Chapter 8: Balancing Stability and Change: A Neo-Diffusionist Perspective on Cultural Dynamics of Socially Transformative Ideas

Cultural transformation of society abounds. In the same way that ideas of Protestantism, women’s suffrage, nationalism, or more generally, culture, have changed the ways in which members of society think and behave, new ideas are changing (and will continue to change) our own thoughts and behaviors. These are socially transformative ideas, ideas that have the potential to change society by virtue of being different to the status quo. In a sense, they describe a possible world in which members of a society perform a set of new actions that differ from what they do now. Clearly, if we wish to understand cultural transformation of society, we need to understand how socially transformative ideas transform society. At one level, the process seems self-evident: if members of a society adopt a socially transformative idea and perform the new set of associated actions, then society is transformed. However, even this makes clear that the impact of a particular socially transformative idea is far from certain; many will not be adopted widely enough within a society to transform it. One of the critical steps in the cultural transformation of society, then, is cultural transmission: the process by which a socially transformative idea is transmitted from one person to another. In this chapter, we seek to shed light on the social circumstances that support the transmission of socially transformative ideas, and hence the cultural transformation of society.