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Communion - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/20
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on February 9, 2014

We are all suffering from serious shortages of communion. We are actually risking getting used to its absence, and so stopping to long for it. Communion is formed within the community, but a reversed statement is not necessarily true: there can be and there are communities without any type of communion among the people in it, where gifts become obligations, without freedom or gratuitousness. Current studies on happiness and subjective well-being tell us very clearly that the main cause of people's happiness is a life of communion, starting from that first cell of communion which is the family. Living a good life definitely depends on the quality of communional relationships at all levels, including the fundamental experience of communion which is work.
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We must not, in fact, make the mistake of thinking that communion is only possible in intimate relationships or inside the family: communion is the deepest and truest vocation of human beings in all the areas in which human qualities are exercised. There are some dimensions of communion that are so intimate and spiritual that in order to describe them we should appeal to the poetic powers of Dante and his ingenious neologisms ("s’io m’intuassi come tu t’inmii", Paradise, IX 81; in English: "If I in-you-ed myself, as you in-me yourself", meaning: if I were in you as you are in me - the translator). But there are other dimensions, no less critical to the quality of our lives that do not require the mutual indwelling of souls, but necessitate that fellow citizens listen to and consider each other as related to and necessary for their own happiness - Europe will suffer forever, until the community does not become communion, too.
It is the community that allows us to decline verbs of our lives in all persons, especially the first person plural ("we"). Also because the first person plural may be missing from our syntax time to time and if it is so, the second person singular may disappear, too, and so does the face of the other person, and we find ourselves in communities inhabited by anonymous and lonely third persons.
Communion, to avoid becoming "communionism" must always be declined along with equality, freedom and gratuitousness. Unlike community, communion requires certain equality, especially when from the communion of goods we move on to the communion between people. It is an equality in dignity, a "face to face" recognition, knowing that the other is there, in that relationship, because he, just like me, has freely chosen to be there (and maybe to get out tomorrow), and chose this as an act of gratuitousness. This communion requires the overcoming of status, and is not complete until this happens. Communities can exist and persist even in feudal and unequal societies; communion requires much more. And even when the experience of communion begins inside a non-egalitarian or caste based community, if the experience is authentic, little by little it will undermine and transform it from the inside. Just like it happened in the early Christian communities and in those born from great religious and secular charismas, where people arrived as noble or plebeian, but soon found themselves in a new reality of true communion, where there was "neither slave nor free...nor...male and female..." (Galatians). For this reason, communion teaches the brothers and sisters who are siblings a new fraternity, where it is understood that you have to become brothers. Communion is all free, because it is the highest experience of gratuitousness - it is no coincidence that the Eucharist was named, the "eu-charis", and also, communion. History has known and still knows the community-without-communion, exactly because and whenever this kind of equality, freedom and gratuitousness were missing.
Our world suffers mainly because of the lack of communion at all levels, starting with that of the economy. Communion would be needed to try to resolve the serious problems of poverty and exclusion; philanthropy is not enough, and often it is even harmful, because it is a one-sided affair. Communion calls for much from all of us, from those who give and those who receive it, because it is a form of reciprocity where everyone gives and everyone receives. And where everyone forgives - without continuous and institutionalized forgiveness, communion does not last long.
Communion is happiness, well-being, living a good life. But life within and around us shows us a constant show of non-communion. To say and to continue to remind us that communion is a vocation of humanity means to have an idea of the health and diseases of human societies. Judeo-Christian humanism, for example, tells us of a beginning of humanity's communion, a start which is also the end of history, the goal towards which we strive. Non-communion is neither the first nor the last word on the human. To say that communion is health and non-communion is disease means to have an idea of therapy to cure ourselves. However, the dominant culture is reversing this order, and has transformed the disease into health. It does it every time saying that the rivalry, envy and oppression of the other are the main agents of economic growth, and harmony, generosity and equality do not increase the GDP.
Those who believe in communion as a vocation of human beings, whenever they find that it is not realised repeat the words of Don Zeno Saltini, "man is different" from what he appears to be, and we see it in history that man is "greater" than the disunities and discords around himself. It is the realistic possibility of a "not-yet" of communion that makes the "already" of non-communion possible and sustainable. When this broad horizon is deleted or when it is classified as naive utopia, the human factor shrinks, and since the ideal that would call for our attention even in the worst situations is missing, politics becomes cynicism, economics turns into dominance, and sociability to life imprisonment. The civil, moral and spiritual quality of the third millennium will depend on our capacity, at all levels, to see more in the human being than what we've seen so far, and equipping ourselves with communional institutions that promote peace, harmony, well-being and living a good life.
With the entry of "communion" this first volume of new vocabulary reaches its end. I feel that I should go back to the streets to look for new words, among the people, the poor - just where I had found what I have tried to tell so far. The great Argentinean, Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story "Avverroes' Search" envisions the crisis that the great Arab philosopher lived through when he had to translate the words of Aristotle, " tragedy" and "comedy". He did not manage to translate them because the experiences those two Greek words meant were missing from his culture (or he thought that they were missing). He left home, walked in the streets of Cordoba in Spain and listened to the travellers. Returning to his library he seemed to have understood the meaning of those far-away words. But Borges' Averroes got it all wrong in his translation ("Aristotle calls eulogies tragedy and satires and anathemes comedy"). Maybe he became too distracted walking the squares and passing between the merchants, and was not able to discover the tragedies and comedies "down in the small gravel courtyard, where little boys were playing. One, standing on the shoulders of another acted as the muezzin, the one that held him served as the minaret, a third one, on his knees, represented the faithful". In this admirable and difficult age of extremely fast passages, there are some "big" words that cannot be "translated", and so we risk losing them forever. We have to go back and watch the children play in the courtyards and meet the people in the streets. There we will be able to understand again the sense of big words lost or worn by time, starting from the Word that has become too foreign in our streets and in our markets. This is what I will try to do from next Sunday on, in agreement with the director of this newspaper, through a new series of reflections.
Thanks to those who followed me in this first volume of "vocabulary", and also to the many who have written to me and, I hope, continue to do so, giving me more words, different semantics, new stories to tell, so that we could share them with each other.
Translated by Eszter Kató
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
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    [text] => 
Communion - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/20
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on February 9, 2014

