Cultural Programming with Impact VI: Humanity's Oldest Mechanism for Connection

One of the questions I encountered repeatedly when conceptualizing cultural engagement projects for vulnerable communities in Egypt was whether arts and culture were truly necessary. I was often told: “People need jobs, education, healthcare, and infrastructure first”. “Why bother about culture when there are more urgent priorities?”

For many years, I dedicated a significant part of my work and resources to challenging this assumption. In times of economic uncertainty, conflict, displacement, or social hardship, culture is often one of the first sectors to be perceived as a luxury and one of the first to suffer budget cuts. It is frequently viewed as something desirable, but not essential; something that can wait until more pressing needs have been addressed.

Yet despite hearing this argument countless times, my experience consistently pointed me in the opposite direction. The more I worked with communities facing adversity, the more I observed that engagement with arts and culture was not detached from the basic human needs but deeply connected to them. It provided people with meaning, connection, identity, hope, expression, and belonging; all of which are fundamental components of human well-being and resilience.

Let me break it down. What did many of us learn during our first introduction to psychology? We learned Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Traditionally, these needs are presented as a pyramid, beginning with physiological needs and safety, followed by belonging, esteem, and ultimately self-actualization. Yet when we examine cultural engagement through this lens, we begin to realize that arts and culture contribute to far more than the upper levels of this pyramid.

Cultural engagement creates spaces for belonging through shared experiences and collective identity. It fosters esteem through recognition, achievement, and self-expression. It supports self-actualization by enabling creativity, exploration, and personal growth. Even at times when physiological and safety needs are under threat, people continue to sing, tell stories, create art, perform rituals, and engage in cultural practices. This suggests that culture is not merely something human beings turn to after their needs have been fulfilled; rather, it is one of the mechanisms through which many of those needs are met (Maslow, 1968).

The same pattern emerges in Self-Determination Theory, one of the most influential contemporary theories of human motivation. Ryan and Deci (2017) argue that human well-being depends on the fulfillment of three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Cultural engagement supports autonomy by allowing individuals to express themselves and exercise creative choice. I am doing so now by writing this article. It develops competence through learning, mastery, and artistic practice. Most importantly, it nurtures relatedness by creating meaningful connections with others through shared experiences, participation, and collective expression. In many ways, cultural participation satisfies all three psychological needs simultaneously.

Similarly, Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach positions imagination, thought, emotional expression, play, affiliation, and participation in cultural life as essential human capabilities necessary for a flourishing life (Nussbaum, 2011). From this perspective, culture is not a luxury that enriches life once development has occurred; it is one of the conditions that make human development possible in the first place.

And yet, perhaps the most fascinating perspective comes from evolutionary theory. Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake argues that art-making is not an optional activity invented by civilized societies after survival had been secured. Rather, it is a universal human behaviour that emerged because it served adaptive functions in social bonding, communication, caregiving, learning, and collective survival (Dissanayake, 2008). One of her most powerful assertions is that "art is a necessity of human nature”. In other words, human beings did not create art because they had spare time after solving the challenges of survival. Human beings survived, in part, because they created art, stories, rituals, music, and shared cultural experiences that strengthened cooperation, transmitted knowledge, and fostered belonging.

Perhaps this is where psychology, human development, and evolution begin to converge. Whether we speak of needs, capabilities, resilience, well-being, or survival, the evidence increasingly points in the same direction: culture is not separate from human development. It is woven into the very fabric of what makes us human.

And this brings me back once again to Al-Fitra (الفطرة), the innate human nature. Looking at the growing body of research on human evolution, creativity, and culture, I find myself arriving at a deeper realization. Perhaps arts and culture are not simply activities that human beings enjoy once survival has been secured. Perhaps the impulse to create, express, gather, tell stories, make music, perform rituals, and participate in cultural life is itself part of our Fitra; one of the very mechanisms through which human beings evolved, survived, connected, and made sense of the world around them.

And here, I arrive at a very different conclusion. Perhaps the purpose of my research should no longer be to prove that culture is important. Psychology has already demonstrated its role in fulfilling human needs. Human development theories have highlighted its contribution to human flourishing. Evolutionary research increasingly points to its role in survival itself. The more intriguing question may therefore be: how did human beings ever come to believe that culture is not essential? At what point did we begin to separate culture from survival, expression from well-being, and creativity from human development? What happened that led us to view something so deeply embedded in our nature as a luxury rather than a necessity?

The answer lies in the way modern societies gradually came to define development itself. As industrialisation accelerated, value became increasingly associated with what could be measured, produced, quantified, and economically justified. Education became linked to employability, health to productivity, and success to economic growth. In such a framework, the intangible dimensions of human existence; meaning, beauty, creativity, imagination, spirituality, storytelling, and cultural participation, became more difficult to measure and therefore easier to overlook. Culture did not disappear from human life, but it slowly became positioned as something secondary to development rather than something intrinsic to it.

At the same time, many of the cultural practices that had historically been embedded in everyday life became institutionalised and professionalised. Storytelling moved from community gatherings to cultural venues. Music moved from collective participation to professional performance. Artistic expression increasingly became associated with artists, while the rest of society became audiences. Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing culture as something we all do, practice and produce, and started seeing it as something we consume. I see this is the greatest paradox of all. The more modern society advanced, the more we began to forget that culture was never merely an industry, a sector, or a leisure activity. It was one of the original languages through which human beings connected, learned, healed, cooperated, and understood themselves. In many ways, the challenge before us today may not be to make culture relevant again, but to remember that it never stopped being relevant in the first place.

And therfore, the magic lies now, in the fact that when people participate in artistic and cultural experiences, they are often doing much more than attending an event. They are engaging in one of humanity's oldest mechanisms for creating connection, meaning, belonging, and collective identity. And this brings us back to the role of cultural programming as far more than the organization of events. We have to understand that Cultural programmers are not merely curators of artistic experiences; they are facilitators of human connection and custodians of collective memory. Their role extends beyond presenting performances, exhibitions, and activities to creating the conditions through which communities can reconnect with dimensions of their humanity that modern life often overlooks.

That’s why the conversation around cultural heritage, particularly intangible cultural heritage, has become increasingly important globally. Today, societies are investing significant effort into documenting, safeguarding, and transmitting traditions, oral histories, rituals, craftsmanship, music, performing arts, social practices, and indigenous knowledge systems. The concern is not simply about preserving old customs for nostalgic reasons. Rather, there is a growing recognition that these cultural expressions contain accumulated knowledge about who we are, how we relate to one another, how communities build belonging, and how societies pass values and meaning across generations. As UNESCO (2003) reminds us, intangible cultural heritage is constantly recreated by communities in response to their environment and history, providing them with a sense of identity and continuity.

Seen through this lens, cultural programming is not only about producing new cultural experiences; it is also about creating a bridge between past, present, and future. It is about ensuring that the stories, practices, symbols, and forms of expression that helped human beings survive, cooperate, and flourish throughout history remain accessible to future generations. In doing so, cultural programmers are not preserving culture as a static artifact. They are keeping alive one of humanity's oldest and most essential tools for meaning-making, resilience, belonging, and collective evolution.

Our role is not to bring culture into people's lives, but to help people reconnect with something that was already there all along.

References:

Dissanayake, E. (2008). The arts after Darwin: Does art have an origin and adaptive function? In K. Zijlmans & W. van Damme (Eds.), World art studies: Exploring concepts and approaches (pp. 241–263). Valiz.

Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being (2nd ed.). Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.