The distinction between content and social dynamic of culture

CONTENT AND DYNAMIC OF CULTURE

How can I so coldly deny that religion and spirituality influence culture, although I have spiritual orientations myself?

That is because, as both a social scientist and a policy advisor, I give priority to looking at generally occurring dynamics or mechanisms in how humans interact, irrespective of the content they produce.

One such general dynamic creates what many call culture. But often we only look at the content of a specific culture or compare the content of different cultures. We then either ignore the dynamic that produces such cultures or mix content and social dynamic.

As a policy advisor, I acknowledge the attention that we pay to culture can be generated by our concern about a specific culture or a need we feel to change that culture.

Now, in order to achieve anything here, it is important to clearly understand the working of the social dynamic in itself, irrespective cultural content.

This cultural dynamic, as I have come to see it, consists of learning, internalizing, expressing and transferring commonalities in behaviors, that is, in feeling, thinking and acting, in a social entity such as a society or organization.

Like it is important to understand how the dynamic of the internal combustion engine makes cars run, for policy reasons it is helpful to clearly see the social dynamic that creates culture.

If we would want to change, say, certain behaviors, we will hopelessly fail if we focus on the surface and only see cultural content. We will be fight symptoms. We need to study how the learning, internalizing, expressing and transferring takes place and find ways to modify those processes.

This underlying social dynamic itself is distinct from religious, spiritual, rationalist, artistic, medical or any orientation that can fill the content of a culture. Of course, it is possible that I see or experience the underlying dynamic in a religious, spiritual, rationalist, artistic, medical or any other way, but then we are back at content again.

In other words, religion cannot exist without the social dynamic of learning, internalizing, expressing and transferring of common behaviors. But this social dynamic can very well exist without religion.