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Regenerations/13 - Both Saint Francis and Job are inhabitants in it. Just as children.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 25/10/2015
 “Ah you don't want to, 
you're scared 
of poverty, 
you don't want 
to go to the market with worn-out shoes 
and come back with the same old dress.
My love, we are not fond 
as the rich would like us to be, 
of misery. We 
shall extract it like an evil tooth 
that up to now has bitten the heart of man."
Pablo Neruda, Poverty (English translation by Donald D. Walsh)
For two millennia the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ has been trying to resist the attacks of those who have tried to reduce it to something else, to turn it into ridicule or an unnecessary comforting exercise. This fight against the simple radicalism of the beatitudes is particularly clear and strong in the case of the blessedness of the poor.
    [fulltext] => 
The process of downsizing its scope started very early, when too much stress was appropriated to the ‘in spirit’ that we find in the Gospel of Matthew, leaving ‘poor’ more and more in the background, relying on new and creative exegeses of that beatitude. So we have written and said that the ‘blessed’ ones are not the poor but those who live a true spiritual detachment from riches, those who share the goods or use them for the common good. All these things are true and present in the Bible, too, but they turned us away from the very simple and tremendous statement of ‘blessed are the poor’.
It is not easy to understand and love this first beatitude. The first and almost insurmountable obstacle is the real and concrete condition of the actual poor: how can we call them blessed when we see them distorted by poverty, abused by the powerful, dying in the sea, being left to their fate on the peripheries of our cities? What happiness do they know? It so happens that the biggest critics of this first bliss are those who spend their lives to liberate the poor from their misery. The greatest friends of the poor often end up becoming the greatest enemies of ‘blessed are the poor’.
If we want this first beatitude to be able to reach us, to love and change us, we need to cross through this paradoxical, outrageous and even manipulative terrain - how many rich people found and used the bliss of the poor as a spiritual excuse to leave them in their blessed conditions of deprivation and misery, or how many were those who defined themselves as ‘poor in spirit’?! We must not make the very common mistake of reducing the range of this curious type of happiness to make it fit in our categories, by amputating (as in the myth) its legs sticking out from our beds that are too short. The paradoxes of the gospel and life are not solved by reducing them, but by ‘making the bed longer’, forming categories that ‘measure up’ to them.
A first clue to step deeper into the first beatitude is found in the text itself: it is the Kingdom of heaven. The happiness of the poor consists in living in the Kingdom already. The kingdom "is" theirs now, it's not something they "will" have tomorrow. The beatitude of the poor does not need the “not-yet”.
The poor are blessed because they are residents of the Kingdom of Heaven. This sentence in itself would be enough to understand, or at least make a close guess of the meaning of this beatitude that, not surprisingly, is the first one. Among the poor called blessed there were those who are rejected, the homeless, those who had little or nothing to live on. But this is where the lepers, widows (and almost all women), orphans (and almost all children) also belong, all these people who, not surprisingly, were the closest friends and companions of Jesus during his life. Most of his disciples came from among the poor: they met him in the streets of Palestine, they were ordinary people like us, who started to walk behind him and together with him. They were already poor or became poor having glimpsed another kingdom, following another type of happiness. In saying ‘blessed are the poor’ Jesus spoke to his people, and he still does.
Only the poor live in the Kingdom of Heaven, in that kingdom inhabited by the men and women of the Beatitudes: the meek, the pure, those persecuted, the merciful, those hungry for justice, the afflicted and the poor. A kingdom different from those that govern our society, but one that has never stopped being in our midst. A kingdom where you get to know the kind of Providence only the poor experience: Providence is for Lucia, not for Don Rodrigo. Holidays are the most beautiful celebrations of the poor: perhaps there is nothing more joyous on this earth than weddings and births celebrated by the poor among the poor. Children love parties and gifts because - and until - they are poor.
The rich do not enter into this kingdom, not as a punishment, but simply because they do not understand it, they do not see or want it. They are interested in the kingdoms of the earth and not that of heaven. If the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the poor, then it does not belong to the rich, unless they become poor leaving their idols behind. The kingdom of heaven is the place of non-predatory relationships with things and with people, where the golden rule is gratuitousness.
Throughout history there are some who have tried to take this bliss seriously. One of these is Saint Francis of Assisi, who has revealed what ‘blessed are the poor’ means more than anyone. Francis is this beatitude incarnate, the word made flesh. The one Francis followed is not the only way to enter the Kingdom as poor, but after the “poverello” (pauperculus, the "little poor man") one can no longer do without his poverty to really understand the one of the beatitudes. If it were not so, the charismas would only be private experiences, useless for the humanity of everyone and every age. Francis is the great and eternal master of the beatitude of poverty, the joy of a different kingdom. Whenever someone chooses to become poor again they meet Francis, although they do not recognize him (he met Jesus in the leper and he did not know, all those who become poor by choice also meet Francis, even though they do not know).
Not all Christians and not all men choose “Our Lady of Poverty”, but the typical joy of real - and not ideological - poverty is only known by Francis and those who are like him. That cosmic brotherhood, the Canticle of the Creatures, that absolute freedom, those kisses to the mouth and hands of lepers, the perfect joy can only come from those who are inside that bliss and live in a different kingdom. It is not mandatory to be poor, not even in the church: the rich are not excluded from the sacraments, they are often praised and thanked by the poor themselves. They have always been part, legitimate and even important part for the Christian communities. They live longer, with better education and health, they collect achievements and applause. But they are not citizens of that kingdom, they do not know those heavens, they cannot see those distant and beautiful stars. There is this kind of justice in this world, too, and it's great.
 But that's not all. The joy of Francis was born from poverty by choice, and his happiness is obvious to those who choose it and also to those who watch it. But the poor who followed Jesus were not only those who became poor by choice. There were so many who were just-poor-and-that's-all, people that did not choose poverty, but found themselves in it since the day they were born, or who had become poor as a result of an illness or misfortune. Among those who are called the blessed poor there were some like Francis, but there were also many "Jobs", that is, those people who were poor not by choice but by fate or misfortune. The amazing strength of the first beatitude is in its turning to the poor: those who were like Francis and those who were like Job. Both are called the inhabitants of this different kingdom. And if the kingdom is theirs, they are not subjects in it but sovereigns.
But while it is relatively easy to grasp the happiness of Francis, to call the many Jobs of the earth and history ‘blessed’ is a very difficult and painful operation bordering on the absurd, belonging to the realm of the paradox. But if we don't include Job, too, in that ‘blessed are the poor’, we reduce its range too much and we transform it into an ideology. We have to understand it and repeat it in the joy of Assisi but also next to the many ‘dung heaps’ where the poor of Job's kind live and dwell. Beatitude has to be true even for those who did not choose poverty but have only suffered it. The Kingdom of Heaven is and must be the kingdom of both Francis and Job, and of the two of them together. Those who are poor by choice should be right beside those who are just poor and that's all: all of them brothers, all blessed. It is not feeling happy that makes us blessed: bliss arises from the objective condition of being poor. It is not a feeling, it is a being, a living. There is no friendship that's more real and greater than the one between the Francis-like poor and the Job-like poor. To come across it it’s enough to go to a few missions in Africa, but also to Termini or Ostiense Railway Station in Rome where many poor people live and see how they hug each other and 'dance' together, all different and all equal citizens of the same kingdom.
The book of Job told us, at a high cost, that even the poor can be righteous and innocent - let's not forget that in that world, just as in ours, wealth was a sign of blessing and poverty was that of curse. The gospel goes out to meet Job and all the poor and announces them something new and immense: ‘You are not only innocent, you are also blessed.’ The dung hill remains, but from that day bliss comes to them as well, which has redeemed an endless story of poor people condemned by the religions of the rich of yesterday and today.
