Credit: supportforstepdads.com.

As you know, I trained as a cultural historian and sociologist.

In spirituality I follow awareness and love, but my research link with the world is as a student of culture.

Interestingly, the tools of the historian and the sociologist hold less and less relevance for me over time. But the notion of culture is and will become more and more relevant.

We’ll soon enough be building a global culture and an understanding of culture itself is, I think, useful.

The discussion is a wee bit academic. Feel free to skip it and move on to the next article if it doesn’t set your toes tapping.

Culture is what lies at the heart of all the social sciences and what will concern us later as we build Nova Earth. Let me repeat my own definition of culture.

Culture, whether conceived of as a continuum or a class of phenomena, is an organization of ideas, manifest in act and artifact, though consisting of neither, by means of which we understand our world and take purposeful action.

I encountered resistance when I proposed that definition . Most scholars in 1979 defined culture in terms of behavior or artifacts.

Why is it ideas?

The precondition for the continuance of a culture is that it be transmissible. No transmission of the ideas behind an artifact or behavior pattern and someone finding it three hundred years from now might not know what to make of it.

We have to “pass the word along”; the receiver has to “get the message.” Culture must be transmitted via schools, the media, books, magazines, etc., to survive. And only ideas are capable of being transmitted.

Humans don’t navigate very much by instinct; we navigate mostly by culture. And culture is taught and transmitted from one generation to the next. If we grew up without being introduced to culture, especially language,  chances are we’d become, not merely an idiosyncratic child, but a basket case.

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I’m not as much attracted to the historical any more, but I am to the historic.

I’m amazed at my good fortune at being here covering the news at a time when extraterrestrials are landing, global poverty is about to be addressed, planetary management will change hands, Ascension will occur….

We live in historic times, as the cliche goes. Only it’s a true description of our times. And I want a ringside seat.

These events are monumental, outside the normal scope of anything we’re used to. Admittedly I’m no longer following accountability day by day, but I still don’t want to miss out on anything historic.

(Concluded in Part 2, tomorrow.)