The Security Functions of Cultural Systems

N THE parlous situations of our time, the fact that life is under the best of circumstances often a dangerous business is especially obvious. Yet continued existence, either on the individual or the social level, is only possible if some defenses are available whereby the individual and the group may confront the dangers which threaten them. Otherwise, either disorganization or destruction inevitably occurs in both the group and the individual. Is it possible to formulate these problems scientifically so that reliable generalizations may be made and so that specific situations may be manipulated in the interests of mankind in general, or of individual men and groups? This article is offered as a contribution to these ends. We shall consider these matters only on the social level and shall not here deal primarily with problems of neurotic fears and anxieties held idiosyncratically by individuals. For the normal individual ini any society the hazards of life are phrased for him by his culture, and the defenses against them ("what to do about it") are provided by cultural patterns he is supposed to be able to learn and to perform. A culture is here considered on the empirical level to be a more or less systematic organization of patterned, socially shared, learned behavior, i.e., habits common to members of a group. Such group habits are called customs, and they may be classified as (1) overt customs of action, (2) overt customs which are representational or symbolic in function, and (3) non-overt or "mental" customs, such as belief systems, thought patterns, underlying premises, fantasies, and the like, common to the members of a given group or society. Since all customs are acquired through learning processes, it follows that they can be manipulated, planned, changed, eliminated, modified, etc., by proper applications of psycho-cultural principles governing such processes.1 With respect to dangers, each culture is rather like an insurance company, it figures the threats and provides certain assurance that said threats may be avoided or neutralized if certain prescribed patterns are followed. To put it more abstractly, each culture may be viewed as a system which balances threats and defenses. The balance, however, in any given case may be "even," or it may be "tipped" in favor of either threat or defense. Furthermore, the balance may be either stable or precarious.2 It is understood that "a cultural system" may belong to a whole society, or we may consider subcultural systems governing the overt and mental behavior of smaller or more specialized groups than a total society-groups or social organizations such as an armed force, a business organization, a political party, and so on. A threat is any circumstance or object which a given culture defines as potentially punishing, i.e., as capable of inflicting pain, frustration of goalsatisfaction, or deprivation of positive satisfactions and rewards. In following the definitions of their culture, members of a group of human beings thus see several specific threats which they regard as the enemies of goals and values as defined in their "way of thinking," i.e., in their cultural system. From the psychological point of view the perception of such alleged threats arouses anxiety unless or until what are believed to be reliable measures are available and are put into practice to reduce or eliminate the threats in question. We have asserted that for normal (non-neurotic and non-psychotic) members of a social group threats are defined by the culture. Several corollaries must be stated: (1) Certain threats recognized in a given culture may be empirically "real," i.e., if not counteracted they actually will result in punishment for the members of the group. (2) Certain other threats as defined by a given cultural system may be non-empirical, i.e., so far as can be objectively determined the objects or circumstances identified as threats have no actual potentiality of physically changing the situation into a punishing state of affairs. It must be remem-