The beatitude of poverty may arrive late, very late in the life of righteous people: sometimes it is the last beatitude. To get a glimpse of another kingdom one must walk a lot, and if life lets us be born and live in the richness and abundance of goods and talents, it takes a lot of effort, a lot of testing and a lot of pain and love to be able to reach the beatitude of poverty. Often it takes all our life, and sometimes not even that is enough to become poor again finally, to be children and ‘naked’ just as we came to the world, and to recite the greatest prayer at the end: ‘Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ (Job 1,20-21) It is possible to go back to being poor, to return to poverty. The doors of the Kingdom are always open and waiting for us.
To believe and hope that the first beatitude is also for those poor who have not received a charisma to understand the happiness of poverty by choice is a message of great hope. Few can become poor like Saint Francis did. But we can all become poor like Job. And so we can all live in the kingdom, perhaps only for the last years, months or days of our lives. And when we finally become poor again in our last hour, the will also earn the kingdom for ourselves. ‘Blessed are you, the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.’
'Regenerations' was an unexpected trail, unexpected, surprising and wonderful for me. From the virtues and non-virtues of businesses we have now arrived at the Beatitudes, through forgotten and humiliated words. From next Sunday I shall resume, with new courage (of the Director and my own), the commentary of another great book: the Qoelhet (Ecclesiastes), expecting some new surprises and new heavens. In doing so, I am counting on the company and help of my readers again who continue to create this Sunday appointments with me. And - as always and more than ever - I would like to thank all those who have followed me this far.
Download  article in pdf
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    [metadesc] => Per capire la beatitudine dei poveri (che lo siano per scelta o per condizione) dobbiamo legarla al possesso del Regno dei cieli. È solo loro quel Regno diverso, dove i ricchi non entrano perché non lo capiscono, non lo vedono, non lo desiderano e non sanno diventare poveri. Ma tutti possiamo trovare la strada, anche solo negli ultimi giorni della nostra vitaRigenerazioni/13

Francesco e Giobbe lo abitano insieme. Come i bambini
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Regenerations/13 - Both Saint Francis and Job are inhabitants in it. Just as children.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 25/10/2015
 “Ah you don't want to, 
you're scared 
of poverty, 
you don't want 
to go to the market with worn-out shoes 
and come back with the same old dress.
My love, we are not fond 
as the rich would like us to be, 
of misery. We 
shall extract it like an evil tooth 
that up to now has bitten the heart of man."
Pablo Neruda, Poverty (English translation by Donald D. Walsh)
For two millennia the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ has been trying to resist the attacks of those who have tried to reduce it to something else, to turn it into ridicule or an unnecessary comforting exercise. This fight against the simple radicalism of the beatitudes is particularly clear and strong in the case of the blessedness of the poor.
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    [title] => The serious happiness of tears
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Regenerations/11 - We all go through suffering and can rise again
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2015
“Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, 
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy; 
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow."

Jeremiah 31,13
The happiness promised by the Beatitudes is not the one promoted and promised by our culture. It has little to do with pleasure, it is not the good (eu) daemon (daimon), it blooms from pain. We can also get pleasure from the things of life if the pursuit of pleasure does not become the only thing in life. Because if we confuse happiness with pleasure we end up having neither the one nor the other.
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The Beatitudes are a 'way of life', they are another already. They are a concrete proposal and a judgement about our justice and injustice, about our embraces and walls, about our indifference and our consolations. Those who believe the truth of the Beatitudes enter into the very concrete world of those who can see the poor, the meek and the pure, and call them blessed. And then they want to live in their Kingdom.
The blessedness of the afflicted, the happiness of those who are crying seem the most paradoxical, that of the last day, not that of our penultimate days. What happiness can there be in tears? Crying in the Bible is not crying with tears of joy or with the false ones produced for profit on TV talk shows. They are the tears of the afflicted, the desperate cry of mourning, separations, failures, those fallen for the children who make mistakes and do not come home, those that fall when we fail to prevent a brother or a close friend to throw their lives away. Those of the wars, for the many poor crushed and oppressed, for those who lose their jobs, for betrayals. But they are also the tears of repentance and forgiveness, those of pain for our own conversion and that of others. Those of happiness are all very serious tears. In the Bible the experience of crying is often encountered. Even the patriarchs and kings shed tears, and Job, too. Jesus weeps for his friend who died, for Jerusalem, and that perhaps his final cry of abandonment was also a cry of tears. The Psalms are full of fruitful tears.
Tears are the first language of human beings. We can speak very different languages, believe in different gods, have many customs and cultures that are very distant from one another; however, all of us understand the language of tears, we all know how to decipher it immediately. Men, women, peoples always started to get to know each other through crying and during the work with migrants, when John did not understand the language of Sergey but could comfort him when he saw him cry looking at the crumpled photo of his children and wife left behind. Lapo did not understand almost anything of what Carmel was saying, but the tears of both of them were falling in the trenches and as they were conversing they understood each other perfectly.
Not all of us are persecuted for righteousness' sake, not all of us are meek, but we all cry. The beatitude of those who cry is a universal promise that reaches all human beings in their most essential, radical, vulnerable and naked form. It applies to all human beings: women and men, the elderly and the young boys and girls. Calling those who are mourn blessed, Jesus made all men and all women of human history and the earth blessed. We enter the world crying, and silent crying is often our last word before we leave. As Job teaches us, even animals, trees, the earth and the worms can cry. There are more tears than those of humans in this world. There exists a suffering of nature, a painful wait for consolation, a cry of creation. When we manage to hear some of its echo, we gain access to a deeper dimension of life, we discover a cosmic brotherhood, and we sing another Laudato Si’ together with Francis - yesterday and today. And there emerges the need to see consolation for human beings arrive, but also for the land that's been humiliated and offended, for the animals that have not been respected and were crushed, for the species that die day by day. We feel that there must be a consolation of tears in the world, that there must come a comforter, a redeemer, a Goel. We all become fully human when we begin to suffer from the non-arrival of these consolations - it is a suffering that once begun never ends and grows with us.
The blessing that lies within crying is called consolation: "They shall be comforted." The Greek word that we translate as 'consolation' is parakaleo, indicating the figure that stands close to the victim, like a lawyer, to defend them from their accuser. So this beatitude consists in having an experience of the arrival of consolation. In discovering a real presence that comforts us while we mourn. And with the arrival of consolation we stop crying, or cry in a different way. In this beatitude, unlike the others, happiness lies in changing the state that generates the beatitude. The meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the poor, the persecuted and those who thirst for justice - they all remain in that condition when the promise is fulfilled. We do not stop being poor because we are in the Kingdom of heaven, we don't cease to be merciful when we encounter mercy, we don't stop building peace when one day we hear being called "children of God". But when in our tears and despair we reach consolation, the crying decreases, changes tone and tears start being dried up. 
We all know the beatitudes inside tears. They are recorded in the moral DNA of human beings. The yoke of life would be unbearable if inside tears we did not find consolation, too.
A first consolation can be encountered in the experience of being able to cry. Inconsolable suffering is when one can no longer (or not yet) cry. Many instances of deep regret, for example, start with deep and uncontrollable crying. It is a different way of crying that we can only get to know when it arrives, in its typical pain and beatitude. When the time of repentance and 'returning home' arrives, the first step is almost always crying bitterly - each on their own way, all similarly and all differently. It is a blessed way of crying, the beginning of a new life. While we cry we feel that we are called blessed: "They were tears of happiness born of the moral awakening dormant in him for many years" (L. Tolstoy, Resurrection). Before 'getting up' to 'return' to his father, the prodigal son had already begun his return by a great weeping. From inside hell there opens a glimpse to paradise, and the possibility of being able to finally reach it is already paradise. The road home is already home.
