Kingdom Principles

Kingdom Concept #8

Every nation also develops its own customs . Customs derive from a nation’s shared values. A custom is a customary way of doing something, a behavioral pattern that is not only commonly accepted but also expected. Overall, customs generally are consistent throughout a nation, although there are many regional variations. Quite often a nation’s customs are so distinctive that they become a point of identification for that nation, such as certain traditional manners of dress or kinds of foods. Finally, there are social norms . These are similar to customs but have greater force and authority within society. Social norms are standards of speech, thought, and behavior that are accepted by the wide majority of the people as right and proper. Violate a custom and you may be thought eccentric; violate a social norm and you risk being ostracized. All of these together—land, language, laws, symbols, constitu tion, moral code, shared values, customs, and social norms—com prise what we call culture . WHAT IS CULTURE? So what is culture specifically? First of all, culture is the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties by education, expert care, and training . In other words, culture is the developing of a peo ple’s intellectual capacities and moral awareness through a combina tion of formal instruction and informal modeling. Parents and society teach children the elements of the culture, and as the chil dren learn and internalize those cultural elements, they begin to live them. Secondly, culture is the enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training . Simply stated, we all come to think like the environment we grow up in. Our intellectual interaction with our environment literally produces a way of think ing in us that becomes our way of life, and so we become trained in

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