On the border and beyond

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On the border and beyond/13 - There is more to life than just work and much more than consumption

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 16/04/2017

Sul confine e oltre 13 rid

"Live!  Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism— that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season..."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The capitalist religion wants to abolish the holiday. It declared a real war against it, which is accompanied by an explosion of entertainment and leisure offers that contain nothing, or too little, of the experience of the holiday. This is another expression of the now famous 'creative destruction' of the twenty-first century capitalism, which first eliminated the holiday and then started selling goods to us trying to replace it. But it cannot, because gratuity cannot be sold or bought. And so its entertainments leave just a great emptiness in us and a great longing for the real holiday, of which mostly children and young people have the greatest need. Only the civilization that knows the different times and free spaces of gratuitousness can be a culture capable of and characterized by celebrating holidays.

[fulltext] =>

Celebrating holidays is a basic and fundamental human need for men, women, young girls and boys, the sick and the old. You cannot live long without holidays. You may possibly survive, but without holidays, individual and social life becomes sad and slowly dies away. Holiday is the relational good par excellence, you cannot celebrate alone. Perhaps there are some things we can do alone, like amusing in front of the TV, smart phones and PCs; but for celebrating a holiday others, companions, children are needed. In the Bible, the concept of holiday is deeply tied to the seventh day, the Sabbath (Saturday). In the beginning of creation, the first one to celebrate was Elohim himself, who had to arrive at the end of creation and wait for Adam to be able to celebrate. Even God needs company to celebrate. He needs the company of his creation, the earth - he needs our company. If it is true that the Sabbath is the great gift of Elohim to the earth, it is also true that the Shabbat is the gift of reciprocity that the creation returns to the creator, because it gives him a chance to rest and celebrate along with us.

In the Shabbat we can and should make merry, visit friends and relatives, pray and sing together. The Shabbat is the mother of all biblical festivals and our Sunday, because it is a remembrance-memory of creation, the Alliance, and especially of the flight across the sea. Of the deliverance from Egypt, from slavery, from forced labour in brick factories. In biblical humanism, each holiday celebrated is a new liberation, a new sea passage, a new Exodus. It is a new Passover. The God of Israel is a different God because he does not want people to work forever. The idols, however, do not know the Sabbath, they do not know gratuitousness, the holiday, they want a perfect and perpetual worship.

Capitalist worship is characterized by being a religion-idolatry with no holidays celebrated. Until the twentieth century, with all its ambivalences and shadows, work culture had been a culture still on the side of life and, in the West, the heir of Judeo-Christian humanism, because it had preserved the boundary between work and holiday. There was much work done, even too much, but free men and women did not always work. There was time for rest and celebration. The blind forces of the capital would have liked, like all empires, all workers-slaves dedicated only to the production of their 'bricks'. But politics, churches, unions have prevented it, and so they have with-held the capital inside social and moral limits. In just a few years, however, capitalism has drastically and radically changed its face, and it has become something very different. Consumption has taken the place of work at the centre of the economic and social system, and all limits and boundaries were crossed. Work has an intrinsic limitation: we do not always work because we cannot work all the time. There is life outside of work that prevents work from becoming a perpetual activity. The innate toil of work is its first boundary. Consumption, however, does not know these boundaries, because - consisting of activities of pure pleasure - it does not have an internal limit. Many, perhaps all, would like stores that are open at any hour, at any time and in any place to satisfy all needs and whims. As long as the economic culture was spelled out by work, the shops were closed because the human work behind consumption commanded it and set its limits. And it set aside the time and space for holidays, it did not want a monopoly of either time or space. The closed shutters reminded everyone that life is greater than work and consumption. What makes us indignant and protest today is not that those dealing with blast furnaces in industrial enterprises, the police, the nurses and the emergency-room physicians have to work over the Easter holidays. Their work is not an enemy of the holiday, and those who meet these holiday workers recognizes their effort and are grateful for it.

Our culture centred on consumption does not see the hidden work behind it any more, or if so, it subjects and enslaves it to the ever-hungry idol. The only sovereignty recognised by the citizens-faithful of the mono-consumerist cult is consumer sovereignty, which is seriously undermining political citizenship. Work done for the idolatrous consumption is what denies the holiday and denies work.

This is why the struggle between capitalism and the holiday is very profound and radical. Large companies and banks, for example, are trying in every way to recreate the symbolic and emotional strength of the holiday, its ability to create a sense of belonging, team spirit, a 'sense of us'. The work culture of the past century has also been created by the popular, religious and secular holidays, by marriages and baptisms. Factories and offices have used that symbolic, social and spiritual capital they were receiving free from the communities in which their employees grew up and lived. The liturgies, processions, the days remembering the great sorrows and liberations fed the soul and all the virtues of the people, who gave these to their businesses for free while they worked, donating a much larger value in return for their wages. The capitals from which the profits of the companies came were (and are) worth much more than their private capital. Together with the men and women entering the company gates, civic, religious and moral values were introduced, too. No capitalist has ever paid for these - that's where the moral root of taxes lied, too, because in the profits there was much wealth donated to businesses by communities.

The individualistic and consumerist culture of capitalism of our time is wiping out these civil and spiritual capitals. Large companies feel the lack of it, even if they do not know how to identify the underlying reasons. And so they think that a company celebration/holiday, a convention or a drink on Friday afternoon could replace the capitals formed through several centuries. The symbols of the holiday without the popular and poor truth that created them only produces new griffins and minotaurs, hybrid monsters.

It is still too early to understand that the great famine at the doors of our economy is the dramatic shortage of spiritual, moral and symbolic capital, of which the companies have nourished themselves, but which are being used up faster than oil. The economy of sole consumption lives in an eternal present, without roots and without a future. Time, however, continues to run on earth. The scars and wrinkles of those who are around and besieging the temples of consumption, attracted by the same promise and illusion, are increasingly deep and painful, they grow and fill the world. And the club of the deluded, enchanted by the elixir of eternal youth, does not want to see them but it continues to produce them. However, unlike in the Oscar Wilde novel, the portrait with sores and wrinkles is not hidden in the attic: it is always in front of us. Only our eyes and our ability to be ashamed end up in the attic, for not wanting to see the real and ugly picture of what we are becoming. When will we begin to look at the wounds on the face of those who have been discarded by consumption, and start feeling responsible?

In a culture of work, to announce the liberation it brought about, the Bible gave us the Shabbat from work. In a culture of consumption, the biblical spirit should suggest a Shabbat from consumption, in order for us to say to the idolatry of our times: "you're not god, I am not your slave." Without a consumption-Shabbat we will not find a good relationship either with work or with the holiday any more. The blessed day when we decide to free up time and a place for non-consumer goods, to have a feast, to celebrate relationships, ties and gratuitousness would be the dawn of a new civilization.

The first request that Moses made to the pharaoh was to let the people free to go to the desert for three days to celebrate Passover (Exodus 5:3), which was an ancient festival of the transhumance of the herds. The pharaoh denied that permission, because slaves cannot make merry, because celebrating a holiday is already the beginning of the time of freedom. Without merrymaking, work is always slave work. And without time for the non-consumption of goods, slavery is perfect, because since the pain and fatigue are not there, consumption appears to us as freedom and we no longer feel the need for liberation.

Although we are no longer able to see them or recognize them, there are new pharaohs behind our work to ensure perpetual consumption and they do not want to leave us free to 'walk three days in the desert'. Maybe because they fear that the sea could open up again in front of us and we would never return. 

Happy Easter!

The series 'On the Border and Beyond' ends today. We have been through some new pages written together, new discoveries, new-old dialogues and new graces. From next Sunday I will continue the commentaries on the Bible, with the prophet Jeremiah. We shall venture across the border again, begging for other words to keep walking in our tremendous and wonderful time.

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Only slaves work non-stop to allow their masters to keep consuming. Easter is, therefore, liberation from merchandise to leave slavehood behind. 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On the border and beyond/13 - There is more to life than just work and much more than consumption

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 16/04/2017

Sul confine e oltre 13 rid

"Live!  Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism— that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season..."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The capitalist religion wants to abolish the holiday. It declared a real war against it, which is accompanied by an explosion of entertainment and leisure offers that contain nothing, or too little, of the experience of the holiday. This is another expression of the now famous 'creative destruction' of the twenty-first century capitalism, which first eliminated the holiday and then started selling goods to us trying to replace it. But it cannot, because gratuity cannot be sold or bought. And so its entertainments leave just a great emptiness in us and a great longing for the real holiday, of which mostly children and young people have the greatest need. Only the civilization that knows the different times and free spaces of gratuitousness can be a culture capable of and characterized by celebrating holidays.

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The great freedom of the holiday

On the border and beyond/13 - There is more to life than just work and much more than consumption by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 16/04/2017 "Live!  Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new...
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On the border and beyond/12 – The time of a different rhythm and relationships that can change life

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 09/04/2017

Sul confine e oltre 12 rid'When you were coming down from the quarry this afternoon with the loaded donkey cart, weren't you approached by a stranger? Didn't you give him a piece of bread?,' the carabiniere went on asking. (...) 'Is it a sin that he is accusing me of? Is it a sin now to do an act of charity?' 'Couldn't you see,' pursued the carabiniere (...), 'that the man was an enemy soldier?' 'Was he an enemy? What does that mean?' 'What did he look like?' asked the carabiniere. 'He looked like a man', Caterina answered.

Ignazio SiloneA Handful of Blackberries (English translation by Darina Silone)

Ora et labora is not only the image and the message of monasticism. It is also the breath of our civilization, which was founded by chanting to different measures, composing a symphony from the variety of rhythms, in the alternation of sounds and silence. The words and the spirit of work are different from those of prayer: they are allies and friends, because they are near and far from each other, intimately close and foreign at the same time. When, in those ancient monasteries, monks were returning from the vineyard and entering the choir for prayers, they were given some time for the transition. It was to another rhythm: that of prayer and the opus Dei, which had a different pace, a different rhythm, a different sound. It pierced through historical time to touch, or at least draw near, eternity to try and defeat death. That first last supper and the cross was experienced again, even the stone was rolled. When you cross the threshold to enter the templum, to a certain extent you become lord of time, you feel that you aren't dominated by the only rational and ruthless tempus, but travel freely between the first day of creation and the eschaton. The adam walks in the gardens of Eden again.

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Something similar happens to the time of work when compared to that spent with care (as in caring for others – the tr.). There is a deep connection between prayer, contemplation, interiority and care. The time, the modes, words, hands and spirit of care are not those of work. When we get back from the office and play with our child, we tell a story or sing a nursery rhyme we leave the registry and the rhythm of work and enter a world governed by other laws and other times. By listening to an old and ill parent, by talking to them we know that the disease prevents them from understanding our words on the level of the logos - but if we listen and talk with care we feel that we tune in to another time with another rhythm; and so we continue the dialogue of the soul that no disease can prevent. When we take care of a plant, prepare a meal, or simply clean the house, in the silence we say important words to others and ourselves. We talk every day also by setting the table for breakfast, cleaning the bathroom, watering the plants, tucking in our loved ones in a blanket when they are asleep. These are of key importance even when that breakfast is ours, because we have been left alone.

We all know that care is another name for gift. And so we know that care conserves all the beauty and all the ambivalence of gifts. Because gifts have never been all the same. Those, for example, celebrated in the public sphere were always reciprocal. The gifts-sacrifices to the gods, those made for the pharaohs and later the great acts of generosity, donations and philanthropy were associated with some form of virtue, and as such they were publicly acknowledged, appreciated, rewarded and honoured. Gifts were made to the great and the powerful, to the city and the church, and blessings, thanks, honours, applause and praise were expected in exchange.

A rather different discourse, which was also radically opposed, was that on the gift inside the home, or under the tent of the house. Here the gifts of time, resources, life and care were certainly not less than those in the town square, their value was not lower, their presence was no less essential in order to live and to live well. But, for many reasons (most of which are related to power, force and their instruments) domestic gifts were not recognized as gifts. The names that gift took in the house were mostly duty and obligation.

The actors of the public virtue type of gifts were male, those of the private duty type were women. In traditional societies the honour and glory of the gift belonged to men, while the first work of the women's subjection and subordination was the denial or non-recognition of their gifts. Motherhood, the care and education of children and youth, care for the house and primary relationships were considered the duties and obligations arising from being a mother, wife and sister. The freedom to donate that men experienced in the public sphere and what constituted its merit based nature, disappeared in women's obligation-gifts in the private sphere.

The same goes for sacrifices. Those offered to the gods, pharaohs and kings produced credits for those who made the sacrifice. Sacrifices made in the world of work produced salaries and wages as reciprocity. Only the sacrifices made by women in the house were simply duties and obligations arising from their status, from maternal and filial debts, or from marital debts. We do not understand how much the possibility meant for women to get access to the 'labour market' of all in the twentieth century unless we consider the significance of recognition and reciprocity hidden inside a work relationship. Women’s salaries, whether they were blue-collar or white-collar workers or teachers, was not different from that of their husbands and brothers except that it was (usually) lower: the pay check also had a flavour and a colour of reciprocity, dignity, social esteem, recognition, honour - which were not the flavours and colours that women experienced at home. The work of men and women have never been held equal.

Until recently, mutual benefit and reciprocity, which we put at the heart of public life, and later the market have not been the main register for civilizations to read the man-woman relationship, and in general the contribution of women to social life. Western civilization reserved love and gratitude for women, but not free reciprocity or recognition.

It was also for this reason that women's take on gift is different from that of men, just like on sacrifice. If it was written by women, the whole theory of the gift, built on the triple movement of 'give-take-exchange' would include a 'take' that's much less free and is very far from gratuitousness. 'I don't like using the words sacrifice and service,' Jennifer Nedelsky, an American philosopher confided to me a few days ago, 'because for too many women these have been and are words associated with actions that they did not chose to take and that are full of pain.' Every time I speak and write about gift, sacrifice, gratuitousness and service, I try to do this by fixing my mind's eyes on the gifts, sacrifices, gratuity and services of my grandmothers Cecilia and Maria, both farmers, and those of my mom, a housewife.

These experiences and their different attitude still have important consequences on my way of conceiving the relationship between the market, assistance and care. Cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the rooms, taking care of the children, the sick and the elderly were activities once entrusted to the servants and slaves, then to wet nurses, nannies, waitresses and cooks. Finally, to mothers, sisters and daughters. Never to free men or noble and wealthy women, so they have always looked at the activities of care as the chores to be done by slaves, servants, or women - to understand the different experiences of gift and sacrifice, it is best to make a 95% man/woman selection, because there has always been an 'élite' group of women whose views resembled that of their husbands rather than their servants as regards care and sacrifice.

At one point the 'care market' was born, but the thousand-year-long experience of care as the kingdom of slaves, servants and (poor) women continues to strongly affect our society and our capitalism. We can see it everywhere. The jobs of care (health, education) are poorly paid because they are still associated with sacrifice and obligation-gift, still deeply affected by the culture of sacrifice-without-reciprocity. The recognition of care workers is still insufficient, as is our gratitude towards them.