These tears are all and only beatitude, regeneration. They are extremely painful and salvific, terrible and wonderful at the same time. Afflicted and blessed.  This crying becomes a means of discovery and knowledge of the deeper dimensions of life. If you want to really know someone, meet them and listen to them while they cry because of repentance, forgiveness or a conversion. Great instances of forgiveness, especially between brothers and between friends, are accomplished while crying together in endless and timeless embraces: "So Joseph said to his brothers, “Come near to me, please.” And they came near. And he said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt..." (...) Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept, and Benjamin wept upon his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them. (Genesis 45:4-15)
There is another form of consolation-beatitude. It's the one that comes from being able to cry with someone who accompanies our pain. Co-crying, or co-suffering is a special form of happiness. Sharing in the pain and joining in the tears with a friend is the only happiness in life for many whose pain and tears are their only 'bread'. In these afflictions consolation comes with the real face of a friend who bends down to our pain. If there are too many afflictions that are not blessed it is also because they lack comforters, friends who are able to cry with us. In the instances of crying without consolation that abound around us there are too many absconding comforters. So many tears could be comforted and dried up, depressions accompanied, loneliness filled, if we could only see ourselves in the role of comforters and not in that of those who are waiting for consolation. I am the one who is missing from too much unconsoled pain of the world. Each beatitude is also an invitation directly to us, to you, to me. The first promised land is that of my house that I share with those who do not have it, the first consolation of the weeping other is my compassionate crying.
One special consolation that's also full of mystery is that of poetry, literature and art. The poet, the writer, the painter, through his or her work can reach the desperate ones of the earth, and console them by creating them. They become a neighbour, a fellow traveller, and so they make them blessed. In the greatest stories there is no need for a happy ending because despair seen and 'touched' by the artist is already happiness. Art gives us these beatitudes, too.
But there is still another consolation of the afflicted. It is that which comes as a 'angel'. Here there is no friend to comfort us. It is the Paraclete, which comes as the 'father of the poor'. It is wonderful that in the Bible the first angel comes to earth to comfort Hagar, a slave driven out into the wilderness by her mistress. The first theophany and the first annunciation both happen for her (Genesis 16). Annunciations, theophanies, the salvation of a child often happen at the height of great afflictions, when an angel comes to us where we could no longer reach, and comforts us. It is the consolation of the Spirit, the comforting Paraclete, it helps us rise again while we are dying on our cross. It is the perfect consoler, it is warms and straightens us out, it bathes us. If we are able to get up every morning when the night before we thought of not making it anymore, it is because the Paraclete is at work, and it kisses the wound of our souls while we are still asleep and dreaming, and heals them all. Not all of us know, or want, to experience God. But many, perhaps all of us have met at least once in our life this comforting spirit, or will meet it in a future instance of crying. It's a promise. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
Download  article in pdf
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Regenerations/11 - We all go through suffering and can rise again
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2015
“Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, 
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy; 
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow."

Jeremiah 31,13
The happiness promised by the Beatitudes is not the one promoted and promised by our culture. It has little to do with pleasure, it is not the good (eu) daemon (daimon), it blooms from pain. We can also get pleasure from the things of life if the pursuit of pleasure does not become the only thing in life. Because if we confuse happiness with pleasure we end up having neither the one nor the other.
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Regenerations/9 - Laws, just like clothes, often get tight and worn-out
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/09/2015
“All that does not regenerate, degenerates."
Edgar Morin, Education for the Future

There exists the justice of the already and the justice of the not-yet. Justice grows, evolves and devolves over time, according to the moral sense of the people, cultures and generations. The statement "It's not fair", repeated by individuals and communities, is the prime mover of any widening of horizons of justice, and thus, humanity.
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Most people form their opinion of justice or injustice based on the difference between what they see and the justice already codified in the laws or customs of a people. The approval of justice and the blame of injustice are the basis for the construction of the justice of our lives.
A first persecution of those who practice justice comes from living with people who do not love justice and seek injustice - even when injustice comes from saying "just" and "unjust" to the wrong things. The market is full of these persecutions, when honest and upright entrepreneurs face a lot of suffering, from every point of view, only because they operate in industries where the sense of justice of others is completely domesticated in the accounts of profits. Honest businesses survive thanks to the honesty of their employees, customers, suppliers and competitors. The dishonesty and injustice of their interlocutors is polluting their air and their land, and the fruits do not come. The greatest virtue required of just entrepreneurs has always been to be able to resist when they are near unjust people and institutions. These are genuine cases of persecution, and those who resist and don't give in should be called "blessed".
The experience of justice and injustice, then, in addition to informing our behaviour can lead us to take action to reduce or eliminate the injustice around us. This is where another form of persecution is experienced. The history and the present of humanity show us a crowd of those who are persecuted because they see injustice perpetrated on other people or the world. As with mercy, what drives us to react against the injustices we observe is not primarily the desire for altruism or philanthropy. It is something much more radical that moves in our guts, which initially looks more like eros than a gift. Later, and only after this first feeling, intelligence and rationality are activated, as the servants of the indignant heart. Inside persecution for justice we find ourselves following disdain, obeying a logic that is different from that of the cost-benefit calculation.
The first impulse that makes us react against injustice is therefore a true and deep pain. We feel bad, we feel moral and sometimes physical pain, and, sometimes, we get into motion. Without going through pain for a world that seems unfair no sense of justice will be born. It is a pain that can arise even when the object of injustice are not human beings but animals, the earth, water or nature, because the pain of the injustice of the world is the greatest pure human pain. As long as there are people who cultivate a sense of moral justice, and as long as humans have an inner life that makes them able to feel this special type of moral suffering, we won't resign ourselves to the injustices that can be fought to reduce them, even though we will be persecuted by those who get benefits from those unjust behaviours.
But there is, in fact, a third type of persecution (and certainly others, too). It is the persecution for the justice of the not-yet.
There are people who have the gift of seeing, suffering and fighting for a type of justice that is not yet recognized as such by the society in which they live. They do not just denounce the violations of justice recognized by their generation. They do this, too, but they have also received the gift of the "heart's eyes" that allow them to see and search for a justice that laws and collective consciousness are slow to recognize. But they actually see it, suffer over it and act. They suffer because of instances of injustice that are not felt to be such by others, because they are considered normal by tradition, life and even the nature of things. They feel it in their flesh that there is injustice in the world that's hidden behind what the law does not prohibit or even encourages, and so the process of complaints and liberation starts, followed inevitably by persecution. They find themselves as people who are against the laws, not only those made to defend unfair low interests, but also those made in the name of justice. Although the laws, like shoes and clothes, often become tight and worn-out and must be changed, otherwise they damage and no longer cover us.
Seekers of the justice of the not-yet provide a continuation of the prophetic function throughout history. Prophets receive vision that is able to see injustices where others still see justice, and to call unjust what others call just, to feel a suffering that society does not understand, to fight for things that seem unnecessary or even harmful to others, to recognize rights and duties before they appear at all as such. Persecution for the justice of the already is capable of arousing the empathy and compassion of many fellow citizens who are humane and just. Persecution for justice of the not-yet, however, takes place in solitude, which is a specific feature of this different type of justice. Nobody makes night or torchlight marches, or hunger strikes for the first battles for justice that is still invisible. Prophets are always lonely.
