Part 7: Model Category: Shared Ideas

Consider: The amount of money Americans spend on diet foods; the tendency to isolate aged Americans; the styles of clothing which are most popular; the multimillion dollar cosmetic industry; the “fortieth-birthday crisis”;…

That a list—really just the beginning of a list—of ways of acting and thinking that stem from the belief that “It’s good to be young and beautiful.”

“It’s good to be young and beautiful” is a core shared idea, a value of American society—one of a dozen or so fundamental ideas which together underlie and motivate most of the day-to-day behavior of Americans. “It’s good to move up,” “Everybody ought to have the same rights,” and, “It’s good to plan for the future” are other core shared ideas of American society.

The important idea here is this: Within each society there a dozen or so shared ideas and values that, collectively, “explain” must of the really significant action of the members of that society. If we understand these shared ideas, we can understand most of what happens, and why.

Robert Redfield, in Human Nature and the Study of Society, said:

As each fresh effort is made to understand humanity “as it really is,” the thing turns out to be made of states of mind. And of these states of mind, the scheme of values of people are central and of most importance. It is this scheme of values which we must come to understand if we are to understand a man or a tribe or a nation.

A society’s shared ideas are woven into its social structure, its political and legal institutions, its economic patterns, its art, architecture, music, religion, humor—even into the structure of its language.

An understanding of Puritan or Spanish colonist premises, values and worldview explains how they dealt with the setting and natives they encountered, and the ways they coped with internal problems. The same holds for any historical period and for any of the many American groups and sub-cultures, then and now—Puritans and Spanish colonists, but also the Iroquois, Comanche, Pueblo, German Anabaptists, Italian immigrants, the Vietnamese boat people, or any of the many other groups that have played or are playing a part in American life.

We’ve said that dealing with complexity requires information-organizing tools, tools largely missing from typical American history textbooks. Of the four primary elements of our Model, “shared ideas” is probably the most important, the one that provides the greatest insight into historical situations, events, conflicts and change. (Chapters that follow this one look at relationships between the four elements.)