Culture and cohesion

Why we are failing to use culture as a coordination mechanism

When a gang of Americans roam the streets of Florence or Paris you often hear them proudly extol the praises of the culture in these cities which, for them, means the litany of objects and artifacts they have likely spent days gazing at in museums and galleries.

From Europeans, you often hear that culture needs more funding which usually refers to the resources being allocated from government coffers to support opera, the arts, or literature.

Even when the frame loosens about and we get into the domains of artisanal crafts or ways of making foods or music - usually referred to as intangible culture - we almost always tether it to the word heritage, as if its present value is only about preserving the past in some of pristine form.

Each case is anecdotal but I feel as though it speaks to our commonplace usage of the term culture being synonymous with objects, practices, and artifacts that are sacred in their rarity, and largely extracted from any part of everyday life — art. That goes for painting and opera as much as it goes for more experimental performances that “intervene” in spaces outside of the white cubed gallery but still retain their separateness from being so out of the ordinary.

It makes sense considering that historically, it was these artist figures - the storytellers, the artisans, the artifact makers - that were traditionally the guardians of culture and critical nodes for transmitting meaningful practices over generations. But in the changing role of the artists as a specialist, and one that must position themself in terms of rarefied uniqueness for the context of contemporary art, the continuity of the traditional stewardships seems more nominal than functional.

Anthropologists too would have a hard time limiting culture to the production of strictly rarefied objects or types of performance. From a more anthropological understanding, each of us operates within a culture - a complex set of practices, norms, rituals, and ways of knowing that evolve over habits of time that help a group of people coordinate each other in some meaningful way.

A navigational stick charts used in the Marshall Islands

If we take that anthropological approach, we can try to talk about what culture does which, to my mind, is to coordinate people and create cohesion. It could be defined cumulatively as a metabolic structure for a group of people to process knowledge from accumulated information over time, which is made possible through the rituals, practices, norms and institutions a particular society has constructed.

Culture is how we as groups of people can extract information, store it, and make it useful for each other down the line in some sort of durable form. It’s a cooperative technology and one that scholars such as anthropologist Joseph Henrich have suggested are the “secret to our success” as a species.

II

I bring this up because it feels like this lack of cohesion and coordination is at the heart of so many problems being faced in the societies I inhabit (Europe / US). Instead of culture consisting of a series of processes and practices that help us metabolize information, it has transformed into a cultural sector based predominantly on the production of fetish objects/performances (art) for the self-realization of creative individuals increasingly decoupled from any societal project beyond the infamous pursuit of “creativity” in the most abstract sense.

But maybe this framing of art as culture is entirely a red herring, and one that truly prevents us from thinking about the role culture has played in coordinating our societies.

It’s no wonder that something telling is happening in places like SF where technological “disruption” has usually been posed as the anti-cohesion mechanism par excellence. AI companies are hiring storytellers as a part of what appears to be a strategic move toward culture building. OpenAI has posted communications roles north of $400,000 a year, and the number of job listings mentioning “storyteller” on LinkedIn doubled by the end of 2025 while Scale AI and Appen were recruiting poets and fiction writers to train language models and companies like Stripe have launched notable publishing imprints.

None of these touch the art world exactly and might better be understood as fumbling attempts to solve a coordination problem. The people building the most complex technical systems in human history are discovering that they cannot hold those systems together. They cannot make them legible, trustworthy, or purposeful in a way that ports easily with a shared cultural fabric that makes collective action possible.

Margaret Mead. Notes on squares from Tchambuli trip, ca. Spring 1933.

The irony runs deep considering that for the better part of half a century, the dominant cultural current in the West has been one of liberation through creative destruction. The Silicon Valley accelerationist, steeped in the Landian conviction that all constraints are merely friction to be optimized away, and the avant-garde performance artist, insistent that every norm is a cage, have more in common than either would care to admit. Both share a foundational commitment to the dismantling of inherited structures, be they institutional, social, aesthetic, in the name of individual freedom and novelty.

As a reaction, we find religious fanaticism and nationalism are on the rise. Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe is surging because it offers purpose and coordination for people who no longer feel that society’s cohesion and ability to coordinate are slipping away. A sense of belonging to something larger than oneself, a story that says you are part of this, a set of rituals that bind strangers into a collective body. It’s a regressive purpose that mistakes the preservation of an imagined past for the coordination of a living society but it does provide a salve for what is clearly ailing many.

III

But what would it look like to take culture seriously as a living technology of coordination rather than as a “which way Western man” meme with regressive religious nationalism on side and vanguardist creative destruction on the other we are left wondering how it is culture’s role in coordinating society has fallen away. So how can we begin to rebuild this understanding of culture and present a new vangaurd that actually tries to reanimate these coordination mechanisms?