Justice of the not-yet is fundamental to the moral development of the peoples, just as prophets are fundamental. Behind every law that is recognized and protected today, there is someone who yesterday suffered for its absence, someone who was indignant and was feeling bad for that injustice that was not yet considered as such. From that pain of the soul a collective action was launched, and the persecutions followed. On the land of the just anyone, like the ancient (and new) Mercedarian fathers, hear a call to do the "vow of redemption" to free the slaves of the justice of the already by taking their place.
This is how the moral sense of everyone grows and the boundaries of justice are moved forward. Every now and then we should remind our children and ourselves of the stories and the great amount of pain hidden behind certain articles of our laws. Collective memory also has a function of keeping our moral sense alive and alert, and when it fades, communities start moving backwards, defeating the pain of the martyrs for justice and offending their blood poured. Whenever the story recedes into the ground of justice - we have seen it many times, and we still see it - first there is an elimination of the "gap" between the facts we observe and our moral sense. It becomes normal to fire someone for his "race", falsify corporate balance sheets, and erect walls where the parents had given their lives to overthrow them (the walls - concrete, barbed wire or looks - are all the same.
Therefore, the first thing that those who love justice have to do is cultivate and nurture the moral sense in children and young adults. Starting from school, where reducing history, literature, poetry in the name of "useful" techniques means decreasing the sense of justice and the ability of resistance to injustice in the next generation - in "technical" schools and universities we must increase the presence of humanities, if we hope for justice in the economy and in construction techniques of "cars".
But there's more to it. The persecution of the prophets does not come just from the unjust and wicked. It also comes from those of the "justice of the already". Often seekers of justice already become the persecutors of those who represent the justice of the not-yet". The scribes and Pharisees, Job's friends, the Sanhedrin, were generally people and institutions who believed and defended the justice of their time: "For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees...". Different types of righteousness, and the second is the persecutor of the first.
The lack of understanding on the part of good and righteous members of their own community is typical of every prophetic experience. Fractures and sometimes real persecutions are created within the same "people of the righteous," because the justice of the not-yet seems unfair, naive, unwise and detrimental to those seeking the justice of the already. This specific persecution, this "friendly fire", is among the greatest sufferings of the seekers of the justice of the not-yet, but it is an inevitable suffering in the advancement of justice on earth.
Sometimes the righteous ones of the already, in a decisive meeting with the righteous of the not-yet, fail to realize that their righteousness must be open to a "beyond" in order not to become unjust. That is why Saul, a persecutor acting in the name of his justice according to law, becomes Paul the persecuted for a new justice. We understand that our righteousness must die to be reborn, it must rejuvenate. Donating one's mantle, forgiving seven times, going a mile with a brother is no longer enough. We feel that we are not righteous if we do not give our tunic, too, if we do not do the second mile as well, if forgiveness does not become infinite, for all, forever. Our justice gets older, it dies many times, and many times it has to rise and then relearn to die again.
The Gospel unites the beatitude of those persecuted for justice to that of the poor: both already have "The Kingdom of Heaven". There is a friendship, a brotherhood between the poor and those persecuted for righteousness. Both are poor, both are persecuted for righteousness. Those seeking justice if they were not already poor they become so as a result of persecution. And poverty is also persecution arising from the denial of justice, whether that of the already or that of the not yet.
There is a shortage of the justice of the already in our days, but more than that, we lack the justice of the not-yet. The prophets are too few. "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
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    [metadesc] => Sono molte le persecuzioni a causa della giustizia. La più dolorosa, e inevitabile, è quella di chi difende la giustizia del "già" combattendo la giustizia del "non-ancora". Ma l’umanità avanza quando la giustizia, molte volte, muore e risorge diversa e più profonda.
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    [text] => 
Regenerations/9 - Laws, just like clothes, often get tight and worn-out
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/09/2015
“All that does not regenerate, degenerates."
Edgar Morin, Education for the Future

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Regenerations/7 - Beyond the times of the sand, to the house of the Beatitudes
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/09/2015
The poverty of joy that Europe and the West has been suffering for long now is a direct result of forgetting the logic and wisdom of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes embody and express all the values ​​discarded and despised by capitalism and so from our world that is increasingly built in the image and likeness of the Business God.
Meekness, peace-building, poverty, mercy, purity are not the words of the capitalist economy and its finances, because if we take them seriously we should destroy our empires of sand and start building the house of the man of the beatitudes. Not surprisingly, in these tragic and wonderful days of the unexpected and surprising revival of the Beatitudes in much of Europe, the great absent ones are big businesses and banks, which, with an empathy without compassion continue their production and rites. They remain indifferent and indolent, they do not open the doors of their "houses", they do not know how to take off their shoes to learn to walk barefoot like Adam, like children, like the poor.
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Purity is the word that’s least understood and loved by our society of consumption and finance. Yet without purity we cannot understand the world, because we only see its more superficial dimensions and we miss out on the vision of the nicest things. Seeing little and badly, we miss out on seeing the great hidden beauty in what appears as impure and repulsive.
In the Gospel, purity is closely linked to the heart and the eyes: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The heart of biblical humanism expresses the profound nature - spiritual and practical - of the person. In Jewish culture, and therefore in that of Jesus and the evangelists, God, however, is not seen. This is one of the deepest and most radical truths of the whole Bible, it is at the centre of its fight against all idolatry worshiping false and therefore highly visible gods. YHWH is a voice that we can listen to through the word of the prophets, and that we can feel throbbing alive in the universe. The condition that brings together all humans is that of being blind listeners of God. What is it then that the pure one can see if it is not God? And what is this new and different type of purity, the purity of the heart?
To understand it, or at least grasp some of it, we should remember that the ancient world had its own idea of ​​pure and impure, which was the basis of the whole social and religious order. There were pure and impure places, people, animals, crafts, times, activities and objects, and society was constructed to avoid contamination and protect purity from impurity. All the sacred hierarchy was explained in relation to this role of separation. The Christian message performed a real reversal in the vision of pure and impure (already foreshadowed by some prophets and the Book of Job), by proposing a new idea of ​​purity that was beyond the category of impurities. That's why the purity of the heart is not the wonderful innocence of children, nor that of animals and nature. These natural purities were the source of the sacred purity of the communities of the ancient world, and after losing it they tried to reconstitute it by sacrificing animals, vegetables, virgins, children to the gods. But the separation of the pure from the impure and the pure ones from the impure ones was too much rooted in the world, although the revolution of the Gospel could last long and create a new civilization. But even in the heart of Christianity we have re-created the unclean ones and the lepers, and brick by brick we rebuilt the same pre-Christian culture of immunity (being uncontaminated), which is experiencing its own apotheosis in our time that is apparently not religious and highly secular, with multinational corporations as its main apostles.
Purity of the heart is exactly the opposite of the old (and post-modern) culture of pure versus impure. Saint Francis of Assisi tells us in his Testament that his conversion really started when he began to attend to the lepers of Assisi, thus breaking down the curtain of separation of purity from impurity. Purity of heart does not run away from lepers, but meets them, seeks them out, loves them, embraces them, kisses them. The first feature of this purity is the elimination of the term impure from the list of bad words, and realising that what we call impurity is exactly where real life takes place. So the first gift of new eyes that the pure one receives means to see a different world where impurity is gone. For this reason, a clear signal that we are not in the presence of eyes of purity is to find the distinction between pure and impure again - in order to position ourselves on the side of the first, of course.
