We have a sick culture?
I was amused to read recently, mind you not in a personalized blog nor a specialized journal but in a mainstream magazine, an article claiming that we have a sick culture.
It said that we have a sick culture because we are still poor and messy, long ago overtaken by our neighboring countries in terms of economics. I got the impression we have been orphaned and abandoned by the rest of the world.
The worst cut was that we are all cheaters, and stubborn clingers and sticklers to outdated Church teaching especially in the area of family planning. The net effect is that religion is the cause of our underdevelopment. Wowowee!
I could not believe what I was reading, and I immediately remembered that in what the author considered as developed countries and therefore with supposedly healthy cultures, there's a lot of abortion, divorce, drug use, massacres, suicide, road rage, etc.
There's even a kind of poverty far worse than what is seen in the Third World. My personal view is that I prefer the poverty here, since ours is much simpler. It hardly affects the spirit. Theirs bespeaks of a graver spiritual ailment.
I thought we have sometime ago outgrown this kind of thinking, but it seems we have not yet. How do we understand culture? With what criteria do we measure its state of health and illness?
I mean we have to try to be more responsible with our views and opinions. We just can't shoot from the hip, making knee-jerk reactions, and hide an appalling lack of research and reflection behind an excellent talent to write and express.
When one talks about culture, he has to understand that he is touching a most delicate and dynamic topic that covers practically everything not only of one's life, but of all people's lives in general.
It's such a complicated thing to handle we have to take extra care not to fall into simplism. The tendency to be rash and to take an irresponsible leap in the dark in our comments, I know, is quite high, given people's mentality today.
Culture is more a spiritual phenomenon than a material or purely social one. It has to be studied and assessed in a way that gives due attention to this spiritual, and thus religious dimension. We'll miss the mark if we ignore this aspect.
What I can see as defects in our culture compared to those in cultures of more developed countries is that we have more of ignorance and innocence where we find conscious and rationalized errors in others.
Ok, we also have our share of corruption and other serious moral aberrations, but I still think that in general ours are nothing compared to what we see in other places.
The clear advantage others have seems to be that they have more material wealth, more of what can be quickly felt and immediately enjoyed. But life is much more than these things.
In these places we already see atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, cynicism not only taking place but also are becoming more systematized. Religion and spiritual values are often ridiculed and considered an unwelcome relic of the past.
There is a kind of approach toward what is called as nihilism which, in street language, means to get wild, to go berserk, to be in a rampage since hardly anything holds any meaning to anyone anymore. Our criminality cannot compare to theirs.
When the spiritual values are forgotten, when people don't feel the need for prayer and sacrifices, don't live by faith but rather simply rely on pure reason, there's no escaping the logic of the flesh that always leads to death.
What I would prefer when we talk about culture is that given its very complex nature and requirements, we be wary in making negative comments. We just try our best to contribute to it in whatever way we can, to the extent our understanding of it can warrant us to do anything.
And comparing our culture with that of others, and, worse, disparaging ours by bashing the Church, religion and spiritual values, the usual bogeys, does not get us anywhere.
We have to learn to move on, respecting everyone and without destroying others no matter how much we disagree with them. Let's all look for true freedom so that one's freedom does not destroy that of the others. Everyone gets to be free.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)