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00579: Re: Significance of the Cross
From: |
Antonio Rossin <rossin(at)tin.it> |
Date: |
Sun, 23 Apr 2006 05:02:53 +0200 |
Subject: |
Re: Significance of the Cross |
Dear Wolfgang,
What are you fearing from?
Also, in democracy, shall we speak to the people, get them
into
being informed of what is passing through, and let them
defend
themselves by themselves?
Or shall we prevent the "relevant people", i.e. the
power-holders,
from being "provoked" by exposing to the people the
hidden ways
they exercise their power over the people?
BTW, I'm changing the title of the article. Some
suggestions?
Perhaps "Religion - Communication - Addiction" sounds
better.
Thanks for your kind attention, best regards
antonio
PS. Now the piece is mounted in the web, as Jud Evans
posted:
==========================
Hi
Antonio!
Hope you are
well?
The piece on the
Significance of the cross is great!
I have uploaded it
to the usual place:
You now have a total of
6-pieces on the EE site and I guess they each get at least 50-100
visitors per day.
Best
wishes,
JUd.
===================================
Thanks Jud
At 13:11 +0200 21-04-2006, Wolfgang Fischer wrote:
Dear Antonio &
Friends,
in the paper quoted below again you very clearly show the basic
relationship between giving and receiving on the one hand and
dialectical communication on the other. Well balanced this
interacting relationship entails guiding orientation whereas
disturbances of this balance entail fatal aberration. Your experience
in and your analysis of pathological family situations have lead you
to such valuable and path-finding insights which have essential
consequences for social sanity too. This is exactly why there is an
important political relevance of your revelation.
By emphasising however on the analogy of the Christian Cross to your
model in my opinion you unnecessarily provoke evitable resistance of
some relevant people you talk to.
Leave the Church and other subordinating structures alone! Their way
of thinking, such aberrant world-view will dry out by itself as soon
as we just leave it alone, do not adopt it and do not give it any
importance!
Focus on your model and trust in its inherent potentiality and
attraction! Clarify again and again the normality of giving and
receiving of INFORMATION (real and virtual) which inevitably causes
development. The quality of this development, its orientation towards
the worse or better depends on flexibly balanced dialectical
communication within the natural context of Freedom based on Natural
Law. As the late Polish Pope once said without knowing what he
said: «Truth liberates!»
Truth is nothing else but Coherency of relationships between the
entities of All and Everything. As soon as we acknowledge this fact
we will discover ourselves beyond any theoretical religious or
political projections and beyond any separation entirely united
by existential needs and conditions in the centre of everyday
life.
Starting from the Father-Mother-Child nucleus of the family your model
evidently extents into the socio-cultural context of human development
the quality of which (be it misery or paradise) is dependent on never
ending and overall free dialectical communication.
Sanity and Health in general are results of finely tuned and flexible
balances of the evidently interconnected entities of All &
Everything of Existence. We are part of this Cosmic Whole and if we
want humanity to survive we are to understand exactly this natural
dependency by the consequences of our way of life.
Never again Idea over Reality!
Never again Ideology over existential orientation and actual teachings
and necessities which are the only relevant benchmarks for Life be it
at local or at global and wider levels.
Function of Life is to govern the structures needed and never the
other way around.
Kind regards, Wolfgang (currently from Shanghai)
---
Dr. Wolfgang Fischer, München
Initiative Emanzipation ad Humanum
Authentizität - Authenticity - Auténticidad
http://emanzipationhumanum.de
http://mensch-sein.de
Am 19.04.2006 12:38 Uhr schrieb "Antonio Rossin" unter
<rossin(at)tin.it>:
Hi friends,,
I append my last writing, hoping it may be of some interest to
you.
Sorry for the length, but it is not yet mounted in the Internet.
