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The Chernobyl Effect

There is great confusion surrounding the words that describe man’s elementary experience. And so we find ourselves all a bit “hard of seeing” about the truth of experience, with our “affective batteries run down.” Taking as a starting point Fr Pino’s lesson at the Fraternity Retreat, we talked about this with a professor of moral philosophy and a psychoanalyst

by Stefano Alberto (Fr Pino)

Abraham Heschel observes, “In the name of good intentions, we have fostered the growth of evil.” Thus, the relationship between man and destiny is not freedom, it is not the possibility of recognizing the winning attraction, but it is something inexorably predetermined, inexorably negative, that cuts off, that annihilates the “I.”
There is a passage where Grossman, in Life and Destiny, writes, “The great change that has come about in the majority of people consists in the fact that they lost, bit by bit, the feeling of their own individuality and perceived with increasing strength the sense of fatality…. The taste for happiness had gone away, it was no longer there, and in its place was the torment of a multitude of desires and plans.”
The possibility of solving this enigma by means of ideas, of the right ideas, inevitably results in a division of reality into good and evil, and this strikes precisely the originality of the “I” as experience, the originality of the heart as an implacable desire, an irrepressible need for happiness….
How can we synthesize this sin? Man is made for happiness, but he seeks death. Man’s freedom tries to deny, attempts to deny what is evident: that it is made for happiness. It is pride, and pride brought evil into the world; it is the affirmation of self before the affirmation of reality. This pride is craziness–in L’autocoscienza del cosmo [The Self-Awareness of the Cosmos] Fr Giussani calls it being “askew.” …
What is weakened? The conscience, the taste for truth, because this pride becomes falsehood (“That’s not how it is”), or capriciousness, or frail, fragile affectivity, as synthesized in the expression that by now has become classic, “the Chernobyl effect”: in terms of affection, we all are a bit run down.
And naturally those in power take advantage of this, and they foster, they augment this “askewness,” this craziness, this, our being–because of the consequences of original sin–a bit run down in terms of affection, a bit “hard of seeing.” The attempt of those in power (remember the beautiful passage from “Between Barabbas and the Phrygian Slave” in L’io, il potere, le opere [The “I,” power, works]?) is precisely to “suffocate and reduce desires, even to dry up their source,” reducing desire and increasing confusion. If my conscience is weakened, if my affectivity is run down, what is left? Reaction, reactivity, and thus more violence. Whoever denies that this wound is inside us, that the possibility of war starts inside me, that the possibility of disorder begins inside me because of the consequences of this wound, needs to divide reality into good people and bad people–he takes away my responsibility, he takes away the possibility of vindication of my freedom.…
“ The spontaneous tendency of ideology is to distribute human beings into two categories: on one side, those who act and thus are responsible for their actions and thus can be accused; on the other, those who react (action reduced to mere reaction; politics reduced to reaction; justice reduced to reaction), and the cause of their actions remains external to them, and so they are innocent” (Alain Finkielkraut)–evil is always elsewhere, evil always pertains to the other, the enemy is always outside. What is done away with is freedom as responsibility, as response, as the possibility of a departure, as a new beginning; more radically, what is done away with is the possibility of loving.