If you join a new group with a distinct culture, get to know the other members, and perform their practices, you will be unconsciously influenced by an invisible sociocultural force. This force modifies your unconscious emotional motivations and reactions through social psychological processes. Every functional group has a force like this, which operates like sociocultural gravity. It maintains the group’s orbital trajectory through sociocultural space by inculcating personal and communal habits.
New people who gravitate into the group are pulled along its orbit at first. They can’t help but resist it initially because they lack the habits it imparts. Through practice and over time, they become contributing members. Individual resistance transforms into communal persistence as their new habits contribute to the force’s strength and thereby boost the group’s integrity and ability.
The force operates both personally and socially simultaneously in a reciprocal social psychological feedback loop. Individuals in the group are continually impacted by group pressures, and group pressures are formed and reformed through individual actions. This dynamic is spatially unbounded. What individual group members do outside of shared group spaces can impact the group. If someone joins two new groups with contradictory pressures, then their habitus (their set of personal habits) may be divided in a way that restricts them from contributing as much as they potentially could to either group. Even what someone does alone reinforces habits that eventually impact group dynamics.
For example, if tomorrow I joined both a church and an atheist organization, my habitus will become split. In my free time alone, I’ll read Richard Dawkins one day and C.S. Lewis the next. I’ll be trying to adopt two opposing existential orbits, but the contradictions between them obstruct my ability to become a full member of either group. In other words, I can’t become fully habituated by either group’s sociocultural force and continue to resist both to some degree.
There are personal and communal habituses. The group’s habitus is composed of organizational structures and practices, communal norms, ideological codifications, and other group-level habits. The group’s force enculturates new members, modifying their existing personal habituses to become more like the group’s. The force isn’t just overt “peer pressure” because it primarily works unconsciously. It habituates new cognitive associations, emotional responses, and behavioral reactions over time. These form through the intentional performance of group practices, but also through the subtle background effects caused by interacting with existing group members’ personal habituses.
This is a detailed way of talking about a commonly understood phenomenon. We are impacted by the people who we choose to associate with. If we interact more with people in a particular cultural group, then that impact will be more structured and more intense. The force is more powerful.
The force transcends time. It created the past in the sense that it tied existing groups together and affected their histories. It influenced how new members were gained, how they integrated, how they changed the group’s habitus, and how they left the group (if applicable). However, it also modifies the probabilities of future events by inculcating habits. Habits change the future by prioritizing certain response patterns over others. How a group and its members respond to future events is largely determined by current habituses, which are partly inherited from the past and partly maintained through present action.
What is the name of this social psychological force? It is invisible and immaterial, personal and communal, past and future. Its nature is culturally relative because its effects are group-specific, but it’s also a universal social psychological process characteristic of all social groups.
It is impossible to name the force in a universally culturally acceptable way. Any given name will be burdened by connotations that some groups favor more than others. I habitually understand things in social psychological terms, so I want to call it “The Habituator.” However, others may habitually understand things in spiritual terms and want to call it “God.” Still, others will interpret it in astrological or mystical ways (“as above, so below”).
There’s an even deeper issue with naming it. Names specify, but the force is simultaneously universal and group-specific. If I call it “The Habituator,” then I’m privileging its universal aspect. Any group can habituate someone! However, if I call it “The Muslim God” or “The Libertarian Ethos,” then I’m privileging a specific instantiation of it for not everyone is part of a Muslim or Libertarian group. So not only will groups disagree about the name’s connotations, but they will also disagree about the name’s proper degree of generality or specificity.
If you ask me whether I believe in “God,” I will say that I’m agnostic. But I do believe in this force’s existence and impact. I think the social psychological evidence clearly demonstrates that it is working in every socialized individual and every group. I am actively working on figuring out how to engage with it more because I want to become more disciplined. I want my habitus to become more integrated and more useful for contending with life.
If I joined a church and started calling the force “God” while still understanding that I could access different manifestations of the force through habituation within different sociocultural group environments, would I be a true Christian? If I joined a mosque and did the same, would I be a true Muslim? I understand the force as a social psychological phenomenon, not an anthropomorphic entity. If I joined an atheist group and called it “The Force of Evolution,” would I be a true atheist? I believe in an invisible and immaterial force, after all.
The tension within all three cases is distinctly postmodern, meaning that it arises as a result of living in a multicultural world. It’s a tension between cultural specificity and multicultural generality. In order to communicate with the many culturally different people around us, we must translate our cultural specificities in a multiculturally understandable way. Cosmopolitanism demands that we expand our ability to gracefully navigate multicultural spaces, but personal discipline requires culturally specific commitments. I want to be able to talk to generally anyone about the force. At the same time, I want my life to become more regulated by a culturally specific habitus. Personal discipline is always culturally specific.
What do you call the force? What connotations does your name for it have? Is your name for it more group-specific or more universal? I challenge readers who have a group-specific understanding of it to find a universal name and vice versa. Maybe then it will be easier to talk about.