We are all suffering from serious shortages of communion. We are actually risking getting used to its absence, and so stopping to long for it. Communion is formed within the community, but a reversed statement is not necessarily true: there can be and there are communities without any type of communion among the people in it, where gifts become obligations, without freedom or gratuitousness. Current studies on happiness and subjective well-being tell us very clearly that the main cause of people's happiness is a life of communion, starting from that first cell of communion which is the family. Living a good life definitely depends on the quality of communional relationships at all levels, including the fundamental experience of communion which is work.
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    [title] => The Good City of the Different and the Babel of the Closed Castes
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    [introtext] => 
Community - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/18
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on January 26, 2014

Community, one of the richest fundamental and ambivalent words in our civil vocabulary is undergoing radical change. The community has always been a reality that is anything but romantic, linear or simple, because the strongest and deepest human passions are concentrated in it and it is a place of life and death. Jerusalem is called the 'Holy City', but the founder of the first city is Cain, and Rome (and many other cities) was founded following a fratricide (the murder of a brother).
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The notion of community can only be grasped without dangerous ideological reductions if this inherent ambivalence is embraced, and not rejected. Already the Latin root of the word is suggestive of this: communitas, cum-munus, since munus means gift and obligation at the same time. It means what is given and what is to be given or returned, the gratuitous act but also the munera, that is, the tasks, duties and obligations, the gratuitousness that evolves in those who are dutiful, right and proper. It is the same semantic and social tension that we find in the common good and the common goods that stay alive and do not perish as long as the weft of obligation is interwoven with the warp of gratuitousness. However, if this vital tension is gone and there remain only the (alleged) gifts or only the obligations, relational disorders are always at the door (if not already inside the house): gift becomes irrelevant to social life and obligations are transformed into traps.
One of the deeper reasons for the generative duality of the community is its non - elective nature: we cannot select the people we are linked with and connected to in the community, or only to a minimal extent. The 'cum' is not created by us through our choices, but it precedes us, it's greater than us. Our fellows inside the community are beside us, some of them are not very likeable to us, many of them would not be chosen as our friends, and yet they are inevitably there, we depend on them and they depend on us. Its non-elective nature and interdependence are the essence of the community, they unite the members of a school class, workplace or local community among themselves. A classmate, colleague or neighbour affects my life for the sole reason of insisting on my own ground, even when I try to avoid them, and even if I do not love them, when I ignore them or fight them. So we can use the same expression of 'community' for family, school, business and our country as long as we feel the same cum and the same munera inside.
The non-elective feature of community has its origin in the primary community, the family. We do not get to choose either our parents, children or siblings. And although it is true that we choose our wife or husband, it is even more true that what we choose in the other person in the years of love co-exists with a whole part of the other that we did not choose, because it is unknown to both of us. A part un-chosen that grows over the years, and makes love blossom in agape, and lends an immense dignity to faithful conjugal love, because the more valuable and expensive loyalty is the one towards the part unknown and un-chosen in the other person (and in ourselves). In general, relationships that are elective at the moment of their formation (friendship, love... ) become capable of generating good communities if they open up to the non-elective dimension of friends and to the welcoming of non-friends. Otherwise they get stuck on the level of consumption which can also nourish but that does not generate anything.
The groups of people where we exercise the most significant dimensions of our humanity are non-elective, we do not choose them. It is in the shared daily life in non-elective circumstances that we learn the relational and spiritual key codes of life; this is where we can fight narcissism (which is now a social pandemic) and become adults. It is a lifelong learning which assumes a very high value when, because of a mysterious loyalty to yourself, you stay in the communities that do not recognize you anymore, and there comes a sort of 'awakening' and you have the strong impression of having made a mistake with that community and with almost everything. The ones who manage to stay even after such painful awakenings may soon find that from children they have become mothers and fathers of their community.
 Diversity is the yeast of the community. Without it, community life does not rise, its daily bread stays unleavened.
Today there is a very strong tendency to create elective communities, that is, to leave the un-chosen communities and join in communities that are chosen. With a decisive role of the web, we are experiencing a proliferation of the so-called 'communities of interest', groups that are formed around common interests, from food to hobbies, from literary tastes to love for some species of animals, and many more, often very good things. New 'communities' of those who are similar, often without bodily presence, are replacing the full-bodied communities that are rapidly dissolving. People flee from the new and difficult diversities of the multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, and recover from that un-chosen diversity by creating other communities. This is an expression of the so-called 'communitarianism', a heterogeneous movement that is a typical establishment around the concept of 'communities of the similar'. Schools, apartment buildings, neighbourhoods, web-communities, places where people try to build communities without the 'wounds' of diversity at one's doorstep. But one of the important messages that comes to us from the age-old wisdom of our civilization is the inadequacy of the communities of the similar for the construction of a good life. If we continue to quit natural communities, and thus the political territories and bodies, we will soon be falling into a form of caste based neo-feudalism that was the condition of Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire. It is a scenario that is already taking shape in the many "Davos'" of financial capitalism, where new castes that are totally separate and immune of the communities are governing us, but without wanting to or being able to see or touch us. When business managers and financiers no longer touch the bodies of vivid and mixed communities, they produce immense damage that is sometimes fatal to the community of the new untouchables and outcasts. In the old feudalism, the few rich people lived in fortresses, surrounded by raids, decay and desert. The day may not be too far for these new feudal lords and the Brahmins when, should they come out of their strongholds they will not find any roads, security, public goods or even a helipad for landing any more.
A great story on the decline of the community of the different in the communitarianism of the similar is that of Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). Saved and reborn after the Flood, the community gathered in one place, they had the same language, and they had a high tower. After each 'flood' (epochal crisis) there is always a strong temptation in the communities to close themselves around the similar ones and expel those who are different in order not to be scattered on earth. Where there is no diversity, promiscuity and contamination, there is no fertility either: no children are born, communities become incestuous and soon disappear, too. The community without diversity soon turns into a form of fundamentalism, an idol of itself. It was the convivial and quarrelsome coexistence of our cities of the different to generate that architecture, art, culture and economy that, centuries later, continue to love us, feed us and save us. This post-feudal Europe of citizenship and diversities today is threatened by the new Babel of finance and annuities, closed in their citadels.
The righteous Noahhad built an ark (a basket-boat) to save the variety and diversity of species and of the living, a variety/diversity that the people gathered at Babel wanted, and still want to delete. The scattering of the communitarianism of Babel is the pre-condition for the building of a thousand communities populated by a number of languages, colours, variety, diversity and beauty: "'Glory be to God for dappled things" (Gerard M. Hopkins).
 
