Culture

Culture may be defined as "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively."

But other definitions include:

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.

Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

It has been written that "Culture is communication, communication is culture" but because culture is the product of many individuals interacting in a variety of conditions over generations of time it has produced the Theory of Cultural Determinism.

Cultural Determinism idea that "ideas, meanings, beliefs and values people learn as members of a society determines the dominant and recessive elements of the human nature of the members of society. While People make choices as individuals they are also the product of what they learn generationally.

It is generally accepted that 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. But is that the only way culture is passed down to the next generation?

It is clear that attitudes, character, perspective, sensibility, and even general temperament of the people can be affected by social learning.

"Two independent medical sources have estimated that 20,000-23,000 incorrect transfers of babies occur each year in US hospitals. Incorrect transfers, such as bringing the baby to the wrong room for a medical procedure, are quickly corrected for the most part. Still, for every incorrect transfer, two families go home with the wrong child." Nancy L Segal Ph.D.

These discoveries of both twins and non twins has revealed an uncanny similarity in siblings raised by different families in correlation to attitudes, character, perspective, and sensibility toward music, art, social behaviors and even politics.

Twins separated at birth have have been seen to choose things as mundane as the same names, like the same foods and have the same opinions about a variety of things. They have shown more similarity between themselves than the families that raised them. So culture, especially in a closed or isolated society, may be passed down by genetics or even some sort of quantum communication or collective consciousness.

So while culture may be a way of life of a group or nation 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 there may also be a deeper connection than merely observation or taught behavior.

Certainly culture may result from symbolic communication including group skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated and transmitted from generation to generation in a society through its traditions, artifacts, customs, stories and institutions.

Culture may result in part from collective programming of the minds of the members of society to accept or reject, pursue or shun views and practices that distinguishes members of one people, nation or category of people from another.

Loss of culture, being a product of centuries of survival as a people, is irretrievable.

Today many cultures unique to the nations of Europe are facing extinction.

The two major causes are low birthrates and immigration.

What is causing low birthrates and immigration?

There are causes and root causes. Is the low birthrates and mass immigration we see in Europe and the middle east merely symptoms of a fundamental shift in societies and their values?