Last week the 40th edition of the Rimini Meeting was held. It is an anomalous initiative, which takes place on the shore of the Adriatic Sea, as an international forum for meeting, reflection and artistic expression. The content of the program has changed a lot in the last four decades, as much as the world has changed since then. When it first opened its doors, Europe was still divided by the Iron Curtain. The promoters were very concerned about what they then called "the friendship of the people." Now they continue to denounce a way of revindicating their own identity that turns the other into "absolute evil . " Although this time the program has focused on the perplexities caused by globalization, the crisis of democracy, the challenges of artificial intelligence, the latest discoveries of neuroscience, Islam after the defeat of the Daesh, the sustainability of the planet and many other topics that often occupy the pages of this newspaper.

In any case, it has remained a strange phenomenon. It has lasted over time, despite being a net expression of civil society. It remains standing thanks to the collaboration of 3,000 volunteers. He has a clear Catholic personality (his promoters belong to Communion and Liberation ), but among his guests there are well-known Jews, Muslims from the University of Al Azhar, lay thinkers, scientists or agnostic artists . In less than a week, more than 200 meetings have been held with speakers from all corners of the world. It is a strange event: a place of culture, where the world takes its pulse, and at the same time a popular space with tens of thousands of attendees.

There are no closed conclusions. The organizers are not looking for them. The answers cannot be immediate, the challenges of a world in transformation are complex. Of course, many of the numerous round tables of religious leaders, scientists, intellectuals, as well as the testimonies of people working in the field of education or cooperation, of entrepreneurs who innovate, pointed in the same direction. The change of era we face requires an anthropological response . Now that an entire old world seems to collapse, even if it were possible it would not be enough to redo an ethic based on the abstract universal principles that the Enlightenment set up, nor reinforce and reform the institutions.

The Rimini Meeting has stressed that the crisis is a crisis of the subject, of the consistency of the person, of the self. The Spanish professor Guadalupe Arbona , to whom the organizers gave her the reference paper, explained it by quoting a letter from Federico García Lorca : "Now I have discovered a terrible thing (don't tell anyone). I haven't been born yet. I live on loan, what I have inside is not mine, we will see if I am born. " "This desire to be born again can lead to the uncertainty of not knowing who one is, of feeling fiercely the lack of identity. The loss of that feeling of birth, of the donated unity of the first throb, makes our young people fall apart in fragments, "said Arbona. The Spanish used as an example the Twenty-four theme of the Switchfoot group.

Without reconstructing the 24 fragments in which life decomposes there is no way out. Without this reconstruction of the subject, democracy will be less and less esteemed, the value of the other will end up dissolving. Without an entire subject, there will be no energy to undertake, to innovate, to maintain the dignity of reason, to face the challenges of a world that are not solved with formulas and doctrines. Olivier Roy , one of the strongest French intellectuals, pointed it out in one of the first debates: "nihilism, the fascination with death, not only attracts jihadists, attracts young Americans and young Europeans."

What is the reconstruction of the subject? How can an identity be born that meets the challenges? Precisely those were the questions that were heard insistently in Rimini last week.

Some figures, some witnesses of the past and others of the present, some particular stories, have given some references. Of the 20 exhibitions prepared for this edition of the Rimini Meeting, one was dedicated to Václav Havel , first dissident and then president of the Czech Republic. Another to Etty Hillesum , the young Dutch Jew killed in Auschwitz. A Havel more alive than ever indicated, through one of his writings, that "for a long time the problem has not been formulated in terms of ideological categories, the problem is whether it is possible to rehabilitate personal experience as the original criterion of things, the the problem is to restore a sense of the human community so that the focal point of social action is a human, integral and dignified self because it is related to something that is above it. " The path of personal inquiry of Etty Hillesum, which led him to "discover the sky within himself" in the middle of the concentration camp, has also offered clues. The voices of Havel, of Etty Hillesum, of social entrepreneurs in a devastated Venezuela, of psychologists who attended to children conceived by force by foreign jihadists in Aleppo, that of scientists who more than ever revived the value of the full human Development of Artificial Intelligence, that of the young volunteers who have spent days and nights working to keep it standing have been heard at the Rimini Meeting. Voices and concrete faces. The motto that has chaired this strange encounter has been a verse by Karol Wojtyla : "Your name was born from the face you were looking at." And the attendees have left with a more pressing question than we had: are there any faces, some specific face that, when looking at it, allows us to fulfill the desire of Federico García Lorca, with the desire of all? Do these faces have seen that we have the capacity to breed a subject that lives up to the challenges?

Fernando de Haro is a writer, journalist and co-director of La Tarde de Cope.

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