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The Night of Contemporary Youth: A reflection after the Economy of Francesco Event

Gaël Giraud, SJ - La Civiltà Cattolica - Mon, Jan 16th 2023

The Night of Contemporary Youth: A reflection after the Economy of Francesco Event

Photo by Greyson Joralemon on Unsplash“Sentinel, how much is left of the night?”

The sentinel replies,
“Comes the morning, then also the night;
if you want to ask, ask,
convert, come!”

(Isa 21:11-12)

Pope Francis’ meeting with the thousand young people gathered in Assisi, from September 22-24, 2022, began with these words from the prophet Isaiah.[1] They arrived from every corner of the world: from Aotearoa New Zealand to Patagonia, from Thailand to Mozambique and Mexico. Thanks to the coordination of the Focolare Movement, these young people – including students, entrepreneurs, activists and game-changers – were housed in 12 villages, set up between the historic center of Assisi and the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

The Assisi meeting was a response to the call launched on May 1, 2019, in Pope Francis’ Letter for the Economy of Francesco Event, addressed “to young economists, entrepreneurs and businesspeople around the world.” It had been postponed because of the pandemic, and there was, in this meeting in the “land of Saint Francis,” a joy that sounded like a challenge to the collective depression induced by the confinements and catastrophic management of Covid-19,[2] the war in Ukraine[3] and the natural disasters caused everywhere on Earth by the manifold ecological crisis.[4]

 

Young people at a difficult time

Francis acknowledged this from the beginning, telling the young people, “You are living your youth in a time that is not easy.” Of course, every age is singular and has its share of lights and shadows. But today’s youth are experiencing a unique turning point in history. A growing number of climatologists no longer hesitate to acknowledge that what is at stake now is ultimately the survival of humanity.[5] Francis echoed the anguish that grips the scientific community and young people today: “Yesterday,” a scientist friend told him, “I had a granddaughter born. If we continue like this, poor thing, within thirty years she will have to live in an uninhabitable world.”

It is true that the impact of global warming has accelerated in recent years, that its severity confirms the most pessimistic predictions made so far, and that a number of “tipping points” have already been passed, while others could be reached in the near future. For example, in the past 40 years half of the mangrove areas of the planet, essential to stabilize the climate, have disappeared; 3.5 billion birds have disappeared in the United States, as well as 90 percent of plankton in the equatorial part of the Atlantic. Instead, between 100 and 1,000 micro-particles of plastic per liter are found in this part of the Ocean.

If it continues, the thawing of permafrost in Siberia and the depths of the Arctic Ocean will release so much methane (currently trapped in the frozen land) that warming would likely surge toward average temperature anomalies of +7 or +8°C in a few decades.[6]

For our planet, this is a situation that has not occurred for several tens of millions of years. In the meantime, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will surely reach the threshold of 1,000 ppm before the end of the century, a threshold at which it seems that the human brain loses a significant amount of its faculties.[7]

The wealthiest among us might perhaps be able to survive and keep their minds sharp by isolating themselves for life in “clean air bubbles,” as some very wealthy Chinese are already doing to escape the pollution of Beijing or Shanghai. As for bees, they are unlikely to survive the sixth mass extinction of living organisms, caused by the lifestyle of the richest, in a context where 80 percent of insects have already disappeared in Europe. The only way to preserve the possibility of agriculture – and thus our survival – will probably be for farmers to pollinate by hand. This is already happening in parts of the Chinese countryside that bees have abandoned. Assuming some can survive that way, that is not the world in which today’s young people want to live.

Ecoanxiety and social misery

Contemporary youth experience the anguish of a lost future in a way that probably no other generation has ever experienced before. Eco-anxiety is a reality.  How many young adults and adolescents are regularly seized by despair, tempted to succumb to the thought that, definitely, “everything is over”? It is not just an intellectual bewilderment, but a deep psychological discomfort. Although eco-anxiety is not included among psychological pathologies, it can be associated with depressive behavior. According to a study reported by the journal The Lancet,[8] over 45 percent of young people are negatively affected in their daily lives by this anxiety linked to climate change.

Francis testified to his concern for these young people overwhelmed by despair: “Look at the percentage of youth suicides, how it has risen: and they don’t publish them all; they hide the figure.” It is only in the long term that we will see the full psychological consequences of the confinements of the last two years, a health policy that was essentially designed by adults , for adults.

