Society
beyond poverty

The Paradox of Paradoxes
History (past and present) teaches us that growth doesn’t guarantee wealth, and that man reduced to an “economic entity” is condemned to defeat.
But there is a common strand that overturns all the theories, that links Fr. Giussani to Roosevelt….

by Gianluigi Da Rold

At the end of the economic crisis we’re experiencing, one might say that the next Nobel Prize (if it has any credibility left) should be awarded to a scientist of paradox. From the exuberant optimism of the 1920s through the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, the impressive expansion of the 1950s, then the implosion of the planned economy, returning finally to the euphoria of the market and to unbridled liberalism, ending in the “credit bubble” of the first years of the new century, the only observation one can make is the reality of the contradictions inherent in human actions and complex modern communities.
The science of economics has brought great benefits in the history of humankind. It often presupposes a dream of abundance, though the research of any good economist starts out from a concept of scarcity. And this is already a paradox. But if you look more attentively at the history of the economy, you come smack up against a still more complex and disquieting paradox, that of economic growth, which should be the guarantor of wealth for people and society, and which, instead, is not at all that hoped-for guarantee–before this most recent Great Crisis, hadn’t we surpassed all growth records?  From this century of history, one can deduce that when people are reduced to mere “economic entities,” they whirl like twigs struck by an ideological wind and never find the strength to face life, with its joys but also with its unexpected events.

Empirical approach. Theoretic Marxism and, before that, applied Marxism-Leninism reduced the person to an economic subject in mortal conflict between opposing classes. For this reason, the person’s need for the infinite was literally torn away, in return for an “earthly paradise” that was never achieved. On the opposite pole, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, another conception described the person as “an economic and profit-maximizing being.”  This view was not an improvisation, but extrapolation from the studies of von Hayek and the theories of Milton Friedman done at the University of Blackburn in Virginia. The theory, “privatism,” said that society as a subject doesn’t exist; instead, it is just an aggregate of individuals and the sum of individual interests. The tough corroborator of this theory was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who would say, “Society? It doesn’t exist.”
In those years, even left-wing secular reformists seemed obsolete. How distant seemed the empirical approach, not at all ideological, of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who battled the Great Depression of 1929 with Keynesian interventions of “social” administrators like Harry Hopkins and traditionalist maneuvers of directors tied to balanced budgets. Nobody remembers Roosevelt’s famous reply when asked his philosophy of government: “Philosophy? I’m a Christian and a Democrat and that’s enough.” Another paradox for that era saturated with theories and ideologies…

A companion on the journey. I ask the reader’s forgiveness for this long premise. But I’ve always seen a similarity between the ideal pragmatism of President Roosevelt, which was a “cultural revolution” in the 1930s, and the ideal and Christian pragmatism of Fr. Luigi Giussani, an authentic “cultural revolution” of the 1980s. In another work, I defined Giussani as a great man, a priest by profession, who was endowed with a marked artistic gift, that is, a person able to read reality and find the most creative and innovative responses for the problems that reality presents.
While the University of Blackburn preached “privatism” with its aggregates of individuals and the vocation to maximize profits, while Mrs. Thatcher decreed the “death of society” and America forgot even the desire to “wage war on poverty,” the great aspiration of John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon Johnson, while real socialism imploded and Keynesianism declined, the Italian priest re-proposed the value of the mystery of Christian Charity.
This is explained in the book, L’io, il potere, le opere [The “I,” Power, and Works]. My expertise is not in theology, so in this passage I see an overwhelming economic and social impact. He writes, “When engagement with need doesn’t remain a pure occasion of compassionate reaction, but becomes charity, that is, consciousness of belonging to a greater unity, imitation in time of the infinite mystery of the mystery of God, then man becomes for the other man a companion on the journey. He becomes a new citizen.”
When Fr. Giussani posits the birth of a new citizen, he faces a human and social issue. In the 1950s, the man, the priest, the artist Giussani began weekly “charitable work” to help the poor of the post-war Bassa, then he adapted for Italy the intuition of the American Food Banks, and, together with Danilo Fossati, established the Food Bank Foundation. Then he launched the annual Food Collection Drive. Uniting these three moments, among many other initiatives, is a common strand based on education to the mystery of Charity, which becomes paradoxical and in some ways disturbing in modern society.
Today, economic mechanisms are able to ensure good levels of growth, but cannot defeat the pockets of poverty, not even with extraordinary interventions.  Redistribution of resources and access for all to primary consumables is a constant problem.

Follow the heart. The Food Bank Foundation experience lives and breathes the ideal pragmatism founded on education to Christian Charity. If this is a foundational part of the human heart, then following it and igniting it are all it takes to ruin the pat hands of economic theories. An individual gesture of Charity, a collective and organized gesture, can recover the waste of growth (what are the surpluses of agricultural and food production?) and provide an authentic non-governmental institution serving two million people throughout Italy who can’t access primary consumables like food. It’s a result that not even the United Nations organisms have reached after decades of analyses and interventions on a worldwide scale.
The practical organization of the gesture of Charity is simple and immediate. In the permanent activity of the Food Bank Foundation and in the annual Food Collection Drive, this gesture of Charity is based on a smooth and efficient organization of volunteers, so different from a complex society that can imagine debit growth, leverage, and the mysterious derivatives that should have guaranteed the economic well being of even the poorest Third World peasants. Many economists assert that the Food Bank Foundation, paradox of paradoxes in the maximizing aggregate of individuals, merits a Nobel Prize. Can anybody explain why it shouldn’t receive such recognition?