How does culture accrete from a micro-level (the ambitious idea of one person) to come to define society at a broader scale (the collective acceptance of entire nations)?
I tend to first think of ideas and their chief evangelists. John Locke with the Enlightenment, Martin Luther King Jr with the Civil Rights Movement, and the list goes on. But what about materialism, instant gratification, and multiculturalism? These all do not have any one founder (hardly anyone believes materialism is good), and yet why do they still exist?
It seems that the evolution of culture cannot be explained merely through the 'loud' propagation of ideas alone, but also, and arguably more pervasively, through the 'quiet' transmission of things. Materialism, instant gratification, and multiculturalism exists in large part because of the creation of things like shopping malls, social media, and the airplane. There are no chief evangelists, just the collective adoption and use of these cultural artifacts by society.
The discipline of sociology agrees with this. Sociologists categorize culture into immaterial culture (ideas) and material culture (things). Immaterial culture are the 'values we hold', while material culture are the 'things we create'. But don't the things we create come first from our ideals? For example, don't we create political parties because we believe in democracy?
Yes, but it also moves the other way, that is, as we shape things, they in turn shape us. For example, we might have created social networks because we believed that globalization is good, but social networks have in turn shaped us by forcing us to curate online identities.
It will do us well, then, to be hyper aware of not only our cultural 'ideas', but also our cultural 'things', whose formational effects are much harder to detect, and more pervasive than we often notice.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” ~John Culkin