It would be nice. It would be very nice if only it were true.
We continue to tell ourselves pleasant and edifying—but ultimately untruthful—stories, thereby perpetuating empty rhetoric.
For example, we repeat the notion that in Europe we have lost the value of fraternity, a value that modernity should have fostered politically by inheriting it from Christianity.
But this begs a few questions: When exactly have we lost this value? And, above all, when has it ever truly prevailed?
European peoples have been brotherly in their extermination of one another for centuries and have fraternally colonised and enslaved the entire world: the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania; often in the name of the Cross.
With cannons, we ourselves have gone to seize everything our Black or Asian brothers possessed; and they would brotherly give it all to us, willingly or unwillingly.
Fraternally then, in a Christian-inspired modern era, French revolutionaries destroyed millennia-old churches and monasteries, slaughtered the people of the Vendée, and in the very name of fraternity cut off heads with a guillotine, a very fraternal and egalitarian tool.
Thereby, fraternally, like true brothers and comrades, communists devastated Eastern Europe and crushed millions of people, to make us all more fraternal, equal, and therefore, happy.
Jokes aside, in real history and daily life, things are a bit more complicated, and it would be appropriate to state clearly that in these decades we have been called upon to bring forth something totally and radically new, to experience a leap of consciousness and humanity that requires an unprecedented spiritual and cultural effort, not merely some moralistic drops in the pond that take for granted what we need to achieve with great effort.
In other words, we need a new and post-belligerent relational consciousness that has so far only been incarnated by a very few saints.
Without this clarity, generic calls for humanity and charity—in the name of a Gospel that is never fully lived and in the name of a secular humanism that is increasingly corrupted—will only serve to ignite furious shadows of hate, impatience, and racism, and unfortunately, bloodbaths are the inevitable effects of the hypocrites’ irresponsibility.
DARSI PACE’S THOUGHT
In the frantic pace of our lives, we all urgently need to allow ourselves peace and to mutually share it with others in order to spread it little by little amongst the peoples, cultures, and religions of the world as a new form of human relationality. However, we need to say clearly that allowing ourselves peace is not something that comes naturally to us humans. Shouting for peace is not sufficient to make us truly peaceful and peacemakers. Real peace stems from a slow and continuous process of deep transformation, above all within ourselves.