Categoria: Espiritualidade

Habitar a Terra

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Faz-se uma constatação triste: o tipo de mundo no qual vivemos é tudo menos fraternal. O que predomina é o poder que, logo de início, estabelece uma divisão entre quem tem poder e quem não tem poder. Trata-se do poder-dominação, político, econômico, ideológico, midiático, também familiar e outros. Desta divisão nasce toda sorte de desigualdades: uns se sobrepondo aos outros, a maioria colocada no andar de baixo e uns poucos no andar de cima.

A desigualdade significa injustiça social que é eticamente inaceitável. Para as pessoas de fé, a injustiça social representa um pecado contra o Criador porque ofende a Ele e a seus filhos e filhas. Portanto, estamos submetidos a uma situação que não agrada a nós e também não agrada a Deus.

Grande é a busca humana por uma sociedade livre, igualitária, justa e fraterna. Em nome dela se fizeram as grandes revoluções, sempre derrotadas, mas nunca definitivamente vencidas, pois o anelo humano por liberdade, igualdade e fraternidade é imorredouro. Haverá sempre pessoas e movimentos sociais que manterão vivo este sonho e procurarão concretizá-lo na história.

Muitos são os motivos que fundam a fraternidade. Primeiramente somos todos portadores da mesma humanidade, pouco importa a origem, a cor da pele, a religião e a visão de mundo. Todos possuímos o mesmo código genético de base, presente em todos os seres vivos: os vinte aminoácidos e as quatro bases nitrogenadas. Dito numa linguagem pedestre: somos construídos por 20 tijolinhos diferentes e por quatro tipos de cimento. Combinados os tijolinhos e amalgamados pelos vários tipos de cimento, emerge a biodiversidade. Quer dizer, existe um laço de fraternidade real entre todos os seres vivos e especialmente entre os humanos. A fraternidade é universal, a natureza incluída.

Outra razão da fraternidade é o fato de todos os seres, também os humanos, possuírem algo em comum: viemos do barro da Terra. Homo, ser humano, procede de humus terra boa e fértil. Da mesma forma, o nosso ancestral bíblico Adam  se deriva de adamah que quer dizer: terra arável e fecunda. Desse barro o Criador nos tirou e moldou como suas criaturas, todos irmanados entre si.

Estas raízes comuns clamam para vivermos em fraternidade universal e ilimitada. Este foi o sonho de Jesus advertindo que ninguém seja chamado de mestre, poque todos somos irmãos e irmãs. A fraternidade sem fronteiras foi a busca ardente de São Francisco de Assis que chamava a todos os seres da natureza com o doce nome de irmãos e irmãs. Foi conversar com o sultão muçulmano no Egito porque queria uma fraternidade universal que implicava incluir cristãos e não cristãos. É o grande sonho de Francisco de Roma, o atual Papa que escreveu uma corajosa encíclica Fratelli tutti, “todos irmãos e irmãs” como resposta a um mundo globalizado que cria sócios, mas não irmãos e irmãs, nos faz virtualmente próximos, mas realmente distantes por causa da riqueza de alguns à custa da pobreza de muitos.

Dentro do mundo atual, fundado sobre o poder-dominação sobre pessoas, sobre povos e sobre a natureza, a fraternidade universal não possui condições de realização. No entanto, se não conhece viabilidade, ela pode ser uma atitude permanente, um modo de ser, um espírito que impregna todas as relações entre as pessoas e também as institucionais, de participação igualitária e cooperativa. Tudo isso à condição de renunciarmos ao poder-dominação e de termos humildade, não como uma virtude ascética, mas como um molhar nossas raízes no mesmo humus de onde a natureza e nós garantimos nossa existência, vendo cada ser e cada pessoa um irmão e uma irmã, com a mesma origem e o mesmo destino. Entre irmãos e irmãs vigora amor, cuidado e um profundo sentimento de pertença.

Devido às ameaças sérias que pesam sobre a Mãe Terra super-explorada e a dilaceração do tecido social das nações, a fraternidade sem fronteiras, como um novo tipo de presença no mundo, nos poderá salvar. Este livro Habitar a Terra: qual o caminho para a fraternidade universal quer trazer ao debate a urgência do amor social e da fraternidade universal, pelo menos como um modo de ser terno e despojado da vontade de poder-dominação, criando um laço de afeto e de cuidado entre todos do mundo natural e do mundo humano.

