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CounterEconomy/9 - The analysis of the civil and economic effects of the Counter-Reformation continues.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 30/04/2023
"There has often been cases of true piety with false theology. As Galileo observed, one does not learn how to play the organ from those who know how to make them, but from those who know how to play them. Theologians make organs, but playing them something else altogether. Even the most unlearned of Christians could manage it better."
Giuseppe De Luca, Introduction to the Italian archive for the history of piety (Introduzione all’archivio italiano per la storia della pietà), p. LIX
The Christianization of the feasts of nature, the affirmation of holy intercessors and of a harsh theology, and the simple strength of fidelity to God, the God of life.
«What about those in each region claiming their particular patron saint? One makes toothache go away, another one assists pregnant women, yet another one recovers stolen objects, and there is one that saves you from shipwrecks, while the mob almost attributes more powers to the Virgin than to the Son». These are the words of the great Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (In Praise of Folly, § 40), written in 1509 while Luther was elaborating his Reformation, to which Erasmus did not adhere. No one listened to Erasmus. More than four centuries later, today the following can be read: «There is a hill, not far from the Pollino, with an arboreal cult that the people here call "Ndenna". It takes place in mid-June in Castelsaraceno. On the first Sunday of the month, the beech tree destined to wear the groom's clothes (the “Ndenna”) is cut down. The following Sunday, the pine tree, the 'cunocchia' that will be the bride, is chosen. And finally, Saint Anthony blesses the union» (Domenico Notarangelo, The Paths of Piety/, I sentieri della pietà, 2000).

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This Lucanian festival of the "Ndenna" is an expression of the Catholic development of nature festivals. "Planting May" was an ancient European tradition, still present in Basilicata (Accettura) and also in various areas of central Italy. Until the Middle Ages, on the night of May 1, young men would plant branches and flowers in front of girls' homes. However, «towards the end of the sixteenth century the Christianization of the rite began, inviting people to direct homages and floral offerings to Mary instead». Then, starting from the eighteenth century, the flowers on the altars of the Madonna underwent a further development «transforming themselves into spiritual "living flowers": small sacrifices offered in homage to the Madonna throughout the month of May» (Ottavia Niccoli, Religious life in modern Italy, 2004, pp. 181-182). This is how the “maggio mariano” ("May of Mary") with the "fioretti" (spiritual "living flowers") was born. Lovely and beautiful traditions, but... it is not easy to understand what the Madonna has to do with those ancient rites of lovers and small offerings of flowers for girlfriends. A link can always be found, of course. A different choice could also have been made, nevertheless: leaving the ancient cults of fertility and harvests alone, not fighting them as Luther did, but calling them "folklore", considering them popular traditions without wanting to bring them into Christianity - the problem with the 'Ndenna' festival it is not the marrying of trees but the presence of Saint Anthony. Something similar to what was done with the Italian figure of the so-called Befana (an old woman who delivers gifts to children throughout the country on Epiphany Eve), who was not made into "the wife of the three kings", but was left outside the crib, right there next to it, could also have been done with the ancient traditions.
However, the choice of applying religious hybridization to the ancient natural rites, quite understandable in itself, ended up having a high cost, linked to the great theme of the cult of saints. The Council of Trent corrected the magical excesses, but reaffirmed the theological and liturgical legitimacy of the ancient intercession of the saints, who continued their role as mediators and protectors of everything from saving crops from hail to sore throats. A growing group of intercessors thus formed between the Trinity and the people, intermediate steps that were supposed to favour and simplify the attainment of our prayers: «God sees our needs and could therefore provide directly: but divine wisdom is pleased to communicate its gifts through intermediaries» (Proceedings of the Council of Trent, Session XXV, 1563). Thus, the idea of ​a ​God too distant to be reached directly by us lowly creatures starts to grow. Thanks be to God, however, there are saints, perceived as mediating creatures, because they are both a bit similar to God and a bit similar to us, and therefore understand both (Latin people have always loved the idea of demi-gods: it is no coincidence that the temples built in honour of Hercules were among the most widespread ones). Hence, the Catholic religion became a religion of God and saints, an explosion of religious biodiversity, a spiritual forest inhabited by an infinity of beings where everyone performed their function in the ecosystem of worship, giving life to a perfect "religious division of labour". Too bad that, in the meantime, too many of us have forgotten that God became man precisely to reduce the mythical distance between heaven and earth. In my country, male and female saints were often more present than the Trinity, also due to the fact that people need to survive amidst hunger and disease, perichoresis is a luxury that many people cannot afford.
However, there is something else that needs to be said in order to understand the great love for the saints - because it really was love: it was the greatest love story of the Counter-Reformation. Turning to the saints was made almost necessary by the development, in the Baroque period, of a frightening anthropological pessimism. If we are mere "nothing", moral grubs, how could we personally ever address that God, who becomes all the more distant in heaven the more we sink into the depths of the earth? Indeed, during this time, the idea that the "objective" of human life was the salvation of the soul and the sole love of God, and therefore the contempt for the natural joy of the body, for the pleasures of life, was established: «You were not born to enjoy but only to love your God and save yourself forever... therefore the deal of all deals, the only important and necessary one, is to serve God and save your soul» (G. G. Giunta, Manual of sacred prayers/Manuale di sacre preci, 1830 , Naples, p. 20). A theology in which in order to raise God it is necessary to lower man, in order to exalt the divine it is essential to first despise that which is human. Thus, God becomes a bizarre Father figure, who enjoys the annihilation of his creatures and who is only happy when we tell him: «You are everything, I am nothing». Theologies that are light-years away from the Bible, both from the Old and New Testaments, where "The glory of God is man fully alive" (St. Irenaeus), and from a Jesus, who told us: «I have come that they may have life and have it to the full» (John 10,10). This life, not just the future one. Instead, the Baroque age was the time in which the search for paradise (or purgatory) transformed present life into hell for too many.
The growing distance that had arisen between Catholics and the reading of the Bible made us forget that the gods who feed on their faithful are called idols, while the God of revelation is entirely on our side, every day he "cheers" us on so that we can fully flourish as people. Instead, the following can be read in those manuals: «If you do not have sufficient courage to seek humiliations, at least do not flee those that present themselves before you: consider them all as a sign of the singular goodness that God has for you» (J. Croiset, Exercises of piety for all the days of the year/ Esercizi di pietà per tutti i giorni dell’anno, 1725, p. 35). The God of Jesus transformed into a being who sends us humiliations, who humiliates us to make us humble, and who has therefore forgotten a most fundamental human law: the best way not to make people humble is to humiliate them. Consequently, and most coherently with this particularly inhuman vision of God, the pursuit of mortification became the main path to follow: «The more we apply ourselves in seeking to mortify ourselves, the more we will move forward in perfection» (Diario spirituale/Spiritual Journal, anonymous author, Naples, Jovene, und, p. 93).
