On Creating Culture
In reviewing the past I have noticed two obvious tendencies — of creation and destruction — relative to culture. One occurs when governments use power to create an ideal culture and so they oppress, repress, forbid, and otherwise restrict anything but those elements conforming to ideology. I see Russia under Stalin, Germany under the Third Reich, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and North Korea. Other examples — positive examples — are less obvious, for no society ignores culture; how can we ignore the foundations of society? Functionally, our culture is comprised of our collective pursuits, character, our convictions most deeply or shallowly held, and our material, intellectual, artistic, linguistic, and technological accomplishments. There are other elements, of course. These elements have developed throughout a long past, and their individual and interactive virtues and qualities, deficits and limitations, did not appear either simply or in an instant.
Any society learns sooner or later whether their own culture works well, or at all, or not at all, though that learning, or recognition, has been known to come, sadly, after the fact. Yet it does not have to be that way.
The example of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century England reminds me that societies have reached “tipping points” where people garnered the influence necessary to change the conditions that were producing societal problems — problems offensive to religious faith, to humanitarian decency, and to human justice. The trans-Atlantic abolitionist movement and the twentieth-century civil rights movement also are good examples.
In a later installment I want to examine that matter of the “tipping point.” Contrary to a line of historical thinking that uses terms like “rise” and “fall” in reference to civilizations, I want to consider the ways that “complex societies” (or civilizations) persist as they rely on their cultural strengths. That sounds like a huge topic, and it is. I don’t want to make it too big right here, but just now I don’t want to ignore it. One point of discussion: in line with a general expectation from Andy Crouch’s new book, Culture Making, what should we be attending to in our own society and communities to create a new, shall I say, renovated, culture?