Deadly Sins

Whatsonmymind October 2011

Seven Deadly Sins

Temptations in a multicultural world for politicians, businesspeople, scientists, consultants and other responsible citizens[1]

Since about fifteen centuries, Catholic Christian tradition has distinguished seven deadly sins: greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, pride, and laziness. This list of undesirables is probably universal to humanity; they are reflected in the claims for moderation in all human efforts pronounced by Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, all three about ten centuries earlier. In spite of its long history the list is also very topical: our newspapers are filled with stories about greed among bankers, lust, anger and pride among politicians, envy among scientists and gluttony among consumers. Laziness today may be the smallest threat.

In the specific context of a meeting of interculturalists however, I propose a different list of seven deadly sins, to be avoided by those responsible for and interested in the survival of our multicultural world with its globalizing economy:

unawareness, ethnocentrism, amnesia, professional myopia, conceptual mix-up, academic polemics, and level confusion. Let us look at them one by one.

Unawareness of being part of a specific culture:

A famous classical example is the following quote from the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1742): “The English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character, unless this very singularity may pass for such”. The one thing I wonder about is whether Hume meant to distinguish between the English and himself as a Scot.

A still very common current example is what happens if in a discussion at an international scientific conference, someone introduces the nationality of the speaker as an argument for her or his position. In my experience, this tends to polarize the audience: some see it as an eye-opener, some as an unscientific, irrelevant and even threatening disturbance of the...