Time to revise fundamentals

By Leonardo Boff                                                                    Read Spanish Version

From
América
Latina en Movimiento

The
combination of the different crises, some of them temporary and other
systemic, forces us
to work on two fronts: one intra-systemic, for immediate solutions to
the problems in order to save lives, guarantee employment and
production, and avoid collapse; and another one trans-systemic,
rigorously criticizing the theoretical fundamentals that have brought
on us the present chaos and working other fundamentals to promote an
alternative that allows the continuity of the human global project at
another level.

Each
historic era needs a myth for bringing people together, for
galvanizing strength and putting history on a new course. The
founding myth of modernity is based on reason, which from the time of
Ancient Greece is society’s structuring axis. Reason creates
science, transforms it into a technique of intervention in Nature and
is bent on dominating all its powers. For this, according to Francis
Bacon, the founder of scientific method, you must torture Nature
until it gives up all its secrets. This reason believes in unlimited
progress and creates a society that wants to be autonomous, of order
and progress. Reason promoted the idea of foreseeing everything,
managing everything, controlling everything and creating everything.
It occupied all spaces; it sent all other forms of knowledge to
limbo.

And
it so happens that after three hundred years of extolling reason, we
witness the madness of reason, for only a demented reason can
organize a society where 20% of the population owns 80% of all of
Earth’s wealth. The three wealthiest persons in the world have more
assets than all the wealth of the 40 poorest countries where 600
million people live; 257 individuals amass more than what 2.8 billion
people (45% of humankind) have. In Brazil, five thousand families
hoard 46% of the national wealth. The dementia of productivist and
consumerist reason has generated global warming that will cause
already visible unbalances and will decimate millions of species,
including humans.

The
dictatorship of reason has created the market society with its
typical cultural, a certain way of life, of producing, consuming, of
doing science, of educating, of teaching and of shaping collective
subjectivity. These should be tuned to its dynamic and values, trying
always to maximize profits through the marketing of everything. Now
this so called modern, capitalist, bourgeois, western — and at
present globalized — culture is in crisis. It becomes apparent in
the different present crises, which are all the expression of a
single crisis, the crisis of fundamentals. This is not about giving
up reason, but of fighting its arrogance (hubris) and criticizing its
shortsightedness. What reason needs most at this moment is to be
urgently completed with sensible reason (M. Maffesoli), with
emotional intelligence (D. Goleman), with cordial reason (A.
Cortina), with the education of the senses (J. F. Duarte, Jr.), with
science with conscience (E. Morin), with spiritual intelligence (D.
Zohar), with concern (D. R. Winnicott) and with the carefulness that
I have proposed for quite some time.

It
is the deep feeling (pathos) that makes us listen to the shouting of
the Earth and the heartrending clamor of millions of hungry people.
It is not the cold reason, but the sensible reason that moves people
to lower them down from the cross and make them live. That is why it
is time to submit the prevailing science model to criticism, to
radically challenge the use they make of it, more for profit than for
life, to unmask the present model of development that is
unsustainable for its predatory and unjust nature.

Sensitiveness,
cordiality, care, all taken to new levels together with nature in
social relations and in everyday life can consolidate with reason a
utopia that we can touch with our own hands, because it is
immediately workable These are the fundamentals of the rising
civilizing paradigm that gives us life and hope.

Brazilian Leonardo
Boff is one of the most lucid thinkers of Theology of Liberation.