The Pope Speaks

[jonsonite]

Here's a Financial Times article about Pope Benedict XVI's newest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. In it the Pope talks about, among other things, justice. (all excerpts are from the article, not the encyclical)

Unfortunately, one of the lost insights concerns justice. The Pope would like us to think about justice as having three aspects. There is

Comments

[bayashi314]

A) I'm not backing up his views in any way, nor necessarily declining them.

From the excerpt, I gather that the article is trying to say that culture doesn't really get shared between most trading partners as the amount of culture typically shared during a trade will be minimized over time. Any deeper aspects of a culture are lost. Very simplistic analogy - when a Jewish family buys meat from a non-Jewish butcher who agrees to make the meat Kosher for them, he only needs to understand the bare minimum of their culture to ensure Kosher - he totally misses out on the background and surrounding traditions.

And the article seems to apply their not quite proven point about minimization of culture via trading to imply that to the extent that our own culture is becoming more commercialistic, we lose the cohesion of a traditional culture because many of the deeper aspects of culture don't get shared via simple commercial activities. Basic analogy - when Lisa and I go to a store and buy a hamburger, we can either buy the hamburger, wait in line quietly, get the hamburger, and leave, *or* we can buy the hamburger, make a joke with the waitress, and end up singing as a threesome to the music on the radio in the restaurant, thus sharing our culture. I believe the article is trying to say that the former type of interaction is much more common than the latter, which seems to be fairly typical for Lisa and I at least.

Thanks for sharing Jon!

[jonsonite]

I prefer friends for my culture sharing needs...

[bayashi314]

Well, I would agree that the bulk of my culture sharing comes from closer interactions with friends and family. To what extent does our culture derive from less-involved culture sharing? Learning about the religious ways of a group we don't interact with or know anything about except via what they share with us on a cab ride from the airport we're sharing, for instance.

Or like yesterday when Lisa and I were helping out at Northwest Harvest as individual helpers and a group from a large bank was there on a coordinated mission. While talking with some of the volunteers, we learned a lot about a type of person (30-40 something lower-level professional with drinking and childcare as 2 major self-professed hobbies) that I might not otherwise have known.

I suppose my question to you Jon - do you only want to learn about culture in a proactive way? Do you want to avoid learning about culture in a passive or reactive way? I'm not sure I know the answer for myself and I'm pretty sure I don't find other answer good or bad, so I'm truly asking.

[jonsonite]

I enjoy learning about other cultures, but the passive/reactive learning is enough for me at its current level without fretting about it. The Pope seems to be fretting.

Maybe the difference is that I'm around enough interesting and different people already that I get my hit of culture without having to look for it...

[bayashi314]

I would agree that I get my hit of culture just fine from the current levels of non-work interactions I have. Sometimes I get to the point that I don't want more culture actually.

What I find though, are that some of the admittedly less interesting culture nuggets that I obtain from coworkers and non-close friends are usually so different from my typical culture nugget that I at least learn something and tend to either broaden my views slightly or at least allow for more understanding of another culture in my future dealings.

I would never have learned anything about NASCAR racing hanging out with you guys. I did learn something about it while playing cards with my coworkers the other day. It wasn't anything super exciting and it didn't change how I think of NASCAR or many of the people who view it.

It *did* give me a little more understanding of another human being so even if I don't agree with an action, I might understand the motivation a little better.

I can't imagine that as a bad thing, but then I might be in the minority in that respect.

[jonsonite]

I often enjoy those cross-cultural communications as well. Read the second paragraph of zabrahl's comment below to see why globalization/technology actually increase such cultural exchange instead of decreasing it, as the Pope seems to fear.