In Praise of Taverns

13/11/2011 Leonardo Boff1 comentário

Given my «gypsy-like intellectual life», always speaking in different places and environments about a multitude of topics, ranging from spirituality to socio-environmental responsibility, and even the possibility of the end of our species, the organizers, out of deference, often invite me to a nice city restaurant. Logically, I observe proper Franciscan tradition, and praise the dishes with pleasing commentaries. But a sour taste always remains, that prevents eating from being a celebration. I remember that the majority of my friends cannot enjoy these meals, especially the millions of millions of hungry people of the world. It seems to me that I am taking the food from their mouths. How can one celebrate the generosity of friends and of Mother Earth, if, in the words of Gandhi, «hunger is an insult and the most murderous form of violence that exists?»

In this context, the consolation of taverns comes to mind. I like to go to the taverns because I can eat there without feeling bad. There are taverns, cantinas, or tascas, all over the world, including the poor communities where I worked for many years. There a true democracy prevails: the tavern (where people with less buying power go) welcomes everybody. A college professor can be there drinking his brandy alongside a construction worker, a stage actor at the same table with a scoundrel, and even with the village drunk, who is downing a cold one. One only has to come in, take a seat, and call loudly, «pass me a very cold beer.»

The Brazilian tasca is more than meets the eye, with its brightly colored tile, the patron Saint on the wall, often a Saint Anthony with Baby Jesus in his arms, the symbol of the favorite soccer team, and colorful advertisements for the drinks. The tavern is a spirited place, where friends and neighbors encounter each other, where conversations last until late into the night; a place to discuss the last soccer game, to comment on a favorite TV series, criticize politicians, and hurl well deserved insults against the corrupt ones. Soon, everybody becomes friends with everybody else, within an incipient spirit of community. Here no one is rich or poor. They are, simply, people who talk like people, using the popular language. There is much humor, joking, and bragging. Often, as in the State of Minas, there is spontaneous singing, that someone accompanies with the guitar.

The general condition of the bar or tables does not matter to anyone. What is important is that the glass is very clean and free of grease; if not, it damages the creamy foam of the beer that must be three fingers deep. No one gets upset over the condition of the floors, or the restrooms.

The names are varied, depending on the region of the country. It can be The Tavern of The Old Lady, Sacha’s Tavern, Don Gomes’ Tasca, The Tavern of the Giba, The Tasca of the Joia, The Blue Turkey, The Brotherhod of the Scented Goat, The Full House, or many others. Belo Horizonte is the Brazilian city with the most taverns, and every year it celebrates a contest for the tavern with the best food. The dishes are also varied, generally prepared from domestic or regional recipes: sun dried meat from the Northeast, pork and el tutú (bean paste with tapioca flour and fried bananas) from Minas. The names are witty: mexidoido chapado (mixed grilled meats), porconóbis de sabugosa (which owes its name to the pig, and the leaves of a plant called ora pro nobis), Adam’s Rib (small pig ribs with tapioca), torrezno de barriga… There is a dish that I like very much offered in Belo Horizonte’s Central Market, which won one of the contests: Liver filet stewed with onions and jilo (jiló: a very popular small sour fruit). If it were up to me, this dish would be in the menu of the banquet the heavenly Father will offer to the blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thinking of it, the taverns, or tascas, perform a community function: they offer to all who frequent them, especially to all who go there often, the feeling of belonging to the city or the neighborhood. There being no other place for entertainment and leisure, the tavern allows people to meet, forget their social status and live an equality generally denied to them in their everyday lives.

To me, la tasca is a metaphor for the fellowship dreamed by Jesus, a place where everybody can sit at the table, celebrate fraternal coexistence, and make eating a communion. And in my case, la tasca is a place where I can eat without feeling guilty.

The Difficult Search for Self Realization

08/11/2011 Leonardo Boff1 comentário

There is currently a broad erosion of the ethical values that were generally lived and passed on by the family, and then through school and society. That erosion has caused the guiding stars of the sky to be clouded by interests that are harmful to society, and to the future of life and the equilibrium of the Earth.

Despite this darkness, we must also recognize the appearance of new values, linked to international solidarity, caring for nature, transparency in social relations and the rejection of forms of oppressive violence and transgression of human rights. But not even this has diminished the crisis of values, especially in the field of the market economy and speculative finance. These define the path of the world and the daily lives of wage earners, who live under the constant threat of unemployment.

The recent crises have exposed the mafias of speculators installed in the stock exchange and in big banks, whose huge earnings and capacity for thievery of other people’s money almost caused the collapse the world financial system. Instead of landing in jail, such scoundrels, after minor adjustments, have returned to their old vice of speculation and to the game of wrongful appropriation of the «commons», the goods common to humanity (water, soils, seeds, energy, etc.).