(Currently, it can actually be found online e.g. here, M. Kolar, Jan. 5, 2013)
No copyright, of course
regards,
antonio
===================================================
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CROSS
By Antonio Rossin April 2006
INTRODUCTION
Psychological dependence appears in an individual either as a passive
relying on comfort, or as a consensus towards the social leader in
hierarchical subordination. If both these conditions fail, whether
because of a natural creativity-transgression-diversity or because the
young individual finds it increasingly difficult to insert the self
into the social fabric, the same psycho-dependence becomes drug
addiction, with all the concomitant discomfort and
depression.
The
antidote to a psycho-dependent personality and its counterpart, the
domineering authoritarian personality, is to be sought in an education
aiming at forming an autonomous, flexible personality, capable of
being part of the social context critically and creatively. This
condition is essential, among other things, to the development of a
genuine democracy.
The Circular instruction 84 of 20th October 1984 of the Ministry of
Health indicates the flexible personality as the most resistant to the
risk of drug addiction. A dependent personality gets moulded, long
before the individual comes into contact with the many-faceted and
necessarily hierarchical social system, in the model of family
communication. The child, between zero and three years of age, learns
the language that allows it to communicate with its first social
authority, the parents.
During that stage of education, the model used by parents/guardians in
communicating, and its feedback, favours either the structuring of a
dependent personality, or that of an independent, flexible one. This
structure is analogous to a cross with four essential poles:
Giving-Receiving, which represents the hierarchy parents-child along
the vertical beam, and Consensus-Confrontation, which represents the
relation father-mother in function of the child along the horizontal
one. The dialectical relation between parents with its critical, joint
confrontation of opinions, not always coinciding, is an educational
option.
The value of this option is being increasingly practised in secular
Western culture, and ignored, or radically opposed, in
religious-fundamentalist cultural traditions. According to such
traditions with their extreme in Islamic fundamentalism there
is no dialectical equality between father and mother contributing to
the growth of their children. The dominant role, first in the family
and later in society, is reserved solely to the figure of the father,
which dominates without even becoming subjected to dialectical
criticism, as it should be from the very same family.
DEPENDENCE
In the early years, the child depends on its parents for every vital
need. Communication between child and parents is inevitably
hierarchical by natural law. By preventing an excessive psychological
dependence, which may evolve later into drug dependence, the parents
have the possibility so to regulate their language as to build an
educational model that prevents the imprinting of a hierarchical
psychological dependence in the child. This process takes place
between zero and three years of age.
The stakes are not small. The quoted official document states that the
issue is to prevent the youngest from becoming drug
addicted.
Yet
this possibility is not developed as it ought to. The formational role
of the parents at that early critical time for the child remains a
void. It would seem that human society as a whole is victim to a
diabolical, albeit unperceived, plot, based on the abuse of hierarchy,
both in the family and in society. The psychologically dependent are
the most obvious symptom of such abuse. In time, the model of
hierarchical psychological dependence has increasingly become an item
of cultural inheritance. The meme has now grown into a Moloch
that feeds on the children, generation after
generation.
But if
this meme reproduces in a context of hierarchical dependence, we ought
to ask ourselves what the position of the domineering role is in our
logical structure of communication. What is the hierarchical authority
that all of us parents/educators look up to, and on which we depend
when we duplicate in our children the model of psychological
dependence? We ought to ask IN WHOSE NAME our system defends such
hierarchical mechanisms to the bitter end, to the point indeed of
camouflaging the very mechanisms by denying the existence of
hierarchies. This happens against every attempt at critically and
dialectically analysing hierarchical communication, even when the
complete lack of reasons for a hierarchy can lead to the cruelty of
drug addiction.