As for the civil and economic consequences, it should come as no surprise that the social practice of recommendation has been incredibly widespread and varied in Catholic countries. Ranging from the consolidated practice of those who in order to obtain a favour from a powerful but distant person, try to go through a closer mediator (“to have friends in high places/someone looking over you from above”), to those who have to apply for a certificate with local authorities and first asks themselves “Who do I know in that office?”. A particular version of mediation, which meant that a culture of civil and political subsidiarity never really developed, even in Catholic countries (despite the fact that subsidiarity is a pillar in the vision that has become the social doctrine of the Church), because this mentality of obligatory intermediate steps only reinforce the sacral vision of human hierarchies, which is anti-subsidiary. More in general, the idea of ​​intercession also fuelled the concept of prayer as a request, as a deal made with heaven, where we turn to the saints and therefore to God above all, to ask him for something that he has not already given us. Thereby, nourishing the ancient economic relationship with the spirits and gods: meanwhile the prophets and Christ drove the merchants out of the temple to let us know that their religion is not a trade with God.
One more thing must be added to the costs, however, something of perhaps even greater importance. This form of Christianity that became a new flowering of the natural religiosity of the Mediterranean people is encountering enormous difficulties with post-modernity, because it risks sinking together with the ancient mythical religiosity that it has incorporated and "christened". We must not forget that the resurrection of Christ was not one of the many miracles and magic of the ancient world, but their end: the secular time of that which is "holy" began with the death of the "sacred". However, as a result of wanting to speak to everyone in everyone's language back in the day, today Christianity runs the risk of speaking (almost) to no one in a language that has become (almost) incomprehensible to everyone.
Yet there is also good news. Despite that theological contempt for human life, despite an incredible disesteem "for all things down here", and hence also for work and the economy, Catholics have managed to give life to wonderful businesses, to work well, to give birth to sons and daughters, to be happy sometimes, to love people, individuals and all of humanity. Although life was made quite difficult for them, they made it. Because people never really believed in an image of God reduced to those conditions. They had good instinct, especially women, which led them to ask God to become something different, something else. Popular piety was also a subversive practice, rebellion against a version of God who had turned into an enemy of human happiness – something we will take a closer look at in the next article. This is also present in some passages of these Manuals of devotion: «O Eternal father, Judge and Lord of our souls, whose justice is incomprehensible! Since you commanded, O Lord, that your most innocent Son pay our debts, look, O Lord and Father, at such tremendous agony. Cease, O Father, your indignation» (Exercises of mercy/Esercizi di pietà che si praticano nella Ven. Chiesa del Gesu Vecchio, Rev. D. Placido Baccher, Naples, Stamperia Reale/Royal Printing House, 1857, p. 191).
«Your justice is incomprehensible... Cease, O Father, your indignation» stupendous prayer of a people who chose to play the part of Cyrene: they voluntarily placed themselves under a theological cross that was much too heavy, for both men and God, in an attempt to relieve that unbearable weight: «Father, cease your indignation, we do not understand your justice». They did not understand that theology, but they did understand God, the God of life. Thus, they learned how to really pray by asking God to save God: they prayed to God for God, not for themselves. They learned the heart of the Bible without ever having read it, and then they filled the churches with paintings of crucifixes with the Father in the back supporting his son in his arms and weeping with him. Because they knew that the "job" of any father and mother is to unpin their children from their crosses, not putting them there. They did everything possible and impossible to save God in their hearts. And they succeeded.
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CounterEconomy/9 - The analysis of the civil and economic effects of the Counter-Reformation continues.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 30/04/2023
"There has often been cases of true piety with false theology. As Galileo observed, one does not learn how to play the organ from those who know how to make them, but from those who know how to play them. Theologians make organs, but playing them something else altogether. Even the most unlearned of Christians could manage it better."
Giuseppe De Luca, Introduction to the Italian archive for the history of piety (Introduzione all’archivio italiano per la storia della pietà), p. LIX
The Christianization of the feasts of nature, the affirmation of holy intercessors and of a harsh theology, and the simple strength of fidelity to God, the God of life.
«What about those in each region claiming their particular patron saint? One makes toothache go away, another one assists pregnant women, yet another one recovers stolen objects, and there is one that saves you from shipwrecks, while the mob almost attributes more powers to the Virgin than to the Son». These are the words of the great Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (In Praise of Folly, § 40), written in 1509 while Luther was elaborating his Reformation, to which Erasmus did not adhere. No one listened to Erasmus. More than four centuries later, today the following can be read: «There is a hill, not far from the Pollino, with an arboreal cult that the people here call "Ndenna". It takes place in mid-June in Castelsaraceno. On the first Sunday of the month, the beech tree destined to wear the groom's clothes (the “Ndenna”) is cut down. The following Sunday, the pine tree, the 'cunocchia' that will be the bride, is chosen. And finally, Saint Anthony blesses the union» (Domenico Notarangelo, The Paths of Piety/, I sentieri della pietà, 2000).

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CounterEconomy/7 - We should remember that God is above all agape and love, never «do ut des»
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 16/04/2023
"The relationship between the taranta and Saint Paul was an extremely confused and contradictory one, in which Saint Paul, protector of the tarantati to whom grace was implored, coexisted with the Saint Paul who began the tarantate to punish sins and faults, and the Saint Paul-taranta exorcisable with music, dance and colours"
Ernesto de Martino, The Land of Remorse
The analysis on the cultural-economic effects of the Counter-Reformation continues. The serious effects of the commercial version of grace in the world of conceiving religion and civil life.
Religions are the first tool with which human beings have tried to defeat death, they are the great ordeal to make what is naturally not immortal. They are therefore the result of a great collective desire for the metamorphosis of death into something valuable, and sacrifice is the medium that ideally should operate this admirable alchemy. Thus, when plants or animals, destined by their nature to die, are sacrificed in the ritual, they leave the natural mortal order and enter a divine immortal one – herein lies the sense of the etymology of sacrifice: "to turn sacred". By killing life against nature on the altar, it is made immortal. This is also an explanation behind human sacrifices in ancient times: when offered to the gods they died sacrificially against nature and hence they no longer died in nature. Thus, «man constitutes himself as a prosecutor of death in the very bosom of natural dying» (E. De Martino, Magic, Ritual, Lament/ Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico, p. 236).

