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VIA Num. 8 / February'09

Summary

Editorial

Ferran Sáez

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Against perfection

Michael J. Sandel

The tremendous advances made in the sphere of genetics are presented to us as both a promise and a conflict. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a large number of debilitating diseases. The conflict is that this new genetic knowledge will also allow us to manipulate our very natures, i.e. improve our muscles, our memory and our moods, choose the sex, build and other basic characteristics of our children and to turn them into «better than good». When the advance of science is faster than that of moral understanding, as is the case today, men and women do their best to express their unease. In liberal societies, they will first attempt to intervene using the language of independence, justice and the rights of the individual, yet this part of our moral lexis is not equipped to provide answers to the more difficult questions that are being posed by genetic engineering. Thus the genomic revolution has led us into a kind of moral vertigo.

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An ethical reflection on the financial crisis

Luís de Sebastián

We are immersed in an economic and financial crisis about which all kinds of opinions and predictions have already been voiced. Luis de Sebastián highlights the contradictions of a number of the accounts that have been used to justify certain measures, as well as the ethical complexity of some of the dilemmas presently facing both governments and the system as a whole, when attempting to put the brakes on the consequences of this crisis. At the same time the author of this article does not hesitate to stress the inability of public authorities to detect the systemic risks involved in the permissiveness of the last few years. Certainly, there is no possible substitute for the capitalist system and, therefore, the changes planned will not transform it at a basic level or affect how it is conceived. However, it will be necessary to make it more human, more prudent, more controlled and, in short, fairer for everyone.

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Is moral education the work of universities?

Philippe Van Parijs

Why have deontological codes been drawn up for some professions and disciplines studied by our university students, whereas for others they have not? Do all fields of science and academia need to be assigned a code that goes beyond the application and definition of a series of rules and also incorporates moral values? These are some of the questions that this philosopher, the holder of the Hoover chair in Economic and Social Ethics at the Catholic University of Louvain, asks in a personal reflection on the role that should be played by the teaching of values at university in the 21st century. There is no doubt, says Van Parijs, that university lecturers and the university, apart from passing on knowledge, also have the responsibility to express, through their own words and actions, a clear idea of what makes a good life.

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Is Islam incompatible with democracy or democracy with Islam?

Benjamin R. Barber

It is absurd, says the author, to believe that Islam is incompatible with democracy or that democracy is incompatible with Islam. It is not Islam per se but religion tout court that maintains a certain tension with secularism and democracy, a tension that is, in a free society, more healthy than it is damaging. Like Christianity and other religions Islam is practised in many cultures and societies that are confessional, stratified, schismatic and plural. In many places, other religions are just as fundamentalist as Islam because, in our secular times, religion itself is under siege and fundamentalism is, above all, the reaction of religion to being besieged.

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Society and values in South Korea

Jaume Giné

South Korea is a country that has, over recent years, undergone some of the most significant political, social, cultural and demographic transformations. The result is a society that we can consider to be both modern and adapted to the requirements and emerging challenges of globalisation. In fact, many of these transformations have been the result of a gradual adaptation to international factors. On the other hand, South Korea continues to be a society that seeks to maintain many fundamental traïts of tradition and identity. This article is an indepth study of the transformations and changes that have had to be faced by the society of South Korea, a country that wishes to take modernisation fully on board, although without this necessarily resulting in westernisation.

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New visibility

John B. Thompson

Before the appearance and development of the press and other media, the visibility of politics and politicians depended particularly on co-presence, i.e. the physical appearance of actors in some kind of physical relation with other people, with its consequences in terms of format and potential audience. As the media has progressively developed, political governments have gradually acquired a visibility that is independent of their direct, physical appearance before the multitude, while at the same time allowing them to transmit messages to people located at a distance. Without doubt, the Internet, along with new digital and communication technologies, have extended even further the appearance of new forms of visibility that arefar more complex, not only increasing the potential flow of audiovisual content but also making it possible for a much wider spectrum of people to create and disseminate content. John B. Thompson, a sociologist specialising in the field of communication, and the author of key works such as The Media and Modernity (1995), analyses the consequences and challenges of this new paradigm of mediated visibility.

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Cinema, a political problem

Miquel Tresserras

Cinema has played, and will continue to play, an immensely important role in creating and producing a shared national world view. Since its very beginnings cinematographic art has, among many other things, been a creator of the collective imagination, a powerful medium that transforms the city and a co-figuring element of the image that its citizens construct of themselves. The author of this article engages us in an extraordinarily stimulating reflection on the many different consequences (both historical and contemporary, and also concerning politics and a specific conception of citizenship) that result from the emergence of cinema in our western societies.

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Media and elections in Catalonia: a divided scenario?

Josep Gifreu

Catalonia offers a political and media scenario that is particularly rich and complex in terms of the study of political communication and the behaviour of the main actors in electoral processes. Based on a systematic study of the four previous Catalan parliamentary election campaigns (1995, 1999, 2003 and 2006), this article poses the question of the suitability of the current scenario in Catalonia of intermediation between parties and citizens. Mass democracy has mostly entrusted this intermediation to the media. Following the transition from dictatorship, during these years of democracy and autonomy, the new Catalan political culture has gradually been taking shape, particularly via the mechanisms of political interaction between the three main actors currently recognised by all comparative research: the political parties, the public media and the citizens. This article, which takes the form of an exploratory essay, based on the aforementioned studies, is centred on an analysis of the mass media, a vertex of the political communication triangle that it forms, along with the political parties and the citizens. In other words, it focuses on the structural and structuring functions of the media’s informative and discursive intermediation in election campaigns.

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Political communication, an emerging field full of potential

María José Canel

The North American style of election campaign is encouraging consultants, analysts and politicians, with examples and cases dealing with the directions taken in terms of political communication, when the aim is the take-over of power. And, as tends to happen in Spain, academics stop for a moment, to note down data so that they might contribute something to our knowledge of political communication in future years. For example, with regard to whether the notable increase in blogger accreditations at party conventions will change the dynamics of the campaign; whether grassroots action by parties, taking the campaign to the people, will manage to increase participation or who will suffer the negative effect of the growing aggressiveness of advertising spots. The United States is certainly an experimental laboratory and as such is useful for analysing political communication. However it is also a laboratory that many other countries have joined, as highlighted by the reflections offered in this article. Canel does not attempt to provide a comprehensive description of everything that is going on at the moment, but rather to provide some notes on the challenges and work agenda of political communication in our environment.

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Leaders do matter

Guillem Rico

What is the electoral impact of leaders? How are their images affected by the probability of voting for one party or another? The position of experts concerning this question has ranged from omission to scepticism. However, the majority of the most recent studies agree on the importance of candidates in the way voters behave. This article reviews some of the main arguments that explain the personalisation of voting in contemporary democracies.

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The politics of spin

Toni Aira

Lecturer and journalist Toni Aira, coordinator of this dossier in the “Debate” section of this edition, reflects here on the growing importance of the capacity to construct a story, a narrative, in order to project leadership and political messages with some guarantee of success. Starting with the recent history of the North American case, the author investigates the increasingly more central role of spin doctors (or perhaps they should be called story spinners), not only as key actors in politics but also as the transformers of the perceived political reality and the people actually responsible for associating the mobilisation of opinion with the presentation of events. New attributes that necessarily lead us to redefine a leading figure in today’s political communication.

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