Culture is a Driving Force in History

I'm thinking about this a lot these days. May write a book about it. So I'm bumping this post from April 2011 to the top of the queue. And this, it seems to me, is sufficient reason to want to talk about cultural evolution as a specific kind of historical process. It's not just change. Everything is flux (Heraclitus). but cultural evolution is a specific kind of flux, one that has its own historical form.

Over at Arcade Gregory Jusdanis has raised the question of culture’s role in social change, lamenting the fact that the default and dominant view is that culture is “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” Culture is treated as being epiphenomenal to the economy.

He believes otherwise, and I agree with him. Culture is itself a driving force in history. Jusdanis goes on to note:

So it was with relief that I read Nurdan Gürbilek’s recent book, The New Cultural Climate in Turkey. As Turkey’s foremost literary and cultural critic, Gürbilek describes the wonderful power of culture in society. Writing on the social transformations Turkey experienced after the military coup of the 1980’s, she shows the intense involvement of culture in the decades since then. She demonstrates, for instance, how intellectuals, pushed to the margins, jailed, and tortured, gained power by seeking refuge and freedom in cultural institutions.

He goes on to observe that

Nationalism is a perfect example of a cultural factor that can act as a force in itself. Colonized peoples, feeling themselves oppressed by foreign rulers, have often turned to culture (as identity and as artistic production) where they preserve something vital and untouched by the foe. And on the basis of this culture (traditional identities, inherited institutions, folk art, ritual), they try to build a new society, different from the neighbors and the colonial rulers. I have studied this in Greece.

In the decades leading to the Greek War of Independence of 1821 against the Ottoman Empire, Greek intellectuals living in Europe and within the Empire, sought to reformulate Greek identity. They provided a new geography of Greece, uncovered the links to the ancient past, reconsidered the ties of Greece to Europe, and tried to create a new type of language. In short, they sought to convince the peasant populations that Greek society was belated, that it lagged far behind developments in western Europe. Trying to rouse Greek populations with the arguments of belatedness, they sought to place culture at the forefront of their program of social engineering.

I’ve done a bit of work about how popular music has been important in social transformation in 20th century America: “Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues”.

I’ve also found Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge 2005) quite provocative. Ikegami argues that networks of artists were crucial to forging Japanese civil society. The publisher's blurb (at Amazon):

In this path breaking book, Eiko Ikegami uncovers a complex history of social life in which aesthetic images became central to Japan's cultural identities. The people of premodern Japan built on earlier aesthetic traditions in part for their own sake, but also to find space for self-expression in the increasingly rigid and tightly controlled Tokugawa political system. In so doing, they incorporated the world of the beautiful within their social life which led to new modes of civility. They explored horizontal and voluntary ways of associating while immersing themselves in aesthetic group activities. Combining sociological insights in organizations with prodigious scholarship on cultural history, this book explores such wide-ranging topics as networks of performing arts, tea ceremony and haiku, the politics of kimono aesthetics, the rise of commercial publishing, the popularization of etiquette and manners, the vogue for androgyny in kabuki performance, and the rise of tacit modes of communication.

Returning to America, in The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago 1999), the economic historian (& Nobel Laureate), William Robert Fogel, argues that religion has been a driving force in American history, with periodic revivals asserting egalitarian claims over against social hierarchy that creates increasing gaps between the rich and the poor. From the publisher's blurb:

To understand what is taking place today, we need to understand the nature of the recurring political-religious cycles called "Great Awakenings." Each lasting about 100 years, Great Awakenings consist of three phases, each about a generation long.

A cycle begins with a phase of religious revival, propelled by the tendency of new technological advances to outpace the human capacity to cope with ethical and practical complexities that those new technologies entail. The phase of religious revival is followed by one of rising political effect and reform, followed by a phase in which the new ethics and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing challenge and the political coalition promoted by the awakening goes into decline. These cycles overlap, the end of one cycle coinciding with the beginning of the next.

Here's the four cycles laid out in brief form. As the blurb has notes each cycle of revivalist activity lasts a century or more and goes through three phases. The American Revolution happened during the second phase of the first revival cycle and the Civil War happened during the second phase of the second revival cycle. The third cycle gave us the labor reforms, civil rights, and women’s rights movements of mid-20th century America.

The fourth cycle began in the 1960s:

1960-?: Return to sensuous religion and reassertion of experiential content of the Bible; rapid growth of the enthusiastic religions (including fundamentalist, Pentacostal, and Protestant charismatic denominations, "born-again" Catholics, Mormons); reassertion of concept of personal sin; stress on an ethic of individual responsibility, hard work, a simple life, and dedication to family.

Recall that the 1960s also produced the various religious and spiritual movements associated with counter-cultural activity. This cycle moved into its second phase during the 1990s:

1990-?: Attack on materialist corruption; rise of pro-life, pro-family, and media reform movements; campaign for more value-oriented school curriculum; expansion of tax revolt; attack on entitlements; return to a belief in equality of opportunity.

What will the fourth cycle yield in its third phase? For that’s what’s on the immediate horizon.