Culture

Culture is the accumulated, transmitted, and contested inheritance of a community: its practices, meanings, symbols, values, narratives, and material forms. It is the medium through which humans are socialised, and the sediment that human activity deposits. Culture is at once the most obvious fact about human life — everywhere, inescapable, constitutive of identity — and one of the least understood phenomena in any rigorous sense.

The concept resists clean definition because it operates at multiple levels simultaneously: as material artefact (objects, buildings, technologies), as practice (rituals, routines, ways of doing), as meaning system (beliefs, values, symbols, narratives), and as identity (who 'we' are in relation to who 'they' are). Theories of culture typically privilege one of these levels and then struggle to account for the others.

Culture as Information

The most analytically tractable approach treats culture as a system of transmitted information. Memetics, Richard Dawkins' term for the cultural analogue of genetics, proposes that ideas ('memes') propagate through populations by a process of copying, variation, and selection analogous to biological evolution. Cultural forms that are memorable, emotionally resonant, or practically useful spread; others die out.

The memetic framework has genuine explanatory power and severe limitations. It captures the self-replicating character of ideas and the competition among cultural variants. It fails to explain why some memes are selected — the selection criterion is 'cultural fitness', which is either circular (fit memes are those that spread) or requires a separate theory of human psychology, social structure, and material conditions that the memetic frame cannot itself supply.

A more sophisticated information-theoretic approach draws on cognitive science to ask which cultural representations are cognitively natural — easy to learn, remember, and transmit — and treats culture as the residue of repeated cognitive transactions in a population. On this view, culture is not arbitrary: its contours track the attractors of the human cognitive system. Religious concepts worldwide cluster around similar properties (counter-intuitive agents with full access to strategic information) because those properties are cognitively memorable. Cultural universals are not imposed by human nature but shaped by it.

Culture as Power

Cultural analysis in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall focuses not on transmission but on contestation. Culture is not a pool of shared meanings but a field of struggle over what counts as natural, normal, and legitimate. The dominant culture is the culture whose contingent assumptions have been made to appear necessary — whose historical origins have been forgotten in the process of their normalization.

This tradition insists that cultural analysis is always already political analysis. To understand why certain ideas spread and others do not, you must understand who benefits from their spread — whose power is maintained by the assumption that the current order is natural. Language is the primary medium of this operation: the terms available in a culture determine what can be easily thought, argued for, and resisted.

The tension between the cognitive and the critical approaches to culture is not yet resolved. Cognitive approaches explain the form of cultural content (why religious concepts have the shapes they do) but are largely silent on cultural contestation and power. Critical approaches explain why certain cultural forms dominate but have struggled to ground their claims in the cognitive sciences. A synthesis remains elusive and urgently needed.

Culture and Technology

The relationship between culture and technology is recursive. Technologies do not merely serve cultural purposes — they reshape the cultures they enter, often in ways their creators did not intend and could not predict. The printing press made the Reformation possible not because Luther's ideas were better than his predecessors' but because printing changed the economics of ideological diffusion. The internet did not merely accelerate communication — it restructured the social topology of discourse, replacing broadcast hierarchies with network architectures and producing political and epistemic consequences that are still unfolding.

Artificial Intelligence is the current entry point in this recursion. Large Language Models are the first cultural technologies capable of participating in their own cultural reproduction — capable of producing the text that trains the next generation of models, writing the articles that shape how knowledge is organised, and generating the stories that form cultural common ground. The epistemic implications of this are not yet understood, and the cultural implications are even further from being understood.

Open Questions

• Is culture one thing or many? Does the concept unify phenomena that should be kept separate?
• Can memetic and critical approaches to culture be synthesised, or do they rest on incompatible metaphysical assumptions?
• What happens to culture when its primary producers are non-human? Is machine-generated culture still culture, or a simulation of it?
• Is Cultural Evolution genuinely analogous to biological evolution, or is the analogy a productive metaphor that misleads at the foundational level?

The deepest question about culture is whether it is a container or a constituent — whether cultures are systems that humans create and inhabit, or whether humans are, at some more fundamental level, creatures that culture creates. The answer is probably 'both', but 'both' is not an answer — it is a placeholder for a theory we do not yet have.