A World to Know

By Guadalupe Arbona - Paginasdigital.es

This crisis and the collapse of shared certainties represent what is known as secularization, and the three authors of the book "Inhabiting Our Day and Age" believe that it offers the possibility of knowing things that had been lost sight of.

I highly recommend reading this dialogue between three thinkers of our time. 

It allowed me to enjoy an ongoing conversation and ignited in me a desire to look at and learn about the world we inhabit. The conversation between Rowan Williams, Charles and Taylor, and Julián Carrón is collected in the book Inhabiting Our Day and Age. 

Coming from different histories and traditions-Anglican England, multilingual Canada and Mediterranean Europe agree on something substantial: our world is an opportunity to discover who we are.

This is not a naïve look, but a very realistic one. And yes, they look at our world knowing that certainties have collapsed; the subtitle contains this starting point: Living Fearlessly in the Age of Uncertainty. This crisis and the collapse of shared certainties represent so-called secularization, and the three believe it offers the possibility of getting to know things that had been lost sight of. 

How is this hypothesis possible? This starting point brings me out of the stillness, out of what lurks within me and whispers that I already know everything about this world. All three say that our age of secularization is "an invitation to enter certain realities that we could not adequately enter before" (Taylor); it is "a challenge that can be an opportunity. It is a call that comes from reality and whose design we can glimpse at. It is an opportunity because it calls me, it calls everyone to a greater awareness of the nature of being human. 

Today, the greatness of ourselves and all the need we have emerges stronger than ever before" (Carrón). "I believe that living in the secular age is a vocation. It is a call from God and, therefore, a gift. If we see it as a defeat, we think there that the outcome of life’s struggles would depend only on us" (Williams).

So, if, for the authors, this collapse is a gateway to new realities, to an imagined design, to an answer to a call, or to a greater awareness, we must, in all honesty, pause to consider whether this is really the case. The participants in this dialogue document, based on experience and what they have drawn from interesting vantage points, a reflective look at sociology, culture, and political engagement (Taylor), a reflection from the theology and governance of the Anglican Church (Williams), and the vision of a popular educator and experienced leader (Carrón)-a new hypothesis about our world. 

This is no small thing, or rather, it is as desirable as it is rare, even more so given the negative analyses of the times in which we live, rising from those who complain about a world that has been lost: mourning for the loss of Christianity, nostalgia for a culture of solid principles; and fear for a world controlled by technology or endangered by the natural disasters we have caused to the planet. So the first question that this book raises and is inevitable to ask is: on what basis do they claim that our world is an opportunity? Why do they say the opposite of the general sentiment of our times? 

Why do they not allow themselves to be overcome by the fear discovered in the foundations of the world we live in? This first question stands out among the many objections that can be enumerated and that surface in a more or less hidden way in the most inner depths of each person's life in the form of what Pavese describes as that daily heaviness that "cuts the legs" (C. Pavese, Dialogues with Leucò). What can we discover in our world?

These reflections made me think of two novels that can illustrate what is outlined in the book. It might seem absurd that I should resort to two dystopian novels to talk about our time and our world. Through them, two stories in which catastrophic predictions are taken to extremes, the prophecies of an uncertain world are stretched to the limit. They were published in 2006, at the beginning of the 21st century, and are very prophetic. The first is Enhet (The Unity), by Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist. The second is The Road, by the recently deceased American writer Cormac McCarthy, who editor A. Gerolin, in fact, quotes in her magnificent introduction.

Holmqvist sets his story in a future world. In a residential center live the people who are considered exhausted, the so-called dispensable, that is, those men and women who do not have offspring-they have not contributed to society who are already entering decadence, that is, women over 50 and men over 60: the entire novel takes place in this "Unit," where those people arrive who have not been able to establish stable relationships and ties. Everything seems happy: they live for free and with all kinds of comforts: the gardens are always in bloom, they eat without having to work, they have all the luxuries of an opulent society at their fingertips, they have gyms, halls, libraries, swimming pools, gardens, laboratories, stores, cinemas, theaters... everything at their fingertips and all without the slightest effort. In return, they ask for only one thing: donations. 

