A New Pattern
Flying in the face of wisdom to do the necessary thing.
It is a common asseveration that culture must grow naturally, and can be neither invented nor imposed. Estimable thinkers have often deplored any human attempts to hoist an “improved” culture upon a people intentionally, and point to the strange, doomed refiguring of society tried in revolutionary France, or perhaps in Communist Russia. No; they aver that culture must grow as lichen on a rock; slowly, naturally, and supported in its delicate formations by providential accidents of place and climate.
Well, I feel at liberty to doubt many sage asseverations, and must do so frequently. I suspect that a real, living culture may be formed, or at least seeded, artificially, and assert that whatever precedents tell against such an attempt, however much wisdom disadvises it, our circumstances demand the renewed trial. A thing failing over and again does not doom it in principal, as any long-iterated invention demonstrates. Many of the marvels which we now consider mundane were proved over and again to be untenable just until the moment when they succeeded.
My purpose here is not to make a scholastic argument about how feasible a contrived culture may be. I accept that there are many instances in history, whether long past or recent, which seem to disprove its feasibility, and not one example which clearly demonstrates a really healthy example of such.. There is no positive prior model I look to. I make the case for it nonetheless, and consider this no more naive than the engineer offering a new blueprint for a machine which has failed so often that it seems a hopeless enterprise. Some things are impossibilities, and some things require only a very specific intelligent arrangement before they work, and telling one type of endeavour from the other does not depend upon precedent or the consensus of the (purportedly) wise.
Nonetheless, there are grounds on which to contend the plausibility of intentionally creating a functional culture; we are not bereft of useful evidence.
When people talk of culture, the word often evinces certain things stereotypically “cultural”; cathedrals, folk dances, bodies of literature and liturgy, superstitions and cuisines. We picture gothic architecture and the stepped rice fields of eastern Asia. The objects which appear to our mind are full of what might be called “accidents”; the features by which they are recognised arise from locale, human happenstance and quite arbitrary turns of history. Nobody invented Andalucian culture, per se, nor the habits and aesthetics of European Christianity nor the form of the headdress of the Amazonian tribe. They have mostly been built up by motley accretions and shaped by the wavering influence of history like rocks in a stream. But we may focus overmuch on these as examples, and must view them through a haze of distance.
Consider the culture under which me now live; this ugly, motley culture of uban, industrialised modernity, which can be rightly maligned as actually “anti-cultural”. It is nevertheless a culture of a sort. It has many characteristic features which would make it easy to recognise in comparison to other cultures, only it is not located in a nation or region, and it is full of jarring inconsistencies which deny it the kind of picturesque harmony we associate with “a culture”. Our dress, our habits of eating, our forms of technology and modes of speech, even the warring subcultures which proliferate everywhere; all of these characterise the culture- but this is obvious. How much of this came about through natural growth? We must admit that many of the features of modern culture developed by happenstance and could have been quite otherwise in their particulars, but is this true in the main, or for its most important forms?
No. One need not be grounded deeply in conspiracy theory to realise how minutely manipulated our culture has been; not only manipulated, but fabricated and arbitrated. A great part, perhaps the most part of our culture was either decided or provided. There are men who sit at such levers that they can effectively choose what will and will not become a part of culture, and inject new elements according to their purposes. We find this difficult to consider because we are largely unaware of how things could have been otherwise than we find them. Think though of the simple fact that every week, often every day, society is animated by a thing given to it, whether a news story, pop song or product. We call these things cultural phenomena, and though they themselves are transient their constant stream forms the culture as diet does the body, and they are things most definitely directed by conscious choice.
This is not zero-sum. Determining the culture of thousands or millions or billions of people is a task that requires the shaper to work somewhat with accident and natural propensity, rather than imparting fabricated cultural forms by dictat; therefore many observers diagnose the direction of cultural change as “emergent” from factors economic, technological, or whatever. But this ignores the conscious wills which only make use of these winds to contrive a change.
It is famously the case that the pop song, and songs in general, have been cast into a very formulaic pattern; three minutes long (give or take) with a standard structure of brief movements; verse, chorus, bridge. Now, this is certainly partly “emergent”, being a response to the technology of radio and the economies of commercial radio stations; but it is also a thing driven by intent. It seems that humans are susceptible to this format of music as the sweet spot or the lowest common denominator of attention, and yet this format it peculiar to our age. Other cultures at other times had very different formats for song; longer, shorter, of much more varied and much more repetitive types. We may naturally gravitate to the three minute “track”, but it evidently takes a push to get us there en mass. And further; though most musical bands are not actually contrived and delivered to the public by arbitrary decision, bands are commonly elected to prominence irrespective of their evident talents or natural followership; if they represent in their style or lyrics elements which are intended to be instilled as culture, they are so placed to serve as important alters of that culture.
More clearly, seemingly trivial things such as fashion and consumer enthusiasms are quite obviously cooked up in an arbitrary manner and simply dropped into the mass mind to achieve an end, be it only monetary, or be it more profound. The daimond ring, the “sports utility vehicle”, the plastic wrist band promoting a “cause”; these are invented artefacts of culture which owe little to the enviromental conditions of a society, beyond the susceptibility of the public mind.
