Where were we heading? Do we perhaps know where we are now heading?

The Editorial by Stefano Lavorini

Starting from the questions raised in the title⁽¹⁾, Denis Diderot - t- one of the greatest representatives of the Enlightenment - expounds on this thought, placing it as a post scriptum to his "Interpretation of nature" of 1754:

«Young person, one more word and I shall leave you. Always keep in mind that nature is not God; that man is not a machine; that a hypothesis is not a fact: and rest assured that you have not understood me whenever you think you see something contrary to these principles».
A strong and direct reference as to how we need to constantly check and verify our own ideas, so as to transform them in our  daily practice from simple hypotheses to concrete facts.
A good practice, much needed in the current moment in time, also in light of what we experienced in this first part of 2020.
Up to now, within the world we knew, we have felt reasonably strong and secure as individuals and as a collective ... yet it only took an extraordinary event to bring us back to the past, to the recollection and personal experience of ancestral fears.
The latter have been months of lively exchange of affections and revulsion, of impulses, of faith  in one's own and other people’s strengths, but also moments in which we have rediscovered fragility and precariousness: a real trauma for many but, to be honest, for others, perhaps more trained in  moral exercise, merely a small addition to their suffering, a modest contribution to the adversities of life.

We have heard the same issues and problems repeated everywhere, we have been tirelessly offered the same questions and a variety of often improbable solutions, united in substance by the distancing from the current economic and social model, as well as by the messianic expectations of the birth of the New Man.
We have grazed the fragments of a different way of thinking and feeling, but this vision, initially  so powerful, is already losing strength amidst the increasing number of expectations and needs posed by the present.

And hence we are faced with the difficult task of re-making the Italians (to stay on our home ground), or that is to allow everybody to have  bread, of correcting the social injustices that have been growing for years, of finding a truly sustainable harmony with the environment in which we live, countering  the instincts of oppression and the overriding ambition for success.
The vanity of vanity ...
On the other hand «without reneging on "having", the reasons for a wider humanity are not re-founded, the image of man is not reconstructed on a basis other than selfishness, the savage struggle for his self-affirmation and his appetites»⁽²⁾.

Like the paladin Astolfo, in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the challenge that lies before us is therefore to face an initiatory journey to return to our common sense, to our reason... not that of Orlando, mad for Angelica, but our own, lost for time and fate.

Perhaps we still have some hope, «Since it was not so very long ago that our idea of an admirable masculine spirit was exemplified by a person whose courage was moral courage, whose strength was the strength of conviction, whose steadfastness was that of the heart and of virtue; a man who considered speed childish, feinting as not permissible, and agility and verve as contrary to dignity»⁽³⁾.