Culture

I have been meaning to share my thoughts about religion, culture and such. Then, I stumbled on this beautiful post I came across on culture and its nuances. Couldn't have expressed it better myself. The stories cited here bring out the essence of this word beautifully.
I think this word is used loosely and out of context many a time. Culture is such a multi-layered and composite concept, you cannot tie it down to any single attribute like religion, geography, ethnicity. It encompasses all these and yet retains the core essentials/features of a society. Just like how it is not uncommon for a Christian in India to celebrate Diwali. Just like how turkey is a symbol of Thanksgiving for people of any ethnicity, religion living in the US.

I like to think of it as the state-machine of a society, or a neural network of the collective brain of the people making it. Something which evolves over time, reacts to the current conditions (inputs - food, religion, language, climate) by way of imbibing some of them and transitioning to a different state. In this process, the external agents themselves undergo transformation making this input-feedback cycle go on. But these changes take time, should take time. A stable society is one where these transitions happen over reasonably long time and once a new state is attained, the likelihood of transitioning to a previous state is minimal.
Can this state machine ever reset? Well, technically it could. It could unlearn all its transformations and become a closed network. This is tantamount to amnesia of the society. An example that comes to my mind is - when fundamentalists get to the helm of affairs driving the society to such a state where heretofore (learned) values are no more relevant. When such transitions happen often, it results in an unstable network/unstable society.