Ethics/Morality

Sequestration. Everyone understands what that means. It is to appropriate something, to make someone or something of interest disappear. The sequestration of truth, therefore, what does that mean? What is it that has disappeared? The truth. And this disappearance gives way to the absence of truth, to post-truth. If we have been robbed of the truth, what is left is what comes after truth. If we think about it, that is strange. To a certain extent, it is a worse option than a simple lie.

The word “reconciliation” is a word with a diverse set of meanings that can encompass many different perspectives: religious, ethical, political and juridical. The author concentrates in this text on the religious perspective and on its Christian version., placing himself clearly in the point of view of victims. From that come all of the questions that recur in these pages: Is there a God who reconciles and who reconciles us with so many victims in this world? If that is answered in the affirmative, what does that reconciliation look like? In what does it consist? How does it concern us Christians?

Vulnerability, linkages (for our mutual dependence and solidarity) and responsibility (or vigilance) are the bases of our being human and the key for our development. These three initial Vs should be for us today guides to reading well our present and for acting in a way that might be, at the same time, universal and practical, in both our work and in all the other fields of life. Perhaps this might be the great lesson of the pandemic.  

We are starting 2021 with our gaze fixed on the end of the pandemic. It seems that now the question is not when it will all be over, but rather how it will happen and what will life be like after this very intense period. The imminent arrival of the vaccine – at least for the so-called “northern countries” – leads us to believe that we will be able to return to the same routine as before the pandemic started. Nevertheless, along the way, the virus of poverty continues wreaking damage. Will we have learned anything during the time that we have been confined? Let us take advantage of this moment in order to stop and review all that we have lived through. We can do it by going back over those slogans that have accompanied us for all these months. When an expression becomes popular it is because it contains within itself something essential of the spirit of our time. Finding in it the deep significance ought to help us to rearm ourselves interiorly so as to be able to live the year 2021 with greater serenity, clarity and commitment.

This publication, according to the author, seeks to make a contribution to the elaboration of a new paradigm of vulnerability, a paradigm that takes issue with the narratives that have shaped the Western worldview of self-sufficiency and forgetfulness of the body. After an initial deconstructive moment, the booklet proposes the creation of a “somatopolitical” language, which uses the universal semantics of vulnerability to place at the very center of social praxis the ethical demand for responsibility and the political vindication of caring.

In this Notebook the Author gathers together the response generated by COVID-19 among the political and economic classes and the consequences that are the prelude to future crises. Because once we are on the other side of the pandemic it is necessary to take on urgently the social and economic aspects of our system that should be questioned in order to foresee and avoid the recurrence in the near future of episodes like the one which we are now living.

The coronavirus has caught humanity off-guard. Death, so far from the daily experience of the self-proclaimed first world, has instead become an event that affects us closely, and in a terribly painful way due to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Although having been affected in many different ways, this is the first disease our generation has faced which affects the world at a universal level, yet it is from this fact that a light of hope springs forth: we may once again feel like one united humanity through the experience of our shared vulnerability.

We find reconciliation a reality that is difficult to accept in our present sociocultural context. A major reason for this difficulty is that the prevailing mindset in our society has no room for the essential elements for understanding and practicing reconciliation, elements such as repentance, self-criticism, guilt, forgiveness, and truth. Drawing on the experience of the Basque Country, the authors of this booklet develop a proposal that takes the perspective of the victims as the necessary point of departure for authentic justice and reconciliation. 

The whole capitalist system has been held up by one central idea: the need for constant unlimited and expansive economic growth. Growth without limits has become a necessity in order to gain the maximum benefit. In this booklet, we try to identify the common points of alternative social and economic proposals from an ecological and “de-growth” point of view, which challenge the current capitalist system. Since the publication of the encyclical Laudato si’, these proposals to “live better with less” should be an integral part of Christian thought and practice.

Jorge Riechmann calls the 21^st century the “Century of the Great Test,” for he sees it as the century in which the future of the planet and the survival of the human race are at stake. Viewing this challenge from the perspectives of philosophy, theology, and eco-feminism, the authors ask about the possibility of changing the current course of our civilization, so that we begin to pursue other goals and promote other values, such as welcoming the stranger, caring for what is fragile, making peace with nature, and accepting ourselves as the vulnerable and mortal beings that we are.