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Ancient man saw nature die a partial but not definitive death, because the cycle of the seasons made what died in autumn "resurrect" in spring, and this suggested to him that somewhere something similar had to happen to men as well: «An old Dinca song laments that while the sun rises, passes and yet returns, and so does the moon, only man is born, passes and never returns» (De Martino, ibid). By giving living things to the gods, they leave time and enter eternity - we do not understand the ancient theology of consecrated life without this transformation and divinization of the gift of life, nor do we understand the profound meaning of mourning, that is, "procure for the deceased that second cultural death which avenges the scandal of natural death» (De Martino, ibid.)
With Christianity, however, something new broke into the world. Christ also overturned the logic of ancient religions: it is no longer we who offer our mortal gifts-sacrifices to the ruling divinity asking to make them immortal. In the Eucharist, that living synthesis of Christ's passion-death-resurrection, it is Jesus who, by giving himself to us in the form of bread, makes us share in the divinity. It is no longer our gifts that die in order to live forever, but it is God who by dying-rising gives us something true of his own immortality. The Eucharist is therefore the anti-sacrifice, it is the final word on the sacrificial logic, the good charis, a beautiful gratitude. It is all absolutely free because it is free from the commercial sphere. Herein lies the humanism of Christianity. In the practice of the Catholic tradition, however, especially starting from the Counter-Reformation, this absolute dimension of gratuitousness did not establish itself in the culture-worship of the people. People continued to interpret religion from a sacrificial perspective, where no grace is free: «'If you don't accept the hen, grace does not apply, and the child will be born blind'. "Grace is free," said Don Paolo. “Free graces do not exist,” replied the woman» (Ignazio Silone, Wine and bread). The Catholic reaction to Protestants' salvation by "grace alone" reinforced and amplified the religion's idea of ​​"works" by which one must "deserve" salvation. Grace is not perceived as unconditional gratuity: someone has to profit from it, it must be earned.
Hence, even confession and consequentially the Eucharist were interpreted within the realms of a relationship of exchange between man and divinity. When reading the "Catechism of Pius X" (from 1905) for example, we immediately understand that the narrative of confession leads to interpreting penance as the price to pay to obtain the grace of forgiveness and therefore communion-Eucharist. The conditional nature of the absolution naturally places it in a juridical-economic-commercial context of do ut des: one of the «fruits that a good confession produces in us is the grace of God», which «makes us capable of the treasure of indulgences», indulgences which are too easily interpreted as the price to pay for «the remission of a temporal penalty» (Catechism, § 9). The Eucharist is therefore not perceived as a free gift, but as a response to our good works - grace does not work if we do not find ourselves in a state of grace first.
This contractual perception and narrative of grace as God's response to our meritorious works has produced much wider effects than just the interpretation of confession or sacramental life. Effects that are already very important in themselves, if we think of how deeply rooted approaches such as "I pay and then buy" to the sacraments still are in Catholic people. Naturally, theologians have said many other things regarding these narratives as well, things that made them more complex and in part even refuted them, but they did not generally reach the people.
Gratuitous-grace is therefore truly the central theme here. Because gratuitousness is precisely what prevents religions from being experienced merely as magic and superstition. Magic is the expression of man's eternal desire to take possession of the sacred, manipulate it and use it to his own advantage through words, gestures and thoughts. For millennia, the experience of the sacred has been the human reaction to the tremendum (Mircea Eliade), to the need to understand and try to manage forces that human beings perceived as supernatural and uncontrollable. The essence of magic is the sacred without gratuitousness, experienced entirely within an aspect of exchange – the economy was born from the world of magic and not vice versa. For this reason the Bible (especially regarding the prophets) has always been ruthless with the world of magic and divination, which it interprets as serious forms of false prophecy and idolatry.
From its earliest times, the Church has always had to contend with magic and superstition. Popes, priests, councils and theologians, therefore, have done and written a lot to protect the novelty of Christianity from the archaic forms of the sacred, in particular from magic. The Renaissance experienced a strong return of magical and esoteric practices on all levels. Before the Reformation, there had been authoritative interventions by top-level theologians and philosophers (from Erasmus of Rotterdam to Boccella, Querini, Giustiniani and Fregoso), who denounced the use of images of Christ, the Madonna and the saints used for various forms of magical rites with regards to rain, lightning, calamities, or for fertility. Those magical and idolatrous tendencies, which were already very present in the Middle Ages, were therefore growing in the sixteenth century and risked becoming a real epidemic - «My Saint Paul of the tarantate».
The Protestant Reformation was a traumatic and decisive event in this area as well. That internal process of criticizing magic and superstition underwent if not a total arrest (the condemnation of astrology continued, for example with Sixtus V), certainly a downsizing and a slowdown. The criticism of Luther and the reformers was in fact also centred on the idolatry and paganism of Catholic countries, accused of cultivating the adoration of fetishes (statues) and images in the "simple people", in a popular form of piety seen as superstition. This great and global Protestant attack on Catholic worship produced two main effects in the Catholic world: (a) a defence, by reaction, of the legitimacy of many forms of mestizo popular piety and religiosity, limiting itself only to the condemnation of grave excesses; (b) criticizing popular piety became a sign of heresy by those who did it. A third, equally decisive, element, was added to all of this.
The Church of the Counter-Reformation did not want to lose the relationship of control that it had with the "simple people" left at the mercy of their beliefs. Thus, it made its "pastoral" choice with the Council of Trent, which was also very different from the Protestant one. While, in fact, Luther's catechism was addressed to fathers of families, the pastoral reform of the post-Tridentine church was centred on the newly educated parish priests (Paolo Segneri) created by the new seminaries and the new religious orders. Books and documents were consequentially written for parish priests and well-trained religious persons who, in turn, had to form and prepare the simple people. The "political" choice of Trent was to train the educators, a second or third level mediation and pastoral care. Images, harmless nursery rhymes and litanies that were easy to memorize in the vernacular or in dialect (I still remember my grandmother's), were created for the benefit of the "simple people". The shepherds were formed, not the flock made up of the illiterates, the poor, the little ones, the women, the ignorant, the brutes, the boors – the institution of family is not even mentioned in the documents of the Council of Trent.
An important consequence of this choice was the inevitable paternalism in treating the "simple people". The natural consequence of paternalism is always a certain level of infantilism, that is, interpreting the relationship of the clergy with the faithful as that of fathers with their children - and when the stupendous evangelical reality of being the "children of God" becomes being the "children of the parish priests", the sense of God’s different form of paternity and of being his offspring is easily lost. In this context, mestizo/mixed or totally superstitious devotional practices were merely seen as "children being children" and therefore tolerated, as parents tolerate when children talk with their dolls. Children allowed to play within the realms of a minor religion, considered harmless in view "salvation" (the only thing that really mattered) and theologically harmless. Many good things were also done "for" the poor, as we will see in the coming articles, but rarely "with" the poor (because to do things with the poor you must first recognize them as adults). However, unlike children who above all live on gifts, the religious experience that the Catholic people had was dominated by an idea of ​​God who when he does not intervene to free us from illness and poverty, it is due to our wickedness. The creation of oceans worth of guilt and fear, while those in charge of its management advised everyone to offer their pain to God. As a result, remembering, in this oikonomia, that God was above all agape and unconditional love became difficult indeed – and, in fact, many ended up forgetting it altogether.