INFORMATION DENIED
A stiff
resistance is being put up against giving parents (and their
educational task) the information about possible models of
communication aimed at changing its original, traditional set up. The
social system defends its hierarchical pyramid by denying the very
existence of a hierarchy among individuals, in the name of a presumed
general equality. Modern scientific research has not been able to
offer to the weak and disadvantaged youth the right knowledge to avoid
the damage done by psychological dependence. At a wider social level,
it has not been able to provide a remedy against the economic
imbalances linked to consumer dependence. Parents, who are responsible
for the early formation in the children, are enticed into delegating
every one of their competences to the school or to institutions above
the family. Their attention is directed towards what to say to
the children, i.e. the traditional exhortation to good manners.
How to speak to the children encourages them towards taking charge
of their own decisions, sharing experiences and reasoning. Thus are
the bases laid for psychological independence and therefore prevention
of drug addiction. But all this remains in a
limbo.
All in
all responsible educators, and parents first of all, ought to place
more emphasis on day to day communication, for this is what gives the
children the information denied. The two main parameters are
illustrated by the following text of an e-mail message sent to the
Italian Minister for Education Ms Moratti on 10th September 2005. The
title was, What synergy ought to exist between family and
School?
I have
analysed the models of family communication from zero to three years
of age, when language is first learned in a milieu of interpersonal
relations. I have isolated the following two basic parameters:
1. a. Should one avoid showing the child conflicting opinions
between parents?
b. Or should
one show that confrontation is possible and constructive, thus
fostering active, critical participation to dialogue first in the
family and then in society?
2. a. Should one speak to the child
first, thus systematically forestalling every initiative it might
develop
b. Or
should one regulate the parents’ answers according to the child’s
conscious question, respecting its creativity and encouraging its
taking up of responsibility?
My question to You is:
What kind of
child would the School like? One capable of participating
autonomously, critically and actively, educated to live in a
“dialectical” context based on confrontation and responsible
autonomy? Or else a child incapable of critical confrontation and of
autonomy, since it has been brought up in a fundamentalist context
based on conformity? In any case, shouldn’t the School inform the
Family about the School’s specific requirements? The type of
participation demanded of today’s student and tomorrow’s citizen
would thus develop synergy between the two institutions instead of
opposition. Shouldn’t this happen from the very first family
education of the child, when we parents are the sole teachers, however
misinformed?
The Minister’s Secretary answered as follows on 26th September
2005:
On behalf of the Minister I wish to inform you that the question you
have posed by e-mail is at the moment being studied by the competent
office in the Ministry, to see how best they can answer
it.
By 31st December 2005 I thought that a reasonable time had passed to
figure out what the answer should be to such a simple question. I
solicited a reply. The answer was:
Dear Sir,
Re.: your letter to the Minister about
intra-familiar communication models and relations between family and
school.
As you
may have well noticed, the whole set up involving the educational
reform according to Law 53/2003 and appended decrees is characterized,
among other things, to a re-assessed central role of the pupil, whose
education is based on personalizing the course of
formation.
As a
result of this choice, the reform has meant to restore to the family a
different role in the educational setup, acknowledging its right to
choose and to participate, with which the ratio between supply and
demand is modified.
All
this will not be put into practice immediately, and it will not be
easy to operate a cultural turning back. We hope, however that the
direction sketched out, approved and supported by both families and
teachers, will cause important changes in the future.
There
was no specific answer regarding “intra-familiar communication
models” and above all no indication about the necessary
communication parameters necessary to “restore to the family a
different role […] acknowledging its right to choose?” If
there are no models of intra-familiar communication to choose from, a
“right to choose” becomes meaningless. Hence the necessary
information is still denied. We parents are led to believe that the
present structurally vertical model, centered on the principle of
absolute parental (even single parent’s) authority, never to be
submitted to critical analysis in function of the child, is the only
one that exists.
THE CROSS
On the other hand no indication is forthcoming from the Catholic
authority, which otherwise places great emphasis on the family, about
the present proposal, which I have been promoting for more than 35
years. The proposal is based on the critical analysis of the structure
of the relations present in the hierarchical intra-familiar
communication. Graphically, this relation is cross-shaped. Its
horizontal beam represents the thesis-antithesis relations between
parents, placed at the two ends of the beam; its vertical beam,
cutting the other in the middle, has the child at the end, in
subordinate relation. The child is hierarchically dependent in respect
of the family authority represented by the
parents.
