In my article on the rise and fall of credential systems and the Medieval University System, I mentioned that universities create culture. Standardized culture, as a rule. There was a fair bit of confusion around what culture creation is, so let’s talk about that.
To start, note that what you’re reading right now is culture creation: ideas about how the world works, or should work. I’m amplifying, as it happens, an academic, Randall Collins, though a lot of my work isn’t primarily based on academic literature, this is. But if I’m writing about Israel, say, and the Gaza genocide, that’s culture production: that’s me amplifying and on rare occasions expanding on all those in the past who have said “genocide is bad” or “Zionism is based on ethnic cleansing, terrorism and apartheid.”
When I write about the ideology, or about surveillance is bad or climate change, it’s all culture production. It’s intended to explain how the world is or ought to be.
Schools and the especially the first parts of higher education, like BAs and Bachelors of science or engineering produce pretty standardized culture: there aren’t that many different standard textbooks for each field and virtually all academic disciplines have a consensus worldview of how things are and how they should be, and that’s what they teach. At higher levels, some disciplines let some doubt in, but at lower levels what you’re getting is pretty much the same as everyone else.
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Over time that consensus changes, of course, but it is a matter of “over time” and major paradigm breaks aren’t all that common.
It may seem weird to include science and engineering, but they also have consensus ways of thinking and organizing the world and those ways, too, change over time.
The Medieval Universities produced lawyers, doctors, theologians and administators. People who had a common view of the world. Of course there were some disputes, but they were much more similar to each other than to, say, the humanists who later replaced them.
The great ideologues produce new cultural projects: new understandings. Confucius produced administrators: he knew that’s what he was doing, that was his intention. He wanted to change China, and the way he chose was to try and make the best ministers. He built on top of a view of society as family. The Legalists, his main opposition, did much the same but with the idea of a ruthless state and complete obedience to the ruler, and the Mohists, though more revolutionary in mind, also trained administrators, but wanted far more equality
Islam is famed for its legalism, and what is law but “how things should be?”
The Philosophes were, likewise, engaged in a project of creating an understanding of “what should be.”
So was Jesus, so was Marx and so was Adam Smith.
But those are the high points, for every great ideologue there are millions of small ones. And yeah, a lot of podcasts fall under the rubric of culture creation, including some of the biggest ones. Joe Rogan qualifies, for sure. Talk radio usually qualifies, and Rush Limbaugh was one of the most important ideologues of the past forty years.
Technology (which is part of culture); natural constraints like geography, climate and biology; and ideology in the sense, again of “what we believe is and should be” are the most important parts of what creates human reality. Culture creation matters and it’s dirt common. Without all the little creators taking up their work, the big ones wouldn’t be big.
bruce wilder
I don’t know why, but reading this I thought particularly of the destructive effects of academic instruction in probability and statistics. People are not good at thinking abstractly about correlation, conditional probability and risk to begin with and many get markedly worse with academic instruction. Whole fields of academic inquiry are laid low by the corrosive effects as “studies” “prove” all sorts of nonsense about economic and medical topics. It isn’t even a matter of there being a contest of ideas oftentimes; it can be simple meltdown as the potential for knowledge is destroyed.
The overwhelming overproduction of salesmanship in cultural production generally may contribute to both the popularity of statistics as a means of hyperbole and obscurantism.
shagggz
@bruce wilder,
Seeing you mention the destructive effects of academic intruction, I couldn’t help but think of the systematic erasure of the history of economic thought from Western academia. Having lobotomized away our ability to perceive the difference between price and cost, rent and profit, wealth and money, capitalism and feudalism, how surprised can we really be that we are circling the drain as we are?
Oakchair
many get markedly worse (at statistical analysis) with academic instruction.
Whole fields of academic inquiry are laid low by the corrosive effects as “studies” “prove”
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Perhaps this is a result of academic instruction focusing on the twigs of a tree and skipping the forest.
Academic statistics is primary about doing mid-high level math. People conditioned this way are more likely to get tunnel vision on the math rather than the logical fallacies and biases inherit in the study design and conclusion.
You rarely need to be able to calculate the area under the curve and do calculus in order to determine that a study is marketing masquerading as science.
Steven Augustine
“The Philosophes were, likewise, engaged in a project of creating an understanding of “what should be.”
