What About Worldview (Pt. 2)? Thinking About Culture
“Culture” in itself is difficult to define. Often it is far easier for those outside of a group, nation, or ethnicity to notice the distinctions that make up a particular culture. I want to suggest there’s a reason for that. But in our consideration of worldview, I want us to consider this difficult question that I will also argue should replace how we think about “worldview”. I would argue that what makes up a culture are what I’m going to call Cultural Imaginative Paradigms that work in and make up culture as they are shared, presumed and invisible to those inside the in-group.
Cultural Imaginative Paradigm
Ok what in the world do I mean my “Cultural Imaginative Paradigm”? I think the reality is we operate in the realm of metaphor more than we honestly want to admit coming off of our “Modern” society. What we do is attach images and meaning to certain things, “burger”, “Cookie”, “Welfare”, “taxes”, all of these things illicit an imaginative response from us. We rarely, if ever think about something in absolute abstraction. Rather, how we think about something is informed by how our collected culture thinks about that thing, what associations we have with it personally, emotionally, etc. Karen Swallow Prior in her book “The Evangelical Imagination” talks about cultural imagination this way,
“Collectively, the works of our imaginations reflect and create cultures. Sculptures uphold our standards of beauty. Love songs shape our views on romantic love. Movies give us images of sexual encounters that establish new norms and expectations. “Poets,” as Percy Bysshe Shelly famously wrote in 1821, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” While the work of imagination contributes to the making of a culture, a culture in turn provides individuals with a precognitive framework-a framework that includes: unconscious, unarticulated, and unstated underlying assumptions- that directs, shapes, and forms our thoughts and desires and imaginations in ways we don't necessarily recognize. Again, think of the unseen parts that form the structure of a house.[1]
A good example of what I’m talking about when I say “Cultural Imaginative Paradigm” would be a “Burger”. In many respects a “Burger” is actually a fairly complex idea, seriously take a moment to think how you would define a “burger” to someone who has never experienced any idea of one before- What kind of meat? What shape is the “patty”? How can you cook it? What type of bread? What else can you put on a “burger”? But it isn’t simply that a complex concept has a cultural “shorthand”, there’s also some kind of framework, I call it “paradigm” for what we think a “burger” is. A paradigm isn’t simply how something is made but encapsulates all thought around that particular thing. This isn’t Platonic as if there is an “ideal” everyone is collectively operating under, but a range of norms and imaginations as to what the “burger” is. Even what some consider to not be “burgers”. However, it isn’t just that there is an imaginative paradigm, it must be also shared, presumed and invisible for it to really be cultural.
Sharing Our Imaginative Paradigms
One of the most basic ways we share our imaginative concepts with each other is through a dictionary. A dictionary is simply an agreed upon set of cultural metaphors (All language is metaphoric- these symbols/sounds represent something else). We simply have to share them. What is humorous is when shared symbols (words) do not result in shared imaginations. Take the British and American use of “biscuit”. For the American (especially from the South) it’s a hearty invitation to buttermilk goodness, for the Brit it’s a sugary desert or snack, invite both together out for “biscuits” and surely one is going to be disappointed. It isn’t simply that one or the other has an ideal “form” of what a “biscuit” is, but an entirely shaped cultural framework and expectation around what they consider a “biscuit” to be. When those that I call “paradigms” conflict you get “culture clash”.
Presuming our Paradigms
In one sense you would think this is under “shared”, but I think presuming an imaginative paradigm in a culture is essential to what makes a culture. It isn’t just that we imagine similar things when we say “burger” but both you and I assume we have that similar imaginative paradigm. The fact is we don’t have to define terms inside the group, that’s what makes it a group. Slang, in-jokes, metaphors (“Shakka when the walls fell”), shared experiences, and increasingly shared media make it so that we do not have to challenge what paradigms we collectively have.
This is one of the ways traditional thinking on “worldview” I believe misses something extremely important to how we think about the world. Separating “worldviews” into those views “out there” that others have that are mostly “wrong” as opposed to “our” views which are supposedly “right” presumes that because “we” have a definition therefore it must be the “correct” one. I’ve even heard fundamentalists (namely KJV only folks) try to claim that language and definitions do not change, which is simply not true (read original Shakespeare written around the time the KJV was translated). In fact, what happens is a shared definition becomes presumed correct for the mere fact that we share it. When that happens, when there’s conflict with others who do not share that Imaginative Paradigm, again “culture war”.
Invisible Culture
The last aspect that I think informs culture in culturally imaginative paradigms is eventually the shared and presumed imaginative “forms” become invisible and unnoticed by those in the culture. Some of this becomes very apparent for Americans when they travel to other countries. We have to be constantly reminded to “LOOK RIGHT” because we simply are used to, and presume, traffic will come from the left. To the point where we will look left and step off the curb into traffic because we’ve lived in a paradigm so much that we don’t even know it’s there. I love David Foster Wallace’s joke that Dr. Pryor includes in her book, “There are two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”[2]
Why it’s Important to Understand Cultural Imaginative Paradigms Exist
Beyond perhaps saving our lives when we visit another country what does recognizing these Cultural Imaginative Paradigms that are shared, presumed and invisible get us? Moreover, how is this better than a “worldview”? I think first it should help us abandon the idea that “the way we see the world” is constructed our of disparate rational and known beliefs. What often most shapes us isn’t what we’ve “deduced” from our world through rigorous observation, rather what has shaped us and what we often are operating on are cultural constructs that frame our imagination. An example of this would be an introduction to Bible class I had in College where students were told there are four “orthodox” ways of viewing the Creation. The students that had been brought up in “literal” 6-24 hour day creationism had the most difficult time. Not just because what they believed was challenged, but that they didn’t have a concept that something else could be even possible. What was most shocking for them was the realization that it wasn’t how they read scripture, nor was it any of the “apologetics” they had been handed or even “science” that were told, it was simply how they grew up that shaped what they thought scripture taught.
This is why I’ve come to believe the “worldview” model doesn’t work, because it’s often people from the in-group for the most part telling the in-group what they already believe. The “apologetics” don’t exist to really inform people about their world and culture but rather enforce it. I saw over and over in the Summit Ministries and Focus on the Family materials, not just poor representation of differing viewpoints, but a blindness to presumptions the authors had about their own beliefs. In other words, because they didn’t really engage fully in viewpoints that differed from theirs, they didn’t even fully understand themselves. We have to acknowledge we have culturally informed imaginative paradigms before we begin to confront them. More on that next week.
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[1] Karen Swallow Pryor, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI (2023), 15-16
[2] Ibid, 22