To the bleak ecological horizon is added, in many countries, a catastrophic social situation. In South Africa – to give just one example – at least half of young black men and women are unemployed and have almost no hope of finding a job in the near future, unless the Ramaphosa government implements a genuine South African Green New Deal. In addition to poverty and idleness, this causes an unprecedented social situation related to the dowry tradition: without income, young people cannot marry the women they love, because they do not have the ability to pay the dowry to her family. As a result, these adults live a love life and then a family life whose precariousness is, for many, extremely destabilizing.

The entertainment economy and the loss of meaning

Another destabilizing factor is the impact of social media and the internet. Most adults born after 1990 have grown up in a world structured by the web. This opens up an unprecedented space for sharing and information. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of its impact on the psyche of young people and, even more so, children.[9] The damage to our capacity for attention and concentration over time is considerable. Indeed, we have always needed material supports for thinking, as evidenced by Neolithic cave paintings and the invention of writing 5,000 years ago.

These supports are not a secondary accessory to our thinking, they retroact on it.[10] Today, the privatization of the internet allows a small number of companies to hold a virtual monopoly on the ownership of these media and to use them to make profits from the “available brain time” of the young (and not so young), possibly through algorithms designed to encourage addiction. Resisting this stranglehold at 18 presupposes a spiritual strength that at the same age older people had been able to invest elsewhere, such as in their studies and the construction of their adult identity.

In Mexico, the impact of social networks and electronic devices has caused emotional and cognitive instability in children and adolescents, who enter into a virtual world of violent fiction that prevents them from developing attitudes, emotions and forms of social expression, empathy and solidarity with others, making them individualistic, little open to socializing in their surroundings. In some cases, these forms of virtuality lead young people to depression, which can even lead to suicide.

With the rise of video games on mobile phones and social networks, these have become addictive tools for children and young people who, in their absence, become paralyzed and unable to interact with other people. In the indigenous communities of the State of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico (where at least eight indigenous ethnic groups coexist, mainly from the Mayan, Olmec and Aztec cultures), this technology has only recently come into the hands of the younger generations (under 30), who are beginning to familiarize themselves with the world of social networks and instant communication, while older generations are beginning to use phone booths to communicate.

Technological developments have also affected farming activities, as owning a smartphone has become a basic necessity for young people, but remains inaccessible for those who earn their living from their work in the fields. As a result, many adolescents are increasingly abandoning agricultural work and thus isolating themselves from their reality and their family, which contributes to uprooting them from their homes and the region where they were born.

A third aspect of the night in which today’s young people courageously struggle is the failure, by the previous generation, to share meaning. As the pope reminded us, we are seekers of meaning: “The human being, created in the image and likeness of God, before being a seeker of goods is a seeker of meaning. We are all seekers of meaning.” Now, Western societies – and with them most of those dependent on the cultural colonialism induced by globalization – have been sinking into a kind of eschatological breakdown since the neoliberal wave that began in the 1960s. Why do we get up in the morning? Many in our societies no longer know today. A resurgence of populism, in the United States as in India, Brazil and Italy, testifies to this dismay.

The ecological transition is certainly the great social project that can give a horizon to our societies, a horizon from which we can see the dawn announced by the prophet Isaiah. In this context, the encyclical Laudato Si’ has placed the Catholic Church in the ancient position of the  sentinel: the one who, turned toward the East, scans the depths of the night in search of the first gleams of dawn. In the early centuries, these mystics turned toward the East, from where the sun rises.

What is our Orient today? It is not a place or a concept, but a narrative: that of the transformation of our societies into a low carbon world with a light ecological footprint on the natural ecosystems around us. It is because Francis has dared to invite the whole Church and, with it, all religious traditions and people of good will to turn toward the ecological transition as toward today’s East, that the youth of the world, Christian and non-Christian, witness to him an affection, a tenderness that those Assisi Days brought vividly alive.

A generational and geopolitical process

This affection is all the more valuable because, for many young people today, the difficulties just described lead to a form of implicit condemnation of previous generations. Witness the rejection of the boomers, i.e. the generation born in the West during the postwar  baby boom, who enjoyed a standard of living that no previous generation had enjoyed and that none will enjoy in the decades and, probably, centuries to come. It is a generation that is held responsible for the current ecological catastrophes, because, according to almost all indicators of pollution (consumption of fossil fuels, minerals, and polluted  emissions), the “serious stuff” all started with mass consumption after 1945.

