Op-Ed: Why it’s harder to change culture than nature

One reason for our relentless “culture wars” and anxieties about “cancel culture” might be our misguided sense of what culture is — and how easily we can change it.

We used to frame everything in terms of “nature versus nurture.” Either something was hard-wired and biological — such as intelligence or athletic ability — or it was cultural. The implications were always pretty clear: If anything isn’t natural, it must be merely cultural.

If something was mappable in our genes or identifiable with multicolored brain scans, it was deemed real and difficult to change. Maybe even impossible. And moral arguments weren’t too far behind. If God designed things a certain way, how dare we tamper with them?

Of course, much of our thinking about human life has long pivoted on the search for biological answers to social questions. From gene splicing to mRNA vaccines, we have gotten better and better at deciphering some of nature’s most complex secrets to suit our goals.

Operation Warp Speed is a large-scale example of just how efficient we’ve become at bending biology and science to fit our needs: in this instance, creating a vaccine in record-breaking time as we attempt to beat back a global pandemic. However, that very same pandemic shows us how much less effective we are at the cultural side of the ledger.

Just because science was able to tee up a vaccine faster than ever before doesn’t mean that we are anywhere near as adept at dealing with the intractably cultural reasons why so many people are skeptical about taking it. The same skepticism seems to have caused five governors to roll back their states’ mask mandates, despite urgent warnings from public health officials.

What science makes possible, cultural impulses can overturn. We see this in conspiracy theories likening the vaccine to a global Trojan horse, a concerted effort to harm the entire world’s population while pretending to heal it. (And that is not even the most bizarre conspiracy theory getting debunked or defended on cable news programs these days.)

Some talk about Americans’ obstinate mask rejection as the politicization of science — which is justifiable given that there is a clear blue-red checkerboard pattern to it. But we shouldn’t allow that fact to obscure a more fundamental one: Politics is just a version of culture’s decidedly unwieldy dynamics.

If culture is, as anthropologists like me describe it, everything that we have to learn while living together in the world, what counts as “culture” is stunningly ubiquitous and undeniably comprehensive.

When I want students to think about the inescapability of culture, I usually start by asking them to tell me what is not culture, what they didn’t have to learn how to do or use or love or believe in. They usually come up with answers such as breathing and going to the bathroom — though even the latter is complicated by the rules we internalize from society about how, where, when and with whom we can go, especially in public. (Think of the controversies over which public restrooms transgender people should use.)

As we continue to improve our mastery of nature, it’s very often at the expense of appreciating the harder nut to crack that cultural practices and beliefs represent. We look for laws of culture, but they aren’t nearly as easy to identify or rely on as the laws of science. For instance, it is arguably more difficult to figure out how to thwart the destructive urges of angry citizens hell-bent on storming the Capitol and attacking the body politic than it is to devise amazingly efficient ways to stop microbes from invading our physical bodies.

Why does that matter? And what can we do about it? First, we need to recognize that there is nothing mere about culture. Not at all. In the nature-versus-nurture debates we will continue to have in the 21st century, it is nature that will increasingly seem more predictably receptive to our demands, ever more susceptible to our scientific breakthroughs. In the future, we could start to think of things as merely biological.

Even with something like climate change, the science of how to tackle it seems fairly clear. It’s our cultural commitment that’s lacking. So while we may get better at predicting, measuring and potentially counteracting natural events, culture will continue to confound us.

We should not keep making the mistake of believing that science can solve our most pressing social dilemmas. There isn’t a pill we can pop to eliminate cultural conflicts. And if there were, we would be wise not to take it. The better treatment is a lifelong willingness to listen to and learn from other people in ways that might help to humble the worst forms of hubris about our own cultural claims.

Culture changes slowly, often unpredictably. While so-called cancel culture might pounce on people in an instant, our continuing wars over cultural ideals and beliefs are much more like drawn-out, self-destructive battles of mutual attrition. And if we continue to wage them as we do, all of us could actually lose.

John L. Jackson Jr., an anthropologist and filmmaker, is dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.