Alan Jacobs asked a question in April, that’s really stuck with me ever since: “what is culture?” I’ve been turning this question over and over in my head since then, as culture is a term I use here quite often. But Alan is right: what is culture really, because what it seems like everyone is always talking about (myself included) isn’t really culture. Here’s how he puts it:

Almost everyone who writes on this subject treats it as unproblematic, yet it is anything but. In the late 18th century Herder wrote of Cultur (the German spelling would only later become Kultur): “Nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods.”

I suspect that (a) when most people use the term they have only the haziest sense of what they mean by it, and (b) no two writers on this subject are likely to have a substantially similar understanding of it.

Alan Jacobs, “Christianity and …?”

I don’t really have a good answer to this, but I think Alan is right when he writes later that “If we can agree on some boundaries for this elusive concept we might be able to have a more profitable conversation.” As with any term we might use, really. It’s hard to have a coherent coversation if we can’t agree on a way to define our terms.

So, reading Wendell Berry as I’ve been doing recently, I ran across this quote, which I find very illuminating on this subject:

A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.

Wendell Berry, “The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture” in The Unsettling of America

Berry here gives us both a sort of composition of (healthy) culture, and some of the effects such a culture would enact on society. He is, of course, writing here in this essay about agricultural settings, but I think his ideas here apply more broadly then that. And, of course, Berry would surely disclaim any authoritative attempt to “define” culture here, and I agree this shouldn’t be presented her at some final word on Alan’s question above. Those qualifications aside, it’s a stab at understanding such a nebulous term, and if there is a list of voices who I trust on the subject of culture, Wendell Berry is surely near the top.

I really want to focus on that first sentence from the Berry is quote. In a later blog post, Alan does some “hand waving” (his term, not mine) towards defining what culture, or maybe what it isn’t. It involves “spheres of symbolic activity”, politics, symbols and imagery, amongst other things. I think he is right when he concludes that any good definition of culture is inevitably going to require the complexity of any entire theology of culture, which “would combine an inquiry into the character of our power-knowledge regime — a study of powers and demons — with an iconology, an account of the deployment of the images and symbols meant to govern our perceptions and affections.” (links are from the original.)

I like the direction Alan points us in here, and I think Wendell’s idea of culture being a “communal order” of things conforms nicely to that direction. If we are looking to define the character of our power and knowledge, as Alan says, then the values of “memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence [and] aspiration” feel like good indicators of a healthy cultural character. Culture, then, is not necessarily one something among other somethings, but is instead a conglomeration of societal values, made possible by the presence of human virtues that society is forming its people in.

I also like Wendell’s cultural order because it opens the space to define an unhealthy culture as well, which I think is really important in our fallen world. So, just to riff off his essay, an unhealthy culture would be one defined by forgetfulness, shallowness, insignificance, sloth, suspicion, cynicism, and despair.

I have more to say about a healthy and unhealthy culture – for instance, I want to think about what forms these healthy and unhealthy cultures are expressed in – but I think I will leave those thoughts for the future, once I have put more thought to it. But, I do think Wendell’s writings can point us in a useful direction for answering Alan’s question.