Capitalism, adopted as part of a consistent program to institutionalize private property, is not a “value-free” social arrangement. Adoption of such a program would immediately signify the elimination of public goods, which alone would create a culture radically unlike anything that has ever come before it. What will this new culture be like? Before its adoption, proponents of this new society are obligated to describe what’s in store.
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Culture is irreducibly defined as “shared values.” Using this definition, we can speak with validity about “cowboy culture,” about “the culture of Periclean Athens,” or about any other culture.
The first case is properly nebulous, in that it can signify anything from someone who earns his living as a cowboy, to someone ranching in Argentina, to someone steeped in the novels of Louis L’Amour, to someone who enjoys two-stepping at a honky-tonk, to name a few possibilities. If all of them had some shared set of values, probably it would be the set defined by the idea of the frontier. For each person claiming this culture in some sense, the values represented by the idea of the frontier would represent a wider or a smaller circle of influence upon his other values. The circle would be very wide for a practicing cowboy who is well-read in the idea of the frontier, with a family history of those who “savvy the cow”; the circle would be very small for the urban cowboy who dresses up for the honky-tonk on occasional weekends. These circles would variously overlap among those who shared the values – wide and nearly coterminous circles for some (say, Wyoming ranchers); wide and partially overlapping for others (say, between an American cowboy and the Argentinian gaucho); narrow and nearly coterminous (say, for friends who went honky-tonking on a regular schedule); etc. In this case, the radius varies from the self-conscious carrier of the culture who can define its underlying ideas (wide), to the dilettante who has a recreational interest in the culture and no interest at all in the ideas it may imply (narrow); and inclusion in the culture is in all events provisional and voluntary.
Plutarch relates a tale from the life of Pericles in which an old man in the agora in Athens followed the ruler around, “pelting him all the way with abuse and foul language.” Persisting in this even to the ruler’s doorstep that evening, Pericles calmly ordered a servant to take a lamp and see the old man home so that he didn’t fall and hurt himself. In what sense did the old man and Pericles share an Athenian culture? Despite their difference in wealth and manly qualities, surely they did. Both spoke Greek, both considered non-Greeks to be barbarians – βάρβαροι – both were free and not slaves, both held a fellow Greek to be valuable in himself and worthy of a respect greater than simple equality before the law. All of these qualities define a very wide circle of values with a great amount of shared overlap. In this case Athenian culture was widely shared in spite of the fact that, between these two, only Pericles could define its underlying ideas – as he did in the funeral oration; and inclusion in the culture was total and involuntary, although, because it was rooted in the language and ethnicity of a homogenous people, benignly so.