Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution (Best of Edge Series)

surprising moments make sense in retrospect, in the framework provided by the unsurprising moments.

The vast mass of routinely rational human behavior doesn’t make good novels, but it is just such humdrum rational narrative that provides the background pattern that permits us to make sense, retrospectively, of the intriguing vagaries we encounter, and to anticipate the complications that will arise when the trains of events they put in motion col

it’s the transaction between you and it, and this context, which creates the value.

Culture is a way of getting people to that point of understanding. The work of a lot of modern culture is to say to people: You’re making value.

A benefit by itself is not explanatory; a benefit in a vacuum is indeed a sort of mystery. Until it can be shown how the benefit actually redounds to enhance the replicative power of a replicator, it just sits there, alluring, perhaps, but incapable of explaining anything.

New cultural thinking isn’t like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable.

intentional stance: the strategy of analyzing the flux of events into agents and their (rational) actions and reactions. Such agents—people, in this case—do things for reasons, which can be predicted—up to a point—by cataloguing their reasons, their beliefs and desires, and calculating what, given those reasons, the most rational course of action f

people are cultural beings. They can’t help themselves.

Musician and innovator Brian Eno answers his own question—“What is cultural value and how does that come about?”—in “A Big Theory of Culture” (1997).