Understanding Culture Helps Explain Why It Matters

André Malraux once wrote: “Culture is both the
heritage and the noblest possession of the world.”

Posted by Keith Tidman

What is culture? The answer is that culture is many things. ‘Culture is the sum of all forms of art, of love, and of thought’, as the French writer, André Malraux, defined the term. However, a little burrowing reveals that culture is even more than that. Culture expresses our way of life — from our heritage to our values and traditions. It defines us. It makes sense of the world. 

 

Culture measures the quality of life that society affords us, across sundry dimensions. It’s intended, through learning, experience, and discovery, to foster development and growth. Fundamentally, culture provides the means for members of a society to relate to and empathize with one another, and thereby to form a collective memory and, as importantly, to imagine a collective future to strive for.

 

Those ‘means’ promote an understanding of society’s rich assembly of norms and values: both shared and individual values, which provide the grist for our standards, beliefs, behaviours, and sense of belonging. Culture affords us a guide to socialisation. Culture is a living, anthropologic enterprise, meaning a story of human development and expression over the ages, which chronicles our mores, myths, stories, and narratives. And whatever culture chooses to value — intelligence, wisdom, creativity, relationships, valour, or other — gets rewarded.

 

Although ideas are at the core of culture, the most-visible and equally striking underpinning is physical constructs: cityscapes, statues, museums, monuments, places of worship, seats of government, boulevards, relics, artifacts, theatres, schools, archeological collections.

 

This durable, physical presence in our lives is every bit as key to self-identity, self-esteem, and representation of place as are the ideas-based standards we ascribe to everyday life. In the embodiment and vibrancy of those constructs we see us; in their design and purpose, they are mirrors on our humanity: a humanity that cuts across racial, ethnic, religious, social, and other demographic groups.

 

The culture that lives within us consists of the many core beliefs and customs that people hold close, remaining unchanged across generations. There’s a standard, values-based thread here that the group holds in high enough esteem to resist the corrosive effects of time. The result is a societal master plan for behavioural strategies. Such threads may be based in highly prized religious, historical, or moral traditions. 

 

Still other dogmas, however, don’t retain constancy; they become subject to critical reevaluation and negotiation, resulting in even deeply rooted ancestral practices being upended. Essentially, people contest and reassess what matters, especially as issues relate to values (abstract and concrete) and self-identity. The resulting changes in traditions and habits stem from discovery and learning, and take place either in sudden lurches or as part of a gentle progression. Either way, adaptation to this change is important to survival.

 

This inevitability and unpredictability of cultural change are underscored by the powerful influences of globalisation. Many factors combine to push global change: those that are economic, such as trade and business; those that are geopolitical, such as pacts and security and human rights; and those that accelerate change in technology, travel, and communications. These influences across porous national contours do not threaten cultural sameness per se, which is an occasional refrain, but do quicken the need for societies to adjust. 

As part of this global dynamic, culture’s instinct is to stabilise and routinise people’s lives, which reassures. Opinions, loyalties, apprehensions, ambitions, relationships, creeds, sense of self in time and place, and forms of idolatry become tested in the face of time, but they also comfort the mind. These amount to the collective social capital: the bedrock of what can rightly be called a community.

 

Language, too, is peculiarly adaptive to culture, a tool for varied expression: the reassuring yet unremarkable (everyday); the soaring and imaginative (creatively artistic); and the rigorously, demandingly precise (scientific and philosophic). In these regards, language is simultaneously adaptive to culture and adaptive of culture: a crucible on which the structure and usage of language remain pliant, to serve society’s bidding.

 

Accordingly, language is basic to framing our staple beliefs, values, and rituals — much of what matters to us, and helps to explain how culture enriches life. What we eat, what we wear, whom we marry, what music we listen to, what plays we attend, what locations we travel to, what we find humorous, what recreation we enjoy, what commemorations we observe — these and other ordinary lived experiences are the building blocks of cultural diversification.

 

Culture allows society to define its nature and ultimately prolong its wellbeing. Culture fills in the details of a larger shared reality about the world. We revere the multifaceted features of culture, all the while recognising that we must be prepared to reimagine and reform culture with the passage of time, as conditions shift. 

This evolutionary process brings vigour. To this extent, culture serves as the lifeblood of society.