Leonardo Boff, 1938, doutorou-se em Munique em teologia sistemática. Foi professor de teologia por 22 anos no Instituo Teológico Franciscano de Petrópolis, posteriormente doutorou-se em filosofia na UERJ e foi professor de Ética, Filosofia da Religião e Ecologia Filosófica na Universidade do Rio de Janeiro. Foi professor visitante em várias universidades europeias. Foi editor religioso por muitos anos da Editora Vozes e coordenou a publicação da obra completa de C.G.Jung.  É portador do prêmio Nobel alternativo da Paz de 2001 pelo Parlamento sueco. É detentor de vários títulos de doutorado honoris causa de distintas Universidades. Escreveu cerca de cem livros nas áreas da teologia, da filosofia, da espiritualidade e da ecologia.

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The future of human life on Earth depends on us

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Covid-19, by affecting all humans, has given us a signal that can be interpreted. Nothing in nature is random. The mechanistic view that nature and the Earth have no purpose is outdated. Being living beings, they are bearers of meaning and form part of the general picture of the cosmogenic process that is already 13.7 billion years old.

If all the elements had not been subtly articulated, over billions of years, we would not be here to write about these things. What is the most immediate meaning that nature is revealing to us with the attack of the coronavirus? The meaning comes to us in the form of an exhortation:

                                                   

 “Stop the systematic and depraved assault on ecosystems, forests and jungles, soils, waters, biodiversity. Your industrialist and extractivist mega-corporations, your mining companies, corporate agribusiness in association with the agrochemical industry, the ejectors of giga-tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the causes of the erosion of biodiversity, you are destroying the bases that sustain their own life; they are digging their own grave within a predictable time frame; not the peasant families, the poor of the land, but you are destroying the habitats of thousands of viruses present in animals; seeking to survive, they found in humans a host for their survival at the cost of your life. The false project of unlimited growth/development of its consumerist culture can no longer be supported by nature and the Earth, an old planet limited in goods and services; As a reaction to the violence against me – nature and Mother Earth – I have already sent them several viruses that attacked them, but they have not seen a sign in them, they have not learned to read them, nor have they drawn the lesson they contain. You only think about going back to the old and perverse normality; That is why I tell you: either you change your relationship with nature and with Mother Earth, a relationship of care, of respect for its limits, of self-limitation of your voracity, feeling effectively part of nature and not its alleged owners, or they will be ravaged by even deadlier viruses; I warn you: one of them may be so resistant that it would show the total ineffectiveness of current vaccines and a large part of humanity would be consumed by the Next Big One, the last and fatal one. The Earth and life on it, especially microscopic life, will not perish. The living Earth will continue to revolve around the Sun and regenerate itself, but without you. Therefore, take care as we are in the time of the countdown. Nature is a school, but you have not wanted to enroll in it and therefore, irrationally, you are paving the way that will lead you to your own destruction. And I say no more.”

The pandemic has affected humanity globally. Since the form is global, the solution should obviously also be global: discussed and decided globally. Where is there a plural and global center to think and seek solutions to global problems? The UN does not meet its founding objectives, as it has become an agency that defends the interests of powerful nations, which have the right to veto, particularly in the larger body that is the Security Council.

We are hostages of the obsolete vision of national sovereignty, which has not yet realized the new phase of human history, planetization, which makes all nations interconnected and all of them together have a common destiny. We are all in the same boat: either we are all saved or no one is saved, as Pope Francis warned.

This is the true meaning of globalization or planetization. The time of the nations passed. We have to build the Common Home within which the different cultural nations fit, always intertwined, forming a single Common Home, including nature. The pandemic has made it clear how inhuman and cruel we can be: the rich took advantage of the situation and have become much richer while the poor have become much poorer. The current culture is competitive and very uncooperative. Profit counts more than life.

