Part of the Multiculturalism Series
“No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive” – Mohandas Gandhi
So, what is culture?
What a question! How does one answer something so heavy, so nebulous, yet so omnipresent? If we look at the dictionary, we see it defined dryly as “the ideas, customs, and art of a particular society.”
But that feels insufficient. It’s like describing the ocean as “a lot of wet stuff.”
To understand the whole, we must isolate the parts. We need to look at the chemical composition of this molecule we call Culture. When we strip it down, we find three primary atoms:
- Expression: The art, music, and language. This is the Soul of a culture.
- Inquiry: The scientific and philosophic thought process; the pushing and probing of edges. This is the Mind of a culture.
- Order: The politics and religion. This is the Skeleton. The structure that dictates how Expression and Inquiry can be explored, or if they are allowed to be explored at all. It is the self-contained vessel within which culture flourishes, ages, and eventually, dissolves into history.
Expression
Let’s start with the loud part. The visible part.
If we view culture as a human body, Expression is the Soul. It is the Art, the Music, the Language, and the Rituals.
To me, this is the most seductive of the three atoms. You might respect a culture’s Order (their laws and stability), and you might admire their Inquiry (their scientific breakthroughs and philosophic musings), but you fall in love with their Expression. No one visits Paris to read the French Constitution; they go to walk the Louvre, to drink the wine, and to hear the language.
It begins with Language.
We often think of language merely as a tool for communication, a way to say “pass the salt.” But it is far more profound than that. Communication is the prerequisite for life. A flower communicates to a bee by way of bright colours that it is available for pollination. Trees use fungi to communicate dangers to one another. Human babies cry to alert their mothers to hunger or pain.
Expression is simply the human evolution of this biological necessity.
Take Ancient Greek, for example. It had at least four distinct words for “love”: Agape (unconditional love), Eros (sexual passion), Philia (friendship), and Storge (familial affection). A Greek speaker perceives the nuance of relationships instantly. A culture with only one word for “love” is painting with a broader brush.
In this way, Expression does not just describe reality; it forms the basis for our continued existence and ability to flourish.
If Language gives the tribe a voice, Art and Music are how they scream, “We are here.”
Whether it is Michelangelo, Dante, and Da Vinci defining the aesthetic of the Renaissance, or Hendrix and The Beatles shattering the norms of the 20th century, these individuals did not just exist within their culture; they actively altered its frequency.
Take Liverpool. Geographically, it is a port city in England. Culturally? It is the capital of a musical revolution. Because of The Beatles, Liverpool became a magnetic pole. It attracted millions of people – and their wallets, ideas, and customs – to its docks. As musicians flocked to Liverpool, the city absorbed them. It took on a new look, a new sound, and a new feel.
This is the power of Expression. It acts as a beacon. When a culture radiates strong art, it doesn’t just entertain; it creates a current. It pulls the outside world in. It allows a teenager in Tokyo to feel the same teenage angst as a kid in Seattle because they are listening to the same Nirvana track. Inquiry appeals to the brain, but Expression attacks the nervous system directly.
Finally, there is a haunting quality to this atom. It is the only one that truly survives.
Think about it. Order eventually collapses; empires fall, laws are forgotten, and borders are redrawn. Inquiry is eventually superseded; Newton corrects Aristotle, and Einstein corrects Newton. Old science becomes history.
But Expression is timeless.
We do not look at the Pyramids of Giza and say, “Well, that’s outdated technology.” We stand in awe. We do not read Homer’s The Iliad and think, “This is factually incorrect.” We weep at the tragedy. Art is the only element of culture that cannot be proven “wrong.” It is the message in the bottle that floats on the ocean long after the ship has sunk.
Inquiry
If Expression is the Soul of a culture, Inquiry is its Mind.
To me, this is the most important atom in the molecule. It is the explosive element – not destructive, but creative, like the Big Bang itself. It is the force that expands the universe of our understanding.
Two giants stand at the gateway of this expansion, shining like the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria: Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. The combination of what these men accomplished is not just remarkable; it is awe inspiring. They were the beacons that guided humanity out of the fog.
Let us discuss one of Galileo’s favourite tools: the telescope. In the 17th century, many would have turned their glass upwards to gaze at the glittering expanse of the night sky. But where others saw only twinkling lights, Galileo saw worlds. This physicist, mathematician, and astronomer laid the foundations for how we view our place in the vast cosmos.
He discovered four of Jupiter’s largest moons, now known as the Galilean Moons: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io.
