Available online the proceedings of the webinar on human capital, social capital and humanitas. 9th Meeting promoted by the Eurispes Laboratory

Available online the proceedings of the webinar on human capital, social capital and humanitas. 9th Meeting promoted by the Eurispes Laboratory

Below are the proceedings of the 9th Meeting sponsored by Eurispes’ Human Capital Laboratory. At the centre of the debate was the theme: ‘Human, social and humanitas capital’.

The meeting was held online on 28 February 2024. The following took part in the discussion: Mario Morcellini, massmediologist, Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes – Sapienza University of Rome, Rosapia Farese, Co-Founder and President of FareRete-InnovaAzione il Bene Comune, Aldo Berlinguer, President of the Eurispes Observatory on insularity and inland areas, Luigi Balestra, President of the Riparte l’Italia Observatory, Benedetta Cosmi, Coordinator of the Eurispes Laboratory on Human Capital.

Benedetta Cosmi: Good afternoon everyone, we are at the ninth meeting of the Eurispes Laboratory, which through webinars connects our networks in various cities, and in this case all the more so because two of today’s guests, compared to the other occasions that had already seen us try to build this bridge, even have in their names the objective and purpose of bringing together the supply chain, the network of the common good of innovation and the restart with the States General, and so I greet and thank Luigi from Bologna. However, I pass the floor to Aldo for the introductory greetings, he replaces President Fara of Eurispes and gives us a link thanks to his particular Observatory, precisely today when, among other things, all the attention is on Sardinia. Thank you to those who are following us from the live streaming and thank you for your greeting.

Aldo Berlinguer: Thank you. Welcome to the guests and those who are following us. In the meantime, a thank you to Bendetta Cosmi who very successfully directs the Eurispes Human Capital Laboratory and who is the organiser of today’s event which is entitled ‘Human, social and humanitas capital’. I would like to thank and greet the other guests, Professor Mario Morcellini who is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Communicative and Cultural Formative Processes, former professor of Sociology of Communication, pro-rector, dean, he needs no special introduction. I would also like to greet and thank Dr. Rosapia Farese, who has been dealing with these issues for a long time. She is the co-founder and president of the association ‘FareRete-Innovazione-Bene Comune’ and therefore this angle of view is also an important, significant contribution to our discussion. I would also like to thank my colleague Luigi Balestra, who teaches Civil Law at the University of Bologna and is here in his capacity as president of the ‘Riparte l’Italia’ Observatory, if I am not mistaken, an Observatory set up with Giuseppe Caporale in 2020 and which focuses on the theme of how this country, also thanks to human capital, can try to restart from the not always edifying condition in which it finds itself today. As you said, I chair the Osservatorio Insularità e Aree Interne (Insularity and Inner Areas Observatory), which was set up recently, only 10 months ago, following the constitutional reform that introduced, or rather, reintroduced, the principle of insularity into the Constitution on the initiative of the Sardinians themselves, who drew up a popular initiative constitutional bill, something more unique than rare, and which was completed on the last day of the last legislature, among other things, with the Chambers dissolved in prorogatio. This law has come into being and we have set up an observatory that looks at these vulnerable, marginal, peripheral territories that have in common with the inland areas precisely their peripherality. From my point of view, I can see many of the problems that I imagine my fellow Members may wish to touch upon, because in these areas, which make up 60% of the national territory, we are witnessing a devouring depopulation, a growing desertification of public services, from hospitals to schools, but also the police forces. And, as you know, these small villages, so many of which have fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, even fewer in areas with a very low population density, the moment the petrol station closes, the bank closes, the Carabinieri barracks closes, the end of life is already in sight, because the school is no longer there and therefore there are no longer any new generations to train and live there. I am witnessing this decline, with respect to which I have to say we must all join together to find answers, curbs to this trend, if not actually succeed in reversing the trend, which by the way, as you said, is also somewhat confirmed in the last regional elections, not because who won, who lost, deserved or not deserved, but because 52.4% of those eligible voted, and this is a figure that remains constant because it is almost identical in 2019, in 2014, and still back; which means that there is a half of that society – some 750,000 people voted out of 1.6 million, which is the population of Sardinia – that seems interested in a policy that, as we would all like it to be, translates into a project site to look to the future. As I was pointing out, it is not just a contingent datum, i.e. someone who shows disaffection for the way the municipality or the region has been governed, because the datum is constant, so there is a structural disaffection and it leaves out a very important part of society, including women and young people – then the data must be read carefully, considerations must be made -; there is really a part of society, including young people, who feel detached from what politics can propose as an image of their future. There is not only the issue of infrastructural, economic, and therefore also social and cultural impoverishment, because then there is a lack of presidia, but there is really an absence of trust in the future and in those who should in some way contribute to designing it. This is something that always takes second place and we focus exclusively on who has won, who has lost, but this silent country that is leaving, that is looking elsewhere, that does not feel like a citizen of this political agora truly represents an open wound that should be healed in some way, I do not say that it can be healed in the very short term, but at least healed. I will pass the floor again to Benedetta Cosmi, who is moderating the initiative. Thank you, thank you again.