The low esteem status of care has been and is one of the deep reasons of the illness that has accompanied the world of work - and still does. Care is an essential dimension of every good human life, but the association between care and servitude has kept it away from the public sphere and therefore the economy (not to mention politics). The famine of care always hits in businesses and offices and it does not diminish with the arrival of many women in these places, because, in general, the care-lessness of the male register tends to prevail over everyone and everything.

Care continues to be abused, disesteemed, humiliated - no less today than in the past. The new slaves are not bought in Lisbon or Nantes, but in the 'labour market' where rich men and women buy services offered by poor women and men offering the care that the powerful dislike and despise, out of need. We have fought for centuries to eliminate slavery and servitude from the political sphere, and today we are totally and shamefully silent in the face of the slavery-servitude that prevails in the field of care in the economic sphere.

Finally, because of the strong influence that the economic culture exerts on the entire social life, the values and virtues of economy and business are changing and colonizing the world and the times of care. Efficiency, speed, hurry, stress, meritocracy and incentives enter the house, too, and destroy what little is left of the times, rhythms, words and spirit of care. Crossing the threshold of the house we do not change the times, we do not change our spirit, we do not change our words. And we don't enter into another time, we don't savour eternity, we don't experience the freedom that only the different kind of time associated with care can give to us. The economic value grows when the time taken is reduced. The value of care grows along with the time invested.

When we are able to enter the temple of care, our hours and those of others get expanded, our lives get longer, everyone's death gets distanced. As in our childhood, when the days never ended, and a school year seemed eternally long. The first reciprocity of cure is the gift of a slower and longer time, it is a return to the endless time of childhood.

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However, the time spent with caring for others tends to be longer, denser, fuller of life. There is an extreme need for a new culture of care for everyone, in every environment. 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On the border and beyond/12 – The time of a different rhythm and relationships that can change life

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 09/04/2017

Sul confine e oltre 12 rid'When you were coming down from the quarry this afternoon with the loaded donkey cart, weren't you approached by a stranger? Didn't you give him a piece of bread?,' the carabiniere went on asking. (...) 'Is it a sin that he is accusing me of? Is it a sin now to do an act of charity?' 'Couldn't you see,' pursued the carabiniere (...), 'that the man was an enemy soldier?' 'Was he an enemy? What does that mean?' 'What did he look like?' asked the carabiniere. 'He looked like a man', Caterina answered.

Ignazio SiloneA Handful of Blackberries (English translation by Darina Silone)

Ora et labora is not only the image and the message of monasticism. It is also the breath of our civilization, which was founded by chanting to different measures, composing a symphony from the variety of rhythms, in the alternation of sounds and silence. The words and the spirit of work are different from those of prayer: they are allies and friends, because they are near and far from each other, intimately close and foreign at the same time. When, in those ancient monasteries, monks were returning from the vineyard and entering the choir for prayers, they were given some time for the transition. It was to another rhythm: that of prayer and the opus Dei, which had a different pace, a different rhythm, a different sound. It pierced through historical time to touch, or at least draw near, eternity to try and defeat death. That first last supper and the cross was experienced again, even the stone was rolled. When you cross the threshold to enter the templum, to a certain extent you become lord of time, you feel that you aren't dominated by the only rational and ruthless tempus, but travel freely between the first day of creation and the eschaton. The adam walks in the gardens of Eden again.

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The infinite temple of care

On the border and beyond/12 – The time of a different rhythm and relationships that can change life by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 09/04/2017 'When you were coming down from the quarry this afternoon with the loaded donkey cart, weren't you approached by a stranger? Didn't you give him a ...
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On the border and beyond/11 - Rites that consume life and the meaning of work

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 02/04/2017

Sul confine e oltre 11 rid"Generosity, nobility have disappeared, and with them the spectacular counterpart that the rich reciprocated to the miserable."

Georges Bataille, The Notion of Dépense

The many, too many people who work little, badly, or not at all, are not the only symptom of serious disease in the realm of work. Another serious sign of its bad condition, although still barely visible, are those workers who work too much, those who dissipate enormous energies in the new rites of businesses, the new sacrificial victims sacrificed to the new gods.

[fulltext] =>

In ancient civilizations sacrifice was characterized by a fundamental tension between the useful and the useless. However useless it may seem in human terms, sacrifice is a useful gift and pleasing to the gods-idols if it is an expression of a loss of ours. The sacrificial offerings activate the divine economy because they deny the human economy. In the Bible the perfect sacrifice (the olah: "make something rise") consisted in offering the best animals, which were burned and completely consumed by fire, leaving no remains usable by those who made the sacrifice: "And the priest shall burn all of it on the altar, as a burnt offering" (Leviticus 1:9). In order for the act of sacrifice to be completely useful to God it must be completely useless to man, or rather non-usable. The perfect sacrifice is, therefore, associated with a loss, with pure economic waste, with what philosopher Bataille called dépense. This idea is still dominant in the current meaning of the word sacrifice: sacrifying oneself for someone or something leads to a loss that the one who makes the sacrifice suffers for the benefit of the recipient of the sacrifice. It is a loss, a dissipation which acquires, paradoxically, a positive dimension.

It is at this basic level that sacrifice and gift meet. Among the many ancient practices of giving gifts (the so-called potlatch: "consume"), studied by anthropologists in the early years of the twentieth century, those characterized by the destruction of the "gift" in front of the rival are particularly interesting. Among the Tlingit people (living in the area of Canada and Alaska), for example, a chief stepped out in front of another chief and slew a number of slaves. A few days later the rival returned and slaughtered an even greater number of men. In these races, where the dissipative dimension is absolute and archaic, in their brutal transparency we can glimpse an analogous dimension that is spuriously present in our time.

Despite the novelty brought by the message of Christ in the culture of sacrifice, throughout and beyond the Middle Ages these archaic elements of the gift-sacrifice continued to be very much present. We do not understand that world if we don’t consider the magnificence of the rich and powerful, the great unproductive expenses for worship, the wastage of festivities and processions, the fireworks, the real races of dissipating gifts in order to create and maintain ranks and power in the city, and/or to earn some reduction in one's sentence in purgatory - there are still many, too many of the potlatch of the mafia in our countries and in our celebrations.

Later, in Christian spirituality, there evolved the idea that the sacrifice-gift is pleasing to God because it is an expression of our loss, a sacrifice, a fee - and it remained for centuries. The economic analogy for spiritual life necessarily led to the idea of a price, meaning that in order to get something (grace, blessing...) out of a relationship with God it was necessary to pay. And so even consecrated life in virginity was read and experienced as a choice of great spiritual value for a long time exactly because it was a gift-sacrifice of the most valuable part of the person. Saint Ambrose said that the virgin was "the victim of chastity." For Saint Gregory the Great virginity replaced martyrdom: "The time of persecution is over, but our peace has its martyrdom." There is an idea of sacrifice, an expression of a theology of atonement that we find still alive in the twentieth century, where resorting to the image of the holocaust, virgins are encouraged as "those who have made the sacrifice to persevere with constancy, and not take back or claim for themselves even the smallest part of the holocaust they have laid on the altar of God." (Sagra Virginitas, Pius XII, 1954).

The Protestant Reformation marked a turning point also in this culture of the gift-sacrifice. Luther identified the sacrificial mentality still present in the Church and in Christianity as the main reason of estrangement from the authenticity and novelty of the Christian event. And he was not wrong, because the culture of sacrifice-loss was a continuation of the pre-Christian economic and meritocratic theology. For Luther there was no Christian sense in refusing human gain in the hope of a divine gain: those sacrifices of ours are useless because there is no God on the other side who is interested in those losses of ours. The Christian God is not a hungry idol. Heaven is not to be earned by us because it has been already given to us as a gift. Hence also his criticism of convents, monasteries and the value of consecrated life as offered in sacrifice. And also the condemnation of conspicuous waste, the magnificence of worship, pilgrimages, holidays, idleness and luxuries.

Anything in civil and religious life that was useless expenditure for people was interpreted by the Reformation as a sacrifice and therefore as a mistaken kind of search for spiritual merit, as a behaviour that is contrary to the true Christianity of sola gratia. The gratuity of sacrifice was seen as a perverse gratuitousness, because if it is true that every gift is a renunciation of something just for the sake of someone else, this scheme does not work in relationship with God because the God of Jesus Christ does not need our sacrifices. In fact, the only good and true sacrifice is what he did for us by giving his life for love, and it’s once and for all, and the only form of reciprocity on our side is gratitude to God and love for our neighbour.

And so the gratuity of a human action was read as the highest form of spiritual non-gratuity. This interpretation of the futility and worldly loss as improper desire for otherworldly gain made the world of reforms to look at outright gratuitousness with suspicion, both in the civil and in the religious spheres, to consider it a bargain made on the wrong floor. These are the deep cultural roots that generated the idea that gratuitousness is something altogether negative. It is either useless or wrong, because it does not find a justification either in human economy (where profit rules), or on the spiritual level. What we find at the heart of capitalism and its "taboo of gratuitousness" is a deep sense of mistrust.

Calvin, later, with his "doctrine of predestination" pushed this revolution to its logical extreme. Since people have no power to change the divine economy, the only good and blessed deeds of ours are those for the human economy and its purposes. That's how work, profession and production take the place that idleness, waste and contemplation used to have in medieval culture, and anything that is not useful or rationally oriented at utility gets condemned. The only good sacrifices are those oriented at earthly and useful goals, and therefore also at work. An economic and work gain that cannot and must not become a merit for the sky, but is the only possible and commendable type of gain on the earth. Uselessness, loss, debt-fault and laziness are the one and only demerit of individuals and peoples. Gain and merit, chased away from paradise, thus become the absolute rulers of the earth.

But that's not all. In recent years of capitalism those dissipating practices, these free acts that are useful precisely and as much as they are useless, are coming back with more and more strength and pervasiveness. A new sacrificial cult - another paradox - was born in those countries where Protestant and Calvinist culture prevailed, criticizing futility and the "free" sacrifices.

The powerful have always used dépense as a tool to say and reaffirm their own power, and so to create a status for themselves, to humiliate their subjects. Endless lines, relevant answers that always come on the last possible day, intentional delays in appointments, useless waiting for "marking" the distance... Asking for and demanding sacrifices from subjects who have no purpose other than to humiliate people and reinforce hierarchies: these are social practices well known to all, today as well as yesterday. This happens in secular circles, but also in the religious ones, where the useless practices for the sole purpose of strengthening distances and powers are particularly dangerous because they are covered by a sacred justification and are often internalized by the victim as necessary and even as something good.

Large companies, however, are pushing very far in these sacrificial dissipating practices. Meetings set on Sunday when they could be held on Monday, at ten in the evening instead of the afternoon, on 24 and not 23 December, work calls even on Easter Sunday. Unnecessary losses of time and life, which have no productive purpose or efficiency. They are a pure dissipation dictated by the cult, a case of dépense where team members end up being self-inflicted, immersed in this new sacrificial culture where the deals are worth more if they are more useless and dissipative. Unsustainable and unnecessarily endless working hours, which often reduce efficiency and quality of work but serve to increase the value of the victim offered as a burnt offering. Business meetings where work problems should be discussed but instead they turn into exhausting and unnecessary rites that are only useful to consolidate roles and hierarchies. And it goes on till the actual sacrifice of the entire private and family life where the potlatch of pure destruction is repeated, a non-usable dépense for the corporate economy but essential for the cult because it is the sign of total and absolute devotion. New holocausts.

"Gifts" that later become instruments of competition and rivalry between workers and companies who compete with each other using their own totally free and unnecessary sacrifices-gifts as their language. This perverted gratuitousness is killing good gratuity and eating up what little was left of the work culture of the past centuries. It is obscuring the real value that some useless actions had and still have, that of being able to shout out a greater freedom.

Mankind took thousands of years to arrive at a concept of God who does not need to eat people or our things to be satiated, appeased or calmed. But people - the mighty - have never stopped wanting to be God. If we do not understand the neo-ancient sacrificial nature of contemporary capitalism, when the day comes in which we realise to have precipitated in a perpetual and absolute worship it will certainly be too late. Chances are that we wake up on a sacrificial altar, and the dances and songs for us will already have begun.

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When will we become aware of it? 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On the border and beyond/11 - Rites that consume life and the meaning of work

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 02/04/2017

Sul confine e oltre 11 rid"Generosity, nobility have disappeared, and with them the spectacular counterpart that the rich reciprocated to the miserable."

Georges Bataille, The Notion of Dépense

The many, too many people who work little, badly, or not at all, are not the only symptom of serious disease in the realm of work. Another serious sign of its bad condition, although still barely visible, are those workers who work too much, those who dissipate enormous energies in the new rites of businesses, the new sacrificial victims sacrificed to the new gods.

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The devouring utility of the futile

On the border and beyond/11 - Rites that consume life and the meaning of work by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 02/04/2017 "Generosity, nobility have disappeared, and with them the spectacular counterpart that the rich reciprocated to the miserable." Georges Bataille, The Notion of Dépense T...
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On the border and beyond/10 - Trust to find the language of reciprocity again

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/03/2017

"Sul confine e oltre 10 new ridThe obligation of reciprocity in the exchange is not a response to specific powers linked to the objects, but a cosmic conception which presupposes an eternal circulation of species and beings"

M. Mauss, The Gift

At the origin of the ethos of the West there is the gift with all its ambivalences. Many origin myths associate human history with the refusal of people to stay and remain in a state of the harmonious reciprocity of gifts. The tales of Prometheus and Pandora (meaning: "all gifts"), or those of Adam and Eve tell us the same story in different languages: ​​that human beings are unable to build their own civilization on free gift. But they also tell us that there is a profound relationship between gift and disobedience, between gratuitousness and authority, between freedom and hierarchy.

[fulltext] =>

In Eden, the subjugation of women to men, the root of all other types of social subordination, is the result of their common disobedience: "Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, / but he shall rule over you" (Genesis 3:16). From the failure of the primordial relationship of reciprocity the first hierarchical relationship of domination is born. And so the hierarchy becomes the main response to the failure of free gratuity, its first alternative, its first enemy.

There is, in fact, a radical tension between hierarchy and gift. Hierarchy devours the gifts of its subjects, consuming them in the form of sacrifice: the kings, pharaohs and priests claim the first fruits and always want the best part (Zeus condemns Prometheus because he offers him the worst part of the bull quartered). However, hierarchy fears free gift more than anything else as it is not geared to its objectives because it cannot be oriented. Trying to turn the gift-gratuitousness into similar but harmless things is the invincible tendency-temptation of every hierarchy, doing everything possible to remove the unmanageable surplus from the gift, its poisonous sting given by its free nature.

The governments of the organizations also need the creativity and freedom of the gift, but they would want only the one that can (and should) stay within the established and safeguarded boundaries. And so, in times of real crisis, when free gratuity would be the first truly necessary thing, one is left destitute of this very essential.

