Culture is humanity’s secret weapon*. It allows us to develop and retain adaptations many magnitudes quicker than genetic evolution. It has allowed us to survive and even prosper in nearly every land environment on the earth. Cultures change, they are changing all the time. However, possibly excepting catastrophic events, deep changes require more than a single lifetime.

I just used the word “culture” in the singular, but in reality, any larger collection of people has a multitude of cultures with many variations on a theme. In my father’s youth (early 20^th century), to say that someone was an Italian or a German or a Swede told you a lot about the person as they were deeply influenced by the culture of their roots (being largely first- or second-generation immigrants). It tells you truly little today.

Each geographic area (from large to small) usually has a dominant culture; those who are of that culture tend to have economic and social advantages over those who are not of it. To use a personal example, I live in both the USA and in Belgium. When I am in the USA, I have the advantage of being a part of the dominant white culture (the so called “white privilege”); when I am in Belgium, I am always an outsider (but less so than the immigrant Muslims), I do not fully understand all the subtle clues people give and my ideas are often listened to politely and then dismissed as coming from someone who does not fully understand the situation (in a parallel with the experience of many women, when my ideas are picked-up and repeated by a Belgian, they are considered seriously).

Culture is a major component in an individual’s success. None of us has a choice as to the culture we are born into and raised in. As we mature, we can choose to deny aspects of our culture and to adopt things from other cultures, but we are probably never fully free from those basic ideas we absorbed from infancy through young childhood just as we are never free from the bodily developmental aspects of the food we ate (or did not eat) and the diseases we suffered from.

* I know that certain animals have demonstrated aspects of culture, but that is not my topic.