Translated by Eszter Kató
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
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Community - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/18
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on January 26, 2014

Community, one of the richest fundamental and ambivalent words in our civil vocabulary is undergoing radical change. The community has always been a reality that is anything but romantic, linear or simple, because the strongest and deepest human passions are concentrated in it and it is a place of life and death. Jerusalem is called the 'Holy City', but the founder of the first city is Cain, and Rome (and many other cities) was founded following a fratricide (the murder of a brother).
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Justice - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/2
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on August 18, 2013

There is a strong contrast between the deep sense of justice that we  all - even the wicked - have deep inside, and the world that appears to us as a display of widespread injustice. <Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains> (J.J. Rousseau). For many injustices the courts and lawyers are not enough, for some they are useless because the legal, commutative and compensable aspects cover only a small part of the territory of justice, the extent of which actually covers the whole of our lives. It is a rapidly increasing tendency today to answer the question of justice the wrong way by "juridicializing" the whole of social life, possibly by encoding every interpersonal relationship, turning all human relationships in contracts.
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There is a trend-or-temptation which, instead of increasing justice, is locking schools, apartment buildings, hospitals in traps of mutual distrust, since many human relationships become distorted when they are forced into a contract. 
The great lesson on justice taught by European humanism was rather different. First, justice was given the rank of cardinal virtue, which means that it is first of all the result of continuous exercise for the improvement of the person. In fact, before being invoked as a principle, justice should be practiced, lived, sought and cultivated like the other great virtues of existence. Justice in the city is generated by the righteousness of citizens, as the Greek culture had expressed it symbolically by the birth of Dike, goddess of justice in the polis. She was born of Themis, the goddess of the justice that comes before any concrete historical legal system and that makes all those that follow it just. For this Themis may also come into conflict with Dike, as it happens in the great tragedy of Antigone, who in the name of greater justice buries his dead brother Polynices, which is against the justice of the polis. Even the scribes and the Pharisees had their own justice, and it was according to this that they condemned the Christ. No invocation of justice is right if it comes from people who use unfair Dike-justice against Themis-justice, perhaps even to oppress the poor and the righteous, and always to their own advantage. If in fact, if there is a lack of citizens who love and practice the virtue of justice, it follows that the laws made can only be unjust, and all the more so if they are made by a democratic form of government. In fact, the need for virtuous citizens is the main fragility of democracies, as Montesquieu or Filangieri recognised it, too. At the same time, just laws strengthen the civic virtues of the citizens by awarding them.
For this reason, the declinations of the virtue of justice are open and deliberately vague: they invite us to recognize and give to "each their own" but they do not tell us how to measure that "their own", nor who should measure it. And when the Dike-justice is called in to give content and limit to the "their own" for each, it is even more true that the vagueness of the virtue of justice is an expression of it being a relationship between people. We recognize and give each other the proper rights if and when there is a common sense of belonging shared by us, because, in a real sense, the one I care for and am concerned about is a third person just because, on a deeper level, that person is a second person (a "you"). And while the Dike-justice may be satisfied to give to each their own, the virtue of justice goes beyond the calculation of their own. Christianity taught us that the difference between its own type of justice and that of the scribes and the Pharisees is called agape and it does not begin where justice ends, instead, it is its form and fulfilment.
Economics has never taken the issue of justice seriously, except for the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, and a few others. For the capitalist ideology-religion justice is part of the constraints to be respected, it does not belong to the objectives to be achieved. Justice at best is synonymous with forced respect of labour, environmental or safety regulations, or the paying of taxes. All constraints are experienced as limitations to achieving the true objective of the capitalist enterprise: maximization of profit or, more properly and more seriously, income. But in the beginning it was not so. The "right price" was one of the great themes of medieval economics. In 1766 Antonio Genovesi, parallel to his treatise on economics ("Lessons of Civil Economy"), wrote another treatise entitled "Diceosina" on justice, the soul of his entire life work in economics and ethics. The justice that our capitalism knows - if at all - is similar to that of the scribes and the Pharisees; it is the justice of constraints and of formal and cultural respect of the laws. The issue of justice regards and judges the current capitalist system in its entirety. It is, however, an issue that we have set aside for too long, especially because of a crisis of critical thinking.
It is not simply about denouncing (rightly) the individual phenomena of capitalism as unjust (from shameful salaries and pensions of many senior executives to the public and private tax havens, from speculations at multinationals that do not create but destroy work possibilities to the dealings that starve the poor with the connivance of the institutions...), but taking note that there is a very profound and radical enmity between our financial capitalism and the cardinal virtue of justice. This is not to deny that there are many people who practice the virtue of justice in economic life every day, but only to recognize that a system based on the search for the maximum turnover of the owners of big banks, insurance companies and multinational corporations is in conflict, as a system of ethics, with the requirements of the virtue of justice. The justice of this capitalism is not to be compared - in order to be judged -  with that of feudalism, which is still less, but with what we could achieve if we had not betrayed the civil and social vocation of Europe to follow the sirens of consumerism and speculative finance. And this capitalism that continues to produce income and privileges for a select few, and unemployment and marginalization for many, is the one that makes the laws that reinforce those privileges and increasingly misalign the points of departure at the expense of the weak and the poor, this capitalism cannot have justice on its side - instead, it has to settle for efficiency, at its best.
If we wanted to overcome this development model and definitely take the way of justice, we should have a civil courage and strength of thought that are at least similar to the ones that generated the European cooperative movement. In fact, at the dawn of capitalism it ventured on a different pathway to market and enterprise, and this called into question the rights of property, income distribution (an issue that is long gone from the books of economics), power and equality of opportunity between economic actors without abandoning either liberty or the market. However, the history of the twentieth century has produced a capitalism which is essentially the backlit image of our vices and our very few virtues - and because of this it can always be changed and made ​​to evolve into something else, if we choose.
The drama of injustice and iniquity continues to dominate the scene of this world. Many have become accustomed to the privileges and comforts of the unjust capitalism and feed it with their daily choices. Others, still in great minority, continue to think and say that many large manifest injustices can be eliminated from our society, and they also act accordingly, as much as they can. And so they continue stubbornly to "hunger and thirst for righteousness" and, occasionally, to be called "blessed".
  Translated by Eszter Kató
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
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    [text] => 
Justice - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/2
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on August 18, 2013

