Virtues

For Another Possible World

Boff, Guilherme

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781621890775
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Virtues are values underlying human practices. We are at the dawn of a new era, an era of global ethics requiring some core virtues. These core virtues are hospitality, co-living, respect, tolerance, and communality. Book 1 treats the virtue of hospitality that is a right and a duty of all, and which is still to be discovered and practiced unconditionally. Book 2 deals with the virtues of co-living, respect, and tolerance, which are important virtues if the peoples of the earth are to live together in peace in our common home, the planet Earth. Finally, Book 3 deals with the virtue of communality; this is a very important virtue because a large part of humanity experiences hunger and thirst, which is something scandalous in this day and age, and which demonstrates a lack of humanity, because we possess the technical means and political framework to resolve this situation. If these core virtues become a reality, they will transform human practices into something beneficial both to human beings and to the planet Earth, our common home.

Book 1

Hospitality—The Right and Duty of All

one

The Global Phase of the Earth and of Humanity

We are entering a new phase in the evolutionary process of the Earth and of humanity, the global phase. People who are scattered in the various continents and who are enclosed in their respective nation-states are increasingly aware of their place in our Common Home, the planet Earth.

Increasingly, people are more aware that we only have this planet to inhabit, a planet which is small and limited in resources. Thus, it is important to treat it with care so that it can accommodate all humans and the whole chain of life. We want our planet to have a very long future.

We have also become acquainted with something that deeply touches us: the astronaut’s perspective from space. From space it is not possible to distinguish the Earth from humanity, the Earth from the biosphere. They form a great, unique, and complex reality. We have the same origins and the same destiny, and for this reason insofar as the future is concerned, we are a single subject.

And this slowly provokes a progressive new state of consciousness. From being ethnically and class conscious, we become species conscious, we become conscious that we are part of the homo sapiens and demens species (i.e., we are rational, sapiens, but we can also be irrational, demens). We discover ourselves to be members of the great human family and of the community of life; we discover ourselves as brothers and sisters, and as cousins of the other representatives of the immense biodiversity (plants and animals) that characterizes the biosphere—that thin layer that envelops the Earth and that constitutes the life-system. Certainly, it is more than a thin membrane of life; it is the most visible part of the planet Earth itself, which should be understood as a living supraorganism, the Great Mother, Pachamama,1 and Gaia.

In the face of this new moment in our common history everybody is affected. People have started to ask themselves: what is the function of each human person, of cultures, of nations, and of religions? And inquire: Will our traditions, our regional cultures, our convictions, our arts and religions matter? In short, will that which constitutes our identity matter? How are we to transform ourselves so that we are in synchrony with this new phase that is emerging? What must we be?

The accelerated process of globalization presents a dramatic crossroads for humanity. It can produce the opportunity for all peoples of all cultures and traditions to meet. It can be a pleasurable experience of discovering differences, and this represents a possibility to form new partnerships and to co-live.

However, it can also present a strange experience that gives rise to mistrust, anxiety, and even fear in the face of differences. Moreover, close contact can reignite old hatreds, tensions, sorrows, and prejudices that have accumulated over centuries between regions and peoples.

Now more than ever hospitality, mutual welcome, and kind receptivity are imperative; for those virtues require a detachment of conceptions and preconceptions. Only in this way can we perceive difference as something that is different and not as something that is unequal and inferior. Thus it is necessary to be willing to co-live in the same Common Home, for we have no another alternative. We must also be tolerant, because without tolerance the logic of the friend/enemy, of wars, and of exclusion endures. Last, we need communality, which is the ultimate implication of globalization, so that we can all sit at the table together to eat and celebrate the generosity of nature and the fact that we are together. Thus, the virtues for a successful globalization are four: hospitality, co-living, tolerance, and communality. And these are the object of my investigations in these books.

The process involving these four virtues inevitably encompasses comings and goings, getting it right and making mistakes. But this process will consolidate and expand the points of convergence, and in doing so it will create a common foundation, which will provide the conditions for a new kind of collective consciousness and for a new global citizenship. When this happens, we will see the rise of a new form of identification that is collective; it is the human-species-identity. All previous identities, national or regional, which have produced so many conflicts and tensions, will not cease to exist; but individually these will not be the defining factor in the future. The future will be molded by all of us and by the common elements that are being identified and taken up by us.