Benedetta Cosmi: Thank you Aldo, let’s come back to these points, which are also fundamental in focusing on what it means to think about human capital, because then when you talk about countries, and therefore a country that is showing signs of ending, it means that this can only be relaunched with human capital and therefore we need to understand who, where and how they interface with whom, where they go. We also talked about this at the Stati Generali in Bologna with Luigi, i.e. where those who leave us go, what they do, with whom they manage to network, with whom they manage to realise their projects, which are often entrepreneurial and not just individual. So I would pass the word on to you that with the observatory that wants to be daily, this Think Tank that takes place on the one hand as a newsletter, but on the other hand as a network and also a megaphone of all the personalities that have participated and are participating live in your event, but which no longer becomes just a sort of festival, a once-a-year extemporaneous meeting, but goes precisely to mend those distances and those solitudes that we have in the rest of the young people. We cultivate loneliness, we amplify it, we don’t mend it, because what is missing is the feeling of being part of a project, part of a team, part of ongoing training, part also – as we said with Rosapia, when we met for this meeting – of the ruling class that otherwise makes decisions in solitude and without constructive interfacing. There were two events (yours in November and another one, I think, down there in Sardinia) that I attended last year at which I did not see the front row stand up, and there I realised that in Milan, for example, and perhaps also in Rome by now, it is difficult for guests to stay – in Bologna you even stayed for two days, the mayor of Naples was there along with other former rectors and even former ministers of universities and so on. The fact of constantly interfacing between panels, staying and studying, if we want to reuse this term, or reflecting, and therefore staying there to think, not just to talk in the few seconds that they listened in the before and after, this makes, in my opinion, the difference compared to the continuous and bulimic participation that we all have. That is why I wanted to gather you, who in this, I believe, have been making a significant contribution since 2020, as Aldo mentioned, so a few years ago, but some symbolic years, not least because of the pandemic, in which we realised that communication infrastructures have to be rebuilt – this could be an expression to be used again later for Mario Morcellini. So you have the floor, and thank you for being here.

Mario Morcellini: Thank you very much for the very welcome invitation. As you remember, “Riparte l’Italia” was born in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic and in some ways it wanted to satisfy what was perceived as a need to be able to make a contribution to the restart in terms of ideas in the knowledge – this was the reflection that we made with Giuseppe Caporale when we ventured into this initiative – that for perhaps three, four decades, if not longer, the intermediation of the bodies, pardon the pun, intermediaries, has been lost. That is, politics has begun to speak directly to the belly of the voter by virtue of a communication that has decreed the direct passage of the message, as if this were somehow more effective in terms of popular consensus. However, we felt at the outset that there is a growing disaffection in the voting booth, a real disinterest on the part of the voter and, therefore, we have lost points of reference with regard to the acquisition of awareness of interests, issues and, consequently, the choices that need to be made, precisely because there has been an overtaking of what an important community could contribute in terms of cultural reflection. The Observatory was born out of this perceived need and has sought, in this perspective, to place itself in a way that is absolutely neutral with respect to the political debate, but also to be able to solicit in a critical manner what are the problems of a country that is perpetually in a state of emergency, because we are used to thinking of the pandemic as the emergency because it is the one that visually touches us the most, because in a short space of time there is total destruction, there are deaths, and so we experience this as the emergency, but there are many other emergencies that this country is experiencing in a state of absolute habituation. One you may have seen in the news in recent weeks: it is that of air pollution that grips northern Italy and causes, every year, thousands of deaths that go unnoticed, because obviously adopting major policies also means losing consensus, it means imposing restrictions, limitations, different habits from those we are used to; the other, but there are many others that could be referred to, is the mafia phenomenon that grips this country, that forces it to live with at least three or four of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world, and we do this with absolute ease, to the point that the mafia culture has taken hold of many levels of the public. So this is a country that, evidently, if it still manages to remain today in the G7 with a leading role, let’s say, it means that it is also capable of expressing excellence, and this must be taken into account, because these are excellences that are passed over in silence, almost as if everything was due, and which, however, contribute to compensating for all those negative dynamics that are evidently present in this socio-economic reality of ours. When we speak of a network, from my point of view, it is a concept that should be declined on multiple levels; try to think of the Italian entrepreneurial individualism that makes it a system connoted by so-called dwarfism, and that makes it uncompetitive with respect to large foreign groups, which are not necessarily in America or East Asia, but just look at France. This is because Italian entrepreneurs are extraordinarily good at planning, at ideation, but find it hard, by virtue sometimes of an exasperated individualism, to get together and create added value that can make them competitive in some way. The network theme, just think that in 2009-2010 a discipline was launched that made reference to enterprise networks, well in my opinion it should be cultivated as a cultural process that concerns not only enterprises, but every form of socio-cultural manifestation that can bring progress and well-being to this country. Young people are the winning soul for the future of any community, and so when we talk about migration, depopulation of villages, of areas that are in some way depressed, marginalised, this is a major theme that is then linked to the even more relevant theme of migration abroad, because not only do people migrate to national territories that are more attractive in terms of opportunities for professional growth, but very often the dissatisfaction and inability that we know is typical of Italian society to give entry to disinterested merit. This leads to young people going abroad and there cultivating the dreams that they had as children. So, I think a lot of work needs to be done on young people, not least because there is a theme that is particularly close to my heart, which is that of poverty, which is not just a concept linked to the circumstance that one does not have sufficient means of subsistence or means to lead a free and dignified existence, but which today is a very complex concept, which we must articulate on several levels. For example, there is an issue of educational poverty, there is a problem of cultural poverty with respect to which those who have responsibilities – but it is we ourselves who are giving ample space for reflection with this initiative – must take charge to try to revive curiosity, stimuli, so that cultural deepening can become a point of arrival for this youthful population that we very often see as disoriented. And if there is a lack of access to the voting booth, this also relates to educational poverty from my point of view, because there is not enough awareness of the importance of fundamental civic duties. Nowadays we look, or rather we do not look, at what are fundamental freedoms – and the sensibility of the person who introduced this work, as a jurist, well knows this – fundamental freedoms sanctioned by a Constitution that, when it was enacted, looked to the past and wanted to repudiate what in previous years had been totally precluded in terms of the manifestation of the personality of the individual. Today we boast a formidable constitutional text in terms of fundamental rights but, as Norberto Bobbio said, it is no longer a problem of recognition, it is a problem of concretisation, of making these rights effective; It is pointless for us always to create new ones, always different ones, and all this is welcome, but it is essential to set in motion processes that make them effective and concrete, and to do this it is necessary for everyone to become aware, from my point of view, that freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of religion, are fundamental freedoms that are part of a wealth of assets that each of us must be the guarantor, guardian and proponent of, so that a society can clearly progress. And so all this can be done by triggering new cultural processes that aggregate; hence, the intuition of these meetings, precisely because networking creates added values, helps to reflect, helps to compare, generates new ideas, sharing, and new paths can only be set up in some way if there is sharing; We cannot rely on the individualism of each individual, who carries out initiatives that are very often worthy – try to think of the philanthropy of entrepreneurs, it is a philanthropy that I define as selfish, i.e. each one panders to his own personal interest, his own prerogative, and sometimes somehow dictated by the impossibility of evading it. For philanthropy to have its genuineness, it must be the attitude of someone who disposes of something without asking for an account and without giving directions as to what is to happen through the use of those assets: that is, a truly disinterested act for the benefit of the community. It is clear that I must always guide it, direct it so that there are no distortions, but it is precisely for this reason that we should all sit around a table and share choices, so that they actually meet the interests of the community, on which we are all called upon to debate today. I really will stop here.

