By Reed Johnson | Discourse Weekly.
We have a habit of believing that if we can identify the cause of a problem, we can eliminate it and change the outcome.
A causes B. B causes C. C causes D. Remove B, and surely C and D will change.
We apply this reasoning to nearly everything: poverty, education, crime, family instability, politics, and even our personal failures. Find the cause, assign responsibility, correct the problem, and expect a different result. What if society doesn’t work that way? What if the very outcomes we seek to change are also influencing the conditions that produced them? What if culture is both the cause and the consequence?
The circle we fail to see.
Consider the relationship between family, education, employment, and culture. A stable family can encourage educational achievement. Education can improve employment opportunities. Employment can strengthen family stability. Stable families can pass constructive expectations to their children. The reverse can also occur. Family instability can undermine education. Limited education can restrict employment. Economic hardship can strain families. Those circumstances can influence the expectations children carry into adulthood.
Where does the cycle begin? More importantly, where do we intervene? For years, I have argued that if we change the culture, we change the outcome, and I still believe that. I have also come to recognize that the statement is incomplete. Culture is not some independent force operating above society. Culture is created and sustained through the repeated choices, behaviors, expectations, and experiences of the people living within it. We shape our culture, and our culture shapes us. Perhaps there is no single lever that changes everything.
Psychologist B. F. Skinner understood something important about human behavior. Behavior followed by reinforcing consequences becomes more likely to occur again. We call this positive reinforcement when a desirable consequence is added following a behavior. That principle gives us a useful way to examine culture. Before asking what society teaches, we should ask what society rewards and now consider what our society celebrates.
We celebrate extraordinary wealth, athletic achievement, celebrity, and fame. Newspapers devote entire sections to professional sports. Television and social media elevate entertainers whose accomplishments may be remarkable, even when their personal conduct is questionable.
Tiger Woods and Michael Vick are examples of extraordinary athletic talent accompanied by serious personal controversy. Their achievements deserve recognition. Their failures should not be ignored. Nor should genuine rehabilitation be dismissed, but what exactly are young people learning from the examples we celebrate? A child may dream of becoming a professional athlete or famous musician. Yet only a tiny fraction of those pursuing such careers will achieve that level of success. Meanwhile, the electrician who completes an apprenticeship, supports a family, purchases a home, and contributes to his community may receive little recognition.
The same is true of the responsible parent, the dependable employee, the honest business owner, and the dedicated teacher. These are attainable examples of successful living, yet we often confuse extraordinary achievement with admirable character. A society reveals its values not merely through what it condemns, but through what it consistently celebrates. What we celebrate influences what the next generation learns to admire. Skinner helps us see how rewards strengthen behavior; the next question is how people learn which behaviors to pursue in the first place.
More than two thousand years ago, Plato described prisoners chained inside a cave, mistaking shadows on a wall for reality. One prisoner escapes. He discovers a world beyond the shadows and eventually realizes that what he once believed to be reality was only a small part of it, but when he returns to tell the others, they resist him. Maybe because he challenges the only world they have ever known. This is where reinforcement alone is not enough to explain cultural continuity. People do not simply repeat behaviors because those behaviors are rewarded; they also watch others, interpret what they see, and imitate the examples available to them.
Now imagine a young man raised in an environment where destructive behavior is commonplace. He leaves that environment, encounters different expectations, develops discipline, learns a trade, and builds a productive life. Maybe someday he will eventually return. My experience is that some will dismiss him. Others may resent him. Some will insist that his experience is exceptional and therefore irrelevant to their own circumstances, but perhaps one young person listens. Perhaps another follows, and perhaps those two eventually influence four more. The returning autonomous man does not have to convince everyone. He simply demonstrates that another way of living is possible.
Psychologist Albert Bandura called attention to the importance of observational learning. People learn not only from their own experiences but also by observing the behavior and consequences of others.
Skinner helps us understand why rewarded behavior is repeated. Bandura helps us understand how behavior spreads through example. Plato adds another dimension: people may resist abandoning familiar patterns, even when someone has shown them that another way of living exists. Together, these ideas describe a cultural process. Society rewards certain behaviors; individuals observe those rewards and the people who receive them; and familiar patterns can be either reinforced or challenged by visible examples. This process explains how culture is transmitted, but it does not yet tell us which behaviors deserve to be transmitted.
