Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
What Do We
Mean by
"Culture"?
CULTURE is usually thought of as a
knowledge of music, literature, painting, or other arts. Thus we
say of persons having such knowledge that they are "cultured."
Obviously culture in this sense is not something that everyone in
a society has.
But culture may also be thought of as a set of beliefs expressed
in behavior. Culture in this sense is not something consciously
learned, like culture in the sense mentioned above.
Rather, it is acquired by successive generations of a people
through imitating the behaviors of their elders that express certain
beliefs. Culture in this sense is the possession of a whole
people.
The way a historical culture comes into being resembles the
formation of a path. When someone first traverses a landscape,
the terrain and the pathfinder's choices among plausible alternative
routes determine the way he goes. Those who come after
him follow the way he took because falling in with a discernible
track is always easier than making independent explorations at
every step of a journey. As time passes, successive travelers continuously
make the track plainer and confirm it as the way to pass
through that landscape until, eventually, the pathfinder's initial
route acquires a compelling utility and rightness. Similarly, in
the formation of a historical culture, successive generations of a
people find before them--already laid out--the way of life of
preceding generations; and as each generation imitates the belief-behaviors
of that way of life, they make them ever more
compelling and right for later generations. So too, just as the
route taken by the pathfinder and his immediate followers is crucial
to a path's formation, in the formation of a historical culture
the belief-behaviors of the first generations of a people are crucial.
Whoever wants to understand any historical culture will
therefore pay special attention to its formative period. In the case
of the United States of America, that period was the century and
a half from 1610 to 1760, the colonial era of American history.
Historical cultures allow human beings to live in society
with other human beings, something that requires a shared sense
of a right way to live. Human beings have a "moral imagination,"
which is to say that we are capable of imagining right conduct
and need to live with other human beings according to a right
way of behaving. A set of right belief-behaviors is as indispensable
to human well-being as food and water. In many instances in
history, ordinary men and women have preferred to suffer death
rather than violate a belief-behavior of their culture.
A HISTORICAL CULTURE can be formally defined as a unique set
of extremely simple beliefs, formed and communicated through
behavior over more than three generations. Cultural beliefs thus
differ from other kinds of ideas in having been acted on for
longer than the lifetime of the oldest person in a society. That is
why they must be extremely simple. If they were complicated
they would not be sensible to many people, nor would they retain
their coherence for many generations. Cultural beliefs have
this order of simplicity: "Worship is a matter of conscience,"
"The emperor is divine," "We are God's chosen people." These
are historical beliefs respectively of the American, the Japanese,
and the Jewish peoples. Beliefs this simple can be acted on for
thousands of years without losing their coherence, and can be
understood by even the dullest-minded persons in a society.
The extreme simplicity of cultural beliefs also allows them
to be expressed in varying behaviors over time. This is important
because a people may have to alter their behavior if they find
themselves living in altered circumstances. But while the behaviors
that express cultural beliefs may change, the beliefs themselves
remain the same. America, for example, was an almost
entirely agricultural society during the century and a half when
its culture formed in the 1600s and 1700s; then, beginning in the
1800s, America became a highly industrialized society. But that
change, which was very great, involved no alteration in American
beliefs regarding work--the beliefs I have designated "Primary
Beliefs" in this book. Those beliefs remained the same whether
the work that expressed them was performed outdoors in fields
or indoors in factories.
It is the set of beliefs in a culture that makes it complex, not
the individual beliefs--all of which must be extremely simple to
retain their coherence over time. Similarly, each culture is
unique because of its set of beliefs, not because each belief in the
set is unique. Cultures are more or less alike depending on the
number of their shared beliefs. Thus we can speak meaningfully
of "Islamic cultures," "nomadic cultures," "Western cultures."
And within any given culture, groups of persons may exist that
share its belief-behaviors but have some belief-behaviors historically
peculiar to themselves. To describe a particular culture is to
claim a certain focus of attention and a comparative rather than
an absolute uniqueness.
When the same belief is shared by several cultures, it is
likely to be expressed by different behaviors in each of them.
The Japanese belief in a divine emperor, for instance, has occurred
in other cultures. But where the Japanese emperor was at
times a mere puppet manipulated by a warlord, in the culture of
the Incas in the pre-Columbian Andes of South America, where
the same belief existed, the will of the emperor was an iron law of
absolute authority. Mummies of all the Inca emperors were kept
in a special room inside the imperial palace at Cusco to be
brought forth to sit among the counselors of the living emperor
whenever he had to make a decision of the gravest consequence
to the empire--a behavior not found in Japan. In ancient Egypt,
whose culture likewise included a belief in the divinity of the
ruler, the corpses of Egyptian pharaohs were as carefully preserved
as they were in the culture of the Incas; but their mummies
were never brought forth and displayed. Quite the contrary.