Benedetta Cosmi: Let’s continue with Rosapia Farese, as in the title, from human capital to social capital, which is a short step.

Rosapia Farese: I would like to thank Eurispes and especially Benedetta Cosmi for the opportunity of this meeting and to be able to make a contribution and leave a trace of the thought and values of the culture of our association. We intend to disseminate in order to contribute to the creation and diffusion of a managerial culture among all the actors of the economic and social system, in particular we work in the fields of health, environment, work, education, citizenship rights and duties in favour of the economic sustainability of the Country-System, of all the issues pertaining to the preservation of the Welfare of health and in particular the management of illness. I have been dealing with these issues for about 10 years in a very concrete way. Previously, through the speech of Michele Gozzaro, who was the inspiration for this project, together we had made our own path of knowledge of what is the common good. Michele Gozzaro has spent his personal and professional life in the continuous effort to concretely pursue this common good, convinced that we must leave behind the conception of the common good as the sum of individual goods acquired through individual opportunity and develop, instead, in function of the primacy of the ego, that is, in function of the ego of the person. The common good understood, therefore, as a system of values to which we aspire to inspire our way of life, but also as a source of inclusive and non-exclusive innovation, as a mark to be placed on the actions of the individual and collective action, as an exhortation to create value for the society in which we live. The association is focused on the development and innovation of the common good; its strategic vision also includes issues concerning inclusion, social integration, as well as all those factors that affect the quality of human life in systemic terms. The association is autonomous, apolitical, non-partisan and non-profit. Both by the breadth of the topics covered, which range, as we have seen, from ecological issues to economic, health, or training issues, and by the type of recipients to whom our initiatives are directed, we distinguish ourselves from other associations that gather homogeneous populations of subjects and operate in their interest, by the fact that we are made up of experts from various backgrounds, who make use of their knowledge and professional experience to work alongside and in support of the institutions, but also of all our referents. Members do not join for the immediate benefit of their needs, but because they feel they can actively contribute to the development of the common good, and thus be part of a structural change in our society. In the association’s name there are two exhortations: networking and common good, which sum up in full the association’s vision, mission and strategy. Our vision is projected into the future scenario in which we imagine we can operate; it is that of a better world in which everyone, and not just a few, strive with commitment and responsibility towards the common good. This is the deepest reason why the association was established and fully reflects the ideals, values, and aspirations of all members, making us proud to be part of it. Thus, the common good is at the heart of our work, where by common good we mean not only the safeguarding of the material goods assigned to and shared by the members of a community, but also and above all the set of conditions that favour the cultural, spiritual and moral well-being of individuals and, therefore, of the community. Very topical issues such as environmental protection, health, education, training of citizens, working conditions, peace and social/human capital fall within the definition of common goods; all these issues are at the heart of our work. We realise, as it is defined, how important and valuable the common good is, because it ultimately forms the foundation of a healthy society with the human being and the intrinsic and very high dignity of his existence at its centre. I would like to get to the heart of this meeting. It is important to define the concept of human social capital and highlight its crucial role as invisible capital that fortifies our societies. In today’s times, the concept of human capital is of crucial importance to ensure sustainable socio-economic development, serving as a foundation for the equitable and inclusive growth of society. The skills, knowledge and experience of individuals not only foster economic growth, but are also crucial in promoting sensitivity to environmental challenges and ensuring a sustainable future for the next generations. Safeguarding the balance between economic progress and environmental protection is at the heart of the contemporary debate, as growing environmental problems are often the result of our ambitions for consumption and profit that lead to an excessive use of natural resources and an increase in polluting emissions. In this context, the concept of human capital emerges as an essential lever to promote sustainable development based on prudent resource management and the adoption of responsible behaviour. Recent studies have also highlighted the direct link between development sustainability and human capital, pointing out that more human capital is associated with better environmental quality and reduced environmental degradation. Therefore, the importance of investment in education, life-long learning, and environmental awareness is emphasised to foster the transition to a more equitable, inclusive and environmentally friendly development model. I would argue that we should move towards a new model of development: to effectively support the sustainability of human capital development, a series of integrated strategies are needed, from investing in education, to promoting active citizen participation, through technological innovation and multi-sectoral collaboration. Every action aimed at enhancing this capital contributes to laying the foundations for a more equitable and resilient future. At a time when environmental and social challenges demand concrete and timely responses, support for human capital is an essential investment in building a more aware, inclusive and sustainable society. Only through a shared commitment and a vision oriented towards the common good can we meet the challenges of the present and shape a future where more equitable prospects and environmental protection are a shared priority. Only together can we build a world in which human capital is valued and preserved as a fundamental resource for a better future for all. For this we must network, we must address the issue of the cost of personal development and life-cycle assurance. The complexity of today’s challenges emerges; unfortunately, contemporary society, characterised by increasing individualisation and the gradual replacement of traditional sources of upbringing by monetised social dynamics, is faced with a significant burden: the transition to a secular society has meant that education and personal development need to be supported by resources mainly from industrial society. However, today’s society is faced with the dilemma of sustaining the life cycle in a context of increasing loneliness and individualism, thus generating not only economic, but also social and existential problems. The critical analysis of the radical society highlights the contradictions and challenges related to sustaining the life cycle and promoting individual development; in this context, hiding the problems of libertinism or powerlessness in the face of imminent death does not solve the underlying challenges related to the costs involved in dealing with planned self-destruction. It is essential to consciously and responsibly address the social, economic and human costs associated with developing the individual and ensuring the life cycle, and to seek sustainable and inclusive solutions for collective well-being. I should move on to define what sustainable and inclusive solutions might be, but I will set them out in the second part of this meeting.

