RelatedLady in red on gray backgroundReligion and illiberal democracies

Some time ago I read a book entitled "The Transformation of the Modern Mind. How good intentions and bad ideas are dooming a generation to failure", written by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.

As I have nothing to do with the publication, I feel free to recommend its reading to our educational authorities, as well as to today's parents and educators, as it seems to me that they could extract interesting ideas to succeed in the important task of educating the new generations, in which our future is at stake.

It is a book published in the United States in 2018 by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and free speech expert Greg Lukianoff, which now appears in Spanish. The phenomena they describe are already perfectly detectable in Europe and, more specifically, in Spain.

Throughout its more than four hundred pages, which are a pleasure to read, they try to answer the question: are we adequately preparing young people to face adult life or are we protecting them too much? And they answer it by shedding some interesting light for all those interested in the education of the young.

The authors tell how some strange things started happening on campuses in the United States around 2015. Students claiming to defend progressive ideas booed politicians and lecturers at their university and prevented them from speaking. Does this situation ring any bells? I suppose it does to Pablo Iglesias and Rosa Díez, yes, since the former starred years ago in a boycott of a lecture given by the latter at a Spanish public university.

In increasing numbers, also in Spain, many students are reluctant to show their opinions and discuss them frankly. For some time now, what should be the "gymnasium of the mind" is full of people who shy away from debate and critical thinking, a curious phenomenon for a university.

As the authors describe in this book, the reason for this distressing situation is due to three misconceptions that have entered the subconscious of many young and not-so-young people who believe they are defending a generous and inclusive vision of education.

The first: what does not kill you makes you weaker (you must flee at all costs from any difficulty). The second: you must always trust your feelings (and therefore be extremely susceptible). And finally: life is a struggle between good and bad people (and you belong to the good ones).

As this courageous and rigorous book demonstrates, these notions, which at first glance may seem beneficial because they protect the individual and flatter his or her own instincts, actually contradict the most basic psychological principles about well-being.

Accepting these falsehoods, and thereby promoting a safety culture in which no one wants to listen to arguments they don't like, interferes with the social, emotional and intellectual development of young people. And it makes it more difficult for them to navigate the often complex and difficult path to adulthood.

Or, in Haidt's own words: "Many young people born after 1995, those who have been arriving at universities since 2013, are fragile, hypersusceptible and Manichean. They are not prepared to face life, which is conflict, nor democracy, which is debate. They are headed for failure.

This is coupled with the well-known general increase in anxiety and depression in adolescents that began around 2011, more prevalent in girls and young women than in boys and young men. This increase is manifested in rising rates of both hospital admissions for self-harm and suicides.

But fortunately the book does not limit itself to making an accurate and somber diagnosis of the difficulties present in our young people. It also provides valuable advice for us older people to help them overcome them successfully.

Like muscles or bones, children are "antifragile," meaning that they need stress and challenges to learn, adapt and grow. If we protect them from all kinds of potentially disruptive experiences - such as failing a subject - we will make them unable to cope with such events when they are older.

On the other hand, it is advisable to warn them against the most frequent cognitive distortions, so that they are not so easily deceived by the falsehoods of emotional reasoning (I am no good, my world is bleak and there is no hope for my future).

Finally, we should combat the culture of public accusation and the "us versus them" mentality, which makes us forget that, as Solzhenitsyn said, "the line that divides good and evil runs through the heart of every human being. Or as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks says, "human life is not radically divided between irredeemably good and irredeemably evil people".

Finally, the authors reaffirm with data the negative influence of the early availability of smartphones and social networks, the decline of "unsupervised free play" and "curriculum arms races" on the mental health of our young people. Significantly, they dedicate the book to their mothers, who did all they could to prepare them for the road.

RelatedLady in red on gray backgroundReligion and illiberal democracies

RelatedLenin in SpainReligion and illiberal democracies

A few weeks ago I was able to attend a conference on this work by Miguel Delibes (1920-2010) given by Professor Nieves Gómez at the Villanueva University in Madrid. I felt like reading this magnificent book that reflects the intense relationship that the Spanish writer had with his wife, Ángeles de Castro, with whom he had 7 children and the fulminating end of her in 1974, due to a brain disease. It is a personal and very delicate book, written in an intimate style. They had met when they were very young and married in 1946, in Valladolid (Delibes was 26 years old and Ángeles, 20). It was, then, almost 30 years of very fruitful marriage, not only because of their children, but also because of Delibes' literary vocation, which was born after their marriage, probably due to her faith in his talent: "I was moved by his confidence in my possibilities. I imagined that if I had excelled at painting anywhere, by doing it properly I could become a genius."