So was Jesus, so was Marx and so was Adam Smith.”
This is a very good beginning but a fundamental question remains to be answered: by what mechanism did these influential culture creators gain positions of influence?
different clue
If the word for what universities, ideologists, we-here-at-this-blog, and other such formalized shareable repeatable information and etc. is “culture”; then what is the word for the multigenerational buildup of food-knowledge, farming/gardening knowledge, building-a-fire knowledge, finding-water knowledge, language itself, etc. ?
I had always thought that was the kind of knowledge called “culture” and that what we are doing here is civilized-knowledge or maybe “High culture”. If “culture” should be the word for what we are going here, then what should be the word for that other basic-survival stuff?
Ian Welsh
Tech, science and so on are fundamentally ideas and are part of culture creation.
bruce wilder
Culture emerges from human mimicry and its expression in linguistics and custom, which are deeply entangled together — philosophical, scientific and technical ideas certainly but the core of culture creation are fashion, tradition, custom, storytelling, ritual — symbol manipulation front and center.
bruce wilder
I don’t know why exactly “culture creation” should have intrigued me in the odd way it has at this moment.
Culture is a form of collective action and it seems as if it must have as options, solutions to collective action problems. That may well be an illusion and a tragic one for our times.
I see a lot of potential for destruction. But, maybe the misdirection from feasible solutions for collective action problems is the most destructive aspect.
Dan Kelly
Technology (which is part of culture)
To begin, you cannot have privacy with all-pervasive tech. And we have to sort this out immediately.
There is no privacy now.
Do we want privacy? How will we get it back while keeping the components of tech we want?
We know they aren’t going to willingly ‘go back’ to less surveillance, and the surveillance is baked into the tech. That was the point the entire time.
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Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.
And this applies to Russia, China, and as far as I know every nation-state, and it affects anyone using a modern ‘smart’ phone.
But those are the high points, for every great ideologue there are millions of small ones. And yeah, a lot of podcasts fall under the rubric of culture creation, including some of the biggest ones. Joe Rogan qualifies, for sure. Talk radio usually qualifies, and Rush Limbaugh was one of the most important ideologues of the past forty years.
I remember more than one leftist influencer (‘Sabby Sabs’ comes immediately to mind) getting a little perturbed when people were wondering about Glenn…
https://www.ianwelsh.net/open-thread-269/#comment-154421
This was all predicted and intentionally cultivated.
In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.
I know Zbigniew Brzezinski gets tiresome, but his early stuff in particular was rather prescient. But then he was privy to the inside machinations at the highest levels of coordination.
Brzezinski gets called out for mismanaging US affairs, but he was never interested in the US as a sovereign nation-state anyway. He was a ‘globalist’ and he said point-blank that all nation-states will be directed by banks and their corporations, ultimately leading to a one-world government.
This is the stuff of the protocols and James Warburg of the Warburg banking dynasty, father of the Federal Reseve, who said before congress in 1950 that, ‘We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.’
So much for participatory democracy.
Remember, Brzezinski was a man funded by the richest men in the world who then went on to write exactly what they wanted to hear and who then went about implementing it once they put him in a position to do so.
This is how it works in all the powerful ‘nation-states’ and even most of the smaller ones, to one degree or another. The existing elite of the country fund the intellectual class who are then their flunkies.
How could it be otherwise?
Let’s all remember our Chomsky, if you can stand to hear the man’s name anymore. Others have made the point as well, and this is specific to media, but it applies to everything: You don’t ‘move up’ in an organization, or even get to be a part of an organization to any serious degree, if you don’t adhere to its basic standard operating procedures. It’s cultural zeitgeist.
So, the example given is that of a writer who complains that someone like Chomsky doesn’t think they write what they believe. They are hamstrung by editors and what have you. Editors themselves complain of same. To which Chomsky replies, ‘No, not at all. In fact I believe that you sincerely believe pretty much everything you write. My point is just that: You wouldn’t be in the position you are in if you didn’t in fact sincerely believe what you are writing.
Of course, there is and has always been editorial control. But the unleashing of writers to their own blogs and substacks has had no appreciable effect whatsoever on elite control of the masses. None.
It’s getting worse. They are richer and more powerful than ever. And they are working together on a global scale.
You won’t find Michael Parenti in the NY Times or Washington Post.