Benedetta Cosmi: Of course, also because we do not want to send messages of pessimism, but of realism. Also because, as Aldo said earlier, we must not let the presidia of the state, of health, but also of social relations such as schools, libraries, which are an element of innovation (on the subject of how to innovate the common good), decay. The protagonist of this remains, as the last part of the title of today’s meeting – which we entrust to you, Mario – humanitas, which makes us penetrate more deeply into some aspects that are more related to the human soul.

Mario Morcellini: Before going into the merits of my speech, I want to react briefly to the three interventions. I start from two points of Aldo Berlinguer’s speech, which I somehow find elaborated in the other two speeches and therefore, in fact, I try to build a block between the three speeches that serve me very much as a starting point for my reasoning, which will be a reasoning that tries to reconstruct the historical, cultural and intellectual bases of the concepts of common good but, above all, of social capital and cultural capital – or rather, in the opposite order, cultural capital is the oldest elaboration, even if you have to know how to recognise it in the history of ideas, social capital arrives thanks to sociology but, above all, to the presence in Italy of a great sociologist like David Putnam in the 1950s and 1960s and then to Coleman. The common good, as is well known, is a concept that already exists even in Thomism, there is the fantastic phrase of St. Thomas that says “Bonum est diffusivum sui”, a very beautiful phrase, but that does not take into account the birth of television and digital, but obviously he could not have known that. The theory of the common good in Italy has been elaborated by many scholars, one of whom is Ugo Mattei (the Ugo Mattei, I would like to quote, not the one of the Covid era), not far from Aldo Berlinguer’s studies. So I would take a few key words, also to make my speech a little more concrete, which is deliberately academic, because in my opinion the concept of social capital and human capital must be elaborated in terms of studies and theoretical research. So, the first is this extraordinary reference that I find very close to the focus on the inland areas, and I do not mind mentioning Sardinia at this time, because I too see that one of the strands that has brought an absolutely unexpected result – you know how difficult it is now in Italy, thanks to the polls, not to predict the results; this time the polls have not understood anything and, in fact, we had begun to perceive that these were a little too close to the political class in government, which is always for culture a folly, because then this remains over the years. Why is the reference to inland areas, to areas of social and cultural deprivation, important? Not only for cultural deprivation of which, in recent years, I have become a specialist also in view of the fact that this is the centenary year of Don Milani’s birth. Because it strikes me that economists, often from left-wing cultural backgrounds – an economist is on the left knowing that economics is more important to him than political vision, and so for me this subject already makes it complicated to understand – use a word that is shocking, because the power of words, as is known omen nomen, means deep visions, almost prejudices. The locution economists use to describe all social areas where investments are not productive, because the number of people makes them economically unsustainable, is ‘market failure areas’. Meanwhile, it is interesting to discover that somewhere there is also a market failure, because otherwise it becomes a crazy theology; on the other hand, the definitions of the scholars are surprising – and here I don’t mind frontally saying that economists on this should take a step back – because every time I used this term at Agicom I used it in a technical term, attacking it, and the economists would say “Ah no, but for us that is just a scientific paradigm”, they didn’t know that they were thus doubling the burden of the difficulty of a discipline to understand that at the centre there must be human beings and the common good. I agree, to tell the truth, with almost all the interventions, so you will see that without almost knowing each other we have already achieved a beautiful harmony on paper. Inland areas are fascinating because of the strength of the cultural identity that survives there, otherwise people would not remain in areas so desertified of social possibilities and services. To make you understand how important this discourse is, I would have to mention many things, such as Don Milani, who clung to a country that was almost a nail in a map, which was not even on the map when Don Milani was alive. Dismissed by a cardinal, something that, obviously, in our memory seems almost incomprehensible to us, sent literally into exile in this country after some controversies linked to his role as vice-parish priest in Calenzano, there he found the strength to make a country destined to disappear – where there was no electric light, there were almost no roads, there was nothing inter-subjective except a cinema and not imminent – become a place in the cultural and educational imagination of the history of the country. We still think of Don Milani almost as if he were alive and Barbiana is the heart of this thought, where, among other things, Don Lorenzo is buried. But that is not all. This year, the association of which I am Vice-President, the Association of University Teachers of Catholic Inspiration, wanted to dedicate some events to Don Milani and so I had to re-read it, although it was a little tiring, because then the words come to me. I discovered, for example, that there is an interview with the last President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, the former Archbishop of Perugia, hence my fellow countryman, who tells us what life was like in those very places. He was born, even this hardly anyone in Italy knows, many kilometres away from Barbiana, in places where only priests or a few courageous teachers invented popular schools. I discovered, for example, that the concept of the popular school, which I crudely annexed to Don Lorenzo, had in fact already begun with an old parish priest whose strength and spirituality this Cardinal, in the last year of his term as president, reconstructs. And that story, I point it out to Aldo because it is fascinating reading, is a book on minor centres, on backward areas, and on how much in those towns, the carabinieri when they were there, the pharmacy when it was there, but above all the parish priest, were the element that cemented identity and unity, the perception of being something, and today unfortunately we know that even that chance no longer exists due to the crisis of vocation. Italy is made up of many villages, of minor centres: it is impressive and Aldo is right to remind us that it is 60% (of the territory). A political initiative can be made to make them count at least as much as they impact in statistical terms. And to close this aspect of my very short speech, I remember, as a gift to Aldo, this beautiful quotation by Pavese from La luna e i falò that says “A country is needed, if only for the sake of leaving. A country means not being alone, knowing that in the people, in the plants, in the earth, there is something of yours that even when you are not there remains waiting for you’. I have studied this stuff because I am a motivational Umbrian, but I insist on the villages, on the inland areas, on the so-called ‘market failure’ areas; we need to launch an initiative, even a scientific one, because culture has taken very little notice of this reality. Only one book has been written by a sociologist, not by chance a pupil of Gallino’s, called Grimaldi – who is also a scholar of votive offerings – who has worked precisely on hill communities, so Aldo will be pleased to know that there is in any case some sociologist who deals with these aspects, and it is not by chance that he too has studied Pavese because for a while he was the President of the Centre for Pavese Studies in Santo Stefano Belbo. This is the first reference I make to the previous debate. The second, even more important, because this really is at the heart of a bold, but finally courageous reading of Italian social reality, is the crisis of intermediate bodies. “Crisis’ is still an academic word, so I would use disappearance, liquefaction, scrapping, because it is hard to think that it was fate. It was the models of development, the incompetence of intellectuals who stay at home instead of acting on the public scene, because more than anyone else, intellectuals could have known that eliminating the crossing points between society and individuals, thus removing all the bridges that somehow reconnect communities, would have had the potential to reduce the dramatic impact of contemporary individualism, one of the worst hangover of culture, especially the contemporary media, because it is difficult to deny that there is a contribution not so much of the mainstream media as of the digital media and, at the same time, make politics absolutely political communication – because when there are no longer intermediate bodies, there is no recognition of what Lazarsfeld called the ‘opinion leaders’, that is, those who somehow mediated, as if they were extraordinary social and political disseminators, knowledge to people less prepared to understand the complexity of a changing world. Therefore, the crisis of intermediate bodies bears two serious responsibilities: the fact that from this point of view politics becomes almost nonsense, it becomes only rhetoric and political communication – this I studied for the journal Paradoxa in which I literally noted with data, even working on indicators, that by now Italian politics is subjugated to communication, both in terms of language and leaders. An example of this today is the statement by the new and brilliant deputy secretary of Forza Italia who says ‘We will only bet on people of great impact for the next election campaigns’. Well, that too is a form of servitude to the communication society: you have to take those who are representative of social needs and capable of solving them. This is the way I connect to the previous debate, but they cannot fail to close with the concept of the common good that was so