On Differentiation

An opportunity explanation of subcultures.

Since we just covered opportunity theories, I thought I’d throw in this opportunity explanation of subcultures. I don’t claim its original, but I don’t recall seeing the logic laid out explicitly. If you think it’s worth repeating, I’d suggest checking the work of Harrison White or Peter Blau to see if they’ve said something similar but more sophisticated.

The interlinking of the modern world erases old cultural differences, blending peoples and causing the extinction of languages, dialects, and local traditions.

But there’s a countervailing trend in which the information age seems prone to spawning new subcultures. Name an interest, identity, or sexual kink— there’s a community of people dedicated to it.

This is made possible by population growth: Subcultures increases with population size.

This is a function of human diversity.

No human population is completely homogeneous, and members will vary in their proclivities. Some proclivities are common and are enshrined in mainstream culture. Some are weird.

All else equal, the more people, the more individuals who share the any given weird proclivity — niche interests, rare sex kinks, or whatever. Thus, the more likely it is that there’s enough people with any rare proclivity to catalyze a distinct subculture or identity around it.

For example: Let’s suppose 2 percent of a fairly isolated agrarian village of 500 people has a strong same-sex preference. That works out to 10 people, 5 for each sex, some of whom will be elderly or prepubescent. You’ll hardly get a gay scene from that. Contrast this with the modern city of millions, where a 2 percent same-sex preference can support gay bars or entire gay neighborhoods.

But it’s not just a matter of the size of the population in any geographic unit. It’s also the rate at which they interact, and the ease with which they form (or end) relationships, allowing for people with the rare trait to come into contact with and establish relations with one another.

This is encouraged by population density, since more people live in close physical proximity. But it’s also increased by any technology that facilitates travel and communication.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term dynamic density to refer to something like the rate of interactions in a society. Another, perhaps overlapping, variable is the rate and/or ease with which people can start and stop relationships — what sociologist Donald Black calls social fluidity. All else equal, including population size, subcultures vary directly with dynamic density and social fluidity.

Modern communication and travel bridge social space, making the creation of new relationships extremely easy. They increase social proximity, and thus dynamic density, even without increase in physical proximity. This allows easy mixing and sorting, encouraging social fluidity. It allows people with rare interests and kinks to come across their own kind, and to preferentially associate with them.

The confluence of growing population and technology-fueled social proximity and fluidity allows for rarer and rarer traits to reach a critical mass where there are enough individuals to form distinct subcultures with an argot, label, and so forth.

By allowing unprecedented degrees of interaction and fluidity across large populations, modernity allows for the formation of lifestyles and identities around a wide spectrum of rare proclivities. Gay neighborhoods were just the beginning, emerging as early as the late 1960s in the US (and perhaps earlier elsewhere). Later decades brought as more unusual subcultures.

In a 1972 paper, Donald Black and Maureen Mileski make a similar point, arguing that the diversity of social “territories” in urban areas increase the odds that “any given individual can and does deal with others who have like involvements.”

Emile Durkheim, following British sociologist Herbert Spencer, used dynamic density to explain another aspect of social differentiation: The division of labor.

But his explanation of that drew on Darwin’s principle of divergence and focused on the role of competition in driving specialization. Such a dynamic might play a role in subcultural differentiation as well, as people seek out new interests and identities to distinguish themselves for the purposes of social competition.

But even in the absence of such forces, increasing the size, dynamic density, and fluidity of the population will spawn subcultures just based on opportunity factors alone. Given a few assumptions about preferences (not everyone is the same, and like attracts like), these are a sufficient cause of cultural differentiation.