Culture, as an ecosystem, exists bound by soft laws (forces, distinct objects, attributes, space), stemming from collective general tendencies of human minds (association, reason, desire) and their material conditions. Barring extreme circumstances, the most important factor to determine a given culture was its past state, and simple directional movements sped forwards (trends).
What counts as "culture"? Culture includes language, what logic is deemed acceptable, what values are instilled, technology, division of labor, social organisation and power structure, artistic language, symbolism, accepted behavior and most of everything in a humans living experience that is shared between people.
For the sake of analysis, I will focus two of the most powerful forces. Namely, pleasure and reason. Pleasure, I use vaguely to mean the range of experiences between love, fulfillment, comfort, happiness, joy, ecstacy, physical pleasure, temptation and all the other dopamine, oxytocin or seratonin assocated emotion. Reason, meanwhile, I will take to be constructive thought mostly limited to the prefrontal cortex, but more specifically, abstract and rational thinking about issues, without significant intetference from substances or emotional centers.
Historically, culture used to be bound to tradition. Tradition seen as What Was/Is/Will be. Increasingly, it is unbound and moving.
The principle cause of this liberation was culture, and the material conditions of the Enlightenment in Europe. After a long, regressive dark age in the continent, the excess development predicated on the feudalist model led to excess, while the aims of the elite increasingly emphasized knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of God or whatever. One could argue a number of causes, but it is worth mentioning they were self-compounding and mostly material, technological and finally cultural, not ethnic. Cultural ego loves to assume good aspects of ones own culture are indicative of the whole, and bad aspects of others, which is naive at best.
Knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of an abstract "good", is an exceedingly contagious idea in the right psycho-socio-cultural spaces. Necessarily higher on the ladder of needs is self-fulfillment, which would be the necessary level, along with identities around abstract truth and ability to make discovery.
Rapidly, it catalized into a new culture in it of itself. Born with barriers on what to and not to q
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.