Understanding Culture Part II: Where Does Culture Come From?
In the previous installment of “Understanding Culture”, we analyzed the basic aspects of culture: what it is, what it isn’t, and why it’s important. Today, we’ll be examining where culture comes from and why its origins are important to us.
First, let’s start with some context.
As we discussed in Part 1, we are born into a cultural environment that shapes how we see the world. Where does this culture come from? It’s given to us by the generation that preceded us. But where did they get it from? Culture didn’t always exist, so someone had to “invent” it. Yet it’s difficult to imagine something so foundational to the human experience be “invented” in the first place. We wouldn’t ever think of logic or time as being “invented”. Culture is a man-made phenomenon, but how exactly does man make it?
As we’ll see, culture has a complicated backstory. Culture is created by man, but not in science labs or in philosophers’ armchairs. Rather, culture arises through spontaneous processes. In other words, we created culture, but we didn’t do so consciously.
Let’s get started:
Culture and Evolution
As we discussed in Part 1, the core problem of the human condition is action: the utilization of means to attain ends according to ideas. Successful action requires a “map of meaning” to understand the world. Fortunately, we do not have to create this map ourselves, as we rely on cultural values to assist our understanding of the world. This arrangement works for us today, but how did people act before those cultural values existed? Primitive man had to live in the world just as we do today, but didn’t have the benefit of culture. At some point, culture entered the picture to fill this void. But how did this occur? How was culture “invented”, and how could it be “invented” in the first place?
To clarify this timeline, let’s return to the plight of primitive man.
Without any prior knowledge to rely on, he had to learn about the world from the ground up: which plants were edible, which animals could be hunted and eaten, how to find shelter, etc. In these areas, successful patterns of action could be replicated in the future: plants that didn’t result in sickness could be eaten again, animals that were hunted and eaten could be hunted again, and shelters that withstood the elements could be used again.
If these modes of action continue to prove themselves, they form habits. Once shared with a broader community, these habits calcify into norms and mores. The best way to do something becomes the way to do something. Any alternative, while not unthinkable, is strange and uncustomary. As these methods are repeated and taught to subsequent generations, their origins disappear into the past. After several generations, the original justification for these modes of action is lost entirely. However, the principles themselves still live on.
Through this process, primitive man developed various skills: tool-making, agriculture, and animal husbandry. However, this process also functioned for other types of developments—specifically, developments in primitive societies. Just as primitive man struggled to sustain his life, he also struggled with existential questions as well. Questions like,
Who am I?
How should I live?
How do I behave towards my fellow man?
Is there something beyond the material world?
are not exclusive to the modern world. As primitive man lived and acted, his attitudes towards these foundational questions evolved into norms and mores as well. Through such avenues, man becomes aware of morality, law, and social expectations.
As time passes, successful modes of action become increasingly integrated into a community. Because they work, they are passed down to future generations so they don’t have to discover them on their own. Eventually, these patterns of action start to coalesce together at a group level. Crafts, skills, gender roles, religious beliefs, social attitudes, etc. all integrate into a (more or less) unified framework. The ultimate culmination of this integration is the emergence of culture.
The American sociologist William Graham Sumner examined the process of cultural emergence, focusing on what he terms the “folkways” of a society:
“It is of the first importance to notice that, from the first acts by which men try to satisfy needs, each act stands by itself, and looks no further than the immediate satisfaction. From recurrent needs arise habits for the individual and customs for the group, but these results are consequences which were never conscious, and never foreseen or intended. They are not noticed until they have long existed, and it is still longer before they are appreciated. Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental development must be reached, before they can be used as a basis from which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future, problems whose pressure can be foreseen. The folkways, therefore, are not creations of human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces which men unconsciously set in operation, or they are like the instinctive ways of animals, which are developed out of experience, which reach a final form of maximum adaptation to an interest, which are handed down by tradition and admit of no exception or variation, yet change to meet new conditions, still within the same limited methods, and without rational reflection or purpose. From this it results that all the life of human beings, in all ages and stages of culture, is primarily controlled by a vast mass of folkways handed down from the earliest existence of the race, having the nature of the ways of other animals, only the topmost layers of which are subject to change and control, and have been somewhat modified by human philosophy, ethics, and religion, or by other acts of intelligent reflection.”
The folkways arise through an evolutionary process: actions turn into habits, which turn into folkways. As the folkways persist, they form into a system of cultural values. As Sumner points out, our lives and societies are greatly influenced by these folkways, the origins of which are often a complete mystery. We’ll discuss this point more later.
