James Harrigan’s Pop Culture Project

The most enduring definition of culture was given by Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), wherein he wrote, “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

150 years or so later, we might quibble with his “ethnographic” qualifier, especially in the United States, but the rest most certainly holds. Culture is the entire way of life of a people. As such, it changes over time, heretofore glacially, offering a relatively smooth trajectory of actual life where the rubber meets the road.

Politics, in every sense, is downstream from culture. If one’s goal is to change anything, one must make that change at the cultural level.

Culture is a leading indicator of politics, which is itself a lagging indicator of culture.

This was as true of the American Revolution, when the North American colonists sought to maintain their way of life rather than redefine it, as it is in our own time, when issues like gay marriage, drug decriminalization, and unbridled promiscuity found purchase in the electorate long before finding their way to our political institutions.

But culture has, dangerously in most cases, come to be a very fluid concern. Gone is the glacial pace that ensured social tranquility. Technology has changed this game, and until and unless we find some sort of answer to the depersonalization of contemporary life, we will reap what we are now sowing.

Articles