A Book Idea: Culture as Something to Shed

Here is a book I have carried around for years and not written. The working title is Shedding Culture, and the thesis, stated as bluntly as possible, is that culture is a mild disease, that most of what we call being cultured is the accumulation of its symptoms, and that there is a method for getting rid of it.

I set it out here the way I set out the steering-or-drifting book: as an outline with the argument visible, so that at least the shape exists.

Part One: The Diagnosis

Culture, in the sense I mean, is the whole inherited apparatus of songs, books, religion, national story, economic doctrine, political ideology, taste. It is what a person absorbs by growing up somewhere, and it is what is praised when someone is called well-read or well-rounded.

The book's first part would argue that this apparatus has one dominant effect, and it is not the one advertised. Culture makes you feel that you understand things you do not understand.

A person who has read the novels, absorbed the religion, and adopted the economic and political stories of his society feels equipped. He has an opinion on everything, and a phrase ready for everything, and the phrases were handed to him. He has not examined a single one. Culture supplies the sensation of comprehension while removing the need for it, and the more of it a person has, the stronger the sensation and the smaller the need.

Each chapter would take one component. Religion, which I have written about at length and will not repeat here. Economic doctrine, which arrives as common sense and is nothing of the kind. Ideology, the pre-packaged bundle of answers that spares you the questions. Art, which trains you to think in individuals and stories and to distrust numbers. And the general phenomenon of having thoughts that are not your own and being unable to tell.

The chapter I find hardest and most necessary is on culture as self-gratification: the way consumption of it, the concert and the novel and the commentary, feels like an achievement and is in fact a pleasure. There is nothing wrong with pleasure. There is something wrong with mistaking it for knowledge.

Part Two: The Method

A diagnosis without a treatment is a complaint. The second half would be practical, and it has four parts.

Science as anti-culture. Science is the one inherited body of practice whose content is not decided by inheritance. It is designed to overturn what its practitioners were taught, and it does so constantly and on purpose. Learning to think scientifically about an ordinary question is the single most effective solvent for cultural certainty I know, because it replaces "this is what we say" with "how would I check."

Direct democracy as anti-ideology. Ideologies exist because representative systems need bundles: you vote for a person, so you need a package of positions to vote for. Decide questions one at a time and the bundle has no function. This is a political argument I have made elsewhere, but in this book it appears as a cultural one: the institutional change that removes the demand for ideology removes the reason to carry one.

Reading every established idea as somebody's interest. Not as a conspiracy theory but as a habit. When a belief is widespread and comfortable, ask who is served by its being held. The exercise does not tell you the belief is false. It tells you why nobody checked, and that is usually enough to make you check.

Default disbelief. The hardest discipline and the last chapter. The cultural default is to believe what one is told unless given a reason not to. Reverse it. The cost is that you will be wrong less often and comfortable less often, and you will have to rebuild from very little. The book would be honest that this is a loss as well as a gain.

What the Book Is Not

It is not a call to ignorance. A person who has shed culture in this sense knows more, not less, because the space the borrowed opinions occupied is now available for examined ones. It is not a claim that art is worthless or that pleasure is suspect. It is a claim about what art and pleasure are for, and a refusal to let them stand in for something else.

And it is not, I think, a book anyone would enjoy. Every reader would find his own furniture in the first half. That is probably why it is still an outline.

Why Write It Down Anyway

Because the alternative, which is to go on being cultured, has a cost that is invisible precisely because culture is what makes it invisible. A society whose members all feel they understand the economy, the past, and the good has no mechanism for noticing that none of them do. The mechanism would have to come from outside the culture, and the only thing outside a culture is the world.

That is the book. I would like it to exist. I am not sure I am the person to write it, but I am sure someone should.