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Materialism or
Spiritualism In which direction is man headed?
What will be his future? Questions such as these do not have
immediate answers.
To be able to decipher the events that are characterizing this
fraction of history or, if we prefer, to find the so-called
key to the problem in such a complex issue, means putting
existential perplexities in order, facing the difficulties of
a generation which has been emptied by the contents of
historical tradition and misled by the illusionism of the
materialistic and consumerist model.
Materialism or spirituality, within our lives, cannot find
coherence with such a system; the dissatisfaction present in
this civilization draws its origin from the lack of depth in
the vision of the future; not because this generation is less
able to interpret the times than the preceding ones, but
because perhaps new times are nearing in which simple and
predictable answers cannot satisfy the questions; times that
foretell the advent of something that escapes man's ability to
analyse, that have been produced by the history of tradition,
a product of that same culture and logic that has led us to
today. Times that are therefore projecting man towards a new
dimension of thought and history.
If this is true, a new great historical event is foretold that
would be reductive to describe as a new Renaissance; if this
can be interpreted through the signs of the times, then this
epoch of the near future will have characteristics and forms
that the man of today can barely perceive. The great world
wars, the great scientific discoveries and the unbelievable
technological applications (which unfortunately often go
against man), the great process of globalization, the great
migrations: all seem to announce the preparations for a great
change in historical scenarios, a history that from the Big
Bang has led to the apparition of logic in the material
universe and to the pursuit of Wisdom, of Truth.
The great wars that have characterised the 20th century were
not only fought in the great trenches (both real and cold) but
were produced by the opposition of materialism and
spirituality, of the immediate and the transcendental. This
duality in man and in his path has produced movements,
ideologies, dictatorships and subcultures, fundamentalism,
racism, discrimination.
Marx, Hitler, just to name two, are not only the promoters of
doctrines and movements that had the tendency to empty man of
his one and true identity, removing from him that dignity that
only a full life can give him; the perfect race, materialistic
man, the illogicality and the inadequacy of faith "in the
modern era". These have been, and unfortunately still are, in
the "followers" of these and other doctrines, the expressions
of the cultural deviation of an epoch that could not express
more values. It is still hinged on a materialistic
philosophical formulation that, even if useful in some aspects
in the evolutionary history of man, does not correspond to the
demands of a truth that can no longer have either limits or
confinements. Man cannot be described and circumscribed in any
human philosophical tendency that is based only on matter as
an absolute entity. Today more than ever there is a need to
complete, and to integrate (and not rewrite) the sense, the
connection of every entity and reality that surrounds us, from
those which are tangible to those which are transcendent.
Today, with greater and renewed substance, it is opportune to
answer to the demands of the only progress that humanity has
known from its first footsteps to today: the development of
logic, the development of that characteristic that
distinguishes man from other creatures and that can never stop
until it has developed full conscience, namely Wisdom, Truth.
And so the great wars, the great revolutions in ideologies and
thought of this last century, of the second millennium after
Christ, must be read with a new vision; a vision that gives a
dignity to history which is different from the infamies of
wars and their injustices; give him a renewed dignity and a
final and full sense. Give him that great impulse that the
whole of humanity, united by a single need, is, without
realising it, impressing onto the times.
Great armaments, nuclear warheads, the threat of any
description and any kind, can not put the universe in order;
order can only derive from knowledge, which is man's true
objective.
Ulysses' words in Dante's poem, "we were not made to live as
brutes…" ring out in the epoch of television, computerization
and the Internet, as if to sign the start, and not only in
philosophical terms, of a great change for which humanity is
preparing.
This is why this historical moment, while sad in some aspects
and thrilling in others, having reached a moment of complex
interpretation, must be appraised in the sign of a great
truth: humanity does not look for stars, it perhaps does not
even look for other sentient beings in other parts of the
universe; it above all tries to escape from the imprisonment
of a materialism that has conducted it up to the thresholds of
folly.
The ideological-religious schisms, the incomprehension between
west and east, between north and south, between whites and
blacks, are only the result of a lack of equilibrium between
the two components that generate man: the transcendental
component and the material one. The more they fuse to become a
single entity, the more we will be able to see the beginning
of a new dawn. The more we distance ourselves from the stupid
and short-sighted consideration that one is incompatible with
the other, the more we will free man. The more we realise that
Religion (the study of the transcendental) and Science (the
study of the immediate) are branches of the same tree, the
more the man the creature can feed and grow.
There have been too many teachers of nothing and of empty
words that have ploughed the admiration of the masses, and who
still today pull men and ideologies into a void by colouring
themselves up like peacocks. A. Einstein said to this regard -
"during the last century, and part of the previous one, it was
widely held that there existed an unsolvable conflict between
knowledge and faith. The opinion that by now faith had to be
increasingly replaced by knowledge dominated intelligent
minds; faith that was not based on knowledge was merely
superstition, and had to be opposed as such. According to such
a conception, the sole function of education was to open the
road to reflection and knowledge, and the school system had to
have this as its sole aim. It will probably rarely happen, if
ever, to see a rationalistic point of view expressed in such a
coarse form…".
We can never love and therefore enjoy Creation until the wall
that divides the transcendental from the immanent is torn
down. After the Berlin wall, and the wall of materialistic
consumerism which is in the process of breaking up, the last
wall to have to be torn down is this: the wall that separates
the finite from the infinite.
Guido Bissanti |
