Abstract: An atttempt to demonstrate how and why cultural
change occurs continuously and independently of any social dynamics and
simply as the result of the working of ordinary cognitive processes understood
here without recourse to specific versions of cognitive theory.
The past is a lost
world. We know so little about it. Of all the trillion upon trillion
conversations, speeches, sermons, invocations, recitations, chants, songs,
concert performances, which took place before the 1870s (at the earliest)
hardly a trace remains. Their sound is recorded nowhere; the memory traces
which they left are gone because everyone born before the 1870s is dead. Only
where something was written down in a musical score, the text of a play or a
prayer, or an entry in a diary, does something remain. The farther back in time
we go, the more reconstructive (and hence at least partly speculative) is any
attempt to reproduce the sounds and gestures of the past. We can reconstruct
the conversation at a nineteenth century country house dinner table guided by what
we read in Jane Austen; an eighteenth century concert fit for a king guided by
a musical score; a seventeenth century theatrical performance guided by all
that Shakespeare researchers can tell us; a sixteenth century speech by Queen
Elizabeth the First as handed down in the history books …. but in the end only
one thing is certain, that somewhere we will have got it wrong. We are guessing
– we are theorising and we are improvising. There are no Big Data such as we
now possess in sound and visual recordings and even those, I will later argue,
are fraught with problems.
I am making an
important assumption. Surely, you might say, there is at least a possibility
that person B who heard it from person A passed it to person C who then passed
it on to person D, and so on down the line so that a twenty first century
rendering of a prayer may be sounded out in pretty much an identical manner to
the way it was sounded out ten or twenty generations ago. I don’t believe this is true and rather than
just say Haven’t you heard of Chinese
Whispers? I want to use this essay to argue that case.
*
In logic, if A implies
B, and B implies C, and C implies D … all the way through to Y implies Z, then
it follows that A implies Z. Logical implication and entailment just is a transitive thing.
But if I understood my
mother when she talked to me, and she understood her mother when she talked to
her, and that mother understood her own mother …. it does not follow that I
would understand my 26th great grandmother if she were still alive
to talk to me. Indeed, it is at least very likely that I would not
understand. There will be a failure of transitivity.
Such failures arise in
two main ways. First, the things I want to speak about are different to those
my 26th great grandmother wanted to speak about. My vocabulary is different,
full of words which would be to her incomprehensible neologisms. Likewise, her
vocabulary included words which have fallen completely out of use and which can
now be found, if at all, only in specialist dictionaries. It is a perfectly
general truth that the world we inhabit change and the words we use to talk
about our world change with them, sometimes very rapidly, sometimes more slowly.
Second, the way we
speak changes over time under both external and internal pressures.
Pronunciation, accent, intonation patterns, all change – indeed, are changing
all the time, never stop.
These simple ideas can
be given expression in terms of very simple set theory. There is a set (almost
certainly fuzzy at the edges) of all the possible utterances which I can
passively understand should they be addressed to me. That set changes over a
lifetime – in my late teens I could understand utterances in Swedish because I
had learnt some Swedish but which I would no longer understand because I have
forgotten what I learnt – but importantly the set includes most (perhaps all)
of the utterances which my mother ever addressed to me. But my set does not
perfectly overlap with her set, not least because the world has changed a great
deal and now includes the internet, emails, and so on indefinitely. Included in
her set were most (perhaps all) of the utterances which her mother addressed to
her, none of which were ever addressed to me because this grandmother was dead
before I was born. Probably there were things which my grandmother said which I
would not understand if by some extraordinary means I could hear them now.
I can even give a sort
of proof. Recently, going through things which belonged to this grandmother, I
found the printed prayer which stood like a photo in a frame on her bedroom
dressing table. I looked at the back where I found printed the words MOWBRAYS’
DEVOTIONAL GLAZETTES G 7. Well, I know that Mowbray is a big religious
publisher confirmed by the later words A.R.MOWBRAY & CO Ltd. London &
Oxford – something which has not stopped the company putting the apostrophe in
the wrong place, useful evidence that the decline of civilisation did not begin
last week. And I know the word devotional.
