Culture

Culture is a system created by human activity comprising spiritual, organizational, and material items and expanding within the Earth's nature at the expense of this very nature. People mostly understand human culture in several ways: (1) as an acquired characteristic of human behavior, (2) as a spiritual culture, (3) as a better view of civilization, and (4) as a continuation or refinement of nature. These various understandings are supported by the original antique meaning of the Latin words colo, colere, which signified, approximately, the same as the current words till, educate, grow, cultivate. The understanding of culture as a spiritual culture, as an acquired feature of human behavior or as a cultivation of nature, becomes perplexing and hardly tenable in the confrontation with the current environmental situation. Culture should be rather understood evolutionally, as a system, that is, as a result of the Cultural Revolution, as an artificially constituted system within the biosphere. Cultural evolution, ignited by humans, is the other possible means of the new ontical (real) structure origination on the Earth, besides the natural, cosmic evolution.

Culture is then a human-created, artificial system with its own internal information—the spiritual culture, that is, human knowledge, opinions, convictions, values, and beliefs. Spiritual and material cultures belong one to another; they are two sides of the same open, nonlinear system of the regional or global culture. The relationship between the spiritual and material cultures is therefore analogous with the biological relationship between the genotype and phenotype in spite of the variant ontical character of cultural and live systems. Understanding culture as a system opposing nature and containing its own internal information and evolution makes it possible to distinguish not only the origins and characteristics of the current environmental crisis but also ways for the alleviation and resolution of this crisis. So far the cultural expansion within the biosphere has resulted in an ever-faster retreat of the original nature and a decrease in the original order of the Earth.

Essential dependence of culture upon nature is primarily determined by the fact that the cultural evolution within nature is generated by humans as a biologic species. Yet culture is dependent on nature and opposes nature and it is also comparatively young and time limited. Humans have not been on the Earth from its beginning and they will not be here until its end. Due to a biologic predisposition to an aggressive adaptive strategy, humans are the only universally active animal species that have managed to ignite another evolution on the Earth occupied with life: This was the cultural evolution—the competitor of the natural evolution. And this artificial evolution, structuring nature differently from the inside, has started not only the conspicuous human era but, unfortunately, also a critical period in the Earth's history. Human artifacts are “baked from the same flour” as natural structures. And since this imaginary flour (elements of the periodic table) has been embedded in live and inanimate structures of[Page 637]the Earth's surface by the natural evolution, the expansion of the cultural existence causes destruction and replacement of this natural existence—it causes a reduction in the natural order of the Earth, including a mass extinction of biologic species.

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