"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). Culture shapes us far more than we like to admit. It tells us what is normal, what is admirable and what is unthinkable, and it can change its mind with surprising speed.
These two stories about culture, retold in our own words, look at its power from two angles. The first is a famous psychology experiment showing how much our surroundings shape what we do. The second is the story of a landmark that the cultural elite once called a disgrace. Each ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- The Milgram Experiments: How Context Shapes What We Do
- The Eiffel Tower: "Monstrous" in 1887, Beloved Today
The Milgram Experiments: How Context Shapes What We Do
In 1961, a young assistant professor at Yale University, Stanley Milgram, set out to test something unsettling. How far would ordinary citizens go in obeying an order to hurt another human being? The answer became one of the best-known findings in the history of psychology, the Milgram experiment.
Members of the public were recruited and the experiments began. Two participants were introduced to each other. One was asked to play the role of "teacher" and the other the role of "learner". The learner was actually an actor hired by Milgram. He was strapped into a chair that appeared to be wired to an electric generator.
The teacher was told that the experiment would test the effect of punishment on learning. He was to ask the learner a series of questions, and every time the learner gave a wrong answer, he was to punish him with a jolt of electricity. The shocks started at 15 volts and went up with every mistake. In reality no shocks were given, but the teachers believed they were real.
To Milgram's astonishment, around 65 per cent of the participants in his best-known version of the study pushed the voltage past the warning label that read "Danger: Severe Shock" and all the way to the highest switch. All the while they could hear the "victim" groaning, then screaming in pain and begging to be let out. Experts had predicted that only a small group of people with psychopathic tendencies would go that far. Yet here were nearly two thirds of ordinary people, drawn from the population of New Haven, Connecticut, acting in a way that almost all of us would call cruel.
What do the experiments prove? Social psychologists have argued about that ever since. Some question whether they simply show people's willingness to obey authority blindly. After all, people disobey authority every day: they defy their parents, speed in their cars and ignore what their teachers tell them. Lee Ross of Stanford University and his colleague Richard Nisbett believe the experiments show how decisive context is for our behaviour. To disobey, participants had to step right outside the situation they were in and tell the experimenter that the whole experiment was wrong. That is very hard to do.
Ross and Nisbett suggest that people often do things because of where they are, not who they are. In one set of circumstances a person may act in a way that would be completely out of character in another. Our surroundings, including the culture we live in, have a powerful pull on what we treat as normal.
Takeaway: We like to think our values are entirely our own. Milgram suggests that the setting we are in, and the culture that surrounds us, quietly shapes far more of our behaviour than we realise. That is why Paul urges believers not to be squeezed into the world's mould but to be transformed from the inside (Romans 12:2). Which situations in your life make wrong things feel normal, and what would it take to step outside them?
Source: Reported in The Good Weekend magazine, 2 December 2000; background from published accounts of Stanley Milgram's obedience studies and Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (1991).
The Eiffel Tower: "Monstrous" in 1887, Beloved Today
The original illustration names Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, as a signatory. He had died in 1870; the signatory was his son, Alexandre Dumas fils.
The Eiffel Tower is one of the most recognisable landmarks on the planet. It was built as the grand entrance to the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, held to mark the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Today it welcomes millions of visitors every year and is a favourite spot for romantic proposals and once-in-a-lifetime photographs.
But when it was being built, the opposition was ferocious. In February 1887, just as construction was beginning, a group of leading artists, writers and architects published a protest on the front page of the newspaper Le Temps. Among the roughly forty signatories were the writer Guy de Maupassant, the composer Charles Gounod, the architect of the Paris Opera Charles Garnier, and the playwright Alexandre Dumas fils, son of the author of The Three Musketeers.
Writing as writers, painters, sculptors, architects and lovers of the beauty of Paris, they declared that they protested with all their strength and all their indignation, in the name of French taste and of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of the capital of what they called "the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."
The engineer behind the tower, Gustave Eiffel, pressed on. History has vindicated him. In 1887 he was roundly condemned by the cultural elite of the day. Today he is praised, and the tower that was supposed to stand for only twenty years has become the very symbol of Paris and of France.
His story shows that what matters is not the opinion others have of us and what we do. Those opinions will rise and fall with whatever happens to be culturally fashionable at the time. What matters is holding on to what we believe to be the values and wisdom of God.
Takeaway: Culture can call something monstrous one decade and beloved the next. If we build our lives on the approval of the cultural moment, we are building on sand. Jesus calls us to build on his words instead (Matthew 7:24 to 27). And Paul reminds us that he was not trying to win human approval but God's (Galatians 1:10). Whose approval are you building for?
Source: Background from the official Eiffel Tower website's account of the 1887 artists' protest.
Final thoughts
An experiment that showed how much our surroundings shape our choices, and a tower that went from "monstrous" to beloved within a lifetime. These stories about culture remind us that the crowd is a poor compass. It can lead ordinary people into cruelty, and it can mock what later generations treasure.
Where is the culture around you shaping you more than you realise, and where is God asking you to stand apart?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.