Culture as we perceive it is dead and this time we are going to leave it in the past. It seems to me that it probably died on August 5, 1858. That was the day that Cyrus West Field ,the force behind the first transatlantic telegraph cable completed a practical transatlantic cable. Culture in its many forms depicts an us vs. them scenario and it focuses on location and locality. This was motivated by the differences in people from different locations. The internet and instant communications have ended those differences. We are not really very different. Homo-sapiens seem to be the same every where and the short sighted and simplistic view that we are better than them is eventually going to go the way institutionalized chauvinism went.
Culture as in excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities does not make sense in a world where everyone has access to the same knowledge, it is simply a bourgeoisie way of looking at the world that is mostly motivated by ignorance and insecurity. There are no excellent tastes, there are individual preferences and given enough knowledge everyone prefers the practical preference.
Culture is also defined as an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning. Knowledge is the same everywhere no matter how its codified. People everywhere want to make the same choices, often for the same reasons.
Culture as a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group ended when Nationalism died. Nations as many people have recently noticed are an inadequate way to solve modern problems. Patriotism is meaningless if you spend most of your time on social networks and consume products from all over the world. Your Nation is not important to you any more, it might have been important to your parents but now its just another form of ignorant unnecessary discrimination. Local issues are now global issues unless you are so dumb as to believe that the rest of the world exists so that you can exist.
Nationalism is still a popular way of looking at the world because most people are pessimistic about our common destiny. Nationalism in all its forms is the last hold out in the war to preserve culture. A war that is doomed to fail because human progress does not move at anybody’s time table. The progress that is in our future will not happen where we want it.
Culture is dead and we are all going to be better for it. We all begun as one group that was different from all the other apes in Africa. It has taken over a thousand centuries for us to populate the planet. It will take us less than a century to populate the solar system and ultimately someday the galaxy will have homo sapiens in every corner of its expanse. That is our destiny and that is why culture had to die, it has served its purpose and it was slowing us down.
According to both genetic and fossil evidence, archaic Homo sapiens evolved to anatomically modern humans solely in Africa, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch leaving Africa by 60,000 years ago and over time replacing earlier human populations such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. –see Wikipedia
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate")[1] is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.[2] However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:
- excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities
- an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
- the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.
When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.
In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.
 | Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. |
 | The Devil himself had probably re-designed Hell in the light of information he had gained from observing airport layouts. |
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