Some highlights on culture from Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse:
“In their own political engagements infinite players make a distinction between society and culture. Society they understand as the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture as whatever we do with each other by undirected choice. If society is all that a people feels it must do, culture “is the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority” (Burckhardt).”
“Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case—like the socialist realism of Soviet art.”
“Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.”
“A large society will consist of a wide variety of games—though all somehow connected, inasmuch as they have a bearing on a final societal ranking. Schools are a species of finite play to the degree that they bestow ranked awards on those who win degrees from them. Those awards in turn qualify graduates for competition in still higher games—certain prestigious colleges, for example, and then certain professional schools beyond that, with a continuing sequence of higher games in each of the professions, and so forth.”
“The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society. The power of a society is determined by its victory over other societies in still larger finite games. Its most treasured memories are those of the heroes fallen in victorious battles with other societies. Heroes of lost battles are almost never memorialized. Foch has his monument, but not Petain; Lincoln, but not Jefferson Davis; Lenin, but not Trotsky.”
“Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—anywhere and at any time.”
Carse’s distinction between society and culture is very valuable for understanding some of the shifts we are seeing in the world today.
The internet has not helped grow what Carse would call “society,” but it has had an incredible effect on culture. It has grown and connected culture across the globe into a smaller number of mega-cultures.
Today, young people in Canada, the US, Australia, Spain, Russia, and Thailand can all follow the same creators, watch the same movies, and read the same books. Language still creates some divides between our cultures, but borders have lost almost all of their effect on restraining cultural transmission
In the past, the edges of societies matched closely with the edges of culture, but that is no longer the case. Culture extends accross every societal border and as a result of the forces, the propagate separated nation-state societies (nationalism, racism, religious discrimination) will slowly fade as they come under the attack of an incredibly strong global culture.
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