A few days have passed since the anniversary of the outbreak of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic in our country, very few believed it would last so long, yet we are still here fighting against the frustration that this condition entails and proceeding undaunted in the attempt to digest this mountain of reality through thought and sharing. The aim of this article is to advance a reading of our condition before and after the pandemic through some key concepts drawn from the thought of Ernesto De Martino and collected in the text La fine del mondo [1] published posthumously in 1977 in which the anthropologist provides an interesting key to understanding the era we are living in through a careful comparison with numerous fields of knowledge, including psychopathology with particular reference to the contributions of phenomenological psychiatry.

Index

A world that can (but must not) end

In a 1964 writing, De Martino summarizes the position of man in the aftermath of the Second World War:

“If I had to identify our era in its fundamental character, I would say that it lives as perhaps never before in history in the dramatic awareness of this must and this can : in the alternative that the world must continue but that it can end, that life must have a meaning but that it can also lose it for everyone and forever.” [2]

The world must continue because no thought outside of it is possible, at the same time the world can end, the Second World War with the atomic bombs and the six million Jews who died in the extermination camps had clearly shown this. To better understand what the author means when he speaks of the "end of the world" it is useful to specify that he refers to the fall of what he calls the ethos of the transcendence of life , or "the primordial and indelible task which precisely makes us pass from the order of vitality to that of humanity, that is, of the intersubjective valorization of life" [3].

The push of humanity

It is a complex concept that can be understood as the drive through which we transcend life and access the universe of meanings and intersubjectivity.

Ernesto de Martino
Ernesto de Martino

Well, according to De Martino, this drive that underpins human humanity and underlies the very possibility of inhabiting a cultural world has acquired central importance in the human zeitgeist. It's 1964: world conflicts had altered the balance of power, extermination camps had made possible the terrifying thought that an entire category of people could be eliminated, and the magical-symbolic cultural systems that had supported community life were dissolving within an increasingly imposing capitalist mass culture. Sixty years later, we can ask ourselves what has changed since then, how has humanity reacted and is reacting to this awareness of an impending end? And what effects is the pandemic we are experiencing having on this level?

The parents' crisis and the children's drama

In attempting to answer at least the first two questions, I believe it's useful to look at adolescents—those who, struggling to transcend life and participate in a cultural world, were born into it. Today, much reflection is being placed on adolescent psychopathology due to the exponential increase in phenomena such as social withdrawal , eating disorders, self-harm, antisocial behavior, and suicide among this age group.

covid_mask_prison_girl

Using the ethos of transcendence as an organiser of meaning, De Martino saw in the melancholy of his time the catastrophe of having to be there (in the fall of the ethos): "the melancholic is not guilty of this or that, [...] but of living the collapse of the ethos of transcendence, of being in this collapse, of being dragged by the change of sign of having to be there in the world, of never being able to place himself, in any moment of life, as a centre of decision and choice according to intersubjective values" [4].

Finance capitalism

Following the author's reasoning, we can therefore imagine that today's adolescents, children and grandchildren of that melancholy, are themselves experiencing a catastrophe: that of not being able to exist, in the sense of "not knowing how" to exist. That is, the dramatic condition of those who , driven by life itself, would like to value things and access the intersubjective world , but at the same time don't know how, can't find a connection. The lives of many adolescents seem to revolve around the feeling, the fear (and the fascination) of being irrelevant.

History and tradition are of no help, the artistic and intellectual world struggles to find frames of meaning and society itself, transformed by that enormous device that Gallino (2011) [5] has defined as financial capitalism, seems to have nothing more to offer beyond a market logic that permeates social relations and transforms everything, even affections, into objects of consumption. In the extreme difficulty of complying with the moral impulse that would make them feel part of humanity and cultural actors, adolescents end up revolting against their own lives , attacking their own bodies as in the case of anorexia and self-harming behaviour, withdrawing from social life, attacking the world from which they feel cut off as in antisocial behaviour.