There is a strong contrast between the deep sense of justice that we  all - even the wicked - have deep inside, and the world that appears to us as a display of widespread injustice. <Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains> (J.J. Rousseau). For many injustices the courts and lawyers are not enough, for some they are useless because the legal, commutative and compensable aspects cover only a small part of the territory of justice, the extent of which actually covers the whole of our lives. It is a rapidly increasing tendency today to answer the question of justice the wrong way by "juridicializing" the whole of social life, possibly by encoding every interpersonal relationship, turning all human relationships in contracts.
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Economics - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/15
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on January 5, 2014

“...(T)he crisis have given many and such denials of what appear strictly to be scientific estimates, advanced by economists. It is no wonder that any layman could believe to be authorized to proclaim the bankruptcy of the political economy... To the voices, some calumny, not a mitigating factor is lacking. In fact, many economists have sinned of immodesty". These are the words of political scientist Robert Michels, author of the first book entitled "Economics and Happiness" (1917). He said this in 1933, but it seems to be written today.
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Immodesty, or superiority, is not the sole prerogative of economic science, since it is a well-known universal anthropological tone. At certain times, however, the community of economists has been affected by a particularly stubborn and widespread form of immodesty. Faced with obvious deficiencies and errors of their discipline, instead of giving in to the force of facts and getting into a crisis, and instead of humbly revising ancient facts and dogmas, they stubbornly returned all criticism to the sender. The present is one of those times, and there is an increasingly strong need for a major overhaul of many dogmas and axioms of economic theory and practice.
In its original form, economy was entirely defined by the boundaries of the house (oikos), , distinct and separate from politics (polis). Economy ended when man (male, adult, free, non-manual workers) left the oikos and moved in to the polis. The oikos with its rules of management was the realm of the unequal hierarchy and the reign of women, while politics was that of men and relations between equals. Throughout antiquity and the pre-modern era, oikonomia has retained this domestic, practical, internal, and usually female meaning. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the noun 'economy' started to be accompanied by new adjectives: politics (Smith and Verri), civil (Genovesi and many others), public (Beccaria), social (many authors), national (Ortes). These adjectives were meant to emphasize that economy was no longer the administration of the house, and neither the "oikonomia of salvation" or the "Economic Trinity", the other meaning of oikonomia widely used from the Church Fathers to modern times. The adjective political (and similar ones) has done much to qualify modern economics in relation to the ancient one. By fusing the economic with the political (political economy), two fields that had been separated for thousands of years, some typical categories of politics entered into the economy. But the strongest among all was the influence in the opposite direction, if we think of the force with which the language, rationality and economic logic are migrating from economics to politics, usually with rather dangerous effects. These include a strong tendency to read the whole of public life from the perspective of budgetary constraints, efficiency and economic cost-benefit, producing an unprecedented democratic dumping which is one of the most general and worrying cultural traits of our time.
But there is a second crucial element on which much more collective and political reflection is needed. The contamination between economics and politics has not brought with it a public or political centrality of women which was originally associated with the oikonomia. Instead, we have continued to think of 'home' as the reign of the feminine and domestic economy; while the economy, turning political and public in its theoretical principles and anthropological axioms has been deprived of the woman and her specific view of the world and the living beings - with serious and undervalued consequences.
