Desire

Along Otherwise Impossible Paths
The Adventure of a Statistician
The witness of a university career, born in the midst of difficulties and disappointments, when the desire to drop everything was overcome by a loving invitation to remain. From his “yes,” pronounced as a prayer, burst forth his self-fulfillment, much greater than any personal calculation

by Paola Bergamini

We meet Giorgio Vittadini, or Vitta, as his friends call him, in his office at the Foundation for Subsidiarity, of which he is President. Every two minutes his cell phone rings; there are papers with strange hieroglyphics on his desk–notes on Statistics, which he teaches at the Bicocca University in Milan. It doesn’t take much to convince me he’s very busy, so I jump to the attack: “Now turn it off, and tell me your life story.” He laughs, “Okay, I’ll put on the mute. Shoot.”

More than once, you’ve said you are a born humanist, and yet you deal in numbers, diagrams, and tables. Where did all this start?
In 1980, I graduated in Economics with a friend of mine, who continued his career by going abroad. I also received the same offer, but some important friends of mine, probably sensing my uncertainty, suggested that I remain working in the university. I said yes. It wasn’t obedience without reasons, because I was persuaded that the fundamental thing in my life was to give credence to the hypothesis of people who help you to perceive what is good for you. At the time, though, there was no possibility of having a position in the Economics faculty at Catholic University, where I had studied. Instead, there was an opening with a professor who taught Statistics at the State University and so, almost by chance, I agreed to take on this subject. Let me just say this: in choosing which subjects to prepare for my high school final exams, I left Math out, in fourth place [there were three obligatory exams]. I wanted to study History, but my parents didn’t agree, so I did Economics. A professor from CL advised me to study it, saying, “Today, history is made above all with Economics.”

Why did you adhere to that suggestion?
Experience at the university had shown me that what most corresponded to my desire, to my needs, wasn’t so much the project of a given setup or of a particular job, but journeying along a road that made me be in close connection with that experience that had generated an intelligence and a passion toward everything, even toward my studies. I didn’t want money or a career, but I did want a job that could be useful to the human experience of the Movement and of the Church. For this reason, I had no doubt in saying yes.

So everything went smoothly, without problems…
Not quite. I immediately had to face two problems. The first was that I’d studied Economics, not Statistics, and the second was that it’s not enough to say yes to someone to make a hypothesis your own. So I found myself at the State University, in the Political Science Faculty, in a dark building–me, who preferred studying on a subway because I couldn’t concentrate when there was silence! Being forced to stay in an office with a book in English full of mathematical formulas made me feel like I was locked in an ivory tower and the key had been thrown away. I was working without a contract, with no security (the first time I had a stable position at the university was three years later); I didn’t understand well what I had to do, and daily I realized how ignorant I was. Whenever I attended meetings, I didn’t understand anything, though I pretended I did; I didn’t have a clear idea of the work, and I was very disorganized. I shed blood and tears. My one steady thought was to escape as soon as possible from that job, which seemed to block my self-expression.

And what did those important friends tell you?
I remember trying to show them in every way possible what a stupid choice it had been. Even though I had said yes, ten days into the job I thought that the person who had advised me didn’t know what he was talking about, or that he only spoke in abstractions. I found myself there against my will but, since the people I had in front of me were fairly authoritative, it was difficult for me to leave. So there I was, taking hit after hit, and every three months I returned to my friends, trying to convince them of their error. After three years of this life, during which I had written a few absolutely insignificant little articles, an opportunity for a doctoral scholarship opened up. The exam went well, but not very well, which was unusual for me. The following months were very hard, and I even failed some tests, while I developed an increasing sense of failure and a stronger desire to go. But one day, during a decisive conversation with the person who had advised me to stay at the university, I was told, “You haven’t truly accepted being at the university yet. You can face these difficulties only if you do it for love of someone for whom it’s worth it. Say yes to Mary, offer it up to Our Lady. I don’t know if you will make it. But if you offer it to her, what you do won’t be lost; every instant will be saved for you and for the world.” At that very instant, for the first time, I truly said yes. I stopped opposing a method of mine against reality. The conditions were far from different, but I was the one who began to change. In the most difficult moments, as I felt I was suffocating, I began to offer, to ask in prayer even without understanding what it would mean. I’ve been told that in the 1970s Fr. Giussani repeated often that, in the Middle Ages, the people wandered about to escape the barbarian violence. Everything began to change because the monks began to say, “We’re not leaving, because Jesus is here, and we trust in Him.” Fr. Giussani added that it’s the same today. Christ has been expulsed from the workplace, and everyone is wandering around searching for something, without stability. Someone has to start staying put, trusting in Jesus. So, in my small little way, I began to stay put in my job.