But what about this glazette? I’ve
never come across the word before. It sounds like it has some connection to gazette, but what connection? So I
google and for the first time ever, Google really struggles. There is no
definition of the word on offer anywhere but there are a handful of other uses
which Google finds on ebay, including uses to brand-name early (1890s – 1910s)
picture postcards which have a glazed surface – what we would now call a
laminated surface. So here we have a word which my grandmother would have
presumably known and understood but which, unaided, I did not. And here we are
only talking about the very, very recent past.
*
It takes only a bit of
imagination to see that over time, the sets of all possible utterances which a
person in generation Z can understand have migrated so far away from those
which a person in generation A could understand
that there is eventually minimal or no overlap at all. There is a more
or less complete failure of transitivity. Or, to put it in the language of set
theory, sets migrate. If this is true
of language, then it will be true of many other forms of expression. That claim
requires some fleshing out.
Why is it not possible
for a singer in an oral culture to orally transmit a definitive version of a
song to an apprentice singer who then in turn passes it on to the next
generation apprentice, and so on, indefinitely?
First, and not at all trivially,
a singer may not care at all about a definitive version and from performance to
performance may vary in all kinds of ways the song they sing. The singer acts
creatively, improvises, but is also affected by how much they have had to
drink, how much they like the audience, and so on through an indefinite range
of possibilities. So an apprentice has to somehow figure out what is essential
to learning and reproducing “the song” and what is incidental. And there is no
guarantee at all that all apprentices will figure out in the same way, even if
they have never heard the expression “cover version”.
This is really a way of
introducing the idea that in relation to cultural transmission or reproduction,
there is always and inevitably an inescapable moment of interpretation. That idea can also be expressed in the claim which
tells us that a theory (an
interpretation) is always underdetermined
by the data which support it. There is always more than one way to skin a
cat.
Second, it is extremely
rare for something like a song or a dance to have only a unique performer at
any one moment in time and for that unique performer to have a unique
apprentice. At any one time, the performances of a living group of performers
are attended to by a group of apprentices. When a culture is dying, one way of
showing that is to point to the fact that the group of apprentices is smaller
than the group of established performers. But dying or expanding, the
performances of current performers constitute a set (almost certainly fuzzy at
the edges) of what constitutes the empirical reality of a particular song. When
a couple of centuries ago (or less), ethnographers began to collect the words
of folk songs one of the first things they had to cope with was the huge
variation between versions of what were,
in some sense, renderings of the same song. The set which made up a song
was not only fuzzy; it was positively indeterminate.
I once encountered a
real-world near-demonstration of this truth. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, men from the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland found
employment with the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada which traded with the Inuit
population of the north. Some Orcadians also served on whalers which hunted in
the Canadian north. These men left behind not just babies but fiddles and the
knowledge of how to play them. Long after the Orcadians left, there continued
to be Inuit fiddlers playing Orcadian music. In 1978, holidaying in Orkney, I
found myself one evening attending a unique, first-time-ever gathering: a group
of Inuit fiddlers had travelled to Orkney and they were going to play their
fiddles. Then some Orcadian fiddlers were going to play theirs. Then, it was
hoped, the two sets of fiddlers would play together. Well, they tried and they
partially succeeded but you would not have called it a successful jam session.
Cultural drift had taken Inuit and Orcadian fiddlers in separate directions and
after a period which could not have been more than 150 years, they were playing
differently from each other. But in between, sons had learnt from fathers in
unbroken chains. The line of descent was there but the music had migrated
enough to create quite a lot of intransitivity.
*
But suppose there is
just one performer and one apprentice, and suppose the performer is an
obsessive about maintaining just one version of a song, a dance, a prayer and
boxes the apprentice’s ears when they deviate ever so slightly from the standard?
Surely this can stop the set from migrating, stop later versions from becoming
intransitive with earlier ones.
I have six inter-connected
arguments to offer against this possibility. One I develop through the concepts
of foreground and background. That is
connected to what I call the sample book
problem. Then there is the important problem of forgetfulness. Then there is a problem of context which is often overlooked. There is a problem of finite intelligence. And, finally, there
is the problem of unique experience.