That's the key to - more or less - the tragedy of the gift in businesses and institutions. This tragedy is manifested at various levels. The communities and movements of civil society, not infrequently even businesses, are also, and in many cases especially, born of passions, desires, overflow, from our desire for life, future and the infinite. That is, from our gratuitousness. These associated forms of life are created because some people, or at least one, can see some all new and interminable spaces that allow for the full expression of their personality and dreams. They see that there is a place, and only that one, where the ordinary limits that exist elsewhere have disappeared, the barriers have fallen, or cannot be seen any more. Everything becomes possible. And they set off towards infinity, even when everything is done in a basement, or in a village in the forest.

Then with the passing of time the ideals and passions become practical, the first proto-institutions are born, leaders emerge, rules are written. Hence contracts, regulations, and soon the inevitable hierarchy are formed. And so the initial communities-movements gradually become associations, organizations, cooperatives, companies, which in order to function and grow need to manage, normalize, remove and banish those spontaneous practices and those surpluses that were the origin of the first experience. In order to be able to manage and navigate within the government rules, to coordinate and guide actions toward institutional goals, it becomes necessary to unify and standardize behaviours, too. And the first freedom of the first gifts dies. The only gifts that remain are the sacrifices that feed the hierarchy and its objectives, the ones that feed its hunger. All this happens not because the management is bad or dull, but by the very nature and vocation of hierarchy: to perform its job it has to encourage the most ordinary, gregarious and domesticated elements of creativity and freedom, in order to fight the more subversive and destabilizing dimensions of gratuity, those that would be essential especially in the most important and delicate moments (crises, generational changes, tests...).

This is one of the most important dynamics of the institutions: once our gratuitousness has generated organizations, the inherent and necessary dynamics of their government eventually denies the expression and practice of those free gifts which had caused it to be born. The "daughter" organization devours the "father" gift. This is how many of the most beautiful collective creations end, because the body generated by gratuitousness puts out the original creative and free spirit, the only breath that life knows. This "impossibility theorem" manifests itself in many organizations and institutions, but it is absolutely central in the so-called ideal-driven organisations (IDO) and so in spiritual and charismatic communities, which often burn out, wither and die because the hierarchy and the government prevent their resources capable of saving the organization from its own extinction to operate freely. We have daily and ample evidence of this.

At the base of the progressive elimination of the free gift, a key role is played by the transformation of the gift into incentive. Gifts and incentives seem very different realities. But if we look at them carefully, we realize that they are bordering concepts that look alike. Reciprocal relationships based on the exchange of gifts create large debit/credit relationships by their very nature. These are highly generative and radically complicated to govern. The gifts that are born to respond to other gifts, never being equivalent to each other, are unable to compensate and to "settle" the debt of the first gift. Instead, they feed the relationship and reactivate the cycle of reciprocity. In other words, when a gift received is recognized and an attempt is made to reciprocate it with another gift, the second gift is not the first gift with the minus sign in front, but it is a primal act that holds open and re-launches the chain of mutually given gifts.

That's why this reciprocity, which was the first language with the help of which communities met and started to get to know each other, gradually generated the commercial type of reciprocity of the contract. If the function of the contract is perfect and balanced, it actually aims to close down a relationship, but if it's imperfect and unbalanced about the reciprocity of gifts it aims to keep that human relationship open, generative, fruitful, and therefore unpredictable, able to surprise and amaze, just like life. In the reciprocity of gifts, the "credit" created by the first gift it is not compensated by the second gift, which remains in excess, and this surplus becomes the mother of new relationships, the dawn of new days. Compensation of gifts is impossible, or at least it is always partial and imperfect, because we do not own the unit of account to make the calculations, we do not want to do them either, and we are most often wrong when we do it, thereby fuelling disagreements and conflicts. Like an iceberg, the greater and more important part of the gift is the one that’s invisible. What we can see is just the surface, but we know that beneath its signs there lives a powerful and mysterious energy capable of extraordinary things: it can rebuild an entire community but it can also destroy it. This invisible and obscure part of the gift is the root of the fascination and fear that gift has always exerted and still exerts on us.

But (and we are in the heart of the tragedy of gift) its submerged part, the calculations never done and the accounts that do not work, the debts and receivables that do not compensate each other, add up to all that businesses - and in general, organisations - really hate. The utopia of every organization is therefore to be able to acquire the creativity, passion, energy and generosity of the homo donator (the "giving man" - the tr.) without the inherent ambivalence, without any demand and recognition of gratitude, without bonds. And so they perform a genetic manipulation and turn it into homo oeconomicus ("economic man" - the tr.). The incentive is the first tool to try to manipulate the gift in the contract. They are somewhat similar: the homo oeconomicus is a homo donator deprived of his original, creative, destructive and destabilizing energy.

The incentive, if we observe it well, is really as a kind of counter-gift in a form of reciprocity. This is what the head (ownership and/or management) "gives" to the agent (worker) in exchange for a given behaviour which is to his advantage. That's why some economists (including Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof) described the employment relationship as a "gift exchange," adding, honestly, the adjective "partial" to it. The incentive can be described as a partial counter-gift because it is completely aimed at the free component, to make the agent controllable and manageable by the head. It is not by coincidence that the incentive is often called (improperly) award by companies, in order to symbolically emphasize its dimension of simulated gift... partial gift. Too bad there is something in human life that does not lend itself to partial reductions, to be shortened, blunt or cut - and it is gift itself. Unlike other living realities, gift lives only in its entirety: if I reduce it, halve it, I simply kill it. The incentive, presenting itself as a small and partial gift, is actually the anti-gift, the antidote that defends the corporate body from the real and free gift, which disappears and is gone when we need to re-start, to resurrect.

Businesses continue to live, to be born and to be reborn because many workers violate the taboo of gratuitousness, bearing all the consequences. Businesses do not know it and do not want it, but if they are alive and reborn it is because the taboo of gratuitousness is desecrated every day by free people who cannot help giving gifts, despite the prohibition to do so. The reason why we cannot help giving gifts is that we are alive, and that incentives are just not enough: we want and we are worth much more.

Long ago, gift generated the market. Will it, one day, be reborn from the heart of the market?

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That’s why it tends to be substituted by the incentive which presents itself as a partial gift. Will we ever see the resurrection of the gift from the heart of the market? 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On the border and beyond/10 - Trust to find the language of reciprocity again

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/03/2017

"Sul confine e oltre 10 new ridThe obligation of reciprocity in the exchange is not a response to specific powers linked to the objects, but a cosmic conception which presupposes an eternal circulation of species and beings"

M. Mauss, The Gift

At the origin of the ethos of the West there is the gift with all its ambivalences. Many origin myths associate human history with the refusal of people to stay and remain in a state of the harmonious reciprocity of gifts. The tales of Prometheus and Pandora (meaning: "all gifts"), or those of Adam and Eve tell us the same story in different languages: ​​that human beings are unable to build their own civilization on free gift. But they also tell us that there is a profound relationship between gift and disobedience, between gratuitousness and authority, between freedom and hierarchy.

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The Era of Partial Gifts

On the border and beyond/10 - Trust to find the language of reciprocity again by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 26/03/2017 "The obligation of reciprocity in the exchange is not a response to specific powers linked to the objects, but a cosmic conception which presupposes an eternal circulati...
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    [title] => Let us violate the big taboo
    [alias] => let-us-violate-the-big-taboo
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On the border and beyond/9 - For a market also directed by the "invisible hand": the gift

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/03/2017

Sul confine e oltre 09 rid"Even if the world we live in is less violent than any world of the past, this is only one aspect. The other aspect shows exactly the opposite: a frightening increase in violence and in the threat of violence. Our world saves more lives and simultaneously produces more victims than it has ever happened in the past."

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Gratuitousness is the main taboo of capitalism. It is feared as the greatest danger, because if it were let to run freely in the territories of capitalism, they would be infected and its "poison" would cause its death, or - and it's the same thing - it would transform it into something substantially different. It is difficult to decipher the taboo of gratuitousness in our economy (and society) because it is covered by another taboo: that of the recognition of its existence. So to understand the profound relationship between gratuitousness and capitalism we must violate this first taboo, by starting to simply talk about it.

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According to an important anthropological tradition, the origin of civilization is deeply connected to two words: violence and the sacred. Even the Bible begins human history outside of Eden with Cain's fratricide. The death of the meek and righteous Abel becomes the first price of the foundation of human civilization. Founding myths of other cities (e.g. Rome) narrate similar cases of violence and murder, where sometimes even the gods are accomplices. Communities have had to learn how to manage people's violent impulses, to prevent their own destruction. The creation of taboos must be included among the tools to regulate and control violence in order to prevent it from becoming camouflage, repeated and explosive. Communities have paid a high price for these tools because they were applied on persons and actions that have led to the discrimination and not infrequently the actual persecution of those who were the subject of the taboo (women, lepers, the poor, the sick, entire peoples).

The relationship between a community and its taboos shows a radical ambivalence. On the one hand the taboo is all that you have to avoid, all you cannot touch, against which you should get immunized not to become contaminated and infected by its spirit (the mana). Furthermore, the words associated with the taboos should not be pronounced. The land of the taboo cannot be crossed. Communities have been changed, they have died and been resurrected according to the rhythm of the creation, violation and elimination of taboos. And, even if by completely different modes, the same ancestral rhythm of the earth keeps appearing in our history, too.

At the same time, the content of the taboo exerts a fatal and strong attraction, by developing some invincible traits in people: the taboo cannot be violated, but (and because) we profoundly wish to do so - it is the desire for vengeance on Cain ("whoever finds me will kill me") which produces his "mark" ("lest any who found him should attack him"): Genesis 4,14. His words are banned, but the temptation to want to pronounce them is strong. Based on what, for example, Freud calls "the taboo on the rulers," the kings cannot be touched by their subjects: a ban that aims to counter the deep passion-desire present in members of the community to kill the kings and rulers.

Objects, animals, people considered as taboo also have a dual characteristic: they cannot be touched, but they cannot be eliminated, either. The goal of the use of taboos is not the disappearance of the taboo, because if the taboos were to disappear, the impassable border would also be gone with it, the community would get contaminated and so it would fall exactly into the "sin" that the taboo was meant to avoid. The taboo and its marks must therefore be very visible; everyone must be able to recognize the totems.

We can understand a lot of capitalism, and in general, of economics, if we take its taboos of gratuitousness seriously. The relationship between gratuitousness and the market contains the anthropological traits of the taboo. First we find the original violence. Traditional or pre-commercial communities were based on two original and distinct principles: hierarchy and gift. Hierarchy was the instrument for the management of power, while gift regulated reciprocity in families, clans and communities. The advent of the market takes place after the killing of the gift, which must die in order to create the contract and commercial exchange in its place, which are characterized so as not to be a gift, not to be gratuitousness. Market economy does not question the hierarchy, what's more, it radicalises it - so much so that the capitalist enterprises are also the main location, along with the armies, where hierarchy continues to play a significant and all in all socially accepted role in the age of democracies.

At the origin of the market, however, there is a sort of primordial violence on gratuitousness-gift (even if it is neither perceived nor told as such by its protagonists). Even Cain's violence is linked to gift and to the economy. God did not accept his gifts; a denial that generated the violence on Abel, the elimination of the fragile brother who knew how to make gifts. Gratuitousness is as fragile and vulnerable as Abel, it is exposed to abuse, helpless and humble. But Cain is also the patron of the trades and the founder of the first city, which is named after his son (Enoch). And its very name has a strong assonance with the verb qanah: buy. Furthermore, in the Book of Genesis, the word "profit" (bècà) makes its appearance in the scene of Joseph being sold into slavery by, again, his brothers (37,28). The fraternity of the gifts is negated by the appearance of profit. In Rome, numus (currency) was the non-munus (gift). In modernity, at the heart of the founding myth of political economy, "the invisible hand", we find the argument that the engine of the wealth of nations is not the "benevolence" or gratuitousness of the traders, but their personal interests (Adam Smith). The visible hand that contained the gifts was replaced by the invisible hand of the market, which is not the Providence of the ancient times, because its nature is the absence of the gift.

Gratuitousness in the market cannot be profaned either, but must be visible and well in sight. The boundary around its territory coincides with the very limits of the market: the land of what's freely given begins where that of the market, the contract and the incentives ends. Gratuitousness begins beyond the company's gates, after we have done the shopping and go home. Everyone should see it, everyone must understand it without any complicated speeches: it is enough to see its signs and its totems: work place time cards, the duration of lunch breaks, the management of overtime, and especially the language. The words of the taboo cannot be uttered: woe to those who say the word gift or gratuitousness and its synonyms in the ordinary course of business.

But, as happened in some totemic civilizations, here, too, we are some specific times at which the untouchable subject of the taboo can and should be touched, sacrificed, ritually consumed in order to seize its mysterious and terrible force. And so in the business assemblies gift is evoked, pronounced and eaten to be then put back in its inviolable tabernacle the next day. We organize employee volunteer initiatives, social dinners to help the poor, to provide organised and regulated activities within the reassuring confines of the rules, limited to that carefully controlled time. These donuncoli, domesticated gifts, managed and controlled, are the new voodoo dolls, resembling the real person (gift-gratuitousness) with the hope of controlling it and subjecting it to witchcraft.

What are then the deep reasons of fear that gratuitousness causes in capitalist economy, to make it the primary taboo? The first reason lies, again, in its appeal. Even in the case of gratuitousness, like all taboos, the prohibition stems from a deep desire. We wish for nothing more than the gift: we yearn for it, it makes us live, it is our profound vocation. And if the economy is life, the charm of the gift (given and received) feels strong, much too strong in the economic life as well.

But nothing is more outrageous than gift, nothing is free any more. It is everywhere and it is free, but in the economic context its effects would be particularly devastating. Because it would break the rules of the contracts, it would undermine the hierarchy. If the companies accepted and embraced the register of the gift-gratuitousness, they would find themselves with people who are unmanageable, unpredictable and capable of actions that cannot be controlled by hierarchies and incentives, because they would be truly free. They would have to deal with workers who would follow their intrinsic motivation, working beyond the limits of the contract - that are too tight and small to contain the overflowing power of the gift. They would be faced with people who would not fit in the organization charts, the job-descriptions, people who would bring much more life and therefore much more confusion and noise with them - as it happens with living things. And if the managers of the companies recognized this gift as such, if it made them grateful towards their colleagues and employees, that free reciprocity and those strong bonds would be created in businesses that are the typical fruits of the gifts that are recognised, accepted and reciprocated. It would change the hierarchy which would become fraternal and therefore fragile, vulnerable, exposed just like the meek Abel; but fragility and vulnerability are the great enemies of capitalist enterprises and their immune cultures. To avoid the risk of recognizing the gift and the generation of strong ties, business culture and governance respond simply by denying it: this is how the taboo of gratuitousness is reborn and strengthened every day. The companies and the markets will protect themselves from gratuitousness to protect themselves from their own death.

