What You Do Is Who You Are

The Theology of Culture

Kabbalists believe that everything earthly and tangible is a microcosm or allegory of something more spiritual, more divine. It is with this hermeneutic in mind that I like to read business books—for all questions of human organization can be thought of as expressions of heavenly dilemma. “As above, so below.”

In What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben Horowitz offers lessons for “how to create your business culture.” Culture is not what you claim to believe or value, but what people do when you aren’t around. If you create a win-at-all-cost culture, there’s a good chance people will break the law and behave unethically, even though you never outright licensed it. Culture includes the externalities of what you esteem (and what you diminish), including the inevitable tendency of people (if left unchecked) to weaponize the culture.

An obvious, but still under-appreciated point is that people absorb culture through mimesis rather than through mission statements. A CEO can praise honesty, but for honesty to scale, the CEO must embody it (and make an example of executives who violate it). If the company is put at risk by honesty (telling the truth about the poor state of the business), the leader’s test is to choose it anyways. If the leader opts for the Straussian option, the culture can no longer be said to be honest, and the knock-on effects will reverberate, with every employee opting for what sounds good rather than what is the case.

“Culture is what you do when the boss is not there” is a great tagline for thinking about God’s culture in the Nietzschean age, in which it is claimed that “God is dead,” or if you prefer Buber’s terminology, “eclipsed.” In fact, the medieval idea of tzimtzum takes Nietzsche’s claim of divine absence and elevates it: God intentionally withdraws to stress test the culture. God wants to know what the world is when God isn’t looking at it. God wants to know how people will behave when they aren’t trying to curry favor.

One of the principles that Horowitz enjoins is “keep what works.” Don’t try to make a culture entirely new, but build on top of it. That seems to aptly characterize the way in which religious and moral systems are built on top of a recognition of human nature. Religion must work with evolution, otherwise we all die. Yet religion can’t simply be co-opted by it, otherwise it proves to be mere plaster on what remains fundamentally animalistic.

Horowitz argues for the importance of doing something shocking to ensure that the culture sticks and is memorable and impressionable. Kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden was clearly a shocking thing, so was asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and so were the 10 plagues. When read in the light of culture architecture, God’s behavior seems intended to leave an impression. The 10 commandments by themselves are not so dramatic, and some of them are even quite common-sensical, but the context in which they are given turns them into an event. Those events get commemorated year in and year out, through liturgy, through holidays, through ritual.

Durkheim and the sociologists treat religion as merely culture, as if that reduced religion to something anthropological. But you can also say the reverse: The Biblical God is well informed about anthropology and sociology and knows that telling people what is right and wrong is not enough. You have to make it stick. You have to make it stick when you are not there.

When Uber replaced Travis Kalanick with Dara Khosrowshahi, it added to its list of values “Do the right thing. Period.” But as Horowitz notes, that’s non-directive and vague. Anyone can claim to be doing the right thing. The Torah tells people “Be holy,” but it also scaffolds that command with specific laws, lest we remain in abstraction.

Judaism’s preference for action over intention (at least relative to Christianity) well grasps Horowitz’s claim that culture is something that we do, not something that we think or feel (although it includes these). Horowitz has written a secular defense of the mitzvah over and above faith. I would argue his ability to grasp that culture is what we do is itself downstream of a Biblical God and a prophetic tradition that have been modeling this for thousands of years. You will not find the word “values” anywhere in the Torah.