Culture and Religion

Having visited Asia recently I've been thinking about the slippery idea of "culture", here are some thoughts on the matter.

Clearly the culture in places like Vietnam and Cambodia is different from the culture here in the UK although it's not difficult to see the similarities and overlaps, in fact when you interact with "normal people" these differences evaporate pretty quickly, particularly when faced with day to day human survival issues such as crossing the road or acquiring food and water. Thinking about this ephemeral thing we call culture naturally leads one to ponder the nature of our own culture, what is it, how would we describe it and what is it's purpose?

Many people would invoke religion at this point, i.e. we live in a "Christian culture", even uber atheist Richard Dawkins claims that he's a "cultural Christian" What he means by this is that his culture, i.e. the one that raised him, has been largely shaped by Christian dogmas and although he "doesn't believe a word of Christian claims" he still likes singing hymns, the architecture of medieval cathedrals and the emphasis of tolerance and liberalism in the modern Christian zeitgeist (as opposed to past horrors and atrocities). Of course things like art and music, i.e. the aesthetic side of culture are our attempts to represent the existential side of culture, for example in pre-history when culture was simply hunting and gathering then our aesthetic preoccupation was to paint the prey animals we hunted on cave walls.

So what is culture and how is it different from religion?

Culture seems to be the hard interface between existential and survival practices diversified by geographical separation (i.e. environment), i.e. how we organise our societies to do critical things like reproduce, build shelters, provide food, fight, wash, fashion clothes and so on. Religion on the other hand seems to be a mash up of the attempt to codify an existing culture, also with the added layer of human imagination of things "unseen" which add another (superfluous) layer to our real-world survival practices. Religion seems to attempt to provide supernatural reasons for natural, cultural practices. For example, we kill animals and eat their meat but religion might add that you mustn't eat meat on Fridays, only fish, because this makes "god" happy. Edicts like this have no survival value but give religion (and more importantly clergy) power over ordinary people's lives and therefore access to valuable resources. It also makes social primates like us feel warm and fuzzy, i.e. that we belong to and are valued by the tribe, however at the base of things religion simply brings artificial compulsion to culture rather than being a necessary part of it.

The evolutionary benefit of culture, and also religion, is obviously therefore to do with group cohesion, it's more likely any individual will survive better if the group stick together and collaborate in acting out survival tasks (especially conflict with other groups over resources) We even see this rule in many animal species, for example birds flock, wildebeest herd, insects swarm and fish shoal to increase the survival chances of the individual. Geography plays a critical part in this, the obvious fact is that culture changes over time as we learn better survival practices, communities that have no contact with each other diverge in their survival practices and therefore in their cultures too. Cultures also feels evolutionary pressure from the imaginary layer of religion, which causes divergence between geographically separate groups as it moulds itself over pre-existing religions and unforeseen survival pressures in parts of the world that are remote from the source of the religion. You can see this in Buddhism as it morphs from Myanmar through Thailand and Cambodia and up to Japan (many differing survival pressures across these differing geographical environments)

I think it's useful to separate religion from culture and the inability to do this seems to me to be a frequent source of conflict. It's valuable to understand pure culture, i.e. food, language, survival tasks, aesthetics etc. when you find yourself in the geographical location where that culture has evolved. Usually it makes obvious sense to eat foods that are easy to obtain, communicate using the local languages and to take heed of effective ways to avoid getting stung, bitten or otherwise consumed by local predators. The religion bit doesn't really add anything useful to this other than for intellectual curiosity. Understanding which fruits can be eaten and taste good in the Cambodian jungle enables better survival in that place, but understanding that the people there believe that they can commune with their ancestors using a stone shrine draped in colourful silk is of no practical use unless those same people are going to harm the unbeliever for not believing the same. Unfortunately violence is the main vector that religions use to spread and gain power (it's always been about having more subscribers than your competitors!) and this fact has served to blur the distinction between culture and religion over many centuries.

There are many thought experiments that we could do to clarify this distinction between culture and religion, for example do we think that there would be the same conflict and hatred between Israelis and Palestinians if those two groups were both atheistic. Their cultures would clearly be so similar, i.e. essentially Mediterranean, with food, cooking, language, clothing all evolving from similar roots. It's only the imaginary religious layers that are radically different (precipitated and perpetuated by ancient wars between geographically separated tribes, Europeans, Jews and Arabs).

On the one hand I'm pessimistic about our inability to separate culture from religion, especially in the Middle East, it seems as though the centuries of indoctrination that the people there have had into the Islamic cult has managed to blur the distinction to such an extent that people there find it impossible to accept that there's a difference. How much better things would be if the people that live in that part of the world recognised that they possess (or could) the same culture and have much more in common that is different. On the other hand I am optimistic, I witnessed in Vietnam and Cambodia the effect of technology in bringing people together, i.e. providing a common cultural stake in the ground. The cultural quanta of using WhatsApp (other social media platforms are available) to communicate is consistent the world over and the instant translation of different languages smooths out many potential misunderstandings and facilitates productive collaboration. Let's hope that the forces of cultural unity can evolve dominance quicker than the forces of cultural division, it seems to be going in the wrong direction currently.