perhaps we should take culture and include other aspects…
for example, morality…In my lifetime of 57 years, we have gone from
homosexuality being a sin and a crime to being accepted and legal…
we have gone from Jim crow laws (again in my lifetime) to the point where
as late as 1969? I believe, in certain states, a white person could not marry a
black person… it was against the law… yet, today we don’t even give
it a second thought… is this culture or is this morality… both, neither…
the problem really lies in being able to pin down this thing called “CULTURE”.
it is so deeply entrenched that we don’t even know what it means…
we cannot separate ourselves from our culture because we don’t even
know where one begins and the other ends…
culture does seem to me to be a series of assumptions that
people hold in common…what if… what if a society becomes
in “trouble” when we cannot agree on our assumptions…
perhaps this act of “alienation” we have all heard about, is really
just us suddenly not being able to trust our assumptions or we find
our assumptions to be wrong… and millions find their assumptions to
be challenged and we have a society full of “alienated” people…
I am old enough to remember the 60’s and many of the old
assumptions were found to be false and this gave rise to the
counter-culture of that era…
to be it in more concrete terms… we Americans have
had a sense for many decades that the government is
a positive thing and useful for us to have…
and we now have a large group of people who believe
otherwise that the government is negative and danger to
our existence and that government must be driven
out of existence… this is where we are now with the GOP
at war with the very government and attempting to dismantle
the very structure of government we have relied upon for decades…
our very assumptions have been attacked and we no longer have
shared common assumptions and this has created, in part,
the vicious attacks and counter attacks between the left,
which still trusts the government, we still make this assumption
and the right, which hates and is actively trying to dismantle
government… our shared assumptions no longer exist…
we are alienated from each other…
for a society or government or a culture to work, we must
have enough people to have those shared assumptions
to allow society/government/culture to work properly…
and we are a fractured society/culture because we no
longer have shared assumptions… the left and the right…
this is why we so often talk past each other, because we
are talking about different assumptions we have…
My apologies if my ramble has carried me a long way from
your original post but as idea’s come to me, I simply write and
I don’t worry about where my thoughts end up…which is quite
often very far from where I started…hopefully some
of this makes sense in context of your idea’s about culture…
Kropotkin