Thus, while theologians continued to discuss the concepts of grace and conscience, the infant people cultivated their innocent popular piety, developing a "religion" of consumption. They continued to invoke the same ancient spirits, the only thing they had really changed was their names, sometimes not even the canopy used for the procession in their honour. At this point, we should not be surprised that once religion in a disenchanted world lost its ability to satisfy the taste of its consumers, these Catholic people, educated for centuries in a faith as children of lesser gods, passed without any delay from the sanctuaries to the shopping centres, from the evil eye to scratch cards, from the old (and serious) saints of the churches to the new "saints" of entertainment and new emotionally based sects.
One last note. The "simple people" occasionally had authentic spiritual experiences, because, thanks be to God, the free voice of the Spirit blows wherever it wants and the Spirit is the "father of the poor", it loves them very much. The history of Catholic countries, including its economic and political history, could have been different, however, if, while the educators were being trained, an attempt had been made to treat the poor as adults - because the poor are not children, they are not even "simple": they are only poor.
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CounterEconomy/7 - We should remember that God is above all agape and love, never «do ut des»
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 16/04/2023
"The relationship between the taranta and Saint Paul was an extremely confused and contradictory one, in which Saint Paul, protector of the tarantati to whom grace was implored, coexisted with the Saint Paul who began the tarantate to punish sins and faults, and the Saint Paul-taranta exorcisable with music, dance and colours"
Ernesto de Martino, The Land of Remorse
The analysis on the cultural-economic effects of the Counter-Reformation continues. The serious effects of the commercial version of grace in the world of conceiving religion and civil life.
Religions are the first tool with which human beings have tried to defeat death, they are the great ordeal to make what is naturally not immortal. They are therefore the result of a great collective desire for the metamorphosis of death into something valuable, and sacrifice is the medium that ideally should operate this admirable alchemy. Thus, when plants or animals, destined by their nature to die, are sacrificed in the ritual, they leave the natural mortal order and enter a divine immortal one – herein lies the sense of the etymology of sacrifice: "to turn sacred". By killing life against nature on the altar, it is made immortal. This is also an explanation behind human sacrifices in ancient times: when offered to the gods they died sacrificially against nature and hence they no longer died in nature. Thus, «man constitutes himself as a prosecutor of death in the very bosom of natural dying» (E. De Martino, Magic, Ritual, Lament/ Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico, p. 236).

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CounterEconomy/5 - And the society of "civil merchandising" gradually became a permanent job
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  02/04/2023
"Search as you might, you will never find any other idea in the Counter-Reformation than this: that the Catholic Church was a highly salutary institution, and therefore to be preserved and strengthened."
Benedetto Croce, History of the Baroque age in Italy (Storia della età barocca in Italia)
We must start by looking precisely at the age of Counter-Reformation if we want to understand the differences between Nordic, Protestant and our form of capitalism.
We know perfectly well that it is difficult to understand capitalism without going through the Protestant Reformation and its "spirit". We are somewhat less aware of the fact that we also need to look at the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as the theological, social, ethical and pastoral forms of the Catholic response to Luther's Reform had very important effects in the way of understanding and doing business in Italy and in other Catholic countries, as we will see in the coming pages.

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Luther's Reformation was the most serious and important crisis in the history of Christianity, its effects were much heavier and more pervasive than those of the first West-East schism were. The Church of Rome saw a concrete possibility of its own dissolution in what was happening in Germany. That revolt did not only feature heresy and a schism: there was a radical criticism of the form that Christianity had assumed in the Roman and Italian Church which in Luther’s eyes was seriously wrong, at times even diabolical. The popes and many bishops understood the enormous theological and ethical significance of that German crisis and were greatly frightened. A radical defence strategy arose from this fear on all fronts, which, it must be said was highly effective, even if the human cost was very high. The Inquisition, the Jesuits and other new religious orders, as well as private aural confession, the index of forbidden books, the return to the past, the Council of Trent, the renewal of priestly training and the evangelization of rural dwellers were all powerful means and part of this defence. On a purely theological level, Luther had attacked some of the main pillars of the ecclesial building. The claim of salvation by "grace alone" and not by works, undermined the whole practice and market of indulgences, pilgrimages and jubilees, which had developed during the last phase of the Middle Ages and were also the fulcrum of the functioning political and economic life of the Roman Church.
The Counter-Reformation was therefore above all a reaction, and this "reactionary" nature conditioned its entire theology and practice. Thus, while conscience and its free examination were at the centre of Luther's reforming action, the counter-reforming action was focused on the role of ecclesiastical authority and its criteria of truth external to the person, based on objective hierarchies of merits and of faults. Born from the primary need to refute the new heretical doctrines to block their spread, the season of the Counter-Reformation resulted in an extraordinary creation of a series of sins, prohibitions, anathemas, and therefore in a complex system for identifying the symptoms of error and of heresy nestled in the human soul, sometimes even without its knowledge. The external forum was managed by the Inquisition, while the internal forum was managed by the confessors, two complementary forums that became the main instruments of that catholicity.
Then there is an ethical aspect that continues to seem paradoxical. If it is true that the theology of the Counter-Reformation was a reaction to that of the Reformation, we would also have expected a reaction to the radical Augustinianism of Luther (a former Augustinian monk) and to his anthropological pessimism, and therefore a greater trust in the moral capacities of men, in the Catholic world. If only for the sake of consistency with Thomas, who in the meantime had become an absolute point of reference for Catholicism and who, compared to Augustine, had a more positive outlook on human nature and on our capacity for good despite the original sin. Instead, when we read up on the theology and practice of the Counter-Reformation we find an exasperation of the culture of guilt, a pastoral action based on the management of sins through a great diffusion in the masses of the sacrament of private confession of very detailed sins in terms of "type and quantity" and thus multiplied to infinity. We also find a revival of Purgatory, a general anguish in view of Hell, as well as macabre dances and baroque churches filled with skulls and skeletons.
