The Model of Culture
Why Every Culture Is Formed by the Models It Elevates
We do not merely live in a culture. We model one.
Culture is not merely a backdrop, a neutral context, or a shared set of ideas we passively inherit. Culture is a mimetic environment — a pattern of being shaped by the desires we imitate. And because desire is always mediated through others, every culture is formed and sustained by a dense network of models.
These models are not chosen. They are absorbed. We become who we are through them — by watching, copying, resisting, and adjusting. Culture forms us through the people, stories, habits, rituals, and institutions that capture our attention and shape what we come to want.
This is not abstract theory. Every cultural conflict is, at root, a battle over which models deserve authority — whose desires should be imitated, whose way of life should be admired, envied, mocked, or shamed.
We rarely ask: Where are we learning how to desire? We ask: What does this culture believe? But beliefs are secondary. They are downstream from desire. A culture is not what it says it values. A culture is what it teaches us to want.
If we want to understand a culture — or change it — we have to start with its models.
Cultural Formation Is Mimetic Saturation
A culture forms its people by saturating them with models. In cultures oriented toward Christ, these models are ordered, limited, and grounded in self-giving love. In broken cultures, the number and intensity of models increase while the coherence between them dissolves. Part of that brokenness is the leveling of all good hierarchy — what Shakespeare calls "degree." No model is better than any other, and there are fewer convincing models to tell us whom to imitate.
"Take but degree away, untune that string and hark, what discord follows! each thing meets in mere oppugnancy"
— William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene 3
This leads to mimetic confusion. People are pulled in contradictory directions, unable to synthesize the many selves they are asked to become. The result is often anxiety, resentment, or the drive to scapegoat whatever seems to stand in the way of self-realization.
Mimetic saturation doesn’t just produce stress. It destroys trust. When everyone is trying to model everyone else, and no one seems sure of their place, culture begins to fracture. Rivalry becomes the norm. Models become obstacles. Even the most intimate relationships are subtly consumed by competition.
This is not a side-effect of modern life. It is a natural result of what happens when cultures forget, or fail to realize in the first place, that they are mimetic.
The Need for Hierarchy — and Sacrifice
Every stable culture must answer two fundamental mimetic questions:
Whom should we imitate?
What should we do with rivalry?
Some cultures answer these questions with hierarchy and ritual sacrifice. Others try to erase hierarchy and deny the reality of rivalry altogether. Neither approach works perfectly. But the denial of mimetic structure — the refusal to name models, rivalry, and the costs of imitation — leads to chaos.
Violence is always nearby when culture fails to make peace with mimetic truth.
Christianity’s scandal — and its gift — is that it reveals this truth fully and then refuses to play by its rules. It names the scapegoat mechanism and unmasks its lie. There is much more to be said about it, but this unmasking makes it harder to unite around a common enemy and disrupts some of the foundational behaviors in human culture. Instead, it calls us to imitate the one who refused to be a rival. And it invites a culture that models self-sacrifice instead of blood sacrifice.
But such a culture must still be a culture of models. It cannot be built on the fantasy of the autonomous self.
The Imitated Life
We are formed by the lives we imitate — not just the content we consume, the schools we attend, or the laws we follow. Even theology is mimetic. So is virtue. So is sin.
If we want to renew culture, we must recover the truth that no one becomes anything alone. We are not self-made. We are model-formed. And culture is not just what we make. Culture is what makes us. But culture itself is the summation of models for a group of people.
A healthy culture — one shaped by Christ — names its models, orders them, and invites us to imitate those who are already imitating Him.
A broken culture lies about desire, denies the reality of imitation, and leaves us to compete with everyone and follow no one. Heaven forbid you admit to being a follower of someone!
We don’t just need better arguments or more sophisticated apologetics — though we shouldn’t do without them. We need better models.
And we need the courage and grace to say so.
Note: The spirit of the age — what it elevates, envies, and exiles — is the mimetic blueprint we are handed without knowing it. In future posts, we’ll explore how this spirit manifests, how it hides, and how we might unmask it without falling into rivalry ourselves.
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