The
analogy with another cross appears at this point. This sign has been
monopolized by the Catholic tradition, which has identified it with
the Crucified to symbolise Christianity with the words: “In the name
of the Father and of the Son” along the vertical axis,
“and of the Holy Spirit” along the horizontal one. Such analogy is
therefore based on a substantial structural identity, the symbol of
the cross, but with a formal difference as to the pertinent
roles.
In
fact, should one want to apply the sign to the field of human
communication, it should recite: “In the name of the supreme
Authority … and of its children.” It would thus indicate the
vertical hierarchical relation that binds the children to the Creator
in the Christian tradition. Analogously, the “Holy Spirit”
of the religious tradition becomes the spirit of family dialectics,
through which all material and spiritual values are produced and
handed down, communicated by the parents to the children in the
familiar praxis. Therefore the name of the Father should be
placed at one end of the horizontal beam, and that of the
Mother at the other end. The relation between them is equal and
dialectic. The necessary dialectic space of critical and constructive
space between the parents and the children is thus open.
The placing instead of the name of the Father, which we common
mortals identify with the dominant parent, at the top of the vertical
beam, is that of the supreme Authority, dominating over the Mother as
over any other family or social role. This established a first
hierarchy, placing the father as the domineering authority whom all
the other members of the family must pay the tribute of psychological
dependence. The first conditioning to psychological dependence is thus
born from an inappropriate, not to say ambiguous, placing of the
various roles of the sign of the cross, on acknowledging it among the
cultural roots of our society, starting from a rational education of
social communication that begins with the
family.
This
change of parameters, however, does not seem possible, at least
without the approval of the Church. The analysis of the “cross”
formed by the triadic logical elements of family communication:
hierarchical (vertical) between parents and children and dialectical
(horizontal) between father and mother, recalls our deepest cultural
roots, and thence to our Catholic tradition. In it, the meaning of the
cross makes reference to the Crucified; the triadic elements of human
communication refer to the Trinitarian elements of divine
communication linked to them, and the mystery of dialectic denied
refers to the mystery of the Holy Spirit, which cannot be discussed
but ought to be accepted by an act of faith. And as the divinity of
the Trinity cannot be discussed, neither can its analogical
representation, the family triad. It is never structurally analysed.
In fact, every time I have submitted my analysis, my proposal of
revising the model of family communication has been accepted with a
certain interest in words, but with a substantial refusal of active
participation. When I went on highlighting the analogy of the rational
cross of dialectic communication with the mystical Cross of religious
tradition, I met with a trenchant refusal by all the people to whom I
submitted a previous version, in truth more involved than the present
one. All saw in it a sacrilegious profanation of the divine reality of
the Crucified. No one was able to grasp the sense of a constructive
proposal towards analysing the Family rationally, as a human reality.
“How” to communicate rationally with the children, in the delicate
age between zero and three years, when the parents are its only
teachers, remains therefore space denied, and this with the tacit
approval of the Church. She considers the structural hierarchical
model centered on the Crucifix as the only one existing. The dialectic
thesis-antithesis, in particular, is banned from the horizontal beam
of the cross, where the Catholic tradition places the Holy Spirit. Let
me quote a personal communication:
It
is [equally] evident that a sign of the cross without reference to the
Crucified could not be anything more than an apotropaic sign,
something like touching wood. To grasp the meaning of the cross it is
necessary to pay attention to the
Crucified?
He
who knows how to read the signs of the times, let him read. He who
does not, let him learn if he so thinks, or let him change the
Trinitarian elements of the cross with the sociological ones he thinks
fit. The Trinitarian divinity is neither obvious nor provable
philosophically. If Jesus is the Christ, it is an act of faith (in
him) [otherwise] let us cultivate the ignorance sown at school,
irrigated by pop culture and matured in the milieu of relativism,
consumerism and materialism that holds forth.
