Encouraging - Culture

Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality – what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, un-important, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain instructions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible.

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World, (Oxford University Press, NY, NY: 2010), 41-42.