Culture defines politics is a concept and principle elucidated, in modern times, by Antonio Gramsci that "the cultural superstructure determines the political and economic base" and not politics from the top, down. (1) The racial stock, religion, physical environment, economics, food, literature, education, etc., are all what produces culture. From these elements from a particular cultural, a particular politic, society and form of government is developed.

Classical Antiquity

The first to recognize this principle were the Greeks. They saw how different they were from other people that they had "self government" while the barbarians around them lived in tyranny. Their independent spirit was a cause of their culture. The first recorded mention of this thought is the King of Croesus recorded by Herodotus:

:"But let the Lydians be pardoned; and lay on them this command, that they may not revolt or be dangerous to you; then, I say, and forbid them to possess weapons of war, and command them to wear tunics under their cloaks and buskins on their feet, and to teach their sons lyre-playing and song and dance and huckstering (the word “retail” in one translation). Then, O King, you will soon see them turned to women instead of men; and thus you need not fear lest they revolt."

This is an appeal from King Croesus, the king of the Lydians, a Greek city and people on the West coast of Turkey, to the Persian King. What the defeated king proposes is to inculturate effeminacy in order to make them docile and servile. Here, changing the culture changes the politics.

In 454 B.C., Solon attempted to institute a balanced government on the people of Athens. His form of government, which he attempted to institute from the top, did not last his lifetime. The German Classicist Karl Otfried Müller remarks on the futility of Solon saying, "But the temperature which he chose was too artificial to be lasting; and the constitution of Solon, in its chief points, only remained for a few years."

Whereas in the case of Sparta, Prof. Müller wrote that "the laws of Sparta were considered the true Doric insititutions; and secondly, that their origin was held to be identical with that of the people."

This phenomena was also observed by Socrates and his student Plato, in the book The Republic. The German Classicist Werner Jaeger argues that Socrates and Plato believed that "A state is never power alone, but the spiritual structure of the man whom it represents". (31) The forms of government are physical manifestations of the spiritual condition of the state, which Socrates and Plato saw through the principle of Macrocosm/microcosm. Socrates observed that the "character of the individual passes into the state". In the last chapters of The Republic, Plato writes:

"Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the state; and that from the individual they pass into the state?—how else can they come there? (3)

“Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that States are made of ‘oak and rock’, and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale and draw other things after them? (4)

"...for as the government is, such will be the man." (5)

In their utopian society in The Republic, Socrates concentrates on the education of the young in order to produce the Ideal state. By formulating the cultural currents of the method and subjects for education and environment, Socrates and Plato sought to first create the individual and that in turn would produce the state in question.

This principle was also recognized by the Biblical writer of Sirach:
"As the judge of the people is himself, so are his officers; and what manner of man the ruler of the city is, such are all they that dwell therein."(6)

Modern times

Antonio Gramsci wrote: "In a developed society, the passage to socialism occurs neither by putsch nor by direct confrontation, but by the transformation of ideas, which is to say, a slow reshaping of consciousness." He recognized that the violent revolution of a society toward the goal of socialism as advocated by Karl Marx was not effecient. Marx wanted his revolutions to start first in England and Germany. These two countries were impervious to revolution due to the Christian and Classical character of those countries. He proposed that the revolution of socialism can be accomplished by Articulation .

Antonio Gramsci proposed changing culture by transforming it through government (and its agencies), schools, universities, social sciences, trade unions, churches, and the print and broadcast media. One changes society's culture and values in order to bring about change in politics. Gramsci articulated the importance of Lenin’s "Long march through the institutions". He proposed to substitute spiritual values with materialistic values. He proposed the softening of morals and character for the advancement of socialist principles and government.

The Fabian Society in Britain and the Frankfurt School in America use the methodology advocated by Antonio Gramsci to further their respective agendas.

Reactionaries

George Orwell, wrote his fictitious works to expose the attack upon language and meaning; the totalitarian methodology of overturning a culture. He also remarked that, "at any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy--a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact."

Ayn Rand in her fictiousous works Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, wrote of this paradigm; how certain words were used and only certain persons were promoted and praised by the media. Sublte techniques of word usage are used to manipulate the feelings of the crowd either for something or against something. She decried the assault upon the "enterprising men", the men of capitol, that created business by the demeaning of their labor, ingenuity and creativity by covetous and envious crowds and elites with a political agenda of equality. She outlined in her stories how values are changed to attack men of worth and how societies crumble and deteriorate by the assaults upon capitalism.

Miscellania

Captured in 1919 by World War I American Forces from a Communist Party office were documents on how to secure Germany for Communism. The first thing mentioned was "To destroy the ruggedness of the People".

Related topics

The Kyklos

References

The McAlveny Intelligence Advisor, January, l993 pg2-3

Herodotus Loeb Classical Library Pg 197 Book 1 155-157

The Republic, Plato, trans. By B. Jowett M.A., Vintage Books, NY. Sec 435; pg 151

The Republic, Plato, Sec 544; pg 293

The Republic, Plato, Sec 557; pg 311

The Book of Sirach 10.2

Bibliography

Works of Antonio Gramsci

Related Works

"Socialism In Our Past And Future" an essay by Igor Shafarevich

From Under the Rubble, Alexander Solzhenitsyn