Opinion | Love Between Generations, the Key to Education | Observatory

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A pivotal moment when writing this article occurred when, suddenly, it became mourning my father’s death, which happened four years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, not because of this virus but because of old age: he died peacefully while sleeping in his bed.

Still, the news of his death (unexpected, despite his advanced age) hit me like an earthquake; for a moment, the floor opened beneath my feet, letting me know for the first time the meaning of this expression. Almost immediately, I had to hold back my tears, more like sobbing, because my little son entered the room, alarmed by my noises.

I could not attend the intimate wake that my brothers arranged around his deathbed for fear of the pandemic and infecting my children, who were in a vulnerable population. It is a decision that today makes me feel satisfaction but also remorse.

My father was a good man. Of his weaknesses, perhaps the most intimate I discover in him is a deep capacity to feel love but a great insecurity in expressing it. Possibly to compensate for this difficulty, he resorted to an unrestricted notion of Goodness accompanied by the corresponding hyper-normativity, by which, for him, the rules themselves became more important than their intended purpose. This became a kind of superstition to strictly observe the rules, a behavior I inherited, which cost me so much.

Fortunately, I believe my father also taught me to be honest with myself, to recognize my mistakes without shame, no matter how big or numerous, and to try to correct them.

My father mended many of his faults in his later years, closing the gap he had opened long before (perhaps not with me and my siblings but with his own father). His tenderness as an older man – and his example, as I say – allowed me to extend my hand and give him my affection. Now, I want to dedicate this article to him about love between generations. It is a text that I did not begin writing with him in mind, but without him, it cannot make any sense.

The so-called Modern era took its first steps five centuries ago when Nicolaus Copernicus plucked the Earth from the fixed center of the universe and set it in motion. Such an implausible event (that our planet flies unsupported through space – it seems a bit incomprehensible, yes?) forced humans to cling to fierce individualism and to seek steady ground in the only immobile thing that remained for them: their own understanding. Since there was no longer anything truly stable externally, each individual began to seek stability in the reasoning he found within (“I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes).

Unfortunately, a few centuries of that salvation of individualism left us alone to wonder where the others had gone, and the twentieth century elevated that great question. At that time, the consideration was not a return to the Middle Ages, where “the others” seemed to be a unit as a bloc, practically without individualities, nor was it a question of returning to the Renaissance, where “the others” were not one’s contemporaries but the ancient Greeks. Instead, in the twentieth century, the inward search mattered: finding a trace of “the others” within us, pursuing the footprints left in us by the strange, the different, the “not me.”

It would not be easy. Modernity would thrash its last drowning kicks, disguising intense egocentrism as collectivism (exacerbating and ending individualism). Half of humanity would plunge into the whirlwind of univocal leaders, stone caudillos, Batmans, Supermans, and other demigods and finally into the asphyxiation of totalitarianism, which put the source of all the meanings of life, the individual, and society under a central authority.

From this suffocation, only a few could emerge safe and sound (although desperate, so much so, wondering about the existence of the others). There were those who, evasively, believed that the answer lay in searching outer space for other civilizations to contact. Still, the most perceptive understood that it was necessary to seek in this world in fellow man. Consequently, the new generations inaugurated the era of communication, determined to build bridges for that encounter. They lay the foundations of today’s culture, characterized by a singular concern for human relationships and the knowledge and care of everything that is not us.

It is difficult to admit it, but self-centeredness seemed to crumble during the Second World War, with the unification of the Allies against Nazism and fascism and with the intervention of the United States. This country emerged in the world’s imagination as a symbol of union, peace, and democracy. For this reason, young Americans reacted with immaculate alacrity when, a few years later, their country engaged in a brutal war in Vietnam, revealing other intentions (perhaps the real ones) behind its presence in the world.

That youthful reaction – known as the hippie movement – laid many of the foundations of what human beings have achieved in awareness of “the other” since then. With unprecedented spontaneity (at least that is what the great historian Arnold J. Toynbee believed), those young people gave themselves to others as if they had discovered them for the first time, with a kind of primal freshness, an epiphany inaugurating a historical moment. Seemingly suddenly, the hippies broke with all the norms that maintained differences with others, denouncing every trait, gesture, attitude, word, or action that separated people. The free and impartial attire (long hair for men, pants, and zero makeup for women) exploded as a bomb of expansive inclusion, which went beyond social classes, races, ages, sexual preferences, and restrictions.