This leads us back to our original question: where does culture come from?
We create culture, but not in the same way we create cars, houses, or mousetraps. It arises spontaneously, through the daily actions of our lives. In the immortal words of Adam Ferguson, it’s the product of human intention, but not human design.
Culture as a Hidden System
Because culture is the product of an evolutionary process, we should approach it with intellectual humility. We shouldn’t assume we know everything about it, how it works, why it works, or why it doesn’t work. As we discussed in Part 1, culture doesn’t fit into a neat set of postulates. In “Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume 1”, F. A. Hayek writes:
“Many of the institutions of society which are indispensable conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits, or practices which have been neither invented nor are observed with any such purpose in view. We live in a society in which we can successfully orientate ourselves, and in which our actions have a good chance of achieving their aims, not only because our fellows are governed by known aims or known connections between means and ends, but because they are also confined by rules whose purpose or origin we often do not know and of whose very existence we are often not aware.” (1983, Page 11)
While I think Hayek is a little too pessimistic about our ability to understand culture (read more about that here), his point is instructive. 1Culture exists because it works, but that doesn’t mean we understand every aspect of why it works. Much like a black box, we can see the inputs and the outputs, but everything in between is obscured.
But this raises a question: if there are so many limitations on our knowledge of culture, what do we really know about it? We can’t fully describe it, we can’t fully understand its origins, and we can’t know exactly how it works. Of course, we understand culture on some level, as it informs our actions every day; but what kind of knowledge is this? What do we really know about culture?
Our knowledge of culture is very real, but of a different sort than we might expect. We often think of knowledge as belonging exclusively to the conscious domain—i.e. things we know that we know. This type of knowledge can be labeled explicit knowledge. However, this is not the only type of knowledge. We also have unconscious knowledge—i.e. things we don’t know that we know. This type of knowledge can be labeled implicit knowledge, and it is this category that our knowledge of culture belongs to.
As explored by philosopher Michael Polanyi, implicit knowledge (or “tacit knowledge” in his terms) are the intuitions, soft skills, and unconscious aptitude that come through experience.2 As we become more acquainted with tasks, challenges, or routines, we develop tacit knowledge of how to navigate them. As we go through life, this unconscious library of knowledge grows.
How do we apply this implicit knowledge? To demonstrate its use, let’s examine something you probably know how to do: drive a car.
Imagine that I gave you a pen and paper and asked you to write down everything you know about driving a car. You can write anything you like: rules, tips, heuristics, principles, concepts, etc. If I gave that information to someone who has never driven before, would they be able to drive as well as you can? Of course not! Even if they had access to all the information you have about driving, you would be the superior driver. Why? Because driving isn’t exclusively a conscious activity. Much of what you’ve learned about driving has been acquired unconsciously over time: the muscle memory, small subtleties, and ingrained practices that can only come from time behind the wheel.3 This kind of knowledge can’t be transmitted on a piece of paper.
While we can consciously recognize our values, culture lives in the implicit background, woven into the fabric of our lives and worldview. It’s exercised more than explicated. Just as we can’t thoroughly explain every aspect of driving a car, neither can we explain every aspect of a culture. As we concluded in Part 1, to experience a culture, you have to live it. There’s no other substitute.
The Value of Culture
The spontaneous origins of culture has weighty implications for its importance in our lives. The cultural values today exist because they worked. Their survival is evidence of their utility. They aren’t just arbitrary artifacts from the past—they are reflections of generations past, preserved for us today. Culture deserves our respect.
However, this doesn’t mean we should accept all cultural beliefs at face value. For the majority of human history, slavery was a normal, accepted practice. Human spoils of war—men, women, and children—were sold into slavery as a natural conclusion of battle. Evidence from all early civilizations—including the famous Hammurabi’s Code—accepted slavery as an institution and set out rules for both slaves and masters. Today, slavery is outlawed almost everywhere and near-universally condemned as immoral.
But wait just a minute.
Following our logic, why are we so sure that slavery is wrong? If it survived for so long, it must have served some purpose or function. Even suggesting this idea makes our modern minds squeamish. Regardless, we are forced to ask: when are we justified in changing culture?
