Culture Tower

Abstract

Humanity has a long and storied history of innovation and progress, however, one is also confronted with an unprecedented variety of survival and sustainable development issues, ranging from poverty to pollution, climate change, conflicts, food security, inequality, and so on. Although many efforts have been made in the last two decades, the sustainable development goals’ outcomes have been (very) modest, or even unsuccessful. Seeking proper solutions or approaches is thus now urgently needed to address the aforementioned concerns. Because culture is a group's shared opinions, values, and norms, it determines how we think, feel, and conduct ourselves, and it influences how we interact with each other and with the environment around us, many people believe that some of the contemporary human issues are attributed to culture. From this view, this short paper introduces and advocates a “culture tower” or “khucc tower”. To put it simply, the tower is built on the whole cognitive and working processes for human survival and evolution. The first/lowest level in this tower is knowledge (K), and the last/highest level is creativity/contribution (C). By thoughtfully learning and applying wisely the culture tower, one can develop a set of high-value culture systems, which ultimately help to transform the world, address humankind’s problems, and build a prosperous world.

Keywords: Culture pyramid, high-value culture, environmental culture, human survival, sustainable development