We publish the text that the journalist and scholar will read on Friday 22 July at the Milanese review. Against arbitrariness, the reflections of famous authors, from Seneca and Cicero to Giordano Bruno and Shakespeare
The term omission occupies an important space within various legal systems: in the moral, juridical, religious field, it expresses consistent behavior in the failure to perform an action or in the failure to achieve a result which, instead, must be accomplished or achieved on the basis of a value belonging to that specific system. In other words: we speak of omission when something is not done that should be done to respect a norm.
In Catholic theology, for example, omission is considered a grave sin. In the eschatological discourse of Gospel according to Matthewit seems that the final judgment is based mainly on what should have been done and not been done: Because I was hungry, and you didn’t feed meI was thirsty, and you did not give me drink, I was a stranger, and you did not host me, naked, and you did not dress me, sick and imprisoned, and you did not visit me (25, 41-43).
Those who have failed to help their brothers and sisters in need are condemned to eternal punishment. Reading this passage has given rise to various interpretations. However, although there is no general consensus, it seems evident that for Jesus the essence of Christianity coincides with the gratuitous love offered to other human beings. Not an abstract love, not a verbal love that is resolved in a prayer, but a concrete love which must result in a material action, in a tangible behavior: giving the thirsty to drink, feeding the hungry, dressing the naked, hosting strangers, assisting the sick, visiting the prisoners, represent the basic rules on which civil coexistence between human beings.
Over the centuries, in an exclusively secular context, many classics have reaffirmed the importance of human solidarity. I think of some beautiful reflections of Seneca scattered in his splendid ones Letters to Lucilius. For the great Latin philosopher, simply not to harm one’s fellow man is not enough. still a great merit, but in the end very little. However, beyond every single precept and every specific action, there is a criterion for orienting one’s behavior, a general rule that teaches us, in short, the true duties of man: to be aware of the fact that this whole world in which we live forms a unity and that we human beings are the members of a large body. Unique and, at the same time, part of one whole. For Seneca, nature has drawn us to life close to family ties, generating us from the same principles and to strive for the same ends.
[La natura] gave substance to equity and justice; by virtue of its constitutive law it is more miserable to do harm than to suffer it; by his commandment our hands be ready to support all those who need help. May that famous verse be in our hearts and on our lips: “I am a man, I think nothing human is foreign to me. ” We make every good available to everyone. We were born to be available to everyone. Human society completely similar to a stone vault, which would collapse if the individual stones did not consistently lean against each other: precisely for this reason the vault is sustained.
Here the famous verse taken from a play by Terentius (Heautontimorumenos, The self-punisher, v. 77) – which had a great fortune over the centuries from Cicero to Juvenal, from St. Augustine to John of Salisbury, up to Dostoevskij and Gide – is used by Seneca in a context exclusively dominated by the theme of human solidarity: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, everything that concerns men interests me, because I am a man. Each human being, in fact, a single stone which, combined with the others, helps to support the weight of the vault. Making every good available to everyone means encouraging the amalgamation necessary to ensure that each piece is linked to the others in such a way as to compose a solid human society (capable of bearing any weight) and solidarity (capable of cementing the individual parts into a organic everything).
Starting from a letter from Plato (you have to keep in mind that none of us were born only for ourselves), Cicero had already emphasized in Offices that we were not born only for us and that the products of the earth were all created for the use of men, but these were generated for men, so that they may benefit one another. Thus, following nature, human beings will be able to put things in common and bind them together
mix lasting social: We must follow nature as a guide, put to common benefit what is useful to all with the exchange of services, with giving and receiving, forging social ties among men with the products of the arts, our activity and our resources.
