FROM THE ARCHIVES
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How Culture Happens
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 11:55 AM]Maggie Gallagher has some good and interesting thoughts on “how culture happens” in the context of the marriage debate. She says that the “language and rhetoric” of choice creates a cultural shift that is not necessarily anticipated or even wanted by those using that language. So, for example, the language of personal liberation and of equal rights which was used by feminists and civil rights leaders creates new categories of public thought which must then be reckoned with publicly during any future debate. So, in Gallagher’s telling, the language and rhetoric of personal liberation open the door for a public argument over gay marriage which in turn opens the door for a public argument over polygamy. Just as the language and rhetoric of the Supreme Court’s birth control decisions opened up the possibility of constitutionalizing the right to abort and probably the right to homosexual marriage. Gallagher says that “[polygamists’] arguments now strike many cultural elites (such as the editors of the New York Times Arts page) as plausible, worthy of being entertained, because of the way they echo the gay marriage arguments. This in itself marks a cultural shift. … I don’t believe polygamy is an inevitable result of the gay marriage debate. But I think the push for gay marriage has already visibly altered our public culture of marriage. Things that were taken for granted, now must be discussed and defended. … [C]ulture consists largely of the things that don’t have to be discussed that much, because they are presumed. Culture consists of shared premises. Institutions shape human behavior by shaping categories of human thought, especially by marking off a huge category of possibilities as ‘not necessary to think about.’” This is an important insight into culture and how it develops and impacts our common life together. And I think that a central aspect of the concerns Rod has raised is to apply this same insight to some of the less obvious cultural arenas and artifacts. The advent of technological advances, for example, marks a serious cultural shift primarily because it opens up huge categories of thought and possibility which were not necessary to think about previously. Technological artifacts carry within them an inherent “cultural logic.” Globalizing markets buttressed by centralized governments likewise open up huge possibilities previously unthinkable. Immigration is a hot issue just now: does the global marketplace’s demand for cheap labor trump sovereign national boundaries (not to mention cultural and legal boundaries)? Not a question which would even have been asked in a culture devoid of the rhetoric of globalization.
The questions being probed on this blog mostly fit into the category Gallagher describes: what cultural logic is stowed away in the baggage holds of the various ways and means we are encouraged to — and largely do — live today? And what possibilities previously unthinkable does that logic open up.
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