Here, we must take a brief pause to admire the view, because history has a wonderful sense of humour. These moons were named after the consorts of Zeus. In 2011, NASA sent a probe to Jupiter. They named it Juno, the Roman name for Zeus’s wife. Millennia after the final poets penned the scandals of the gods, we sent the wife to check on her husband once again.
But back in Galileo’s time, these discoveries were no laughing matter. They challenged the assertion that all heavenly bodies orbited our planet. Even as Galileo dismantled the literal interpretation of the cosmos, he maintained that the Bible was a guide to the soul, not a textbook of astronomy. He believed scripture was often figurative. It took time, but the religious establishment eventually had to embrace his discoveries. The truth of the universe does not require a blessing to exist.
Galileo did not invent the inquiring mind; he inherited it. The “Mind” of culture had been waking up for thousands of years.
It is a common misconception that the West holds the monopoly on logic. Long before the Renaissance was even a dream, Confucius was taking the first steps towards a logical framework in China. He taught a process that prioritised humanity and nature over mysticism. “While you are not able to serve men,” he asked, “how can you serve their spirits?”
Then, a century later, a titan of thought emerged in Greece.
The Grand Master of logical thought. Socrates is almost a ghost in history; he wrote nothing down. Everything we know of this progressive philosopher arrives by virtue of his students, Plato and Xenophon. But his impact was seismic. He introduced the Socratic Method, a relentless process of deduction. It is the step-by-step guide to solving a mystery, the precursor to the Scientific Method we use today.
When we combine Socratic logic with Galilean observation, we get results that ripple through eternity.
We get Sir Isaac Newton.
These great luminaries of history stand on a grand stage. Centuries may pass, but the weight of Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery remains absolute. The discovery of something so fundamental, yet so invisible, reverberated through the ages.
We have all heard the myth: the apple bonking him on the head. But the reality is far more serene, a quiet moment of inquiry in a garden. From manuscripts written by his contemporary William Stukeley, the story is less slapstick and more contemplative. Stukeley wrote of a conversation with Newton, where the great thinker recalled the moment the notion of gravitation came to mind.
It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.
“Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,”
It was not the impact of the fruit that changed the world; it was the impact of the question.
Order
Arguably the most contentious of the elements. There is a reason the old adage warns us: “Never discuss religion or politics at the dinner table.”
But in our chemical analysis, we must.
This element plays a different role from its counterparts. If Expression is the gas that expands, and Inquiry is the spark that ignites, Order is the steel container that holds the reaction. Expression and Inquiry drive cultural evolution from the bottom up, spreading like pollen on the wind, fertilising new ideas wherever they land.
Order works from the top down. It is the structure, the containment, and often, the barrier.
History shows us that “Order” is rarely purely political or purely religious. It is usually a merger of the two.
Take Clovis I, the King of the Franks. He is often cited as the grandfather of Europe’s transition to Christianity. But this was not a conversion of the heart; it was a transaction of the battlefield.
According to Gregory of Tours, Clovis, purportedly a descendant of the gods himself, found his divine lineage failing him during the Battle of Tolbiac. He was losing against the Alamanni. In desperation, the man who claimed the blood of gods in his veins turned his back on his ancestors. He prayed first to Wodan (Odin), and when the tide did not turn, he hedged his bets. He prayed to the Christian God of his wife, Clotilde. He made a deal: Grant me victory, and I will be baptised.
He won the clash. The Raven God had been ousted by a King losing a fight.
This parallels the story of Constantine the Great nearly two centuries earlier. At the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he used the new faith to unify a fracturing empire. Constantine supposedly saw a cross in the sky and the words In Hoc Signo Vinces (“In this sign, you will conquer”).
These moments reveal the nature of the “Order” atom. It separates the rulers from the ruled. It provides a “Divine Right” to leadership. And unlike music or philosophy, which spread in uneven waves, Religion and Politics are heavy-handed. They have the deep pockets and the shiny trinkets required to disseminate ideas instantly across vast territories.
Religion is perhaps the most stark and authoritarian contributor to culture. While its influence may be diminishing in the face of scientific thought, it would be folly to discount what benefits it provided.
As civilisations entered their infancy, something was needed to control the enthusiastic growth of the “Ocean.” Religion sat on the throne, ready to govern.
It is important to note; religion did not invent morality. Humans had long understood that killing, stealing and betrayal destroyed the tribe. The social contract already existed. What religion did was ratify it. It took the unwritten rules of the community and carved them into stone. It transformed “don’t hurt your neighbour” from a polite suggestion into a “Divine Commandment.”
And with that elevation came a new, more powerful mechanism for compliance: Fear.