To illuminate this question, let’s examine a thought experiment by G.K. Chesterton, often referred to as “Chesterton’s Fence”.4 Imagine you are walking along a road one day and you stumble across an inconveniently-placed fence. You don’t know who put it there, and you would prefer to just knock it down. What should you do? Chesterton argues you are justified in knocking down the fence only if you understand why the fence was built in the first place. After all, the fence could be serving an invaluable purpose you are totally unaware of. Knocking down the fence could ultimately be much worse for you than leaving it be. Don’t do anything until you know why the fence is there.
As you might have gathered, Chesterton isn’t talking about landscaping. It’s an analogy for social norms and structures. As we discussed above, cultural beliefs are the product of a long, evolutionary process that started long before we were born. These are the fences in Chesterton’s story. These fences can be knocked down, but only once we understand the rationale for why they emerged in the first place. If you find out that the fence was put up for no reason, a bad reason, or for reasons that are no longer pertinent, then smash away. But until we understand the origin of these fences, we must leave them standing.5
Chesterton’s arguments are powerful, but there’s a catch. As we bemoaned above, much of what we know about culture is implicit, not explicit. This doesn’t lend well to investigations into the origins of our values. Moreover, cultures don’t have clear origins like fences do. Because they arise spontaneously, they don’t have a “final cause” in the Aristotelian sense.
But even with these restrictions, analyzing culture according to Chesterton’s challenge isn’t impossible. Even if we can’t completely reconstruct the origins and function of values or norms, we have tools at our disposal to generate informed guesses: anthropology, archeology, evolutionary biology, psychology, etc. This leaves more room for error, but it’s the best we can do.
The Diversity of Cultures
In both Part 1 and this article, I have almost exclusively referred to “culture” in the singular. As I am sure the reader is aware, there isn’t just one culture that engulfs all mankind. The world is filled with different cultures that embody different beliefs and values. We also see a variety of cultures in the historical record as well. The past is filled with cultures that lived and flourished and are no more.
What’s the cause of this wide range of cultural diversity? First, there’s no shortage of problems in the world, both universal and local. As different groups of people have addressed these problems, there’s no reason to assume that everyone would try the same solutions. As different folkways emerge, different cultures evolve. This leads both to superficial differences—food, clothing, language, etc.—and fundamental differences as well.
As we discussed in Part 1, cultures are never static. As the world changes around us, cultures change in response. This constant state of flux leads to further diversity, as cultures react to challenges differently. This causes further splits and schisms, resulting in new cultures and subcultures. Even if there was one monoculture that lorded over all humanity, that culture would soon fragment apart.
As it turns out, this diversity comes with benefits.6 Culture is never a finished product, and we shouldn’t ever assume our culture can’t be improved. Living in a world of diverse cultures lets us observe other solutions to common problems. However, these observations come with stipulations:
It’s very difficult to isolate the effects of one value or belief in a culture. When people act, they don’t make those decisions based on one particular value that was instilled in them; they act within the framework of their culture as a whole. We can highlight important aspects of a culture that influence particular attitudes, but it’s very difficult to establish a clear, exclusive line of causality.
When we examine other cultural beliefs, we shouldn’t assume those beliefs could be easily imported into our own culture. Because culture is structured, values cannot be easily added, dropped, or substituted without undermining that structure.7 For instance, if a culture holds the values A, B, and C, these are not a randomly chosen group of ideas, but all interrelated and mutually supportive. It may not even be possible to substitute C for X without undermining the culture entirely.
The diversity of culture leads to an unavoidable question: which one is the best? After all, not every culture holds the same values. Not all values are equally conducive to human flourishing. Therefore, there has to be a best—or at least, some that are better than others. I know nobody likes a cliffhanger, but we’ll discuss this question in-depth in Part 3.
Conclusions
Understanding where culture comes from helps us appreciate its importance. The cultural beliefs passed down to us aren’t just vestigial ideas from Bronze Age sheep herders. They persisted through the generations because they worked. We may think of our modern world as superior and learned, but we shouldn’t ignore the accumulated wisdom of the past. The product of a hundred lifetimes shouldn’t be taken lightly.
I also highly recommend reading Hayek’s “The Three Sources of Human Values” from Law, Legislation, and Liberty Volume 19
See The Tacit Dimension
This implicit knowledge is why we can drive while on “autopilot” without consciously thinking about driving. “Were all those lights green???”
Originally found in “The Drift from Domesticity” in The Thing (1929)
Diversity can also come with drawbacks as well. We’ll explore these in a future article.
We’ll discuss these structures more in Part 3.