Is there culture beyond yoghurt?

Our English word "culture" derives from the Latin cultus which means more or less "tilling, cultivating, tending". The very roots of civilization can be recognized as it was when humans first learned to systematically till and cultivate the soil, to farm, that they initiated what we today refer to as "history": the story, the narrative of where we as a species have been. That, of course, is the most general, all-encompassing view of the situation.

There are individual, isolated and particular histories as well. At the other extreme we have individual histories, which we no longer call such, but rather call biographies. Just about any geographical region that you can name, has its own, often oral history. And, since the late 17th century, we find the development of national histories as well, many of which are intertwined. The history of the United States in unthinkable without the history of Great Britain, and its history is tightly interwoven with that of the Portuguese, Spanish and French, all of which were greatly influenced by the history of Rome and Greece, and voila we've got the makings of Western Civilization.

These histories don't only describe what this or that person or this or that group have done, they also describe means of expression (statuary in Greece and Rome, painting in the Renaissance, music in the 18th and 19th century, just to intimate some readily recognizable motifs), rules of interaction (e.g., Roman law), and institutions (in the West, primarily the Church) which have left an indelible impression on how we do things, how we express and how we organize ourselves, and, not the least, what we believe.

When we stop to reflect upon such things, they come into much sharper relief than usual. Our everyday mode of interaction with them is on the contrary subliminal, unconscious, assumed, or simply taken-for-granted. Whatever it is that makes a culture, however, takes time, long periods of time. There is never just one thing that distinguishes one culture from another, that's for sure. They consist of an amalgamation of traditions, legacies, stories, works of art and language, and more that operates so far beneath the threshold of consciousness that we have difficulty saying what they are. And many of them sit so deep, so firm that we have trouble recognizing them even when they are specifically pointed out to us.

What appears to happen, though, when someone, like Mdme Thatcher, rips the heart of the economic-political-social-religious-cultural matrix is that the entire edifice collapses and we end up with an every-person-for-themselves situation: John grasping firm to the political, Joan to the cultural, Jane to the religious, and Jim to economic. We become like the blind men describing the elephant, as a tree (if all you can feel is a leg) or a snake (if you happen to be holding the trunk) or a rope (if you've got the tail). We've got all of the pieces but no keystone to hold it all together.