Cicero and Seneca are certainly not the only possible examples in the vast ocean of antiquity. Many other authors could be cited. But their reflections helped us to identify themes that persistently reappear in the most diverse literatures of each era. I am thinking, for example, of a great medieval Persian classic He rose
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(Golestn) by Sa’d by Shrz (circa 1184-1291), who in a series of memorable verses (some, not surprisingly, carved in the glass building of the UN in New York) reminds us that all human beings are members of one body and that the pain of our fellow men belongs to us. We are all children of Adam, members of one body. And if a single party feels pain, the same suffering is necessarily reflected in the others parts connected to each other: The children of Adam are members of the same body, because in creation they all receive the same nature. When misfortune throws a member into pain, the other members no longer have rest.
Here too the idea of a humanity returns in which specific individuals find themselves components of an identical whole. For this reason, a human being who does not care about the pains and sufferings of his fellow man does not deserve to be called a man! (O you who do not care for the pain of others, / certainly do not deserve to be called a man). If you are indifferent to the suffering of others, it means that the link with humanity was severed and that, as a result, we renounced being men.
But unfortunately it is those who hold the power who, in the first place, do not care about the last, the rejected stones, the voiceless. In fact, Giordano Bruno’s reproaches are addressed to those in charge whenin the of monadreminds the princes who hold the scepter to exercise power without trampling the weakest: You did not create God to despise the peoples who must reverence you, nor did He command you to trample those who must respect you, as, instead, the custom of a not a small number of powerful who wield the scepter as an instrument to enslave the neglected people.
For Bruno, in fact, nothing more serious than the will of the powerful; the greedy, crude breed, being able to arbitrarily create its own rights, thinks that it touches the sky and that it can trample every right with impunity.
Shakespeare too shows us the sins of omission that rulers often commit. In fact, Lear does not see in the guise of a king. Only when madness overwhelms him does his blindness dissolve, allowing him to look at the ingratitude of the two daughters to whom he had donated all of his possessions. And precisely during a terrible storm (in perfect harmony with the inner storm that torments him), the old father, deprived of any defense, manages to perceive, through his sufferings, the sufferings of the poor, the hungry, the homeless: Poveri naked wretches, wherever you find yourselves offering yourselves to the fury of this merciless storm, how will your hungry heads and hips, and the holes and windows of those rags, protect you from a season like this without a roof? Oh, I’ve always neglected these things! Fasto, here is your medicine: expose yourself to all that the poor feel, so that you can strip yourself of the superfluous and give it to them, and show a more just sky.
There would be other beautiful pages to read by other extraordinary authors. But my time is now over. I wanted to show just a few small examples of how the classics can help us make humanity more human. And, above all, to disprove the violent lies that many political parties around the world have used to promote selfishness and hatred disguised as miserable nationalism and localism. Behind the same slogans – America first, La France d’abord, Brazil a top de tudo, Italians first – hides a contempt for the other, for the different, for the stranger, for those human beings who suffer from hunger, dictatorships, wars, racial and gender discrimination.
Over the past forty years we have suffered the ruthless principles of neoliberalism condensed into Margaret Thatcher’s formula (Tina: There Is Not Alternative) who have progressively canceled the right to have rights, to take up a beautiful expression by Hannah Arendt. From education to work, from personal relationships to politics, everything has been bent to the service of the market and finance. The Supreme Court of the United States has canceled, with a simple sentence, the rights of women (the delicate issue of abortion), the protection of the planet (by removing the autonomy of the Environmental Protection Agency) and the right to life ( liberalizing the use of weapons even more).
Now more than ever it is necessary to reiterate clearly that it is not true that there are no alternatives. Literature, the arts, music, philosophy, basic scientific research, teach us that there is always an alternative and that cultivating utopias serves to seek and invent it.. Utopias inspired above all by a single great rule: that of living for others, of fighting against omissions and indifference, of taking material actions in favor of our fellow men to give a strong meaning to our life. Because, as Seneca recalled in the Letters to Luciliusalteri vivas oportet, si vis tibi vive (it is important to live for another, if you want to live for yourself).
July 20, 2022 (change July 20, 2022 | 22:10)
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