THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CROSS Doctor Antonio Rossin Reifications (like biological entozoic infections of the gut) are proto-socio-neurological enculturations and as useful fictions are not necessarily symbiotic with, nor necessarily benignly adjuvant to the welfare of their unwitting and often naive hosts. Jud Evans. "Reification and the Philosophy of the Unreal" Freedom in humans consists of the ability to liberate oneself from the tyranny of reificationalist imprinting. Antonio Rossin. "Democracy, Religion, Drugs".

Introduction

The 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:

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