If tradition means a set of shared moral rules (many) and common exposure to certain ideas (if this second category is not excessive), then culture exists in many groups, or perhaps in any, individuals. If culture is nothing but national culture, one of the two terms is meaningless, as “cultural culture” or “national culture” would be. Culture is often a black box or contains anything and everything associated with the human or human mind: according to Britannica“includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, principles, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, customs and ceremonies, among other aspects.”
I am not interested here in the concept of culture as “humanity,” as opposed to its broader meanings described above. (For a distinction between culture in its narrow and broad sense, see Marc Fumaroli’s 1999 book, L’État Culturel. Essai sur une religion moderne [The Cultural State: Essay on a Modern Religion].) In its broadest sense, culture is hard to see. “You know it when you see it,” he suggested Financial Times author Stephen Bush. The definition of culture is often far removed from a set of necessary or sufficient conditions for being, say, British or English. Bush writes (“There Is Such a Thing as British Culture,” October 8, 2024):
I won’t pretend this list is exhaustive, but there is a distinct set of British cultural norms, among them apathy, a commitment to scatological humor and an obsession with class, that have a major impact on many British cultural departures.
I take culture to mean the influence of people among a group of people characterized by geographic location, political allegiance, or other means—”Catholics,” “Jews,” “social culture,” “the artistic community,” the world of 140,000. members of the Academy of Model Aeronautics, and so on. Other characteristics or effects of individual influence are what give the group its unique characteristics. Culture affects the individual, but without people and their interactions, there would be no culture at all. In a sense, each person is his own culture; Extreme eccentrics are not the only objective. At least in complex, free societies, no two people have exactly the same mosaic of “cultural” traits; everyone participates in many cultures.
For a while, i Financial Times the writer seemed to reach universalist values with an individualistic flavor:
To suggest that condescension, crude humor or classism are essential to sustaining a nation’s health is patently ridiculous. In terms of social cohesion, national prosperity and so on, what really matters in the UK is freedom, religious tolerance, respect for individual choice and the autonomy of their bodies. So, in a sense, who cares if those values lose their distinctive British accent?
The columnist could have continued by pondering the meaning of “national life” (a bare anthropormophic concept), “social cohesion,” “liberty,” and “individual choice,” and whether these concepts are compatible. But his question was purely rhetorical, because the most important thing is what the government is doing to preserve the culture – via the BBC, for example:
And in a global economy … small and medium-sized countries like the UK and South Africa will not be able to maintain their unique cultures without some level of public support.
This is what successive governments in France have realized with their support for French-language film and television. All British governments owe a great deal to the forward thinking of the Conservative administration in the 1920s in establishing the BBC’s license fee. If you care about preserving a distinctive British or English culture, and not just the usual “this could be any liberal democracy” type of liberalism, the BBC is the only game in town. …
There is no obvious way to produce or maintain a national culture or shared identity that does not go beyond the norms of public service broadcasting in general and the BBC in particular.
Is the Financial Times that British (or English?) “culture” needs to be forced on taxpayers for funding and government propaganda about its content? Is culture a way to encourage obedience to the dictates of the country’s politicians? Or is it simply to financially support the cultural beliefs of some at the expense of others?
Interestingly, and apparently unbeknownst to Bush, some related questions were raised in the 1920s when the BBC was created as a broadcasting empire, an independence that lasted until 1954 for television and 1972 for radio. The BBC is still largely funded by “mandatory annual television license fees, paid by those who own televisions or watch live television on devices such as computers” ( Britannica ).
Ronald Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in economics, wrote an interesting book on these issues: British Broadcasting: A Lesson in Monopoly (New York: Routledge, 2013 1950 for the [original edition]). He explained how the BBC had gained a broadcasting monopoly by stealth, and that this monopoly had been unquestioned for several decades. It was primarily a government tool to spread the “culture” of the state or its main clients. Coase wrote:
While the policy of the Union system gave the lower social classes what they deserved, it gave the educated classes what they wanted.
In 1951, he wrote again The Owl: A Quarterly Journal of International Thought:
The idea that only public service is desirable can only be accepted by a Socialist: the widespread support for the current public broadcasting system is another example of the acceptance of Socialist ideas not only in the Labor Party but also in the Conservatives. and Liberal parties.
The BBC is not as dangerous as it was when it was alone but, from what I hear, it has continued to do what government intervention does best: reinforce the dominant political “culture”—that is, the culture chosen by the most politically important constituencies.
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