If we examined the global social networks of 2023 and those of the beginning of 2024 we would see that the most written and pronounced word has been that of hope for a better world.
We have wished it on each other, in all languages, from end to end of the map. Days ago, however, 522,000 mentions that the world was going to end had been identified. Is it true that deep within each of us hope is still alive?
Brazilian psychoanalyst Christian Dunker stated that “there is a climate of hope in the air.” Will it be true? With two wars underway and threats of other possible ones in the air? With the fear of the climate catastrophe? With the resurgence of a nihilistic extreme right? With the fear imposed by the new discoveries of intelligent machines? With the almost universal anger that is breathed from East to West?
The truth is that hope has never been an easy flower to grow. Pessimism ends up being so many times more resistant than pure reality. The fear of the ancients continues, sometimes dormant and sometimes alive, deep within each human being. And also hope? Yes. And that is why the world still stands and that is why we have just wished each other hope and happiness in the last hours.
All of this has made me remember my years as a young theology student in the 1950s in Rome, where I was lucky enough to attend some classes by the then famous Dominican Garrigou Lagrange, considered one of the greatest theologians of all time. One of his students was the Polish Pope John Paul II when he studied in Rome. For that French theologian, a new subject until then unknown was created: that of mystical theology.
In a personal conversation I had with him one afternoon during a hot August in Rome, he confided to me that of the three Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, for him the most difficult of all in his life had been hope. He didn't tell me why.
After so many years, that hackneyed word of hope rises every time from the ashes like a phoenix to remind us that life is stronger than death. Hence the religious prophecies that life does not end, it only transforms.
For those of us who are betting not on the end of the world, but on a better future for ourselves and for those who will follow us, this 2024 could also surprise us with the resurgence of new reasons for hope. What if the two ongoing wars that threaten world peace ended? What if the enigmatic artificial intelligence that still scares us finally gave us new possibilities in the field of medicine to live longer and better?
What if from that extreme and gloomy right that seems to want to suffocate us, a new policy emerged as a counterweight dressed in a new democracy stripped of the corruption that grips it today? What if finally those who govern the destinies of the world became aware that we are truly poisoning the planet and dedicated to saving it what they currently spend on weapons and shameful personal interests?
Hope is a difficult word to digest, immersed as we are in prophecies of personal and universal hecatombs. And yet, there is no other path or better aspiration for those who will pick up our baton than that difficult, stubborn bet, which reminds us of the already famous phrase of the physicist and mathematician, Galileo Galilei: “Eppur si muove” [y, sin embargo, se mueve]pronounced at the end of the trial to which he was subjected in 1633 by the Court of the Inquisition when defending that the Earth moves around the sun.
In this my first column of the new year I want to bet, like the rebellious Italian mathematician more than four centuries ago, that despite all the pessimism that seems to embrace the world, hope will be by following the magic and liberating word that should be written in the door of every home and in the heart of each of us.
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