The issue of truth has become one of the most influential underlying debates in our cultural, social and moral perspectives. Terms such as post-truth or fake news or proliferations of conspiratorial suspicions were not even part of the cultural panorama thirty or forty years ago. There has been a drift that has been disparaging rationality and sliding towards emotionality. But in a culture more attentive to emotion than reason, the topic of truth becomes stranger, and the dialogue, harsher and more difficult. Hence, discussions about some truth that transcends individuals, societies and cultures, that goes beyond simple intersubjective conventions or cultural consensus, have become intense and tempestuous.
The empire of multicultural and moral relativism has heavy consequences: uncertainties regarding the future, dystopian scenarios and a certain degree of unreality in a series of debates, more focused on a struggle for cultural hegemony than on a careful analysis of multifactorial complexity. of the facts, the shortcomings and the needs. Skepticism is proclaimed and at the same time rationally dubious perspectives are assumed as dogmas. The erosion of grand narratives has given rise to the predominance of narcissistic and disengaged individualisms. The political sphere, decisive for the construction of the common good, is affected by the emphatic proliferation of misrepresentations and lies as a political weapon, horizons of thought and action limited to the short term and focused on the immediate ideological or group environment. The consequences of all this are great political polarizations and cultural wars. The result is very worrying: more discouragement, more disengagement, more apathy, less motivation for study, reflection or positive, purposeful and excited participation in public affairs.
Given the uncertainty and partiality with which we know and act, today we tend to think that there is no underlying truth and not to emphasize our cognitive limitations. In this way, the presupposition that there is no truth attenuates the desire to search for it, limits the effort to dialogue to reconstruct it like a broken mirror, and makes us more prone to absolutize intimacies, emotions and groups related to our opinions.
We need to ask ourselves why all this has happened, how we have reached such an extreme situation, because without knowing the causes it will be difficult for us to overcome the slope. The explanations may be multiple, but we believe that we must look for the root in the cancellation of the idea of ??God in a good part of Western culture, a cancellation caused by the misunderstanding that the acceptance of God, even as a possible hypothesis, prevents freedom. human.
Precisely about thirty years ago, in August 1993, John Paul II published the encyclical Veritatis splendor, which addresses a central issue in the Church: that of the foundations of its moral teaching, in which it deals with the search for moral truth. , in the relationship towards God and others, and in which, among others, two primary reasonings are exposed and developed. One, the relationship between human freedom and the law of God, explaining why there is no opposition between the two but rather one is a consequence of the other and, for this reason, they claim each other. The other, closely related, considers that the moral life is the growth of the human being in freedom and remembers that without freedom there is no morality, and that freedom acquires its full meaning when it is used to travel the path of perfection. Both considerations help us understand how in our time post-truth, the moral crisis and the woke conception go hand in hand with a serious decline in freedom.
The splendor of truth points out how irreplaceable the moral good is for society; for their common good and for their more friendly and harmonious functioning. It also contains a message of anthropological optimism, difficult to find in times of understandable discouragement and pessimism like ours.
For all these reasons, we thought it would be interesting to remember it, as well as encourage you to read it and think about it. Today more than ever we need the encouragement and warmth of a truth beyond what monopolizes us, a truth that glimpses the world and transcends minutiae and credulities.