embroidered by Rosapia Farese. It is a fascinating concept in modern society, which tends to sterilise and Americanise all instruments of interpretation; a word so quietly linked to our language, indeed to Latin, as mentioned earlier there is even a reference in St Thomas. Common good, hear this word resound because we are not used to linking the idea of goods, i.e. the resources that make life desirable and worth living, not with the adjective individual or consumption, but common, i.e. linked to the community, to the discovery of our interaction. On the basis of this premise, which as you see is completely linked to the paradigm we shared together now, more briefly, in less than 10 minutes I try to tell you what are the conceptual foundations that support the interpretative force of the concepts of immaterial culture – in the last speech Rosapia spoke of invisible goods, very interesting this definition, I work in the concept of immaterial, but I do not need to tell you that it is the same thing – and I also put them at the origin of the affirmation of the concepts of social capital and cultural capital. The times in which these concepts were born are obviously never as neat as scholars would like, because immaterial culture only became powerful in this century; before that there were references in cultural anthropology, in the sociology of culture, when one remembered to deal with the constructs of culture, but I cannot say that they were codified or defined, because concepts become interesting when the culture of them gives a quick, assertive definition, so that it does not need to be self-explanatory from the outside. Let us start with the concept of the intangible good, which comes into being publicly, of course: even these things always need institutional interventions, because those sometimes change history, and so it means that men gathered in an institution can somehow construct definitions that go beyond even their human and political season (I am thinking in particular of Ruberti). In 2003 there is a famous Unesco general conference, the 32nd, which lasts a full 17 days, from September to mid-October, in Paris entitled ‘International Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’. This is probably the first time that the idea that the concept of cultural heritage is intangible, i.e. something to be left to generations, is implicit in the title of an international conference, particularly by Unesco. This idea is translated in the title of such a long event, hence of a reflection of a long duration (17 days). There is a great scholar of cultural inequalities, now dead, called Richard Hogger who wrote a book that would not come out today, would not find any publisher, entitled ‘Proletariat and the Cultural Industry’. This is how he defines cultural inequality, or rather what we today call educational poverty, cultural poverty, etc. Cultural poverty in my opinion is an even more interesting concept for politicians to understand. But from the point of view of the elitism of definitions they call it ‘cultural deprivation’. Think about it, there is the deprivative ‘de’ and, at the same time, ‘deprivation’ which means that men can live their lives without access to the light and power of culture and therefore means that they live almost like automatons, without spiritual, cultural, cognitive stimulation, as if their minds are not stimulated by such exciting and enduring concepts. I’ll go fast because this stuff I was telling you is from 2003. What was meant in those years by intangible culture? Living masterpieces – and Italy would have every reason to be the world’s number one – and at the same time cognitive capitals, hence the things we are talking about: the university, research, popularisation, expert communication, which is different stuff compared to so-called ‘mass’ communication. In these 20 years that separate us from the elaboration of the definition, in a word, of ‘cultural heritage’, there was a decade that was profoundly marked by Minister Ruberti, who at that time, after having been Minister of my great university, the one that thank God restored the ancient name of Sapienza after the splendours of Boniface, also became European Commissioner and there he worked in a resounding way to give a boost to cultural capital, giving it, to some extent, his own contribution: he was a professor of systemic engineering and the adjective helped him more than the discipline, i.e. the ability to put discourses together, as we heard earlier in the arguments that were made in particular in the last speech. Listen to this definition used by a famous Italian anthropologist called Clemente who taught for a long time in Siena and wrote one of the first books on cultural and intangible heritage. It is not the best in quotations, but it is the oldest, so out of respect for this scholar, I use him. “The issues that cultural heritage talks about connect with a social space”, already here we are getting closer to the things Rosapia was telling us just now. I take the quote again: ‘they connect with a social space, that of civil society’. There is another great, dazzling, discovery, typical of anthropologists who see the world from below, not as sociologists do who see the elites and the powerful. Civil society therefore means that we are already approaching the concept of the common good, which as such is not yet widespread and has not had any luck – it will have it shortly afterwards. “A concept that was born against the Hegelian philosophies that obviously see family, civil society and state (thus also intermediate bodies) as elegant scales for the articulation of social complexity”. This theme is then taken up by Gramsci in his very famous, foundational book, perhaps his most modern book, which is ‘Literature and National Life’, i.e. the discovery that the ethos of a people also needs a symbolic apparatus and we do not always realise this, as if we did not know that what remains of us are relationships and culture. The final sentence of this quotation, which makes Clement of Gramsci’s own, is to “describe the social articulation in the perspective of stratified alliances and analyses, later taken up again in the international context the cultural heritage indicates the positive and progressive factors of social action organised from below” practically an anticipation of what already represents the experience to which our friend who spoke to us just now has given birth. Over the years, the two concepts of social capital and cultural capital began to appear at the door of immaterial capital, of invisible capital, and here two other scholars stand out, whom I will mention: one is André Gorz, who for 10 years travelling between France and Europe gave concrete form to the concept of immaterial capital and made it more living. The double chain that he describes, the category of intellectual property – hence copyright, licences, patents, hence science that is codified – and the competitive ones, human capital (here we immediately find our theme), innovative capacity, effectiveness of organisational processes. So you see that these words are not modernist, but have two decades behind them. I mention only two things in closing. The first is the reference to the relationship between cultural capital and the economy, because here really Gorz becomes decisive. “There is a positive correlation, studied by economists”, so sometimes even anticipated by sociologists, it is no coincidence that contemporary economics is competitive with sociologies and social psychology, “a positive correlation between intangible capital and economic growth”. This does not ring true. It means that every step backwards that we take with respect to an investment in culture means fostering impoverishment, and it is all the more so at a time when Europe has obviously given us two concepts that have become taken for granted and would not be so if it were not for Europe and perhaps Ruberti, such as the knowledge society and the information society. Both Ruberti and Gorz were shocked by the symmetry of investment on the part of European states with respect to the fact that culture produces participation, produces value – and here there is a beautiful quotation from Rullani, a great economist if I am not mistaken from Bocconi, who tells us this sublime phrase: “knowledge also produces value because it generates sense”. Not profit, but sense, hence cohesion, participation, the sense of taking part in one’s own life and being a contemporary in ourselves. I close with the promise to refer to a former head of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, who wrote, a few years ago, a delightful booklet on which Professor Gaudio, when he was Rector of my University and I was his Professor of Communication, built an inauguration of the academic year. In the booklet he works on the concept of competences as a simple translation of the cultural capital of labour, of new professionalism. He starts from the knowledge society, and here the concept of competences is at the centre, meaning ‘a dimension that starts from training but translates it into a cultural personality bent on action’. This is an impressively modern text that also refers to a Nobel Prize winner of those years, a certain Felps, because he also reconstructs in this concept the idea that workers who do not train, or rather that companies that do not induce, push, do not urge them to train – because there is also a need for a push from companies – somehow remain with the knowledge they entered with, and therefore do not learn anything about their lives. And he translates this with this final sentence that ‘the return on investment in knowledge is higher than that of any other investment’. Mind you, that the President of the Bank of Italy in the third-to-last year of his term of office uses this proposition, that is, that not only economic investment, but investment in knowledge and therefore also in social capital, means that we are ready to recognise that our time can make a fundamental bet on people, which is precisely that of relational social capital, as it has been called in recent years. But for this I will take up a quote from Paster, with which I will close: ‘The Greeks gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word “enthusiasm”, which, if we study the semantic origin, means “a God within us”. Happy is he who carries a God within him, to these men is entrusted the future’. Thank you.

