The First World War, the spirit of the world, the indifference of our time

(To Andrea Pastore)
24/08/15

"One day your scream and my roar today on us the high voice of God".

Today the Colle di Sant'Elia is a cemetery, not because it is placed in front of the Military Shrine of Redipuglia, but because it is the victim of an immanent relativism, a degenerate son of post-modern society. Tourists in August scream among the trees sentinel of history and with their coarse chatter make the environment paradoxical even more cemetery. It is not the death of bodies that makes this place a Camposanto, but the death of ideas, the end of common morality buried in alienation from reality.

Between these stones and these shrubs the struggle of man against man took place, but at the same time the clash between states, a clash that in the analysis of the war '14 - '18 of the twentieth century cannot be reduced to the effect of tensions social, industrial or commercial interests, but it is to be considered, due to its brutality, the echo of a struggle between peoples' spirits understood as ethical elements from which human communities are born and consequently their confrontation is also painful.

The hardness of the conflict is therefore a consequence of the generative force of human societies and as such it must be accepted and governed in order to prevent it exploding in a disruptive way, as happens when large-scale conflicts occur, which have always been the result of human inability to govern the spirit of the world.

Going back to our time it is possible to observe that there is nothing left to govern, since nothing of that spirit of the world, which animated the first world war, remained alive, proof is the total forgetfulness of the glorious vestiges of the past, of the places of confrontation and death, even the names of those who sacrificed the supreme good of life. The indifference of a positive attitude towards an era in which ethics was still able to guide the choices of men is the reflection of a contemporary society suffering from ignorance and flattening of the hedonistic conceptions of the world, of an uncertain and disoriented political class. perhaps of a world unable to look out of its condition.

Do not misunderstand these words, the hunting of man against the man we call war, as a bearer of suffering is never desirable, nor shareable, but when it manifests it is useless to turn away, as it is useless to cover up the I remember the war events of the past in the vain hope that this indifference may be worth as an apotropaic rite capable of erasing one of the extreme manifestations of the spirit of peoples.

The hill of Sant'Elia and these steps of the Shrine, after a hundred years, continue to be middle ground, yesterday between the wills in struggle, today between memory and oblivion, who knows if there will be in this tormented and restless society burst of pride capable of bringing out the consciences from the torpor that everything is uniform and that today has made vain the sacrifices of a past more and more buried under the weight of indifference.