Imagine if I picked 1 person from 1000 disparate tribes from around the planet and put them in a town together. The town would have 1000 citizens, but no culture. It may develop a culture over time, but immediately post-transplant, there is none.
Culture is a shared experience. It's high-context. And, to persist as a coherent entity, must have traits that encourage cohesion, it must have homeorhesis.
What are a culture's traits that promote social cohesion? They're its social Schelling points. A Schelling point is the solution most people will come up with in the absence of communication — i.e. a societal default choice.
When you want to socialize, where do you go? The pub? The piazza? Church? Gym? Cafe?
How do you move from acquaintances to friends? Swearing blood oaths? Watching the game every Sunday? Drinking?
All of these are downstream of the Schelling points that define the culture.
If you were to build a culture partially from scratch — because you're building a new town perhaps — what social infrastructure would you take or leave from current American culture? What would you adopt from other cultures?
I'll list a few specific things I'd add.
Bookends are a definite start and end to something. In a Muslim country it might be the first and last call to prayer of the day. The closest thing most Westerners have is 9:00AM through 5:00PM — the traditional workday.
Bookends are powerful social tech. They provide default synchronization points. When should we get coffee? At the start of the morning. What about dinner? After the evening bookend. The bookend itself can also be an activity that promotes social cohesion.
The best example I've seen of this in the US is in Roche Harbor WA. It's a little resort town with 1950s stylings. Nostalgia for an older American summering community — a very pleasant place!
Every morning, an old-timey song plays over the whole town's speaker system. It marks the start of the day's activities. Everyone gets out of their cottages, hotel rooms, and houses and goes to walk around, sip coffee, wave at neighbors, see the sun. Stretch your legs and talk to friends.
Then, every evening at sunset, they do a flag-lowering ceremony — again with patriotic music on the speakers — and fire a small cannon. Everyone comes and watches the production. You look around and feel a hint of Asabiyyah.
There's something about uniforms that is deep in the human psyche. Uniforms don't have to be literal identical outfits. It's just some ingroup marking.
I was recently at a conference that gave out sweatshirts. On the second day, it was cold, so a lot of people wore theirs. It's remarkable the effect this had on group-feeling. Strangers feel like they are on the same team and are subtly more willing to open up to each other.
Hats, buttons, scarves, whatever. Your culture should have some visual indicator. Don't try to rationalize it, just accept it as a known glitch in the soul of man.
Like uniforms, there is something hard-coded into the DNA that makes us love saying the same well-known words as those around us. A chant, an oath, a pledge, a prayer.
In my last few years of high school, I transferred from a public school to a local Episcopalian school. The school had a 20 minute chapel service with the whole school in attendance every day. At the end of each service, they'd say the same prayer in unison.
I was an angsty atheist teenager and just stood silently. Having just arrived from a public school, this was all very cultlike and weird. But, sometime in second semester, one day the school began to recite, and my mouth opened too. I caught myself mid-sentence. I was saying the words without thinking. What was happening to me?
By the time I graduated a few years later, I actually came to like it despite not being religious. Asabiyyah.
The end-of-day bookend would be a good place for something like this. It doesn't need to be a lengthy prayer. Something as simple as a one-sentence motto would be fine. You want it to feel very slightly ridiculous, but in a playful way. You want newcomers to feel like it's silly, but to come to appreciate the ingroup play.
Let's steal a tune from the Orthodox Jewish repertoire. Every Friday evening, observant Jews start Shabbat — the ritual day of rest that lasts until Saturday evening.
It's considered a mitzvah — a blessing — to host guests. Most Orthodox Jews I know have friends over for dinner every Friday night — and for many other meals, but always Friday.
A community can probably just pick a day of the week and say that's the dinner party day of the week. The key is to establish it as a tradition in the founding population. All newcomers will be quickly indoctrinated. You want to cultivate a feeling that it's rude not to invite someone over for dinner on that day.
The Jews also sing songs and recite prayers at these meals, demonstrating synchronous recitation. They have a good set of Schelling points — it's impressive to last for 3000 years.
This is a simple and powerful piece of social infrastructure. You want to host an event? Want to start a group? How to get the word out? Post it on the bulletin board. Your community should have a nice big central one. Probably in the same place you do the end-of-day bookend.
Where do you hang out when you want to socialize outside of work and home? That's your third place. The British have the local pub. Italians have the piazza. Wealthy Americans have the country club. Most Americans have… nothing.
Early on in the establishment of your culture, you want to define a third place. An ideal place can be comfortably used most days of the year. If you're in a cold or rainy climate, it should probably be indoors, or if in a sunny climate, should have a lot of shade.
There's a lot of implementation details with this one. Army recruits bond over the shared suffering of physical exertion. But Muslims and Orthodox Jews bond over the hunger of fasting.
I'm writing this a few weeks after the Jewish tradition of Sukkah in which a temporary hut is put up for a week. You dine in the hut, hang out in the hut, and if the weather permits, sleep in the hut.
A secular example is a polar bear plunge.
Once or twice a year is enough for this tradition. It just needs to be something mildly unpleasant but kind of compelling in retrospect — either because of the absurdity or the feeling of overcoming adversity, or both.
I'd like to keep adding to this list. Send me any valuable social tech you've heard of. I think this is all going to become much more important as the age of AI looms nearer.
A friend sent me this excellent related post by Kevin Simler which is about a similar topic. It focuses on the schema of rituals with synchrony (same actions at same time, e.g. marching) and/or coordination (working together, e.g. team sports) — a really useful frame I think.