José's Essays on Culture and Ethics

The meaning of culture | Culture and nothing but culture | Ethics

These essays are a part of a book of mine entitled "The Possible Argentina - The Challenge" that is ready to be published here sometime around the end of this year.

The desirable Argentina, as the desirable Latin America, or the desirable world, are very easy to draw up and to write about.

In this book I try to leave my experience and advice to our society from the cultural point of view. I think that it is easy to complain about what difficulties we have and why things are not as desirable as we want. This challenge is the main point throughout all of the chapters: Culture as a universal subject where no theme is left out of it.

A sampling of some: Academies, universities, museums and the media as culture´s columns and main support of a civilized society in our time; education, politics, ethics, the rescue of truth, cultural reflections about the war, fame and prestige, and cultural differences.

It is one thing WHAT we want to do and another we want to be, both as individuals and as a society, and the real challenge is HOW we can attain those ideals.

The adventures of today´s entrepreneurs shows us that nothing that we want to get will be for free and without our effort, creating a new sense of a team versus individuals.

My critisism is not to be accepted as the actual normal way of complaining about culture by trying to appear as a smiling author to create an easy way for applause. This book is devoted to future generations, to my children and grandchildren, to rescue common sense, and not mourning for what we are because of what we have been through consuming all that our ancestors found pathological, as a fun way to create dreams of an easy way of life.

That was the instrument of Antonio Gramsci, the cultural leader of European Communism, to change common sense through the content of the media, inserting pathology as a funny media program for radio and TV. So, the main thing to propose is not to complain about what Gramsci and his fellows did to insert false ideas to change common sense, but to be better than him, and through correct values of universal culture, rescue common sense, using today's challenge to express ideas without boring the audience. If Gramsci's ideas were in funny packages, ours have to be in even funnier packages.

To be a better society is our real duty as parents and citizens, and as Pope John Paul II said: "Culture is the only solution to the main problems of our day".

So here I am, and I will continue to write and talk about these topics, as my way of contributing to better ways of mutual understanding.

Now that I´m beyond any possible individual appetite for honors, I think that leaving this way of thinking through writings, lectures, and this book, will be the heritage to leave to my family and those who can take these opinions not as the entire truth to fullfill, but as topics to be discussed in order to find the way to a better quality of life.

Cheers
José

The meaning of culture | Culture and nothing but culture | Ethics

The meaning of culture

Culture is a world with everything in it. It does not just mean art and music. Everything in culture and all it's themes can be an exchange of experience if we take the time to talk about it from the viewpoint of culture. No one can attack a concept or point of view when we accept it simply as showing a part of someone's culture that we are discussing.

If there are differences of opinions we can share them with each other. It should be a challenge to try and bring these differences together or find a way to see something we may ignore. Things that we ignore because of a preconception of what we think, not knowing what the truth is, or just having a part of it and not realizing we only have just part of it and not the whole story.

This is the challenge for all of us to understand others in the world and to rescue the common sense that we all share.

I think that those of us who have lived through life, had experiences big or small, good or bad, one or many, should pass them on to younger people. We do this to help them see that we need to find a better way for all people to learn to live together. It is a real challenge to find the things we have in common instead of what makes us different. This is our chance to work together for all our children to show them that it IS possible to have an exchange of the cultural potential of all people but that we all belong to the same universe.

When we visit a museum we have the various facts of history, art, science, etc. left by our ancestors to judge them by and compare with us now. I think that working for culture and the exchange of ideas will now be our chance to live in our own museum that future generations will judge us by...what we did during our short time alive on Earth.

The meaning of culture | Culture and nothing but culture | Ethics

Culture and nothing but culture

I think that the old meaning of financial supporters of culture, which we call "mecenas", means those who give just for the pleasure of giving resources for cultural activities. This has been replaced with those who want to know exactly what the programs, activities, projections and results are that their contributions will achieve.

In other words: "If you want my support you'll have to explain to me the projects not only in theory but in facts, the present and in the future. Then I will decide if you and your program fits with my feelings and if it merits my effort to decide for your proposal over another".

All of this should be kept in mind when we talk about culture and what the word means. A cultural activity should not just depend on an analysis of whether it is economical. There should be thoughts given to what is involved economically and the financial resources needed, but we should demand a clear chance for it to work properly and get the best results for the community it represents.

That is why I said that now is the time to show the merits of culture, not to beg to a level of society that throughout the world seems to think that the world of culture is something useless and only for social purposes.

On the other hand I am for the re-evaluation of all kinds of cultural affairs, and when I mean culture, I want it to be all kinds of subjects and involve all culture, because, as Pope John Paul II said to the United Nations Assembly a few years ago: "Culture is the only solution for the problems of mankind".

So I can only add: Culture, just culture and nothing but culture.

The meaning of culture | Culture and nothing but culture | Ethics

Ethics

Society today exhibits a concern, a little guilty by the way, on the topic of ethics.

Meetings, national and international conferences, seminars and individuals focus on the topic with the intent of establishing coded norms that might allow a way to sanction all individual or collective behavior that can be defined as ethics, a lack of or a transgression of ethics.

Have we reached such a low in our appreciation and forgetfulness of our values that we now think the solution is to establish a code of ethics?

I sincerely believe that ethics doesn't recognize limits, codes, positive laws, empty excuses or indulging liars.

Ethics only recognizes man's conscientiousness of well-being, in thoughts, actions and projections, and makes one aware that, based on nothing else other than the natural right (which goes back to man's appearance on the earth), it marks the differences between what is right and what is wrong and what is good and what is bad.

Transmitted as part of the education parents give to their children from the cradle, continued from generation to generation, it is based on a sense of honor, of the responsibility for my duties toward myself and toward those who surround me, be they an integral part of my family, my circle of relationships, or anyone, who for whatever reason or title, ends up having to know me.

Ethics brings the satisfaction of looking at everything upfront all during the day, seeing through it and acting clearly, free of hypocrisy; the tranquility of peace at night, the satisfaction, both in successes and errors, of having proceeded according to the unwritten norms of honesty and the duty fulfilled, in our fight for the quality of life that we want for us and for those who constitute the object of our dreams.

Ethics in business builds conceptual stability in projects, in respect for the opinions of one's own and other people's, to take a stance less from pretending to be the owner of the truth than from humility, not of greatness which is fallible and to take disagreement as a sincere desire for not wanting to make a mistake.

Ethics separates the straw from the wheat, to distinguish from just a contribution to social solidarity to the clear objective of obtaining an honest and economic benefit.

It is thus wise to build a solid team consisting of moral principles and technical knowledge which supports the diverse specialties and enhances the possibility of success of each entrepreneur's adventures.

Ethical reasoning is always combined with good sense because the environment we live and work in doesn't operate just in the actual realm we are in but from the worldwide view of common sense.

This is the common sense that faces our natural inclination toward the easy way out and attention should be called to the consequences of that. Not to mention thinking about the results from an eventual concrete economic benefit that will also reflect on the way ethics are used.

Ethics in the public function, as well as in business, in our professional life, in the work environment, study, and the daily relationship with the world in which we live, comes from a fundamental principle of life.

A principle that we remember with pride and respect that we received from our parents, and, without a doubt, it is the most expensive and valuable treasure that we want to leave to our children. Something that they in turn, will formulate as an objective which deserves the recognition of future generations, for their ethical upbringing to imitate them, or why not, even better them.

José María De Lorenzis
Buenos Aires-Argentina, May 2000

The meaning of culture | Culture and nothing but culture | Ethics

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Page created: August 10, 2000 - Last updated: August 10, 2000 in Hot Metal Pro 6.0