Several non-conformed, dissonant, provoking and heretics thoughts have recently been circulated. Francis, for example, has never been the Saint of reconciliation, of non-violence, of folly and paradox. No. We are the architects of a clamorous ambiguity. All of us have been misunderstanding, and for many centuries. Francis has been the expression of an average, reasonable and common sense holiness. Love, of course, but also war, if and when necessary. The habit of radical poverty,  but also the spear of security and of defence.

Again: the two thousand years of Christian history, which runs through the veins of Europe, suddenly are re-rediscovered to be contaminated by a fatal anti - catholic virus, so very aggressive as to require an immediate rejection therapy, on the basis of clear-cut, strong and integral statements. Thus, the laity, the delicate affirmation of autonomy in the mundane space, the laity, so audaciously conquered, becomes an ephebic manifestation of weakness, before an amoral and degenerated reality.

Diogneto is a far off memory, we need to go back into the world with a new confessional clothing. What matters is what you mean, not what you do. It is your look that matters, not your being.

Always conformists

This is what Italy is. Conformism is always the unique answer to conformism, even when it is called anti-conformism. Frontiers are erected and troops are arrayed. No problem is aroused; heads do not confront one another. An Italy that always breaks into two, without ever dividing itself. An Italy necessarily pro or co', majority or minority, yet, anyhow, with and open grey zone always on the alert in the midst, there, just in the centre, for eventual mediations. This is melodramatic, since reality is never to be taken too seriously: anyhow,  the epilogue adjusts things, even the impossible ones. It re- composes everything with a cathartic weeping or a maternal embrace. The reasons posed by a good heart make every conflict soluble, even an Italy with "tarallucci e vino"(ending up in friendly ways) and some inciucio (cheating?). There are those who hold positions, but who, anyhow, negotiate under the table an agreement which may allow the sharing of benefits.

Certainly, even this Italy has its exceptions, its resistances. The Resistance, the extreme gesture of the conscientious revolution,  which pushes up to the sacrifice of one's own parts, even of life, if required. This Italy is furrowed as well by moral frontiers in which also the blood of its saints and its heroes continue to run. The Italy of Falcone, of Borrelli and Caselli, but also that of the "middle-class heroes",  such as Ambrosoli, of those who simply carry on their daily duties, but have the misfortune of finding themselves in extreme, exceptional situations. Such an Italy does exist: it runs in the underground of the national culture.  Sometimes it re-emerges in the admiration of the over twelve million spectators, who weep at the memory of the judge Borsellino. But those twelve million spectators, perhaps, are the same as those who, in spite of everything, share the ritual scrape of Sanremo  or the disease of voyeurism  of the "Isola dei Famosi". They aren't two Italy, but one and the same Italy.  Exceptions are admired, but not imitated. They are appreciated, but not emulated. They arouse pride, but do not build the custom. They are conformist in consumerism, more than citizens in the public spirit.

Extreme conformists

The psychologists have extensively proved that, to adapt oneself costs less than to quit one's own habits. In other words, we are inclined to conformism moved by a question of costs. Like a little ball, which, on a perfectly smoothed surface, spends less energy to go on moving along the started direction, than to modify it. The majority of people releases a more powerful uniform force  than the motion of inertia. To be with the majority re-assures, protects, identifies and justifies. Without going back to the over-quoted studies of Ash and Milgram, now we know that the majority can lead the single ones to extreme forms of perversion, without generating any feeling of guilt. The "banality of evil", which Arendt discovered in the general Eichmann, has not yet stopped to move towards horror. It is not a mechanism expelled as unworthiness by the human relations.  We have seen it at work some ten years ago, in a remote corner of central Africa, in Rwanda, in a horrible slaughter, which has re-sucked, perhaps, more than a million  (we are supposed to write in letters, and not in digits) of human lives.  Reading the testimonies of people who survived the massacre of the Great Lakes, means to understand that the "no more", which was pronounced on coming out of the Aushwitz gates, has been violated. It is still violated.

Therefore, conformism is an object to be handled with care, because it could provoke catastrophic effects.

Conformists, but not too much

It is agreed that our Country is immune of this risk.  Though, since the Renaissance, they go on injecting over-doses of military rhethorics into the common sense, the conviction that the hero in arms does not represent the deep national soul is very much rooted. The city's squares are filled in with military symbols; the memories of heroic sergeants, of courageous captains, keep on surviving on the plaques of the urban toponymical, but their virtues have not penetrated the blood of the Italians. Some years ago, a debate about the "original characters" of the Italians in war, re-kindled the investigation on the reasons which make our Italian soldiers more inclined to defence than to attack. Our best models are the martyrs, not the winners. Some threw it into the anthropologic reasons, the most convincing on the historical ones.  It is, however, a datus of fact that, notwithstanding the contamination of a market without national frontier, the extraordinary metaphor of the natural culture, namely the Italian football, is up-to-date a symbol of "melina" (time-wasting tricks), of offensive audacity surely not.

This does not mean that it is negative. Sure, the "melina" game dissimulated the temptation of parasitism, the somehow choice of interrupting the match, assailing the result as soon as it becomes advantageous.  The safety chain is the mash where they allow the adversary to get drowned slowly when they notice that it would be risky to attempt of winning him. An Italy which reaches far, perhaps without any clamour, without spectacle, tearing only the necessary net, up to the limit of decorum, is an Italy that is liked. Since others are better than we, Italy is always ready to be satisfied with winning for nets difference, provided it does not waste the energies for the decisive trials. This Italy, which exercises the least effort and is satisfied with the least production, is a culture.