Many religions utilise myths designed to scare believers into obedience. In Ancient Greece, the image of the Gorgon, Medusa, was used as a weapon of social compliance. Soldiers painted her on shields to terrify enemies; parents used her legend to keep children away from dangerous places.
But even here, the story is not solid. Medusa’s myth has multiple origins. In some, she is born a monster, in others, she is a victim of Poseidon, punished by Athena. This highlights a crucial truth: even the fixed stories of Order are fluid. They change to fit the narrator.
The ultimate tool of Order, however, is the afterlife. Dante Alighieri, in his Divina Commedia, took the vague concept of Hell and calcified it. He structured the punishments and solidified the terrifying architecture of damnation. He took a fear and turned it into a concrete structure of Order; approximately 2500 years after the ancient Hebrews first wrote of Sheol, the early predecessor to Hell.
We tend to view ancient religions as monolithic pillars that stood unchanged for millennia. But if we brush away the sand, we see that the gods themselves were constantly moving.
Almost two thousand years before the Hebrews formalised the first real monotheism during their Babylonian Exile, shifting from a tribal belief to the worship of a singular, universal god, the sands were already shifting in Egypt.
The Egyptian pantheon was a mosaic, not a monolith. In Lower Egypt, they devoted themselves to the builder god, Ptah. To the south, in Upper Egypt, they followed the rising sun god, Ra.
As the dynasties evolved, so did the heavens. Ra took prominence over Ptah, but then the political landscape shifted again. The myths of Osiris and Horus rose to justify the lineage of the Pharaohs. The King became the living Horus, charged with maintaining Order on earth, while Ra continued the eternal battle against the serpent Apophis.
The roles were split. The bureaucracy of the gods expanded to mirror the bureaucracy of the state.
By the New Kingdom, we see the ultimate corporate merger of the divine: Amun-Ra. The gods fused to consolidate power, eventually even blending with Greek deities to form Greco-Roman hybrids.
This teaches us the final lesson of the “Order” atom: It presents itself as eternal, but it is always adapting to survive.
The Molecular Bond
So, we have our elements. We have the Soul (Expression), the Mind (Inquiry), and the Skeleton and Skin (Order).
But elements sitting in a row of jars do not make a molecule. Oxygen and Hydrogen do not make an ocean until they bond. To understand the world we see today, and the history that built it, we must look at how these atoms react when they are thrown into the together.
Every society in history is formed from these same three elements, but the ratios vary wildly. It is this variation that creates the “flavour” of a civilisation.
- High Order, Low Inquiry: This creates a stagnant but stable structure, like a monastery or a totalitarian regime. The skeleton is strong, but the mind is asleep.
- High Expression, High Inquiry: This creates a volatile, creative explosion, like ancient Athens or Florence during the Renaissance. The soul and mind are racing, often outpacing the skeleton’s ability to hold them.
- Balanced Order and Inquiry: This creates an Empire like Rome or Han China, where the skin is flexible enough to expand, but the mind is open enough to adopt new ideas.
Cultures Within Cultures
This chemical reaction explains the phenomenon of “cultures within cultures.” We often speak of subcultures, the goths, the tech-bros, the evangelicals, the artists, as if they are separate entities. But they are simply localised reactions within the greater solution.
Imagine a bucket of water. The whole bucket is the “National Culture.” But within that water, you can inject a stream of warm water (a new musical movement) or a drop of dye (a new religious sect).
Picture the bucket, filled with undiluted water. Then, add a few drops of red dye and watch as the dye moves through the water, snaking left and right, forward and back. That seems a good analogue for how culture and cultural units geographically migrate.
These subcultures are just groups of people who have bonded their atoms differently than the majority. A scientific community living within a religious nation has simply dialled up their “Inquiry” and dialled down their “Order.” They are floating in the same ocean, but their internal chemistry is different.
And this brings us to the edge of our map.
We often hear the phrase “Multiculturalism.” The idea that many distinct cultures can exist side-by-side, like marbles in a jar, touching but never mixing.
But looking at our atoms, we know this is impossible. Culture is not a solid; it is a fluid.
If you pour a cup of red water (one culture) into a bucket of blue water (another culture), you do not get multi coloured water. You get purple water. You get a new solution. The atoms of Expression, Inquiry, and Order will inevitably interact, swap, and bond. The music will blend, the food will fuse, and the gods will marry.
You cannot stop the chemistry. You can only watch the reaction unfold.
To understand this reaction, to see how the red water became blue, and then purple, and then black, we cannot just stare at the beaker. We must look at the flow. We must look at how these currents have swirled together over ten thousand years to create the tides of history.
We must look at the Timeline.
Nurable 