Human beings,
constructed as they are, can only attend
to some things at any one time out of all the possible things which could be
attended to at that moment. They can, in fact, only notice some things out of all the possible things that could be
noticed. About these things to which they attend or which they notice, they can
say at least something, though even
then it may be sketchy and not very informative. Nonetheless, it is a whole lot
more than can be said about all that was not attended to, was not noticed.
There is a foreground of experience - things we
notice - and a background of things
we don’t. Quite often, we can change our focus
of attention in order to pull something out of the background and into the
foreground. But not as often as we may imagine and quite often we only do it
when prompted.
This is not just a fact
or truth about perception. It is perfectly general. Everything we experience and
everything we do is handled within the frame of foreground and background and
there is no avoiding that fact. The consequences are multiple, not just for
everyday life but also for things like artistic creation and political
understanding.
The contrast of
foreground and background is played out very obviously in relation to spoken
and written language. Parents, teachers and ministers of education habitually
foreground some bits of language as particularly important for children to
learn. They emphasise bits of pronunciation, bits of grammar, bits of
punctuation as things which are very important to get right. Quite often, these
foregrounded features are selected with a view to stopping some incipient
change occurring. They are conservative measures.
You can only practise
so much vigilance. No ordinary parent or teacher or even minister of education
can be googling all the time. As a result, some changes get past even the most
vigilant defenders who are thus always in the position of King Canute, unable
to turn back the waves. Change will happen even on those language fronts you
have opted to foreground and defend.
Worse, there is the
background of language use still to consider, all those things which aren’t
being attended to. Here change happens unnoticed even by those who pioneer the
changes. They just do it without knowing that they are doing it or why they are
doing it. I will give an example from written language. Recently, I was
reviewing articles and chapters I had written forty or fifty years ago. As I
turned some of them into new Word documents, I realised there were things in
them that I now write differently. Decades ago, I would have written U.S.S.R.
and N.A.T.O. and B.B.C. and so on indefinitely. But nowadays I don’t do that. I
write USSR, NATO and BBC and so on indefinitely. But there was no point at
which I was conscious of dropping the stops and I did not know that I had
indeed made this discontinuous change in the way I type until I got involved in
reading my own old work. Likewise, there was that point when – like many people
–I stopped speaking and writing Roumania
or Rumania and switched to Romania. Don’t ask me when or why.
So in the background,
even though it involves things which we do quite consciously – as when we sit
down to type – changes happen which are not reflected on or brought into
consciousness at the time they occur and may indeed not be noticed until much
later. Historical linguists come into their own studying such changes but what
is happening here is not specific to or confined to language. All things change, whether we like it or
not or whether we notice it or not. And All
does mean All, even those things
we may imagine are under our own control. To return to language, if you think
there is something called The Queen’s English or BBC English which does not
change, just try listening to a fifty year old recording of a BBC radio
broadcast or a fifty year old Queen’s Speech.
So far, the
argument amounts to this. Everything we experience and think about is handled
in terms of foreground and background. We have a bit more control over
foreground but not enough to prevent change even when we are trying to prevent
change. We have less control over background, often none at all, and background
changes all the time and sometimes very fast. Change goes on
in the background willy-nilly, as I have already suggested with the example of
pronunciation. We are capable of
changing things in the foreground and liable
to change things left in the background. The dynamics of change are different
in the two cases.
In the foreground, we
are liable to influence from others (often massively so) but when we make a
change it is often (perhaps always) of a discontinuous nature and involves a
decision on our part, as when we decide to quit smoking and move from being a
smoker to being a non-smoker which in turn makes us an agent within a broader
cultural shift. But when something in the background changes, unknown to us, it
often does so in a way which has a sort of continuous character. So we start to
say “Hi” instead of “Hello” on a few occasions, without knowing why we pick
those occasions, and then we start to use “Hi” more often and, perhaps
eventually we move to a situation where we become a monoglot “Hi” user rather
than a monoglot “Hello” user. But we didn’t decide to do this. We still
understand what other people mean when they say “Hello” but we just stop using
“Hello” ourselves.
(The contrast between
continuous and discontinuous change is important. There is a long history of
theorising about the contrast, with the science of geology having been a major
site for the early discussion. Nowadays we are most familiar with the idea from
the way we contrast analog with digital. Think of clocks).
