Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretive anthropology, once described culture as:
‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’
(Geertz, 1973)
It is such a great definition. Culture as webs of significance humans have spun — and, implied in that idea, the fact that such webs have meaning that can be interpreted. To interpret those webs is to get at a culture’s values, identity, and self-image: the core concepts behind the stories that groups of people tell themselves in order to maintain their culture.
Values, identity, and self-image are also the components of a similar structure in our individual psyches: the ‘ego’ (1). The ego, which begins early in human life and runs unceasingly throughout it, is, above all, a self-representing system whose primary function is to maintain a coherent and stable image of the self against the persistent threat of its own fragility. As Di Francesco, Marraffa, and Paternoster put it, the ego (2) is ‘essentially a repertoire of psychological manoeuvres whose outcome is a self-representation aimed at coping with the fundamental fragility of the human subject’ (Di Francesco et al., 2016). In other words, the psychological structure through which we do everything in the world is not a window onto reality, but a framework for managing it — built to protect the coherence of the subject from whatever might threaten to dissolve it.
Culture, I argue, does the same thing at the collective level. Like the ego, it is a self-referential system of meaning and social intra-coherence. It defines what counts as real, what counts as valuable, what counts as sane for members of a given group. It determines which questions are worth asking, what answers are acceptable, and which can be safely ignored. And, like the ego, it is largely invisible to those who inhabit it, presenting itself not as a perspective but as reality itself. This is what makes it so powerful, so resistant to examination, and so incredibly difficult to change. This parallel, which owes more to Plato’s idea than to me (Plato, c. 380 BCE/2007), is more than a metaphor: it may be productive for how we think about social change. By investigating the mechanisms through which change happens in individuals, we may gain important insights about how it happens in societies.
An instructive individual parallel is the process Jung called individuation: the long, difficult work of making the unconscious conscious — of bringing into awareness the stories the ego tells about itself and examining whether they are true. This involves confronting the persona, the polished mask we present to the world, and recognising it as a construction rather than an identity. It involves encountering the shadow — the rejected, disowned, or simply unexamined parts of the self that the ego keeps out of sight precisely because they threaten its coherence. And it involves, gradually and painfully, integrating what is genuine and releasing what is not. It is not self-improvement. It is something closer to self-dissolution followed by reconstruction on a more honest foundation — which is precisely why the ego resists it so fiercely. The ego’s entire function is to protect the organism and maintain coherence; scrutiny feels, from the inside, like annihilation (Jung, 1964).
Cultures, I argue, are capable of the same movement. The Axial Age — that extraordinary period between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, in which Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets independently articulated new frameworks of ethics and interiority — reshaped multiple civilisations simultaneously. The Enlightenment dismantled the theological foundations of political legitimacy across Europe and installed reason, rights, and secularism in their place. These were individuation moves on a cultural scale: moments when a civilisation’s foundational stories were examined, found wanting, and partially replaced.
But the parallel extends further, into less comfortable territory. These shifts did not arise by choice. They emerged from ecological, political, and spiritual crises — from the point at which the cost of remaining unconscious became greater than the pain of change. Cultures, like individuals, appear to undergo this process most readily when the alternative is disintegration. And the resistance follows the same pattern: the ego does not surrender its stories without a fight. It pathologises the very scrutiny that might free it — dismissing challenges as threats, attacking those who raise uncomfortable questions, doubling down on its existing self-image precisely when that image is most in need of revision. A culture under pressure behaves in exactly the same way, as anyone who has tried to create meaningful social change can confirm.
Can societies change for the better before crisis forces them to? Can they develop enough collective self-awareness before the cost of remaining unconscious becomes catastrophic?
If we look at our history, the unfortunate answer is ‘no.’
- Or the self, depending on the tradition.
- The authors are actually examining the self in their book, but I prefer the term ‘ego.’
References and Further Reading
Di Francesco, M., Marraffa, M. and Paternoster, A. (2016) The Self and Its Defences: From Psychodynamics to Cognitive Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Jung, C.G. (ed.) (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books.
Plato (c. 380 BCE/2007) The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. London: Penguin Classics.