This implicit process manifests itself in the protests of some icons, such as Greta Thunberg, Ralyn Satidtanasarn[11]  Vipulan Puvaneswaran and Bella Lack,[12] but also in a profound questioning of the authority of the previous generation: “You are leaving us a planet on fire; you have enjoyed as never before the fire it is our turn to put out, and what’s more you claim to give us lessons?” So when Pope Francis says in Assisi, “Not only will you be there tomorrow, you are there today; you are not only the ‘not yet,’ you are also the ‘already,’ you are the present,” he is in tune with one of the strong aspirations of young people. They no longer have time to wait, and they no longer have time to be pessimistic. They know that if they want to avoid the worst in the coming decades and, for some regions of the planet, the worst that is already here, they must act now.

In most of the countries of the Global South, the accusation against the boomers comes with an accusation against the countries of the North: “You are mainly responsible for the current destruction of decent living conditions on the planet and would like to prevent your former colonies, which you continue to cheerfully plunder, from reaching a collective standard of living that would guarantee our dignity?” Recall that a citizen of Chad emits on average less than two tons of CO2 per year, while a citizen of the United States produces 20. This same Chadian consumes less electricity than an American refrigerator.

This collective rebuke is partly in line with criticism of clericalism in the Catholic Church. Catholic youth know the 15 maladies of the Roman Curia,[13] they clearly see the internal resistance within the Catholic Church that Pope Francis is up against. Because of the intergenerational conflict just referred to, the majority of today’s young people do not feel indebted to tradition; they draw on the Christian spiritual heritage only if it seems relevant to them in order to meet the challenges they face and if the Church proves exemplary.

For the vast majority of young people, Pope Francis has not gone too far – as some critics imply – quite the contrary. And he knows where the Church is heading. Not in the sense that he can know what awaits us on the horizon, only God knows that (cf. Acts 1:7). In the eyes of many, Francis humbly carries out his pastoral mission with prophetic courage, a mission that involves pointing out a meaning, a direction, and of urging us to walk together toward the coming Kingdom.[14] It is undoubtedly for this reason that the joy in Assisi was immense. This joy had little to do with the carefree joy of an immature age, but rather the opposite.


DOI: La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 6, no.12 art. 7, 1222: 10.32009/22072446.1222.7

[1].      The video of Pope Francis’ pastoral visit to Assisi can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kWJ_68bRHg4&t=1s

[2].      Cf. G. Giraud, “Starting anew after Covid-19”, in Civ. Catt. En. April 2020, https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/starting-anew-after-the-covid-19-emergency/

[3].      See “‘Solution négociée ou destruction totale’. Entretien avec le jésuite économiste Gaël Giraud suite aux paroles du Saint-Père prononcées lors de l’Angelus du 3 juillet”, in L’Osservatore Romano, July 12, 2022.

[4].      Cf. G. Giraud, La rivoluzione dolce della transizione ecologica, Vatican City, Libr. Ed. Vaticana, 2022.

[5].      See L. Kemp et Al, “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios”, in Pnas, August 1, 2021.

[6].      Cf. J. Lacaze, “Les conséquences du dégel sur le sol de l’Arctique”, in National Geographic (www.nationalgeographic.fr/environnement/les-consequences-du-degel-sur-le-sol-de-larctique), November 9, 2017. We are currently around 417 ppm on average.

[7].      See K. B. Karnauskas et Al, “Fossil Fuel Combustion is Driving Indoor CO2 Toward Levels Harmful to Human Cognition”, in GeoHealth 4 (2019/5).

[8].      See E. Marks et Al., “Young People’s Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury: A Global Phenomenon”, in The Lancet (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955), September 7, 2021.

[9].      Cf. D. Kwong, Votre attention s’il-vous-plaît. 7 Principes pour captiver et convaincre, Paris, Belfond, 2019.

[10].    Plato was already aware of this, as can be seen from the myth of Theuth, developed in the Phaedrus, 274b-275c.

[11].    She is a young Thai woman who was present in Assisi and was able to discuss with Pope Francis.

[12].    Youth who participated in Cyril Dion’s 2019 film, Animal.

[13]. Cf. Pope Francis’ December 22, 2014, speech on the 15 plagues of the Roman Curia.

[14]. Cf. C. Theobald, Le courage de penser l’avenir. Études œcuméniques de théologie fondamentale et ecclésiologique, Paris, Cerf, 2021.

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