 

Terrorists, Secret Services and Private Incomes

Sceptical reflections and conspiracy theories relating to the politics surrounding the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the recent massacre in Saint Denis

 

The shooting at the start of this year of the cartoonists at the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo has all the hallmarks of a CIA inspired brutal incident. November's massacre at Saint Denis looks much more like an attempt to replay, in the center of European social life, similar deadly outrages to those committed in towns and cities across the Middle East. Colin Kirk* teases out the links.

That most of the perpetrators of these atrocities were known to French secret services is now admitted. There are even several indications of what may have been secret service and police assistance to the Charlie Hebdo incident. Help apparently given to the get-away vehicle and discovery of the driving license dropped by the driver recalls some aspects of the slaughter of over 3000 people on the ninth of November 2001 in New York.

Charlie Hebdo was a satirical magazine before it got its current name after an atrocity in Northern France that resulted in over a couple of dozen deaths was reported in Paris as 28 dead in Northern France. It caused little stir compared with mourning for De Gaulle, who died a few days later. Un homme mort à Paris was the bold, black cover of what was thereafter called Charlie Hebdo.

President Charles De Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in his own image with draconian rights of state surveillance of its citizens that are not dissimilar to those afforded by the American Patriot Act. The State of Emergency currently in force allows police entry without warrant and arrest without charge. There really isn’t any further to go in state legal rights of citizen control, is there?

The CIA is known to have funded media to promote certain political messages in America, Britain and France in particular. On his own account, Stephen Spender, the editor of the British literary magazine Encounter, originally founded by the poet Stephen Spender, resigned  when he discovered the source of much of its 'well-wisher' donations.

Satirical media and those critical of the state were important to western democracies to demonstrate state toleration of dissent in comparison with actions of totalitarian states. Egalité and Fraternité were far less important to politicians than the sacred notion of Liberté.



Heads of State who linked arms with President Hollande to lead the Liberty March in Paris the Sunday following the Charlie Hebdo massacres included central African dictators not to mention Prime Minister Netanyahu. The simultaneous attack on a Jewish supermarket was the reason for his presence and for President Hollande’s ostentatious attendance with him at the central Paris synagogue that evening.

Anti-Semitism is the most serious taboo in France, Semites in this context being Jewish rather than Arabian Semites. Charlie Hebdo itself dismissed a journalist for writing a somewhat anti-Israeli article not long before the murders of some of its staff for drawing cartoons of Mohammad.

The murder of cartoonists horrified people who had adored Charlie Hebdo in its glory days, although it was, until the early January murders, a spent force. Je suis Charlie was displayed in posh shops. The t-shirts didn’t catch on. Here in the Normandy town where I live the Charlie Hebdo March was of elderly and middle aged lefties. And two weeks later it was all forgotten.

'Plantu', the cartoonist of Le Monde, the guy who always has a little mouse observer of the scene, made a film of international cartoonists (Caricaturistes, fantassins de la démocratie) that was released two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo killings. It was a brilliant film with world-wide coverage of cartoonists’ art, except from the sacred monarchies of Britain and Japan for some reason. Brilliant as it was it was not a box office success. Surely after the dreadful incident everyone would want to see it. But that was weeks ago, according to the local film projectionist when asked why such a small attendance in mid-February. Not here the spirited defence of the right to lampoon.

France is not unique in being media led. It certainly is media led. Flavour of the month has become flavour of the week as span of attention has contracted. The same tune is played in all the papers, on all the television channels, in almost all social gatherings; much as elsewhere world-wide.

Only the issues of immigration and Islamic terrorism are here to stay in France, as in the rest of Western Democracies or Civilisations or the International Community or any other feel-good appellation appropriate to smug arms manufacturing countries, which have caused mayhem in the Middle East and are beginning to do so in Africa. The CIA will see these issues retain top billing.

The CIA’s sundry billion dollar budget is not accounted for other than in the most general terms. The last 'almost serious' presentation to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was by Professor George Tenet, who himself had long been a member of it. President Clinton made him Director of Central Intelligence when they turned down his earlier choices. President George W. Bush kept him on as 'A charming diplomat liked by all '. Director Tenet admitted that hidden in the accounts somewhere are colossal expenditures on Hollywood films, computer war games, and subsidisation of all branches of the media on a grand scale. His wording was rather less transparent than here.