This (di)vision is theorized very clearly by  Philip Wicksteed, a leading British economist of the past century, as well as protestant pastor and translator of Dante. At the heart of his most famous and influential treatise (Commonsense of Political Economy, 1910) there is the analysis of the behaviour of the "housewife". The housewife, as long as she moves inside the home, is moved by the logic of gift and by the love of the "you" that she has in front of herself. But as soon as she leaves domestic economy to go to the market, she disposes of her roles at home and takes on those of political economy, the logic of which must be what Wicksteed coined "non-tuism" (from the Latin 'you'). The housewife, in fact, is permitted (by the economists) to strive for the good of all through the market, except the good of those whom they face in an economic type of encounter: "The economic relationship does not exclude everyone from my mind except myself [selfishness]; and it potentially includes everyone except you [non-tuism ]". This way the economy overcomes selfishness ("everyone except me") but loses the personal relationships within the economic ones ("everyone except you").
The typical tones of the real meeting with the 'you' - gratuitousness, empathy, caring ... - are the ones that the 'housewife' should exercise only in the private sphere, not in public which is all defined by an instrumental register and by the absence of "you" and the presence of and only and lonely 'him’, ‘her’ and ‘them’. And all this because someone has determined a priori that those relational and emotional characteristics that most typically (but not exclusively, of course) are of the woman, were not serious and rational enough things for the serious and rational economic sphere. Too bad, though, that when the face of the "you” is missing from the view, which is the only real and actual face in every human environment, all that remains is a faceless and therefore inhuman economy. But above all, we produce an economy that does not see, and therefore does not understand the typical goods that would need categories other than those of non-tuistic logic, among these the category of common goods, relational goods, the logic of plural actions, non-instrumental rationality and much, much, more. Non-tuism is still a pillar of the economic science. And all the times that in the real economy a supplier looks another one in the face, and, moved with compassion, gives him a deferment of payment, or when a worker goes beyond the contract and takes care of a client in difficulty, the "pure" economist considers these exceptions as friction, as incomplete contracts, costs that should be reduced to zero if possible. In fact, the more businesses and banks become large, bureaucratic and rationally managed, the more these 'tuistic' frictions are reduced - but they never disappear completely, and they will not disappear as long as the organizations are inhabited by human beings.
But things are different. We know that 'tuistic' actions are not frictions or simple costs, but they are the ones that compose the invisible but very real oil that helps our organizations not to produce clogs and that turns the complex human gears even in times of crisis when contracts and efficiency are just not enough anymore. Providentially, the real economy goes ahead despite the economic and management theories, but today we must have the cultural courage to stand up against this suffering, which is for the most part preventable, produced by an obsolete anthropology and an economic ideology of a single dimension. Let us not forget that unlike in the past centuries when the public sphere was the monopoly of men (who theorized and occupied it), women today find themselves living in economic and political institutions in which there are, in fact, cultural and theoretical peripheries. The data show that in our businesses and banks it is mainly the women who suffer, because in their workplaces they seem to be conceived, designed and promoted by theories that are missing their "other half' in the world and in economy. To change the economy to shape it to the 'measure of a woman' would mean - I only hint at it - also to review the theory and practice of the management of the home, the economy of the family, raising children, caring for old people. And much more.
The difficulties of the present time also depend on not being able to exploit the immense relational and moral power of women who are still too often guests and outsiders in the productive world of men, and so they cannot give expression of their full potential and talents. The world of economy is also waiting to be enlivened by the female genius.
   Translated by Eszter Kató
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
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    [text] => 
Economics - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/15
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on January 5, 2014

“...(T)he crisis have given many and such denials of what appear strictly to be scientific estimates, advanced by economists. It is no wonder that any layman could believe to be authorized to proclaim the bankruptcy of the political economy... To the voices, some calumny, not a mitigating factor is lacking. In fact, many economists have sinned of immodesty". These are the words of political scientist Robert Michels, author of the first book entitled "Economics and Happiness" (1917). He said this in 1933, but it seems to be written today.
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Charismas - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/13
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on December 22, 2013 

