When most of us hear the word “culture,” we think of the symphony, the museum, the theater district, the restaurants we recommend to out-of-town friends. That is culture in the narrow sense — important, beautiful and worth defending. But in its broader sense, culture is both more ordinary and more powerful.
Culture is the shared operating system of a community. It is the unwritten rules enforced with raised eyebrows or warm smiles. It is the stories we tell about who belongs. It is the habits we reward, the behaviors we normalize, the tone we take in disagreement, the way we treat service workers, the way we drive, the way we handle conflict, the way we behave when no one is watching.
Writer David Brooks once described culture as the “moral ecology” in which we live. That ecology either strengthens human dignity or erodes it.
If that definition feels too broad to wrap your mind around, it’s because culture touches everything. Anthropologists describe it as shared meanings and norms — patterns of thinking and acting that harden into “common sense.” Over time, what is repeated becomes what is expected. What is expected becomes who we are.
Culture is something we produce. It is formed when we decide what to overlook and what to confront, what to praise and what to shrug at and whether we bring our better selves into public life or outsource decency to someone else.
I’ve heard many North Texans complain that “our culture is broken,” as if culture were a distant bureaucracy or a weather system rolling in from elsewhere. But culture is rarely imposed from above. We are the ones who give it form and reinforce it. We are, by nature, culture-creators.
The good news is this: If culture comes from us, then culture depends on us.
We often assume meaningful change happens first at the national level through popular movements and effective leadership. But culture is local before it is national. It is practiced face to face, learned by repetition and reinforced in small, visible acts.
When groups of people intentionally practice a higher standard of conduct in how they disagree, how they include, how they celebrate and how they care for shared space, they alter the lived experience of a place. They create proof that something better is possible.
What would that look like in Dallas? It would not begin with slogans.
Culture changes when three things align: telling a compelling story about who we are trying to become, engaging in repeatable practices that make that story tangible and encouraging, and reinforcing the behaviors that bring that story to its conclusion.
Imagine a city that treats dignity as a civic norm instead of a private virtue, a city that prioritizes hospitality, a city that elevates gratitude over grievance, a city that expects disagreement without dehumanization, a city that understands beauty as a public good, not a luxury.
That kind of civic culture cannot be manufactured by even the most efficient or well-meaning government, nor by any single institution. It would require alignment among schools, businesses, nonprofits, faith congregations, arts organizations and civic leaders reinforcing the same signals — that character counts, that self-mastery matters and that public life is worth tending.
The real contest for a community’s future is not fought over budgets and buildings, but over the moral ecology we create around one another. The battleground is what we normalize and what we reward, and the outcome will determine whether cynicism becomes the default tone of adulthood or optimism and goodwill regain their place in civil life.
Every generation faces the same question: Can society make an improvement, or are we destined to recycle the same failures with new branding?
The answer depends less on national headlines or exciting popular movements and more on whether ordinary people decide to take on the responsibility of being the culture-creators we really are.
Culture is a practice. And if enough of us practice what is higher — dignity, courage, restraint, gratitude, hospitality — the higher stops feeling exceptional. It becomes normal.
That’s how culture changes. And that’s how a city rises.
Kyle Ogden is president and CEO of the Thanks-Giving Foundation.