“I am young, educated and athletic”

Culture should perhaps be a roof under which we are all born, a roof that grows high above our heads, a roof that grows larger, that moves away from us, that becomes complex, that makes us not fear our own insignificance. For when culture is great, it does not feed egos, it feeds consciences; it does not make men great or fill them with power, but it gives power to men's thoughts. Culture has works done and evidence of earthly life, but culture is profoundly immaterial and lives beyond the tangible.

Culture is, perhaps like nothing else, the mark of a country, because it is, without a doubt, a mark, the most imprinted seal that Men leave on Humanity when they leave. Through word association, a game so characteristic of the species, we can get there. Paris? Louvre, Mona Lisa. Italy? Leonardo, Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo. New York? MoMA, Guggenheim, Broadway, Woody Allen. England? Shakespeare, Theatre. Russia? Literature, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ballet.

Portugal is no exception. Portugal has culture, but it has not always treated it well and, judging by the evidence of time, it will not always treat it well. Camões, Saramago, Gulbenkian, Jerónimos, Lusíadas, CCB, Expo 98 are just a few examples of moments, people and building blocks of culture in our country, but what will we have to show from now on? The timing of this text is not innocent and comes in light of the rapid swallowing of culture in a ministerial cake together with youth and sport. Perhaps they work well together as a business card at a company party or on a dating app — “I am young, cultured and sporty” — could be the true epitaph of a healthy mind in a healthy body, but in a ministry I have doubts.

In a poor country with many problems to solve, the absorption of the Ministry of Culture is not a question of priorities, but rather an old and musty issue in a country that, let's be honest, tends to show a certain animosity towards culture and what it represents. One need only recall the controversies with José Saramago when he published The Gospel According to Jesus Christ , which, according to Sousa Lara, then Undersecretary of State for Culture, “does not represent Portugal or the Portuguese”. Whether or not one likes Saramago or the book, culture is a home that one can enter without religion or political parties. It is often through culture that the “rotten” aspects of a society are recorded for posterity. If it were not for Eça and other compatriots, we would not be able to enjoy “horse racing” today. The problem is that society, particularly its leaders, are always tempted to take on the role of moral compass, of advisors on Good and Evil, and prefer to keep the “rotten” things buried and not brought to light by independent eyes. Culture can be shrewd and biting, and has been so many times, and will continue to be so, even with the lack of importance and neglect to which they want to condemn it.

A country without culture is a country with nothing to show for the next 20, 50, 100 years. Times are like that, but perhaps one day we will get fed up with the gaps that modernization cannot fill, the sorrows that artificial intelligence cannot solve, and the money that, no matter how much it is, cannot buy progress. Today, we are dependent on many things, on technology, on networks, on money, on bureaucracy. But culture feeds a type of dependence that should never fall into disuse. The more we cherish culture, the harder it is for us not to think for ourselves, the harder it is for us to let others think for us. Culture makes us dependent on our own thinking.