The Mind of Culture . . . and How to “Read” It

As far as I know, Edmund Burke was the first author to suggest in clear terms that cultures have minds of their own. In Reflections on the Revolution in France he differentiated between individual and cultural reason, and predicted that the immediate workings of individual reason in France would disrupt the long-term workings of cultural reason and lead to cultural madness. He was, of course, correct. The reign of terror proved his ideas decisively.

Like individuals, cultures can be reasonable, and guided by rational thinking. The efforts to help the poor, to create an equitable system of justice, and to eliminate or weaken social and sexual prejudices are evidence of that. But also like individuals, cultures have deeply-embedded habits and assumptions that cannot readily be altered. No amount of rationally-mandated legislation can change those habits. Prohibition in the U.S. was a great example. By creating rational legislation to prohibit the making and use of alcohol, the U.S. government made it all the more attractive and enabled the black market to flourish—and crime to grow rapidly. Marijuana is a similar story. Outlawing this substance has created a criminal underworld of vast proportions, enabled the drug dealers to create new markets with other drugs, and overburdened our prison system.

So part of the job of humanists is to read, interpret, and alter the mind of the culture. Not to order it to change (good luck), but to provide it with alternative visions of what it might be, what it could be, what it should be. Not an easy task. But we all use the internet, and as Merlin Donald has shown, we live in a cultural space that has expanded exponentially over the years. We have all kinds of information, and knowledge, and even wisdom, at our fingertips. But we also have the cultural “id” to contend with, and we often do not know where to begin to work in such a vast informational landscape. The idea of “information literacy” is feeble because it assumes that purposes and approaches already exist for students. They need only learn how to determine what information is “valid” and “ethical” in some very watered-down sense. . . Who directs the attention of a culture which is mad with possibilities? Why not just watch the “news” and wait for the latest developments? Because we are all part of the cultural mind, and we can all help to shape it over time. Especially when we have an understanding of it, and our own agenda and purposes. When these ideas are shared, they become all the more powerful. Ask Hitler.

Our cultural mind is in crisis at present. We live in a world that is overloaded with inputs and information. We work in our small corners and overhear the great workings of the cultural mind from a distance. Those workings are often akin to a pathological mind. Rather than being dynamically balanced, the cultural mind is on runaway—what Gregory Bateson called a schismogenic system. The evidence lies everywhere—in celebrity obsessions and superficial modes of communication, in the lack of meaningful knowledge people have of the advances of science and their meanings, in the “symbolic overload” that Neil Postman writes about. People yearn for meaning, for connection, for sacred spaces and places, but they are hard to find in our cultural milieu.

We should read, and write, and practice, with the aim of “entering the conversation” about important things. We too are part of the mind of our culture.