If so, it seems obvious that a general feature that we find in pure hearted people is that they have no self-definition. Once the barrier between pure and impure collapses, purity becomes the environment and it is not seen any more since it is inhabited by the pure hearted. This elimination of the curtain between pure and impure is done in various ways. Almost always it comes as a gift, and sometimes it is an act of liberation that comes at a particular time of life. But it is always a movement of the soul that is not aimed at conquering purity, because looking for purity directly is the main way to lose what we already had and did not know, and to find ourselves left with the pagan type of purity only. For this reason, purity of the heart, like all the other beatitudes, cannot be called a virtue, because it comes without searching for it. Therefore it is pure freedom and the deepest kind of happiness.
This is the first purity of the pure one: to be pure and not to be aware of it, and so not to be able to appropriate its purity to oneself. It is the purity of purity. Furthermore, the one who is pure of heart is not recognized as such, because this purity cannot be seen, and when we see it, it is that ancient and pre-Christian one. The world is filled with pure hearts, but we cannot see them, because we seek purity where it isn't.
The pure ones should be recognized from what they can see around themselves. They See God. But if God is not seen, what do the pure ones see? They can see or feel a presence of the infinite within themselves, something that some feel and call God, and that many others also see and feel but do not know how to call it by name. They can also see it in nature, in the world, everywhere. But above all they can see it in the other, in all others that they meet or discover in books, music, art and poetry. They see every man and every woman as a tabernacle that holds a presence, even when the key to it is lost and the door is closed for good. And so they are attracted to every person, they are lovers of life and especially people. The love of the pure ones is all agape, but it is also all eros and philia. They can see that the world is really filled with beauty, and that the greatest beauty is that of the people. And with their eyes they can tell us: "Little girl, I say to you, arise." Purity watching us has the ability to resurrect the divine image that appears dead to us, too, but in reality it was just sleeping while relatives and friends wept for its death. But the unmistakable signal that reveals the presence of the pure hearted is when we see them embracing and kissing the poor and the lepers.
This purity brings wonderful fruits when we find it in those who happen to be responsible for a community or a business. The leadership of the pure hearted can be recognized for what they can see in others. One of the greatest gifts that life can give us is to place us next to pure hearted colleagues and executives. The yoke of fatigue becomes very light and work becomes our brother.
But there is something more, and perhaps even more sublime. If it is true that the pure hearted can see God and if it is true that God on earth is not seen, then the world is full of people who can see God although not being able to see him, not knowing that what they see is God because they do not recognize him . God is where he isn't, where not even the pure hearted can see him. This is very good news, one that should fill us with hope in this time appearing as the darkest night of God.
Meeting a pure hearted person is often the decisive encounter in life. Thanks to those eyes looking at us differently we can, if only for a moment, connect with the deepest and truest part of us; and feeling looked at like this, there blooms the desire inside us to become what we already were once, but we did not know yet, or simply to go home. In these crossings of eyes we relive something of that first good look of a woman who greeted us when we came into the world, and that we are always looking for in this life. The presence of these eyes is an extremely precious form of common good that keeps the gaze of Elohim on earth, continuing the action of those eyes that changed the world in the streets of Palestine, looking at it in a different way: "And, having looked at it, he loved it."
Purity, as all reality of the earth, can be lost. Even the pure hearted can have a blurred vision. And the only real sign that tells us that we have lost purity is not seeing a presence of the infinite in the other, in the world and inside us, and therefore not being in love with everything and enchanted by everything anymore.
But, like all spiritual realities, purity of the heart can be found again: you can return to be pure. You can return because there is an immense longing for that God we could once see-not-seeing-him in and around us. And the first sign of this return is wishing again, even more, to go back to kiss the poor and the lepers. It takes a long way to find that flourishing and blissful existence again, the purity of childhood - transformed into purity of the heart. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
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Regenerations/7 - Beyond the times of the sand, to the house of the Beatitudes
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/09/2015
The poverty of joy that Europe and the West has been suffering for long now is a direct result of forgetting the logic and wisdom of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes embody and express all the values ​​discarded and despised by capitalism and so from our world that is increasingly built in the image and likeness of the Business God.
Meekness, peace-building, poverty, mercy, purity are not the words of the capitalist economy and its finances, because if we take them seriously we should destroy our empires of sand and start building the house of the man of the beatitudes. Not surprisingly, in these tragic and wonderful days of the unexpected and surprising revival of the Beatitudes in much of Europe, the great absent ones are big businesses and banks, which, with an empathy without compassion continue their production and rites. They remain indifferent and indolent, they do not open the doors of their "houses", they do not know how to take off their shoes to learn to walk barefoot like Adam, like children, like the poor.
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Regenerations/5 - Businesses, society, family: less and less time for compassion
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/08/2015
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner."
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
Processing our own and others' emotions is requiring more and more effort from us. We have drastically reduced the community and personal spaces, places and instruments to accompany, tend to or elevate our emotions.
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The culture of the big firms, and all that is entering the entire world coming from it is producing a growing quantity of negative emotions (disillusion, fear, anger, anxiety, sadness...) that are treated as actual "refuse", so they are rejected, eliminated or taken as the markers of the "loser" type of workers. Should anyone show them or make them visible in the same places they were generated, they get punished by getting stuck in their career, or, not infrequently, losing their job. In the past few years these collateral emotional effects have grown so much that it made big businesses introduce new professionals who have been delegated and contracted to manage emotional illnesses produced by unsustainable relational styles at the workplace. This is how everyone gets engaged in a downward spiral similar to what we find in (more or less) hypothetical factories that pollute the work environment and then, instead of eliminating the poison, give their workers free cure in detoxifying clinics, or create new internal departments for detoxification of employees affected by toxic fumes. But while our ethical sensitivity no longer accepts such solutions in health and environment, we still serenely approve them in the management of our emotions, and so we do not rebel against our companies that first make us sad and depressed by keeping us in unsustainable working relationships, and then they offer techniques and experts to treat them; perhaps we even thank them for offering these treatments for free. Just like getting a disease and then (trying to) cure it was the same as not getting ill at all. And so we continue to multiply negative emotions and their cures - they cannot help but grow together.
In fact, these new authentic emotional traps of poverty depend on the strong decrease of compassion, one of the most precious and great human virtues, and its replacement with techniques and tools. Compassion literally means "suffering" (pati) "together" (cum), that is, the ability to know how and want to share the pain of others. Compassion is the form of behaviour that is the opposite of envy, because while the envious person rejoices for the suffering of others and suffers for their joy, the compassionate one suffers for their pain and rejoices for the joy of his or her neighbours. Envy, a sentiment produced, encouraged and cultivated by our competitive and rivalistic culture can be cured by limiting its serious damage, by having people capable of compassion enter the social organism, as they are a natural antibiotics for the virus of envy. In the Western tradition (but not only in that: just think of Buddhism) compassion is something different from what we now call empathy, because in compassion there is a wilful participation in the pain of the other in order to alleviate it, which is not requested for in case of empathy. Compassion is the desire to do good to those who are in a state of suffering. It arises from the knowledge or hope that the sharing in that suffering can somehow have a relieving effect.
