Page 27 - Cultures and Organizations

12 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

guage and shared habits. Your first task would be to develop an embryonic
common language and some shared rules for behavior, cooperation, and
leadership. Role divisions would emerge between young and old, men and

women. Conflicts would arise and somehow be handled. Whose responsi-
bility would it be whether two people mate? Who would take care of the
sick, the dead, and the children born on the island?
The point of this example is to show that no group can escape culture.
Creating shared rules, even if they are never written down, is a precon-
dition for group survival. This pioneer group of thirty people united at
random will have to create a new culture. The particulars of that culture
will largely depend on chance, inheriting from existing values, particularly
those of the most prominent group members. However, once the culture
is set, and supposing children are born into the group, that culture will
reproduce itself.

Values and the Moral Circle

From 1940 to 1945, during World War II, Germany occupied the Neth-
erlands. In April 1945, German troops withdrew in disorder, confi scating
many bicycles from the Dutch population. In April 2009, the Parish Coun-
cil of the Saint-Catharina church in the Dutch town of Nijkerk received a
letter from a former German soldier who, on his fl ight to Germany from
the advancing Canadians, had taken a bike that was parked in front of the
church. The letter’s author wished to make amends and asked the Parish
Council to trace the owner or his heirs, in order to refund the injured party
for the damage. 8
It is perplexing that human beings possess magnificent skills of refl ec-

tion, empathy, and communication but are nonetheless capable of waging

intergroup conflicts on massive scales over just about anything. Why is

intergroup conflict still with us if it is so obviously destructive? Appar-
ently, we do not use the same moral rules for members of our group as we
do for others. But who is “our group”? This turns out to be a key question
for any group, and from childhood on we learn who are members of our
group and who are not, as well as what that means. People draw a mental
line around those whom they consider to be their group. Only members of
the moral circle thus delineated have full rights and full obligations. 9
The German soldier in our story has probably spent long years revisit-

ing his war experiences. In his old age he has redefined himself as belong-
ing to the same moral circle as the churchgoer whose bicycle he took