San Marino. Don Mangiarotti: “Will a swallow make spring?”
Will a swallow make spring? “Open” letter for free communication
I am pleased to see that San Marino TV finally hosts, among the press releases, the individual letter from a teacher. I will not go into the content, shareable or not, but I am delighted – and I hope it is not the classic “swallow (which) does not make spring” – for the fact that the ostracism towards those who write and communicate could be over judgments without appealing to “official” institutions or acronyms.
I remember that, in response to my request as to why my press releases were no longer published on San Marino TV, this was the answer: «Hi Don, no oversight. One choice. Our press releases section has become everyone’s notice board. In agreement with the management, we only publish press releases of political, cultural, social and economic forces, evaluating the newsworthiness of the release. And no longer ordinary citizens who want to express an opinion and who have the means to do so, see social media. Unfortunately it became ingestible. “
It seems to me that a multi-voiced debate, free and respectful, is a wealth for our reality, so that we can build relationships and dare to make profitable contributions, of course, with moderation and without “excommunication” or invitations to leave the public arena , if not from the same Republic, for those who have positions from the same Republic, for those who have even different positions.
Although in a different context, what Pope Francis recently affirmed, to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, is striking: “As I have been able to affirm on other occasions, I believe that it is a form of ideological colonization, which leaves no room for freedom of expression and which today increasingly presupposes the form of that cancel culture, which invades so many ambitions and public institutions. In the name of the protection of diversity, we end up by erasing the sense of every identity, with the risk of silencing the positions that defend a respectful and balanced idea of the various sensitivities. “
Speech commented by Antonio Polito in the Corriere della Sera: “A false idol, in short, could be glossed over; with the risk of an “ideological colonization that leaves no room for freedom of expression”. In short, Francis sees a liberal problem that seems to escape many liberals: namely that “a single thought is being elaborated, forced to deny history, or worse still to rewrite it on the basis of contemporary categories, every historical situation must be interpreted according to hermeneutics of the time, not today’s hermeneutics »”.
Of course, I cannot be the one to dictate the rules of communication of the various media, but I have always imagined a public service that is open to the variety of positions, in order to avoid that, due to silences and censorships and certain emphasis, we lend ourselves to exploitation with the risk of an “ideological colonization that leaves no room for freedom of expression”.
How many times have we wanted Marcuse’s words, how many times is it certainly questionable, but whose analysis is sometimes centered? “A comfortable, smooth, democratic non-freedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a sign of technical progress … The independence of thought, autonomy and the right to oppose are deprived of their fundamental critical function in a society that seems to be getting better and better capable of satisfying the needs of individuals thanks to the way it is organized. A society similitude requires a good right that its principles can and its institutions be accepted as they are, and reduce opposition to the task of discussing and promoting alternative behaviors within the status quo … In the presence of an increasingly higher standard of living , not conforming to the system seems to be socially useless, all the more so when it involves tangible economic and political disadvantages and endangers the fluid operation of the whole “(H. MARCUSE, Man on one dimension, p. 21s). Marcuse himself, in the introduction to his famous text, wrote: “Our means of mass communication are few and far between in selling particular interests as if they were those of all men in difficulty.” (Id., P. 7)
The pandemic and the vaccination problem have made it increasingly urgent to create spaces of authentic freedom of thought, positive and constructive relationships, human encounters without patterns or prejudices, openness to a new climate of conviviality that know how to take advantage of the presence of identities capable of diversity without fear and without inferiority complexes, but above all charged with that hope which, as a great pre-Socratic philosopher said: “If he does not hope he will not reach the hopeless, because otherwise he is nowhere to be found and unattainable”.
Gabriele Mangiarotti