ABSTRACT
Morality, ethics, and individuality are the main ideas of this section. Despite the diversity of topics and focuses, the authors in general make their individual attempts at making sense of how norms begin from individual explorations of life, and at one point, ideas start getting viral, almost epidemiological, like today’s memes that quickly and widely circulate social media, and become parts of the collective or cultural property of a people. Social movements play an instrumental role in the inculcating of new ideas into norms, but also in revolutionizing them—replacing the old ones with the new ones. Different authors in this section approach these issues from philosophical, political, and historical perspectives, offering a large and complex picture of how culture—at the levels of ideas, social behavior and institutions, as well as individual creative endeavor—evolves.
The question of ethics complicates things further. Ethics is a dimension that keeps coming back as ideas crystalized into norms, behavior gets institutionalized, and individual expressions canonized into arts. The personal does not entirely get erased by or disappear into the collective in the process of the birth of a culture. Instead, it persists, and ethics is part of the personal realm that always disrupts the collective, cultural process through self-interrogating processes which take place while changes are happening at the social and political levels.
