Fallacies of Consumerism

The term knowledge society brings together many of the transformations that are taking place in today's society, and its definition serves as an indicator of these changes. The related concentrations or asymmetries that arise from the phenomenon are also the subject of analysis and dispute. Its development and scope have been uneven, constantly incorporating new meanings to the existing terminology, hence the need to analyze 82 concepts of the knowledge society through a frequency count in Google Scholar, with a subsequent categorization saturating in six dimensions, in order to analyze their framing. The methodology used a higher-order association, establishing the most significant combinations and weightings. From these results, the concept of the knowledge society is defined by the dual economic-social category, according to its frequency of use in Google. This shows economic influences as a determining factor in the knowledge society, engendering processes far from the common good or the general interest.

There are two ways to answer the question, What can Catholic social thought learn from the social sciences about the common good? A more modern form of Catholic social thought, which primarily thinks of the common good in terms of the equitable distribution of goods like health, education, and opportunity, could benefit from the extensive literature in public policy, economics, and political science, which study the role of institutions and policies in generating desirable social outcomes. A second approach, rooted in pre-Machiavellian Catholic thought, would expand on this modern notion to include concerns about the way the culture shapes our understanding of what genuine human flourishing entails. On that account, the social sciences offer a valuable description of human life; but because they underestimate how human behavior is shaped by institutions, policies, and the discourse of social science itself, their insights need to be treated with caution.

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la construcción, sustentabilidad y usos del capital social comunitario en un movimiento social argentino que plantea la horizontalidad y la autonomía como valores fundamentales de organización social. A través del análisis de la dinámica de tres tipos de capital social —unión, puente, y nexo—, se observa que el movimiento en cuestión consigue crear rápidamente capital social comunitario y una identidad común diferenciadora. Sin embargo, el capital social rápidamente construido no logra sustentarse en el tiempo, debido a la incapacidad de sus integrantes en generar mecanismos descentralizados y eficientes de monitoreo mutuo, responsabilidad compartida y penalización moral que protejan el bien común y refuercen la identidad comunitaria a través de redes sociales densas.   ABSTRACTThe objective of this article is to analyze the construction, sustainability and uses of community social capital in a social movement in Argentina that identifies horizontality and autonomy as fundamental values of social organization. By analyzing the dynamics of three types of social capital —bonding, bridging and linking— we can observe that the movement studied here is able to rapidly create community social capital and  differentiating common identity. Nevertheless, the social capital rapidly constructed is not sustained over time, because the movement’s members are unable to generate decentralized, efficient mechanisms for mutual monitoring, shared responsibility and moral penalization that will protect the common good and strengthen community identity through dense social networks.

Abstract“Social justice” is a powerful idea today, but its origins and meaning are unclear. One of the first to use the term was Antonio Rosmini, author of The Constitution under Social Justice (1848) and other works of moral philosophy. I argue that Rosmini arrived at his idea of social justice by developing Thomistic natural law theory into a novel view of the common good that balances two principles: (1) the equal rights and dignity of persons as ends-in-themselves, a version of “personalism” influenced by Kant and Christianity; and (2) unequal rewards for those who contribute most to society, a version of Aristotelian “proportionalism” based on the social nature of man. I conclude by comparing Rosmini's idea of social justice to John Rawls's “theory of justice” and Catholic social teaching.

This text can be defined as an attempt to look at the question of the common good through sociological glasses. The author suggests that many of the issues subsumed under  the term “the common good” have already been elucidated and described in detail on the basis of classical and contemporary sociology. If it is assumed that the common good can be understood triply, as (1) a postulate of the social good, (2) materially, as an object of collective ownership, and (3) as an effect of the individual’s life in society, then it must be admitted that, at least in the third case, reference to the collected achievements of sociology is necessary in order to describe the common good properly.

Social behaviors do not only exist in higher organisms but are also present in microbes that interact for the common good. Here, we report that budding yeast cells interact with their neighboring cells after exposure to DNA damage. Yeast cells irradiated with DNA-damaging ultraviolet light secrete signal peptides that can increase the survival of yeast cells exposed to DNA-damaging stress. The secreted peptide is derived from glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), and it induced cell death of a fraction of yeast cells in the group. The data suggest that the GAPDH-derived peptide serves in budding yeast’s social interaction in response to DNA-damaging stress. Importance Many studies have shown that microorganisms, including bacteria and yeast, display increased tolerance to stress after exposure to the same stressor. However, the mechanism remains unknown. In this manuscript, we report a striking finding that S. cerevisiae cells respond to DNA damage by secreting a peptide that facilitates resistance to DNA-damaging stress. Although it has been shown that GAPDH possesses many key functions in cells aside from its well-established role in glycolysis, this study demonstrated that GAPDH is also involved in the social behaviors response to DNA-damaging stress. The study opens the gate to an interesting research field about microbial social activity for adaptation to a harsh environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic redefines how we think about the body, physiologically and socially. But what does it mean to have and to be a body in the COVID-19 pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic offers data scholars the unique opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to revisit and reinvent the fundamental concepts of our mediated experiences. The article critiques the data double, a longstanding concept in critical data and media studies, as incompatible with the current public health and social distancing imperative. The data double, instead, is now the presupposition of a new data entity, which will emerge out of a current data shimmer: a long-sustaining transition that blurs the older boundaries of bodies and the social, and establishes new ethical boundaries around the (in)activity and (im)mobility of doing nothing to do something. The data double faces a unique dynamic in the COVID-19 pandemic between boredom and exhaustion. Following the currently simple rule to stay home presents data scholars the opportunity to revisit the meaning of data as something given, a shimmering embodied relationship with data that contributes to the common good in a global health crisis.

This chapter applies the value of meaningfulness to a philosophy of the city. It argues that philosophies of the city can supply smart and sustainable city initiatives with human values and attention to the common good which they currently lack. By bringing the value of meaningfulness into a description of city-making, the chapter shows how city people have responsibilities to make the city when the activities of social cooperation associated with discharging such responsibilities are constituted by freedom, autonomy, and dignity, and when the social interactions of meaning-making are just. The features of an ethico-normative architecture which is capable of promoting city-level meaningfulness are specified. These include three core elements: public meaningfulness; the society of meaning-makers; and agonistic republicanism. City-making organized to manifest these features will generate a rich diversity of meaning sources on which city people can draw to craft meaningfulness in life and in work.