Once
again there is a net separation between the divine nature of the
Crucified and his every possible human projection. (Was this
Christ’s teaching, by the way?)
CONCLUSION
No one
knows how long ago human consciousness gave the cross a particular
significance: surely, long before Christ, since we find the “Crux
ansata” among Egyptian hieroglyphs. But, in order to set up
its believing-behaving procedures, the independent human mind needs
the four parameters, the Give-Receive on the vertical hierarchical
beam and the Yes-No dialectical confrontation on the horizontal one,
with the beams linked together in a cross structure.
This logical structure, essential to prevent gregariousness and
addiction, is learned by the child since its earliest age from a
family model where the Give-Receive vertical relationship is exercised
by the family authority above and the child below. The
"Yes-No" horizontal relationship is optionally exercised by
the dialectics between the two parents.
Unfortunately, in time the same cross structure has
acquired a different meaning in Catholic tradition, where it is
identified with the Crucified, even though the actual cross may have
been in the shape of the Greek T. And since our western culture
is rooted in the principles of Catholic tradition, it follows that
anyone who tries to rationalise one’s role in the relations of human
communication, cannot but refer to the same roles of father, mother
and child as sanctified in the toponymy of the religious cross.
Here the upper authority in the vertical axis - God - is but
named "father", like the male parent. This naming upsets the
logical structure being so essential for the independent mind to
function properly.
Further, and even worse, the figure of the mother, so
essential in family dialectics, is absent. This absence actually
denies the formational-educational function of dialectics from
babyhood on.
Is it right to deny such space? The children need it to express their
autonomous and creative participation to the family and to society.
They would thus become free from any useless conditioning that renders
them dependent, passive and uncritical on the family and social
hierarchies, as also on the slavery of drugs.
An analysis of hierarchy in family communication as involving an
absence of dialectics between parents, goes beyond the problem of
psychological dependence and later drug dependence of the children. It
is enough to think about the absence of the father-mother dialectics
in fundamentalist communities and its consequences. Equally, the
richness of a spiritual dependence of love in respect of the divine
hierarchies becomes a misery of uncritical and excessive dependence on
human hierarchies, even when its excess could and should be avoided.
And to avoid it, starting from the family triad, the necessary
information is lacking, even by the church.
I
remember these thundering words in a warning by Augusto Corsini, a
famous Paduan surgeon:
Within pathologic
proceedings, structure governs function;
within physiologic proceedings,
function governs structure.
Is here
to be found the hidden reason why the Catholic Church resists a
representation of the values of the cross, which she identifies with
the Crucified, in the human reality of family education and
communication? If so, the Church would defend the Cross as
the highest symbol of her own hierarchic structure to the detriment of
her very function: the promotion according with the Crucified’s
teachings of the human values, starting of course from the
appropriate communication of the latter.
Antonio
Rossin
www.flexible-learning.org
Notes:
1. From the presentation of “Drugs and the
Family” -- published by Libreria Editrice Zielo, Padua 1990, ISBN
88-85689-13-2 -- a reflection on the link between the educational
model and the formation of a dependent personality. Friday 3rd March
2006, Genoa “Balbiquattro”, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy.
Cycle 70: Self-controlled seminar on removed memory, edited by Marino
Ramingo Giusti.
2. For details see:
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/bottom_up.htm
3. Indications on how to intervene to prevent drug
addiction, G.U. n.21 of 25th Jan. 1985.
4. For details see
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/einstein.htm
5. Technical term for a culturally inherited
phenomenological character.
6. The same question, mailed on 2 Jan.2006 by Doug Everingham to the
Australian Minister of Education, did not get any reply up to date,
Wed.20 April 2006
7. For details see
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/the_role.htm
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