Vaccines have been unevenly distributed, leaving the poor exposed to contagion and death. An entire continent, with more than a billion people, such as Africa, has been forgotten. Barely 10% of its population has been vaccinated. Death is rampant especially among children due to the insensitivity and inhumanity of our globalized civilization. It is the empire of barbarism, which denies any sense of human civilization. No wonder there are analysts, especially biologists, who ask themselves: do we still have the right to live on this planet? Our ways of being, producing and consuming threaten all other species.

We have inaugurated a new geological era, the Anthropocene and even the Necrocene, that is to say: the great mortal threat to life on this planet does not come from a grazing meteor but from the barbarized human being, especially among the most opulent strata of the population. Among the poor and marginalized, humanity, solidarity, mutual help, care for common things are still preserved, as has been proven during this time of global pandemic.

The outbreak of Covid-19 is an invitation to reflection: why have we reached the current point, threatened by an invisible virus that has brought the militaristic powers and their fanciful imperial drive to their knees? Where are we going? What changes must we make if we want to guarantee a future for ourselves and for our descendants? The global trillionaires (0.1% of humanity) dream of a total radicalization of the order of capital, imposing on everyone a cybernetic despotism that will monitor and repress all opponents and guarantee their fortunes.

The stomach of Mother Earth will not digest such a monstrosity. Together with the indispensable human resistance, it will annul their pretensions, denying them the ecological bases, uncontrollable by them, for this perverse project.

As never before in history, the fate of our lives depends on the decisions we must make collectively. Otherwise, we will know the path already traveled by the dinosaurs. We don’t want that. But we are at a crossroads.

 

*Leonardo Boff has written Caring for the Earth – protecting life: how to escape the end of the world, Record, Rio de Janeiro 2010; with J.Moltmann, Is there hope for the threatened creation? Vozes, Petrópolis 2013.

¿Cuánta tierra necesita un hombre? La mente capitalista

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Sentado en círculo con los rústicos peones de su hacienda Yásnaya Poliana, Leo Tolstói (1828-1910) el gran escritor ruso, les contó la siguiente historia que me permito resumir para ejemplificar cómo funciona la cabeza de un capitalista.

Había un campesino pobre, pero muy deseoso de poseer cada vez más tierra para cultivar y hacerse rico. Pensó: “Voy a hacer un pacto con el diablo. Este me va a dar suerte”, dijo a su mujer, que torció el gesto y le advirtió: “Marido mío, cuidado con el diablo, nunca sale nada bueno de un pacto con él; ese deseo tuyo de hacerte rico puede echarte a perder”.

Pero, ante la insistencia de su marido, resolvió acompañarlo. Así que partieron, llevando unas pocas pertenencias.

Supieron que lejos de allí había un grupo de gitanos que vendían tierras baratas. Y se encaminaron hacia aquel lugar. Cuando llegaron, allí estaba de pie el diablo, bien trajeado, dándose aires de rico comerciante de tierras. El campesino y su mujer saludaron educadamente a los gitanos. Cuando iban a expresar su deseo de adquirir tierras, el diablo sin ceremonias se anticipó y dijo:

“Buen señor, veo que viene de lejos y tiene un gran deseo de hacer fortuna. Tengo una excelente propuesta para usted, mejor que la de los gitanos. Le propongo lo siguiente: usted pone una cantidad razonable de dinero en una bolsa aquí a mi lado. Todo lo que usted recorra a lo largo de un día, desde el amanecer hasta la puesta del sol, siempre que esté de vuelta antes de ponerse el sol, esa tierra recorrida será suya. En caso contrario, perderá las tierras y el dinero de la bolsa”.

Los ojos del campesino, ávido de riqueza, brillaron de emoción y dijo:

“Me parece una propuesta excelente. Tengo piernas fuertes. Acepto. Mañana bien temprano, al amanecer, me pondré a correr y todo el territorio que mis piernas consigan alcanzar será mío”.

El diablo, siempre malicioso, sonrió contento.

Y así fue. Bien temprano, apenas el sol despuntó en el horizonte, el campesino, lleno de codicia, echó a correr. Corría y corría mucho. Saltó cercas, atravesó riachuelos y, no contento, ni siquiera se paró a descansar. Veía delante de sí una encantadora planicie verde y pensó: “aquí voy a plantar trigo en abundancia”. Mirando a la izquierda, se abría un valle muy plano y pensó: “aquí puedo hacer una plantación de lino para dar y vender”.

