close-up
prelude to meeting

The judgment that makes men of us
The Rimini Meeting is just around the corner. From August 23rd to the 29th, the debate will be open on this year’s theme: “Knowledge is always an Event.” What is the challenge of this theme? “The discovery of what we are and of why we are," says the Italian journalist Oscar Giannino, the guest who will conclude the event. He tells Traces how  personal and collective history is played out in the “prime question in life”: getting to know things.

by Alberto Savorana

Born in Turin in 1961, he earned a Law degree before specializing in Economics at the Chicago Business School. Oscar Giannino is one of the keenest observers of the financial and economic scene in Italy and in the rest of the world. He took up journalism working for the Italian daily La Voce Repubblicana, official organ of the Republican Party, for which he was official spokesman for some years. He has worked for a number of other newspapers and recently began hosting a daily radio program on the Italian channel Radio 24. He will take part in the presentation of Fr. Giussani’s recently published book Qui e ora [Here and Now]on the last day of the Rimini Meeting.

In the run-up to the Rimini Meeting, he agreed to discuss this year’s theme and to read the situation after the financial crisis in light of the factor most neglected by the analysts: the human person, in the concreteness of his humanity. In this interview, he focuses attention on the need to judge because without a judgment, there can be no knowledge and no experience, and therefore no human person.

Those who read and hear you speak note a characteristic trait in your cultural position: an attentive observation of reality and a taste for judging, both rather rare in the present-day panorama. How did you come to have this attitude?
I have to reply by referring to the course of my life, because “first” I happened to modify very gradually the way of analyzing and criticizing reality with respect to the vision of the world in which I grew up. Later, and only later, once the change had come about, did I come to grasp the question in more general terms. Then, I happened to read Fr. Giussani’s address to the CL University Students in Novegro, Italy, on October 30, 1975. As he was speaking of love as the category that lies at the basis of life, Fr. Giussani said, “The gravest question about love is not at the level of the heart, but at the level of judgment, because the root of the heart is judgment. The ancient scholastics said, ‘Nihil volitum quin praecognitum’–‘Nothing is desired unless it is first known.’” He then goes to the point, as if with a razor: “The phenomenon by which man gets to know things as man, that fixes the object toward which the steps of his journey are directed and the goal of its dynamics, is called judgment. The prime question in life is value judgment.”

What has this to do with the course of your life?
In a world of commentators for whom meticulous precision becomes a veil covering widespread hypocrisy, the concern to keep everybody happy, appeasing monopolists and free marketers, the State that taxes and angry taxpayers, I left politics fifteen years ago and took up journalism, deciding that political correctness (not wanting to sever important relationships, perhaps in view of a career in the upper echelons of a big daily) wasn’t for me. Yes, value judgment is the prime question in life. No knowledge of reality can be reached without an argument drawn from a value judgment. One who judges often makes mistakes. When, on deeper and successive bases, I come to realize that I have been mistaken in making a judgment, I have learned to say that I am the one who went wrong, and not because I was following a particular set or lobby.

The cultural and social context does not favor a journey of knowledge of reality, so much so that all too often we find ourselves “blocked” on the surface of things, incapable of knowing how things really are, extraneous and indifferent to what is going on. The title of the Rimini Meeting 2009, “Knowledge Is Always an Event,” lies at this level of the question and takes up what for Fr. Giussani was a constant concern for the precedence of reality and event (coming across something that happens and that provokes the “I”) in the phenomenon of cognition. What does this year’s theme suggest to you?
It suggests the essence of the discovery of what we truly are, and of why we are. Once I considered it quite differently, child as I was of an extremely secularist and anticlerical vision that precluded me from a true confrontation on the themes of Christianity as a historical and religious phenomenon and, naturally, on faith itself. One of the classic justifications I gave myself and others was a literal interpretation of the First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 1, where it says that God scoffs at human reason and human criteria. My attitude was, “You can keep a God like that for yourselves, because man’s reason is what makes him great, and if God scoffs at it, then He doesn’t exist, or else He is a God of the losers.”
But this is not Christianity according to Catholic tradition.
In fact, Christianity is not that literal version that I had stopped short at. It is the Protestants, to use rather extreme terms, who read that passage convinced that faith is based upon itself, since its truth is self-evident. On the contrary, for Christianity, faith does not become something truly lived if it does not strike and penetrate the intelligence I have of myself and of things–that is to say, reason. The process of verification of the event-knowledge brings into play each one’s originary experiences, in such a way that each one of us can elaborate his own knowledge of things, developing this knowledge toward certain ends. This is culture–a free process of self-examination in which the “I” accepts to become–as a source of knowledge of reality and thus, ideally, the center of the world–a mirror in which other free sources of light, thought and real facts are reflected.

