What is Culture? Part Four: Conventions

The way of life of a culture is not an explicit set of beliefs held by the people living in it. It is much deeper than that. A person brought up in a culture learns its way of life the way he learns to speak in the language and with the accent of his family and peers. But a way of life is much broader than this. It involves a sense for how it is ap

Culture is a web of metaphors, which we use to filter the raw information of the world into a distillation of the communal relevance of individual yet shared experience. “Metaphors make connections which are not contained in the fabric of reality but created by our own associative powers,” Scruton argued.

Durkheim underscored the complexity of culture, as a “system” that defines a group of people, while also providing some elemental codes that collectively make up the system—shared beliefs (values and principles, a way of thinking), rituals (traditions, social norms), artifacts (symbols, clothes, decorations, tools), and, of course, language (dialec

Why? Because we adapt to what is deemed acceptable behavior for “people like us.” Therefore, we act according to what is “normal” for the tribe based upon the social facts that we have collectively established. This influence isn’t always overt, but its impact is substantial.

Culture is the unspoken set of rules that people in a group follow when interacting with one another. You act differently when you’re in a bar than when you’re at a family dinner. That’s because the rules that run the interactions between the different nodes in the networks have changed. Culture is the name for those rules.