But there is something else to say, too. In recent years, the taboo of gratuitousness has left the economy and the large companies to move progressively and quickly to civil society, to non-profit organizations, associations, movements and communities. The taboo is expanding and the house of gratuitousness on earth is becoming more and more cramped. The techniques and tools of management which until recently belonged exclusively to large companies and banks are now entering in many areas of civil society. The real - almost always invisible albeit very high - price of the entry of capitalist management into civil organizations, movements and communities is the gradual elimination of these places of the free gift. So, paradoxically, the taboo of gratuity is created right in the heart of the realities that were born from and for gratuitousness.

Who will break this taboo of our time? And if some prophet does it for us, will we be able to walk towards the land of free women and men? Or will we, too, cry in the desert, regretting having left the meat and onions behind along with slavery?

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And evil, little by little, is contaminating civil society and the non-profit sphere. The ancient house of gratuitousness on earth is likely to become more and more cramped. We have to return to our walk towards real freedom. 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On the border and beyond/9 - For a market also directed by the "invisible hand": the gift

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/03/2017

Sul confine e oltre 09 rid"Even if the world we live in is less violent than any world of the past, this is only one aspect. The other aspect shows exactly the opposite: a frightening increase in violence and in the threat of violence. Our world saves more lives and simultaneously produces more victims than it has ever happened in the past."

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Gratuitousness is the main taboo of capitalism. It is feared as the greatest danger, because if it were let to run freely in the territories of capitalism, they would be infected and its "poison" would cause its death, or - and it's the same thing - it would transform it into something substantially different. It is difficult to decipher the taboo of gratuitousness in our economy (and society) because it is covered by another taboo: that of the recognition of its existence. So to understand the profound relationship between gratuitousness and capitalism we must violate this first taboo, by starting to simply talk about it.

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Let us violate the big taboo

On the border and beyond/9 - For a market also directed by the "invisible hand": the gift by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 19/03/2017 "Even if the world we live in is less violent than any world of the past, this is only one aspect. The other aspect shows exactly the opposite: a frightening...
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On the border and beyond/8 - Sociability at a good price will run wild and betray us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 12/03/2017

Sul confine e oltre 08 rid"To seek, not the fruit of benefits, but the mere doing of them... - this is the mark of a soul that is truly great and good."

Seneca, De Beneficiis
(English translation by John W. Basore)

Sine merito: without merit. This was how the first so-called Mounts of Piety (Monti di pietà) were called from the Middle Ages to Modernity. these were prototypes of the community banks created and promoted by the Franciscan "Observants" (Order of Friars Minor). To emphasize their nature as humanitarian or philanthropic institutions, the presence of merit was denied. A few centuries ago, Bernard of Clairvaux described the passion of Christ as: donum sine pretio, gratia sine merito, charitas sine modo: a gift without a price, grace without merit, love without measure. Saying 'gift' excluded a price, saying love eliminated measuring and saying grace denied merit. Merit, price and measure on the one hand - gift, grace and charity on the other.

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These distinctions and oppositions have held up the ethos and spirituality of the West for many centuries, until the capitalist culture, with its new Pelagian - and therefore meritocratic - religion has finally convinced us that all those words were actually on the same side, sisters and allies; that the gift would go along with the price, that merit was a new name for love, that grace/gratuitousness was only useful if present in the 'right' (microscopic) measure, as in vaccines where a tiny dose of the virus is introduced into the body to immunize it from the same.

The greatest human innovations occurred when inside a religion, a philosophy or a wisdom tradition someone broke the retributive-economic relationship with the gods, the idols or the pharaohs and kings, and proclaimed a jubilee of the 'liberation of prisoners'. One of these great anthropological and theological innovations is contained in the Book of Job, the Bible book that fought the retributive-economic logic of faith the most. The book opens with a bet between God-Elohim, and his angel Satan, which is precisely about gratuitousness. Satan, we read in the prologue, has returned from a trip on the earth, and having noticed the uprightness of Job he asks God: “Does Job fear God for no reason? You have blessed the work of his hands... But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1,9-11). It is interesting that the author of the story chooses Satan as an exponent of the "economic" vision of religion and life - a choice that in itself says a lot. Satan challenges Elohim and Job, he challenges God and the man, to test if it is possible that there is at least one man on earth who loves-and-fears God 'for nothing', i.e. freely, without a reward, without being paid for it.

Can we be good and just for the intrinsic value of goodness and justice, or just because we are hoping for some reward? Are we capable of pure love, or, rather, are we only in a commercial register of give and take? It can be understood that the idea of gratuity is deeply tied to that of freedom: what is left of our freedom and that of others if, in fact, in the heart of our actions there is a boss that pays us to do what he wants... Therefore, the first one to be liberated in any greater remuneration religions, past and present, is God himself, who finally steps out from the palaces of kings and emperors, and comes to live among us.

No wonder then that some decisive stages of human history have been marked by debates, schisms and revolutions that had to do with gratuitousness directly. What is it that really saves us? Is it the merits, incentives, the profit or is it something else and precisely because it isn't merit, it isn't incentive, it isn't profit? Do we have value and infinite dignity only because we deserve it, because we are useful to someone, for something, or rather for some other reason that comes before all these? That's where the nature of that dimension we call gratuitousness lies, in its essence. Cultures, religions and philosophies have declined it in many ways, but in its core it has this dimension of the non-profit, non-merit and non-incentive. The constant resistance that civilizations have always showed, until recently, to the affirmation of the logic of the market stemmed from intuition and was formulated in various ways. It says that whenever human relationships assume a mercantile registry, there is an invincible tendency to drive out and destroy just that something vague and difficult to define, that subtle and essential thing called gratuitousness.

The incentive is now the main instrument by which the capitalist cult is eliminating gratuitousness from the world of men - thank God, there will always be plenty of gratuitousness in nature, in the sun, in the sky, in the lives of animals, in the rain and in the snow, in children. Each idolatrous worship tends, in fact, towards the elimination of every intrinsic dimension in our actions. As long as we do something because we believe in it or because we like it, we are still not the prisoners of idols. The ideology of incentive produces the emptying of the intrinsic dimension of the action precisely because by assigning a price to everything and every act, it ends up expelling gratuitousness from the world. The incompatibility between gratuitousness and the ideology of incentive does not lie in the free-paid opposition (there is much generosity in many relationships governed by contracts and regulated by prices, and there are many services provided for free that have no gratuitousness in them). The conflict is more radical, and point precisely at Satan's argument: it is not possible for people to do good things for free, 'without being paid'.

Faith in the incentive is spreading unabated everywhere, because, paradoxically, it comes as an expression of the 'freedom of the modern'.

One of its latest achievements is the so-called sharing economy. The sharing of homes, cars or meals appear today as innovative and more human experiences than those possible in traditional markets and capitalist enterprises. And some of them really are. But, as always, to understand what is happening in this fascinating and varied world of sharing economy, you have to be able to see its non-intentional effects, which are the most important ones.

The essence of sharing economy is to create new markets in areas previously governed by gratuitousness. Until a few years ago, when going on a vacation we had to choose between a friend to host us or a hotel. If we wanted to go out to dinner, the choice was between friends-relatives and a restaurant. If we had to make a trip we could rely either on hitch-hiking or paid transport means. Two distinct worlds ruled by very different logics: gratuitousness and profit. Today a third way is developing: to go on vacation, we can also be hosted by unknown families; to dine out there are people who organize dinners for us; to travel there is also a network that combines the asking for and the offering of lifts by car; and much more… We just have to pay some. The market continues to do its job, providing exchanges of mutual benefit that allow you to meet people that you would never have met without these new 'collaborative' markets, which operate through a combination of sociability and profit. People really like this phenomenon because it seems to add a new opportunity, leaving everything else intact (hotels, friends, restaurants, trains, hitch-hiking ...). It enlarges the set of possible choices, and so it expands the range of freedom for individuals and society.

However, the market and its actors have already realized that the arrival of these new 'low cost products' does not leave the previous markets intact because even here there is a 'creative destruction' in place that is breaking up old balances and returns, and that could create a real revolution in the medium term. And so the protagonists of today's markets are concerned and tend to react, and the most cunning among them seek alliances with these new subjects.

In the second area involved by the sharing economy revolution, in that of gratuitousness or sociability sine merito, all is quiet. The interests of the merchants are focused, clear and strong, and so their reactions are also determined. The 'interests' of non-merchants are variable, less visible and above all, very weak. For gratuitousness there are no dedicated organizations, trade unions, not even politicians to refer to. And so no one moves. And we do not realize that even on the other side of the coin of sharing economy a 'creative destruction' is in course, that, affecting the common goods and having no property rights, happens amidst indifference or applause, and sometimes it's met with the same enthusiasm with which the Aztec emperor Montezuma welcomed the Spanish Cortés, thinking that he was their god (Quetzalcoatl) returning to them. When my neighbour starts organizing dinners at their house for a fee, what happens is the creation, the invisible but very real creation of an 'opportunity cost'. Even if I will not start a home restaurant, creating that price will also have an effect on me. Because when I do my accounts to calculate the cost of a dinner with seven friends, I will not use the market cost of the ingredients but the higher 'opportunity cost' of the neighbours' dinner. And maybe, one day, I will conclude that it costs too much, and say no to this free sociability, or I will begin to ask for a price - or at least a refund of my expenses. Others will continue to invite friends for dinner, with a 50% discount on the price of a similar dinner next door. And we will lend the house to a relative of ours with an 80% discount on the current price of housing in sharing economy. We will feel generous, and they will think they have received a gift. And the poor will be increasingly excluded from the houses, from travel, from meals, marginalized by a culture that wants nothing and nobody sine merito.

Soon these new social markets will be regulated and become like all the other markets. In the meantime, however, we will have further reduced the field of gratuity, and we will always have fewer friends.

In the Book of Job, Satan did not win his bet because Job was able to continue being righteous 'for nothing' in return, for free. His victory has been our victory for more than two thousand years, and we have always been able to invite someone to dinner 'without reimbursement'.

But if tomorrow another angel sets out for another round looking for someone capable of gratuitousness, will it manage to find a new Job in our land of merit, profit and incentive?

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Especially because we do not understand its range. Even "sharing economy" can become, unwittingly, the creative destruction of what remains of gratuitousness. 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On the border and beyond/8 - Sociability at a good price will run wild and betray us

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 12/03/2017

Sul confine e oltre 08 rid"To seek, not the fruit of benefits, but the mere doing of them... - this is the mark of a soul that is truly great and good."

Seneca, De Beneficiis
(English translation by John W. Basore)

Sine merito: without merit. This was how the first so-called Mounts of Piety (Monti di pietà) were called from the Middle Ages to Modernity. these were prototypes of the community banks created and promoted by the Franciscan "Observants" (Order of Friars Minor). To emphasize their nature as humanitarian or philanthropic institutions, the presence of merit was denied. A few centuries ago, Bernard of Clairvaux described the passion of Christ as: donum sine pretio, gratia sine merito, charitas sine modo: a gift without a price, grace without merit, love without measure. Saying 'gift' excluded a price, saying love eliminated measuring and saying grace denied merit. Merit, price and measure on the one hand - gift, grace and charity on the other.

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But the future is "without merit"

On the border and beyond/8 - Sociability at a good price will run wild and betray us by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 12/03/2017 "To seek, not the fruit of benefits, but the mere doing of them... - this is the mark of a soul that is truly great and good." Seneca, De Beneficiis (English tra...
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On the border and beyond/7 - The sacred tool that can buy anything. But how long?

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/03/2017

Sul confine e oltre 07 rid«In a world where money can buy anything, money becomes everything.»

Giacomo Becattini, From a Private Conversation

From the dawn of civilization, money has always had the invincible tendency to enter the territory of the sacred. The keepers of the sacred have always sought to keep the flow of money in its banks, but at certain times in history money and the sacred became allies and gave birth to idolatrous cults and many variations of the "markets of indulgences". In our time, the flooding of money has generated a much more radical and pervasive economic cult than that of the previous ages. But this new religious pathology is not generating antibodies and reformers who would be able to understand the seriousness of this new global market, and react effectively.

[fulltext] =>

The distinction-separation between the sacred and the profane is a fundamental axis of religions and cultures, even if the experiences that people have made and are making of the sacred and the profane are very different from each other and occupy the entire spectrum ranging from the sacred that attracts and seduces to the sacred that terrorizes because it is tremendous. Biblical humanism knows the same separation, but it is also interwoven by a large and continuous attempt to break the threshold that separates the sacred and the profane, the city and the temple. Its prophetic and wise spirit has been, in fact, a long and tenacious pedagogy to teach us that God's "place" was neither the tent nor the temple but the earth. The whole world is sacred because it is creation, and so the whole world is profane because Elohim is present on earth without becoming the earth or the things on it. For this, at the height of biblical revelation, we read that in the New Jerusalem, "I saw no temple in it any more" (Revelation 2.22 to 27).

The separation of the sacred and the secular was (and is) primarily a system of social control, creation and reinforcement of hierarchies and caste. The first and original distinction of the sacred and profane generated, in fact, the other, radical separation of the pure and the impure. The impure ones had no access to the sacred, the place of purity that, in turn, was such only because it wasn't contaminated by impurity. In the world of religions it has always been difficult to help and truly redeem the poor because, being generally unclean, they could not be touched by the pure.

The development of the economy and so that of money are deeply connected to this radical distinction made by and in the world. At the centre of monetary economies, however, we find an element that has proved decisive for the fate of Europe, the world and capitalism over time: money is exempt from the laws of purity/impurity. Unlike objects, animals, people and organic materials, money does not become impure when touched by impure persons or things - there are only rare experiences of leper colonies and leper villages in which only a special type of money circulated that could not get outside those boundaries so rigidly designed and managed by the "pure".

This special immunity of money is as significant as little explored. Unlike all other things that become unclean if touched by an impure being or object, money does not become impure from a contact with impurity. The first "tool" that medieval money changers used to test the non-falsity of coins were their teeth: they bit them on their rim - and so the first skill of those proto-bankers developed from their tooth sensitivity. A coin so pure that it can be put in the mouth. Pecunia non olet (money does not stink) expresses this ancient immunity, too, as well as the non-contaminating nature of money, which we find in various forms in all civilizations. At the same time, however, also because of the decisive influence of Christianity, money was also "the devil's excrement" in the Middle Ages, stinking, of course, by its nature and in itself. It stinks, but touching it does not contaminate. It is the only dung which does not make things impure. No wonder, then, that in Christian Europe those who managed money were mostly the Jews, confined to their ghettos, and that in traditional India mainly the pariahs had to perform the banking functions. The cast-away, because they were considered bearers of some impurities, and as they touched the coins they turned them into the only "thing" that can circulate among all without contaminating anybody - two "negatives" multiplied that magically become a "positive."