Subió, con dificultad, una pequeña colina y vio que allá abajo había un campo de tierra virgen. Y pensó: “quiero también aquella tierra. Ahí voy a criar ganado y ovejas y voy a llenar las alforjas de las burras con mucho dinero”.

Y así recorrió muchos kilómetros, nunca satisfecho con lo que había conquistado, pues los lugares que veía le atraían y alimentaban aún más su deseo incontrolado de poseerlos también.

De repente miró al cielo y se dio cuenta de que el sol se estaba ocultando detrás de una montaña. Se dijo a sí mismo:

“No hay tiempo que perder. Tengo que volver corriendo, si no, pierdo todos los terrenos recorridos y, encima, el dinero. “Un día de dolor, una vida de amor”, pensó, como decía su abuelo.

Se puso a correr con una velocidad desmedida para sus cansadas piernas, pero tenía que correr sin reparar en los límites de sus tensos músculos. Miraba siempre la posición de sol, cerca ya del horizonte, enorme y rojo como la sangre. Pero aún no se había ocultado totalmente.    Cansadísimo, corría sin parar y ya ni sentía las piernas. Con tristeza pensó: “tal vez abarqué demasiadas tierras y puedo perder todo. Pero sigamos adelante”.

Viendo, a lo lejos al diablo, solemnemente de pie y a su lado la saca de dinero, recobró un poco el ánimo, seguro de que llegaría antes de ponerse el sol. Reunió todas las energías que tenía e hizo un último esfuerzo. Saltó una cerca, atravesó un riachuelo y corría, casi volando. No muy lejos de la llegada, se tiró hacia delante perdiendo casi el equilibrio. Recuperado, dio todavía unos pasos largos.

Y entonces, extenuado y ya sin fuerzas, se desplomó en el suelo. Sangraba por la boca y todo su cuerpo estaba cubierto de arañazos y de sudor. Y murió.

El diablo, malvadamente, solo sonrió y tomó la bolsa de dinero. Indiferente al destino del muerto, aun se dio el trabajo de hacer una fosa del tamaño del campesino y lo metió dentro. Eran solo siete palmos de tierra, la parte menor que le tocaba de todos los terrenos recorridos. No necesitaba más que eso. Su mujer, petrificada, presenciaba todo hecha un mar de lágrimas».

Este cuento nos recuerda al poeta pernambucano João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999) que nos dejó la conmovedora obra Muerte y Vida Severina (1995). En el funeral del labrador dice:

“Esta cueva en que estás, con palmos medida, es la cuenta menor que sacaste en vida; es la parte que te cabe de este latifundio”.

La mujer del campesino tenía razón al advertir : “Cuidado con el diablo, pues te impulsa a tener más dinero cada vez y luego acaba contigo y toma todo tu dinero”. Es la lógica del capital. En él vivimos y sufrimos. Avanzando sobre los bosques y las selvas él nos trajo la Covid-19.

¿Cómo nos libraremos de él?

*Leonardo Boff es escritor y ha escrito: Habitar la Tierra:¿cuál es el camino para la fraternidad universal? Vozes 2021.

Traducción de Mª José Gavito Milano

“The iron cage” of Capital will produce ” a polar, icy, dark and arduous night”?                                                                  

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We are still in 2021, a year that did not end because Covid-19 cancelled the counting of time by continuing its lethal work. 2022 could not, for now, be inaugurated. The fact is that the virus has brought all powers, especially the militaristic ones, to their knees, as their arsenal of death has become totally ineffective.

However, the genius of capitalism, regarding the pandemic, has caused the transnationalized capitalist class to restructure itself through the Great Reset, expanding the new digital economy through the integration of the giants: Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Zoom, and others with the military-industrial-security complex.

Such an event represents the formation of an immense power, the like of which has never been seen before. Let us note that this is an economic power of a capitalist nature, and that it therefore realizes its essential purpose, that of maximizing profits in an unlimited way, exploiting, without consideration, human beings and nature. Accumulation is not a means to a good life but an end in itself, that is to say, accumulation for accumulation’s sake, which is irrational.