The book is a reflection of his personal life, under the identity of a painter who has lost his inspiration after the death of his wife and muse. He then takes refuge in drink with great nostalgia (mostly because it makes him have moments when he thinks he can see his wife again). It transmits the rich personality of Ángeles de Castro and a concrete sample of how the feminine vital reason is. She was a determined woman, with a harmonious figure -which the 7 pregnancies did not spoil-, with her eyes wide open to reality and the capacity to improve the world around her.

Someone who liked to give surprises and receive them, with a natural elegance and a "selective intuition". innate. A woman "of complicit gaze", which had "an admirable ability to create ambience" and that it was "enemy of spreading bad news". But this necessarily had to have its counterpart: "When she faded away, everything languished around", "her joy was missing".A person who had "an admirable ability to create ambience" and that in her travels she was able to go beyond the stuffy academic environments (which Delibes did not like). He recalls how she had played castanets at a faculty meeting at Yale University and had enlivened the gathering.

She had great personal charm and people skills. At a certain point in the book, it is said: "Aesthetics count too." The protagonist of the story tells his daughter that "your mother's power of seduction was rapturous." and in another fragment, "his faith made me fertile because the creative energy was somehow transmissible". She was a woman of enormous kindness and ability to inhabit the lives of others: "He had the ability to intrude in other people's homes, even to interrupt his neighbor's sleep, without irritating him, perhaps because deep down everyone owed him something". Someone who disliked vulgarity and bureaucracy, as she was impervious to their charms. A woman with an innate talent for interpersonal relationships and for receiving confidences. In this sense, the writer highlights her "his tact for coexistence, his original criteria about things, his delicate taste, his sensitivity".. One of his tips in times of low creativity was to "Don't be dazed; let yourself live.".

A woman with a fine musical ear, who could make herself understood within a few days of staying in a foreign country and who was able to have rhythmHis was an intuitive ear that sometimes allowed him to capture the unexpressed". A woman who hated routine and knew how to make every day a unique event. She was a woman who knew how to be happy. When she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, her expression was: Today these things are fixable," he said. At worst, I've been happy for 48 years; some people can't be happy for forty-eight hours in a lifetime." Someone who did not mind accumulating years (and experience), because not only do the years go by, but they stay: "Every morning, when she opened her eyes, she would ask herself: Why am I happy? And immediately, she would smile to herself and say: 'I have a granddaughter.

Delibes leaves us in this work fascinating reflections on life, on true knowledge, on beauty, describing his wife as a person with the gift of discovering it in the most precarious places and even creating it: "From whom did he learn then that a rose in a vase could be more beautiful than a bouquet of roses or that beauty could be hidden in a gutted old wall clock filled with books?" As it could not be otherwise, the book is a profound reflection on death, but not so much in the biological sense, but biographically, as the loss of a shared life. And this, with delicately achieved moments, as when, on the eve of the operation, the sick woman reads a poem by the Italian writer Giuseppe Ungaretti, entitled "Agony":  To die like the thirsty larks/ in the mirage. / Or, like the quail/ once across the sea/ in the first bushes.../ But not to live on lamentation/ like a blinded goldfinch.

Undoubtedly, it is a reflection on the complementarity that exists between men and women, and how we balance each other. In this sense, he highlights his woman's "vivid imagination and a delicate sensibility. She was balanced, different; exactly the renewal that my blood needed". In another passage, he states concisely but accurately: "Ours was a company of two, one produced and the other managed."

This particular work is an in-depth reflection on daily happiness, on how the key to it lies in continued coexistence: "We were together and it was enough. When she left, I saw it even more clearly: those conversations without words, those glances without a plan, without expecting great things from life, were simply happiness".

The book is also a reflection of a daily religiosity, lived by Ángeles de Castro: "Your mother always kept her belief alive. Before the operation she confessed and received communion. Her faith was simple but stable. She never based her faith on mystical accesses or theological problems. She was not a devout woman, but she was loyal to her principles: she loved and knew how to put herself in the place of the other. She was a Christian and accepted the mystery. Her image of God was Jesus Christ. She needed a human image of the Almighty with whom she could understand herself".

