2004 / 5
Introduction: This World can be Different1
Luiz Carlos Susin
‘A different world is possible!’ resounded from the loudspeakers on the balcony above the grass esplanade on which the crowd was gathered, next to the abundant river Guaíba, as the summer sun was setting. This proclamation, that ‘a different world is possible’, opened the second meeting of the World Social Forum, held in January 2002 in the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, with some 1.4 million inhabitants. And so, in that opening ceremony with its staging and symbols, was born the slogan that has guided new meetings of the World Social Forum towards a utopian viewpoint capable of drawing together increasing numbers of people from all continents, coming from hundreds of social movements and NGOs, in one great movement aimed at a future world. The slogan ‘A different world is possible’ is not yet a motto for a set of orders, nor does it point to a course of action or militancy; it simply indicates a horizon or a time that is largely concerned with hope and with eschatology.
‘But it is not another world beyond this one. A different world is possible here, on this planet earth,’ the various speakers continued to tell the crowd. What would Popper or Marcuse or the critics of modern ideologies make of such statements? And what would Thomas More and the missionaries setting out for the New World in their caravels to found a new Christendom feel about them? What is certain is that anyone in that crowd who was familiar with theology must have wondered: Is this a millenialist, messianic utopia?
The great questions for millenialist dreams were: Who would the Messiah be and what would he do? Who would now be the one anointed to usher in the happy era of this different world? What needed to be done? And how should it be done? Does the church, the ‘universal sacrament of salvation’ (LG 1), still have anything to do with all this? On the esplanade that summer evening were many people from various churches, including bishops, but they were simply immersed in the spirit of the crowd. In a more intensely [8] globalized world, in the ‘global village’, can religions play a transforming role through their potential for beliefs, dreams and ethics? Among the festive colours of that crowd on the riverbank, one could see various traditional religious garbs mixed in with the light and informal summer clothing. There were young people and adults, with different attitudes to religious faith or to expressions of their other choices, but they were all together on that esplanade, ready to accept the differing ways of building the common dream of ‘a different possible world’.
There was, then, in this multitude of persons and of movements, a striking cultural and religious pluralism, coming together in a great movement towards a different world, or, more precisely, towards this world being different, qualitatively different. Was this a pluralist millennialism, a collective messianism, woven out of this convergence of social movements, of organizations, of human energies directed to a common endeavour? Was it a militant drive for a world developing into a democratic and pluralist socialism, an antidote to both the evil of free-market capitalism and the deservedly failed dictatorial socialism? We still need to ask the question when confronted with this fine utopian and milleniarist horizon — still extremely open and too general: Is a different world possible?2
There are many remaining questions and no complete answer. We are still learning that ‘movements’ make the flow of history but are by their nature ephemeral. And so they should be. Once their mission is accomplished, they naturally dissolve. Their institutionalization is a foretaste of their death-throes, the crucifixion of the Messiah. This has perhaps been the course of base church communities in Latin America, a mixture of movement and ecclesial structure. Lately the structure has been strengthened and the movement strangled. In the World Social Forum we have also seen the danger that NGOs will eventually take over and throttle the social movements, the apple of the Forum’s eye, the stream that makes possible its existence and lends plausibility to its slogan of a different possible world.3
Analyses of the relationship between movement and institution often come to the opposite conclusion: precisely because intuition, movement and mysticism are ephemeral, they have to be underpinned with organization, with institutionalization. Marriage is the stabilization and protection of love. But it is also often at risk of becoming the tomb of love. How can the institution go on inspiring the original intuition and the early love? Churches and religions are institutions, vessels of clay that pour out but also contain the precious liquid of mysticism, of messianism, of the spirituality with [9] the potential to change the world. Left to their own inertia, churches and religions crucify and bury messianic energies under their institutional weight. These energies, however, often in their very ups and downs, provide a powerful channel for the flow of spirituality that has the power to help this world and to stimulate social reform movements by infusing them with an unequalled mysticism, a generosity with no bounds, even of martyrdom. One of the great concerns of liberation theology, officially consecrated in the title of the 1968 Medellín document, ‘The Presence of the Church in the Present-day Transformation of Latin America’, is that living faith and religious practice should not necessarily be alienating or conservative but can also be revolutionary, transformative, opening up possibilities for making a different world achievable.
What sort of different world is possible? We all want, and in the end always will want, peace and justice, tranquillity and prosperity — for all. Today, however, these messianic benefits are conditioned by the sustainability and by the political and economic, technological and scientific, resources of a globalized world paradoxically ever more limited by the very course of its own development. In other words, if this world is to be sustainable, it must necessarily become ‘different’. The prime sustainability is at once ecological and ethical. Above all, it requires an ethic of living together in peace and keeping the earth habitable, which means an ethic of pluralism and justice. Do religion, spirituality and theology possess resources to assist in the ecological and ethical sustainability of this world, helping it to become different? Perhaps the relevance of religions and churches depends on the answer to this question. If theology has nothing relevant to say on this sustainability, it had better remain silent. And it would be shameful for it to make its own apologia, to declare itself relevant a priori. The World Social Forum, with its utopian outlook and its stream of movements, could be a broad and suitable authority for judging and making a case for the type of theology that helps to promote an ecologically sustainable world, with justice and peace for all. Could God, when all is said and done, want anything else for this world of ours?