Organ donations for people who live outside so that the so-called useful can extend their lives; they are also the subjects of sometimes deadly pharmaceutical experiments. Throughout the novel, we see the deformities, cancers, deficiencies, mutilations, and ailments of many of the characters who suffer from having their organs amputated or being subjected to poisonous tests. All this happens in a closed world in which the authorities, with friendly faces and by constantly invoking the democracy in which they live and the common good, decide that the time has come for the final donation, the world that one of the characters calls the "fancy butcher's machinery."

On the other side, McCarthy imagines another space of desolation: the road along which a father and son trudge, surrounded by danger. They do so in what appears to be a space that has suffered a nuclear catastrophe, a world war, or something similar. It is a burned, scorched, contaminated world with no plants or animals, where life is so difficult that they find piles of corpses, destroyed houses, depleted forests, black water, dead crops, black snow, and ash-covered fields in their path..., they walk along a charred, smoldering road. They are pursued by raids from violent, anthropophagic survivors. In this world, the cold and adverse weather is the worst enemy in their journey south, and it seems impossible to live in such a world: "Everything was burned as far as the eye could see, rocky, hirsute shapes sprouting from the ash banks and the piles of ash rising to move away from the wasteland. One could see the path of an opaque sun that moved invisibly beyond the darkness."

It's clear that both stories are set in spaces where life becomes precarious, suffering, and extremely painful—the genius of both narratives lies in the authors' ability to embody the reactions of the characters.

In the first case, the story is told in the first person by Dorrit, the protagonist who arrives at the center for dispensable people. As she discovers the luxury and apparent ease of a settled life, she realizes that her every movement, word, and gesture is monitored by cameras and recorded to be used at will by those who have taken control of the Unit. 

She, a writer who has sought independence and solitude shared only with her dog Jock, must now submit to the rules and demands of the house. In one of the therapies, the psychologist asks Dorrit about the meaning of life, and to answer, she must turn to the independence and loneliness she has sought in the past that has left her sad and unsatisfied:

"I probably always believed that my life belonged to me, that it was something I was free to dispose of and over which no one else had any rights or say. But now I have changed my mind. Actually, I am not the master of my life at all, others are (...) Those who govern us, of course (...) The state or the business world or capital. Or the mass media (...) To own everybody's life. And life is a capital. A capital to be redistributed equally among citizens in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy. I am only an administrator: I administer my vital organs."

Dorrit has moved seamlessly from seeking independence to submitting to power. In both cases, she found herself: "very angry, so angry that tears came to my eyes (...) and I felt infinite pity for myself." Dorrit seeks freedom by breaking the ties that could bind her to anything and ends up being the object of power's experiments, but this leaves her with only anger and tears. Interestingly, through the depth of this experience, she feels infinite pity for herself. According to our three thinkers, this is where freedom begins: "The most decisive freedom is that which comes into play only in the light of a 'sense of necessity'" (Taylor). Williams adds, "We often reduce freedom to being able to choose, but freedom has to do with our energy, with what arises in us, with what makes us feel intensely alive."

And it is precisely what makes Dorrit feel alive is her love for Johannes that lifts her out of her weariness and apathy; faced with her companion, dispensable as she is, she recovers and enjoys a happiness that now tastes like freedom: "When I knocked on Johannes' door, I was very tired. I felt old and heavy but, when I heard his footsteps approaching the door from inside, I felt a feeling of lightness, it was as if I had been filled with helium or laughing gas that made me happy and euphoric."

A love that unites the two characters and, anticipating their short journey, becomes painful because of its brevity: "In this place, generations are very short (...) After a while I realized from her breathing that she was struggling to hold back tears."

They love each other, but the protagonist is so sincere that she senses that this love aspires to something more than protecting them from fear: "In the morning, when we woke up, we were (...) like two drowning people clinging to each other in a last and fruitless attempt to save themselves or to avoid dying alone."

Freedom, says Carrón, has to do with desire: "one experiences freedom when he sees his desire fulfilled. What is the big question? Since human desire is boundless, limitless, boundless, what can make man truly free? Either we experience a fullness that makes us free from power, or we will always be tempted to submit to it in order to enjoy at least some crumbs that power offers us as an alternative to true freedom."