This special protection from impurity thus enabled the coins to be exchanged anywhere and by anyone: between Christians, Jews, Muslims, believers and non-believers, even with people that those religions considered idolatrous. We would not have had the development of commerce in the Middle Ages and then the birth of global capitalism without this special status of immunity and exemption that money had.

This special pass the coins enjoyed was also valid to enter the kingdom of the dead. It is a very old and widespread tradition to put coins on the body, over the eyes or the mouth of the deceased. The Egyptian priests refused the carrying of the dead along the Nile if their debts had not been settled before they died. And so, by extension, they put coins in the graves for the payment of the toll to Charon, or to pay off hypothetical unpaid debts or faults on arrival in the kingdom of the dead. In this creative "double game" between heaven and earth, money became the means to clear faults made in this life for the afterlife. This payment of the "obol", the fee for crossing the last threshold is very symbolic. Money that becomes the object that's most similar to gods and the most profane object at the same time, the thing that stinks the least and the one that stinks most, but is not subject to the first religious laws of impurity, which therefore can then be touched by everyone without any consequences.

So when the some Mediaeval possessor of money thought of using money to pay someone else to fulfil their own promise or a vow (the crusades, pilgrimages), or paying some poor to do penance and pray on their behalf, or even buying a discount of their years in purgatory or a piece of paradise, it wasn't anything innovative to do because those coins had always had a supernatural power and nature. In the biblical world and in the Gospels the "impure" money plays an important role. But the impurity of the coins was linked to the presence of images of kings, animals, or in any case, some idolatrous things. Even if not without difficulty and discomfort, the Jews, however, handled and touched the coins that seemed impure to them. There was only one place where those coins could not enter: the Temple. Only coins without idolatrous images were allowed inside it, and those pure coins were the language with which to communicate with YHWH through sacrifices and offerings.

The "disenchantment of the world" and the desecration of the earth are also - and perhaps mainly - the result of the pass that money received on all visible and invisible thresholds.

If we look at it carefully, we discover other interesting aspects hidden under the immunity of money. The exemption of the currency by the rules of purity and impurity has neither eliminated nor reduced the caste systems of the world - instead, it has only strengthened them and created new ones; it has exasperated them. First of all, the impure have always existed and continue to exist also in connection with money. They were and are those who are not in a position to own money; they are those who do not touch it. Because of another paradox of the economy, the impurity of monetary societies was founded by a non-contact: those who are impure cannot touch the money. They are unclean because they are poor, excluded, rejected from the havens of the rich and capacious, from the market clubs. Yesterday and today.

But there is still something more radical and therefore not visible to the naked eye. In ancient times, the money that passed between and beyond the various social classes allowed the rich and the Brahmins to use the services of manual workers and the poor without having to "touch" them, without the need to enter into a personal relationship with them. By paying something, usually very little, those who were in power by money could and can still make use of arms and hands without touching them. With the development of market economy and later financial capitalism, money has thus become the great mediator of our time, the tool that allows us to live close to each other but without touching each other in order not to get contaminated, not to be wounded by diversity. With the de-materialization of money that, thanks to technology, our era is witnessing, we have amplified the "spiritual" nature of money, which, just like the more developed gods, is not visible but it operates, acts, saves and condemns. The invisible electronic money is what increasingly gets to mediate our mutually immune relationships with each other, with the novelty that it is no longer even necessary to touch the coin, which has magically become a "zero mediator". We no longer see the pariahs that by touching money purify it with their impurities, but in the basement of our capitalism many people continue to launder our dirty money: new outcasts, the same old function.

Finally, there is a further, decisive novelty of our civilization of the invisible and all-powerful money when compared to the old ones. Until recently, things that could be purchased with money were, all in all, few and almost never decisive. Money could not buy the most important things of life, only a small part of health, a small part of esteem, a (less small) part of comfort and care. For millennia the coins could buy little, certainly not all, and above all these things were few and meant for few. The sacred nature and mystery of money depended also on its scarcity and therefore on the ignorance and incompetence that the great majority of people who came into contact with it experienced - similar to what the vast majority of people are experiencing about the new finance now.

Today, however, a lot can be bought with money, almost everything is on sale, we are being convinced that we can and must buy everything: from health to youth, from justice to beauty. And that's, in fact, the return of a new, global "market of indulgences", where paradise and purgatory can be promised and purchased with money, where the rich buy time, services, care, life from the poor. We do not pay a poor person to pray for us or go on a crusade or to Santiago de Compostela in our place, but to sell us a kidney, bear a child for us or help us to die.

Money still wants to buy paradise. And we allow it to happen, because we have forgotten how the real paradise was.

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But money, too, divides us into the pure and impure, even more than in the past, since nowadays there are new, global “markets of indulgences” where paradise is being sold to us here and now and we believe that we can buy it. 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On the border and beyond/7 - The sacred tool that can buy anything. But how long?

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/03/2017

Sul confine e oltre 07 rid«In a world where money can buy anything, money becomes everything.»

Giacomo Becattini, From a Private Conversation

From the dawn of civilization, money has always had the invincible tendency to enter the territory of the sacred. The keepers of the sacred have always sought to keep the flow of money in its banks, but at certain times in history money and the sacred became allies and gave birth to idolatrous cults and many variations of the "markets of indulgences". In our time, the flooding of money has generated a much more radical and pervasive economic cult than that of the previous ages. But this new religious pathology is not generating antibodies and reformers who would be able to understand the seriousness of this new global market, and react effectively.

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Money is Omnipotent

On the border and beyond/7 - The sacred tool that can buy anything. But how long? by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 05/03/2017 «In a world where money can buy anything, money becomes everything.» Giacomo Becattini, From a Private Conversation From the dawn of civilization, money has always h...
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    [title] => The Easy Gods of the Markets
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On the border and beyond/6 - The "catchy tunes" of spiritual illiteracy

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 06 rid«My words are too difficult for you, that's why they sound too easy.»

Yehudah ha-Levi, Kuzari

The golden rule of mutual benefit is the basis of much good life for human beings. The market is a network of exchanges of mutual interests, but also associations and even communities and families can be described as a network of mutually beneficial relationships. When it comes to educational processes, in actions aimed at reducing economic and social vulnerability, if we move within the register of mutual benefit we have more hope of giving life to practices that respect the dignity of the person and are more responsible and less paternalistic. For this reason, many wise men of all ages have pointed out reciprocity (not altruism or in the individual interest) as the first rule of community and social life. But there are places of living where looking for mutual benefit is not good, because satisfying mutual interests only and simply leads to the distortion and degeneration of those relationships. One such area is that of spirituality.

[fulltext] =>

Our time is characterised by a great offer of "cheap" spirituality, even in the world of big enterprises. Realizing that workers are spiritual and symbolic beings, the latest chapter of capitalism seeks to offer a bit of spirituality at the workplace, too. For a mutual benefit: happier employees, more productive work teams, more profits for the businesses. But since real and serious spirituality is difficult to "offer" and "demand," - especially in a culture like ours that has lost touch with the faiths and popular piety - the very word "spirituality" has become ambiguous. Understanding and appreciating a prayer or a psalm today is at least as difficult as understanding and appreciating the symphonies of Mahler or Respighi. We are in an immense spiritual process of illiteracy. We have lost our skills regarding inner life, the peace of mind and the silence of the heart. We have accelerated the passage of time, and then we filled in every fraction of it. And when we try to pick up books like the Bible, a text of poetry and true spirituality, they seem difficult, distant, too far away, silent. They do not speak to us, we do not understand or love them, they do not love us.

Authentic spirituality is not a commodity, it does not increase our comfort. It is not equivalent to a massage or to a good shower in the spa of the hotel where the business convention is taking place. The blessed day when we meet a true kind of spirituality and feel called to start a new wonderful journey is the one that begins a true liberation process. We enter into crisis, we feel upset inside, in the beginning we often lose productivity, we don't increase efficiency, because we are too distracted by "things" that the companies do not want, for a long time, sometimes for years. And so, in search of mutual benefit, the market lowers prices and offers imitations of spirituality. These are easy and harmless; they entertain us and activate simpler emotions in us. When these are over we find that we haven't changed at all. Those emotions do not ask us any conversion but confirm us quietly, in what we already did or who we already were. Instead of "symphonies" they offer us catchy tunes that reflect melodic and harmonic structures of real compositions, maybe sung by opera stars. And we are all happy: businesses, workers, the singers. Only Mahler and Respighi are suffering, and those who love them and respect them. Better Paulo Coelho than Isaiah, better the Gospel of Thomas than that of Mark.

This is a typical case in which the rule of "a little is better than nothing" is not true, because that "little," not being a portion or a taste of the same good, but a commodity with another nature, turns out (almost) always as that catchy tune that kills the desire for symphonies.

This reductionism of faith and spirituality for the good of comfort is influencing decisively even the little that remains of the religious and spiritual life of churches, parishes and religious communities, new and old. This is another of the many paradoxes of our confused age, another eloquent sign of the religious-idolatrous nature of capitalism. Spirituality reduced in a consumer good, considering the faithful as a customer, the carrier of tastes to satisfy, religious offerings designed to answer the demand of spiritual consumption - in fact, these are becoming the characteristics the new religious landscape.

During its long history, Jewish-Christian humanism has often been profoundly influenced by the logic of the market. The Bible is full of episodes, stories, words borrowed from the lexicon and the economy of the mentality of the era. We do not understand the Covenant without knowing the commercial treaties of the time, or the Law (Torah), or Job's friends. And we do not understand many words of the New Testament and even the Christian Middle Ages without considering the economy. Trade and economy have always offered categories and words to interpret and narrate religious things.

But - and here's the main point – the economic and commercial categories and words have always been the ones that systematically conducted faiths onto the wrong track, which may have been the easiest, but was bad in the end. The prophets and some wisdom books tried to straighten those crooked tracks, showing another God and another man who is liberated from commercial logic and retributive religion. In Christianity we have not yet completely freed ourselves of the "theology of atonement," which for many centuries made us read the incarnation and death of Jesus as the payment of a "price" to a Father-God, who is a holder of an infinite credit of humanity for our endless sins and debts which could be repaid or paid back only by the sacrifice of his only begotten Son. An economic-retributive ideology-theology that has very much alienated us from the Bible, it has covered and hidden from us the most beautiful pages of the Gospels and St. Paul, and deformed the idea of ​​God and mankind. Metaphors and languages ​​are never neutral tools: words have the capacity to create, all words, even the wrong ones.

Today we are experiencing another season of the profound influence of the economy on faith and spirituality, larger and more powerful than we have ever seen throughout history. The market is gradually changing the religious culture that it had previously fought and reduced to a commodity, and it is creating new "theologies of atonement and debts", more powerful than the ancient ones, for an unprecedented empowerment of this market of ours.

The phenomenon is very vast. The surface of it is manifested in the entering of the language and categories of businesses and management into parishes and church movements. Leadership, speed, efficiency and even merit are words that now constitute the ordinary vocabulary of many communities, movements, parishes and families.

But we must look beyond the surface if we want to see more interesting things. Let's consider, for example, the growing development of "emotional liturgies", where people are engaged by activating their sentimental and emotional dimensions above all. People come to church or groups already influenced by a culture centred on consumption which activates more and more emotions and, in line with the culture of this hedonistic capitalism, encourages the pursuit of pleasure. And so the requirement emerges - whether consciously or not - even for the liturgies and religious practices to meet the emotional needs. If the leaders of communities and movements give in to the economic logic of "mutual benefit", they lower prices, and meet the preferences of the faithful consumers who in turn soon become consumer-faithful.

It is difficult to accept this consumerist drift of faith, because the liturgy and experience of faiths have always been events of a global nature, involving the whole person, including their emotions. In spiritual experiences all senses are activated: the eyes looking at the beauty of the architecture and the stained glass windows and frescoes, the hands shaking other hands, the ears listening to the music... But the idolatrous and totemic cults, too, have always been and are still global sensory experiences which the Bible and Christians have fought hard. We wouldn't have had two thousand years of Christian civilization if the dimensions of emotion and consumption had prevailed in the liturgies in the early days. It would have been absorbed by the surrounding natural cults. Because, as the great tradition of wisdom will always remind us, the road leading to the temples is full of pitfalls and some deadly traps.

There exists a "critical point" on the axis of emotional consumption that must not be exceeded. Without the involvement of emotions spirituality does not become flesh and does not save us; but if the emotional dimension and that of consumption become the only or the main registry of faith, it is all too likely that we lose contact with the biblical world and find ourselves - without either knowing or wanting it - at an idolatrous banquet, where the first sacrifices are we, ourselves. Christian communities have had to struggle a lot to ensure that their dinners were not like the ones so common in the rituals of the Mediterranean peoples, to say that the Eucharist was all and only gratuitousness and communion given, received and given again, a thanksgiving. And this is why they gave that dinner the most beautiful name: agape, the same name of their different God.

The eternal temptation of idolatrous consumerism is defeated when people are not held in the liturgies, when "consumer spirituality" is left behind for "production spirituality", the multiplication of communion outside the temple, instead of burying talent in the crypts of churches. But the emphasis on emotional faith encloses people in homes and churches, it even binds them to sofas and benches and does not let them out to free someone, at least one person, at least their own selves. The emphasis on the individual and collective consumption of religious goods inevitably transforms the community into clubs, it distances us from history, from the incarnation, from the suburbs, from the poor. And when the emotional liturgy ends, nothing of that food remains. Authentic spiritual life is not an aspirin, but a substance of slow absorption, which bears fruit in due course, when we find ourselves inside something and Someone who had grown silently in our midst, while we were busy taking care of other things, of others. The faith of sole consumption does not help us on our life journey outside the temple. And the nice secularism of the street dies.

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It is a vast and dangerous phenomenon that threatens to kill the beautiful secularism of the streets of those who seek God. 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On the border and beyond/6 - The "catchy tunes" of spiritual illiteracy

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 26/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 06 rid«My words are too difficult for you, that's why they sound too easy.»

Yehudah ha-Levi, Kuzari

The golden rule of mutual benefit is the basis of much good life for human beings. The market is a network of exchanges of mutual interests, but also associations and even communities and families can be described as a network of mutually beneficial relationships. When it comes to educational processes, in actions aimed at reducing economic and social vulnerability, if we move within the register of mutual benefit we have more hope of giving life to practices that respect the dignity of the person and are more responsible and less paternalistic. For this reason, many wise men of all ages have pointed out reciprocity (not altruism or in the individual interest) as the first rule of community and social life. But there are places of living where looking for mutual benefit is not good, because satisfying mutual interests only and simply leads to the distortion and degeneration of those relationships. One such area is that of spirituality.

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The Easy Gods of the Markets

On the border and beyond/6 - The "catchy tunes" of spiritual illiteracy by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 26/02/2017 «My words are too difficult for you, that's why they sound too easy.» Yehudah ha-Levi, Kuzari The golden rule of mutual benefit is the basis of much good life for human beings...
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    [title] => Salvation is not a company
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by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 05 rid"Workplace spirituality seems to be a significant new management paradigm that business executives can use to improve their organizations by increasing, among others, the levels of organizational commitment, satisfaction and performance of their employees."

