Imagine you’re at a fancy New York fundraiser, and one of the jewel-encrusted Upper East Side ladies is telling you all about how much she loves “Culture.”
Automatically, you think of highbrow things like art museums, opera, Shakespeare, Miles Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, trips to visit friends in Positano and Hermès Birkin bags.
Yet the etymology of the word “culture” traces back to a much more earthy Latin word- “cultura”– the tilling of land, the act of preparing the soil for crops.
So these wealthy New York socialites and tractor drivers in Kansas actually have something in common. Who knew?
It’s actually not that far-fetched. Tilling land- preparing soil- and “culture” in the highbrow way we mostly use it today, have one very significant connection.
Roy W. Simonson wrote in the USDA Yearbook of Agriculture in 1957, “Be it deep or shallow, red or black, sand or clay, the soil is the link between the rock core of the earth and the living things on its surface. It is the foothold for the plants we grow. Therein lies the main reason for our interest in soils.”
Soil is the foothold for the plants we grow. And the culture of our society is the foothold for the ideas, the art, the products, the companies, symphonies, and revolutions we create.
There are certain kinds of plants that simply cannot grow in certain kinds of soils, period. Just not possible. And there are certain kinds of ideas that simply cannot succeed in certain kinds of cultures.
If you’re trying to plant a risky, rewarding, bold, innovative idea in a risk-averse, fear-driven, status-quo loving culture, it just won’t grow. It won’t go anywhere. It’ll be like a blueberry bush in high alkaline soil.
Similarly, if you have a difficult, fast-paced, high-stakes environment, it’ll prevent the growth of another certain kind of person. Just like how certain wines become better because of the harsh soil in which they grow.
Charles Kellogg, in The Soils That Support Us (1956), wrote that, “Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.”
So too with culture. It doesn’t just emerge one day, it’s the product of many influences over time- artists, engineers, entrepreneurs and other builders- working away for years, day-in-day out, piling up a mountain of accumulated trial and error.
But this does mean that it can be influenced. By powerful language. By small groups of committed people working together. By persistence. By design.
The daisies might take their sweet time, but as any good farmer will tell you with the right amendment at the right time, you can also green up a field overnight.
It will take time to see the full fruits of your labor, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start changing the chemistry now. With the right language. The right symbol. The right intervention at exactly the right moment. The question is are you still sitting by hoping for it to happen or are you ready to start tilling.