Where and how is compassion created? In past generations, where compassion was more present and in certain periods even superabundant (during wars and after great collective mourning) the main place where they formed and fed compassion was inside community, beginning with the family. Compassion had its institutions, and its upkeeping occupied much of collective energy. Funerals, for example, were thought of as a great form of community compassion. A few weeks ago while attending a funeral in my native village, I was very impressed by the amount of kisses and tears falling on the cheeks of the widow and children of the deceased, as an expression of collective and true compassion that in past decades had lasted for several days. The many communities of life used to be the ones that created our capacity for compassion and the places in which to practice it. The long nights were not yet occupied by television but were the time for compassion, exercised by adults between themselves, and watched by the children who learned it by watching. In those past societies you learned compassion starting from a very young age by listening to the stories and fables, reading great literature, that created and cultivated the ability to suffer and rejoice in the suffering and joys of others so that they were becoming, little by little, our own, too. How much compassion can new digital narratives and video games played on tablets create in our children?
Compassion is an experience that never leaves us immune. It changes us, it contaminates us with the feelings and suffering of the other. We all have a natural empathy in varying degrees, but compassion begins when once taken empathy and felt something of the emotions of the other, I decide freely to be infected by the other's suffering, to share their emotions, to become their supportive neighbour and companion for a stretch of the road. For this reason, while there can be (and there is plenty of) empathy without kindness, for compassion agape is needed, the decision to lift the concrete person by loving them, like the Samaritan did with the victim of robbers. Compassion, then, is not a unilateral and unidirectional act. It is a relationship, a "feeling together" and being mutually and simultaneously aware of experiencing the same emotions and the same feelings. It is this mutual and contemporary experience that relieves pain and multiplies joy. Some instances of pain can be alleviated only by compassion. If you don't reach this conscious emotional reciprocity, compassion is not complete and does not bear its gorgeous fruits. If, in fact, I cannot enter into the feelings of the other - or the other does not give me permission to do so - so that we become "one heart"; compassion can neither relieve the pain of the sufferer nor make those who take the pain of others on themselves feel that typical and profound joy. Therefore, the experience of compassion teaches us that it is not true that pain and joy are two opposite feelings: the greatest types of joy are those that arise from shared and accompanied pain, where the pain is still there but next to it there develops, like a rare flower, a mysterious and sublime type of joy.
The immunitarian culture of big firms does not want compassion because it does not like the mixing and the contagion of emotions in ordinary work relations, and so it discourages and fights this contagion. But since the emotional suffering in the workers grows, companies want to respond by offering empathetic techniques for the demand of compassion, creating professionals who deal with the emotional distress without having to "touch" it deeply. The development of compassion between workers and managers is inhibited and prevented, restricted to non-working community spaces. Corporate culture occupies more and more areas of life where it exports its contempt for compassion and replaces it with the techniques (I saw these professionals, even inside a sanctuary). And so, paradoxically, these figures and these tools do nothing but increase the dissatisfied and frustrated demand for compassion, despite all good and often excellent intentions. As long as the dominant culture in our businesses and in our society we continues to consider pain, vulnerability and wounds just as costs and evils to be avoided and fought, without touching them, and welcome them and allow them their own space as necessary components and often friends of human beings, they will only multiply the real emotional evils that arise from partial, immunitarian, artificial and therefore sick human relationships. Empathic techniques, professionals and consultants can be very helpful in all areas, provided they do not become substitutes and "monopolists" of that widespread civil compassion constituting the profound spirit of every society.
Finally, compassion has its typical words. The first among these is attention. We do not cultivate and practice compassion if we are distracted and not attentive to those who pass by, those who work at the desk next to ours or live in the apartment across the street. There are too many victims of robbers who are abandoned and injured along the roads to our Jerusalems and Jerichos because there is a lack of people capable of noticing them. Without this inner attention that is spiritual vigilance we fail to exercise the second fundamental verb of compassion: to look. Compassionate people move around in this world watching it. They have enough attention and inner silence to watch the life that flows near them. They look and see, and so hear the infinite cry of compassion that rises from the cities. And once they have seen and heard the pain of others, they freely choose to exercise compassion by bending over, standing close to, taking care of the pain of others. Compassion is essential to live well, because it also enables us to multiply our joy by sharing it. It is a kind of a moral muscle: if it is wasted, it not only prevents us from reducing the pain of others, but even diminishes our capacity for joy and life. The culture of immunity dominating our time is wasting this muscle and so we take more and more pains to feel emotions for the suffering of others, and even more to act moved by compassion.
We have an immense need of compassionate people now, more than ever. We are increasingly inundated with psychological, moral and spiritual suffering, but the ground cannot absorb all this water because too few people are capable of compassion, and still less exercise it. Yet they are the ones who can radically change the moral quality of the places of living. Sometimes one compassionate person is enough to save an entire community. Life functions and flourishes when we are able to discover the beauty that surrounds us, letting it love us. But it is no less important to try and discover the pain around us, love it and let ourselves be loved by it. The greatest gift that you can do to help your child is to increase their capacity for compassion. Because it is compassion for the pain of others that makes us see the greatest beauty of the earth, the one hidden in people's hearts.
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    [metadesc] => La compassione è l’atteggiamento opposto dell’invidia, perché mentre l’invidioso gioisce per le sofferenze degli altri e soffre per le loro gioie, il compassionevole soffre per il dolore e gioisce per le gioie dei suoi prossimi. Le tecniche empatiche, i professionisti e i consulenti possono essere molto utili in tutti gli ambiti, purché non diventino sostituti e "monopolisti" di quella compassione civile e diffusa che costituisce l’anima profonda di ogni società.
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Regenerations/5 - Businesses, society, family: less and less time for compassion
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/08/2015
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner."
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759
Processing our own and others' emotions is requiring more and more effort from us. We have drastically reduced the community and personal spaces, places and instruments to accompany, tend to or elevate our emotions.
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    [title] => The Wonderful Song of Humility
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Regenerations/3 - A virtue that is not loved by economy, but is key for the future
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 09/08/2015

“...and when I see the stars burn up in heaven,
I ask myself:
Why all these lights? What does the endless air do, and that deep
eternal blue? What does this enormous
solitude portend?
And what am I?

(Giacomo Leopardi, Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia English translation by Jonathan Galassi)
Humility is one of those virtues that the economy and big firms do not really like even if they have a vital need of it. As it is increasingly modelled on corporate values, our culture fails to see the beauty and the value of humility, and so it gets "humiliated".
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In fact, the virtues practiced and powered by large enterprises and organizations feed on anti-humility. To make a career and be appreciated one has to boast one's own merits, show a "winning" mentality and attitude, be more ambitious than the others competing for the same position. We must seek and desire what is at the top, and escape from the bottom where there is the earth, humus, humilitas.
Ours is not a humble era. Past generations and those whose sun is sinking now knew humility very well and they recognized it, too. They had learned to discover it hidden on earth, by having experiences of the margins, something done only by those who know the earth by their own hands. It is by touching the bricks, the wood, the coarse tools of work, poor clothes, little food, the machines in factories and workshops that used to let us discover the earth, and it is by dialoguing with it that we used to learn the trades and the craft of living. The culture of the generations that lived through the great wars and the holocausts and still managed to save their faith in God and man was a humble culture, because those men and women loved, esteemed and rewarded humility.
Humility is a virtue of adult life. Children and young people should not be humiliated in order to make them humble. Humiliation caused by others does not produce humility, but a thousand distortions of character. The only good type of humiliation is what comes from life, without anyone there to procure it intentionally. Children and young people are trained for humility by putting them in touch with beauty and art, with nature and spirituality, with poetry, fairy tales and great literature. It is by meeting the infinite that we realise how finite we are, yet inhabited by a breath of eternity, and when the experience of touching the infinite is accompanied by the highest expressions of the human, the finiteness does not crush us but raises us and the limit does not stifle us but makes us live. When we raise our eyes and feel how "infinite and immortal" the sky is, the ground where humility can blossom is formed in us.