Generalized unisex triumphed; vegetarianism (which Franciscanly embraced brotherhood with animals and with everything existing); the exaltation of the bucolic within the cities; the resurrection of Eastern and indigenous wisdoms that contemplated otherness in their cosmos; the use of psychedelic drugs to open the doors of perception to the other (the other that is simultaneously the One); the care of one’s body and others’, giving valuing the body as a temple; the practice of sex as a loving and possibly cosmic union; contraception as respect for oneself and the life of every new being, avoiding accidental or habitual pregnancy; the creation of commune families and tribal upbringing, where parents cede their children’s education to all members of the community; the development of collective economies and sustainable small enterprises; the discrediting of private property, nationalities and all kinds of borders, capitalist production, impersonal and mechanized labor, employer relations that create vertical positions and privileges, industrial mass production that pollutes the environment and standardizes people through artificiality and uniformity, neglecting what is natural and authentic…

The spontaneity with which the hippies burst onto the world scene made people think it was a passing fad. However, among the changes the young wrought, one soon emerged beyond protest or scandal: The movement began decisively closing the generation gap that had long separated parents and children. In the 1960s, adults (and authoritarians, in general) could no longer hide the enormous crisis of modernity or its failed attempt to rigidify family and social rules as a last resort to avoid collapse. The lack of understanding and conservatism were increasingly suffocating. So, as never before, the hippie parents began closing the distance between themselves and the new generations, making it clear that they would bequeath all the new changes to them. (Crucial in this whole process was the effort of education linked to the practice of freedom. Thanks to this and the student movements of the decade, the beautiful liberal pedagogies of the first half of the century became the great currents of active and libertarian education that we inherited, firmly establishing themselves as authentic, universal, and irreversible practices).

It seemed like the end of the patriarchal era of the father master who imposed his law (a law increasingly empty of content and sustained by the obligatory nature and unjustified respect for the paternal image). The Age of Aquarius began, the Anthropocene, Postmodernity, Cosmodernity, or whatever we agree to call it. The revolution thus undertaken spread worldwide. No one, not even the most traditional social media, could escape its influence. Gradually, the intergenerational gaps were closing throughout the planet, and this atmosphere of closeness between adults and young people allowed – with its spirit of equality or, at least, tolerance – the flourishing of all the other freedoms that had been achieved. The discovery of the “others” made the hippies pioneers of almost all the mass cultural movements that mark our lives today: sexual liberation, gender fluidity, pacifism, civil resistance, generational continuity, spiritual and religious pluralism, feminism, free reproductive choice, free expression and transformation of the body, inclusion and non-discrimination, environmentalism, active and inclusive education, inclusive language…

As we all know, parents have been increasingly attentive to their children’s needs and desires for decades, empowering youth and children as never before. Largely thanks to this closeness and the strength it provides, human beings today launch themselves into the world with a unique, innovative spirit, as if they were discovering or inventing it.

However, as we all also know, in recent years, so many drastic changes have begun to frighten many who see in this unconditionality apparent traits of parental servitude to their children. Everywhere, it is perceived that the lack of limits has not helped young people but instead has made them useless and utterly dependent on their parents, whom, consequently, they tyrannize. The gap has closed so much that, in the opinion of many, parents have begun to blend in with their children. The passing of the baton is performed with a closeness that tends to normalize the blending of the generations. Could it be that the balance has fallen to the other extreme?

Hordes of mothers and fathers have begun to react with despair. The first response seems to be, in most cases, an attempt to return to the past and to the conservatism of previous generations, characterized, as I have said, by empty regulation lacking content, demanding respect for the law for the sake of the law itself, and a hyper-normativity that hides impotence. After half a century of flourishing, parents seem to want to back down, scared and regretful, and reopen the gap to separate them from their children and reject their behaviors with a fury and fear that we have not witnessed in decades. Disillusionment with young people seems to take refuge in the widespread idea that the world is collapsing, and under that pretext, we decline our responsibility to encourage, guide, and support them to move forward. As a result, we are not just bequeathing a problematic world to them – we are making it impossible for them.

I think we do not understand that today’s young people do not oppose law, education, or the succession of generations. There are clear indications that they need and accept all this, but not the return to authoritarianism. However, how they show it is not with protests and rebellions, as in other decades. It seems they resort more to indifference, waiting for us to recognize the existence of the new virtual communities that they are creating and on which they base their presence in the world. For our part, standing on the other side of the gap that we reopened, we waste our time judging them as apathetic, selfish and mediatized.

However, the truth is that their radicalism in including others can no longer be stopped (unless we are willing to resort to violence). The only thing that we as teachers and parents can still do (and this is a lot!) is to agree to a free and honest discourse that helps them to expand contextually so that this “radicalism” (that descent to the roots) finds fertile ground for expansion. We can still place in their hands a law based on the humility (humus: earth) of our own experiences, a law that renounces once and for all being the source of all meanings and is a true example of coherence between life and the word.

Aware that I am falling short in my description of this law (especially considering that it seems to be the last chance to leave something precious to our children and students), I want to conclude my text with a paragraph by the Italian psychoanalyst and teacher Massimo Recalcati, who in his book The Telemachean Complex sums up forcefully the vision I have expressed so far. Recalcati, as a sound psychoanalyst, refers to the father as the wielder of the family law. Still, to me, it is clear that we can associate it with any other authority, including, of course, parents and teachers. It reads: “The father who is invoked today can no longer be the father who has the last word on life and death, on the meaning of good and evil, but only a radically humanized, vulnerable father, incapable of expressing the ultimate meaning of life, although capable of showing, through the testimony of his own life, that life can have meaning.”

I bid you farewell, then, with a gesture of hope.

Translated by Daniel Wetta