This anomic atmosphere, where anything goes, that also reaches into politics, dulls the ethical senses, and, faced with widespread corruption, leaves people feeling impotent, and condemned to bitterness and humiliating resignation. In this context, many seek meaning in self-help literature, comprised of bits of psychology, oriental wisdom, and spirituality, with prescriptions for complete happiness, all of which is an illusion, because it is neither based on nor supported by a realistic and contradictory sense of reality. Others go to psychologists or psychoanalysts, who give more grounded counsel, but everything boils down to the following recommendations: given the failure of the things that create meaning, such as religions and philosophies, and considering the confusion of world visions, the relativity of values and emptiness of existential meaning, seek your own path, work on your deepest Self, establish your own ethical references to guide your life and seek self realization. Self realization: that magic phrase filled with promise.

It will not be me who combats self realization, after having written, The Eagle and the Chicken, a Metaphor for the Human Condition, (El águila y la gallina, una metáfora de la condición humana, Trotta 2002), a book that urges people to find in themselves the basis for sensible self realization. This comes from a wise combination of the eagle and chicken dimensions. When should I be a chicken, that is, concrete, attentive to the everyday challenges, and when should I be an eagle, seeking to fly high, in freedom, to realize hidden potentials. Articulating such dimensions creates the possibility of successful self realization.

I think that this self realization is only reached if three other dimensions are seriously incorporated.

The first is the shadow dimension. Each of us possesses a self-centered side, arrogant, with other limitations that do not dignify us. This dimension is not a defect, but a sign of our human condition. To accept that shadow, and to take care that its negative effects do not affect others, makes us humble, understanding of the shadows of others, and allows for a more complete and integrated human experience.

The second dimension is the relationship with others, open, sincere, and consisting of enriching exchanges. We are beings of relationships. There is no self realization if the bonds with others are severed.

The third consists of nourishing a certain level of spirituality. I do not mean by this that the person must belong to a particular religious confession. It can happen, but it is not indispensable. What is important is to be open to the human/spiritual capital that, contrary to material capital, is unlimited and made up of such values as truth, justice, solidarity and love.

Into this dimension comes the question that cannot be avoided: What, in the end, is the meaning of my life and of the whole universe? What can I hope for? Going back to cosmic dust, or to the shelter of a divine Uterus that accepts me just the way I am?

If the reply is the latter, self realization will bring profundity and an intimate happiness that no one can take away.

How to Deal with our Inner Angels and Demons

30/10/2011 Leonardo Boff1 comentário

The human being is a complex unit: it is simultaneously man-body, man-psyche and man-spirit. Let’s dwell for a moment on the man-psyche, that is, his inner world, made up of emotions and passions, light and shadows, dreams and utopias. Just as there is an outer universe, made up of order-disorder-new orders, of horrible devastations and of promising emergencies, there is also an inner world, inhabited by angels and demons. They display tendencies that can take us to madness and death, and impulses of generosity and love that can bring us self-realization and happiness.

As observed by C. G. Jung, who well knew the pathways of the human psyche: the journey to our own Center, due to these contradictions, can be longer and more dangerous than a trip to the Moon and the stars.

Among the philosophers of the human condition, there is a question that has never been satisfactorily resolved: what is the basic structure of our interior, of our psychic being? There are many schools of thought.

In short, we affirm the thesis that reason is not the first reality. Before it, there is a whole universe of passions and emotions that arouse the human being. Above reason there is intelligence, through which we sense totality, our openness to the infinite and the ecstasy of contemplating the Being. Reasons start with reason. Reason itself is without reason. Reason is simply there, indecipherable.

But reason carries us to the more primitive dimensions of our human reality, those that nourish reason and that run through all its expressions. Kantian pure reason in an illusion. Reason always comes saturated of emotion and passion, a fact accepted by modern cosmology. Contemporary cosmology includes in the concept of the universe not only energies, galaxies and stars, but also the presence of the spirit and of subjectivity.

To know always involves entering into an interested and affective communion with the object of knowledge. Supported by many other thinkers, I have always maintained that the basic form of the human being does not reside in the Cartesian cogito (in the, I think, therefore I am), but in the Platonic-Augustinian sense (in the I feel, therefore I am), in the profound feeling. This puts us in live contact with things, making us aware of being part of a larger whole, always affecting and being affected. More than world ideas and visions, it is the passions, strong feelings, germinal experiences, love, and their opposites as well, the rejections and the overwhelming hatreds, that move us and propel us forward.

Sensible reason finds its roots in the moment life appeared, some 3.8 thousand million years ago, when the first bacteria erupted and started to dialogue chemically with the environment, in order to survive. That process deepened when, more than 125 million years ago, the organized brain of the mammals appeared, a brain that carried caring, tenderness, affection and love for the newly born. The emotional reason reached a level of self consciousness and intelligence in the human being, because we also are mammals.

Western thought is logic-centric and anthropocentric, and always held emotion under suspicion, for fear of harming the objectivity of reason. In some sectors of culture, a sort of lobotomy was created, that is, a great insensibility for human suffering and for the problems which nature and planet Earth have endured.