Sofia Lupi, La spiritualità nelle organizzazioni (The Spirituality of Organisations)

In the 'spirituality market' the ancient 'Gresham's Law' is making a return: bad money drives out good money. This law made a re-appearance every time two types of currency were being handled in the streets: the good and the false type, neither of them easily recognizable as such. Bad money infested the streets and the squares, and within a short time the good type would disappear from circulation.

[fulltext] =>

The meritocratic-capitalist religion which is more 'lightweight' and of a fast movement is displacing the traditional genuine faiths as it is replacing totemic cults by its major innovations. These in turn threaten to infect even the remnants of ancient faiths that get fascinated and seduced by the new cult. The first major operation of the latest generation of capitalism has been the reduction of religion and spirituality into merchandise. The second, very recent operation is a true masterpiece: making large enterprises the first consumers of these 'spiritual merchandise'.

Let's just think of corporate rites, the new fashion in large companies, where we find more and more liturgical forms and typical rituals of ancient idolatry. Working groups are left alone for a few days in the forests and deserts for collective initiations and 'team building'; increasingly bizarre role play games are used to enhance the team 'spirit'; 'escape room' sessions are held where people are locked in for a time to solve puzzles and manage to escape within a given time. Real social rites are replacing the exercises of 'trust' (deemed ancient now), where someone leaned and dropped backwards to show confidence in the other members of the group.

When, a few years ago, these adult games were introduced to some innovative companies, everyone took it a bit like a time for recreation, and we even had fun playing them. At some point, though, the game got out of hand, we stopped laughing and realised that it was all serious, very serious. And we believed it. We even believed in the traditional get-togethers, where all the employees were wearing the company uniform (or T-shirt) and singing the sad hymns of the company - all these are now replaced by more sophisticated liturgies. Among these is the 'company theatre', where employees act out plays that are written or reviewed by the consultants in order to sublimate work conflicts and frustrations. Or the so-called 'road shows', where top management goes to visit the departments and branches to meet their workers directly in their environment. Real pastoral visits, one could say, which serve as an alternative for ad limina visits.

No wonder, then, that a final frontier of large enterprises is the spirituality in management, which is experiencing a real boom nowadays. There is a multitude of conferences, courses and books on very fascinating topics like 'love and forgiveness in management', 'how to train spiritual leaders', 'interiority and leadership' and much more. And so the gurus of every ancient and modern 'religion' are invited in the company, as long as they are able to increase the 'spiritual capital' of enterprise, cultivating the corporate karma. 'Meditation rooms' are beginning to appear in company buildings where you can spend a few minutes (of a precise quota) to recover spiritual energy. The production of real liturgies and corporate prayers is also well in course, as a way of starting work meetings or the company 'spiritual retreats'. These ‘secular’ rites and liturgies are well known for a long time in the world of economy. But  they were secrets until recently, known by just a few people, and strongly opposed by the churches and the world of work. Today they are public, popular and praised by (almost) everyone.

One area where this wave of spirituality is particularly evident and dangerous is the variegated world of leadership. Leaders and leadership, expressions decorated with ever more creative adjectives, are becoming the first watchwords of this new religion, fitting perfectly with the meritocratic ideology. Words such as manager, executive, head of office have become old and outdated, tied to a capitalism that seems too trivial. This is why these new terms emerge (always pronounced in the sacred language English): now we have leaders. These, unlike the old leaders, must have charisma, charm, attractiveness. In new enterprises it is essential to obtain the consent of the soul and the heart, not just that of the contract, and only a leader can earn this type of commitment of the spirit. Because of the very nature of leadership, we cannot all be leaders. So consultants and professionals are called in who can recognize the signs of a call to leadership in workers. They go through selections, training and get started on their mission, which in its essence is to manipulate the consent of the people guided by them, leading them to give voluntary consent to the leader's proposals. The ultimate goal of the leader is in fact to achieve the deliberate and free commitment of followers to the group objectives, which are internalized and followed thanks to the ability and the charisma of the leader. It is the definitive end of hierarchy and coercion: the leader has the gift of transforming external orders in internal ones, where every follower, by adhering closely to the leader's directives obeys only to him/herself, realizing the greater autonomy of the worker-follower. The dream of a 'fraternal production system' is finally realized - it is no longer based on conflict and fight, but on the free and reciprocal consent of the heart.

Therefore, if we try to read between the lines of the newest theory and practice of leadership we discover, and sometimes we read, that the figure of the ideal leader is that of the prophet, that is, someone who is followed freely and joyfully because of the strength of his charisma, for his authority, for its spiritual charm. Someone who has the ability to internally convert his followers without the need for command or control, because workers internalize his word, becoming fully independent and a law unto themselves. And above all, they are happy to follow him.

The latest generation of leadership can therefore be seen as spiritual leadership, creating a new form of meritocracy: 'spiritual meritocracy' (Shawn van Valkenburgh). By putting together meritocracy and spirituality, this corporate new age of the third millennium is making a perfect implementation of the retributive-economic religion against which Job, the prophets and later Christianity had struggled with all their might. And what is shocking is that everything is happening not only in the silence of the world that is a friend of real work and the people, but also of a good part of the ecclesiastic world and, in general, of the 'true religions'. Among the gurus invited to speak about spirituality to the managers there are more and more monks and priests, and the number of leadership courses for pastors and 'leaders' of religious communities is increasing, organized and sold, of course, by the same consulting companies and business schools.

Unfortunately, the promoters and disseminators of these quasi-theories do not know that the biblical prophets and founders of authentic charismatic movements have never considered themselves as leaders. The most important prophets of the Bible (from Moses to Jeremiah) show resistance when they receive the call of God, because they do not feel to be leaders, let alone wanting to become one. The very thought of being leaders terrorizes them. However, where many men who longed to become leaders gathered spontaneously were the prophetic schools that were producing multitudes of ‘prophets by profession’ and, above all, many false prophets and charlatans. The first law that the great biblical wisdom left us reads: 'beware of those who present themselves as candidates to become prophets, because they are almost always false prophets', deceivers, or, we might say today, simply narcissists. History and real life tell us that you become a 'leader' not wanting to become one. But above all they tell us that when communities designed classes of leaders they ended up simply failing in the best case and forming monsters in the worst, even when they were driven by good intentions.

Only a few decades ago when the union tradition and the culture of real work were still alive and alert, these phenomena would be denounced as the worst abuses, they would be fought and, above all, ridiculed and mocked, this new sub-culture would be flooded and made to sink by disdain and laughter. Today, however, in the spiritual and ethical crisis in which we have sunk, these manipulations are presented as innovation, humanism, participatory governance and modernity, and are received with enthusiasm.

Today, we must ask businesses for more secularism, much more secularism. Let them do their job and resize their imperialist designs in the world and in the soul. Firms do not need either prophets or salvation, but they should leave more free space for us, a piece of free land where we can grow plants and flowers that we like. Companies can do many good things, but not all. If they honestly want to increase the welfare of their workers (and there are such), having understood that the cultivation of spiritual life makes them live better, companies should leave their workers adequate time to develop and cultivate these essential dimensions of life, but outside of the workplace. With their family, with their friends, with their communities. They should not seek a monopoly of lives and souls. The spirituality that is good and gives life requires more air than is possibly there in the offices, more sky than what you see from the windows of companies, more light than that of the LED lamps. And above all it needs two words which, after all, are one: freedom and gratuitousness. Art, faith and prayers are among the most beautiful and sublime human expressions if and because they are not finalized and they are nothing other than beauty, faith, prayer. The only end they can have is the infinite. But when we try to direct them, to finalise and to use them, these wonderful things become caricatures, toys, sometimes even monsters. Behind the offer and demand for spirituality that is emerging from capitalism there are certainly good intentions, mixed with a lot of manipulations and much ingenuity. But the most important effects in social and organizational realities are the unintentional and medium term ones. If today we underestimate the movement of company spirituality, if we do not criticize but encourage it, tomorrow if we want to go to mass in the city we will have to ask to be hosted by an enterprise. It will be a secular and highly spiritual kind of mass, it will be offered to us for free. And we shall give thanks for it.

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Leadership theories are a high expression of this new worship. We must not underestimate this wave of corporate spirituality. 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by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 19/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 05 rid"Workplace spirituality seems to be a significant new management paradigm that business executives can use to improve their organizations by increasing, among others, the levels of organizational commitment, satisfaction and performance of their employees."

Sofia Lupi, La spiritualità nelle organizzazioni (The Spirituality of Organisations)

In the 'spirituality market' the ancient 'Gresham's Law' is making a return: bad money drives out good money. This law made a re-appearance every time two types of currency were being handled in the streets: the good and the false type, neither of them easily recognizable as such. Bad money infested the streets and the squares, and within a short time the good type would disappear from circulation.

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Salvation is not a company

by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 19/02/2017 "Workplace spirituality seems to be a significant new management paradigm that business executives can use to improve their organizations by increasing, among others, the levels of organizational commitment, satisfaction and performance of their e...
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    [title] => The Sad Empires of Merit
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On the border and beyond/4 - A "famine of gratitude" fills the world of the damned

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 12/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 04 rid"Affliction is by its nature inarticulate. The afflicted silently beseech to be given the words to express themselves. There are times when they are given none..."

Simone Weil, Human Personality (English translation: Richard Rhees)

Merit is the great paradox of the economic cult of our time. The first spirit of capitalism was generated by Luther’s radical critique of merit (that is, the merit-based Christian theology of his time), but that "rejected stone" has now become the "cornerstone" of the new capitalist religion, which is emerging from the heart of the very countries built on that ancient anti-meritocratic Protestant ethic. Salvation for "sola gratia" and not through our own merits was placed at the centre of the Protestant Reformation. It was also a revival of Augustine's polemics against Pelagius (Luther was an Augustinian monk), a millennium later. The anti-Pelagian criticism was essentially a surpassing of the ancient idea that the salvation of the soul, the blessing of God and heaven could be earned, purchased, bought or earned by our actions. The theology of merit also wanted to imprison God within the meritocratic logic, forcing him to punish and reward based on criteria attributed to him by theologians.

[fulltext] =>

The fight against Pelagianism was an operation far from being marginal. It was decisive for the Church of the first centuries (a struggle that in fact, as we can see, has never been won). If, in fact, the Pelagian theology had prevailed, Christianity would have been added to the many apocalyptic and Gnostic sects of the Middle East, or transformed into an ethic similar to stoicism. He would have lost the charis (grace, gratuitousness), which was its specific feature, and clearly distinguished it from the religious doctrines and the dominant meritocratic idolatries.

The origin of the meritocratic type of religion is therefore very old, it hides deep within the history of religions and idolatrous cults. In continuity with the prophetic soul of the Bible, the message of Christ made a real revolution in a theological world dominated by economic / retributive cults and by merit - to see this and get a very clear idea of it, just re-read the dialogues of Job with his friends. Although we find some merit remnants in the Gospels and the New Testament texts, the words and life of Jesus were above all a radical critique of meritocratic faith, continued and developed by the theology of Paul. To understand this it is enough to take the parable of the worker of the last hour, where the wage policy of the "owner of the vineyard" follows a radically anti-meritocratic criterion; or to consider the role of "elder brother" in the story of the "prodigal son" who scolds their merciful father just because he has not followed the meritocratic rules about his brother - mercy is the opposite of meritocracy: we are not forgiven because we deserve it but it is precisely the condition of being undeserving that moves the bowels of mercy. Not to mention the Beatitudes, forming an eternal manifesto of non-meritocracy. In his Kingdom there exists a different law: "be (the) sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good". The perfection of this ethic is the definitive surpassing of the register of merit: "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5)

Despite the clarity and strength of this message, the old economic-retributive-meritocratic theology has continued to influence Christian humanism throughout the Middle Ages and well beyond. The neo-Pelagian ideas continued to inform the doctrine and especially the Christian practice until the real disease of the "market of indulgences", which can be understood only in the framework of a deformation in the retributive-meritocratic sense of the Christian message. And as it always happens in matters of religion, the consequences of these theological ideas were (and are) immediately social, economic and political. Those considered undeserving were (and are) also condemned and marginalized, and the deserving attained paradise on this earth, before winning it in the other life, since their merits were associated with many privileges, money and power.

The history of the Christian Europe has been a slow process of getting rid of this archaic vision of faith, in a succession of several more Augustinian as well as Pelagian historical stages. But until recently we had never thought of building a wholly or predominantly meritocratic society. The army, sports, science and schools had a tendency of becoming meritocratic areas, but other decisive spheres of life were governed by a different and sometimes opposite rationale. In churches, in the family, in health care and in civil society the basic criterion was not merit but need - another great word now forgotten and replaced by consumer tastes. School, for example, is a place where no one, or just a few, have questioned that the merit system should be prevailing (though not the only) one in the training and assessment of children and young people.

But we should not think that this choice, which seems non-controversial, did not result in very serious consequences for centuries. Based on merits and school grades we have built a whole social and economic system that's caste based and hierarchic, where the first places were taken by those who responded better to those merits, and the last ones by those of the worst performance at school. And so doctors, lawyers, university professors have had much better wages and social conditions than workers and peasants; and today, in this new wave of Pelagian meritocracy, workers who, working day and night, keep the streets and sewers clean, receive salaries that are hundreds of times lower than those of the managers of the companies for which they work.

Merit obtained at school, which seemed so obvious and peaceful, actually resulted in very different privileges and dignity among those who have always held and continue to hold the structures and inequalities of our societies. If we wanted to break the cycle of inequality and exclusion today, we would have to create anti-meritocratic educational policies, especially in poorer countries - as we were able to do in the past century in Europe with the introduction of universal compulsory and free schooling.

Today it would be more urgent than ever to return to Augustine's ancient criticism of Pelagius. Augustine did not deny the existence of talent and commitment that generate those actions or ethical states which we call merits (from merere: earn, wages, profit, prostitute). The decisive point for Augustine was about the nature of these gifts and merits in people. For him all these were charis, grace, gratuitousness. According to Augustine, "God does not crown your merits as your merits, but as His own gifts." Merits are not our merits - except in small part, a part that's too minimal to make it the main wall of an economy and a civilization. That's why an important side effect of a culture interpreting the talents received as merit and not as gifts is a dramatic scarcity of true and sincere gratitude. The first characteristic of merit systems, in fact, is mass ingratitude.

Actually, when we tie social esteem, remuneration and power to talents and so to merits, all we do is extend and greatly amplify inequalities. People who are unequal already at birth because of their natural talents and family and social conditions, become even more so as adults. In the twentieth century, particularly in Europe, politics reduced the gap in the points of departure in the name of the principle of equality. Our meritocratic age, however, strengthens it and takes it to the extremes. Therefore, if I am the son of educated, rich and intelligent parents, if I was born and grew up in a country with many public goods and good health and education systems, if my initial set of chromosomes and genes was particularly lucky, it follows that I shall attend the best schools and will attain more academic merits than my peers who were born in more unfavourable natural and social conditions, and that in all probability I will find an employment in the labour market that is much better paid by the merit system. And so, by the time I retire, the distance from my fellow citizens who came to this world with less talent will have been multiplied by 10, 20 or 100.