At a much smaller scale we can see the invention of functioning cultures in many cults, clubs and religious orders. Though precedent and accident determines some part of every culture, no matter how small and intentional, a greater part may be devised to conform with an elected vision. The Boy Scouts, though in the mess of the last few decades they have been badly deformed from their incipient vision, maintained for nearly a century a popular culture which sprang from the head of one man both in its superstructure and minutiae, down to songs sung and the shape of the hats. The many fractured branches of non-conformist Christianity have often persisted for even longer in honouring the modes spelt out by their originators, and the varied cults and esoteric sects of prominence- I think especially of Hari Krishnas, Theosophists, Anthroposophists and Mormons- have done the same with much wierder and more demanding eccentricities of culture, which were not the evolutions of long habit but prescriptions given at their inception. Sometimes the fidelity of these micro-culture to their arbitrary features is explained by their proved usefulness, sometimes by the effectiveness of isolation, coersion and plain human stubbornness, but whatever the case we may observe that men can accept a fabricated culture, and can adopt it as a lifeway for themselves and their progeny, for better or worse.
Ah, but that is the crux; “for better or worse”! If it be granted that a working culture can be invented, who can presume to possess the wisdom, taste and understanding to undertake its invention? On that point surely the wise will revolt; “yes, you may herd any number of men into new and particular ways, perhaps for centuries, but then you only condemn them to centuries of what is at least ridiculous and probably pernicious.” Sophisticates may argue that the only true cultures (like the only true Scotsmen), are the products of providential happenstance, common sense, slow mutation and the necessity inherent in nature modifying the affairs of men. Well, let us allow that they may be broadly correct, and that probably the best of cultures need such a gentle genesis; yet this presumes a kind of “normal” historical circumstance, the “all else being equal”, which if it has ever been really extant, is not so today. Culture is moved for us and shaped for us; most of us have come to the unhappy conviction that this is done very much for the worse, and that our healthful, natural necessities have but little valency in its determining. We already live under a markedly artificial culture, one which erodes all of the salutary features ascribed to natural culture, and its dominance effectively suppresses the outgrowth of better modes which depend on the gentle winds of happenstance and common sense. Anything which escapes the corrupting orbit of our anti-cultural culture must have the force of intention behind it, and thus we are obliged to make an election; to arbitrate what our better culture will be.
Consider, if there are three cultural artifacts which are totems of the late twentieth century, they may be; the motorcar, the credit card and the smartphone. To some degree the forms of all of these things are emergent from the conditions of the age, but we know that to a great degree they are entered and maintained in the culture by active effort; by manufacturers, governments, advertisers etc. Regardless of how intentional are their prominence, each are technological artifacts which powerfully define how our daily lives are lived in myriad ways; how we work, eat, talk, worship and mate; even how we relate to our own kith and kin. But then practically all wakeful minds have come to recognise that these dominant objects each objectively create more problems than they solve. They do more harm than good, and no arithmetic of common sense can recommend them as healthful fulcrums around which men should organise their affairs. We were coerced into these things by men and forces which are more potent than natural necessity. Natural necessity tends to protect the fertility of the land, the sanity of the young and the solvency of the workforce, if for no higher reason than stability; unfortunately unnatural states may clearly be maintained at length by habit, cunning and main force, and these unnatural states we tacitly accept as our culture. So we make the choice of an arbitrary culture whether we would or no, but our passivity leaves us in the domain of a culture which, if we have any sensitivity, we seethe against and often fear. We will have an unnatural culture; the choice is only whether we will take responsibility to establish one of our own.
Unfortunately also, we cannot regress to safety and health in the older traditions which we may trace. Were it desirable to do so it would yet be impossible, because the incumbent culture has swept away definitively all of the men and conditions upon which those older cultures were predicated. Some things are perennial of course, and must appear to some extent in any solvent culture, but we cannot conjure the forces which cultivated the lifeways of our forebears. For my part, I believe that true cultures must begin with both positive impulse and novelty, no matter how much they may respect ancient modes. In order for traditional modes to be reused they must be not simply revivified but remade; actually rediscovered and proved out anew, through which effort they will certainly evolve a new presentation.
I say that we, to the extent that we are wakeful and active, are obliged to this effort of inventing culture. Yet prudence warns us to moderate our terms; we may assert the possibility of such a thing and inwardly commit to its prosecution, but we should speak of it modestly. To tell a man that you are ushering in a patent culture is to invite ridicule. Let us say rather that we are establishing a new Pattern, and who knows how that pattern may grow. When man and wife have children in view, the man does not talk about the serious necessity of impregnation during the romancing of his wife; the profundity of the duty is left unsaid lest it stilt their affection.
Moreover, a culture is less a thing one makes than a thing one becomes, and the externals multiply out from mens’ personal ways of being. Let us consider how these ways may be fructified.