Culture has become a buzzword. It is the new Marxism, says historian Linda Colley: theorists use it to explain virtually everything. I am partial to looking at things - such as terrorism, history and politics - from a cultural point of view in this column. I regularly reduce half the globe to a handful of cultural cliches. My defence is that bite-sized opinions require a strategic boiling down of complexity. That is not a problem as long as it is done in a spirit of exploding myth and bringing insight. Culture, after all, is nothing if not a generalisation. It has always been present in our way of thinking, in things we do together and even in how we feel. But culture was so omnipresent that we did not notice it. The only ones that stood out vividly were cultures that were very far away, in time or place. Or both, as in the days when culture was the sole preserve of Harvard-educated anthropologists studying the initiation rights of the Papua New Guinean adolescent. Its relevance has since trickled down and pooled in best-sellers about culture shock and newspaper reports about ethnic minority subcultures that breed terrorists. The obvious reason the cultural angle has caught on is the multicultural pile-ups and hybridisation that characterise all world-class hubs. America's original huddled masses dropped their most visible customs, and even their languages, to fit in. Today's immigrants assert their cultural identity through dress, religious practices, customs, diet and so forth. So attention has turned to culture to explain differences. Not so long ago, they were accounted for by personality. But I would argue that differences in character are still more important. Being shy or outgoing distinguishes a person more than being Chinese or Japanese. You may argue that this is true only when one is Chinese in China or Japanese in Japan. But I disagree: personal traits are still paramount. They help determine how one responds to being a member of a cultural minority, how one handles cultural challenges or to what extent one identifies with aspects of the host culture. Cultural awareness is even rewriting the past. It is now standard procedure for historians - who once stuck to economic, military or political accounts - to come up with cultural explanations for past events. In politics, too, culture and especially cultural values have become a prominent debating point, mainly because of increases in immigration and terrorism. In the last US presidential election, 22 per cent of voters were persuaded that cultural values were an issue, according to a poll published in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, there were no great statistical differences between party members' views on cultural issues, and both major candidates shared all the same basic cultural values, says political scientist Morris Fiorina, author of Culture War? The Myth of a Polarised America. Similarly, half of the 10,000 Europeans surveyed in a recent study believed there were big differences in cultural values between EU countries. But the same survey showed that very few actually existed. The biggest gaps it found appeared along socio-demographic lines, not national or cultural ones: older, less educated people were more religious, for example, than young professionals. Behavioural contrasts - such as how people keep house or dressed - tended to distract them from their more fundamental agreements on social and economic policies. Still, the cultural perspective was and is necessary. Cultures are powerful; groups of people are not unblended conglomerations of individuals; and it is a poor collective story that is told solely in terms of who has the power, guns and money. But let's not go overboard. Jean Nicol looks at everyday issues from the point of view of a psychologist everydaypsychologist@yahoo.com