That's why we do not understand the increase in inequality in our time unless we take its root very seriously: the sharp increase in the presence and influence of the merit theology of capitalism. And we do not understand the increasing blame placed on the poor who are more and more seen as undeserving instead of unfortunate if we do not take the undisturbed advancing the meritocratic logic in consideration. If, in fact, I interpret the talents I received (from life or from my parents) as merit, the step of considering those who do not have them unworthy and guilty will also be taken readily and all too soon. The axis of meritocratic worlds is not heaven, but hell and purgatory. Demerits are the protagonists of the empires of merit.

Before being a theory of merit every meritocratic theology is a theory and practice of demerit, unworthiness, guilt, and expiation. They appear as humanism, personalism and liberation, but in no time they become a mechanism for the creation of guilt and punishment, a mass production of sins and sinners who eventually get to manage and control a complex system aiming to reduce the pains on this earth and in heaven. The meritocratic universes are inhabited by very few elected and a multitude of the "damned" who hope for the reduction of their sentences throughout their lives. Yesterday, and today, the place of the Pelagian preachers is taken by the new evangelizers of meritocracy in businesses and now everywhere, and they are re-creating new and flourishing "markets of indulgences" in their temples, where the currency to buy paradise - or at least purgatory - is no longer people’s money or pilgrimages to Santiago, but the sacrifice of whole chapters of their life, their flesh and blood. Control of the souls is no longer practiced in the confessionals and in the manuals for confessors, but in coaching and counselling offices and, above all (thanks to the incentive contract mechanism that made a perfect distribution of rewards and punishments according to merits and demerits), it is defined in careful detail by the enterprise-deity and implemented by its priests.

Meritocracies of yesterday and today have one great enemy: gratuitousness. They fear it more than anything because it disrupts hierarchies and liberates people from the slavery of merits and demerits. Only a revolution of gratuitousness - shouted, desired, lived, donated - will deliver us from this new flood of Pelagianism, if during this time of slavery and forced labour in the service of the pharaoh we do not stop dreaming collectively of a promised land.

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In this system, we are only saved by our own merits, not by gratuitousness. Could we still save ourselves from this heresy? 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On the border and beyond/4 - A "famine of gratitude" fills the world of the damned

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 12/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 04 rid"Affliction is by its nature inarticulate. The afflicted silently beseech to be given the words to express themselves. There are times when they are given none..."

Simone Weil, Human Personality (English translation: Richard Rhees)

Merit is the great paradox of the economic cult of our time. The first spirit of capitalism was generated by Luther’s radical critique of merit (that is, the merit-based Christian theology of his time), but that "rejected stone" has now become the "cornerstone" of the new capitalist religion, which is emerging from the heart of the very countries built on that ancient anti-meritocratic Protestant ethic. Salvation for "sola gratia" and not through our own merits was placed at the centre of the Protestant Reformation. It was also a revival of Augustine's polemics against Pelagius (Luther was an Augustinian monk), a millennium later. The anti-Pelagian criticism was essentially a surpassing of the ancient idea that the salvation of the soul, the blessing of God and heaven could be earned, purchased, bought or earned by our actions. The theology of merit also wanted to imprison God within the meritocratic logic, forcing him to punish and reward based on criteria attributed to him by theologians.

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The Sad Empires of Merit

On the border and beyond/4 - A "famine of gratitude" fills the world of the damned by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 12/02/2017 "Affliction is by its nature inarticulate. The afflicted silently beseech to be given the words to express themselves. There are times when they are given none..." ...
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On the border and beyond/3 - This market devours life and provides just a little money in return

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 03 rid"(C)apitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology."

Walter BenjaminCapitalism as Religion (translated by Chad Kautzer)

The capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth century was animated by a Judeo-Christian spirit, a spirit of work, effort and production. But we no longer understand the spirit of our capitalism if we continue to look for it inside Christianity or the Bible. Market society in recent years has been increasingly resembling a religion, but the traits that it is taking make it more akin with the Middle Eastern cities of three thousand years ago, or the Greek and Roman ones of some later centuries. With their public spaces occupied by many statues, temples, steles, altars, shrines, and their private spaces filled with amulets, household gods and a huge production of household idols. And their many sacrifices, around which their life, parties and death were ordered. The Judeo-Christian humanism was, above all, an attempt to empty the world of idols and free it from the sacrifices. It was an only partially successful attempt, because the tendency to build idols to worship has always been too strong in men.

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The prophets, the wisdom tradition (Ecclesiastes) and then Jesus have operated an extraordinary religious revolution also because of their radical struggle against idolatry. They tried to remove the idols from the temples and churches to create an environment free from things, one where you could hear the voice of a free and liberated spirit, its "thin voice of silence". Christianity has also surpassed the ancient sacrificial logic forever, because the sacrifice of people offered to God was replaced by the sacrifice-gift of God given to mankind, establishing the era of gratuitousness. But today, after two thousand years, capitalism - first fighting gratuitousness and then trying to put it to income - is reintroducing some archaic sacrificial practices in its own cult.

The sacrificial culture of capitalism can now be glimpsed everywhere. Consider, for example, how food and cooking have been turned into a spectacle on TV and in the media in recent times. In various cultures eating was a fundamental practice, always communal, the heart of family relationships, friendships and the maximum expression of solidarity. People ate together because food is the first resource, the decisive one for communities, and therefore it must be shared, "constructed" socially, not left to the natural play of the force and power of individuals. Food is the first language of fraternity, and through the universal institution of hospitality it is also open to those who knock on the door. That's why the place of eating was the house, the intimacy of the tent. The preparation of food was a private matter, generally entrusted to women, who were the producers of the meals that transformed the scarce products of the earth into conviviality and the goods into relational goods. Confidence in the person who cooked was the first word in the discourse on food. The sideboard (in Italian: "credenza") did not only preserve foods, it also kept the confidence and credence in the primary relationships of the home.

Eating in public, in the square, however, only happened on the occasion of festivals, which in the pre-Christian world were associated with animal sacrifices offered to the deity. The animals offered were then baked, cooked and eaten together in public. Christian civilization has transformed those ancient festivals, and to overcome the archaic sacrificial logic it has discouraged cooking, eating and drinking in public. On Christian holidays there was dancing, singing and games in public, processions were held, and above all the Eucharist was celebrated: the good (eu) gratuitousness (charis), in another dinner, another bread and another wine. But everybody ate at home, and the preparation of food remained something private and feminine. The great spectacle that food and cooking are being turned into is taking us back to the culture of the sacrifices, the sacred banquets offered to the idols, to cooking in the square. To understand the invasion of cooks and meals, it is not enough to resort to sociological aspects only (having to relearn how to cook, or questions of health): we must also discover their religious and sacrificial nature. The idols are continuously eating, they are never satiated.

In these new rites, celebrated by male priests, the food completely loses its intimate and familiar nature. Its solidarity and its sharing are totally deleted, leaving their place to competition and race. The good words of home become insults, the bread that falls to the ground is not kissed after it is picked up, only the echo of a shout is heard, cooking is no longer surrounded by good words and relatives of commensality: it is completely and only play, entertainment, business. And we forget and deny the basic rule of early education passed on by mothers to their children for millennia: "don't play with your food" - because it is too serious, the most serious of all, sacred. However, this ancient-new sacrifice of the food makes nothing and no one sacred, and it makes us fall back into a world full of parrots and victims: panem et circenses.

But sacrifice is also a keyword of new global corporations. To understand the universe of the corporate "sacred", we must not stop at its most superficial aspects - such as the presence of coaches in companies who try to mimic the old spiritual fathers; the use of words taken from the spiritual language, as "mission", "calling", "faithfulness", "merit"; the fake initiation of rites and liturgies by pseudo-marketing; the disesteem of the word "old" that by now has become a dirty word or an insult ("you're old!": all idolatrous cults worship youth). These phenomena are epidermal symptoms of something much deeper and rooted in the organism of capitalism.

After having used (until a few years ago) the lingo and metaphors taken from military life or sports, the big capitalist enterprises are now realizing that to buy the hearts of their employees they need a stronger symbolic code, and they're taking it from the religious sphere. But, even here, the symbolic register is not taken from the Judeo-Christian religious culture, or even from other major religions (Islam or Hinduism). These great forms of spiritual humanism are too complex and resilient to be easily manipulated by business. And so, with a leap back, passing thousands of years, they return directly to totemism and its sacrifices.

Sacrifice is a key word in the cult of business. Nothing more but sacrifice is asked of the workers of large companies: the sacrifice of their time, their social and family life. Work has always been strain, sweat, and so in a sense also sacrifice. But the sacrifice of the corporate culture of the twentieth century was transparent to those who made it and those who received it. The trade union movement had managed to contain it within political limits, and when it exceeded these limits it was not called "sacrifice" but "exploitation." We always knew that behind a lot of work there were far-away "gods" who lived from our sacrifices and the exploitation of our work in the fields and factories: but we were aware of it, we were suffering a lot, and we struggled to reduce or eliminate these injustices. Today the semantic manipulation of our age is managing to present the "more” of the sacrifice (the excess part of efforts - the tr.) as a form of free "gift". We are more exploited by rich gods now than we were yesterday, but, unlike yesterday, we have to be happy for our sacrifices and internalize them as a free gift offered. The sacrifice required of the workers by big companies is a necessary act to be able to hope in the "favour of the gods," that is, in making a career, earning a lot, having respect and recognition from above. But those who refuse to make these sacrifices and are committed to defending a boundary between business and family, those who do not accept requests to stay in the office until eleven at night, are left out of the number of the elect, and often develop severe guilt for being losers.

Furthermore, as in the sacrifices to the old gods and idols, offerings and vows could never pay off the debt of those making the sacrifice - today in these companies the more of our time and life are given, the more of them are required, until one day our offers get exhausted... But on that day, management will offer to us the "free" service of the right type of coach that will help us get back on our feet and to the altar to offer more sacrifices. The idol does not sacrifice itself; it can only receive sacrifices from its followers. The invisible and distant gods feed from the sacrifices of the workers, and they are developing a more and more vital need for it. But the stroke of genius of this type of capitalism lies in being able to cover the sacrificial structure of the "labour market" with "contracts". What they actually ask us is a sacrifice, but its true nature is hidden very well by presenting it as a free contract. Because they make payments, businesses become totally disconnected and ungrateful towards their faithful. And on the day when the market opportunity and profit change, they do not feel indebted to the many sacrifices they have received, they seek tax havens; and with a few thousand Euros - at best - they repay the sacrifice of a lifetime, the sacrifice of life. The sacrifice of the ancient cults had to be alive: the gods were offered animals, children, virgins, rarely plants (libations), but never objects. The new gods are also demanding life and offer money in return.

The sacrificial nature of this capitalism is not so much a moral property of people; it actually regards the system as a whole. Its first sacrificial victims are the very executives and managers, who are priests and victims at the same time.

The likely and gloomy scenario on the horizon of our civilization is a rapid growth of this new idolatry, which is gradually shifting from the economic sphere towards civil society, schools and health. There is no opposition in its path of expansion because it draws on those religious symbols that our culture no longer has the categories to understand. Those who want to understand and maybe control the economy and the world today must study less business and more philosophy and anthropology.

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We can see it in the way food is turned into a spectacle on TV, and in the sacrifices required of the employees of big enterprises, without reciprocity. 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On the border and beyond/3 - This market devours life and provides just a little money in return

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/02/2017

Sul confine e oltre 03 rid"(C)apitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology."

Walter BenjaminCapitalism as Religion (translated by Chad Kautzer)

The capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth century was animated by a Judeo-Christian spirit, a spirit of work, effort and production. But we no longer understand the spirit of our capitalism if we continue to look for it inside Christianity or the Bible. Market society in recent years has been increasingly resembling a religion, but the traits that it is taking make it more akin with the Middle Eastern cities of three thousand years ago, or the Greek and Roman ones of some later centuries. With their public spaces occupied by many statues, temples, steles, altars, shrines, and their private spaces filled with amulets, household gods and a huge production of household idols. And their many sacrifices, around which their life, parties and death were ordered. The Judeo-Christian humanism was, above all, an attempt to empty the world of idols and free it from the sacrifices. It was an only partially successful attempt, because the tendency to build idols to worship has always been too strong in men.

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The idols are never satiated

On the border and beyond/3 - This market devours life and provides just a little money in return by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 05/02/2017 "(C)apitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult...
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On the borders and beyond/2 - While the individualistic market triumphs and shakes

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 29/01/2017

Su confine e oltre 02 rid"All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity — and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they "spiritualize" themselves."

F. NietzscheTwilight of the Idols (English translation by by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale)

A particularly important form of the "creative destruction" of the capitalism of our time is the one it performs about religion. Market economy has grown and keeps growing with the consumption of the sacred territory, which, deconsecrated and turned into an undifferentiated and anonymous profane space, has become a new area cleared for trading. The merchants are back in the temple, all the temple is becoming a marketplace, even the sancta sanctorum (the holy of holies) was put to produce income.

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To destroy a religion, the first step is to undermine communities and isolate people by turning them into individuals. And capitalism has been able to do this very well. Individuals are unrelated to each other, and therefore cannot obtain religio, which is an experience that is only possible for those who share and preserve something important. When the common ground of the community is lacking, religious experience is inexorably put out. Or it becomes a commodity, as it happened to the West, where in the space of two generations the community and religious heritage built over two thousand years has been reduced to rubble, and where the homeless and rootless individuals have become the perfect consumers. We have agreed to be emptied of meaning and filled with things.

This emptying-and-filling represents the maximum development of the first "spirit of capitalism" that read the accumulation of goods as a blessing of God. With a decisive difference, however: what had been an elitist experience of a small number of entrepreneurs and bankers for at least two centuries has become a mass religion in the twentieth century, thanks to the shifting of the ethical centre of the gravity of capitalism from the sphere of production to that of consumption. The "blessed by God" is no longer those who produce, but those who consume (and they are praised and envied because and if they have the means to consume). The predestined ones have become those who can consume the goods, not those who produce them by their work. The more they consume, the more blessing they receive. The sacred figure of the entrepreneur-manufacturer has thus given way to the new priest and messiah of the manager-consumer, and the higher his bonus - and therefore his consumption standards -, the more "blessed" he is.