We now realize that it is urgent to definitively include sensible and cordial reason, in addition to intellectual reason, which cannot be replaced. If we cannot get back to feeling, with affection and love for the Earth as our Mother and for us as her conscious and intelligent organ, it will be difficult for us to mobilize to save life, heal the wounds, and prevent catastrophes.

One of the undeniable values of the psychoanalytical tradition, starting with Sigmund Freud, its founding master, was to have scientifically established passion as the basis, at level zero, of human existence. The psychoanalyst works not from what the patient thinks but from his affective reactions, from his angels and demons, seeking to establish a certain equilibrium and a sustainable inner serenity.

The question is how to creatively take control of our volcanic passions. Freud dwells on the integration of the libido, Jung in the search for individuation, Adler in will power control, Carl Rogers in the development of personality, Abraham Maslow in the effort of self realization of latent potentialities. Other names could be mentioned, such as Lacan, Reich, Pavlov, Skinner, transpersonal psychology and cognitive behaviorism, among others.

What we can affirm is that independently of the different psychoanalytical schools, the man-psyche sees himself as forced to creatively integrate his inner universe, always in motion, with the diabolic and symbolic tendencies, destructive and constructive. Through a process of successes and mistakes, we discover our path.

No one could take our place. We are condemned to be the teachers and disciples of ourselves.

The Ilusion of a Green Economy

23/10/2011 Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

Everything we do to protect our living planet, Earth, against forces that upset her equilibrium and therefore cause global warming, is valid and must be supported. But the very expression, «global warming» masks phenomena such as the extended droughts that decimate the grain harvests, the great floods and hurricanes, water shortages, soil erosion, hunger, impoverishment of 15 of the 24 services numbered in the Evaluation of Ecosystems of the Earth (UNO) and which are responsible for the sustainability of the planet (water, energy, soil, seeds, fibers, etc..) The central question is not even that of saving the Earth. The Earth takes care of herself and, if necessary, she will do so by expelling us from her womb. But how are we to save ourselves and our civilization? That is the real question, to which the majority responds by shrugging their shoulders.

Lower carbon emissions, organic products, solar and wind power, reducing our intervention in nature’s rhythms, seeking to replace the resources used, recycling, everything that falls under the rubric of green economy is sought after and disseminated. And this mode of production should prevail.   Even so, we must not be deluded and lose our critical awareness. Green economy is discussed to avoid the issue of sustainability, because it is contrary to the present mode of production and consumption. But deep down, the green economy utilizes measures within the paradigm of dominating nature. The green and the not-green do not exist. There are elements that are toxic to the health of the Earth and society in various phases of the production of all products. Through the Analysis of the Cycle of Life we can demonstrate and monitor the complex interrelations between the different phases: extraction, transportation, production, use and discharge of each product, and its environmental impact. It is clear that the so-called green is not as green as it sounds. The green only represents a phase of processing. Production is never eco-friendly.

Take as an example ethanol, considered to be clean energy, and an alternative to fossil fuels and dirty energy from oil. Ethanol is clean only at the mouth of the fuel pump. All the processes of its production are highly polluting: the chemical products applied to the soil, the burnings, the transportation in big trucks that release gasses, the affluent liquids and the chaff. The pesticides kill bacteria and expel the earthworms that are fundamental to the regeneration of the soil; they only return after five years.

To ensure production of the goods necessary for life, in a way which neither stresses nor degrades nature, something more than the search for the green is required. The crisis is conceptual, not economic. Our relationship with the Earth has to change. We are part of Gaia, and through our careful actions we can help her become more conscious, and create a greater opportunity for assuring her vitality.

I see no path to saving ourselves other than that defined by The Earthcharter: «our common destiny calls us to search for a new beginning; this requires a change in the mind and in the heart; it demands a new awareness of global interdependency and of universal responsibility» (final).

Change of mind: to adopt a new concept of the Earth as Gaia. She does not belong to us, but to the group of eco-systems that serve the totality of life, regulating her biophysical base and the climates. She created the entire community of life, not just us. We are her conscious and responsible segment. The hardest work is done by our invisible partners, a true natural proletariat, the microorganisms, the bacteria and the fungi, of which there are thousands of millions in each tablespoon of Earth. They have effectively sustained life for 3.8 thousand million years already. Our relationship with the Earth should be like our relationship with our mothers: one of respect and gratitude. We should gratefully restore that which she gives us, and maintain her vital capacity.

Change of heart: besides the instrumental reason we use to organize production, we need the cordial and sensitive reason that expresses itself through the love of the Earth and by the respect for every being of creation, because they are our companions in the community of life, and by the feeling of reciprocity, of interdependency and of caring, because that is our mission.

Without this conversion we will not overcome the myopia of a green economy. Only new minds and new hearts will give birth to the future.