Benedetta Cosmi: Thank you, Mario, we certainly bring with us the reflection on meaning, because sometimes what seems to be missing in society, starting with the criticism of journalism, where it seems that the news floods everyone, but does not bring with it meaning, does not give society a vision of meaning, and on to other areas that we all bitterly realise every day, is precisely that. Even when we were talking about young people, we were talking about transmission, so even possibly a criticism of the school world, there is what we usually want to make up for but it seems that no one participates in that cause which is, precisely, meaning. And so I feel like saying, and I’ll pass the word back to you: sense, participation in the creation of sense, which in the end is also the antidote to boredom, as Moravia himself said, “the absence of relationship between things is boredom” and therefore the absence of relationship between things means not finding sense in them, which is the opposite of the net, which instead tends to bind and therefore forces one to find that point of conjunction. Back to the proposals and to you, Rosapia.

Rosapia Farese: I would like to thank Professor Mario Morcellini very much, because he has given a very in-depth view of what can be sustainable and inclusive solutions, which I feel I can give. Above all, these are challenges related to the development of the person and the guarantee of the life cycle; they are fundamental solutions also to avoid that cultural deprivation that the professor mentioned. Education and continuous training, social support network, mental health and well-being, decent and fair work, environmental sustainability, democratic participation, promotion of culture and art. I would also like to hear the professor and give a definition to what sustainability is, sustainable development. How can we interface with this development? How can each of us make a contribution to this sustainability? I would like to have support for this from all of you, because according to our association, and according to what I also think, it is essential to chart a course precisely to achieve this common good. Thank you.

Benedetta Cosmi: So let’s take up your question and raise it to everyone.

Mario Morcellini: I’ll just respond with a joke to the challenge of defining sustainability, which is obviously a complicated challenge, but I’ll put it in these terms for today: sustainability is a more advanced balance with the earth, the one we were born into, the environment, the one Pope Francis tells us unforgettable things about, and economic resources.

