237. The container of culture

In the preceding item in this blog, on multiculturalism, I announced that I would untangle what is involved in culture.

Culture contains a lot. It refers to what is man-made, in contrast with nature. Cultural heritage includes architecture, art, music, literature, science, philosophy, etc. Culture in the anthropological sense is the set of habits, customs and rules people live by.  

Culture includes religion or other sources of spirituality. It includes language. And ideology, defined as ideas and ideals about the human being and its relation to society. That includes things like justice, equity, rule of law, separation of powers (or not), free speech (or not), separation of church and state (or not), democracy or authoritarianism, scope of markets and private enterprise, corruption (or not), inclination to trust, and so on.

Underlying all that are philosophical ideas, often implicit and tacit. This includes views on knowledge and truth, language and meaning, ethics and morality, relation between subject and the world, between individual and collective, orientation more towards ‘exit’ or ‘voice’, legalism or consensualism, and so on.

The different elements of culture seldom stand alone, and depend on each other. Culture is systemic. Presence or not of compassion is related to religion and ethics. Free markets are related to liberalism.

Culture is rooted in history, myths, literature and art. It is a product of history: religious contention, wars, political and technological revolutions, alliances, disasters, and so on. As a result it contains much narrative. But as I argued earlier in this blog (item 10), this does not mean that it has some essence distinct from any other culture. There is always more or less overlap.

However, against postmodern mixomania, one cannot arbitrarily mix elements from different cultures. Mix Christianity with the Islam? Utility ethics with virtue ethics? Individualism with collectivism? Patriarchy and matriarchy?

Given the long and yet far from complete list of features, it is clear that culture is not homogeneous. Within a culture, people do not equally share features. There may be different religions, and belonging to the same religion people can be more or less religious. There is, thankfully, opposition between different views on many features of religion. Within cultures one cannot arbitrarily mix elements either. That is what a culture of democracy is for.  

Cultural overlap between cultures arises from trade, communication, exchange, invasion, alliances, and refugees.

Intercultural differences are both a problem and an opportunity. A problem of misunderstanding and an opportunity of diversity that feeds intellectual and spiritual growth. Here, ‘cultural distance’ is similar to the ‘cognitive distance’ that I discussed in item 57 of this blog. Profiting from cultural difference requires some basis for viable interaction and communication.  

There is an essential vagueness, indeterminacy, variety in cultural categories. Without those there would be no basis for difference of views and meanings, needed for cultural development, and how boring would it be? Indeterminacy of meaning is needed for poetry and created by poetry. Imperfect as cultural similarities may be, they do provide some basis for making connections. Inter-cultural debate is the poetry of politics.   

Cultures feed a human lust for expansion, will to power, for manifesting oneself (‘conatus’), for feeling superior. Again ironically, this can arise from both a universalistic and a relativistic view of culture. The first is prone to yield a messianic drive from universalistic pretensions of one’s own culture, to ‘help’ other cultures to see the light. The second may arise from a sense of superiority that deserves to expand and replace, if necessary annihilate other cultures. Here, the apparent opposites meet.