“Culture”. We hear the word all the time: the culture is in decline, we are losing our culture, we are fighting a culture war. But ask someone to define culture, and you will likely receive many different answers—answers which consist primarily in listing what kinds of thing belong to culture: language, art, movies, music, politics, cuisine, customs, beliefs, rituals, and something of an ethos. Such definitions make it seem at once to be everything and nothing—showing deep conceptual confusions. Few outside of anthropology departments seem to question its origins—either as for what it is in itself or how the concept came to be accepted. The etymology of the word—the care or honoring of that which can be grown—receives a polite nod in most of these accounts, as they race to other questions. Without an understanding of its origins, however, its reality is most often missed completely; we hear what kinds of things are cultural, but seldom what kind of thing is culture.
This conceptual impoverishment leads to subsequent practical errors: chiefly experienced in confrontations between different “systems” of life’s meaning. Thus we find ourselves amidst a “culture war”: conservative vs. liberal, traditionalism vs. progressivism, ancient vs. modern—and now, technology vs. humanity. But what is it over which the war is being waged? What stands to be won, or lost? The prevalence of this conception, I would argue—that culture can be won or lost—shows how these conceptual confusions and practical problems have compounded within our technologized way of life. Put otherwise: culture has itself become another form of “technology”, an (over)extension of our own minds.
I. The “Culture War”
We want our cultures to have the right values: the right attitudes or opinions towards abortion, gender identity and sexuality, marriage, families, religious freedom and traditions, immigration, national identity, race, education, free speech, police, crime, the environment, and technology. Ostensibly, instilling the right values is the end goal of the “culture war”. Combatants wage this war over values, it seems, through displays of rhetoric. These displays are not only in words—written in essays or spoken on television—but through representative and influential images, movies, television shows, and even music. “Messaging”—what is the message, how is it conveyed?
Whole organizations, some quite large and successful, seem to have grown up in America and lived on the idea that they are warriors in this fight. The culture, they saw, was being lost—especially in the 1960s and 70s, as progressive ideologies took hold of younger generations. The mingling of drugs, sex, music, and revolutionary politics posed a threat to the values previously seen as “American”: values of hard work, Christian decency, individual vigor, strong families. Evil ideologies were making war upon the good—and thus a defensive war would need to be waged.
But can a culture be “won”, like a war? What does it mean, to “win”? A war may have many different conditions which constitute victory: gain of a certain territory, a resource, regional stability, defeat of the enemy’s attacking or standing forces, surrender, even total annihilation of the opposition. Not all these conditions will render the war a just war—but they determine in advance what it means for the war to be won. Without such conditions being stipulated, no war can be just.
But what are the conditions for winning the “culture war”? Can one defeat the opposition’s values? It is in fact a very strange notion—the “culture war”—if we reflect upon it. For what is a value? It is a kind of relatively-enduring judgment about the worth of some object or its pursuit. Can you defeat a judgment? Gain security against it, or in favor of it? A judgment is an act of the mind following upon apprehension and involved in the thick of all reasoning. How does one “control” judgment? Only, it would seem, by controlling thinking itself.
II. Technologized Culture
It has been discussed throughout the Humanitas Technica project that the defining characteristic of modern technology is not to be found in any of its devices or systems, but rather in its modality of thinking. Modern technological thinking sees everything in terms of control, and makes all of its judgments in terms of increasing that control.
Both sides of the “culture war” have control as their aim: control over the “values” that are believed and which determine human practical activity. When culture becomes the “battleground” of this war, it becomes conceived as a system to manipulated or re-designed. It becomes seen as the instrument of forming a given social group’s practices, behaviors, institutions, and norms. The war is waged over who controls this instrument. Of course, it must be noted and well, one can never gain final and absolute control over the culture; for it is always shifting, changing, becoming other—in and through every new person who enters into society, in fact. Thus, it becomes a forever-war: one must always be fighting for control over how culture is realized.
Technology plays a double-role in this conception and praxis of cultural warfare: on the one hand, as it mediates our practices and especially our communication, technology comes to alter the shape of that “system”. The medium is the message. Have we not, after all, heard a great deal in past decades about “who controls the media?” An institution long held by “progressive” hands, “conservatives” have often opted to create their own media structures, to compete with news networks and Hollywood. Put otherwise, opposed sides in warfare develop technologies aimed at defeating one another.