Furthermore, humility is formed in the relationship with one's peers: in comparison with peers, with brothers and sisters. The reduction of the number and biodiversity of the companions of our children, replaced by "functional" meetings (swimming, music...) and above all by too many "all-powerful" encounters with machines (TV, smartphone, tablet...), inevitably changes and reduces occasions for the good experiences of the limit, and therefore threatens the development of humility. An essential meeting for the birth of humility is the one with death and disease, from the earliest years of life. If we hide the sight of dying grandparents and relatives from our children, if we do not bring kids to funerals or to visit sick relatives and friends, it distances and complicates their encounter with the law of the earth and does not favour the maturation of humility in them. Education without a limit and without limits cannot teach humility.
Many seniors and elderly people are witnesses and teachers of humility, because life has had the time to make them humble. In previous civilizations, their presence was essential for their function of teaching of humility. The distance from the earth that had generated them and the close proximity of the second that awaited them offered a different and equally essential perspective on living, which could be passed on to all. For this reason the world of big business, built on the psychological registers of adolescence and youth (hence the wide use of sports metaphors, almost all improper), does not know or understand humility.
Humility is seen at its best as a universal law that we find at the heart of many virtues and other great things of life: you become humble without actually realizing it. Humility comes as we seek something else: justice, truth, honesty, loyalty or agape. It cannot be programmed, but it can be desired, estimated, waited for as a gift from life. And if we wait for it, sooner or later it will arrive, as a surprise. It often comes in moments of weakness, after a failure, abandonment or bereavement, when humility flourishes from inside humiliation. Love for humility is the foundation of every good life, because it does not allow you to take possession of your own virtues and the gifts received.
Humility is an "unspeakable" virtue, and it is radically relational: only others can and must recognize our humility, and we recognize theirs, in a game of reciprocity which is the grammar of good civic life. It is invisible, but very real, and we know how to recognize it - even if we are not equally humble, even if we are not humble at all but we want to be: the desire of humility is already humility. Its fruits are unmistakable. The first is the sincere "gratitude" felt over life, others and one's parents which comes from the awareness that my talents, my merits, my beauty, are a gift, "charis," grace. Humility is to acknowledge the truth about the world and life. It is born naturally, it is an act of the soul and it does not require efforts of will; it is a recognition emerging one day as something clear. We understand that our share in the most beautiful and greatest things is very small, in fact, tiny, because all that we are and what we possess we have simply received from the generosity of life.
Everything is grace. But to get to this natural act and radical of gratitude an ethical exercise of love for the truth is required, which lasts throughout adult life, and ends - with that last act of gratitude - when we take leave from this world, only grateful and humble at last. Humility, therefore, is nothing more than access to a deeper truth. That's why it is a great gift. Those who are humble are always grateful. Their "thank you"-s are rare because they are precious. They are born from the awareness of the beauty and goodness of those who live together with them - there is a deeper and more real beauty of the people and the world that is revealed only to the humble. And only the humble know how to pray.
A second signal of its presence is the ability to say "sorry" and "forgive me." There are conflicts that are not healed because everyone involved is convinced that he or she is completely right, and so waits for the other to apologize. But because the certainty of being right is reciprocal, parties remain stuck in relational traps that end up swallowing families, friends, communities, businesses and sometimes entire peoples. To get out of these traps at least "one" humble person is needed, one who is able to apologize even if not feeling responsible for the conflict - and maybe he/she isn’t, either. That person takes the first step of reconciliation because it is in his/her interests to rebuild the damaged "relationship" first, and it is a stronger force than wanting to see the responsibilities and the guilt of the various parties involved recognized. It is because he/she knows that only after having reconstructed the relationship will it be possible and necessary to reconstruct the weave of responsibilities for all that happened.
Pronouncing this "sorry" and "forgive me" is particularly difficult in hierarchical relationships, and therefore it is very valuable, too. It is difficult to say "sorry" to a superior with humility: it's much easier not to say anything, or say it out of fear or opportunism. But it is even more difficult for a director to apologize to one of their employees. No regulation of the company and no code of ethics require them to do so. But only few words like "forgive me" said by a manager to a worker of his team can give ethical and human dimensions to the entire workgroup. These are words that create a spirit of solidarity and brotherhood within the work team that manages to do well even in times of trouble only if and when its members feel that they all share the same fate, that they are all equal before the differences in salary and responsibility are taken into account. A sincere and humble "thank you" and "sorry" uttered by a manager create more team spirit than a hundred team building courses that in the absence of these profound words end up looking too much like the games played by our pre-adolescent children. Humility, however, like other great words of life, makes us stronger and more resistant while making us more vulnerable. Thanking and apologizing to each other actually makes managers and executives more fragile in a world where invulnerability is the first and most important value. It's like showing a wound, our own and that of others, because we want to heal it. But in the completely male dominated registers of business relations, these wounds have neither sense nor space. So they do not heal, they are hidden, become infected and poison the whole body.
The corporate world of the West is suffering a serious deprivation of new ruling classes because there is an awful lack of a culture of humility. In fact, it has been removed by practices and ideologies inspired by anti-humility, where the one who is humble is only a "loser". The first lesson of leadership courses should be on humility. It is a lesson that is missing everywhere for lack of teachers and because humility cannot be taught in business schools; but above all because if you were to start praising humility and her sisters (meekness, mercy, generosity...) the whole culture of leadership with its techniques would have to be completely reversed. Humility teaches us to follow. A manager who has not been trained to follow - the others, each and every other person, the poor, the best and truest part of themselves - will never be a good guide or a real leader.
The value of a complete lifetime is measured by the humility that it has been able to generate. Humility is essential to live and resist during great trials. When life makes us fall down and we touch ground (humus), we do not get hurt too much and we can stand up again if we have learned about the earth (the ground we have just touched) and if we have become its friends. Without humility you cannot reach human excellence, you cannot learn a profession really well, you do not ever really become adults. It is the last word of each and every Canticle of the Creatures.
 
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    [metadesc] => Il nostro non è un tempo umile, a tutti i livelli. La prima lezione dei corsi di leadership dovrebbe essere sull’umiltà e, invece, manca ovunque per carenza di docenti. E questo rende i manager incapaci di essere davvero delle guide, perché non conoscono la sequela degli altri. Senza umiltà nessuna vita fiorisce, dentro e fuori le imprese
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    [text] => 
Regenerations/3 - A virtue that is not loved by economy, but is key for the future
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 09/08/2015

“...and when I see the stars burn up in heaven,
I ask myself:
Why all these lights? What does the endless air do, and that deep
eternal blue? What does this enormous
solitude portend?
And what am I?

(Giacomo Leopardi, Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia English translation by Jonathan Galassi)
Humility is one of those virtues that the economy and big firms do not really like even if they have a vital need of it. As it is increasingly modelled on corporate values, our culture fails to see the beauty and the value of humility, and so it gets "humiliated".
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Regenerations/1 - Values are not to be manufactured and challenges should be acknowledged
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 26/07/2015
“Everywhere in the world, human beings want the same thing: to be recognized with dignity for what they are and what they do. Companies like ours are in the unique position to satisfy this desire.” 
(Robert H. Chapman)
The culture of big firms is gaining more and more space in our era. Categories, language, values ​​and virtues of the multinationals are creating and offering a universal grammar suited to describe and produce all the ‘winning’ individual and collective stories. This is how the big company that used to be interpreted as the main place of exploitation and alienation became the icon of excellence and human flourishing within just a few decades.