How does all this apply
to the single performer with a single apprentice? Suppose it is a singer and a
song. The singer has a unique voice profile (as modern technology knows) and it
changes through time: an old man does not sound like his younger self. The
singer can’t do much about this and almost certainly discounts it and consigns
it to the background when teaching an almost certainly younger apprentice. The
singer can only foreground so much of the song and its singing and inevitably
some things will pass unnoticed. Maybe the singer takes four minutes thirty
three seconds (on average) to sing the song and the apprentice takes four
minutes thirty one seconds. If you don’t notice and stop that, then the song
has already changed. In contrast, when the singer foregrounds something, like a
drawn out note or word, then that does mean that the apprentice may well get
their ears boxed for getting it wrong.
There is still a double
problem. The poor apprentice has to understand what they have got wrong and
find a way to correct it. Because of the ubiquity of the need for
interpretation, the apprentice has first to correctly identify what the singer
is so agitated about. The problem is analogous to that children have when their
speech is corrected and they have to grasp what it is that it is being
corrected. Not so long ago, I listened to a young child reciting numbers from
one to twenty with complete accuracy. But at the end, his father intervened to
say No, not twen-ee, it’s twen-tee. The
child was completely baffled by this piece of linguistic correction which had
absolutely no connection to the task he had set himself of reciting the numbers
in correct order. How was the child supposed to know that though living in
south east London he was not supposed to speak like south east London?
Even if he had been a
budding theorist of cultural arbitraries, there would still be the problem of
converting advice into successful practice. Children do often get it right in
the end, though it probably has little to do with advice they are given, and as
anyone who has ever learnt to drive a car will know, giving advice is more easy
to offer than to act upon.
Worse is to come. In
oral cultures, singers forget today what they prescribed yesterday or, perhaps
to make it more plausible, they forget next year what they prescribed this
year. They have no sample book
outside their own heads and we all know that our memories are constantly
re-organising themselves. They have no means of comparing the sample which
occurs to them today with the sample which they were using yesterday, let alone
last year and which is almost certainly completely forgotten.
But suppose there is a
real sample book in the form of a voice recording, even a film which shows all
the accompanying gestures and so on?
The very same problems
recur even if they seem less severe. Eliminate the possibility that the singer
says they were having an off-day when the recording was made, there is still a
problem of determining what is foreground and what is background in the recording,
what matters and what does not matter. If the singer looks up at a certain
point, does that matter or is it just because a bird was flying overhead at
that moment? Then again the apprentice has to convert what is available in the
recording into a new performance which uses the apprentice’s unique voice
rather than that of the recorded singer, and so on.
Sample books do not
solve any problem in some automatic way; they have to be interpreted and a
regress can only be stopped by making a decision: this is the way we will do it. And decisions, one might say, are
fatal to the integrity of cultural transmission. The decision indicates what
will be allowed to Pass and what will
Fail. But on a different day, or with
a different judge, it is entirely likely that the bar would have been set
higher or lower.
Imagine the teacher
listening to the apprentice and eventually declaring That’s it! or perhaps merely That
will do! That’s a decision, not something completely grounded in the sample
in the teacher’s head. Nor is there any guarantee that next time around the
teacher will come down in favour of the same version; the teacher is capable of
forgetting the sample used last time and also capable of unconsciously
modifying it. The mind is always at work, in one way or another, and it is the
mind at work which makes all culture unstable even in what we might think of as
an otherwise unchanging world.
*
There is a further
peculiar, problem created by the fact that all our activities have a broader context.
Background and
foreground are separated by temporary boundaries – things move in and out of
focus, the change triggered for many different reasons. But even when something
stays for a long time in background, even deep background, it exerts an
influence on what goes on in foreground. I use a hypothetical example to
develop the argument.
Imagine a culture in
which it is expected that certain utterances will be produced in a voice which
is loud, clear and decisive. Maybe when a prayer is spoken or a sentence handed
down by a judge. But suppose that in the wider culture there is an unmonitored
and untheorised drift towards quieter forms of speech. The explanations could
be purely external and chance. Maybe people are living in a police state and
fall into the habit of talking in whispers; maybe more and more people work in
open plan offices or live in apartment blocks with flimsy party walls.