The moral and civil shortcomings of our times are also the result of the expulsion of the charismas from public life, the charismas that all too quietly accepted their marginalization and retreated. And when the charismas are missing, or when they are considered some “religious thing” only and therefore irrelevant to civilian life, than economy, politics and society are all at a loss because they lack the essential resource of gratuitousness. In fact, there is an inseparable link between the charismas and gratuitousness.
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Gratuitousness arrives in the world, transforming it every morning, through two major pathways. The first lives inside us, since every human being has a natural capability for gratuitousness. Life itself, our coming into the world is the first major experience of gratuitousness; we find ourselves alive, called into existence, without having chosen it, as a primitive gift which is the foundation of all other gratuitousness. And it is also for this reason that there is no act of gratuitousness greater than that of a mother who lets an unwanted child to come to this world. This is our natural vocation for gratuitousness that makes us attribute an immense value to the gratuitousness of others, and makes us suffer a lot when our gratuitousness is not recognized, appreciated or thanked. Perhaps there is no spiritual pain that is more acute than the one felt by those who see their gratuitousness trampled, hurt and misunderstood by others. If gratuitousness were not already in us, we could not recognize or appreciate the generosity of others, we would remain trapped inside our narcissism, and we would be incapable of perceiving true beauty or the virtues. For this reason, gratuitousness is a constitutive dimension of the human being, of the whole of it, of every human being, even of the homo economicus, which today systematically denies it and drives it away. Without gratuitousness Mr. Rossi will never be more than a client, colleague or supplier: it is gratuitousness that transforms him into Mario. Gratuitousness is often relegated to the places of its (non -profit?) professionals where it dies for lack of the open air of the streets and the lively sound of factories. The dough needs yeast, but the yeast needs the dough, too.
The second main way of gratuitousness are the charismas, the gifts of charis (grace, gratuitousness). Every so often, much more often than one would think, there appear among us people with a special vocation of gratuitousness. These "non-ordinary" bearers of charismas once operated mainly inside religions or great philosophies. Today we can find them in other realms of human life: from economics to politics, from environmentalism and human rights. There are many, but rarely do we have the cultural and spiritual capability to recognize them. Without gratuitousness there is no charisma, and so all the phenomena that, after sociologist Max Weber we now call "charisma" or "charismatic" are something else, often ambivalent, sometimes even bad things. The charismas increase and enhance gratuitousness on earth, and they wake it up or revive it in those who encounter them. They find the "already" of our gratuitousness and they make the "not yet" flourish. Every real encounter with a charisma is an encounter with a voice that challenges our gratuitousness, and if it looks dead it says: "Talitha kumi", get up, girl.
We should write encyclopaedias on the essential role of the charismas in economic and civil life, starting from the less obvious things. For example, one of the dimensions of the charismas and gratuitousness-charis is their "natural-ness" which links them on earth and reveals the hidden gratuitousness to us, mysteriously but really, in nature. When you meet a true bearer of charisma, whether that person is a social assistant or a founder of a religious community (I've met and I meet many of them and they always make me a better man), the first and most radical experience that you have is the physical sensation of meeting people who love you and do good in the world by just being there. You do not see people who are better or more altruistic than others, but people who are there and do what they should. A charisma is not primarily an ethical issue, but an anthropological and ontological one: it is being manifested and shining. Gratuitousness is its ordinary exercise in everyday life (although many virtues are necessary in order not to lose it along the way). So the charismas are at once pure spirituality and pure laity. Just as the greatest meekness and the most radical action to <put down the mighty from their thrones>. This "natural" dimension of charismas, for example, means that those who feel they are benefiters of this gratuitousness do not feel that they are indebted. This gratuitousness takes away the demon of the gifts (called hau by Polynesians) and thus it frees us and transforms this reciprocity into an encounter of freedom.
This friendship between gratuitousness and nature is very important. The tree grows and bears fruit because that's the way it is and it could not do otherwise. The stream runs into the lake because it obeys a law of nature. Just like the charisma: whoever receives it will act because "that's the way they are" and because "they could not do otherwise". They know they must preserve and nurture that "something" that dwells in them, but even before that they know that the something or someone who speaks to them and guides them is acting on a force of its own, although, paradoxically, that charisma is also the best and truest part of them. It is this dynamic of "intimacy - otherness" that prevents its holder from taking possession of their own charisma, to use it to their own advantage (and when he or she does so, the charisma disappears) which guarantees gratuitousness. A dynamic that applies to the founders of charismatic communities, but also to each member of these communities who are no longer followers of movements, or associates of organizations, but persons driven from the inside because the same charisma of the founder dwells in them. The Franciscans do not follow, nor imitate Francis, but together with Francis they follow that same charisma of his, and become in time than they already are. This is where the mystery of charisma lies, for all the religious charismas and all the secular ones (if you really want to tell them apart), for and their typical freedom.
It is here that you will discover a profound analogy between the charismatic person and the artist: both are "servants" of a daimon, a Spirit, both obey a voice and can conquer death. Theresa of Avila and Caravaggio were two very different moral realities, but both have made the world better and more beautiful, they both loved us and love us, free of charge. It is here that gratuitousness intersects with beauty, too, which is so similar to it (perhaps this is the etymology of "grazioso", meaning graceful or pretty in Italian - the translator). Both tell about the intrinsic value of life, which comes before any payable price, before reciprocity, and even before a careful look taken at the other. It is the beauty-gratuitousness that really decorated the rooms of the palaces and the vaults of the cathedrals, or that today is urging Giovanna to prepare a beautiful table, even though she has been widowed and is alone, so she cannot share with anyone.
The charismas come into the world for the good of all, even those who cannot see the charismas or disregard them. But they come mainly for the poor. If there were no charismas, the poor would not be seen, loved, cared for, saved, valued: <Today Salvation arrives in our community: a family with five children, all handicapped> (Don Lorenzo Milani). It is the different gaze of the charismas that gives the poor hope, joy, and it often revives them. And it is the gaze of the poor that makes the charisma alive, does not let it die or become a mere institution.
It is the charismas and their gratuitousness that reveal Christmas to us. And it is Christmas that opens the charis up for us. Merry Christmas to all.
  Translated by Eszter Kató
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
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    [text] => 
Charismas - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/13
by Luigino Bruni 
published in Avvenire on December 22, 2013 

The moral and civil shortcomings of our times are also the result of the expulsion of the charismas from public life, the charismas that all too quietly accepted their marginalization and retreated. And when the charismas are missing, or when they are considered some “religious thing” only and therefore irrelevant to civilian life, than economy, politics and society are all at a loss because they lack the essential resource of gratuitousness. In fact, there is an inseparable link between the charismas and gratuitousness.
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    [introtext] => 
Market - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/11
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on December 8, 2013

