I don’t really understand what you mean by saying that ‘mass communication is a market product’. We have developed sophisticated technology to facilitate communications but some media of social communication has always existed in the world. The Renaissance and age of Enlightenment in the recent past, demonstrate that the veins of social communication are very real and fast flowing regardless of the type of media at work.
You do yourself too little credit; you demonstrate that you know what I mean in your last paragraph. I will explain there.
That technology is sophisticated is true. That we have had social communication since the advent of language is also true. And yet, mass communication is a market product. Do you not pay for it, exchange goods for it, isolate those who do not have access to it, have charitable foundations to spread it, acquire more and more devices to access it, and, ultimately, to treat people as though they must have it (or else be ‘‘tribal’’)?
Since it is a market product, though, it is necessarily true that it is produced by the market - and the market is out to make profit. You cannot ignore this deminsion, or have you ignored the passage in Laudato Si which insists that every purchase is a moral choice - never a purely economical one? If something is produced by the market, then it is inculturated (i.e. it is created according to it’s birthing-society’s assumptions). Yet, as I argued in 150 and you never did me the courtesy of a reply, some cultures are more compatible with Revelation then others - to say otherwise is to separate religion and culture absolutely, saying that one can have no influence on the other; simply an incorrect idea, or else a lot of theology will go to pots.
Vatican II was a different Council to previous councils in that it recognised that it couldn’t depend of the tribal dynamic to impart its authoritative teachings anymore… it was no threat to the authoritative teaching of the ‘tribal leader’.
There it is again; the idea of cultural-change is inevitable, and that if one tries to preserve culture, one is ‘‘tribal.’’ Why, then, are you so unwilling to consider the possibility that culture is, in fact, something to be preserved? Your idea (cultural-change is a good, inevitable thing) is an idea you share with your culture; you are, as it were, inculturated. Very well, your defence of it must be as tribal as those who defend ideas of culture which you disagree with.
To defend the idea that culture is to be preserved is not ‘‘tribal,’’ or ‘‘cult’’ or ‘‘isolationist’’ or any of the other words you’ve used to belittle it; it is an affirmation of the idea that culture is not a blank-slate - a neutral field.
E.g. Communism has clear cultural-effects. A communist culture is less able to receive Revelation than many other cultures, precisely because that culture’s assumptions are less-compatible with Christianity. The most effective thing, then, would not be to conform Christianity to communism (philosophical impossible), but to work to make that culture Catholic. On the other hand, there are cultures which are built on Christian assumptions. In that case, the culture ought to be persevered in order to facilitate evangelization.
The whole Church had been constructed within that tribal dynamic… which goes against the whole principle the Catholic faith. That is to go out into the world.
I cannot imagine the assumptions I would have to have about myself to think that I knew, out of hand, that everyone throughout history who, conforming to their culture’s ideas, believed that that culture was to be preserved, were going against the whole principle of the Catholic faith - waiting in darkness for me to enlighten them by me conforming to
my own culture’s ideas.
Too many people had become religious automatons being Catholic out of tradition, rather than experiencing that identity. Hence when something like reliable contraception came on the market, their superficial identity just crumbled and there was no deeper instinct to reject the new exciting lifestyle.
Perhaps. Or perhaps choices were made which destroyed their catholic identity, both before and after the council, before the collapse of their identity became manifest. Vatican II need not be so strict a line-of-demarcation. If there were, perhaps, deficiencies which developed during the 50’s and 60’s, one need not necessarily say that those deficiencies had always been there in previous times. I am inherently suspicious of anyone, though, who sees the world’s problems as being solved when, finally, the world accepted his or her ideas on some matter.
I personally have a new cynicism for Catholic media that forces me to read the documents available for myself rather than trust anything in the media too much.
Catholic media is a market product, just as any kind of mass media is. Why, then, are you cynical of the Catholic media (as I also am), but not of the media in general? The media in general is after the dominance of its ideas as stringently as you and the Catholic media are. That is precisely my point about the Mass media being a market-product, and therefore, not a neutral field. This means we cannot assume that mass-media is a good tool, having been inculturated in a secular culture.
