Culture is essentially a misnomer; it is a subverted expression or an undermined one by the standards of what it implies. Culture is synonymous with being civilized, when actually Culture, in the aim of its virtue, is a term for a long association with civilization and not civilization exactly. Culture, like sex, is a symptomatic word. You think sex, you think orgies, oils, handcuffs, fantasies; likewise, you think Culture, you think dance, the generic literati, page 3, Prem Chand and more ethnic jabber.
When you say or brood a thing as Cultured, advertently or inadvertently, you render some other elemental thing as unCultured. Theres no third concept in a dichotomy. A wall is a wall and a door a door; they cannot subsist in an exchange of application, and they become so correlative that they correspond as extremities. Culture and non-Culture, shall we call it, are natural extremities; were dependant on privileging one over the other. It is seldom a matter of choice , and rarely a matter of subjectivity. Culture is an explicit term; a wrong term, but a term nonetheless. Mind you, a term for collectivism and not individualism. Not me, but us. Let us consider a political facet: the British bested us by the means to an end of a very elusively simple theory Divide and rule. Weigh those words divide and rule, they comprise the whole potential of man. It is inherent even in our most complex natures to be divided and to be ruled, and men, as a species, encompass such a tendency to be divided and to be ruled because their sense of individuality is compromised. This tendency arises from a collective idea of self; it is not psychological, it is not philosophical it is merely demented. We do not have a wholesome and manifest definition of an identity. For us, it immediately becomes the baffled something that we secure from the rest of the world. The objective of Culture, but, is not to divide and rule but something comparatively more insidious to unite and disintegrate.
Man might be a constant social animal but he is foremost a cultural beast. Culture is discrete from society owes to the fact that it is the only unit symbolic of it. Chiefly, it is symbolic of its evils. You see, the text of uniting and disintegrating is contingent on rational boundaries. You compound man, disillusion him as a collective force and then, you begin defining him. We are men enslaved in catalogues, in brochures, plastered stiff on walls, we can be opened, skimmed through and put back on a rack. Culture is the ornate design on our fronts and the price tag on our backs. As declared earlier, Culture is a term, a term that insinuates collectivism. However, a term, by manner, is always a representative of something. If so, what does Culture stand for, what does it represent? If we were to seclude two men in a room one culturally advanced and another, culturally backward, they will inevitably be in a conflict of notions, of ideas, of something both, we and they have yet to determine. Culture is a backward and forward motion and no man contains it wholly, we, all of us, are trapped at some point of our desires.
The fault lies not in the capacity of man but in the obvious presence of his common variation Culture. Now, the erstwhile question what does Culture stand for? What does it represent? Verily, it stands for nothing; it is altogether indifferent to the safe concept of representing something. It just adds to the basic human values, and by values alone, a man can neither be more human or less human, or more qualified or less qualified to be so. We bear a sense of something when were competent enough to ignore it. Hence we have neither a sense of individuality nor a sense of identity, but we do have a fundamental talent for each of them. And that is what we stand for, what we represent, and that is also what we hold against Culture.
Assuming Culture is NOT a divisive force, then, a man standing on top of a building about to affect a fall is a moral equivalent of a man standing right below it. But assuming Culture IS a divisive force, then the two men are factually and thankfully morally displaced, and are in their positions of advantage and disadvantage not for the result of Culture but for the resolute state of its divisiveness.
Culture, semantically, evolves from the word cult, again, an offbeat divisive term. Culture, finally and irrefutably, is about a procession of boundaries not of manufacturing a surplus, but manipulating the existential ones. The fantastic quality of its divisiveness is something it picks up from its handling of a similar contagious human attribute. Culture, by all means, is and shall remain indicative of civilization and civilization, by no means, shall make ostensible a lucid, united concept of man.
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Author:: Tushar Jain
Keywords:: Philosophy, Culture, Style
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