Whatever, people are talking more quietly. In this situation, the priest or the
judge who continues in the old way will begin to sound ridiculously loud rather
than impressively loud. Quite unconsciously, but affected by what is happening
all around, an officiant shifts towards dropping their voice by a decibel or
two. Should their audience contain an old-school office holder in retirement,
that person may be saying to themselves Speak
up! Speak up! because they happen to be outside the loop of an ongoing,
broader cultural change.
It is in such continuous
contextual interaction that I think we may find part of the explanation of
cultural changes which it seems no one intended but which have happened anyway.
For example, if a broader culture gravitates towards greater informality of
style, then that may provide a kind of push towards making things like weddings
and funerals more informal, even though those are things which most people
might be happy to regard as governed by tradition and to be kept going in their
older forms. Context is not a sinister force, but it is a powerful one.
*
There is one final and
very important thing. Our brains aren’t big enough and the time available to us
is so short that it’s not possible for every bit of cultural material to be
given foreground attention. That implies that those who want to stop cultural
change cannot win every battle because they can never have enough troops to
deploy. There aren’t enough hours in the day for anyone to stay on high
reflexive alert to more than a small number of things which may change if not
attended to.
To write English properly, you are supposed to
master apostrophe rules. As it happens, they have a rather complex and confused
structure which make them very difficult to learn without a quite
disproportionate expenditure of effort. Very few people master this glass bead
game. In this case, there is a long-term dislocation between a set of rules
which tell you what you are supposed to do and what is actually done. The most
likely resolution is that the rules will eventually be abandoned.
The problems which
arise from limitations of time and intelligence can be seen in comic form in
the desperate, expensive and futile attempts which English schools make to get
pupils to conform to school uniform rules. The Deputy Head goes on offensive
against jewellery but misses what is happening to finger nails; they switch to
finger nails and miss what is happening to skirt hems; they focus on skirt hems
…. The only sound conclusion available is that they never will succeed because they never can. To a disbelieving
audience, King Knut proved that claim a very long time ago.
*
Last but not least,
people do not share the same experience set, the set of things which happen to
them and which provide the raw material for their minds to work over, interpret
and act upon. Experience sets are unique to individuals. Every day and all over
the world, many millions (maybe more) people use or hear used the word Heathrow but only a very strange fluke
would ensure that over time they have identical sets of Heathrow experiences. In all probability, they hear the word
pronounced in different ways and out of that experience they have to fashion
their own pronunciation, much affected by the language context from which they
are working – Cantonese, French, Russian…. Very few will head to the online
forum where such things are discussed and even then the effect will not be
decisive.
We do not have a Big
Data set which harvests the sounds of each day’s token utterances of the Heathrow type. There is no central
depository, only the experiences of millions of individuals. A linguist with a
sample of all the utterances will be able to sort them into sub-types – for
example, the sub-type HEATH-row with
stress on the first syllable and the sub-type Heath-ROW with stress on the second. The linguist may be able to
hypothesise that the distribution of sub-types have shifted over time, the
first pronunciation (American) overtaking the second and original English
pronunciation for reasons much connected to patterns of global aviation. So we
have the beginnings of an account of cultural change. The only sure thing is
that it would be absurd to suppose that the continuously updated pie chart
breaking down Heathrow pronunciations
into their variant forms could have remained unchanged even over the short
period of time in which the airport has existed.
*
The lines of argument
developed in this essay apply equally to the understanding of changes in
beliefs, belief systems, ideologies. Those who wrote the religious texts on
which many cultures have relied probably thought that they were settling things
for the future. In fact, as everyone knows, they simply provided data for an
indefinite number of ever-changing
interpretations. The human mind seems to like nothing better than the
challenge of a text. This inherent
instability in what in some cases are presented as unchangeable belief systems
has one major advantage. It also allows for scientific progress and revolution.
Of course, there is also an external dynamic provided by migration, war,
conquest and economic change. But even without that external dynamic to prompt
it, human minds are always churning.
© Trevor Pateman 2018;
first published in slightly different form on my Blog readingthisbook.com, September 2018
