Let me articulate the secret to successful culture change this way. The new culture must appear to grow organically out of the old culture. It must be new enough to be recognizable as different but also sufficiently similar that its relationship to the old culture can be sensed. That principle is a shorthand for what we discussed in our previous lecture. We added that the description of the change also affects how people understand it, and therefore how they reason about it. Now, this is all fine and good. But you may have sensed that we have left something important out. We've talked about three kinds of force that effect the motion of culture. The inertial, the entropic, and the reflective or metacultural force. But none of these seems to include what we identified as crucial to team success in unit three of this course where we focused on symbols and rituals. There we saw that symbols of a particular sort, condensation symbols had efficacy in the world because they were capable of calling up feelings and emotions. In the case of dominant symbols, those feelings were then attached to the idea of the group. In the scheme of four great classes of force operative on the motion of culture I'm presenting you with here. Ethics and emotions fall under the fourth class which I'm going to call simply interest. I mean interest in the sense of being attracted to the culture or alternatively being repulsed from it. Interest is a hugely important force in the emotion of culture and it is in my view essential to all of economics. Laws of supply and demand are ultimately grounded in the interest people have in commodities. The realm of affects and emotions is a complex one. I can't get into the complexities in this class. Insofar as they affect the motion of culture though, we can really think of feelings and affects as propelling the motion of culture or alternatively as inhibiting it. A particular hairstyle for example might get propelled because of the interest in it. In fact around the turn of the millennium some of my students conducted a project in which they talked to hairstylists at beauty parlors. It happens that at that time there was a popular style called the Rachel cut. You can see examples by doing an Internet search. The name came from a hairstyle worn by a character in a television show called Friends. Now I admit I have never seen the show however I have seen photos of the character in question whose fictional name was Rachel Green. The actress portraying her was Jennifer Aniston. Apparently, according to the stylist, woman would bring in photos of the Rachel Green character with the characteristic haircut and ask to have their hair cut in just that way. Turns out, this actually annoyed many of the stylists since they would try to explain to the client that a haircut should be appropriate for a particular facial structure which by implication the client just did not have. Still, this kind of application of the hairstyle was all the rage. We can say that the positive interest people had in the Rachel cut was an element of culture, as an element of culture rather, was a force propelling it through the world. An example of negative interest might be that regarding horse meat as a food appropriate for humans, we discussed earlier. We talked about this actually way back but I think about it in unit one of this class. Here we can put it in a context of interest in the context of interest in the motion of culture. In the US, there's a widespread antipathy to the thought let alone the practice of actually eating horse meat. The antipathy inhibits the motion of cultural practice into the US, although horse meat is eaten in many other countries around the world. And yes, that's horse meat sausage you're looking at here on the screen. According to the 2008 Alberta Horse Welfare Report, the country in which by far the most horse meat was consumed was China. Interestingly China's followed on the list by Mexico, a neighbor of the United States, in fact one sharing a border with us. The report mentions that the United States is listed as quote having zero consumption of equine meat end quote. Now, there's a cultural border for you. In addition, of course, to a social one.