The Book of James and the Question of Character: Behavioral psychology can help us understand how conduct is learned and repeated. It cannot, by reinforcement theory alone, tell us whether the behavior being reinforced is morally worthy. For that, I return to the Book of James.
James 2:17 tells us: “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.”
James challenges the separation between what we profess and what we practice. It is easy to declare ourselves honest, compassionate, responsible, or faithful, but what do our actions reveal, and perhaps more importantly, what do we choose not to do? I am capable of anger.
I am capable of violence. Like every human being, I possess impulses that, if acted upon, could harm others. Yet I can recognize those impulses and choose restraint, and that choice matters. Character is not demonstrated merely by the absence of temptation. It is demonstrated through the discipline to resist it. We cannot eliminate every destructive impulse from human nature, but we can cultivate the judgment and moral discipline necessary to govern those impulses. James therefore supplies the moral standard that Skinner and Bandura cannot provide on their own. If behavior is shaped by rewards and examples, then the central question becomes whether our rewards and examples are forming people capable of self-restraint and responsibility, and that brings us to the American experiment.
Liberty Requires Self-Government. John Adams wrote in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
James Madison offered another observation in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
The Founders understood that human beings were imperfect. They established constitutional restraints because they recognized that neither citizens nor their leaders could be trusted with unlimited power, but they also understood that laws alone could never sustain a free society. A government can punish dishonesty. It cannot manufacture honesty. A government can prohibit violence. It cannot compel compassion. A government can establish rules governing conduct. It cannot guarantee that individuals will develop the character necessary to govern themselves. The connection is direct. If culture teaches through rewards and examples, and if character determines how people use their freedom, then political liberty depends on more than institutional design. It depends on citizens being able to exercise restraint without being forced to do so at every moment, and therein lies the great challenge of liberty. How do we develop people capable of governing themselves without allowing government to govern every aspect of their lives?
A free society must cultivate responsibility without eliminating choice, because obedience imposed through coercion is not the same thing as virtue freely practiced. Perhaps we have been looking for cultural change in the wrong places. We expect legislation, government programs, elections, and political movements to produce transformations that may require generations. The first generation begins by changing expectations and reinforcing constructive behavior. Parents teach responsibility. Schools recognize effort and achievement. Employers reward reliability. Communities elevate attainable examples of success. Individuals are encouraged to accept responsibility for their decisions.
Some people change. Others do not, but those who change begin raising children under different expectations. The second generation grows up observing behaviors that their parents had to learn deliberately. Responsibility, discipline, education, and productive work become the norm rather than the exception. By the third generation, those expectations may become deeply embedded in family and community life. What began as deliberate change becomes an inherited cultural pattern. Of course, this is not a guaranteed timetable. Human beings are too complicated, and circumstances too unpredictable, for that. Nor can we ignore the influence of poverty, discrimination, institutions, economic opportunity, and public policy. Those forces matter, but they are not the entire explanation, nor are culture or individual choice. They interact, and that is precisely the point.
Breaking the Circle: We began with the assumption that A causes B, B causes C, and C causes D, but perhaps the world works differently. Culture influences beliefs. Beliefs influence choices. Choices produce consequences. Consequences reinforce or challenge behavior. Repeated behaviors influence the next generation, and that generation reshapes the culture it inherits. We have come full circle. The question is no longer simply how to change culture.
It is where we can intervene in the ongoing exchange between individuals and society to achieve the greatest lasting improvement. Perhaps the answer begins with the individual who recognizes that his circumstances influence him but does not necessarily determine every choice he makes. The individual who understands that freedom includes responsibility. The individual who chooses restraint when capable of wrongdoing. The individual who demonstrates through conduct what others merely profess in words, and perhaps, like Plato’s returning prisoner, becomes an observable example for someone else. Not everyone will follow. Not everyone will change, but perhaps enough will, and those who do will influence others. That is how culture can change, not through one extraordinary act, but through countless ordinary decisions repeated across generations. We cannot rewrite yesterday’s history. We cannot control every circumstance confronting us today, but we can influence tomorrow’s culture through the choices we make now, and tomorrow’s culture will influence the choices of those who follow. The preservation of liberty begins with self-government, and the future of a culture depends, in part, upon what each generation chooses to teach the next. Perhaps the greatest responsibility of a free individual is not merely to govern himself, but to recognize that his conduct helps shape the character of those who inherit his freedom.
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