Dorrit senses this, which is why every event in the residence awakens desires, tears, and secret rebellions. Despite all attempts to tame her, Dorrit feels” homesick.” She feels the loss of the heart, the organ that serves to contain the self:

"How I wish I had lived in the time when human beings still believed in the heart. When one still believed that the heart was the central organ that contained all the memories, emotions, feelings, gifts, faults and other characteristics that make us the specific individuals we are. Yes, I longed for a return to the time of ignorance, before the heart lost its status and was reduced to one of many certainly vital but replaceable organs."

In a world of dispensables, the desire to be free remains. After attempts to find meaning in independence and submission to power, the desire to be all that one again remains. With Dorrit, one feels the urgency of freedom, which is inalienable even in the cruelest world.

In The Road, the protagonists are a father and a son. From the very first pages, we discover that the father has made a decision that is anything but easy. On the day his son is born, he decides to continue living even though he knows that the world he is offering his son is a violent, cruel, barren, and barren world. The father's decision rests on the certainty - tested several times throughout the narrative - that his son's life is worth living because there is a promise of life in him, given to him: "He sat there with the twins in his hand, watching the ashen light of day settle on the earth. He only knew that the child was his guarantee. And he told himself that if he is not the word of God, God never existed."

In that world of desolation, the father offers his son the world that bets everything on the now: "No to-do lists. The day is its own providence. The now. There is no later, the later is this," and he takes the risk for his son to face it.

Therefore, the most surprising part of the story is to see how the father's bet that the son will live in this world (while the mother prefers suicide) culminates in the awakening of the child's self. Nothing is an obstacle to openness to the things around him. The child knows that he has fire, an inner force, *  a criterion that he uses that leaves his father astonished, sick, and frightened. In a scene where they have seen violence and death, he reacts as follows:

"He turned and looked at him. He [the boy] seemed to have cried.

He speaks.

We would never eat anyone, would we?

No, of course we wouldn't.

Even if we were starving? (...)

But we wouldn't.

No. We wouldn't.

No matter what.

No matter what happens.

Because we are the good guys.

Yes. And we carry the fire.

And we carry the fire.

And we carry the fire. That's right.

Okay."

In the final episode, the child has to deal with loneliness and loss, and his ability to reason is revealed. He is able to test those he meets to see if the new company is reliable. Indeed, the child's self-awareness emerges with an affective and intelligent force that astonishes the reader, such is the challenge of the wasteland in which he lives. 

As Carrón states in the book, he confesses that he learned this from Giussani.  *"in experience, reality, [...] by which [...] you are struck, shocked (affectus), makes the criteria of the heart leap out at you." These, "as criteria, are infallible (...) Experience awakens your heart, which before was confused and asleep; it awakens you to yourself. The criterion of judgment on experience resides in experience itself." Exactly as described in the experience of the child. 

The father's decision in The Road confirms Taylor's statement, "Fear, I would say, is overcome by discovering man’s heart."  What is the father's intuition when he sees his son open up to the world becomes a process of knowing as the story moves forward. 

In it, we discover in action what Williams says: "God's supreme truth is that he hears us and sees us: we never go unnoticed, forgotten, or overlooked."

The two novels I have chosen indeed exaggerate the calamities of possible worlds. Still, it is no less true that they powerfully demonstrate an insight convenient for our time, namely, the irreducibility of the human. The fragile self in The Road's opening pages- a breath of life in a barren world- shows its capacity to love, discover, enjoy, and judge. In another way, Dorrit discovers herself rebelling against a power that limits her freedom and, at the same time, feels that being free coincides with a desire of a destiny that she does not know but to which she aspires. This is why both novels are examples of the imprint of the infinite as an existential tension that moves the characters.

Will it be possible in this world—our world—to discover the face of this infinite Mystery? The three authors have discovered it through a particular story, that of Jesus of Nazareth, which today, in the 21st century, has caught up with them and sharpened their intelligence to know what the challenges of today's day and age are.
Translation by Vanessa Kohler Angelini -  EpochalChange.org
Unrevised translation by the author.