The problem of meaning

Thinking in these terms runs the risk of overgeneralizing. This certainly doesn't mean to minimize or overlook the uniqueness that every adolescent, like every human being, brings with them, nor the clinical importance of attuning to the life world of others, a key concern of phenomenologists. However, I believe it's useful to try to identify comprehensive frameworks of meaning that can situate human beings, their suffering, and their actions within a shared need. In this regard, De Martino urges us to "start from the ethos of transcendence," arguing that:

“Psychopathological states as a movement of dissolution of existing functions and as a liberation of underlying instances, the conception of a "force" or of a system of forces organised in time which, by bending, bring about various forms of mental regressions etc. have only an apparent interpretative meaning if one does not start from the ethos of transcendence, from an analysis of intersubjective valorisation as constitutive of humanity, and from a historical-cultural appreciation of the dominant levels of valorisation and the corresponding risks of regression, of bending, of falling.” [6]

De Martino, Covid and today's youth

Today's adolescents and their psychopathological manifestations clearly show that the problem of meaning that forms the backdrop to all of De Martino's work is today more relevant and urgent than ever . The ideological and religious questions that animated men in the past have given way to global questions connected to the very survival of the human race. Harari (2018) [7] identifies the risk of nuclear war, economic and environmental collapse and uncontrolled technological advancement as the main problems of our era and highlights the senselessness of intervening on them at the level of individual nations.

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It's not that there once weren't problems affecting the entire world; the difference lies in the fact that today these (global) problems affect the local dimension like never before, placing the individual in a state of confusion, anxiety, if not downright disarming passivity from which it is almost impossible to escape and from which it is inevitable to defend oneself . Covid-19 reproduces this dynamic in an exemplary and massive way, forcing us to reckon with the most essential dimensions of existence—the inevitability of death, the need for intimacy, the fear of loneliness—and it is doing so by calling the entire world onto the stage, a world with which, in one way or another, we are called to confront in an attempt to identify new shared meanings , to "save" that intersubjective dimension that makes it possible to think of ourselves as a human community.

Starting from fragility, starting from the Other

The impact is strong, at times terrifying; it's all too much, and the world truly seems unable to cope. The success of anti-democratic movements based on a paranoid response to complexity curiously flirts with the proliferation of ever-larger groups of people ready to swear the virus doesn't exist and/or certain there's a grander plan behind it. The sense of unease and disorientation born from the need for grand narratives, whether religious or secular, seems to have found in the enormous scope of the pandemic the ideal object on which to unleash the fear, anxiety, frustration, and anger of our existences in crisis.

James Coleman: The Roots of Altruism

De Martino hoped that humans, no longer able to draw on a transcendent force located outside the world, would be able to overcome the awareness of their intrinsic fragility and, from there, set to work to make the world a better place for all, a task no one can undertake alone and which consequently brings us all, as a community, face to face with the dimension of responsibility . The responsibility, first and foremost, to take a stand against the prevailing individualism that characterizes our culture, against the (delusional) idea of ​​the complete, self-made human being who has no need of the Other, who has no need to feel seen and recognized as lacking.

Such a hope can only seem naive, even utopian, yet given that the world must go on, it's fair to say that "despite everything, we're still here" and that this pandemic, by forcing us to stay apart so as not to harm each other, has brought out, by contrast, the pleasure and fulfillment of being together , of meeting, sharing, and engaging, and with them the confidence that under certain conditions it is still possible to access a democratic disposition from which new ideas, new solutions, and new ways of being can arise.

Roberto Ardilio

[1] De Martino E. (1977) The End of the World: A Contribution to the Analysis of Cultural Apocalypses. Turin, Einaudi.
[2] E. De Martino (1964) The problem of the end of the world, in P. Prini (ed.), The world of tomorrow, Abete, Rome, pp. 225-31.
[3] E. De Martino, (1977, p. 174)
[4] E. De Martino, (1977, p. 175)
[5] Gallino L. (2011) Finance Capitalism: The Civilization of Money in CrisisTurin, Einaudi.
[6] E. De Martino, (1977, p. 174)
[7] Harari YN (2018) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Milan, Bompiani.

References

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