TRANSCENDING CULTURE #3

* Can culture be changed?

* How easily or difficult is it to change culture?

* What are some of the cultural change processes?

Given that “culture” is a man-made construct, a construct of frames of meaning, interpretation, understandings, and beliefs—of course culture can be, has been, and is being changed. In fact, it is changing all the time. That’s why the old cultures of the ancient world, the old Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman cultures are no longer around as such.

Because “culture” refers to ideas, understandings, and beliefs, and because we carry this cultivation around with us in our minds and in our lifestyles (ways of interacting, operating, being engaged in business and other things), cultural change occurs in the mind. It occurs as belief systems about the ways we cope with our humanity, how to effectively master the activities that concern us, how to get along with others, how we define ourselves, our group, our people, and how we define and think about us in relationship to other groups and peoples, etc.

Given that “culture” is a frame of meaning in the mind, an interpretative frame of meaning, when we change the meaning of any facet of culture, we change “culture.” So, if we want to change the “culture of violence” which exists in nearly every country and society, we have to change the minds of the people involved in such. So with the “culture of victimhood.” As long as people believe that they “are” victims, that they have no power within themselves, that they can only react, they have no hope, that there are not powerful non-violent methods for taking charge of one’s life—it will be that long that they remain in that culture.

So how do we change culture? What are the tools and processes available to us for altering the content and nature of a given culture?

To answer this, and to share a bit about what we do in Cultural Modeling and Change work in Neuro-Semantics, we use the formula developed by Professor John Searle that has a set of meta- levels and which corresponds to the Mea-States model.

John Searle’s analysis of the construct of social reality in his book by that title distinguishes the levels of “facts” and the meta-structure of culture. On the primary level it begins with the brute facts. Here we have sensory-based things. For an example, here we have balls, fields, lines marked on fields, poles, seats in a stadium, nets, people, players, etc. And it is here that these brute facts can become more. They can become social facts if there is an agreement among people that when a player kicks a ball into the net that, then that player’s team will win a “point.”

Now if we ask, “What is a ‘point?’” “Can you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste a “point?” The answer is, “No you cannot.” At that level, there’s no such thing as a point, not in brute reality. A “point” can only occur in the mind, in a human mind, and in the human mind which understands the set-up and structure of the “game.” Then when the player kicks a ball into the net, a “point” occurs. That’s then reflected externally on the score-board.

Fido the dog who doesn’t understand about “games,” “points,” the “rules of the game” of course, doesn’t see a “point” when a ball goes into the net. But Fido could hear the roar of the crowd in a stadium when the ball goes into the net. And what if we endowed Fido such advanced consciousness that he now can mentally perceive a “point.” So next day when the teams are on the field and kicking the ball, the ball again goes into the net, Fido now with his advanced consciousness is ready to see “point.”

But there’s no point. Why not? Because it is not a “game” but “practice.” The team is just practicing for the game and so the ball into the net doesn’t mean a point, it does not count as a point. In fact, there’s no counting going on at all. And there’s just a few people in the stands watching. So something else is going on. Another kind of social reality. Here we are dealing with “culture”—how the minds and hearts of those people have been cultivated.

So Fido now learns to wait for the day of the real game when there’s lots of people in the stands. And so he now sees a man kicking a ball and it goes into the net, but something is wrong. The crowd is not cheering. There no additional number put up on the score-board. Why not? Man kicked ball across white lines and into net. That should have been a “point,” right? But no.

So, what’s going on now? Oh, the man who kicked the ball was a spectator who jumped down onto the field and kicked the ball. That’s why it did not “count” as a real “point.” He was not a legitimate “player.” What he did violated the “rules of the game.” The culture of that ball-game has rules, set by groups of people who are authorized to make up the rules and enforce the rules. Yet Fido did not know all of that. He was not privy to all of the “culture” of the game.

Searle’s analysis shows that it is through the agreed-upon understandings, rules, beliefs, etc. about the game that brute facts become social facts become institutional facts and become a whole “culture.” This brings into play various facets of culture in how we construct social reality through the assignment of meaning as we call and designate certain things so that they hold a meaning that many people share. What we call “culture” then is the inner game that many people share and it has multiple-levels, meta-levels. And that’s how it is, in part, held in mind as a cultural meaning.