The question of the appropriate national reaction to atrocity has to take account of the reaction imposed by the media. Under and overlaying that reaction are ancient religious prejudices in a country where political prejudices have the psychic force of religious ones, not least because they tend to be interlinked. Bourgeois Catholic and Protestant Christian beliefs inform and are informed by the mainstream media feed, which is conformist and conservative. Since President Mitterrand’s second term most all politics in France have become conformist and conservative.

President Hollande, in his inaugural Presidential address, appeared to be about to break the mold: his only enemy was capitalism, which he said he was determined to release France from. He was quickly overcome by the same machinery that engulfed President Obama and will no doubt have the same success with Prime Minister Trudeau.  Shortly after, Trudeau informed Washington that Canadian planes were no longer available to the coalition, President Hollande authorized massive revenge air attacks on Islamic State (ISIS) for its agents’ revenge attacks on Saint Denis. When will we ever learn?

France, in the days of Freedom Fries, condemned the war on Iraq and subsequently fêted President Gadhafi, the key proponent, along with President Mandela, of Pan African government. These were when there were right wing governments in power. French oil interests are given as reason for government action whoever claims to lead the country. Right wing leaders have always tended to an independent line to Washington’s. In the Middle East French and Russian interests are at variance to those of the Anglo-Americans.

By and large the popular mood in France remains that of La Marseillaise - perhaps the most jingoistic and racist national anthem in the world. The French Third Republic, which led the world in consumerism, self-indulgence and free thought began with murder in 1870 of 20,000 communards and ended in 1945 with murder of a similar number of collaborators, all in Paris, and all without any legal process.

This is the country of the Dreyfus Affair, fire at the Charity Bazaar, loss of a million soldiers in the First World War, capitulation at the beginning of the second and loss of empire that was never as glorious as was made out. France has been a wounded beast ever since the Battle of Waterloo. Indeed, since Régis Debray published his Loués soient nos seigneurs; un education politique in 1996 there has been very little serious dissenting intellectual voice in France. He gives as explanation:

We are forced to witness the death throes in France of Marxist Socialists; a proud species that emerged in the nineteenth century from the crossing of the Revolution as myth with the Book as instrument but is now a technical anachronism, doomed to disappear in the global ecology of the videosphere.

These days, it seems to me that the Christianist and Christian Zionist control freaks are truly in control by means of the New York Council on Foreign Relations This private body links the State Department, Wall Street and every other power house in America. It was founded with $1000 donations of the 1000 richest Americans to control President Wilson, as honest broker at Versailles that produced the Peace Treaty signed 28 July 1919. He appeared to have achieved nothing for the United States except honest influence but appearances can be deceptive.

Alan Dulles the first Secretary of the Council went on to found the CIA, with brother John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, the family tinned fruit fortune escalated in value from millions to billions of dollars. In a democracy one looks after one’s own interests…and how!

As someone who loves France for its landscape and folkscape, probably in that order, and as someone able from personal experience to compare it with Britain and the United States, I think there’s little to choose between the three in terms of genuine dissenting analysis of the perilous state humanity is in.

---

Colin Kirk writes on health and philosophical issues, poetry and classical history, whilst growing lots of fruit and vegetables in a mediaeval walled garden, to prepare and cook for guests - what has been described as a kind of ' Pythagorean GuestHouse'. A characteristic recent publication is Death of Augustus his Conversion to Christ

What Would Happen If 3-D Printers Could 3-D Print Themselves?

Posted by Matthew Blakeway

“In the future, [the human species] will refuse to put themselves at the service of pirates. They will become what I call transhumans – who will give birth to a new order of abundance” ―Jacques Attali.

The French philosopher and economist Jacques Attali* predicted in the 1970s that the music industry would collapse. Within twenty years, he was basically proved right. If something is freely or cheaply replicable, then economic theory predicts that its value will trend towards zero. Ever since we were able to record our friends’ vinyl LPs on cassette, the ability of musicians to earn a living from recorded music was doomed – and so it turned out to be. Musicians today earn less and less from selling recorded music. I myself, as a writer, am acutely aware that it is getting harder to make a living, even in a world where people are reading more.

Now Attali is making the same predictions about manufactured goods. 3-D printing, while it still is a relatively new technology, opens the door to being able to scan a wide variety of objects into a 3-D printable file and e-mail it. Many manufactured products may become infinitely reproducible, their value trending towards zero. It has already been done, if only experimentally. We already have 3-D printed musical instruments, camera lenses, weapons – even 3-D printed refrigerators and cars. It isn’t inconceivable that we all will be able to upload 3-D printable files for such items which we can print at home and assemble Ikea-style. We could then tweet the link so that everybody else can have one.