What changed concretely?
The first change was a profound sense of usefulness. Thousands of more times I felt anxious and unstable in a job where everything was competition, where the exams were never-ending, and I was gripped by the fear of not making it. From then on, though, in every important and dramatic moment, the counter-challenge was always to repeat “Veni Sancte Spiritus, veni per Mariam. May this trial, this exam, this article be for Your glory, for Your kingdom in the world. Lord, help me, if You can, make it go well, but do what You like. It’s enough that it serve Your kingdom, that it serve the Movement.” Anybody who thinks that prayer is abstract and pietistic is himself abstract. How many miracles I could tell you about in my university life! How many providential encounters at the right moment! Having said this, though, the situation continued to be far from simple, because no work is as demanding as a university job taken seriously. The exams to take are endless (I took eight public selection competitive exams) and at the same time you teach, you write articles, you participate in conferences, you continue to be evaluated… Also, the competition is fierce if you decide not to coast and if you want to follow the evolution of your field. Anyhow, I continued, and this was the first fact that enabled me to begin to look at that subject matter, which seemed so far from me, as something interesting. Now I like Statistics. I’m not an economist; I’m a methodologist, and I try above all to find multivariate variables and the fundamental point of my work is to invent demonstrations. I like it a lot, but this correspondence wasn’t there in the beginning. The first thing an interesting encounter arouses is the perception of what corresponds to you, not because you like it or you don’t like it, but because it makes you see that nothing is lost. But I repeat, in order to discover what corresponds to what you truly have inside, someone has to help you understand it. What has to be unleashed is freedom, that is, saying yes to a circumstance, engaging yourself. At a certain point, I said, “I’m in.” And here I want to underline what perhaps has been a constant in my life, the importance of the encounter with a ‘master’, someone who teaches you how to live. But, even more important, you must be open and positive, because this is what will enable you to make important encounters and to learn, even if you don’t have a such a ‘master’, or work and life mentor.

What would you say to a young person heading out into the world of work, who, as you did years ago, has to face this new reality?
I continue to meet people, especially young people, who talk about impossible working conditions, who complain, who think that it’s impossible to move ahead, to improve, who attribute everything that’s bad to external conditions. Thus, prayer and the experience of faith seem to have no influence on work, above all in changing your working conditions. Instead, I have to testify that the prayer to Being is also at the origin of my professional improvement. Over the years, a profound sense of the positivity of the real has grown in me. Instead of recriminating or despairing, after so many failures, I learned to ask myself what I needed to learn in order to move ahead. The openness to the real that was given to me enabled me to approach professors who were initially hostile, asking them to be able to work together, to become their disciple, in an environment where presumptuousness often reigns supreme. I realize that what the Movement taught me about prayer, asking the why of things, makes me more attentive to the observed datum, more capable of seeing nexuses and implications, a holistic vision that colleagues more expert than myself often don’t have. This is why I’m so passionate about building statistical models that serve to interpret reality. Being asks to make Itself recognized even in the steps of a theorem I’m trying to demonstrate.

I’ll play the devil’s advocate: what if you had understood that you’d taken the wrong path?
I don’t know how I would have reacted immediately. Probably I wouldn’t have been so mature as to perceive that it wasn’t about a personal failure, but a suggestion to change roads. I am certain that that human reality–those friends–would have helped me return to consciousness of myself. They would have made me understand that the failure was a suggestion, because that reality always has served to show me what Being wanted from me through signs, good or bad. For that matter, my entire university road has been marked by the presence of someone who opened me to life and made me more capable of intuition, more ready to bend myself to what at work seemed useless, boring, and repetitive, more attentive and capable of forming relationships that opened otherwise impossible roads for me. These suggestions have been for me the face of the Mystery that responded to me, communicating Itself.