Fiat iustitia pereant immundi
Wanting to hazard a comment on what is happening in our country, one would not really know where to start. Perhaps from the most urgent, from that numb feeling of normality that is the background to events, from that soft hypnosis into which tragedy escapes and sinks. As the winds of war blow in the east, I glance at the rubble of the war that has been raging in our house for two years, and collect debris at random.
The school . Kids bullied by the teachers (!) Because they did not allow themselves to be injected with a vial, or for the same reason excluded from the classroom. Others placed under house arrest on anonymous notification, that is, deprived of personal freedom without trial as it could no longer be done for about eight hundred years. Because there was habeas corpus – there was.
The teachers . A week ago, a professor of medicine spoke on television. I don't know what he said, but the day after the university he works for let the Twitter metworld know that the teacher's words "do not represent the institution's thinking" and announced "further actions". The pleasure-seeking internet users raised with jokes and jokes on the surname of the unfortunate, which recalls a vegetable. He would have been sorry to wedge himself into this winged exchange to ask what the "thought of the institution" was. Since when has it been in existence, where is it encoded? I do not think in Article 33 of the Constitution (indeed) but not even in the long history of universities, where until yesterday natural persons, not legal ones, thought. If during the plague of the fourteenth century the doctors of the universities (not the universities) freely debated about remedies, today it is science that speaks for scientists. Yes, but who is speaking for science then? Mystery.
The work . Also at school, a teacher wrote to her principal that even harassing or violent colleagues are recognized a part of the salary during the suspension period. A former justice minister recalled that even life sentences are allowed to work and earn a living. The Lombard administrative judges have rightly asked themselves why suspend a psychologist who works with patients only remotely. Yeah, why? And why does someone who already has certain antibodies have to take medicine to develop those antibodies? And why is the "global scientific consensus" in force in Como no longer valid in Chiasso ? And why does a puncture count more than a state exam ? Why yes, because "it just has to be done". Because it will be true, the water does not flow upstream and six months ago you were not yet born. But I am the wolf, you are the lamb.
Democracy . It seems that the Prime Minister has ordered the parliamentarians to "guarantee the votes" necessary to approve the Government's decisions. Usual inverted geniture: the executive, that is the body "which is capable of executing" (thus the Gabrielli dictionary), gives orders to the legislature that should dictate the law, on behalf of the electors. But since a principal must necessarily be there, then who dictates the tasks to the executor? Another mystery.
Now, thinking coldly, it is not plausible that such a collapse has been consumed in so few months, nor that a disease and some decree have pulled down by themselves a building erected over the centuries. No, the walls must have already been cracked for some time, for a long time and perhaps from the beginning, so that the collapse was expected by all, feared by few, greeted by many. And then the sun continues to rise, the milk hits the shelves and the television broadcasts debates and competitions. Old Orwell really believed in it, that in Germany, Russia and elsewhere there was nothing but apathy, backwardness and terror and that no one there dared to dab the gray of the dictatorship with a song or a smile. And we with him. So no, there cannot be a regime. If there is a thread of light – at least for me, at least while it lasts – times cannot be dark.
Obviously we do not ignore suffering and violence, we listen to certain stories in the family and read them in the newspapers, and certain methods never seen before except in the history books. But for this there is the strongest hypnotic, the one that normalizes every abomination: justice. That's okay because that's right . And it can be said everywhere, with the exalted satisfaction of a lay Savonarola or with the downcast eyes of someone who tries hard to swallow a hard but necessary lesson. Stunned by the nonsense of progress, we really believe that material gadgets also award us a moral palm over our ancestors, so we are not ashamed to ask for a tear from the kids who cannot get on the bus today because seventy years ago, in another country, someone he could get on it as long as he occupied the seats in the back.
It would be easy to demonstrate more mathematico that if injustice produces crimes, justice incites the massacres. Because the first is punishable, the second unpunished. The first works within the limits of the objective, the second has no limits or objectives other than itself, nor hesitations, nor censors. "You have no mercy," says Aglaja to Prince Myshkin, "but only justice: therefore you are unfair," summarizes Dostoevsky at a glance. And Our Lord, who was the most innocent victim of a court ("nos legem habemus"), never spent a word of praise for the zealous à la Javert, while on the contrary he called "blessed are those persecuted for justice" and he promised them the kingdom of heaven. The story of St. Paul also speaks of persecution and justice. Before his encounter with God he was precisely a persecutor "blameless as to the justice that derives from the observance of the law", but as a convert he no longer lived "with my justice deriving from the law, but with that which is obtained through faith in Christ : the justice that comes from God, based on faith "(Phil 3,6.9). Justice can pursue but if pursued it is something else, it is the mask of an injustice.
So what is right? How does the relative circle break, the one that makes us cry for Mrs. Parks returning from work (yes, it was scientific even then ) and not for the fifty-year-old with offspring who just can't go to work today? Among the treasures swept away by modern barbarism there is certainly the millennial effort to link ethics, and therefore laws, to a norm that transcends its authors and preserves it from the absurdity of anchoring itself to itself. If today we shout "o-ne-stà!" in the squares, seven centuries ago Thomas Aquinas placed the jus civil codified by the sovereigns at the last step of the hierarchy of laws. Above were the jus gentium common to every people and the lex naturalis , the innate moral disposition of the soul (synderesis) which senses the lex aeterna with which God has ordained the world. Insubordination of the lower degrees produces willfulness and violence.
The flattening of this necessary complexity into the point-like dimension of the last codicil written by the last bureaucrat gives the measure of today's desert which is, in order, spiritual, cultural and moral. If eternal justice collapses on that of men, the prescriptions of the latter mimic the divine decrees: they must not give reasons other than the muddled and cryptic ones of a mystery to which it is necessary to bend down and promise a salvation that in earthly dominion can only be that survival, convenience and vainglory at the expense of others. It is from the institution of this paucity that we have arrived where we have arrived: to accept the unjust because there is no other justice; to talk about something else even from the pulpits because there is no one to answer, neither above nor after; to live with the absurd and the abnormal because there is no norm, and therefore not even the normal.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/fiat-iustitia-pereant-immundi on Wed, 02 Mar 2022 01:09:18 PST.