The New Barbarians

As always, culture is in constant flux.   Nothing stays put, and that frightens us.    The idea that all past culture was better is a common foolishness as old as humanity,  but today we have the novelty of glorifying the new. 

We are living a new globalized culture that is disturbing many as it challenges us to change and adapt to a new way of being,  while others naively take it in.   The architecture of the world suffers the monotony of monstrous heat sinks made of concrete, steel and glass in which we dump those magnificent and complex carbon based molecules produced by mother Earth during her billions of years.   The idolatry of easy money that invades all of our social classes,  diminishing our productivity and distorting our economic life.   And ¿music?…   rap and its frequently obscene content displaces our beautiful musical heritage the world over.   Sexual debauchery invades the media,  destroying the very meaning os sex and family,  and,  consequently,  the very foundations of society.   A culture of death in the form of abortion,  infanticide,  war,  boy soldiers,  urban violence,  rampant lawlessness,  toleration of homosexuality,  and so many terrible aberrations.   We must certainly employ all of our ingenuity,  energy  and will  in this cultural war against the new barbarism.

Modern communications enable a more productive relationship between people the world over.   Scientific progress is impressive,  and when properly used in the service of man,  it is a very good thing.   An economy open to the whole world places an abundance of goods and services at the service of mankind augmenting the possibility of a better quality of life.

But the quality of life is more than goods and services,  more than science and communications.   Those are means called to enrich mankind,  but all too frequently they chain us to sterile entertainment and pleasures that deprive life of all meaning,  leading mankind to an empty life.   Many take advantage of this new reality to promote and supply the foolish with those “goods” they desire.   Confronting these tendencies as old as humanity  —known as prostitution—  there rises a culture of life always new called into being by God.   The Second Vatican Council has renewed the millennia old Judeo-Christian culture;  a culture rooted in humanity’s very foundations,  the dignity of man,  funded,  in its turn,  in Gods dignity.   Thereby, the quality of life and the values that promote it,  can only be valued in relation to the ultimate good of man,  that which leads to his growth and development toward his fulfillment as a being for the “other” and with the “other”.

We frequently equate oall of this change with un attack on our traditions and way of being,  which only looks at the surface of the problem,  but,  what and which is “our culture”?