I’m doing a chapter-by-chapter summary of James Davison Hunter’s new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010). We’re still on chapter 4, looking now at Hunter’s four propositions on cultural change. It’s important to remember that Hunter, at this point, is describing rather than prescribing.
Hunter begins by taking issue with Richard Weaver’s well-known maxim, immortalized in his book title, Ideas Have Consequences. Hunter would tweak it as “Under specific conditions and circumstances idea have circumstances.” He offers some provisional observations about the nature of those conditions and circumstances that typically lead to cultural change.
8. Cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up.
Sometimes economic revolts and social movements occur “bottom up” as ordinary people are mobilized. But the deepest, most enduring cultural changes always occur “top down.”
The work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites. (p. 41)
Culture is about how societies define reality (good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, real vs. unreal, important vs. unimportant), and the capacity to do this is concentrated in certain powerful institutions and well-connected networks that have access to the means of cultural production. Cultural innovation is translated and diffused roughly through the following process: theorists to researchers to teachers and educators to popularizers. Enduring cultural change comes when the structures of imagination and frameworks and perceptions are altered, and that only comes from the top down.
9. Change is typically initiated by elites who are outside of the centermost positions of prestige.
“Prestige” is a range with infinite gradations. Even within the central sphere of cultural life, there are degrees of prestige, with the highest being at the core or nucleus. Change usually comes from those in the center, but not from those in the core or nucleus.
10. World-changing is most concentrated when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap.
“When cultural and symbolic capital overlap with social capital and economic capital, and in time, political capital, and these various resources are directed toward shared ends, the world, indeed, changes” (p. 43, my emphasis).
11. Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight.
“Conflict is one of the permanent fixtures of cultural change” (p. 44). Culture is the realm in which institutions and their agents defend their understanding of the world against alternatives—legitimizing themselves and seeking to delegitimize others.
It helps to see these eleven propositions (seven on culture, four on cultural change) contrasted with the common view:
Against idealism, the view that ideas move history, we now see ideas inexorably grounded in social conditions and circumstances, not just material objects.
Against individualism, which influences us to view the autonomous and rational individual—even if a genius—as the key factor in social change, we now see the power of networks and the new institutions that they create, and the communities that surround them that make the difference.
Finally, against Christian pietism, which biases us to see the individual’s “heart and mind” as the primary source and repository of culture, we now see that hearts and minds are only tangentially related to the movements of culture, that culture is much more complicated and has a life independent of individual mind, feeling, and will; indeed, that it is not so much individual hearts and minds that move cultures but cultures that ultimate shape the hearts and minds and, thus, direct the lives of individuals. (p. 45, my emphasis).
A Critical Lesson
“Cultures are profoundly resistant to intentional change—period” (p. 45).
Hunter explains that the DNA of a civilization can only be changed indirectly by the cultural-change tactics that Christians typically employ:
Evangelism, politics, social reform, and the creation of artifacts—if effective—all bring about good ends: changed hearts and minds, changed laws, changed social behaviors. But they don’t directly influence the moral fabric that makes these changes sustainable over the long term, sustainable precisely because they are implicit and as implicit, they form the presuppositional base of social life. (p. 45, my emphasis)
An Important Qualification
“Even when successful, change does not always occur in the direction that people propose or with the effects for which people hope” (p. 47, my emphasis).
Application for Christians
Culture is incredibly complex and resistant to change, but one thing is clear: “Christians will not engage the culture effectively, much less hope to change it, without attention to the factors mentioned here” (p. 47).