Great pains were taken to conceal the corpses of these rulers
in places where, it was hoped, they would never be disturbed. A
culture's particular set of beliefs, it appears, will cause a belief it
may share with other cultures to be expressed in distinctive behavior.
The beliefs of a culture are transmitted in a more unerring
and natural way than instruction and indoctrination. Since the
beliefs that constitute a culture are expressed in behavior and acquired
by imitating the behaviors that express them, historical
cultures do not depend on literacy. They exist independent of
conscious learning. Systems of education may reinforce or
weaken a culture's beliefs, but they can neither produce a new
culture nor guarantee the continuance of an existing one. A historical
culture is not a rational construction. For a person to
change his historical culture, something acquired by participation
in the historical way of life of a people, he must change his
residence and acquire a new allegiance--among a people with a
different history.
The illusion (one might well call it the disease) of revolutionaries
is that they can cancel history and produce a new culture
that will be a rational construction. They want a new set of
belief-behaviors, which they will design. But historical cultures
are highly resistant to willful change undertaken by political operatives.
For a people with a historical culture, nothing justifies
an attempt to deconstruct its beliefs and replace them with a different
set of beliefs. Indeed, the beliefs of a culture determine a
people's way of knowing whether something is justified. For this
reason, cultures rarely change. History cannot be reversed and
begun anew, the slate having been wiped clean, the way revolutionaries
seem to think it can.
When a culture does change, it normally does so in piecemeal
fashion over several generations of time. The change occurs
by the addition of some new belief to a culture's set of
beliefs, through acting on that belief for more than three continuous
generations; or by the subtraction of a belief from the set by
the gradual failure of successive generations to act on it. Such an
addition or subtraction alters to some degree the dynamics of the
whole set of beliefs by changing the relationships among them.
True changes in a culture occur over so many generations that
they are usually imperceptible until after they have been completed.
Why are more than three generations of behavior needed to
establish, or enculturate, a belief? Because three generations are
usually alive at any one moment in a society (children, parents,
grandparents), for a belief to acquire historical validity for those
in the youngest generation it must connect with an absent, fourth
generation whom parents and grandparents knew but children
did not. Seeing their parents and grandparents pay respect to the
graves of the dead helps to establish in the minds of the youngest
generation such a connection, as does hearing stories about their
ancestors, holding dear the same symbols the dead held dear, listening
to music associated with their cultural ancestors, preserving
structures built or lived in by them, and receiving personal
mementos or other possessions of their ancestors. In all these
ways, a connection with the past is created in the young. It makes
them feel that the way of life they see going on around them,
which they are beginning to imitate, originated in and has been
sanctioned by the past. (The respect for cultural ancestors need
not, of course, be for a biological ancestor, or even for a person
who really lived. It may be for a legendary or mythical ancestor,
whose behavior embodies a belief of the culture. Only in the culture
of a clan would one's biological and cultural ancestors be
identical. In all nonclan societies, one's cultural ancestors always
extend beyond one's biological ancestors.)
Another basic point about historical cultures is that they are
organic. Not every person in every generation of a people acts on
all the beliefs of that people's historical culture in exactly the
same way. A historical culture has an organic, not a mechanical,
conformity--like a forest in which there is always a certain
amount of dead wood and downed timber, even when the forest
as a whole is healthy. So, too, when the leaves of the deciduous
trees in a forest change color in autumn and begin falling to the
ground, not all leaves change color at the same moment or
change to the same hue or fall from the trees at the same moment.
Similarly, when the new leaves emerge from their bud
cases in the spring, they do not do so uniformly. At no time in
the life cycle of a forest is there a precise and total uniformity of
process, or the same state of vitality in every tree. Yet the forest
has a conformity, is healthy, and perpetuates itself. A culture's
processes also have no total, precise uniformity, but rather a
general organic character.
As with a forest, the features of a culture are best appreciated
from an overview. Any attempt to comprehend all the details
of a culture would be doomed to failure by the very nature
of the attempt. One remembers in this regard the legend of the
Spanish cartographer who wished to make a perfect map which
would replicate every detail of the kingdom of Castile, on a scale
of 1:1. He finally succeeded in making such a map--and, of
course, it was as large as the entire kingdom. According to the
legend, fragments of this wonderful map are still to be found
moldering into the ground in remote and seldom-visited corners
of Castile. To pretend to represent in full detail the organic
wholeness of a historical culture would be a similar vanity.
In short, this book is based on the following propositions:
that a people's culture consists of a particular set of simple beliefs
learned and validated ("enculturated") through behavior for
many generations; that cultures satisfy an ineradicable human
need for a shared sense of right behavior and make it possible for
human beings to live together in society; that once a culture has
formed, it tends to persist unchanged because it satisfies a deeply
human need; and that every culture is the best culture to those
who participate in it.
