By LEONARDO BOFF*
Israel has killed over 207 UN staff, bombed hospitals, schools, universities, mosques and destroyed 80% of Gaza
Following the current course of the world, both at the international and national levels, we have seen a true tsunami of hatred, lies, exclusion, and genocide and mass extermination, as in the Gaza Strip, which leaves us perplexed. How far can human evil go? There are no limits to evil. It can even lead to the self-extermination of human beings.
Thinking about our country, the deaths, the murders of young black people in the outskirts of communities, the children who are victims of stray bullets, whether from the police (who kill) or from criminal gangs, the daily feminicides and the hundreds of rapes of girls and women, the dismemberment of kidnapped people, leave an entire city like Rio de Janeiro continually under fear and threats. It is losing all its glamour. This is happening in almost all the big cities in our country, considered by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda as “cordial” (Brazil roots).
However, most interpreters have not read the footnote to the term “cordial” where he observes: “enmity can be as cordial as friendship, in that both are born of the heart” (n. 6). Therefore, the Brazilian is showing, especially under the government of the Ineligible, the enmity between friends and in families, the banality of swearing, bad habits and lies: everything being “cordial” because it is born of a “cordial” (perverse) heart.
At the international level, the scenario is even more atrocious. With the unrestricted and complicit support of the United States and the shameful support of the European Community, which has betrayed its legacy of citizen rights, democracy and other civilizational values, true war crimes are being perpetrated against 40 civilians and the undeniable genocide of around 13.800 innocent children in the Gaza Strip, all by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a totally disproportionate retaliation for another, no less horrendous crime committed by the terrorist group Hamas.
Benjamin Netanyahu allows such genocides because he is heartless and does not put himself in the shoes of the mothers and innocent victims. He does not care if in order to kill a Hezbollah leader he has to victimize dozens of other people in a bombing. Hatred has made him cruel and merciless. Similar crimes are occurring in the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine, with thousands of victims, with the destruction of an ancient sister culture and with countless innocent victims. Let us stop here in this via crucis of horrors that has more stations than that of the Son of God carrying his cross.
The question is how does this happen in broad daylight without there being a recognized authority that could stop this extermination of people and entire cities? What is the underlying root of this iniquity? History in the past has known exterminations, even carried out in the name of God as in the terrible book of Judges of the Judeo-Christian Bible and in so many wars of the past. But we exceed them in cruelty at all levels.
Israel has killed more than 207 UN staff, bombed hospitals, schools, universities, mosques and destroyed 80% of Gaza. Today we are in serious danger of an all-out war between militarist powers competing for world hegemony, which would bring about the beginning of our self-destruction.
Holding the interpretation that all this became possible because we lost our heart, spirit of finesse (Pascal's kindness) and the dimension of soul (CG Jung's sensitivity). Modern culture was built on the will to power as domination, using reason, torn from the heart and conscience, translated into techno-science for our own good and more for warlike purposes.
As Pope Francis noted in Laudato Si: “human beings have not been educated for the correct use of power… because they have not been accompanied by responsibility, values and conscience” (n.105). Reason has established its despotism in the form of rationalism, degrading other ways of knowing and feeling reality. Thus, feeling (pathos) was repressed on the false assumption that it would hinder the objectivity of the analysis. Today it is evident that there is no absolute objectivity. The subject researches with his assumptions and with his interests in such a way that subject-object are always intertwined.
The fact is that the dimension of the heart and cordiality has been repressed. Apart from the reptilian brain, which is the oldest, the limbic brain constitutes our real fundamental base. It emerged with paleo-mammals between 150 and 200 million years ago and in higher mammals 40 to 50 million years ago, with which we have the same condominium. We are rational mammals, therefore, beings of feeling.
The limbic brain is the seat of our emotions, whether hate, anger or other negativity, but it is mainly home to the world of excellence, love, friendship, empathy, values, ethics and spirituality. The neocortical brain emerged with humans 7-8 million years ago and culminated about 100 thousand years ago with the emergence of Homo sapiens of which we are heirs. It is the world of reason, of concepts, of language, in the logical ordering of things.
Therefore, it appeared late. But with its development it founded the kingdom of reason. But it is important not to forget that it is a single brain that involves these three dimensions that are always related (in MacLean's version of the triune brain: reptilian, limbic, neocortex). The excessive concentration on rationality with which we dominate the world, women (patriarchy) and nature at the expense of feeling, caused the socio-historical mistakes, the harmful consequences of which we are reaping.
It is urgent to unite the neocortical brain (reason/Logos) with the limbic (heart/(phatos), the heart enriching rational projects with humanity and sensitivity; conversely, investing reason, that is, giving direction and fair measure to the world of feelings and the heart. Only in this way will we find the necessary balance. Because we drown out the feeling of mutual belonging, that we are all human, without exception., We have become cruel genocidal (against our species) and ecocidal (against nature). We have enslaved, subjugated and discriminated against our brothers and sisters.
Because we have not rescued the dimension of the heart, of the spirit of refinement (Pascal), of essential sensitivity (soul) Western liberal-capitalist humanism has gone bankrupt. The so-called “rules-based order” (which always changes according to the convenience of the powerful) has proven to be a fallacy.
As a senior UN official, Chelsea Ngnoc Minh Nguyen, has warned: “The violence and brutality of recent years should compel us all – whether in the South or the North, in the East or the West – to undertake an honest and profound introspection about the kind of world we want to live in” (IHU 4/10/24). I see no alternative other than to change the civilizational paradigm (from domus/owner for the frater brother and sister) if we do not found a new humanism, rooted in our own nature.
In it we find the anthropological constants, intrinsic to our humanity: unconditional love, essential care, cooperation, empathy, compassion, recognition of others as our fellow man, respect for nature and the Earth that give us everything, enchantment in the face of beauty and goodness and reverence for the Mystery. Such values would be the foundation of another possible and necessary world. Otherwise, we will encounter the unimaginable.
*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Caring for our Common Home: clues to delay the end of the world (Vozes). [https://amzn.to/3zR83dw]
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