Culture

Art, fandom, and camera obsession are all culture

Culture is a core concept in metaculture, as one can imagine.

When used in this wiki, Culture is meant to include all of the primary influences, language, beliefs, traditions, art, ritual, religion, political beliefs, etc. that contribute to what makes any group of people unique.

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." -Marcus Garvey

Culture can be defined on many levels. Nations, cities, religions, political parties, corporations, music fans, sports teams--any group of people with something in common can create a common expression of culture.

See What links here for a list of pages that cover topics related to culture.

See Society for an index of pages related to how groups of humans behave.

Culture and metaculture

metaculture seeks to create a universal common culture based on a culturally neutral ethical framework and creation story. Not a monoculture that suppresses the unique and varied cultures of the world, but a common cultural language that allows for in-group identification despite different nationalities, religions, or other major cultural touchstones.

The postmodernism movement in philosophy popularized the concept of cultural relativism, which many have interpreted badly as a version of moral relativism that offers no independent judgement of ethics outside of local cultural norms. This straw man is naturally abhorrent to people with an innate understanding that morality comes from the brain and everyone has a similar one. It's also abhorrent to literalists who reject anything that doesn't conform with their own cultural canon, as well as rationalists who believe in a shared reality that is revealed through science. Don't even get Jordan Peterson started on it!

Postmodernism pisses off nearly everyone, so why is it so pervasive in academia? The reason for this is because it is the first stage of cognitive development that is truly pluralistic and inclusive. The need for a pluralistic worldview was compelling in the years following World War 2. Global communication and trade has caused cross-cultural interaction on a level never before seen. In order to prevent constant moral misunderstandings and the resulting conflicts, it was necessary to promote a philosophy that prioritized peaceful coexistence over empirical exactitude.

metaculture offers a universalist cognitive development perspective on culture that considers postmodern criticisms of scientific biases and priorities, while still acknowledging the increasingly accurate picture of our shared reality that the messy but persistent progress of the scientific method reveals. It uses the same approach to create a new metanarrative that avoids ideological rigidity. It is fully inclusive without being relativistic. It offers strong moral convictions without harsh moral judgement of differences that are ultimately stylistic and linguistic rather than functional.

When a deep understanding of human psychology and sociology are combined with a utilitarian ethic and universalist perspective, the result is a general theory of human behavior that allows for a wide range of cultural variation, while still acknowledging that there are lines which no amount of cultural conditioning will allow us to cross, and differences in the happiness outcomes that can be measured and considered as society evolves.

What is Culture and Why Does It Matter?

Cultural Attractors

An attractor in self-organizing, complex systems represents a set of states towards which these systems tend to evolve. Culture, being one of the highest-order complex systems the universe has ever produced, naturally exhibits many attractors. See cultural attractor theory on Wikipedia.

Beliefs, social structures, and other elements of culture that quickly spread globally once they are invented can be thought of as attractors. The progress of religion from animism to polytheism and then monotheism each represent attractors in the development of beliefs and cultural metanarrative. Science is an attractor. So are monarchy, democracy, capitalism, and communism.

There are also cases where similar rituals, beliefs, and traditions spring up in different cultures despite there being no direct contact between them, referred to as convergent cultural evolution. [1][2][3][4] These represent strong evidence for cultural attractor theory when the possibility of innateness is unlikely.

The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: An Agent-Based Model of Collective Perceptual Alignment

McKenna's views aren't always scientific, but this video shows how the concept of the attractor is powerful.

Terence McKenna - The Strange Attractor

Cultural Rumination

The concept of rumination in psychology describes how negative feedback loops in our thoughts can trap the mind and prevent us from taking actions that might actually solve our problems.

Culture is a reflection of the collective consciousness of its people. If a large number of people are trapped by anxiety and rumination, the macro-level behavior of the society will mirror this. The result is political gridlock. When individuals are unclear about the path forward, so is society. See self-similarity, fractals.

One of the things that can cause rumination is hyper-focus on problems instead of solutions. In the media, this is reflected in negativity bias and the way that criticism of society vastly outweighs proposed solutions.

metaculture offers a way to break the cultural rumination cycle by focusing on our common goals over the ideologies we have created to pursue them, and providing a framework for evidence-based decision making that can break the gridlock caused by competing subjective views of reality.

Culture Club

You must adopt the culture of the club in order to be a member of the in-group.

Culture Club - Karma Chameleon