But, there’s also a reason pro-capitalist writers weren’t/aren’t promoted in communist states, yet ‘communist states’ are all run by a wealthy elite these days.
That elite are now working together globally with little real resistance.
How are you going to maneuver if all the lower level elite of even the small ‘countries’ are in fact selling you out for their piece of the international pie?
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I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economic textbooks.
Brzezinski was funded by Rockefeller and met Carter at a Trilateral meeting. Carter and Brzezinski had no love for Israel, but US hegemony was fine. They were certainly aware, however, of what the Zionist neo-cons were up to, and much of the 1979 Iranian hostage event was simply elite maneuvering for control in the US – and the Iranian elite participated in the endeavor, though they were duped.
The side that won went on to use that leverage to fund war adventures primarily in South America and to flood the streets of the US with prepackaged smokable cocaine.
This, along with a flood of lots of high-caliber weaponry into the cities combined with the convenient rise of a new form of ‘gangster hip-hop’ that took the old dance celebrations that emerged from the projects in NYC and turned them into a celebration of a ‘culture’s’ own inanity – this all but eliminated any organized fierce resistance from the inner cities.
It also created conditions which were ripe for politicians to call for increased policing and for more militarized police to deal with the sudden rapid infux of mass quantities of hard drugs, primarily cocaine in this instance, and high-powered weapons. These were conveniently at the ready thanks to the folks at the Pentagon.
So, ghetto resistance was neutered, its remains commodified and sold back to its own people as well as suburban white kids everywhere and eventually worldwide – a celebration of ugly sex, violence and downright inanity.
And I’m the furthest thing from a prude.
Haters gonna hate.
Racist? The Seattle ‘grunge’ scene psyop accomplished much the same thing.
I write about the crack and the ghettoes of NYC because I’m quite familiar with both.
Oh yeah: Intentionally creating a ‘culture’ around hip-hop allowed ‘them’ to make even more money on all the sampling of others’ creative work. Sure, the original artists get paid too, but those at the top make out the most without doing anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin
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Now you can catch ‘the resistance’ playing clips of Fred Hampton interspersed with mockings of Hillary Clinton and vague rootings for Donald Trump. Jill Stein’s the ticket!
This can all be caught on youtube, rumble, odysee, facebook, tumblr, telegram, a link to my friend’s blog, a mention on an expert panel. And now I’m on substack too!
You can create cultures online and attempt to ‘do resistance’ online till the cows come home and you will never make a dent in the power structure.
That’s why they led us here.
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Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. – Davey Rockefeller, memoirs
Their conspiring for a more integrated global and economic structure sure has paid dividends – for them.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/2100-Zbigniew_Brzezinski
https://annas-archive.org/md5/48ba08879fe031124f31636a7c14183a
https://annas-archive.org/md5/46876cb685365ada7a1713242311e5de
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It is hard to see how we will be able to stop continous fear/trauma inducing deep state events which are used to ‘necessitate’ ongoing continuous ‘security’ and nonstop surveillance now that they are all effectively working together.
‘Let me issue a nation’s currency and I care not who writes its laws.’
‘I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economic textbooks.’
https://inv.nadeko.net/QajDxF9uEf4?t=87
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This is how powerful they are. Remember Frank Zappa saying that when it’s no longer profitable they’re just going to tear it all down. Guess what? They have. And they’re STILL making money.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ
We desperately need to unplug and build deep-rooted cultures. Good luck to us:
https://annas-archive.org/md5/0e7b80440f986ca499bab1a9443006bb
Good night.
Dan Kelly
It also created conditions which were ripe for politicians to call for increased policing and for more militarized police to deal with the sudden rapid infux of mass quantities of hard drugs, primarily cocaine in this instance, and high-powered weapons. These were conveniently at the ready thanks to the folks at the Pentagon.
I didn’t even mention the jails as social control and then the cheap labor. Geez.
Sorry for another long-winded one. Although wandering, I did keep coming back to the theme of culture creation. I think bruce’s ‘core of culture creation are fashion, tradition, custom, storytelling, ritual’ are what I’m trying to impart, as I sit here in front of this glowing screen.
shagggz
@Dan Kelly,
“So much for participatory democracy.”
World government achieved by consent sounds like participatory democracy to me.