productions, a media company that develops books, films, and other cultural projects that promote human flourishing and the common good. He and his wife, Kathryn, live in Cohasset, MA. He can be reached at .

8 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Global Culture, Society, Thu 13 Nov 2008