Rosapia Farese: I believe that through the enhancement of social human capital and humanitas we can truly chart a bright path towards responsible innovation and inclusive growth. So I invite everyone, every individual, organisations, communities, to join us in this vital mission to build together a tomorrow where every person can realise their potential and contribute fully to the collective wellbeing. The commitment of our association, mine above all, is to these ideas of transforming not only individual lives, but strengthening the very foundations of our society, guiding us towards a horizon of shared hope and perspective. I would end with a slogan, let’s call it: innovate to unite humanity, community, sustainability. Thank you all.

Benedetta Cosmi: Community is definitely a word that comes back and is a common thread in all the speeches made so far. I won’t dwell on the theme of the common good, but I liked the reference to the gaze of politics, because that is basically what we are trying to do with the Workshop as well, that is, to bring it back to where the attention would not go on its own, precisely because of the speeches you were also making, Mario, on communication, on difference, on pursuing communication and making it even become a political manifesto, rather than using it as a means of spreading a message, and then, at that point, it is politics that is emptied of meaning. The other, if you like, also has Eurispes as a claim because it says ‘research is a common good’, which I think is also a winning expression in this case. Obviously, a country that does research among other things becomes attractive, obviously the areas of research and interest change; there are those that are more economic, if you like, more ethical, but apart from the background on which it is based, the idea of doing research means not flattening out to ‘it has always been done like this’ and consequently it is attractive for talent, for young people and for those potentials that you mentioned, that is, that need to be brought out. So, Aldo, do you have any other references?

Aldo Berlinguer: Yes, in the meantime, thank you all, the speeches were very interesting. I grasp a key of the things you have pointed out, namely this rampant individualism and this absence of community. It is not a new phenomenon, we find it in many contributions in history, in literature, Carlo Levi spoke of it, Edward Banfield spoke of it when in his essay ‘The moral foundations of a backward society’, he spoke of Basilicata in particular, but of the Mezzogiorno in a broader sense, highlighting this total absence of community feeling, this always putting oneself and one’s clan, let’s say, before the community. This has also been pointed out by many others, it is well known to the economy, just look at the relationship that exists in Italy between public debt and private wealth; it is well known to the tax authorities, just look at the incidence of tax evasion on what is a public asset. It is also known to politics, because, look, there is not only sovereignism, populism and other various drifts that animate it a little: There is also this terrible parasitic plant called clientelism, where the vote has even become, as my colleague who follows us from Bologna would say, a synallagmatic relationship, i.e. I vote for you because you give me something in exchange, I don’t vote for an idea of the country, I don’t vote for a project for the community, I vote if you get me employed, if you give me the hope of a job, if you condone building abuse, etc. etc. So you well understand that when even the relationship with politics becomes imbued with a devouring individualism, which fails to look at all at a prospect of a common future, moral foundations crumble. I want to emphasise that all this is exacerbated precisely in the less populated areas. Italy is not all the same, individualism is everywhere and the damage is being counted, but there are also territories that are more animated by a mutualistic, cooperative approach, even in economic terms, some regions in particular. While unfortunately our Mezzogiorno, including the islands, are spiralling downwards in this spiral where individualism is not only the effect of an economic and social backwardness in the series ‘it’s every man for himself’, but it is really a cause and perhaps one of the main ones of this socio-economic backwardness. You have mentioned many people, on the islands I will mention one who is not Italian: Marshall Sahlins, an American anthropologist who passed away recently and studied islands. He did a very nice essay called ‘Kinship, what it is and what it is not’ asking: what is kinship? Is it consanguinity? One fails to realise even on islands that are now almost depopulated that that small nucleus is bound by kinship, that is, one fails to realise that the community nucleus is part of oneself, it is not alien, it is not something to be taken advantage of in some way, if one can, without ever perceiving oneself as a common factor in the community. I fear that if we do not act on this lever with strong injections of communitarianism, especially in the Mezzogiorno, but not only there, both in conventional educational processes, i.e. in schools, universities, etc., and in unconventional processes, (unfortunately today they are manned by these private investments which, among other things, bombard a limbic part of our psyche, i.e. not the cortical one, the logical one, the rational one, the one made up of what Jung called the affective-tone complex, i.e. a disjointed set of primordial drives) but that is where private investments are being concentrated. While the public ones concentrate on the part so of memory, of notion, of knowledge, even if we want to be traditional, the public investments are all going in the direction of profiling the individual, of seizing his weaknesses, his inclinations, his desires, even unconfessed ones, working and investing enormous sums on this. This perhaps gives us the pulse of where we are going and why we are investing on the private side on that – and the process should be better monitored and managed – and on the public side too little on that, in the sense of not really involving them. University professors know this, we provide a service to the public and we don’t really ask ourselves fully who is sitting in the first and who is sitting in the fourth pew, and in fact, as my Anglo-American colleagues often remind me when I invite them to elections in Italy, they say ‘we know that we are in Italy, you know from what? From the fact that students start filling the classroom from the back’. Now it is clear that we need to invest more and better in getting people to assume this awareness that there is a collective quid of which we are an integral part and from which we cannot disregard, this especially in the Centre South, in the Islands, everywhere, in the inland areas, a bit at every latitude in Italy. If we do not resolve this cultural sensitivity, which at the moment is, I must say, truly a disarming gap, which I fear is also becoming more acute, we will struggle to imagine socio-economic development based on human capital. Human and social capital, i.e. the individual with all his knowledge, skills, must put them at the service of a common project, not just an individual project, otherwise this community is never born.

