COLUMNS
"CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE"
by Osvaldo Rivera
Cultural Manager
Osvaldo Rivera
Osvaldo Hernán Rivera Riffo. Culture Manager.
- Professor of Natural Sciences, Biologist and Agricultural Engineer, Pontificia Universidad Católica.
-Teacher, researcher and director at various universities.
-His preferential interest is the History of Art and Philosophy.
-Former Director of Corporation Cultural of Providence
-President of the Foundation National Voice
-Director of El País Digital Weekly
-Advisory Director Free Artists Community
CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE
History is the narration of the events of the past. The entire humanity is involved in a story that goes through the different periods full of epics, discoveries, wisdom and also full of the evil of the human being, homo homini lupus (Thomas Hobbes made this phrase famous in the 17th century, in his work De Cive, but whose origin is circumscribed to the year 254-184 BC by Plaucus in his work Asinaria).
Today as never before, the nature of man is in danger not because of extinction but because of the hatred incubated by groups interested in a new order (postmodernism). We are frankly horrified at the ideologically savage attitude of groups in different parts of the West trying to rewrite history.
In the American continent and particularly in Chile, we are going back to the beginning of civilization with its discovery and then the conquest of the country with all the cultural influence of Spain that, for three hundred years, was consolidating the civilization of the new territories.
With a revisionist vision of history, more than 500 years of human history are called into question, with an intellectual fallacy.
Is it possible for this to happen? What has humanity lost in these times? Undoubtedly the reason and with it, the denial of objective reality and the cognitive ability to directly access the truth. In this context, one of the fundamental pillars of the West is the importance of beauty, which for Sir Roger Scruton is not a merely subjective matter, but the universal need of human beings: without it we find ourselves in a kind of spiritual desert.
This article is divided into 2 parts that will be published separately and both based on work by Ernesto Baltar, doctor of philosophy from the Complutense University, (Beauty Contemporary Art Conservatism and Praise of Beauty); in José Ramón Ayllón (Why Beauty Matters) and writings by the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton.
This last English intellectual, who recently passed away, is one of the few contemporary thinkers who has bravely defended, with a philosophical foundation and harsh criticism, the classic link between the beautiful, the good and the true, which are in themselves the three transcendent aspects of Being and which so vilified have they been in our days.
Scruton defended the status of beauty as a value as important for life as good and truth, and with it, staying true to more than two thousand years of Western civilization. Thanks to this strong defense, as well as to the permanent search for beauty, we can perceive the world as a habitable home and come closer to understanding our own nature as spiritual beings.
We have crossed more than two thousand five hundred years of history, inheriting the Hellenic culture and then the Roman, thus forging our Western civilization. Where else does the word philosophy and its meaning come from? Who was in charge of guiding the thought of the human being? Etymologically, philosophy means love of wisdom (philos: love and sophia: wisdom), and it is the study of diverse problems such as knowledge, mind, conscience, ethics, language, beauty, morality.
It is philosophy that provides the tools for critical thinking that help to understand the concepts of tradition, authority, power, etc. and history, in this framework allows us to identify our place in the world in relation to other cultures.
However, with the emergence of the avant-garde in the 20th century, the value of philosophy and history begins to be relativized. The concept of beauty ceased to be important, being replaced by "originality": the object of art was no longer to achieve beauty; but to disturb, transgress norms, break limits and moral taboos, offend good taste or reproduce the negative things of the world, beginning the cultivation of ugliness. In this postmodernist ideological process, the left, in all its variants, plus the liberal sectors took control of the instances of cultural development, killing creativity and manipulating it through the market and transforming art into a mere object of exchange, where what What matters is not the work itself, but the characteristics of the artist.
This is the great battle of the cultural war and those of us who have a strong value formation, derived from our customs, traditions and history, are called to defend it and not allow, as Scruton denounced, that art be transformed into a "desire for scandal and imposture undermining the meaning of life”
