Looking for your glasses while wearing them
The challenge of cultural change, and a job opportunity at The Emergence Trust
**One of Perspectiva’s longstanding supporters, The JJ Trust, now The Emergence Trust, is advertising for “a cultural strategist” and it looks like a great job. What’s a cultural strategist, I hear you ask? Or why might a cultural strategist be the kind of person we need to help forge a better world? If you can figure that out, you should apply by the closing date of 19 June 2024 at 23:30, before the clock strikes midnight.**
The new mission of The Emergence Trust is culture change. Perspectiva doesn’t use that language directly, but it is effectively what we are working on too. We see culture as one of ‘the five flavours of betweenness’, and a relatively accessible one, so this is an important appointment for a Trust we are close to, for the emerging field it supports, and we’re happy to help widen the net of applicants. Do forward this post on if you can think of someone who might be interested.
I don’t speak for the trust, but I know them well, and I believe they are fully aware of the ambiguity of ‘cultural change’. The term is doubly nebulous - what is culture, and what is meant by change? They still see it as the appropriate and relatively neglected level of focus, and I understand why.
The Trust’s ultimate interest is in what people normally think of as ‘systems change’, but remember what Robert Pirsig said about systems change?
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Indeed. As I put it when I first shared this quotation from page 104 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
Until you can see that systems have emotions and epistemologies, there is little hope of changing them.
This insight is partly why Perspectiva works on systems, souls, and society. We see life as an ongoing conversation between the inner, outer and shared features of reality, and we believe the world changes as that relationship between systems, souls and society changes. Once you see the world that way it’s hard to unsee it. This plural perception is a good tonic to build immunity against the wishful thinking of panaceas, for instance, the idea that all we need is love, power, or Bitcoin. What we need is better relationships, particularly within and between the constitutive features of reality.
‘The work’ today is never just in heart and minds, and never just in new economic thinking and never just in better public conversations. These things are always cross-pollinating, for good and bad, and meaningful social change is about working on the relationship between such things, and how we help that relationship to mature and evolve. ‘Culture’ is as good a word as any to describe the arena of that challenge.
When people hear ‘culture’ they think of all kinds of different things, but with this plural view of what is necessary for meaningful change, it is easier to see why you need such a roomy concept. (The meaning of change is also complex, but for another time, though I write about third-order change here for those who enjoy getting diverted).
Depending on your mental model, culture change is more fundamental than systems change, a subset of it, or something that has to co-arise with it. (Or perhaps the distinction ultimately breaks down into ‘paradigmatic change’).
My impression is that the trust cares about bringing ideas from the margins into the mainstream in a context where we are stuck on climate, our economy is arguably not fit for purpose, and education is failing to adapt to the pace of change in the world. So when they say they are interested in ‘culture change’ they mean something like: ‘Contributing to systems change through supporting better ideas in education, economics and ecological practice, and helping them to be better transmitted through media influence and innovation’.
The job has significant social, operational and practical aspects, but for those who want more philosophical context, I’ve added some below.
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Culture is to humans a bit like water is to fish; it is everywhere and yet imperceptible because it is not so much what we perceive but what we perceive through. Culture is what brings the world into focus, and it can be thought of as the lens through which objects are seen, not the object as such. In this sense, looking for culture is like looking for your glasses not merely while they are on your head, but while you are actually wearing them.
In fact, while it is possible to link culture to heritage, or arts, or ideas, or many other things, it is almost as easy to ask what culture isn’t than what it is, because it pervades everything. Culture is something we are, something we have and something we do.
The connection between culture and ecological action is inherent in the etymology. ‘Culture’ stems from the Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes writing about a cultivation of the soul or “cultura animi”, using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood as an ideal for human maturation. In Middle English the word culture meant ‘place tilled’, and goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' but also cultus relating to cults, especially religious ones. To have a culture is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly. Some of this paragraph came via Wikipedia, which is now an integral part of our culture, and a place where volunteers inhabit the infosphere and care enough to strive for accurate and helpful information, tilling the text as they go.
Clifford Geertz famously said that a human being is “an animal suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have spun”, and culture is those webs of significance comprised not of silk but of shared norms, habits, ideas, meaning, institutions, customs, laws, practices, and rituals. Those are all things ‘we ourselves have spun’; they are all things people collectively do, and they are also usually things that people in power and with power collectively do. Some link culture most directly to technology of all kinds (including early tools like the hammer or the pen but now also smartphones), others to land, or to food, some to power, others to education, some to meaning, and many link it to language, others to history, and so on.
We can think of culture as inter-subjective pattern recognition that forms the basis for social expectations. Culture keeps us going while we reconstitute the world; it is both the setting and the plot and all of us have to find our place in it.
Considering culture set against the spectre of possible ecological and social collapse, the poet Adrienne Rich puts this aspect of culture beautifully as follows:
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”― Adrienne Rich
But what does it mean to reconstitute a world that seems to be falling apart? And what follows for our scope to change the patterns that reconstitute the world, i.e. what does it look like to change culture through culture? Is it even possible?
I have more to say about culture and climate inertia, the challenge of online ‘dopamine culture’, and the challenge of building what Margaret Mead calls prefigurative culture, but that’s for another time. I just wanted to share enough here to encourage anyone who feels so inspired, to apply.
If I had to summarise the job as I see it as someone who knows the trust, I think the operative question is this:
What does cultural change that is adaptive to the challenges of our times look and feel like and how can we give it the support it needs?
The application details are here. Good luck!
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And it's not too late to book your place at the Realisation Festival: find out more.
Does the successful candidate need to move to London, or is it a remote position?
I really like the title and how it is an image for what it means to look for culture. I wrote about something quite similar recently, in the larger context of world view and metaphysics:
«There is no yardstick we can hold up between the past and now in order to compare our experience and world view, for we see the past experience and our previous world view through the lens of our current one. We can set out on a quest, but our starting point will have changed in the process of journeying. That the starting point remains what it was is a projection we do, but when we return to what was the starting point we will have changed.»
(From https://tmfow.substack.com/p/a-view-of-reality-as-a-whole)