for the currently common fear that some public areas are “not safe,” quite apart from whatever assaults have taken place in them. Most people have no personal knowledge of the alleged assaults, but they experience violation of what might be called the “Goffman rules” of public order as the prelude to danger and do not go to places which make them feel that way.
Cultural understandings, if they are to be effective in the organization of public behavior, must be very widely held. That means that people of otherwise varying class, ethnic, and regional cultures must learn them routinely, and must learn them quite young, because even small children can disrupt public order very effectively. That requires, in turn, substantial agreement among people of all segments of the society on how children should be brought up. If no such agreement exists or if some of the people who agree in principle do not manage to teach their children the necessary things, public order breaks down, as it often does.
In another direction, cultural understandings affect and “socialize” the internal experiences people have. By applying understandings they know to be widely accepted to their own perhaps inchoate private experiences, people learn to define those internal experiences in ways which allow them to mesh their activities relevant to those topics with those of others with whom they are involved. Consider the familiar example of falling in love. It is remarkable that one of the experiences we usually consider private and unique—falling in love—actually has the same character for most people who experience it. That is not to say that the experience is superficial, but rather that when people try to understand their emotional responses to others, one available explanation of what they feel is the idea, common in Western culture, of romantic love. They learn that idea from a variety of sources, ranging from the mass media to discussion with their peers, and they learn to see their own experiences as embodiments of it. Because most people within a given culture learn to experience love in the same way from the same sources, two people can become acquainted and successfully fall in love with each other—not an easy trick.
Because shared cultural understandings make it easy to do things in certain ways, moreover, their existence favors those ways of doing things and makes other ways of achieving the same end, which might be just as satisfactory to everyone involved, correspondingly less likely. Random events, which might produce innovations desirable to participants, occur infrequently. In fact, even when the familiar line of activity is not exactly to anyone’s liking, people continue it simply because it is what everyone knows and knows that everyone else knows, and thus is what offers the greatest likelihood of successful collective action. Everyone knows, for instance, that it would be better to standardize the enormous variety of screw threads in this country, or to convert the United States to the metric system. But the old ways are the ones we know, and, of course, in this instance, they are built into tools and machines which would be difficult and costly to change. Many activities exhibit that inertia, and they pose a problem that sociologists have been interested in for many years: which elements of a society or culture are most likely to change? William Fielding Ogburn, for instance, proposed sixty years ago that material culture (screw threads) changed more quickly than social organization, and that the resultant “lag” could be problematic for human society.
A final consequence: the existence of culture makes it possible for people to plan their own lives. We can plan most easily for a known future, in which the major organizational features of society turn out to be what we expected them to be and what we made allowances for in our planning. We need, most importantly, to predict the actions of other people and of the organizations which consist of their collective actions. Culture makes those actions, individual and collective, more predictable than they would otherwise be. People in traditional societies may not obey in every detail the complex marriage rules held out to them, but those rules supply a sufficiently clear guide for men and women to envision more or less accurately when they will marry, what resources will be available to them when they do, and how the course of their married life will proceed.
In modern industrial societies, workers can plan their careers better when they know what kinds of work situations they will find themselves in and what their rights and obligations at various ages and career stages will be. Few people can make those predictions successfully in this country any more, which indicates that cultural understandings do not always last the twenty or thirty years necessary for such predictability to be possible. When that happens, people do not know how to prepare themselves for their work lives and do not receive the benefits of their earlier investments in hard work. People who seemed to be goofing off or acting irrationally, for example, sometimes make windfall profits as the work world comes to need just those combinations of skills and experiences that they acquired while not following a “sensible” career path. As technical and organizational innovations make new skills more desirable, new career lines open up which were not and could not have been predicted ten years earlier. The first generation of computer programmers benefited from that kind of good luck, as did the first generation of drug researchers, among others.
In every society, some of the understandings we have been talking about are thought to be more important, more noble, more imbued with the highest aspirations or achievements of that society. For hundreds of years, Western societies have given that kind of privileged position to what some regard as “high culture” and what others regard as “culture” without a qualifying adjective—art, reflective thought, philosophy. These pursuits are generally opposed to more manual occupations and to those connected with industry and commerce, although the growth of science and the commercialization of art in more recent times have created substantial areas of ambiguity. It seems obvious, without Thorstein Veblen to point it out, that these judgments reflect the relative prestige of those segments of society which more often engage in or patronize those pursuits. They are the hobbies, the playthings of political and religious leaders as well as of people of power and privilege in general, and it is a good sociological question whether they receive their mana from the power of those interested in them or whether they lend some portion of that mana to those supporters.
How do these areas of cultural understanding differ from the more mundane examples I addressed earlier? They have a better reputation, of course, but is the basis for that reputation discernible in them or could any set of concerns and activities achieve that special estate? That is an enormously complicated question which I am not going to answer in a few words. It is enough to ask, from the point of view assumed here, what kinds of activities, pursued by whom, follow from the existence of these understandings. Who can do what together as a result of their existence?
One answer is that, in Western societies originally at least, culturally reputable activities are carried on by specialists who make a profession of them. Those professions gather around them a special world—a network of people who collaborate in the production, distribution, and celebration of “high” culture—and that collaboration is made possible by the kinds of cultural understandings I have been discussing throughout this paper.
In addition, the people who cooperate in these ventures regard the work they do as having special value. “Art” is an honorific category, a word applied to productions that a society decides to treat as especially valuable. A great deal of work that seems to share the observable qualities of what comes to be called high art never earns that distinction, and that suggests that the difference does not lie in the work so honored but rather in the process of honoring. We can easily observe, furthermore, that the same objects and events earn the label of “art” on some occasions and not others, often migrating back and forth across the dividing line as fashions change. (I have discussed these matters at length in Art Worlds.)
High culture, then, consists of work recognized as belonging to an honored category of cultural understandings by the people who have the power to make that determination and to have it accepted by others. We may be able to devise systematic criteria that will identify work of superior quality, but it is unlikely that the work we can distinguish in that way will be the same as the work legitimated as high culture by the institutions that make that decision for any society.
Thinking of high culture this way suggests