Benedetta Cosmi: Certainly the new generations in this have sent out clear messages, in some cases we could even call them ‘sustainable natives’, and in other cases when they criticise their country and express their disapproval in various ways, including disaffection and other forms of apparent detachment, they are basically asking for just that, namely new elements of a sense of belonging, to be able to make what the Cassa Deposito e Prestiti defines as cultural deposits, to be able to make them headmasters of innovation, to make them even become revenue rather than just an expense item within the public budget, because today they are seen only as events to be protected and not as something to be turned into cultural industry activities to which many graduates would like to be able to contribute. But of course an innovation is and will be needed, a type of policy that will identify in these places elements of openness. As long as they remain closed places, not only closed-minded, when you say the cultural revolution, but also closed to inputs from outside, from the ability to attract the different in all its facets, and obviously the idea of the common good then clashes with the idea that everyone is part of the context. And so a phrase I would like to give to today’s debate is ‘context is us’, because then it always seems that everything that is wrong always starts a little further away from us. So the context is us, also in the positive sense, that is, that element that starts to make a difference, that element that starts to bring and see in others something good. Luigi, you certainly both in the Observatory and in the meeting, where you practically gathered the highest levels of the ruling class (it always struck me that for example there was the Vice-President of the CSM considering that the President should be the President of the Republic, it makes me laugh that the lowest office they had was a Vice-President). This is to say that really the top managers of both the political decision-makers and the entrepreneurial class were meeting there and that they were reminded of the principles that we have debated here today, but that they were also nailed to their responsibilities and brought their cases. There was a businesswoman who recounted the failures even in the family governance of her own company, which in that positioning had therefore crushed an industry that could have gone better, i.e. criticism and self-criticism also raise awareness, thus helping to make that extra leap.

Luigi Balestra: The Stati Generali per la Ripartenza was an extraordinary occasion and we will make it a regular appointment to discuss. We had about 80 speakers from the world of institutions, from the world of business, from the world of social work, and we discussed many topics. The one you mentioned, namely family governance, is one of the great issues shaking the Italian entrepreneurial system, because the family is very often an incentive factor for business activity, but it can also become a disruptive factor, because while in partnerships between outsiders quarrels arise and arise within the company, very often in family companies quarrels arise within the family and have repercussions within the company. Together with the fact that many entrepreneurs in the business class are already over 60 or 70 years old, which means that there is a major problem of generational transition, which is very difficult to manage, and of opening up to the outside world. Suffice it to think of what happened, to give a striking example, with reference to Del Vecchio, i.e. a company, an asset that was capitalised to the tune of some 30 billion lire, where there was no generational handover, where until the very end, until the moment of his death, Del Vecchio (who did extraordinary things) held the helm of the company and above all divided up his business fairly, with not insignificant problems. On this point I will be silent and conclude with respect to what Rosapia Farese was urging, i.e. what are the answers we can give: dignified and fair work, even here there is talk of poor work, i.e. the poverty of work because it does not provide sufficient means to support oneself and thus give effective entry to the constitutional precept of that Article 36 according to which pay must ensure a free and dignified existence; environmental sustainability, technological sustainability. From my point of view the answer is basically one, then it can be declined on many levels: it is a recovery of the ethics of behaviour, that is, the ethics of behaviour is absolutely fundamental. It can be an absolutely secular ethics, because then we talk about religious morality, but it can be a completely secular ethics, which means nothing other than doing the good of all, so much so that when we talk about corporate social responsibility and ethical balance sheet, it means that nowadays it is no longer the time of exasperated profit, but that in a balanced way (certainly the company must make a profit) but must also take into account many other interests of all those involved in a dynamic process that is very complex and therefore ensure the welfare of the community by doing good. Otherwise we remain on the level of the affirmation of values and we fail to concretise what we are saying at the already constitutional level everyone legitimately expects in terms of concretisation, and I will end here.

Benedetta Cosmi: A word that is very frightening is the word ‘power’, but it must be accompanied by the ethics of behaviour, the awareness that each one of us has the power to act, to make decisions, has the power to influence, has the power to vote in the proportion of each one, has the power to say no, has the power to say yes, which is also another power to be exercised, because otherwise we would not be proactive and therefore also decisive compared to a list made up only of no. So the power, the context is us, we must remember it in every office, in every role, in every moment of private and public action that we exercise, because I believe that this is the difference with respect to the ruling class of the past, which in some ways had less power to use the media, less power to reach thousands, hundreds, billions of people, but that power that it had it used in a heavy way, that is to say that it had the perception that as CEO it affected, it decided. Now it seems that on the one hand this power has been fragmented, that is, it is in some ways diffused, and as such no one thinks that it is up to him to do that thing, and at that point, thinking that there is always a long line of decision-makers who come alongside him, or before him, with this excuse, starting with the politicians, but in the end everyone in their own role, all things considered, collaborates in the malfunctioning of a country. So, we hope we have made a contribution in this sense, that is, in the knowledge that in the common good each of us has a weight, a role and a task and also a network, several networks to which we refer to be made known to each other, and I hope we have succeeded in this today. Obviously, I thank you for your participation, I thank Eurispes whose board of directors will also value what you say for the Italy Report which is, as you know, the Institute’s core business. This, however, means helping to have practices for everyone, i.e. a sort of support at times when loneliness, individualism, in short, at times when cosmic pessimism will take hold of us all, and I believe that today our focus is on the words you have given, so I repeat: sense, community, and of all things, the discourse of areas against the desertification of services. Many of those locations that we now consider second-class are the same ones that we then choose at another time of the year, perhaps as tourists. It is our paradox to consider them second class for 300 days a year and then to consider them fabulous 60 days a year. This is the provocation with which I conclude.

Aldo Berlinguer: I renew my appreciation for what was said, for the very interesting points, but also for your activism and for promoting the initiative. I thank our guests. I hope that there will be further opportunities to continue the discussion, also in terms of collaboration with the various bodies, associations, the observatory, with which we can, in fact, attempt to collaborate in order to pool studies, research and the activities on which each of us is engaged on a daily basis. So thank you again to everyone and I hope to see you soon.

Benedetta Cosmi: Thank you to those who followed us. Thank you all, we hope to see you again.