In the undersoil of our civil and economic culture there are two opposing tendencies growing. The first is the gradual rapprochement between culture and the languages of the capitalist market and social economy. The second, opposing trend is a growing opposition on an ethical evaluation of the market, which leads some to see the capitalist market as the solution to all our economic and civil ills, and others to consider it instead as the fetish of all moral, social and political evil.
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The first would like a society that is led and managed only, or mainly by market values and instruments (from the privatization of common goods to the buying and selling of organs), the latter would banish them from almost all morally relevant areas of human life, and keep them in a very tight and controlled channel. With globalization and the financial and economic crisis this ideological juxtaposition which has at least two hundred years of history has entered a new phase.
Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable that books written by economists containing the pros and cons of markets could become best sellers. This new phase, however, does not have the spiritual and communal strength of the ancient forms of popular humanism and their intellectuals because having lost contact with the vital places it does not have the taste of warm bread and the salty smell of sweat. And the opposition, which is very important but neglected by our culture, is becoming one of the biggest brakes in the search for a new phase of concord and unity, however indispensable it would be. This prevents us, among other things, from recognising and fighting the distortions and diseases of specific markets (and not imaginary ones).
The commitment to create this harmony and dialogue is not an easy task because it goes in the opposite direction of the trending approach having an ever stronger flattening and degrading effect on culture.
Traditional companies have learned a "social" language carrying too much rhetoric and little conviction. And the whole of a traditionally non-capitalist movement of economy has been trying to foolishly imitate the language (a fake type of English), culture, consultants and categories of a dominant economic thought in a damaging process of syncretism. It is an imitation that often stems from a cultural inferiority complex.
The new synthesis and the new constructive dialogue that we need are something different, something much more difficult and profound. We should first recognize that the history of the real world showed us the real markets that are much more vital, promiscuous, non-ideological and unexpected than imagined and planned by some theories. The most significant and long-lasting economic experiences, those that have increased the true welfare of the people, democracy and the common good were all hybrid experiences born of the market and society. The real market worked really when it pervaded social places, when it learned to live in and include the suburbs, too. And when it did not, and it does not do so it produces discomfort and becomes an enemy of the people and the poor, in order to make profit even from "the refuse of the wheat". Our best remote and near past are the result of the intertwining of markets and reciprocity. The cooperative movement, industrial districts and family businesses are the offspring of meetings between the language of the market and that of the gift.
Families have always known that businesses are very important and essential for their own good. It is from there that the work and wages come; it is in these promiscuous and hard places that real dreams and real life are nurtured. People have always lived and experienced the real markets as human places, squares and shops populated with people, smells, tastes and words - also, do not forget that for decades the markets have been among the very few places of public life that were marked by the sovereignty and leadership of many of our mothers and grandmothers.
The great and long history of the relationship between markets and civil life is mostly a story of friendship and alliance. Even when there were quarrels and fights in the factories, the better part of the country enrolled in different parties knew that inside those factories good things were being produced for them and for all. They quarrelled and fought inside them, but they knew that the world, theirs and everyone’s, would have been worse without those factories. They fought because they loved their factories. 
Intellectuals and politicians contrasted capital with labour, market with democracy, freedom with equality but people knew with a greater truth that reality was different because that work, albeit hard and sour, was freeing them and their children, and it was moving them away from the feudalism they had departed from. They recited social liturgies, each wore their own mask in the comedy and tragedy of real life, but the relationship between workers, employers and social classes was even more real, which gave real substance to the expression Common Good. Until those old "owners" became, not long ago, the owners of increasingly anonymous, distant and invisible hedge funds. When the critics of capitalism wanted to give life to another economy, they invented cooperatives and rural banks in Europe, but they never thought - or at least not seriously and not in great numbers - that those cooperatives and those banks were the antithesis of the other banks and companies of the country. They were certainly different, but the workers of large companies knew that any co-worker had a very similar experience to theirs, and so they understood each other and fought together; they would also turn to the same savings banks and outlets.
We were able to withstand the extremely harsh post-war times, terrorism, the ideological, radical political and violent conflicts because the real country was living an experience of unity in the factories, in the land, in offices, in cooperatives, and has woven a social bond that has been supporting and sustaining us ever since. We have survived by working together, workers, housewives, trade union members, farmers, entrepreneurs, bankers and politicians alike. We may have been arguing and fighting in the factories and in the streets; but above all we have been working and suffering together - for this reason it is urgent to return to generating new work. And we will survive if we can still find unity in work, economy and civil life.
At the beginning of civilization, gift and exchange for interest were indistinguishable. One gave gifts as a way to exchange, which, one day, became the market. This anthropological fact also tells us much on the reverse link: it reveals that there exists and remains a lot of gift-giving in the market. If it was not so, it would mean mighty little and it would be quite a sad thing to go to work every morning for decades for those who have the "gift" of work, or to donate our best years in a factory or in an office. Just as our projects and work plans would be mighty little and sad, our work relationships would be too poor and the hours of real life lived would be too few. We all know this, we've always known it. But in this phase of weak and superficial economic and social thought we need to remind ourselves of this, and all the others, too.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
Translated by Eszter Kató
 
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    [text] => 
Market - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/11
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on December 8, 2013

In the undersoil of our civil and economic culture there are two opposing tendencies growing. The first is the gradual rapprochement between culture and the languages of the capitalist market and social economy. The second, opposing trend is a growing opposition on an ethical evaluation of the market, which leads some to see the capitalist market as the solution to all our economic and civil ills, and others to consider it instead as the fetish of all moral, social and political evil.
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Cooperation - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/9
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on November 24, 2013