The Chinese writer and curator Hu Fang offers one way in. Writing about the relationship between craft, daily practice, and community, he describes what he calls the “meridians of cultural practices of survival” in a short essay in e-flux he wrote in 2016. Borrowing from Traditional Chinese Medicine, these meridians are the quiet, habitual practices through which people sustain themselves and each other: not the spectacular interventions of the gallery or the disruptive innovations of the startup or the provocations of artistic experimentation, but the accumulated knowledge of how to live together, tempered day after day. What builds up over that slow tempering, he argues, is “not hate but an appreciation and reverence for life.” Through these practices, it becomes possible “to recover the original power of daily practice possessed by ‘craft’ itself and build connections between self and community.”

This might sound parochial against the hard-edged language of innovation and disruption but it is, in fact, a description of something closer to how anthropology would ground culture. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, for instance, calls the vast, distributed intelligence a “collective brain” that emerges not from any individual genius but from the size and interconnectedness of a population’s shared knowledge and everyday practices. In The Secret of Our Success, Henrich claims that what distinguishes human beings from other species is not that we are individually smarter, but that we are collectively smarter. We (humans as a species) have evolved to learn from each other across generations, and the technologies and institutions we build are not the products of individual minds but of cultural accumulation over deep time.

Margaret Mead from “A Twi Relationship System,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 67, 1937.

Once a body of knowledge becomes sufficiently complex, Henrich argues, cultural evolution will favor “an increasingly complex division of labor” which is really, he clarifies, “a division of information.” Our progress and our coordination depends on maintaining a large, interconnected population of people at what Henrich calls the “knowledge frontier” consiting of individuals who know enough to have any chance of making improvements on existing forms. Getting people to that frontier depends entirely on what he calls “cultural transmission institutions” which starts to sound a lot like Hu Fang’s meridians, or even, more boringly, this broad view of culture as a metabolic system I mentioned earlier.

IV

Artists, writers, designers, and other cultural practitioners were arguably among the most important people working at the knowledge frontier throughout the history of many societies. They are trained to synthesize, to make legible, to translate between domains, to hold complexity and steward that knowledge for societies. But now that the entire cultural apparatus orients itself around the production of artifacts for the self-actualization of the individual creator, those capacities are effectively taken offline. The potential vanguard becomes a rearguard; not leading the way but providing coping strategies and therapeutic outlets for a society trying to respond to increasingly adverse material conditions and a lack of agency. Which is not to say they are not valuable contributions, but that they are single-minded in what they do. It puts culture in the backseat in the production of society rather than the driving force.

I’m of the mind that this is because cultural institutions (along with theorists) have, in the course of the last century, stopped asking about the role of culture in coordination and focused too heavily on pushing away from society. But this has come with dire consequences especially today when technological change has become so rapid as to entirely reshape many of the cultural metabolic forms that have so far functioned to process information and coordinate shared knowledge for the benefit of society.

In doing so, we have lost a critical metabolic process in our societies at a time when technological and scientific change accelerates. We live in the lag of that failure, as societies without the cultural infrastructure — the practices, institutions, and norms — to adequately and meaningfully metabolize what science and technology taught us.

Carl Sagan saw this coming thirty years ago. In his book The Demon-Haunted World, he wrote with a clarity that has only become more urgent arguing that “we’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.”

Sagan’s argument is usually read as a plea for better science education, and it is that. But read through the lens of Henrich’s framework, it is a more significant warning about the collapse of a cultural coordination mechanism. In a high-technology society, the knowledge frontier is vast and the division of information extreme. If the cultural transmission institutions and shared practices of sense-making fail to bring enough people to that frontier, the whole system becomes fragile. Not because the technology stops working, but because the society can no longer collectively understand, govern, or incorporate the technology or knowledge it depends on.

Culture is not art. Culture is not heritage. Culture is not nostalgia. It is a technology and perhaps the most important technology our species has ever created so that our “collective brains” can continue our remarkable evolutionary path as a species. It turns a collection of individuals into a coordinated body capable of thinking, adapting, and surviving together. Every society that has flourished has done so not because of the brilliance of its individual members but because of the robustness of its cultural infrastructure. A society’s ability to metabolize information, to store knowledge, transmit it, and make it useful across time and across the boundaries of individual experience. When that infrastructure weakens we lose the capacity to coordinate. And a society that cannot coordinate cannot survive its own complexity.

The question, then, is not whether we need more funding for the arts or more storytellers in Silicon Valley even if that is directionally helpful. Rather we need to rebuild, or reinvent, the cultural practices of survival that are adequate to our moment with the meridians through which knowledge and meaning flow between people, binding them into something more than a crowd of individuals optimizing in parallel. Not a return to some imagined past, but a clear-eyed commitment to the ongoing, evolving work of making sense together. That is what culture does when it is working and it is what we most urgently need it to do now.