But on the other hand, insofar as “the cultural system” comes to be seen as itself an instrument, it becomes coopted into a kind of technology itself. One begins to think of “using” the culture. The more technological mediation comes to shape the patterns which constitute culture, the more culture becomes itself a technology. It suffers an assimilation into its own instruments. The norms of enculturation become thoroughly technologized. This gradual shift in our cultural norms—shifting to the point that they become inhuman, inhumane—follows from the confused conception of what kind of thing “culture” is.
The “self”. We all know what we mean by this—until we are asked to explain it. Simple reduction to a label, a set of categorical terms, seems inadequate. We reject this reduction. Who are you? Who am I? Who can find enough words to say who any person is?
III. Glimpsing the Meaning of “Culture”
A full accounting of what we truly mean by “culture”, how it has come to mean that, where this understanding deviates from the truth, and what the truth is would exhaust us all. Allow me instead to make a brief contrast. Consider this definition, given by the well-known linguist and anthropologist, Daniel Everett, who writes:[1]
Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. The roles, knowledge and values of culture are only found in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members.
When Everett calls culture “an abstract network”, it is important to note that he is thinking in terms of the common grammatical convention which opposes this to the “concrete”: i.e., the “abstract” is that which cannot be touched, seen, or otherwise sensed.
As definitions go, this is far from the worst. But it also contains an internal conflict: Everett calls it an “abstract network” and yet says it is found “only in the bodies… and behaviors of its members”. I am not sure how it can be both abstract and embodied: an abstract network consists in relations, and bodies and behaviors are things, or what happens in things. In contrast, I would say that culture is the invisible reality which affects our interpretations of the social world in which we live—and, conversely, which we re-shape through our own linguistic expressions. In other words, culture may not be directly sensible, but it very much impacts our “concrete” experience of the world.
What happens more often than not with our treatment of this invisible reality, however—because it is so powerfully effective on the minds of those living within it—is we reify it: that is, we turn it into another “thing”. With technologized minds, we treat its reality like any other instrument to be used.
IV. De-Weaponizing Culture
If we are to keep culture from being further instrumentalized and, indeed, weaponized, reduced to an instrument of domination, we need to think more deeply about what it is itself. We need also to think about how it is transmitted, grown, and shaped. “Culture”, as that invisible reality which shapes the social world, comes into being in many ways.
The reason so many people identify artworks as among the most important cultural signifiers is simple. Artworks of every kind tell a narrative about beliefs and practices. We interpret the meaning of our lives very often through or with the assistance of art. More people have their participation in the cultural reality of life affected through engagement with artistic works than anything else. A low art, a vulgar, base, and unthinkingly-formed art, will result in a corresponding people. It seeds and grows into vulgar, base, unthinking habits. That “art” today—music, movies, television, books—has become predictably formulaic, targeting the lowest common denominators of taste and desire: this shows its technologized and inhuman constitution. It moves us away from thinking.
Similarly, education. Often, “education” is itself presented as though something neutral. This is a point for a latter essay, but “education” too today has been technologized, rendered into a system of control: a “means” for instilling (installing?) the right and most important information. Here, too, we see a technologized and inhuman constitution. Where art is the most common transmitter of culture, however, education is the deepest. Today’s educational malformation conscripts one into the weaponized, instrumentalized concept of culture.
V. Conclusion: Language & Culture
At its most fundamental level, culture is constituted through language. Non-human animals have social structures and practices. They do not have cultural ones. This does not make human culture, by default, into something “unnatural”. Rather, it makes it a fulfillment of our specifically-human nature. We are the animals that possess language. We may nourish this essential element of our humanity—studying language, understanding how it transmits ideas, thoughts, beliefs, enters into our practical behavior, and so on—or we may neglect it. Through its neglect, we neglect also the constitution of culture: for that invisible reality affecting our interpretation of the social world is shared, but only through language and what follows upon our possession and mastery of it.
Continue the Inquiry
This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “Culture as a System” which more deeply analyzes how technological rationality has permeated our contemporary cultural structures.
[1] Daniel Everett 2016: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious.
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