The consequence of this radicalization of capitalism confirms what a sociologist from the University of California at Santa Barbara, William I. Robinson, in a recent article, has well observed (ALAI 20/12/2021): “As the world shakes off the pandemic, there will be more inequality, conflict, militarism, and authoritarianism, and as social upheaval and civil strife increase, the dominant groups will seek to expand the global police state to contain the mass discontent from below”. In effect, artificial intelligence with its billions upon billions of algorithms will be used to control each person and the entire society. Where will this brutal power take humanity?

Knowing the inexorable logic of the capitalist system, Max Weber, one of those who best analyzed it critically, shortly before his death, asserted: “What awaits us is not the blooming of autumn, but a polar, icy, dark and arduous night (Le Savant et le Politique, Paris 1990, p. 194). He coined a strong expression that strikes at the heart of capitalism: it is an “iron cage” (Stahlartes Gehäuse) that cannot be broken and, therefore, can lead us to a great catastrophe (cf. the pertinent analysis of M. Löwy, La jaula de hierro: Max Weber y el marxismo weberiana, México 2017). This opinion is shared by great names such as Thomas Man, Oswald Spengler, Ferdinand Tönnies, Eric Hobsbown, among others.

Various world-society models are being discussed for the post-pandemic. The most important ones, besides the Great Reset of the billionaires, are: green capitalism, ecosocialism, the Andean bien vivir and convivir, biocivilization, of various groups and Pope Francis, among others. It is not up to me here to detail such projects, which I have done in the book Cvid-19:A Mãe Terra contra-ataca a Humanidade (Vozes 2020). I would only say: either we change the paradigm of production, consumption, coexistence, and especially the relationship with nature, with respect and care, feeling part of it and not over it as owners and lords, or else Max Weber’s prognosis will come true: we may from 2030 to at most 2050, experience an ecological-social Armageddon extremely harmful to life and to the Earth.

In this sense, my feeling of the world tells me that the one who will destroy the order of capital, with its economy, politics, and culture, would not be any mill or school of critical thinking. It would be the Earth itself, a limited planet that can no longer support a project of unlimited growth. The visible climate change, object of discussion and decision making (practically none) of the last UN COPs, the increasing depletion of natural goods and services, fundamental for life (The Earth Overshoot) and the threat of breaking the main nine bounderies of development that cannot be broken at the price of the collapse of civilization, are some indicators of an imminent tragedy.

A significant number of climate experts say that we are too late. With the already accumulated greenhouse gases we will not be able to contain the catastrophe, only, with science and technology, to lessen its disastrous effects. But the great irreversible crisis will come. That is why they have become skeptics and even techno-fatalists.

Are we resigned pessimists or, in Nietzche’s sense, supporters of “heroic resignation”? I think, as a pre-Socratic said: we should expect the unexpected, because if we don’t expect it, when it comes, we will not perceive it. The unexpected may occur, within the quantum perspective assumed by the new cosmoloy: the current suffering due to the systemic crisis will not be in vain; it is accumulating benign energies that, upon reaching a certain level of complexity and accumulation, will make a leap to another, higher order with a new horizon of hope for life and for the living planet, Gaia, Mother Earth. Paulo Freire coined the expression to hope: not to keep hoping that one day the situation will improve, but to create the conditions for hope not to be empty, but to make it effective through our efforts.

I believe that this leap, with our participation, specily  the victims of the exploitetion of the capitalism, can occur and would be within the possibilities of the history of the universe and the Earth: from the current destructive chaos, we can move on to a generative chaos of a new way of being and inhabiting planet Earth.

This is what I believe and hope for, reinforced by the word of Revelation that states: “God created all things out of love because He is the passionate lover of life” (Wisdom 11,26). We will still live under the benevolent light of the sun.

Leonardo Boff, ecotheologist, philosopher, and writer, has written The painful birth of Mother Earth: a society of fraternity without borders and of social friendship, Vozes 2021; Inhabiting the Earth: what is the way to universal fraternity?  Vozes 2121.