two quick blurbs on culture. I wrote the 2d first but the 1st is punchier. 2d is sort of the background for the first.
culture is medicine, it’s engineering, law, social visions and longterm development projects, logistics, agriculture, dialect. it’s family and caring for the next generation. communal joy and shared hope, mourning and celebration. all attuned to specific, nontheoretical people.
None of us have that. To quote a friend, “we are all forced to live as a cheap imitation of the old English gentry.” Even fully English peasants and descendants are denied culture (and have been for centuries). Consider the Welsh-English relationship too.
it’s wild how culture has gone from a full set of practices, traditions, and knowledges used to navigate your people’s specific environment, ecosystem, and circumstances to just foods and dances
almost no one lives in a way terribly adapted to their ecosystem any more. half the people who live in places with winters dont even know how to handle snowy roads (i barely do). we have festivals, but few are tied to any common experience or speak to more than a subcommunity
the food and dance stuff are vestiges of this. but if knowledge were better distributed, i think things wouldnt be quite so ridiculous (eg, more engineers would build for their ecosystem instead of working from models developed in the mildest American/European climates)