The work also speaks -indirectly- of the vicissitudes of Spanish society at the time (1970s): student strikes, arrests, revolts, torture in prisons. In this sense, the writer refers to the arrest of the couple's two children, Léo and Ana, who is the painter's interlocutor. A mention of Franco appears at a moment when the painter and his wife visit their children in prison. In this sense, the artist's wife says: ' "That man is not going to be eternal"., as if taking him down from the pedestal'. It is also, certainly, a work that carries an implicit criticism of uniform and standardized education, which does not allow the development of the personality: "He was irritated by the structure of the career, by the indoctrinated professors, by the imposed ideas. His head was moving too fast, he was ahead of his mentors'."

Other themes that were always in Delibes' mind: The combination of the rural and the modern: "It was necessary to insert the modern into the rural without resorting to violence." The loneliness of the elderly, as when he recounts his wife's ability to give company to the elderly: "These crazy, lonely old men were never absent from your mother's life: [...] They were all irreparable old men, caught unawares by the lack of solidarity of modern life. They felt lost in the maelstrom of lights and noises, and it seemed as if she, like a good fairy, was taking them by the hand, one by one, to transfer them to the other shore". Communication between generations: "He was attentive to everyone, both to the old, with their cominías, and to the adolescents with their equivocal intimacies. He did not bargain for his devotion".

All in all, a book worth reading.

RelatedLenin in SpainReligion and illiberal democracies

At this point no one disputes that the brotherhoods are not foreign bodies to society, but are part of it and are affected by the same problems.

In the analysis of today's society, there is a strong current of relativism and a populist discourse that leads man to surrender his freedom to the state in exchange for the guarantee of a certain welfare; although in the end he ends up without freedom and welfare.

In a social environment as liquid as the one in which we live, the brotherhoods should not position themselves corporately in the political struggle, but they should give criteria to the brothers (CIC c. 298) so that they can have a positive impact on society.

They should not present technical solutions for the resolution of social problems, nor should they propose systems or express partisan preferences.

Among the missions that the Code of Canon Law assigns to the brotherhoods is the Christian perfection of their members; to fulfill this mission it is necessary to identify the differential notes of the person and to strengthen them.

They must proclaim the moral principles and give criteria on any human issue, including those concerning the social order, to the extent that the fundamental rights of the person, of their brothers and sisters, demand it.

This analysis of society is not done in a vacuum, but from a certain anthropology, more or less explicit, so that the management and development of the brotherhoods must be the external manifestation of a firm doctrinal foundation and a solid inner life of those in charge.

However, there are sisterhoods that are buying into the dominant discourse of sociology. kofrade, centered on the most gratifying topics - processional procession, annual worship services, social activities - and isolating themselves from the debate of ideas, which they consider foreign to the life of the brotherhood. They thus assume a vision of reality without foundation and centered on feelings. A friendly and comfortable model, but one that weakens the brotherhoods, making them vulnerable.

The Second Vatican Council proposes to the faithful "the Christianization of society from within" (LG No. 31) and the Code of Canon Law transfers this imperative to the brotherhoods (CIC c. 298).

In order to work along these lines, the Church continually provides everyone, including the sisterhoods, with the doctrinal foundations for the necessary social dialogue.

Lately it has done so through two exceptional and very current figures: St. John Paul II and St. Edith Stein, Doctor of the Church.

Both move in the realm of personalism: the meaning of human existence is recognized to the extent that the person [the brotherhoodto attend to the task that has been assigned to you [its purposeThe first is to reach its perfection.

Consequently, the "quality" of the person [of the brotherhoodIt does not depend on their compliance with certain norms, nor on the observance of customs and customs of the confraternity, but on their behavior being in accordance with their nature.

It is the study of action that reveals the person and his or her development as a person.: "every person [each siblingThe "action is perfected in action, to the extent that this action conforms to the natural law, imprinted in man as a participation in the divine nature". (Karol Wojtyla, "Person and Action").

In the brotherhood, as in society, each one must put his abilities at the service of others, aware that the ultimate criterion of a person's value is not what he brings to the community, to the family, to his brotherhood, "... but what he brings to the community, to the family, to his brotherhood, "...".but whether or not this contribution responds to God's call, whether or not it is in accordance with his nature." (Edith Stein, "The structure of the human person").

This approach is a bit laborious to assume, but it provides the Elder Brother and other leaders of the brotherhood with a special freedom and serenity in their actions, even when it might be shocking to some.

It is very likely that neither of these two saints, of solid intellectual formation, were aware of the importance of their personalist approaches for the brotherhoods, but they have opened a very interesting path, full of opportunities, for the development of the same. Now it is a matter of following them.