Opinion

THE CULTURAL TIGHTROPE

Driving forces

Catalans are simply too cautious with money to want to risk it on a gamble rather than a sound investment...

Hav­ing lived in var­i­ous cul­tures and taken great in­ter­est in try­ing to work out what makes them tick over the course of my life, I feel qual­i­fied to give my opin­ion on what I tend to call cul­tural dri­ving forces. And even if I'm not qual­i­fied, I'm going to do it any­way. In the United States and many other places it's “God”, in the UK it's “jus­tice”, in Spain it's “corazón”, in Japan it's “ho­n­our”, in Ger­many it's “logic”: say that you were dri­ven by those things in your de­fence and you are for­given just about any­thing. So what is it in Cat­alo­nia?

I think most Cata­lans would agree with me that the dri­ving force here is cer­tainly not the afore­men­tioned “corazón” so in­flu­en­tial and pow­er­ful in neigh­bour­ing Spain and many other what we might call Latin cul­tures. I be­lieve the an­swer may be some­thing more to do with fi­nan­cial cau­tion, or being smart with money, or work­ing hard to make money; but we'll need to in­ves­ti­gate a bit be­fore we can con­firm that. And it's not very catchy, is it? So per­haps we can come up with some­thing bet­ter.

I've lived in Cat­alo­nia and there­fore among Cata­lans long enough now to know that earnest hard work and ded­i­ca­tion to cre­at­ing and pre­serv­ing wealth/money are viewed as, if not the strongest, a strong ar­gu­ment and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for your ac­tions. It's some­thing that stands out when you talk to peo­ple, if noth­ing else in the phrases they use. By way of ex­am­ple, “la pela és la pela” is a say­ing that has al­ways sounded to my ear like it should be Span­ish but is ac­tu­ally at­trib­uted to the Cata­lans. It lit­er­ally means “the pe­seta is the pe­seta”, pela being an old slang term for the for­mer Span­ish cur­rency. A good ex­am­ple of when it is used would be if some­one asks to be par­doned a debt only to be ad­vised “la pela és la pela”, or in other words, money is too im­por­tant to sim­ply dis­miss a debt with no fur­ther con­se­quences.

The gen­eral con­sen­sus among many Cata­lans I speak to is that nowa­days every­one is work­ing far too hard while get­ting ripped off by the main basic ser­vice providers, such as elec­tric­ity, gas, water, tele­phony, etc. De­spite this, how­ever, work­ing hard to earn money is seen as the only hon­est and proper way to live. That might sound ob­vi­ous, but com­pare it to cul­tures where gam­bling is rife - the Span­ish, the British, the Irish, the US and es­pe­cially the Chi­nese and many other Asian cul­tures - and you see my point. Cata­lans are sim­ply too cau­tious with money to want to risk it on a gam­ble rather than a sound in­vest­ment - per­haps one el­e­ment of the Cata­lan seny (what might be called the every­day ap­pli­ca­tion of com­mon sense). In­deed, in­her­ited Cata­lan wis­dom es­pouses the virtues of what I've now de­cided to sim­ply call “pru­dence” - and which may well spill over into other spheres of Cata­lan life rather than just the fi­nan­cial - with many say­ings con­firm­ing it, such as Del jugar, al robar una passa només hi ha or El bon joc és no jugar-lo.

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