Someone could object that you are being too philosophical…
I don’t think so. I think, rather, that the relativism which impregnated the terrible 20th century, child of the crisis of modernity and of the prevalence of language over reality, condemns culture to being merely a descriptive shelf on which the prevalence of Non-being drowns, rather than an instrument for continuous transformation based on the person who wants Being.

Why on earth is it so difficult to learn from experience?
I don’t think it is difficult. Let’s say that, unfortunately, the media and cultural environments are marked by the prevalence of types of learning already “classified” by schools of thought whose authority is unchallenged, although there is no on-going verification of the results, in a way that recalls those who defended Aristotle’s theory against Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. The philistinism of our times takes the form of a “virtuism,” which in the official culture is used to cover up the theory according to which redistribution comes before production, the collective before the person, and European ties before our specific economies.

We are all immersed in a cultural context that identifies knowledge with science and tends to apply the scientific method of quantity and measurement to every aspect of human, individual and social reality. What are your ideas about this?
This is the long-term heritage of a conflict that in Europe has its own historical reasons unlike the rest of the Western world. It explains why things are different in the United States, where it is possible for God to be at the center of public life without anyone complaining about violation of freedom of conscience, as happens here in Europe in some circles of the press. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio was published as long ago as 1998. I would say that an honest reading of it is what all those bad teachers sorely lack.

The financial crisis that has brought the world economy to its knees is the outcome of economic legislation presented as scientific, therefore perfect in describing reality, set up by the world’s best business schools, in some of which you yourself studied. What have you learned from this crisis?
For years, when I would question those who had studied with me, but were nevertheless younger than I was, and had become investment bankers, I was continually told that my perplexities about the lessons handed down by the teachers at the Chicago Business School showed why I was doing a job that was less promising and lower paid. Even today, I don’t know how many of them have changed their minds. Two or three generations of the world’s most refined minds grew up on the conviction that models of financial risk put together by intermediaries were the realization of earthly paradise. It will not be easy to change the minds of 500 academics and bankers who really do count in the world when it comes to influence over those who today specialize in corporate finance.

Is there a point from which we can start over again?
I have little faith in homologating planetary architecture in question of financial watchdogs. They are the latest of a series of products of political illusion born of the Enlightenment. I have much more faith in reforms based on self-regulation from the base, following various national and continental models, without doing away with the differences between economic regimes and systems. Finally, I believe very much in the need for a great cultural revolution. The 21st century needs a theory of financial discount based on the enormous potential of human capital, after the second half of the 20th century made us the gift of a discount based essentially on the immaterial and the so-called intangibles.

What do you think of Pope Benedict XVI’s repeated appeals to broaden reason, without which it would be impossible to know things?
We all know that the Regensburg address was a kind of stumbling block for the present Pontiff. Yet it is was there that the Pope developed a line of reasoning that should have inspired the lovers of reason. In pronouncing a strong, clear “no” to the attempts to de-Hellenize Christianity, the Pope did much more than confute those who, in the name of a generic inculturation, reduce Christianity to a diversified anthropological adaptation, each one re-interpreting it in his own way. The only effect of purging Christianity of its Greek soul–the philosophy expressed by that civilization–is to divorce faith from reason, relegating faith to irrationalism and fideism. I personally clapped my hands, and was dismayed to see so many rationalists railing against it.

Fr. Carrón maintains that “witness is the form of communication of the truth.” Many people look to you for guidance in order to know something of a reality like the economy that is crucial for people’s lives. What does being a “witness” mean for you?
To tell the truth, I find it hard to see myself as a witness. I certainly could not be a teacher. I could never tell people, “Come and see” if disciples were to ask me, “Where do you live?” I prefer to think in categories different from authoritativeness–that of people who involve us with their heart, and with it offer better arguments to experience in the future on which they base the “prime question of life,” to return to Fr. Giussani and value judgment.

These people are precisely those whom Fr. Giussani and, following him, Fr. Carrón call “witnesses.” It is not the first time that you will take part in the Meeting. What is it for you; what is its value?
Every time I have gone there, I felt more and more with my hands the deep companionship, the sharing of a common journey. I have felt, in the materiality of life and its thousand different experiences, the commitment to realize firstly the “hundredfold” on this earth. To those who, over the years, have tried to paint the Meeting as a kind of congress of a political tendency or party or faction–as I myself used to do–I hold the same convinced respect with which I believe one should help the sick, even when he is against you; respecting him, but helping him to understand.