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In a time like ours, when collective passions surviving from the twentieth century are the sad ones of fear and insecurity and where the passions of the individual still reign and are mostly left unchallenged, the culture produced and conveyed by global firms is the perfect tool to embody and strengthen the spirit of our time. In fact, nothing is as capable of enhancing and strengthening the values of the individual and his passions as the capitalist company.
This is why the words of ‘business’ and its virtues are becoming the good words and the virtues of the entire social life: politics, health care and education. Merit, efficiency, competition, leadership and innovation are now the only good words of communal life. In the absence of other strong places capable of producing a different culture and values, the virtues of the companies present themselves as the only ones to recognize and cultivate starting from childhood.
Companies often do good things, but cannot and don't have to generate all the social values or the entire common good. To live well we need to create something other than economic value, because there are values that are not those of the companies, and the common good is beyond the common good generated by the economic sphere.
This is something we have always known but are forgetting today. The management of the Greek and European crisis in the past weeks - and the next ones - is an eloquent sign of this. But also what is happening in the areas of health, education, the world of volunteering, in social economy and even in some Catholic movements and Christian churches tells us that the economic virtues are gradually replacing all the others are also because these latter ones are being presented by the global corporate culture as vices (e.g. meekness, mercy ...). Furthermore, we must take note that the 'guilty ones' for this impressive reductionism are not only, and perhaps not even mainly businesses, global consulting firms or business schools that are the main carriers of this mono-culture. Civil society has a great and objective responsibility as it can no longer create sufficient places outside of the economic realm that should be able to generate virtues other than economic ones in young people and in others. School, for example (and along with it, family) should be the main counterweight of the company culture, because it belongs to the school to teach the virtues to children and young people, especially those that are not utilitarian or instrumental, the ones that are valuable even if (or exactly because) they do not have a price. However, what we are seeing around the world is that school is being taken over by the logic and values ​​of the company (merit, incentives, competition...), where directors, teachers and students are evaluated and trained in the values ​​of enterprises. And so we apply efficiency, incentives and merit even in the education of our children and in managing our friends (it is enough to visit the Nordic countries where this process is in a more advanced stage already, and see how they are transforming their community life, human relations and friendship accordingly).
The anthropological deficit experienced in economic and civil life today will not be overcome by filling the void left by the ancient, non-economic virtues with the 'new' economic virtues, but by generating and regenerating old and new virtues beyond the economic and corporate realm, that will allow the full flourishing of the people, inside and outside the world of work.
Economy has always needed virtue, that is, excellence (areté). Until a few decades ago, however, the factories and workplaces used the heritage of virtues and values that had been formed outside them, in civil society, politics, churches, oratories, cooperatives, trade unions, in the shops, on the seas, in the fields, at schools and especially in families. It was in these non-economic places governed by principles and laws other than those of the companies and the market that the character and virtues of the people were formed and reformed. This personal capital then was transformed into productive, entrepreneurial, management and work resources inside businesses. Without forgetting the immense heritage represented by women - mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, nuns, aunts, grandmothers - who formed, loved, looked after, generated and regenerated boys and men every day inside the houses; and these in turn carried some invisible but very real female figures with themselves when they crossed the gates of the places work, who actually offered and performed services of the highest value, even in the economic sense, at zero cost to the company.
In two or three decades, we are running out of this secular stock of ethical, spiritual and civil heritage, without being able to generate new ones as yet. And so the people joining the companies usually come with a poor and fragile moral heritage, and they are not quite equipped with the virtues essential in working life, in team work and especially in the management of human relations, crisis and conflict.
To continue to create wealth and profits, businesses got equipped to create the values ​​and virtues they have a vital need for by themselves. Almost none of these virtues and values are new, because they are nothing but the reworking and adaptation of ancient practices, tools and principles with a new focus (and here is the key point): the goals of the post-modern company.
This opens up some decisive challenges, perhaps the most important ones that have a determining influence on the quality of economic, personal and social development of the coming decades, which will be discussed on the next few Sundays.
Yesterday, today and always, there are virtues that are essential for the formation of a good character in people, who should come before the economic virtues and those of the company. Gentleness, loyalty, humility, mercy, generosity and hospitality are pre-economic virtues; when they are present, they also enable economic virtues to work. You can live without being efficient and particularly competitive, but you live very badly, and often die without generosity, without hope, without docility.
In a world occupied solely by economic virtues, how do we respond to the questions: 'What do we do with the undeserving?', 'Where should the non-excellent go?', 'Where do we put the non-smart ones?'. Not all of us are deserving the same way, not all of us are talented, not all of us are able to 'win' in the competition of life. The market and the economy have their own answers to these questions. Those who are not competitive in the markets have to leave; in the successful companies 'those who do not grow will be out of the group'. But if the economic sphere becomes the entire social life, where else can the losers of the competition exit to, which 'outside' welcomes those who do not grow or those who develop at different rates and in ways that do not count for the indicators of corporate performance? The only possible scenario that remains this way is the building of a 'society of waste'. We remain worthy people even when we are or become unworthy, inefficient and uncompetitive. But this different type of dignity is not recognised by the new culture of the company.
Creating economic and managerial virtues in the workers takes some other virtues that companies are unable to generate. The economic virtues are authentic if and when accompanied and preceded by the virtues that have their active ingredient in gratuitousness.
It is here that the great project of the company culture to create its own virtues needed to achieve the desired goals faces a strict requirement: the virtues, all the virtues, to be created and to flourish have a vital need for freedom and excess of the goals set by the management. We will never be excellent workers if we lose the intrinsic value of things, unless we free ourselves from the servitude of the incentives.
The economic virtues of businesses do not turn into vices if they are left to be humbly accompanied by other virtues that mollify and humanize them. Only by learning to waste time inefficiently with my employees can I hope to become a truly efficient manager. Only by humbly recognizing that the most valuable talents I possess are not fruits of my own merit but pure gifts (charis) can I recognize the true merits in myself and others.
Companies cannot build the good character of their workers, because if they do, they do not generate free and happy people as they say, and maybe as they want, but only sad instruments of production. Companies can only welcome, strengthen and not destroy our virtues. They cannot manufacture them. As with the trees. As with life. This is one of the most beautiful laws of the earth: the virtues flourish if they are larger and freer than our goals, even the most noble and greatest ones.
Here in Vallombrosa, where I am writing these lines, a few months ago a storm knocked down about twenty thousand trees. While working on the removal of fallen trees that were tended for centuries by virtuous monks, the Forest Service is also starting to plant new trees, of many different species, to try and save the biodiversity of the forest that will be reborn.
When forests fall someone must start planting trees. The tree of economy will grow well if it is surrounded by all the other trees of the forest.
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    [metadesc] => Le parole del ‘business’ e le sue virtù stanno diventando le buone parole e le virtù dell’intera vita sociale: nella politica, nella sanità, nella scuola. Ma le virtù economiche delle imprese non si trasformano in vizi se si lasciano, umilmente, affiancare da altre virtù che le ammansiscono e umanizzano.
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Regenerations/1 - Values are not to be manufactured and challenges should be acknowledged
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 26/07/2015
“Everywhere in the world, human beings want the same thing: to be recognized with dignity for what they are and what they do. Companies like ours are in the unique position to satisfy this desire.” 
(Robert H. Chapman)
The culture of big firms is gaining more and more space in our era. Categories, language, values ​​and virtues of the multinationals are creating and offering a universal grammar suited to describe and produce all the ‘winning’ individual and collective stories. This is how the big company that used to be interpreted as the main place of exploitation and alienation became the icon of excellence and human flourishing within just a few decades.
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