Is Changing the World Even Possible?

Here’s how James Davison Hunter thinks it can be done.

This is part of a series on To Change the World by James Davison Hunter. You can read part 1 here.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash (edited)

James Davison Hunter begins his book¹ by debunking the myth that cultures change when a critical mass of people alter their beliefs and feelings about certain key issues. But where ideas are torn down, new ones must be built, so Hunter continues by presenting an alternative view of culture and cultural change in 11 propositions. They are:

1. Culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations.

Simply changing someone’s (or many someones’) worldview will not change culture, because culture is much more than worldview (though certainly not less). “Most of what really counts, in terms of what shapes us and directs us, we are not aware of; it operates far below what most of us are capable of consciously grasping.” (33)

2. Culture is a product of history.

“Culture is much less an invention of the will than it is a slow product of history.” (33)

3. Culture is intrinsically dialectical.

Culture does not exist as ideas unattached from reality. “... culture is as much an infrastructure as it is ideas. It takes shape in concrete institutional form.” (34)

4. Culture is a resource and, as such, a form of power.

Culture is a form of capital, what Hunter calls “symbolic capital.” “Some individuals, some organizations, and some objects have more and accumulate more symbolic capital than others.” (35)

5. Cultural production and symbolic capital are stratified in a fairly rigid structure of “center” and “periphery.”

“The individuals, networks and institutions most critically involved in the production of a culture operate in the ‘center’ where prestige is the highest, not on the periphery, where status is low.” (37)

6. Culture is generated within networks.

“... the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks. And the more ‘dense’ the network--that is, the more active and interactive the network--the more influential it could be. This is where the stuff of culture and cultural change is produced.” (38)

7. Culture is neither autonomous nor fully coherent.

Culture is made up of competing views and interacts with a variety of other institutions which have their own logic and aims (ie., the market economy and the state).

8. Cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up.

“Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.” (41)

9. Change is typically initiated by elites who are outside of the centermost positions of prestige.

“Innovation… generally moves from elites and institutions they lead to the general population but among elites who do not necessarily occupy the highest echelons of prestige. The novelty they represent and offer calls into question the rightness and legitimacy of the established ideas and practices of the culture’s leading gatekeepers. The goal of any such innovation is to infiltrate the center and, in time, redefine the leading ideas and practices of the center.” (42-43)

10. World-changing is most concentrated when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap.

“...when networks of elites in overlapping fields of culture and overlapping spheres of social life come together with their varied resources and act in common purpose, cultures do change and change profoundly.” (43)

11. Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight.

“...conflict is one of the permanent fixtures of cultural change.” (44)

Hunter completes Part I of To Change the World by briefly outlining evidence for this view of culture and cultural change in the historical record. He also demonstrates that modern Christianity constitutes a rather weak culture within the American cultural landscape because very few Christians with significant symbolic capital are present in the networks and institutions at the centers of cultural production. Instead, American evangelical Christianity especially has taken a largely populist form and has developed its own alternative networks and institutions which remain (relatively) on the periphery of cultural production.

I’m reading To Change the World alongside Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland, a non-Christian historian. His account of Christianity’s influence on the history of the West as we know it has provided a valuable warrant to the claims Hunter is making about cultural change. Over and over again changes to Western culture happen painfully slowly and are sparked by those in the highest reaches of power.

I myself am convinced by Hunter’s thesis in this first part of his book, but the question that dogged me as I reread was not “Is this really how culture changes?”, but rather, “Should cultural change be one of our central aims as followers of Jesus?” I’ll continue to wrestle with that question as we continue to read, but I want to know what your gut response is. Hit reply or share your thoughts with us in the comments!

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