What is culture?

I'll start with the punchline. Here's my definition of culture:

Culture is the long-term result of the problems a human community observes and chooses to fix, the solutions the community tests for those problems, and ultimately which of those solutions the community makes habitual on the time scale of generations.

I'd like to make a few points about this definition right away:

1. The definition positions culture as observational and reactive, meaning that culture changes over time as a result of (a) collective and individual observation of problems, (b) collective and individual problem-solving, and (c) individual habit formation that is coherent across communities.
2. The definition does not restrict itself to just one kind of problem a community faces; in fact, it is a very expansive definition that could fit just about anything, like religion/theodicy, art, music, law, the economy, climate change, education, roads and infrastructure, housing, agriculture, cooking, planning for the future, outside aggressors and war, cosmology/cosmogeny, crime prevention, and entertainment, among many others.
3. I have chosen to use the words "problem" and "problem-solving", because I believe at a cognitive level we are constantly trying to resolve problems of some kind or another. Much of it is subconscious, but much rises to the level of conscious thought. Those problems could be prosaic, like, "how do I ensure this commercial deal I'm developing leaves me with the right kinds of protections from being cheated?", or they could be much more poetic, like, "what am I to make of the fact that once I wasn't, and then I was born and now I am?" Or they could be subconscious, like, "wall coming ... avoid." The solutions we develop and eventually habituate for these problems are the feedstock of culture.
4. This definition does not require anything more than a trial-and-error, empirical process to execute. In other words, because culture is engaged by the entire community, with multiple actors testing out multiple solutions, there's no explicit need for a centralized decision-maker to advance one solution over another (though we'll eventually discuss the absolute necessity of centralization as communities increase in size). Habituated solutions emerge best by quorum. Solutions by fiat are far harder to adopt and can lead to a wide range of new, unintended problems down the road. (Communication and dispersal of ideas is a key part of cultural health according to this definition.)
5. Because these solutions are habituated, they become an entrenched part of the system. Then when the world changes around the system (which always happens), the solutions of the past become the problems of the future. In fact, there is no cultural solution that, once habituated, doesn't become a new cultural problem. This is because existing cultural solutions are hard to displace. We are creatures of habit, and by forming a habit, we are in essence making our lives easier. There better be a pretty darn good reason to do something different.
6. Solutions derived from different sets of problems can end up in conflict. Indeed, it is the fact that habituated solutions would have to be broken that we end up in conflict all the time. Working through these conflicts (either peaceably or through violent means) is a massive part of the machinery that drives cultural change, as well as the principle reason that cultural changes are very difficult to predict (ask handicappers in Vegas).

There is so much more to be said about this. As I explore these concepts further on this blog, I will very likely discover the need for revision, but the last thing I want is for this to become a semantic argument about the nature of culture ... that would be a rabbit hole. There are a bazillion different definitions of culture. The one I've provided here is simply the most expansive one. I did this on purpose: from the clean, purist perspective I'm trying to develop here, the mechanics of changes to the law should be very similar to the mechanics of changes to crime prevention or modes of entertainment, or to the mechanics of changes to other complex human systems, so I don't need to specify too much. That's a convenience that lends a great deal of simplicity, which for now is a good thing. More on that shortly.

In the meantime, it is useful to do a quick survey of how culture is defined. Ifte Chaudhury, at Texas A&M, does a great job summarizing the many definitions (and classes of definitions). The closest to the one I've developed here is the following (and it's the first one listed):

Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

Frankly, I'm not too bothered by this definition, and in principle it is the closest to the one I provide above. But it's a bit floppy is in its over-specification of the kinds of things that can be "accumulated" by the group. Does technology not fit in this list? How about law? Or the way we do our plumbing in the US?

But my real gripe is that the "striving" is given such short shrift. It's as if the author is committed to describing the things that can be included in culture, without providing a mechanism for change. And it's this that I think is utterly missing from the discussion; without a theory of change, cultural mechanics are next to worthless in understanding human biology.

Here's more of the same, from the same website, each describing how to draw the circle around what is and isn't culture, but none taking a stab at the mechanics of change. The list tends to veer into what you might imagine is the archeologists definition of culture, i.e., a somewhat discrete sociological unit attributable to an antiquated civilization or people, like the Minoans:

• Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
• Culture is communication, communication is culture.
• Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
• A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
• Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
• Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
• Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
• Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

If you can see in these definitions a clear theory of cultural change, please let me know. I'm not so arrogant to think that because I can't see it, it doesn't exist, but I don't see it now.

In the next post, I'll share my thoughts on how cultural change occurs, and what about human biology drives that change.