If we then start leafing through the "Manual for Confessors" (I have collected several), which began to multiply (reaching as far as Vatican II) from the mid-sixteenth century, we will most probably be amazed by the spectacle of a whole constellation of sins, which had become their very own science, making the collections of Roman and medieval canonists pale in comparison. Guido De Ruggiero wrote about this: «Morality becomes a matter of a mechanical classification of each single case in the appropriate class, and the question regarding the more or less exact suitability of one in the other takes the name of scruple, forming a kind of fictitious moral aura around the merely peripheral action, devoid of any intimacy... Hence, the creation of specialized guides, directors and confessors, capable of orienting an individual in the fantastic labyrinth». An «exceptional legalistic ability is developed, to adapt the case to the law and perhaps, sometimes, to evade it». Faced with a Reformation that denied any extrinsic spiritual direction of consciences and conceived penance (which nonetheless remained in Luther) as a total renewal of life, «the casuistry mentality of the Counter-Reformation instead reaffirms the sacramental character of confession» whose application became increasingly frequent during the course of the year (De Ruggiero, Renaissance, Reform and Counter-Reformation, Laterza, 1947, pp. 198-199).
The diffusion and intensification of aural confession was therefore a central step. The new confessor created by the new religious orders of the Counter-Reformation was formed by theologians (especially the Jesuits) and passed under the jurisdiction of the bishops – previously, confession was almost monopolized by Franciscan and Dominican monks and friars. The confessor became the "doctor of the soul" who must be capable of recognizing the moral illness beyond the always imperfect anamnesis of the penitent-patient: «The devil uses a thousand ingenuities to make confession more difficult... So you shall open communication with a penitent individual as follows: “You have heard bad speeches and have had bad thoughts, have you not?”. If he or she deny them, take their negations as affirmations. Go on and say two or three more times: "You have lingered with pleasure on these bad thoughts, have you not?" Even if they say no, continue…» (Abbot Gaume, Confessors’ Manual, p. 49). Much attention is given to the treatment of recidivist sinners: «How can one absolve a penitent sinner used to saying bad words six times a day or even more than ten times a day? He said that almost once a day every eight days and … has he not relapsed more than three times during those eight days? Etc. etc.» (Abate Gaume, Manual for confessors, p. 269).
Hence, when it comes to the confession of a merchant and workers of various types, it is important for us: «If a merchant comes, ask him if he charges more when selling on credit, and if retail merchandise can be charged more... If a tailor comes, ask him if he worked during holidays to finish the clothes without any extraordinary reason, if he kept the scraps of the fabrics, and if it is a near occasion for him to sin when taking the measurements of women... If a barber arrives, enjoin him to find a woman who knows how to style people’s hair, because women will never turn to a man to have their hair styled, Etc. etc.» (A. Gaume, Manual for confessors, pp. 160-161). The parish priests then had to create parish lists with the "non-confessed" (those who did not confess). Everyone in church could see who left the confessional without doing communion, so sins that remained non-absolved ended up leaving the strictly internal sphere becoming a public fact and knowledge.
It is not difficult to understand,therefore, how this use of confession fueled a tendency towards developing double standards, a systematic recourse to lying and not telling the truth. Penitent individuals were strongly encouraged not to tell the truth to their confessors, in part because the confessional was the last offshoot of the Inquisition: «He told me that when one goes before the confessor one must only say what one wants him to know and then expect a Jubilee because one’s sins are forgiven» (Donna Olimpia Campana, Modena, 1600, quoted in A. Prosperi, A passive revolution (Una rivoluzione passiva), p. 275).
Thus, finally we arrive at the matter of economy. In order to stem the deleterious effects of the freedom of conscience not mediated by the clerics, the Council of Trent forcefully reaffirmed the ancient economic and financial prohibitions that Scholasticism had overcome between the 1200s and 1500s. The moralists went out of their way to find usury in those contracts (exchange letters, commendations, insurances…), which had been invented by the merchants to avoid the formal prohibition of usury. More than three centuries worth of civilization and economic and juridical wealth went up in smoke in those confessionals and Italy and the Latin countries consequently found themselves with a more backward economic-financial set of ethics, compared to that of the Franciscan friars who had worked so hard to establish that not all loans were usurious in nature.
This proliferation of controlling measures and casuistry of sins ended up producing a series of highly relevant phenomena. A distance and mutual distrust was created between the business world and the Church. The merchants continued to give alms to the Church, financing processions and patronal feasts and they went to confession once a year by telling the priest what they could say. They remained within the enclosure of the church but sent their wives and daughters to actual religious services (thus, the "feminization" of the Catholic Church was born). The double economic and civil morality was strengthened: that of the things that can be said to the authorities, and that of the other things that you do not tell anyone. The idea arises from the impossibility of respecting all the complex and infinite laws of economic and social life, where only those who tell part of the truth can truly survive and where only stupid people would tell the whole truth - «Taxes? I pay them, of course I do, a little: paying all of them is impossible», an entrepreneur told me a few days ago.
Hence, people lived and worked in an ordinary state of imperfection, while that very same religious and social system that offered closure. The Church was aware of the impossibility of implementing those individual control mechanisms, due to failures both on the supply-side (the priests were not well-prepared enough) and on the demand-side (the faithful). Therefore, that same Church decided to introduce or resume ordinary and extraordinary plenary indulgences, jubilees, holy years, pardons and pilgrimages that served to erase unconfessed sins. This is the very deep root of the Catholic "culture" of amnesties: private sins and lies that were paid for in public with instruments designed and desired by the very institution that was suffering the transgressions.
Finally, another equally serious side effect was the estrangement of the profession of being a merchant from that ars mercatoria that had made Italy great until the Renaissance. Why should I carry out a job, already risky in itself, which is regularly examined in its smallest religious details, which enjoys a bad reputation ("dung of the devil"), forcing me to tell lies every day, even to God? I had better dedicate myself to the liberal professions (lawyer, notary), better yet, a military or ecclesiastical career, and best of all, public service. Something similar to what happened to the theology happened to Catholic economy: why risk being condemned to the stake by being a theologian, better devote yourself to music or the arts, or to economic science, as did Antonio Genovesi, who after being condemned as a theologian became the first European economist in 1754.
Thus, the Italy of "civil merchandising", which had served to make our municipal cities stupendous, gradually became the Italy of permanent employment.
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CounterEconomy/5 - And the society of "civil merchandising" gradually became a permanent job
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  02/04/2023
"Search as you might, you will never find any other idea in the Counter-Reformation than this: that the Catholic Church was a highly salutary institution, and therefore to be preserved and strengthened."
Benedetto Croce, History of the Baroque age in Italy (Storia della età barocca in Italia)
We must start by looking precisely at the age of Counter-Reformation if we want to understand the differences between Nordic, Protestant and our form of capitalism.
