NO characteristics

"Culture" is known to be a difficult word. It is a deep and expressive linguistic "sign" (as the semioticians would say) that can be looked at from many angles. But at any rate, one of its meanings is that of a group of persons that has its own characteristic way of being, or of doing stuff.
Liberal modernity is a cultural system that persons live in. The culture they live in has been called the "developed world." But liberal modernity is a bit different in that it is not a culture wherein a group of persons look at things in some particular characteristic way that is held in common by all members and that comes as naturally to them as breathing. This is the sense of "culture" we briefly visit just above. And it works fairly well, right up until we get to this new thing, the "modern" thing. Here is a "culture" where things are looked at from many if not all angles. Any and all angles. Yet this is exactly what we need to understand in a more comprehensive fashion.

In the other cultures the entire group sees things in one particular way. Not so in the system most high-income persons live in today. Which is "the" characteristic way of their looking at things? Even the functional division into "left" and "right" is deceptive because the truth is that there are many ways of looking at things in modern urban developed culture, not two.

There is no reason to believe that human beings can live without culture. Culture, the anthropologist tells us, is universal. Everyone needs culture, and you cannot live without it. Everyone needs to have an ordered life. We see that "culture," is a particularly difficult word to define. But it is always there and this because it is an ordering system. At least up until these days, because now I am not so sure there is an ordering system. If there is, who is in charge of it? The hedge fund managers? Goldman Sachs? Or is culture itself in charge? There is something ominous about the way things are going, when everything comes down to economics --- yet this “economics” is about stock market and hedge fund and derivative. That seems ominous. What all human groups need has something to do with [sorry, anarchist communities] order. It is hard to see order coming from capitalism as it now operates --- consisting of a kind of a poker game, one wherein you need the main players to follow the rules.
But what kind of "cultural" rules are the rules of the stock market? Humans require some kind of order. Humans, like most animals, always live in some kind of society (sorry, "rugged individualists;" sorry, those who don’t like government).
This point brings us to the crux of what seems to be a looming problem with what has up until now been, for some folks, a successful system. As our modern, liberal, open, tolerant society has existed and as it continues forward, it shows a disturbing tendency towards being a system with no characteristics.