Uncertain times - How necessary is it today to develop a new spiritual grammar, in dialogue with modernity, without fear?
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on May 15, 2025 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 05/2025
What determines the wealth of a community or a country? Many things, but certainly its capital: economic, financial, but also human, social, civic, and environmental. It is capital that generates flows, including GDP, that flow of income that has become very important in recent decades, perhaps too important. Until the 18th century, everyone more or less agreed that wealth consisted solely of capital: gold, palaces, mines, ships, armies, and above all, land. At most, the Camaldolese monk and economist Giammaria Ortes went so far as to say that the wealth of a people is its people. Then, gradually, people began to think (with the French school of Physiocrats) that the most important wealth was not capital but income, because without the ability to generate income from natural and social capital, a people remains poor. And, in that context, they were right.
Then, in the mid-19th century, the Milanese economist and philosopher Carlo Cattaneo wrote something very beautiful: “There is no work, there is no capital, that does not begin with an act of intelligence. Before any work, before any capital, it is intelligence that begins the work and imprints on it for the first time the character of wealth.” With the birth of GDP in the 1900s, we forgot about capital and began to measure only annual flows. So, by not seeing capital, we consumed it, deteriorated it, and failed to maintain it, until we suddenly realized that it was running out.
The first SOS was sent out by the climate and the earth: we suddenly realized that natural capital had deteriorated significantly, and that it was us humans who had caused this deterioration.
Community life
Some are saying that civil and social capital, made up of virtues, the ability to cooperate, and community life, is also rapidly running out. In the space of a generation, we have consumed all that tacit ability to be together, to work as a team, to act collectively, not to mention that ancient knowledge of how people suffered and died, how conflicts, frustrations, and bereavements were managed, how people lived in the world.
There is another type of capital that is becoming extinct: spiritual capital, especially in the West. The social, ethical, and economic miracles we have been capable of so far have also been possible, and in some ways above all, thanks to real capital made up of spirituality, popular piety, inner life, prayer, and religion.
Faith
Faith, which in Latin means corda (fides), has held people and communities together, healed crises of the soul and body, taught us to work, to live, to be born, to leave this earth. For centuries, workers arrived at the gates of companies equipped with this special and popular capital, which companies did not pay for but used as an essential resource.
It was “produced” by the family, the Church, and communities, and was “consumed” by companies that were unable to reproduce it (today totally incapable). We are already seeing this: the so-called fragility of the younger generation (which in other ways is as strong as all young people) also stems from this scarcity of spiritual capital, of an inner life too occupied by consumption and its thousand liturgies.
What can be done? First of all, it would be very important to start measuring what remains of this spiritual capital in the world, as the young economists of Economy of Francesco are doing. And then we must ask ourselves how to rebuild it: certainly not by returning to the religions of yesterday, because history does not repeat itself. Something, however, must be done, and soon, if we want to avoid mass depression becoming the new Covid.
The dream of dreams
The great religions should certainly do more: instead of cultivating the past, continuing to use a pre-modern symbolic and theological code, instead of being concerned with saving what remains of a Christianitas that ended long ago, they could instead try to teach everyone a new spiritual grammar, in dialogue with modernity, without fear. Doing exactly what Pope Francis said to young people in Lisbon: “Don't be administrators of fears, but entrepreneurs of dreams.” And spirituality remains the dream of dreams, of young people and of everyone.
Photo credit: © Diego Sarà