We know perfectly well that it is difficult to understand capitalism without going through the Protestant Reformation and its "spirit". We are somewhat less aware of the fact that we also need to look at the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as the theological, social, ethical and pastoral forms of the Catholic response to Luther's Reform had very important effects in the way of understanding and doing business in Italy and in other Catholic countries, as we will see in the coming pages.

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CounterEconomics/3 – Once again on the latest attempt that the market is making to resist the wind of vanitas
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 19/03/2023
"What scares me most is the suffering that rolls through the world like a steamroller. I care little about guilt, little about justice, little about truth, little about beauty: I do care about suffering."
Sergio Quinzio, An attempt to bridge the abyss (Un tentativo di colmare l’abisso)
The consultant's departure from the scene at the end of the process is part of its excellence. In the book of Daniel, there are precious indications on how to interpret the visions of others without becoming their masters.
The environmental, financial and military crises of the beginning of this millennium risk making us underestimate or forget a no less serious triple crisis: of faith, of great narratives and of generating. A world that no longer awaits paradise, without collective narratives and without children, no longer finds sufficient meaning to live and therefore to work. Why should I work if I no longer hope for a promised land (up in or below heaven), if I have no one who expects a better present and future from my work? The world of work has never created or exhausted the meaning of work. Once upon a time, it was family, ideologies, religion that gave work its first meaning. The factory, the fields or the office reinforced that sense which, however, was born outside of it. Work is grand, but to be seen in its grandeur it must be looked at from the outside, from a door that opens onto the outside. Without this large space, the work room becomes too narrow, its roof too low for that infinitely sick animal called homo sapiens to be able to stay there for any longer period of time without asphyxiating.

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Our Constitution is built on work because work was built on something else. The economy is registering a growing unease in the sphere of work: but when will we understand that this work related unease is first and foremost an existential unease generated by this triple famine? «Where has God gone?… I wish to tell you! We killed him – you and I! We are all his killers!… Are we not wandering in an infinite nothingness?» (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science). That mad man cries out the death of God in the «marketplace», since «many of those who did not believe in God were gathered right there». In the marketplace, the herald of God's death «caused great laughter» (The Gay Science, 125). The merchants laughed; perhaps because they hoped that that "super-man" needed to live in a world without God would be homo economicus, thanks to his new capitalist religion. However, the merchants who were laughing yesterday are now realizing that that infinite nothingness is devouring the economy itself. Consulting is the latest attempt that the market is making to resist the wind of vanitas. Because no superman has yet appeared on the horizon line of this earth without gods, instead, we have seen an increasingly fragile and lonely man. Suffering, hidden by the funny mask of hedonism.
Last time we left the concept of the consultants while reflecting on the matter of subsidiarity. One last step is still missing: a good subsidiary consultancy must know how to leave at the right time. Having finished his work, a consultant must know how to withdraw, disappear, exit the process in order not to transform the link into a bond, favouring the autonomy of those who he has helped. However, since there is also a dimension of potential conflict of interest in consultancy, (the assistance is also invoiced and paid for), the exit is never easy or guaranteed. Thus, sometimes, the relationship of assistance lasts a bit too long and therefore risks becoming perverted. The non-exit is often desired by the "client" who during the process of assistance has progressively developed a relationship of dependence on his assistants. Thus the precious art of the consultant (who deals with people and relationships) and of the assistant lies in his or her ability to disappear, to let go. Becoming less and less necessary overtime, until he is no longer needed – this final uselessness should be his explicit objective, herein lies his excellence. On the other hand, when the passage of time increases the need for the consultant, the consultancy in question is actually failing and the risk of manipulation increases: from being an aid in discerning problems and their solutions, the consultant becomes the one who decides and governs: though he once came in to serve, he now ends up commanding.
Another essential dimension of good consultancy and organizational accompaniment is once again suggested by the Bible, in the Book of the prophet Daniel, the great dreamer and interpreter of dreams. Dream interpreters in the ancient world were a profession on the crossline between art and science, at the service of those in power above all. They were seen as bringing order to an unfamiliar and menacing world. One day, Daniel has a "difficult" dream - the one about the mysterious "son of man", a figure dear to Jesus (Daniel 7,13-14). He has a vision in a dream – note that vision is one of the great words of counselling. However, this time Daniel fails to understand the meaning; he gets agitated and becomes upset, and hence he asks for help from an angel-interpreter: «I, Daniel, was troubled in spirit, and the visions that passed through my mind disturbed me. I approached one of those standing there and asked him the meaning of all this. So he told me and gave me the interpretation of these things» (Daniel 7,15-16). Although he is an interpreter of dreams, his own and those of others, Daniel now needs the assistance of a third party, another interpreter - the same situation is then repeated in the next chapter (8).
The need "of an interpreter for the interpreter" tells us something important. Dream interpretation has a relational and ternary nature. From being binary (A-B), a good relationship of assistance and accompaniment must, in fact, become ternary (A-B-C), because the opening of the relationship to a third party (C) protects the interpreter from becoming the master of the dreams he is interpreting. The third is the possibility of the interpreter’s chastity. However, for this opening to be activated, the interpreter needs to feel the "disturbance", because he feels his own insufficiency in the face of the dream. The greatest danger is the lack of this awareness of need, when the counsellor never feels or no longer feels the need to ask for help from an external "angel". Good subsidiary advice is therefore a relationship open to a third party. This is the biblical foundation of supervision, which is mandatory in many forms of counselling today – though not all. When the interpreter does not in turn have another interpreter, the relationship tends to close in on itself into a binary relationship, something that is always dangerous but especially serious with particularly difficult visions, which remain sealed because the "two" has not become "three".
The Book of Daniel, a great manual for dreamers and interpreters, contains another particularly interesting episode. At the beginning of the story, King Nebuchadnezzar has a mysterious dream. In fact, he is so agitated by it «and he could not sleep» (Daniel 2,1) because he did not know how to interpret it. He thus summons all the soothsayers and haruspices of the kingdom, but none of them succeeds. Also, a curious and decisive detail: the king does not tell the interpreters the dream that needs to be interpreted, he asks them to narrate it. Why? He had not forgotten it. No, he had a different reason. If the king revealed his dream, Babylonian culture possessed sophisticated handbooks of oneiromancy which deconstructed dreams into their essential elements and thus always produced a response. The dream would have been explained by the technique; the king, however, wanted something more, he felt that technique alone was not enough for that different and special kind of dream. The king was therefore afraid that his dream would be manipulated by the experts and technicians, who exercised great and seductive power over the sovereigns – all interpreters are fascinating as they are repositories of mysterious knowledge. He therefore wants a guarantee that his interpreter is being honest, and in that world being honest meant being a messenger of God: therefore being a prophet, that is, someone moved by gratuitousness, by vocation and not merely by profit and power. Finally, Daniel, a true prophet, arrives «During the night the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision» (Daniel 2,19).
