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| Photo taken from the website of the newspaper Expresso. |
A cultured person for me is
not someone with a deep knowledge on a number of subjects, someone who reads books, who goes to museums and to
the theatre, who travels and knows the world. A cultured person for me
is someone who does all this and more and tries to put his knowledge
and experience into practice in order to help reconstruct the world, a better
world. Being a cultured person is not something that comes naturally to us
humans. It is a daily mental and practical exercise against our inner
barbarity, against our ignorance.
-----
On the night of the 15th of July, the Greek
Parliament voted on a new bailout reforms package proposed / imposed by the
European Union. Just 10 days after the historic (and, for me, surprisingly
strong) ‘No’ in the Greek referendum, things took a different turn and the
proud and desperate resistance of the people gave way to a coup d’ état.
After a disappointing
discussion, when the voting started and the names of the MPs were being called,
I couln’t stop my tears from falling. After each name, after each ‘Yes’ and
each ‘No’, it seemed that the black hole was getting bigger. The hole to bury a
people’s pride, many people’s hopes, our tormented democracy, our idea of a “union” - a
European Union.
I spent hours and hours
reading intensely in the last months – European, American, African and Middle
Eastern press; blogs; tweets; Facebook posts. It was enlightening and confusing
at the same time. One could come across very logical and well constructed
arguments defending totally contradictory views. There were times when the
search for the ‘truth’ would get desperate, but all one could get was views and
all one could do was try to reach some kind of believable conclusion.
It was among those views that
I identified what was for me one of the most worrying and saddening parts of
this whole discussion. I was taken aback by how easily and untryingly citizens
of all ages from different “European Union” countries would adopt and perpetuate
stereotypical views on people from another “union” country, generalizing them
and turning them into absolute truths regarding individuals they might have
never come accross in their whole lives. Views based on headlines, on small
talk, assumed without any further questioning. Good enough truths.
From one moment to the other
we turned cultureless. Europeans in name, but that was all. Where did our Union
and everything it represents go? Our common values? The lessons we learnt in
the past? The wish to build something better together? What happened to our
critical thinking and our ability to search for more, to look for answers
beyond what showed in the surface? How hard the practice of our culture can
be...
-----
Pope Francis’ reaction to the latest chapter of the Greek crisis took me by surprise. He encouraged
the faithful to pray for Greece before the referendum and said that “The
dignity of the human person must
remain at the centre of any political and technical debate, as well as in the
taking of responsible decisions.”
A
few months before, at the conference The Role of Culture, Álvaro
Laborinho Lúcio, in his brilliant comment of the session “Culture, beyond
religion”, wondered if “(...) this dimension of Pope Francis comes from his
theological comprehension of the world and of life or rather from his origin,
from Latin America”. Laborinho Lucio went on and questioned: “Aren’t we
creating a new figure to be placed next to the old and desconceptualized figure
of the ‘catholic, non-practicing’? Aren’t we being confronted with the figure
of the ‘practicing, non-catholic’?”
Are
we? What a wonderful world this would be...
The new year
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