At first glance, this all sounds as though it represents an impressive technological advancement. But actually, in an important sense, it is anti-technological – just as music streaming is anti-creative. The incentive to invent a better refrigerator or car is to make money. But if, as soon as you have done so, the value of the inventor’s work trends towards zero, then all hope that the inventor has of making money evaporates. So what is the point of innovation?

We like to think that people will continue to create and to innovate for the love of it – like inventing a new music genre. But I remember a time (not so long ago) where all waiters and bar tenders in New York City were aspiring actors, musicians, or artists. They could survive on three shifts a week and devote the rest of their time to their creative pursuits. But today, it takes six shifts to support subsistent living in a dingy bed-sit – so all those creatives have disappeared. I would like to think that they went to another, better place, but I see anecdotal evidence instead that many of them were forced to take menial office jobs.

If most forms of creative output (artistic or manufactured) will eventually become valueless in economic terms, then the economic constraints upon consumption will evaporate – as has already happened with music. But then so will all the manufacturing jobs that create that stuff, and so will the artists and inventors. In fact if we look at what is going up in value, not down, it is mostly what is not infinitely replicable, like land. The cost of education is currently going up, but this could sharply reverse through the rise of Internet education. Fossil fuels were becoming cheaper as we became more effective at extraction, but this already is understood to be a passing phase.

There is something else on planet earth that is infinitely and cheaply replicable – and that is humans. During my lifetime, the population of humans on this tiny planet has doubled. And if I survive into my eighties, it will treble. If something is freely and infinitely replicable, then in purely economic terms its value will trend towards zero. And that is precisely what is happening across the world.

The value of unskilled labour is trending towards subsistence wages – and in a globalised world, nations that value human rights are powerless to protect unskilled workers from the market forces of labour in countries far away, that have too many people doing jobs of declining worth. Real wages, even of American workers, have declined as their productivity has increased**. And this divergence of wages and productivity started in the 1970s, just as economists started preaching the value of globalisation. In the developed world, we have been trying to resist this trend, by pouring resources into education – attempting to ensure that we have no unskilled workers. But this post started by explaining why the value of the output of skilled creatives, too, is trending towards zero. This strategy only seems to defer the inevitable.

The logical conclusion is that, while people's labour will have little value, there will be few economic constraints on the consumption of products which cost little to produce. And while increased productivity should reduce the need to work, that is not the experience of the workers, who everywhere are working harder just to stand still. Even if – playing devil’s advocate – we argue that goods cost little to produce but that the cost of raw materials will offset this, it so happens that commodity prices are universally declining too.

We need to ask what this means for the future of humankind. But first, we need to ask what it means for the future of economic theory. It occurs to me that most economic theory doesn’t work in a world where there is an infinite supply of everything and therefore everything costs nothing. And if everything costs nothing, money no longer works as a means of allocating access to resources. This sort of argument isn’t trivial, and economists are currently debating different forms of the same thing: they worry about what happens when the conventional tools of economic management (among them, fiscal and monetary policy) simply stop having the effect that they used to have. Some governments have already tried negative interest rates after an interest rate of zero was found not to be low enough to stimulate growth and recovery from recession.

One way to escape this death spiral, where ultimately the planet may have billions of economic migrants, is to abandon the idea that all decision-making should revolve around money. We need to stop thinking about the monetary value of labour, and start thinking about the intrinsic and emotional value of a human life, and how this may be safeguarded and guaranteed. A good place to start is to consider how much consumption would optimise a human life. Bearing in mind that the advertising industry has been pummelling us with propaganda as to how consumption enhances our emotional wellbeing, it seems likely that we need a lot less consumption in reality than most of us think. Then we can start to consider how much consumption this planet can support. And then it becomes easy to compute how many humans we can fit on this planet before it bursts.

If economics is going to have any role in working this all out, then it is going to have to go cold turkey on its addiction to converting everything to monetary value before it can even think about it. Interestingly, we have seen powerful trends in this direction, reflected no less in the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

* Sam York. The Pop Star and the Prophet.bbc.com. 17 September 2015.

** Gillian White. Why the Gap Between Worker Pay and Productivity Is So Problematic. The Atlantic. 25 February 2015.