We will emerge as citizens of the Earth, who are different, but who also share a common humanity. The ancient and basic concept humanitas will become pivotal and the common reference value. Only then, will we live as communal sojourners on Earth, our common fatherland and motherland.

In order to understand this complex process with all its presupposed developments, we must become aware and pass judgement on two basic attitudes that are present in the process of globalization: one attitude that is guided by the past and another attitude that is directed toward the future. These attitudes provide us with two different paradigms, for each of them try to shape in their own way the process of globalization, and this provides us with two distinct futures.

Looking Behind: The Paradigm of the Enemy
and of Confrontation

When faced with something new, a great number of societies and people look to what has happened before, look to the past, in search of guidance. In redefining their identity, they appeal to traditions, to language, to religion, to custom, to the glories of their culture, to national heroes, to the values that characterize their culture, to traditional feasts, to literary and other artistic masterpieces, to long-lasting institutions, to the singularity and the beauty of their ecology. Moreover, they look to those peoples and cultures with whom they have an affinity and with whom they share a destiny, but they also refer to those peoples with whom they maintain tense and even hostile relations.

Identities that are reaffirmed by taking the past as the reference point are usually constructed by emphasizing the difference with other identities. This form of identity clearly defines one’s enemies and friends. One modern theorist of political philosophy, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), analyzed this issue in his well-known The Concept of the Political where he states: “For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case . . . determine by itself the distinction between friend and enemy.”2 Who is the enemy? The enemy “is . . . the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. . . . Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly.”3

Another well-known modern theorist on political philosophy and on globalization, Samuel P. Huntington, states something similar in his The Clash of Civilizations when he says: “For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential. . . . We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.”4

This perspective, as one may gather, is full of risks, for it is guided by the paradigm of the enemy and by a predisposition to conflict and even to war. Certainly, the post–cold war era is being characterized by wars in various parts of the world, wars that have origins in those groups that seek to defend their identity, whether because they judge their identities are threatened by traditional enemies, or whether because they feel their identities are threatened by the homogenization caused by the dominant process of globalization, which is so characterized by the Westernization of the world (and some call this the “Western intoxication” of the world), and which is so characterized by the standardization of the economy and of political thinking. Alongside the process of globalization we can also see, unfortunately, the process of balkanization and of fragmentation of humanity.

It is important to seriously consider the question, how can we consider others to be enemies, enemies to be faced, if we must co-inhabit a small place, the planet Earth? This paradigm of friend/enemy, even if it is realistic, must be set aside if we want to share a sole and unique space (for we do not have another), our Common Home, the Earth. This kind of paradigm stands for the endurance of the past and does not present us with a future. The reaffirmation of ethnic identities through definitions and outlines vis-à-vis others, through disregarding the search for points in common, represents a battle that has been lost from the outset, for it ignores the minimal and unique identity that will necessarily emerge as the outcome of the process of globalization of the human species. Moreover, by conducting a war with the current technological resources, we have could put in danger the biological future of our species.

It is this reductionist perspective that has inspired world politics after the terrorist attacks on that sad day, September 11th of 2001 in the USA. The discourse is very clear: it is a war between “the world of order and the world of disorder,” a world of disorder characterized by “rogue states”; it is a war between the “evil axis” and the “good axis.” President George W. Bush in his political-religious fundamentalism sought to pursue wars with no limits, an “infinite war” against terrorism and against those who provide strategic support for terrorism. The dominant superpower confronts all countries with the following alternative: you are either with the USA (and thus pro-civilization) or with the terrorists (and thus pro-barbarism). There is no other alternative. Curiously, Islamic fundamentalists follow the same reasoning, and only invert the terms: there is a need to fight against the Empire of Evil, against Western arrogance, against atheism, and against the materialism of Western culture, which is dominated and represented by the USA; and it is imperative to opt for the kingdom of good represented by Islamic religion and culture. Islamic religion and culture place everything under the reign of the unique and true God, Allah, and for this reason it invalidates the separation of religion and politics, the sepa...

Table of contents

• Virtues
• Preface
• Book 1: Hospitality—The Right and Duty of All
• Book 2: Co-living, Respect, and Tolerance
• Book 3: Feasting Together and Living in Peace