Cultural Identity, Unfinished Humanity, and Culture's Moral Purpose

The Myth of Pure, Closed Societies

Due to globalization, it is now impossible to consider cultures as bounded or isolated entities. Cultural exchange is not a secondary phenomenon but rather integral to the core of cultural identity. Instead, this exchange is now substantive, to the extent that diverse cultural identities are currently formed from a selected combination of features of varied origin. This reality renders the idea of 'pure societies' a mere literary fantasy or a more or less radical political utopia, far removed from the deeply effective anthropological reality of our time.

The Unfinished Nature of Humanity

Nature and society define what is human, but they do not render it something finished or complete. Thus, humanity, precisely because it is unfinished, constantly feels the need to reflect on itself, to choose among possible conceptions of the human, or even to create new ways of interpreting it, thereby deciding on its own being.

Neither nature nor society definitively determines its form, for humanity is the being for whom the question "What is man?" can never cease to make sense or be considered definitively answered.

Culture Beyond Survival: Human Aspiration

If we reduce the notion of culture to its socio-anthropological concept—a set of rules and established patterns of behavior—we thereby make it a correlate of biological laws within the social sphere.

If, moreover, we insist that humanity is cultural by nature and emphasize the adaptive nature of culture itself, we foster a naturalist or biologist interpretation of culture as the primary mechanism through which humanity adapts to the environment and begins to control it.

If we stick exclusively to this, we let escape the fact that differential human activity in the world transcends the mere logic of survival. Namely, culture is not only an adaptive function, and human creativity does not end with the pragmatic, or merely cunning wits, skills, and trickery that bring benefits—schemes that can be found everywhere, both in the natural and the social. Instead, culture embodies the ideal aspiration towards what should be achieved, what each society considers good and a decent way of living.

In this sense, culture is uniquely human because, first of all, it offers humanity a chance to criticize reality experienced as unjust and unworthy, and a commitment to seek a better alternative. Culture assigns a moral value that cannot be reduced to a simple calculation of benefits, but is related to the ethical dignity we attach to the individual.