A Point of View on Politics

A speech by Fr. Luigi Giussani given in Assago, Italy, February 6, 1987

The dynamic element

1. Politics, as the most accomplished form of culture, can’t but hold back man as its fundamental concern. In the speech to the UNESCO, Pope John Paul II said: “Culture is always in an essential and necessary relationship with what man is.”

Now, the most interesting thing to point out is that man is one, in the reality of his “I”.

Again in the same speech the Pope remarks: “In culture it is always necessary to consider the whole man, in his whole person, in all the truth of his spiritual and corporal subjectivity. It is necessary not to impose preconceived divisions and oppositions on culture, which is an authentically human system, wondrous synthesis of spirit and body.”

What determines and thus, shapes this unity of man, of the “I”? It is that dynamic element which - through questions and fundamental needs in which it manifests itself - guides the personal and social expression of man. In synthesis, I call “religious sense” this dynamic element, this fundamental factor which manifests itself in man through questions, instances, personal and social solicitations.

The religious sense is the shape of the unity of man.

I remember the 17th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where Saint Paul explains the great and unstoppable migration of peoples as a search for God.

The religious sense thus, appears to me as the root from which the values spring.

A value, ultimately, consists in the perspective of the relationship between a contingent factor and totality, the absolute.

Man’s responsibility, through all kinds of solicitations that come from the impact with the real (reality), commits itself to answering the questions that the religious sense (the Bible would call it: the “heart” of man) expresses.

The power

2. By putting into play this responsibility in front of values, man has to deal with power.

By “power” I mean what Romano Guardini — in his book “The Power”- described as delineation of the common goal and organization of things for its achievement.

Now, either power is determined by the will to serve the creature of God in his dynamic evolution (that is to say to serve man, culture and the praxis that comes from it), or it tends to reduce human reality to what it has previously decided to be its image of the evolution of the real, i.e. history.

This way we have a State that poses itself as the source of every right and then brings back man, as it is said in the “Gaudium et Spes”, to being “a piece of matter or an anonymous citizen of the worldly city”.

The tragedy of our time

3. I want to insist on the inauspicious possibility that I just pointed out.

If power only aims at the achievement of its own image of the real, it must try to master the desires of man. Desire is, in fact, the emblem of freedom because it opens the horizon of the category of possibility. On the contrary, the problem of power is to be sure to get the greatest consensus from a mass that is more and more conditioned in its needs.

So, mass media and secularization become tools for the fierce induction of certain desires and the obliteration and elimination of others.

And man’s desires, and therefore values, suffer an essential and systematic reduction.

As the Pope remarked in the encyclical “Dives in Misericordia”: “This is the tragedy of our time: the loss of freedom of conscience of entire peoples obtained by the cynical use of the means of social communication, by the one who has the power”.

The great homologation

4. What is the consequence of all this?

The panorama of social life becomes more and more uniform, gray: it is the great “homologation” of which Pasolini spoke. You could describe this situation with a formula: the P (power) in direct proportion to an I (impotency). Power would become arrogance in front of an impotency that is achieved, precisely, through the systematic reduction of desires, needs and values.

I take the liberty of quoting a passage by the great Czech writer Vaclav Belohradsky, one of the first signatories of Charta 77. He says: “ European tradition means never being able to live beyond conscience, reducing it to an anonymous apparatus like the law or the State. This tenacity of the conscience is a heritage of the Greek, Christian and bourgeois tradition. The conscience irreducibility to institutions is threatened in this era of mass media, totalitarian states and general computerization of society.

In fact it is very easy for us to imagine institutions perfectly organized so to impose every one of their actions as legitimate. In order to legitimate anything (you want) you just need an efficient organization. We could synthesize the essence of what is threatening us, this way: the States are programming their own citizens, the industries their own consumers, the publishers their own readers, etc...the whole society becomes little by little, something that the State produces”.

The youth’s perplexity and the adults’ cynicism originate in the flattening of desire.

And what is the alternative in this general tiredness? A voluntarism that has no breath or horizon, no geniality or space. A moralism that supports a State conceived as the ultimate source of consistency for the human flowing.

Movements and works

5. A culture of responsibility has to keep alive that original position of man from which desires and values spring. A culture of responsibility can’t start but from the religious sense. This urges men to get together, not because of a temporary profit, but substantially.

It urges men to get together in society according to a surprising integrity and freedom: the birth of movements is the sign of such vivacity, responsibility and culture that make the whole social order become dynamic.

It is necessary to remark that the movements are not able of remaining on an abstract level. In spite of the inertia or the lack of intelligence of those who represent them and participate in them, the movements tend to show their authenticity by facing the needs in which desires take shape. This happens by imagining and creating operative and opportune structures that we call “works” (“forms of new life for man”, as Pope John Paul II said at the Meeting of Rimini in 1982).

This works constitute a true contribution to the novelty of the social fabric and the social face. At this point I take the liberty to remark that the characteristics of works that are generated from an authentic responsibility, must be realism and prudence (realism is connected with the importance of the fact that the foundation of truth is the conformation of intellect to reality; while prudence — that in St. Thomas’ Summa is defined as a correct criterion in the things that one does- is measured on the truth of the thing itself, even before on the ethical aspect of goodness).

This work, because of this need for realism and prudence, becomes sign of imagination, sacrifice and openness.

It is, therefore, in the commitment with this primacy of free and creative society (he uses “socialita’” that according to the dictionary would be “sociability”, but in English it has a different connotation and I think that in this case it’s better to use “society”) in front of the power, that the strength and the endurance of personal responsibility are demonstrated. It is in the primacy of society in front of the State that the culture of responsibility is saved.

It is in the primacy of society, and therefore (in the primacy) of the fabric that is created by the dynamic relationship between the movements: with the creation of works and fellowships, the movements create the intermediate communities, that express (or: that are the expression of) the freedom of the individuals empowered by the associative form.

The task of politics and of parties

6. Now I’d like to draw some conclusion.

A party that suffocates, that doesn’t support and defend this rich social creativity, would contribute to create, or maintain, a State that is arrogant toward society.

Such a State would be reduced to be functional only to the plans of those who have the power. Responsibility would be evoked simply in order to elicit consensus around things that have already been planned. And even morality would be conceived and proclaimed in function of the status quo, that might be called “peace”.

Pasolini suggested with bitterness that a State of power (that is to say the State as a specific order of power), as we often have today, can’t be modified and, at the most, leaves space for utopia, because it doesn’t last. Or for an individual nostalgia, because it’s impotent.

On the contrary, true politics defends a novelty (newness) of life in the present, that is capable of modifying even the order of power.

Politics must therefore decide whether to support society exclusively as an instrument of manipulation of the State, as the object of its power, or to support a State that will be a real lay State, a State that serves social life according to the Thomistic concept of “common good”, vigorously reaffirmed by the great and forgotten teachings of Leo XIII.

I made this last remark, even if it is obvious for everybody, to remind you that it isn’t an easy path at all; on the contrary it is tough, like the path toward each truth in life.

But it is necessary not to be afraid of what the Holy Gospel said: he who will hold his things, his life, will lose them. And he who will give his life in the name of Christ, will gain it.