Under the aegis of the World Social Forum and its slogan, ‘a different world is possible’, a World Forum of Theology and Liberation is taking place in January 2005, in the same city of Porto Alegre.4 The objective is to bring together those theologians, men and women, from the various Christian traditions and from all continents, who are producing theology in contexts of initiatives, movements and organizations in search of justice, peace and freedom for the sons and daughters of God, including all creatures [10] on earth. The evangelization mandate is tuned with the slogan of the World Social Forum and becomes an imperative, for theology too: this world can and must be different. Christian theology cannot remain cynically seated in the square on the pretext that no one has summoned it to the task, nor can it go and care for its own ecclesiastical oxen, consuming itself in concerns for its own patch, its own space and its own rules, with its own identity and its own self-justification, and absent itself from interpretation of and celebration of hope in a different possible world. It has heard the good news and is impelled to evangelize, to make its contribution, but without abdicating from what has been familiar to it since birth: the messianic dream of the coming kingdom of God. Because ‘The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?’ (Amos 3.8).
This issue of Concilium shares in the same outlook and forms part of the same stream of social movements. It has taken upon itself the task of working out the reasons for such a great clamour for a different world. Clearly, it is working these out not univocally but from a variety of disciplines: in Part I, it relies on the contributions of specialists in sociology and philosophy, treating the need for ‘a different world’ from three angles: the dead-ends and unsustainability of the decided courses of some aspects of economics, politics, and today’s dominant ideologies; then it looks at sketches of, pointers to and experiments in a different possible world by social movements with viable alternatives; plus — which implicates theology more directly but also more arduously — the possibility of utopias and their role and place in committed efforts at changing the present world.
In the recent past Concilium has devoted several issues to consideration of the problems and possibilities, sufferings and victims, risks and hopes that permeate the economy, power structures, cultures and religions in the midst of growing globalization. Utopia, after the death of ideologies, has also begun to be re-considered by Concilium. Should it be that we ought to treat the subject from another, more radical viewpoint, stated by the theologian Juan Luis Ruiz de la Peña, of happy memory, that this is the time for the death of utopias and for new possibilities for a renewed eschatology? How to distinguish without separating? How to unite without confusing? Are we not facing new forms of the paradox of the relationship between natural and supernatural, grace and works, and so on? However one looks at it, there is no possibility of being comprehensive in re-thinking utopia and eschatology for this world, but this does not excuse us from yet another consideration. Or from dreaming and expressing our hope, like the poet Oscar Campana, quoted by the admirable bishop-poet Pedro Casaldáliga when he confessed [11] his passion for utopias by changing his Doctor honoris causa to Doctor ‘passionis’ causa:
If there were no road to take us
our hands would
open one,
and there would be room for children, for
life and for
truth;
and this place would be for everyone,
in justice and in
freedom.
If anyone is willing, let me know:
two of us then will make a
start....
In Part II of this issue, like experts drawing on treasure-chests of things old and new, the contributors turn to the resources of the religious traditions, with emphasis on the biblical and Christian tradition, to see how religious practice can become different, starting from other people, from other creatures and from the courtesy and justice we owe to all that is different from ourselves. This is absolutely not a matter of apology for religions, but of how religious traditions, with their ethics and mysticism, with their theology and their poetry, their representations of the divine, of the Creator and creation, can provide an apology and sustainability for a ‘different’ world.
In Part III, realistic and practical in tone, we begin with the relevance of minority religious traditions to the sustainability of a globalized world. Further consideration is given to the contribution religious traditions can make to political and economic sustainability. Finally, a case study is provided in the form of the possibility of a peace process in the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, a difficult but possible peace and one of the test-cases for humankind to make ‘a different world possible’.
Under the eschatological veil of life in abundance and looking towards the utopian horizon of a possible different world, Concilium joins in the stream of regional and global social movements in exodus, in the hope of eis-odos, of entry into a different world — this has to be possible. But, along with everything that is divine creation, it also depends on human decisions and responsibilities. Jon Sobrino concludes this interdisciplinary collection with a recollection of Ignacio Ellacuría, a contemporary martyr who, with clarity and faithful love, left the testimony that unachievable utopia can inspire and invigorate what can be achieved towards a world of justice and peace.
Translated by Paul Burns
Notes
1. An editorial decision has been made to prefer ‘different’ to ‘other’ in English, to avoid confusion with the ‘other’ world ‘beyond’ — a meaning ruled out in para. 2 below (Trans.)
2. The Revista de Análises y Reflexión Teológica ‘Alternativas’ (Managua) reacted immediately, in its January–June 2002 number, making this its general title, but with a question mark at the end.
3. The World Social Forum came into being, in fact, as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum held at Davos in Switzerland. This is why it takes place on the same dates. But it grew to such an extend that it outgrew its original intentions and developed surprising forms.
4. More information of the World Forum of Liberation and Theology can be found at http://www.pucrs.br/pastoral/fmtl/index.htm
Concilium
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