7 Million Shades of Cultural Reality

Culture is partly about categorization. Sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in fine ones. We fit in—or stand out—through our clothes, our jokes, our values, our ways of seeing. But culture is far more finely grained than our categories suggest.

Under ideal conditions, normal human vision can distinguish millions—often estimated between seven and ten million—different colors. We have no vocabulary for those gradations, and no memory precise enough to retain them, yet we experience them all the same.

Something similar happens in culture. “Red” is something we hold in common, but the reds themselves spill into the tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands. When we call a rose red or a sunset red, we are not seeing quite what anyone else sees, or even what we ourselves saw the last time.

We live in communities, so we are compelled to converge on something like red. But we live in our own heads, and there we register how different this red is from the last—how fashion, dance, manners, or belief let us share an experience that is still uniquely our own. An experience we do not fully share even with our past or future selves, much less with those around us.

Culture binds us by what we share, and by what we quietly agree not to notice, including how much we ourselves have changed.