Many people have an unexamined belief that cities are the engines of culture. The reasoning seems straightforward. Cities have more people, more money and more infrastructure. It seems natural this would be where the most culture is formed. But is it really the case?
To answer we need a more precise idea of what culture is. Sometimes we think of culture as artistic productions like paintings, pieces of music, or books. But, this misses the communal, communicative, and procedural aspects of culture. A painting hanging on the wall of a museum without any visitors is not culture but merely an object taking up space. Culture requires shared activity.
You can see this clearly when we talk about culture in a workplace. It’s one thing for Jeff Bezos to write a shareholder memo that says Amazon folks "focus relentlessly on our customers". It’s another thing for a set of behaviours to be the reality for all people at all levels and at all times in the organisation.
In this context, the best definition of culture I’ve heard is as the set of invariants shared across a group of individuals1. In other words, the patterns of human behaviour that persist through all of the members of a group across time.
This description accounts for how a culture can be a living force in a group as well as how it manifests in that group’s artefacts. It also helps explain how people can be part of multiple cultures and subcultures with varying degrees of overlap. Someone can be both “British” because they participate in the invariants of the English language and a terrible taste in food as well as a "goth" because they have piercings and terrible taste in music2.
Culture, as the name implies, requires cultivation. Cultivation means - among other things - maintaining the right conditions without too many extreme forces that could prevent the invariants from taking hold3.
Another, perhaps contrarian, way of saying this is that a culture needs boundaries. Boundaries like the edges of a state, the language used, the kinds of businesses that are allowed to form etc.
These boundaries create a space for invariants to emerge4 without being swept away by revolutions, copying, and memetic drift. If you don't have them the culture can never solidify its unique invariants. You can see what happens when the boundaries are taken away by the way that globalisation has led to a homogenous culture.
So a culture is a set of invariants. For these invariants to emerge they require boundaries. Can cities provide the necessary boundaries?
From one angle the answer may be no.
In tribes and villages the physical distances that separate groups across time and space enforce a boundary. By contrast, a city experiences a regular flux of people from many places with varying history, and a complex set of different resources, all living on top of one another. Such a constant mixing and re-mixing means the city may be unstable for invariants to form.
Of course, this argument has to acknowledge that the city has resources that a village doesn’t. A city can effectively promote any culture that it is able to import. This is why you the grand cathedrals and paintings live in the city. The ideas and underlying culture came from somewhere else but they could use the capital and the manpower of the city to reach new heights.
In other words cities are like the mushroom that flourishes by relying on the underlying wealth of mycelium.
There is some truth to this view. You can see it when you consult how people talk about a city having restaurants that offer ‘local’ foods from many different ethnicities. This culture is not the flourishing of new invariants - in this case new types of cuisine - but the promotion of existing invariants, imported from outside, now presented without the separation of time and distance.
The argument however does not account for the existence of the walled city.
In the case of the tribe or the village, because of the time and money cost of reaching the next group of people, there is automatically a space where it is easy for invariants to emerge . However, there are many potential boundaries beyond time and distance: Architecture, language, secret knowledge, social markers… A simple accumulation of people in one place and a willingness to trade and intercourse with the wider world does not prevent these kind of intangible ‘walls’ from being erected.
Shanghai and Hong Kong present good case studies for how this works. People think of these places as giant global cities with huge amounts of immigration, trade and cross-cultural discourse. All this is true. At the same time though both cities have prestige languages, Shanghainese (上海闲话) and Cantonese (廣東話) spoken by the majority of their residents that create huge boundaries between the long-term residents of the city and newcomers5. These languages both places to create invariants and cultural riches that would be impossible otherwise.
To a lesser degree, you can see the same kind of walling off of language in London and New York. Would Stormzy or Biggie Smalls be anywhere near as interesting if it weren't for their unique South London, or Brooklyn intonations?
Even physically a city that is ostensibly without a surrounding border contains bounded spaces: The coffee shop. The social club. The immigrant neighbourhood. The hidden alley. The subterranean rave. Each a space with its own subtle delineations. The primary difference with the rural boundary is simply that the creation of these spaces is explicit. The space is given walls that are consciously constructed, guarded and maintained so culture can develop there. Every city contains many such walls:
Of course a real city, unlike a village, is not a tree. Each bordered space can be given some boundary with the outside world but it is never fully enclosed. Instead these spaces form a complex semilattice of overlapping containers. The ecosystem is fragile. A city, by definition, lacks the distance in space and time to enforce the boundaries that are set up and the walls need to be constantly rebuilt.
In the city, citizens will carefully build walls and enclose a space to allow invariants to emerge, but these same spaces can be taken away in a moment as they are ripped away by developers intent on leveling a city block or planners that severely limit the kinds of activity that are possible. Or, they simply dissolve because the unique composition of people that were in that place and worked so hard to create the walls starts to change. In villages and tribes there is no need to fret over such things. We can be content to simply let the invariants emerge over time. But the city requires constant vigilance.
The potential niches are there, it takes a lot of effort but we can identify them and we can build what is needed for them to operate. When we do unique cultures unlike anything that could form in the countryside are given an opportunity to come forth.
Links
The New 4 Seasons - Max Richter
On Wednesday this week I went to see the new ballet production of Margret Atwood’s Maddaddam series of books6. It was a deeply moving and beautiful piece of art. The music was composed by Max Richter one of the greatest living classical composers. If you are unfamiliar with his work you should listen to his devastating and sublime piece On The Nature of Daylight. The Maddam soundtrack isn’t available yet or I would link to that. In the meantime though, earlier this year, Max Richter put out a recomposition of one of his most famous albums reworking Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It is a joy to listen to.
Choose Good Quests
Your career is going to consist of a quest to achieve something. But not all quests are created equal. What quest are you on?
See Patrick Collison’s answer in this interview (2:50 - 4:54)
It also helps explain why we are always having debates at the margins around what exactly is in, or out, of our culture. Each individual invariant that we add or jettison cannot fundamentally alter the entire thing. But, if you replace enough the culture can become unrecognisable. So a culture a collection of invariants across a population but where does this culture come from?
There is a group that believes a culture needs to prioritise inclusivity above all other invariants. There is obviously a place for this value but it is also true, if the set of invariants across a particular culture becomes too small then at some point it will cease to be recognizable as a culture at all.
A plant needs the right kind of soil, water, heat etc. The conditions can and will fluctuate but if they change too much then the plant will never be able to take hold and flourish.
Invariants have to emerge rather than being enforced
Although related to mandarin it is important to understand that both these dialects ultimately unintelligible to any other group. It should also be stated that neither language is growing but they have remained unbelievably persistent in the face of a push for mandarin standardisation by Beijing.
The dates aren’t confirmed but the show is next moving to London for a run. I would highly recommend it if you can get tickets.