Cultura i societat

The title of this Booklet joins two words, democracy and culture, that mutually support each other like exhausted travelers in the middle of their journey. The tiredness of the word democracy is due to the fact that it designates a tarnished reality, eroded at its foundations by economic globalization, the power of the great industries, techno-politics and populism. The word culture has arrived at the same state because it has lost critical and Utopian stamina in going from being a noble ideal and an antidote against power to being a vassal.

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.

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the general public; it is a softwareprogram trained to reproduce human language and to answer any question it is asked. The fact that this softwarehas learned to offer non-predetermined responses, thanks to the vast amount of information fed into it, has put the expression artificial intelligence (AI) on everyone's lips.

Why do we assume that jumping over the limits imposed by nature and social customs is the right thing to do? What consequences are there for our lives by uncritically assuming the technological mentality? Is there some way to escape from this labyrinth? These are some of the questions that the author poses in this pamphlet, written from a philosophical point of view and attempting to go to the roots of a question that is not only technical or scientific, but also affects that which is most central to the human condition.

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?

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. 

This year 2021 to a close and usher in 2022, right now we shan’t be reaching for grand words, but only penultimate words, spoken in fear and trembling, uttered from an urge to help: penultimate words that serve as an invitation to recover two principles which, in the present moment, can provide guidance in the life of people, communities and institutions. These principles are not new, but instead draw from the tradition that has guided forty years in the life of our study centre and which we go on revindicating as valid.

The pandemic has questioned the paradigm of self-sufficiency upon which our civilization is based and it has demonstrated the great limitations which our economic system has in order to guarantee the basic rights of all people, especially of those who find themselves in a situation of vulnerability. Flipping through pages in order to forget about this serious nightmare, in our opinion, is an error.

In Europe we are witnessing a genuine collapse of the Christian faith. In relatively few decades, a European society with deep Christian cultural roots has become a society in which Christianity is culturally irrelevant. In this booklet the author analyzes this crisis and then explores the conditions that would make a new Christian initiation possible. Such a re-initiation will have to take place from below, from the poor, from the passion of the people, from the great masses of humankind.

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.