As a result, work is out of the picture, relegated among the somewhat nostalgic memories of the past and its utopias. It has become a means to increase consumption, thanks to finance becoming increasingly friendly with consumption and the enemy of work, enterprises and the entrepreneur-worker. The old Calvinist spirit of capitalism, centred around production and work, was still an essentially and naturally social type of capitalism. Working and producing are collective actions, cooperation, mutuality. Work is the first brick of human communities. By moving the axis of the economic and social system from labour to consumption, the community has naturally given way to the individual. Consumption has become more and more an act of the individual, gradually losing its social dimension yet being tied to the economic sphere. Until a few decades ago words were also exchanged in the markets. Today online shopping has become the perfect act of consumption, where the product reaches me at home without any other human between me and the object of my desire (possibly not even the postman). That's why the gamble mania of the latest generation is the most fitting image of this capitalism. From the coupon of the football pools or the racecourse races, which were in many cases social experiences, we have moved to the individual-machine relationship, where everyone "plays" alone (so it is not a game), completely focused and sucked in by the object of the game - it is by no accident that many slot machines have a totemic aspect: they are shimmering, colourful and always hungry.

The shift from labour to consumption is also the result of a systematic operation of disesteem for anything that has to do with hard work, sweat and sacrifice. We really like consumption because it is all and only pleasure: no fatigue, no pain, no sacrifice. So no wonder that the new frontier of civil battle is shifting away from "work for all", which was the great ideal of the twentieth century, to "consumption for all", which is becoming the slogan of the twenty-first, perhaps made possible by a guaranteed minimum income letting everyone be introduced in the new temple. More consumption, less work, more blessing. Idolatries are always economies of pure consumption. The totem does not work, and the work of its devotees is only recognised if oriented to consumption: to offering, to sacrifice. The more idolatrous a culture is, the more it despises work and adores consumption and the type of finance that promises a perpetual cult consisting in effortless consumption only.

However, this anthropological, social and sacral structure that has held up capitalism until now is inexorably coming into a crisis. The days of individualistic capitalism seem to be numbered, although it is living its best season (great crises always start at the height of success, and occur with a time delay of a few years). And it is not difficult to notice.

As long as we were within an economy of the scarcity of goods, the things were enough to fill our imagination and satisfy our desires for the market cult. But since much of society has reached and exceeded the threshold of satiety, the capitalist religion must completely rethink itself if it wants to continue to grow and retain its faithful - forgetting, by the way, all those who are not satiated but knocking on the doors of our banquets. And it is exactly by looking at the changes underway in this new phase - the capitalism of post-satiety - that we can see the power of the religious-idolatrous nature of the current system clearly.

Let's just think of the individual vs. community relationship. The smarter components of our economic system are sensing that the capitalist cult needs communities in order to be powerful and lasting. Like every religion, the capitalist one can also only exist as a community. Every religion is an "integral social phenomenon" (Émile Durckheim). And so, from the centre of capitalism something very difficult to imagine began to emerge just a few years ago. Once the process of the individualization of consumption and the consequent zeroing of the community was reaching its apotheosis, that same economic culture has given birth to children who look very much like those of the old religion and the old community that it has opposed and fought so much as its main enemies. The phase of the market growing by offering goods to individuals that replaced the ancient collective cults with the individual idolatry of new totem-objects is gradually giving way to a new phase of community, and therefore more religious consumption. The separate and isolated individual consumer, the worshipper of idols by which he/she is devoured will not be the protagonist of the markets in the coming years. The market of the future will be social and full of stories. We cannot understand, for example, the new season of sharing economy (which could be described as "collaborative consumption"), unless we read it in the framework of this new phase of capitalist religion which is also communal, but in a different way (and we will see that in a future article).

Let's think of the great phenomenon of narrative marketing and the so-called storytelling that are more and more often inserted among the ingredients of successful new businesses. Narratives are a typical element of religions and communities, so much so that they constitute their first capital. Faiths are mainly a legacy of stories received and donated.
There are no faiths without narratives of the beginning, the end, the fathers, the liberations and the encounters with God. Faith is transmitted by telling a story. The new marketing of the post-scarcity era no longer presents the products with their technical and commercial characteristics. It does not bewitch us by describing the properties of the goods: instead, it enchants us by telling stories. Like our grandparents did, like the Bible did and still does. The new advertising is more and more like a creation of stories using the typical language of myths, where the aim is to activate the emotion of the consumer, their symbolic code, desires and dreams - not only and no longer his needs.

And so to sell us their products new businesses make us dream by resorting to the evocative power of myths: just like faiths, like the stories that have shaped our religious and social heritage. With one major difference, though: the stories of faiths and the fairy tales of our grandmothers were greater than us and they were all and only gratuitousness. Their aim was to convey a gift, a promise, a liberation to us, bringing them back to life just for us every time. They did not want to sell us anything, only to transmit an inheritance to us. And instead, the emotional storytelling of the businesses of the capitalism of today and tomorrow wants only and exclusively to sell us something. They have nothing for free and are smaller than us because of that missing gratuitousness that made the other stories great: new businesses tell us stories to increase profits for those who invest a lot of money into the inventing and telling of those stories - which, in the end, are nothing but plagiarism and imitations of the great religious narratives they, too, have received for free and then recycled for profit. The stories of yesterday, the eternal ones, have been able to charm us because they did not want to enchain us. The stories told for profit are, however, all just variants of the fairy tale Pied Piper: if he is not paid for his work, this "merchant" goes back to town, and while we are engaged in our new cults in the new churches, he drives away our children with his charmer flute, forever.

So far the history of civilization has taught us that gratuitousness used without gratuitousness does not last, and soon the bluff is discovered. But perhaps the greatest innovation of the capitalism of tomorrow will be transforming gratuitousness into a commodity, and it will be done so well that we will not be able to distinguish fake generosity from the genuine one. But we can still save ourselves from this tremendous manipulation, which would be the greatest of all, if we keep the great stories of gratuitousness, safeguarded by the faiths. Or if we conserve the seed of gratuitousness in that last space of our soul that we managed to preserve and not to put on sale.

download article in pdf

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The capitalism of tomorrow will attempt to use communities and stories to sell us its merchandise. But it is not to be taken for granted that it will manage to enchant and enchain us. 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On the borders and beyond/2 - While the individualistic market triumphs and shakes

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 29/01/2017

Su confine e oltre 02 rid"All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity — and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they "spiritualize" themselves."

F. NietzscheTwilight of the Idols (English translation by by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale)

A particularly important form of the "creative destruction" of the capitalism of our time is the one it performs about religion. Market economy has grown and keeps growing with the consumption of the sacred territory, which, deconsecrated and turned into an undifferentiated and anonymous profane space, has become a new area cleared for trading. The merchants are back in the temple, all the temple is becoming a marketplace, even the sancta sanctorum (the holy of holies) was put to produce income.

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Resisting the Pied Piper

On the borders and beyond/2 - While the individualistic market triumphs and shakes by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 29/01/2017 "All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity — and a later, very much later phase when ...
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On the border and beyond/1 - Between market and gratuitousness, finding new ways

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 22/01/2017

Su confine e oltre 01 rid"We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect."

F. de La RochefoucauldReflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (English translation: J. W. Willis Bund, M.A. LL.B and J. Hain Friswell)

In our time, loneliness grows along with the desire for community in us which we try to satisfy with methods and tools that end up, too often, increasing it. The market society needs individuals without strong and too deeply rooted ties, and it has the economic and political means to make them more and more so. People with significant interpersonal relationships, with a cultivated inner life are just imperfect consumers who are difficult to manage.

[fulltext] =>

We do not understand the extraordinary success that the capitalist market is having in the past two or three decades unless we pay enough attention to its main device: the destruction of free non-market goods. In fact, these are increasingly replaced by merchandise, which try to respond to the famine of the first type of goods (and in their own way they succeed, too) but continue to fuel it at the same time. The new culture of work and consumption produces individuals with increasingly fragmented relationships. At the same time, large multinational companies offer new forms of communities on the net that while accompanying our solitudes do nothing but increase the number of lonely hours we spend gazing at the screens of our phone, computer or TV. The GDP is growing thanks to our effort of responding to the loneliness generated by the market with the same market - and so the share of income that families spend today on phones, internet refills and fees has exceeded the part spent on food.

The consequences of this new form of 'creative destruction' - which destroys free goods and creates merchandise with a price - are seriously undervalued. Let's just think of social exclusion and poverty. Traditional communities were generally common goods, freely accessible even to the poor, and, in some cases, especially to the poor, who compensated for the less economic goods they had with more relational goods. The poor were often not poor in all: they had community and festive riches which made them less poor. The strong trend of the new poverty of the third millennium is the creation of poor people who are thoroughly poor. When we were children, for example, the social organization of our townships and villages (almost) prevented us from becoming obese: our entire life was made up of natural and necessary movement. Our cities and our social and economic organization are (almost) natural causes of obesity. But then, with the stroke of the most impressive collective genius of our era, capitalism has made it all a business of gyms, swimming pools, fitness clubs and special foods in order to combat the obesity that the market society creates - simply by paying. And so the poorest children (and adults) are often also the most obese, because they cannot access the 'cures' that the market sells.

Growth and profits achieved thanks to the resolution of the damage created in making more profits (and income) – this is the great 'social innovation' of the capitalism of our time. The mechanism of this creative destruction is very radical, and it is applied primarily to the same community. Traditional communities were only minimally elective: we get to chose a wife and some friends but not our parents, brothers and sisters or children, nor our neighbours and the other inhabitants of our village. All these companions of our life were inherited, a matter of fate but above all body, flesh and blood, with all their typical injuries and blessings. Post-modern communities are only elective: we get to choose almost everything, we would like to choose everything. We only like weak ties, disembodied and chosen ones; and so we forget that people are living and real precisely because they are different today from those we chose yesterday. The flowering of a life means staying true to all that has changed, continues to change and that we did not chose in the people we love - every marriage pact is a mutual yes to a faithfulness to what the other will become, an alliance to welcome and love the "not yet" (of ourselves and the other) that we do not know and will not be able to control. (Yet, 'you've changed', 'you are no longer the man I married' are the words we most often say when leaving each other, as if we had not married that 'change' and that 'no longer the same', too).

An important place in this argument is occupied by the theme of authenticity. In the twentieth century, authenticity - sincerity, genuineness - was also a feature of the market. Businesses, cooperatives, shops and banks were human affairs through and through, with the same vices and virtues of life. And so they were just like life. Then we started building a corporate culture and an increasingly artificial marketing, to create a commercial where we all know that the goods presented are not the same as what we're going to buy, to sell extremely fake financial products, to form relationships with our colleagues, clients, suppliers and leaders following protocols and incentive schemes. It's a commedia dell'arte where everyone can play their role thanks to the mask that covers their face - and so we no longer see the blush on the cheeks and the tears in the eyes of the other. A certain artificiality and non-sincerity have always been part of the ethos of the market - anyone attending the fairs and markets of yesterday entered into a world of seducer sellers who spoke of the fantastic features of some miraculous products. But we were aware of it: that kind of artificiality was part of the folklore and rituals of that world, of every world. That artificial element was explicit, known to all, and thus it became - paradoxically - authentic and sincere. We all played 'merchants of the fair' to some extent, but we knew it.

At some point, however, that first market culture was amplified, inflated and exaggerated by the large multinational corporations and by the global consulting companies. It has become a proper ideology, and that first good feature of artificiality of market relations has grown a lot, even too much. Gradually, and without realizing it, we forgot the non-authenticity of many practices, and we gave them the consistency of reality. The management of work has become technical, that of the people is now called human resources, marketing is a science developed in neuroscience laboratories. The game has become reality, and that first genuineness has left the scene.

But once again, the market is finding a solution to the evil it created. The search for authenticity in the market is in fact one of the most important and profitable trends of today's capitalism. Consumers seek authenticity in the products and services they buy. We want to find it in food, where everything that we think to be genuine is worth more; when we look for a truly Neapolitan restaurant in Naples, and a truly Lisbon one in Lisbon. Even in 'social' tourism we want to see indigenous people who are authentically indigenous, and poor people who are genuinely poor. Hand-crafted beer and ice cream are preferred because they bring something of that authenticity that we have decided to always look for. A well-prepared chef is not enough, we would like someone who really believes in what they do and say that they do. A farmer doing biological cultivation is not enough: we want to meet him while working in his fields and speaking to us in dialect in order to verify the authenticity of the story that he tells us with his goods.

A first side effect of this interesting new phenomenon is regarding the price of these products. This authenticity is generally associated with a high price, sometimes very high, therefore, again, one that excludes the poor. Furthermore, authenticity is not only a characteristic of the products, it is also a dimension of persons. So if we take a careful look we realize that we are asking the market to provide precisely the gratuitousness that it has expelled from its offices, shops and banks, especially in the past few decades.

In this colourful world of authentic markets some future scenarios open up that are worth paying attention to. One of them concerns the great growth of new market communities, where the consumption of the same product or brand brings people together in new forms of 'tribes'. What we see today as products of identity formation only (in food, in music, in clothing, in cars, motorcycles ...) could become a widespread and generalized phenomenon tomorrow. In these tribes of consumers the object becomes the construction element of the 'community'. That is how archaic forms of a totemic cult come back to life, since the relationship between people is a side effect of each individual's relationship with the thing. The faithful (faith-fidelity is everything here) offer sacrifices of time and energy to something that, by nature, is not at all a free gift - the product has a selling price, it has its profits that do not go to the worshippers but to the owners of the brand who use the free labour and promotion performed by their faithful. There are new idolatries-religions consisting of only worship, filling the earth with fetishes and doing away with gods.

Biblical humanism fought the idolatry of its time also to free man from the original debt that characterized the totemic and pagan cults of the surrounding peoples. The covenant with a God who creates out of an overflow of love was also the liberation from the cults for objects, those of the totems and taboos of the ancient world, where the objects enchanted and chained people with their magic and with their occult powers. Should the disenchantment of the world and the battle against the Jewish-Christian humanism that we are witnessing produce a simple return to new totemic cults of objects in the end, we would be facing the worst failure of western humanism, the destruction of two and a half millennia of human and spiritual development.

But other scenarios are also possible, some different narratives can already be discerned on the horizon of our complicated and beautiful era. To observe and understand them we will place ourselves 'on the border and beyond'. We will set up our lookout post on the dividing line between gratuitousness and market, between communities and people, between the totems and authentic spirituality. Let's expect everything and anything, and - bon voyage.

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I beni liberi trasformati in merci. Tra questi l’autenticità, una dimensione sempre più cercato dal mercato e dalle sue tribù di consumatori. 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On the border and beyond/1 - Between market and gratuitousness, finding new ways

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 22/01/2017

Su confine e oltre 01 rid"We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect."

F. de La RochefoucauldReflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (English translation: J. W. Willis Bund, M.A. LL.B and J. Hain Friswell)

In our time, loneliness grows along with the desire for community in us which we try to satisfy with methods and tools that end up, too often, increasing it. The market society needs individuals without strong and too deeply rooted ties, and it has the economic and political means to make them more and more so. People with significant interpersonal relationships, with a cultivated inner life are just imperfect consumers who are difficult to manage.

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Break away from creative destruction

On the border and beyond/1 - Between market and gratuitousness, finding new ways by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 22/01/2017 "We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by tha...