Communities flourish when they are capable of cooperation. Had we not started to co-operate (work together), community life would never have started, and we would have stayed stuck at the pre-human level of development. But as it is often the case with humanity's big words, cooperation, too, is one and many at the same time, it is often ambivalent, and its most important forms are the less obvious ones. Every time that human beings act together in a coordinated way to achieve a mutually beneficial common goal we are dealing with an instance of cooperation.
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An army, a religious liturgy, a class at school, a business, a government action or a kidnapping are all forms of cooperation, but they refer to human phenomena that are very different from each other. A first consequence can be drawn from this: not all cooperation is good, because there are some that, while they increase the benefits of those involved, they also worsen the common good because they harm others outside of that cooperation. To distinguish the good from the bad type of cooperation it is necessary to first look at the effects that cooperation intentionally produces on people that are external to it.
Throughout history, political and economic theories have been divided into two large families: those that depart from the assumption that the human being is naturally unable to cooperate, and those that claim the cooperative nature of the person. The main representative of the second tradition is Aristotle: in his argument man is a political animal, capable of dialogue with others, of friendship (philia) and cooperation for the good of the polis. The most radical exponent of the tradition of the unsociable animal is Thomas Hobbes: "It is true that certain living creatures, as bees and ants, live sociably one with another... and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know why mankind cannot do the same” (Leviathan, 1651). Much of the modern social and political philosophy fits within this tradition of the anti-social, while the ancient and mediaeval ones (including Thomas Aquinas) were generally on Aristotle's side. We could also say that the greatest dilemma of the modern political and economic theory has been the attempt to explain how cooperative outcomes can emerge from human beings who are not capable of intentional cooperation, because they are dominated by selfish interests.
The modern age response of political philosophy is the emergence of the many theories of 'social contract' (but not all of them): selfish but rational human beings understand that it is in their interest to create a civil society with an artificial social contract. The so-called natural man is uncivilized and so civil society is artificial. The response of modern economic science to the same question is composed by the various theories of the 'invisible hand', where the common good ('the wealth of nations') is not born of the cooperative and intentional nature of social animals, but by the play of interests of private selfish individuals divided between themselves. At the base of these two traditions we find the same anthropological hypothesis: the human being is 'crooked wood' that, without the need to straighten it out, produces good 'cities' if it is able to create artificial institutions (social contract, market) that transform self- interested passions into common good.  
And it is at this point that a mystery of the market is revealed. Market society, too, has its own form of cooperation, but there is no joint action required between 'cooperating' individuals in it. When someone walks into a store to buy bread, that meeting between the buyer and the seller is not described or experienced as an act of intentional cooperation: each seek their own interest and fulfils the counter-performance (money for bread; bread for money) only as a means to obtain their own good. Yet the exchange improves the condition of both, thanks to a form of cooperation that does not require any joint action. The common good therefore becomes the sum of private interests of individuals mutually immune to each other who cooperate with each other without actually meeting with, touching or looking at each other.
It is inside the company that we find strong or intentional cooperation, since it is a network of joint and cooperative actions to reach objectives that in great part are common ones. So when I buy a Rome-Malaga ticket, between me and the airline there is no form of intentional cooperation, only separate interests that are parallel (travel and profit); among the crew of the flight, however, there must be strong, explicit and intentional cooperation. It follows from this that while (almost) no economist would write a theory of markets based on the ethics of virtue, when looking at the theories of the company and organizations, many 'ethics of business' are based on the ethics of Aristotle's and Thomas Aquinas' virtues.
The division of labor in markets and in society at large is a great unintentional and implicit cooperation; the division of labor inside the company, however, is the strong sense of cooperation, a joint voluntary action. The Anglo-Saxon, protestant type of capitalism has thus given rise to a dichotomous model, a new edition of the Lutheran (and Augustinian) 'Two Kingdoms Doctrine '. In the markets there is implicit co-operation, which is 'weak' and non-intentional; in the company and in organizations in general we find explicit cooperation instead, which is strong and purposeful – two types of cooperation, two 'cities' that are profoundly and naturally different from each other. 
 This cooperation, however, is not the only possible type in the markets. The European, and particularly the Latin version of cooperation in the marketswas different, because its cultural and religious matrix was not individualistic but communal. Here the distinction between ad intra cooperation (inside company) and ad extra cooperation (in the markets) has never prevailed - at least until recently. And 'This is the tradition of the so-called Civil Economy that interpreted the whole economy and society as a matter of cooperation and reciprocity. The family business (in Italy 90% of the private sector is still composed by these) , cooperatives, Adriano Olivetti can all be explained by taking seriously the cooperative and communal nature of the economy. This is why the European cooperative movement has been the most typical expression of market economy in Europe. Just as the industrial districts (from the township of Prato and yarn to Fermo and shoes) are (and were) such, where entire communities have become economy without ceasing to be a community. Thus, the model of the U.S. capitalism is the anonymous market and it seeks to "marketize" (render into market) even the company, which is increasingly seen as a nexus of contracts, a 'commodity' (merchandise), or a market with 'internal' vendors and customers. The European model, however, has always tried to 'comunitize' (render into community) the market, taking the mutual and communal type as a model of good economy, exporting it from the company to the whole of civilized life (credit and consumer unions). Taking the costs and benefits of doing this results in a type of economy that is filled with humanity and the joy of living, but also with those wounds that fully human encounters inevitably bring about.
Today the U.S. model is colonizing the last of the territories of the European economy, also because our tradition of community and cooperation has not always lived up to the cultural and practical standards, it has not developed in all regions, and, in Italy, it had to deal with the (still not completely unfolded) trauma that fascism caused by proclaiming itself to be the true heir to the tradition of the cooperative company (corporatism). The 'Great Crisis' we are living now, however, tells us that the economy and society based on cooperation-without-touching-each-other may produce monsters, and that business that is only business becomes anti-business eventually. The ethos of the West is a network of strong and weak instances of cooperation of individuals that flee from the bonds of the community in search of freedom, as well as people who bind themselves of their own accord in order to live freely. In a phase of history where the pendulum of the global market tends to move towards individuals-without-ties Europe must remember the inherently civil and social nature of economy by taking care of it and by living it.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
Translated by Eszter Kató
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    [text] => 
Cooperation - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/9
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on November 24, 2013

Communities flourish when they are capable of cooperation. Had we not started to co-operate (work together), community life would never have started, and we would have stayed stuck at the pre-human level of development. But as it is often the case with humanity's big words, cooperation, too, is one and many at the same time, it is often ambivalent, and its most important forms are the less obvious ones. Every time that human beings act together in a coordinated way to achieve a mutually beneficial common goal we are dealing with an instance of cooperation.
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