What do television sitcoms, good coffee, suburban houses, fins on a 1957 Cadillac, and the latest Steven Spielberg blockbuster movie have in common? They all contribute to the “stuff” that anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars refer to as “culture.” At Gutenberg, we spend countless hours exploring the facts and meanings of Western history and the cultures it has created. Having some understanding of our own culture—knowing what culture is and how it works—can be both liberating and critically important to our everyday lives as Christians.
I once thought culture was something one “has”—as when one enjoys going to museums to view fine art or wears “tasteful” clothes or hangs out with “cultured” people who can discuss Emily Dickinson’s poetry or who have actually read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This is a common but narrow way of thinking about culture. Culture is much broader.
Perhaps you have experienced “culture shock”—that strange, experience of being in a different country, feeling engulfed by a language you can’t speak or understand, being in a totally alien landscape or urban environment, and being generally bewildered that people can possibly live as they do with all their strange habits and customs. Living in a culture radically different from one’s own—experiencing culture shock—aptly illustrates the invisible force culture exerts over our everyday consciousness.
We do not live in a vacuum, but in an environment of visible, man-made things (like machines, clothes, buildings, paintings, and poems) and invisible things (like ideas, beliefs, customs, and languages). This environment is our “culture.” Culture is the things people make, which reflect humanity’s material needs, along with the ideas and the moral dispositions people carry within themselves. Put metaphorically, culture is to people what water is to fish.
Culture is both our friend and helper and our potential nemesis, an invisible dragon that can work to destroy us. It is our friend when we can use its languages to communicate with and to care for one another. It is our friend when it gives us tools to provide for our protection and material needs, like shelter, clothing, and food. Culture is our friend when its tools and concepts help us survive in a threatening world. But because culture is loaded with ideas and beliefs, many of which are morally vicious and destructive, culture can also be our enemy.
If man is an “angel-beast”—a beautiful creature made for good, but with evil at his very core—then the cultures he makes will inevitably carry the effects of his evil. An obvious example is the culture Hitler eventually dominated: people created an atmosphere—a “plausibility”—for believing it was OK to think and to do the unthinkable. Cultural atmospheres of racial and ethnic hatred are birthed by small cadres of individuals whose beliefs gain collective force and thus make violence and human atrocities seem “normal.” The source for such evil is man’s heart, and culture becomes the powerful vehicle for disseminating that evil in the world.
In the abstract, culture is neutral. It is simply the extension of man’s need to survive physically and to cope mentally, psychologically, and spiritually with his identity and meaning. The “stuff” of culture, however, is not neutral. Because man’s moral disposition pervades his ideas, art, and machines, these creations are inevitably colored by the intention of man’s heart. Thus a tool like bow and arrow that man uses to provide food, he also uses to do evil. Thus a beautiful poem or painting can also be saturated with the artist’s rebellion against God and his quest for power or self-aggrandizement.
Culture can work against man in two ways. First, because of its collective nature, culture can create momentum for ideas and beliefs, evil as well as good. When ideas and beliefs gain “cultural momentum,” they grow exponentially in influence and power. For example, homosexuality has become “normal” as it has gained increasingly powerful political favor; homosexual practices that until the 1970s were considered abnormal by American psychological professions are now considered normal. Culturally empowered ideas, even when false and destructive, are easy to believe simply because so many people believe them; they seem “normal.” So, for example, it is easier to believe Mormon doctrines in Salt lake City than in San Francisco or New York City.
Second, culture “acts back” on its human creators in ways difficult to detect. Humans create ideas and machines that take on a life of their own and, in turn, alter human life. We are aware of certain aspects of these cultural creations and unaware of others; for example, we understand generally how different our lives would be without automobiles, and yet we may take for granted the belief that doing things faster is always better. When culture’s powerful ideas, beliefs, and effects remain more or less hidden from us, we take them for granted or assume they are “real” in such a way that we never even think about their origin or how they are affecting us.
Learning what human culture is—about its creation, maintenance, and its powers—can be critical for understanding the nature and character of our present world and how to place oneself in it.
