What is valuable and why?

Jim Lacey at NRO, in a piece on the West's prospects for survival, makes the distinction between culture and civilization.  He says the rich mix of the former is what has made Europe and the Americas so vibrant, but that some of these cultures sprang from civilizations antithetical to the defining characteristics of our own: property rights, free speech, the view of women as fully human, etc.  He says that relativism results from a confusion of the terms "culture" and "civilization" and that, in the minds of those doing the confusing, the latter is no longer seen as worth defending.