For many ordinary consultants techniques are enough. However, some kinds of discernment and interpretation require a combination of both technique and vocation to truly work and be "free". In these rare but decisive cases, interpreting the recounted vision is not enough; we have to guess it before having it retold to us. Here, the dream itself becomes the necessary third party. This is relevant in those very complex and delicate situations where the very existence of the institution or of the community is at stake. In these cases, the consultant is required to make spend an extraordinary amount of time, resources, energy and face the risk of failure, choices that are not only justified in terms of the contract and the fee, an expenditure that goes beyond any ordinary small costs. It soon becomes clear that trying to solve the case will take much more than what is usually done. Thus, we can decide to quit early on or not to start all; but we can also decide to stay, and by staying we reveal our vocation, telling ourselves that there is a greater honour in it than the fee, that we are interested in being in the world and not just being in the market. These choices almost always remain hidden from the "customers", but are kept deep in the wine cellar of the heart. Sometimes, however, someone does notice, and that deep, slow and timeless kind of listening makes the other party understand that we are not working merely with technique. Techne joins psyche and competence joins the soul. Furthermore, when the other party understands that we are also working by vocation, a different quality of trust is born in him/her and he lets us enter the secret rooms of his dreams, where the key to the solution of his interpretation can often be found. Some things can be said to the experts or technicians, a lot is said to the soul, but everything can be divulged when technique is applied together with the soul.
However, there is something more. That dialogue between Daniel and the angel-interpreter takes place during a vision. The exegete of the dream can be found within the dream itself. In many cases, it is possible, and perhaps even good, for the interpreter to find himself outside of the dream, therapeutic distance is often very important – sometimes it is good for the interpreter to be "awake" while we are dreaming. Nevertheless, in some different kinds of dreams and visions, the interpreter must find himself within our very dream; the angel must be someone who knows us intimately because he finds himself within the same experience, a character in a shared vision. Sometimes we cannot decipher our problems because the interpreter is too close; other times, often when it is crucial, the explanation of our vision can be found right at home, yet we seek it far away. When moving from for-profit companies to the civil economy, even arriving at religious communities, in order to understand some "visions", the kind that leave us sleepless during many nights for many years, the interpreter must stay inside. Here the only good therapeutic distance is equal to zero. These interpreters know the vision before we tell them about it because it is their vision too.
A consultant who approaches an idealistic non-profit organization from the outside, which generally does not belong to their charismatic dream, must be well aware of being an "angel" outside the dream. He or she then has to spend a lot of time and energy trying to daydream, trying to get inside that nightly vision without actually being there. Then, after a long time spent in mild silence, he needs to say a few words as if he were that angel while aware that he is not. Remembering and reminding everyone every day, until the end, that he is not the interpreter that they really need. It is from the awareness of this fragility that his true usefulness can arise.
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CounterEconomics/3 – Once again on the latest attempt that the market is making to resist the wind of vanitas
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 19/03/2023
"What scares me most is the suffering that rolls through the world like a steamroller. I care little about guilt, little about justice, little about truth, little about beauty: I do care about suffering."
Sergio Quinzio, An attempt to bridge the abyss (Un tentativo di colmare l’abisso)
The consultant's departure from the scene at the end of the process is part of its excellence. In the book of Daniel, there are precious indications on how to interpret the visions of others without becoming their masters.
The environmental, financial and military crises of the beginning of this millennium risk making us underestimate or forget a no less serious triple crisis: of faith, of great narratives and of generating. A world that no longer awaits paradise, without collective narratives and without children, no longer finds sufficient meaning to live and therefore to work. Why should I work if I no longer hope for a promised land (up in or below heaven), if I have no one who expects a better present and future from my work? The world of work has never created or exhausted the meaning of work. Once upon a time, it was family, ideologies, religion that gave work its first meaning. The factory, the fields or the office reinforced that sense which, however, was born outside of it. Work is grand, but to be seen in its grandeur it must be looked at from the outside, from a door that opens onto the outside. Without this large space, the work room becomes too narrow, its roof too low for that infinitely sick animal called homo sapiens to be able to stay there for any longer period of time without asphyxiating.

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CounterEconomics/1 – A new series of articles on business, its organization and some of its infections.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 05/03/2023
"Along the way, I have acquired the conviction that our education suffers from an enormous deficiency regarding a primary need of life: to deceive ourselves and fall into illusion as little as possible."
Edgar Morin, Teach how to live
The tendency to outsource the management of relationships and emotions has taken root. A model that is also being exported to other sectors of society.
We are in the midst of a great transformation of business culture, which began in the last part of the 20th century and is now experiencing a season of broad consensus and great development. However, as so often happens in all great social processes, it is precisely at the moment of its maximum success that the signs of decline begin to emerge in this new corporate humanism, the first cracks that threaten and prefigure the possible collapse of the entire edifice. Without really realizing it, in the space of about half a century big businesses have gone from being seen as the paradigm of exploitation and alienation to becoming icons of excellence, merit, well-being and even human flourishing, and as such imitated and imported into all social spheres, up to and including, recently, the non-profit world and even spiritual communities.

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Let us start with a word that seems rather distant from the business world: frailty. Previous generations were able to pass the ability to face the difficulties of existence onto us and, despite many contradictions, they did manage to create an inner capital made up of religion, wisdom and popular piety and then the values ​​of the great mass ideologies which were also collective narratives on the meaning of life, pain and death, in people. This was because the cultures of yesterday were humanisms of imperfection and hence they placed the limits, the effort, the incompleteness and sacrifice at the centre, while happiness was experienced as a short interval between two long periods of unhappiness. Life was hard, poor and brief, and the art of character formation essentially consisted in turning that hard life into a possible and sustainable one, perhaps a bit better for the children without deluding oneself that it would turn out to be too much so. In the world of our grandparents, no one would ever have thought of educating young people in the culture of success, encouraging them to become "winners", because everyone knew that it would have been the perfect way to lead a life a frustrated and angry life. The game of life ended well if you brought home a good draw, in an eternal game of football.
With the passing of the millennium, we have quickly moved from the humanism of imperfection to that of the pursuit of happiness and success. “Away with the vanquished and the unhappy!” has become our new motto. We gradually and quickly forgot the ancient craft of living and the fatigue of democracy; instead, we fell in love with easy meritocracy, easy because it is imaginary. The end of the great ideologies and (in the West) the weakening of religion has brought about great anthropological changes. The moral world has ended and its vacancy has not yet been filled by anything new or equally robust.
