As we ready ourselves for the long Easter weekend or short holiday spent with friends and family around the dining table, I would like to dedicate a few minutes to remind us all of this coming festivity. Often, in fact, trapped within the limits of modern life, we forget that our civilization, built on the family unit around the dining table, is fundamentally a Christian civilization. Today in particular, humanity celebrates the most important dining table in all of human history, the table of the Last Supper. I say all of humanity and not only the Christian world because the gift of the Good News is a gift for all human beings. Today humanity celebrates Maundy Thursday, from the Latin word ‘mandatum’, which means mandate or command. Exactly 1990 years ago today, Christ, our Redeemer, instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist and gave his apostles the task of spreading and defending His Good News. Since then the Church, contrary to the nihilistic propaganda of contemporary hyper-materialist revisionism, under the banner of the Cross, imposed itself as an arbiter between the ambitions of sovereigns and the needs of their peoples, thus becoming the vessel that allowed humanity to evolve and ferry towards those emancipated societies that we know today as advanced democracy. It suffices for us to dwell for a moment on the postmodern theses according to which there is no link between the emergence of human rights in advanced societies and the fact that this phenomenon is exclusive to Christianity, to realize against their falsehood. On the contrary, it should become quite clear to all of us that these irrational attempts to discredit the Church for the central role She played in favour of human evolution over the last 2000 years, betrays in reality, a concealed desire to promote archaic and barbaric pre-Christian tyrannies. We have all witnessed the horrors states are capbale of when the mediation of the Church is lacking. Whether it be Stalin, Mao or Hitler, without the mediation of the Church, there are no limits to the barbarity of which states become capable of. Today, this evolutionary progress towards individual emancipation, which is the fundamental driver of Life, and of which the Church has become the author, is once again in grave danger.
Listen to the Essay on 10 Minute Philosophy with Carmelo Pistorìo
In 1930 the great English economist Maynard Keynes managed to predict with great precision the global GDP of the human population a hundred years later, and on that occasion declared that for the first time in the history of our species, man could overcome his greatest problem, the economic problem, that is, the problem of having to work for a living. Today more than ever, we are on the threshold of an age in which man can freely overcome the constraints of physical necessities. This emancipation, however, endangers the lifestyle of those who depend on material dualism, primarily the monopolies of global multinational corporations and the earnings of those families that control them. In 1942, before the Normandy landings and even before the landing in Sicily, the extraordinary Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter made some singular predictions. He correctly noted that Nazism and Fascism would lose the war, but he also noted that Communism would also eventually fail because it was unable to compete with the efficiency of capitalism in creating goods and services, in generating wealth. He went on to expalin that Capitalism would create such a concentration of wealth and power that in the long run free markets, private enterprise, entrepreneurship and innovation would be eliminated. According to Schumpeter, the success of Capitalism would lead to global monopolies that would in turn impose social systems identical to those of Socialism, but this time answering to corporations rather than political parties. In fact, this is the geopolitical reality is the global system of today, where the near totality of all means of production and distribution of wealth, as well as our sources of information, our institutions and our governments are controlled by multinational corporations, a system that I call corporatism. Schumpeter, however, could not imagine how this system could degenerate into the violence we have witnessed recently, especially in the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where with the disappearance of the Soviet threat global oligarchies no longer impose on themselves that former minimum caution to curb their greed, out fear of popular uprisings. Bertrand Russell, the greatest eminence in the world of twentieth-century philosophy, in 1952 proved much more skeptical towards these new powers. In his book, The Impact of Science on Society, he explained that our governments would use the media, psychological instruments, injections and injunctions to make populations completely subservient. In this scenario a popular revolt of the plebs, he said, would become as “unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.” The people, thus enslaved, would become so repressed as to assume physical features so starkly different from their masters as to seem a different species altogether, just like pre-Christian civilizations, such as the Aztec. Finally, I also want to mention how the great George Orwell and his 1984, published in 1948, and which nowadays has been ubiquitously adopted by our politicians as an instruction manual rather than the dystopian novel it was meant to be, realized how in our modern societies war would no longer have the purpose of being won, but that of being perpetual, that is, an instrument to maintain a permanent state of emergency.
Thus, in light of the immense potential we enjoy today, and aware that evil can be easily defeated simply by remaining human, my little prayer for all of us is to preserve our humanity, and to do so by exercising freewill, the faculty of reason and compassion towards others. The Magnificat, one of the most ancient and most beautiful Marian hymns, has long eluded me in its verse, “Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me, and holy is His name. (…) He hath shewed might in His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the thoughts of their heart”. I could not comprehend the meaning of the phrase 'thoughts of their heart', until recently I discovered that in the absence of surgery and knowledge of electrical systems, the Greeks believed the heart to be the organ responsible for generating thoughts. And indeed our thoughts become rushed as the heart accelerates, just as they calm down when we can calm our hearts. Let us therefore profit from this period of rebirth which is Easter, to unite the mind and the heart. Let us use this period of reflection and hope to ask ourselves healthy and necessary questions about the actions of our politicians, our leaders, our institutions, and our governments.
Happy Easter to everyone.
Copyright © Carmelo Pistorio 2023
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