Moreover, when true reality, even today, continues to make us face limits, lack of success and failure, which in fact have not disappeared merely because we have decided not to see them anymore, young people and now adults as well, find themselves deprived of the ancient virtues. Ancient virtues by now placed among the odds and ends of the company and then moved to the dusty old wardrobe, together with granddad's old hat and the coffee bean grinder.
This lack of ethical equipment manifests itself in every sphere of social life - family, politics, school - but it is not yet perceived in all its gravity. It will be, soon, when this relational and emotional unsustainability will become evident. However, when this frailty arrived in the sphere of big business, reaching and exceeding a critical threshold, something new started. Because in our liquid world a company is still something solid that lives thanks to collective action. It therefore needs employees capable of cooperative virtues that allow them to carry out complex operations that take place in the midst of conflicts, difficulties, frustrations and failures, where all emotions come into play and require specific education and maintenance to make a good life together possible and sustainable. For decades, for centuries, companies had never concerned themselves with the formation of the workers' character or their cooperative virtues; instead, they limited themselves to their professional and technical training. People entered the factory gates already equipped with a relational capital, which allowed them to cooperate with others, an art they had learned and re-learned day in and day out in their family, in their village, in the harvests, in the grape harvest, in slaughtering the pig, in processions, in funerals, in weddings and patronal feasts.
In fact, businesses in the 20th century grew thanks to the spiritual and ethical capital of their people and the crisis of that moral universe immediately became a crisis of the productive universe. Enterprises, businesses, anticipate the future; they know how to see beyond – this is also what speculation is all about. Thus, when the moral climate changed, the first place that experienced the subsequent crisis were the companies, especially the large and global ones, and they immediately tried to respond.
Their first response was the evolution of the old concept of management, which transformed the factory from a community into an artificial and rational place, where human relationships were tamed, "reduced" and operationalized so that they could be easily managed by the new managers, now conceived as leaders and no longer executives, transformed into the new protagonists of large companies. Human relations were simplified, but still managed within the company in a co-management divided between entrepreneurs and managers.
This new culture of corporate relations worked for two to three decades, while companies lived on by consuming the revenue of what was still left of the ethical capital that their workers had accumulated in the communities outside the company, without reproducing it within their walls anymore. Until, at the beginning of the new millennium, the last generations who were children of twentieth-century ethics left the stage, by which this capital of civil virtues was (almost) exhausted.
At this point, companies had to innovate again, and they looked for a new solution: to recreate the human resources they needed themselves. It is the third turning point: management understands that the necessary new ethical capital can still be found outside the company and that the managers themselves are part of the same frailty as their employees, although they would hardly declare it openly. Hence, they seek outside, but not in the old, traditional places of life and community – family, the Church, political houses and groups - which in the meantime were slowly but surely being abandoned or had begun emigrating to social networks. They understand that the resources in question are still out there, but now they are being offered by the market, a for-profit market that was already gearing up to produce and sell new professional figures who are fast becoming the real new protagonists of companies.
In fact, a highly bio-diversified forest is growing up around managers, made up above all of consultants churned out by large consultancy firms, together with occupational psychologists, managers of occupational happiness and well-being, practical philosophers of meaning, mission and purpose. Together with priests, nuns and transcendental meditation experts for accompaniment and training in corporate spirituality, not to mention the new figures of coaches and counsellors who present themselves as the profession of the future. Half a century ago, businesses were helmed by entrepreneurs; then came the managers and finally the consultants. Thus, a company of fifty employees finds itself populated by at least ten, fifteen or twenty of these various figures of assistance. The new ruling class is being assisted and supported and increasingly replaced by ancillary figures who are becoming the new kings and queens.
A sort of outsourcing of emotions is taking place, a contract with external agencies for the management of the maintenance, care and nurturing of human relations within companies. Managers are no longer able to manage the emotions and relationships of their employees, who are less and less endowed with essential virtues, with the traditional tools of old (hierarchy, coordination, incentives, unions), so a series of new external suppliers manage them on their behalf. The management of emotions is becoming something akin to managing the company canteen or cleaning. Furthermore, the more fragile the employees are, the more the demand for these relational and emotional services grows, as does the GDP. Partly because the presence of relationship professionals also performs the function of externally certifying and validating this new form of quality. A certification of the quality of the relationships within the company is now added to the certification regarding its financial statements, which serves to greatly reassure insecure managers.
Why – some might ask – would this be a problem? Everything evolves; everything changes. Why is it possible to outsource the maintenance of systems and not the maintenance of emotions? Actually, there are several problems in fact, and some are quite serious.
One important problem concerns the growing extension of these phenomena outside the corporate world. If, in fact, external contracts for the management of many aspects of human relations concerned only the world of large businesses or capitalist finance, it would still be something important but in any case limited to a sphere of life with a set of necessary typical features - such as sport or the army. However, this outsourcing of relationship maintenance is starting to extend, reaching non-profit organizations, communities and churches, in part because consulting firms are perceived as the "doctors" of every form of human organization, the technicians required to solve new problems. However, what would relationships within a spiritual movement or a religious community turn into, if those in charge delegated the management of many aspects of human relationships (crisis, fatigue, criticism...) to professionals outside the company? What would become of those relationships whose quality is the heart and root of the future? So, what aspects can be delegated outside the organization and which ones should necessarily remain within it, managed by our imperfections and efforts?
While necessary in certain specific cases, external figures can easily become a perfect form of immunity, a screen that those in charge use to protect themselves from the contagion of relationships and from the "wounds from others". Furthermore, while the world of large global business is already feeling the insufficiency of these external contracts (as we will see), non-economic organizations are only discovering these tools now, late in the game, and tend to see them as a great novelty of salvation. The phenomena of dumping towards the "poor" can be found in these cases too: let us be careful that the world of social affairs and churches does not soon become a new refuge market for consultancy companies looking for new markets because the old ones are running out...
Hence, in the next few weeks, we will ask ourselves further questions: where is the line between coaching and substitution in the relationship between managers and consultants? Are the external models and theories subsidiary enough, in other words, do they arise from listening and from the life that already exists within a given company before trying to improve it? What if an imperfect but internal relationship turned out to be more generative and human than a less imperfect but external one? Are we sure that the most important virtues can be created and cared for by the market or are they, perhaps, still to this day in need of that essential ingredient called gratuity?
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CounterEconomics/1 – A new series of articles on business, its organization and some of its infections.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 05/03/2023
"Along the way, I have acquired the conviction that our education suffers from an enormous deficiency regarding a primary need of life: to deceive ourselves and fall into illusion as little as possible."
Edgar Morin, Teach how to live
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