Wise conformists

Since Croce was right in stating that the character of a people is always "its history, nothing else but its history", even in this character of ours there is our history, in its entirety, our specific way of interiorising the lived events. Events, which are undergone, not acted. In fact, it is good not to forget that "Italy is ploughed by events"; it is an open house difficult to close in itself and in which every sort of things can happen. Italy defends and isolates itself badly, bearing in itself the thousand signs of the invaders, the colours and the names of near and far off Lands, a little security and plenty of transits, crossings and arrivals. This is, perhaps, the reason why it knows such an acute contrast between the evidence of the geographic unity (the boot) and the neurotic variations of the political charters"¹.

Thus, here we are:  conformism also hides its ambivalence. There is fatalism before the events but, at the same time, also wisdom in its complexity of conflicts. Mistrust in changes, but also sobriety before utopias.  Disenchantment with regard to the reasons of morality, but also a marked intuition of the opportunities. In other words: because of conformism one can die, but also survive. At least in this Italy, where the maternal code prevails over the paternal one, the effects prevail on the norms, the needs on the rules, the short net of family ideology on the long ones of collective solidarity, the customers on the State.

Double conformists

Probably, our conformism is a reaction to a national belonging, which has never been absolute. We are always with the majority to keep on following the mariner's compasses of our particular interest. We are outward conformist in order to remain individualistic within. Just like the average Italian of Alberto Soldi: the common sense of some public virtue as a cover to hide the dust of daily private vices. Sympathetic, extrovert, shrewd, but not always harmless, sometimes even wicked.

We remain cautious conformists, to say it clearly, paying attention of not hurting ourselves. But how can this image of Italy stand in the fray of the safety chain, though remaining good and generous, in which by the end everything can be adjusted?  What is the meaning of conformism not at the time of the great mediation and of the infinite compromise, but in that of methodical shrewdness, of the instrumental deceit as unique, exclusive and supreme value?

To find an answer to these questions we are free to turn to him, who by function or by job, investigates the deep part of the society's culture.

Slothful conformists

In the past, it would have been simple to indicate references to our "civil conscience". by pointing at the intrinsic moral function of literature. For instance, the enlightenment and, therefore, the sceptic reason with which Sciascia revealed the obscure, dark, disquieting and an almost absolute face of power, hidden by the culture of national mediation. Or, the provocations by which Paolini described the devastating effects of omologation of the popular culture ( he defined it: an authentic genocide) produced by the daring practice of compromise with the unique culture of  consumerism and of  commodification.

Today, instead, the analysis is firm on the incapability of our intellectuals to penetrate the transformations in act and  to translate them into words, into images, into awareness. The eyes turn round in the void. It doesn't bite. It renews the form, up to the production of stylistically audacious results, but it is sterile in arousing generating words and ideas. Then, nothing is left, but quoting the only start which is perceived, that of the fathers, of the great old people:  Dossetti, who breaks his almost half century monastic silence, to answer the inward duty of defending the values of the Italian Constitution; Scalfaro, who interrupts his well-known Marian devotion to emphasise, in the squares, the presidia of peace and legality; Vittorio Foa, Paolo Sylos Labini and finally Mario Luzi, all of them above 80 years of age, who thunder,  with an almost militating determination, against the risk of a conformist giving up, before the disintegration of the intimate nucleus of the community conviviality, the nucleus of values which keep the cohesion of the whole.

The return to the fathers speaks of the concrete risk of disorientation. It says that it is not allowed to give up before a different idea of a society, which renounces to shoulder the destiny of the other. It is not allowed to conform oneself even is this idea should root itself into the belly of the Country and thus become a majority. Because at that moment, just at that moment, a superior duty arises, that of the insurrection of the conscience. To give in to a society which is regulated by the principle "leave each man to himself" means to get ready for a catastrophe, in a world, on the contrary, where everything is more and more intimately connected. To accept that selfishness may become the necessary and sufficient adhesive to found a covenant of conviviality among people, means to transform oneself into accomplices of the fatal fracture which is setting humanity wide apart.

These are the elementary evidences which the fathers speak to us about, with a passion which recalls past times, when they were convoked by their conscience and got ready to the point of giving up their life and that of others,  in order to put together freedom, justice, solidarity, well-being and peace. It was like drawing e squared circle, like conciliating political options impossible to conciliate, but they tried and, in many ways, they succeeded.

Conformists, yet up to a certain limit

There is a moment, therefore, in which to leave the group is not a choice, but a duty we perceive as irresistible. We need to be transversal, slanting, to walk against current. At such a time, the dividend of conformism is no longer enough to fill in all the costs of our balance. Then, it is clear that, if the material immobilisation  (the achieved success, the quiet winning-posts, the acquired security) is important in the accountability of an existence, even more the immaterial ones are so, because they do not busy themselves with things, but with sense. At that moment, we might have discarded all the uncomfortable, embarrassing sights, but we are unable to avoid the sight of our intimate conscience. In the life of each person, there is always a moment in which that sight imposes a truth operation in our balance. May it come, even at the last moment, as it happened to the bourgeois merchant Ivan Ilich, by Lev Tolstoj.

Uneducated conformists

The real question is that this subtle accountability is no longer educated. We give up at this false in balance with our conscience. This is why, perhaps, a true pedagogic culture has never rooted itself in our country. There have been great pedagogues, but not the noble tradition of the supreme value of our interior responsibility. Maria Montessori e Danilo Dolci, Aldo Capitini and Don Lornzo Milani are also theoretical references, known all over the world, but foreigner, like their biographic itineraries, to our natural culture. The school and, we must acknowledge it, also the Church imprint the identity not autonomy, the value of the norm, not the value of the critical judgement, the doing, not the being. We miss masters,  and  places where to go to, for the formation of  an "active morality", which may act within the conscience as an impulse for the research of the truth, which may solicit it to a confrontation with one's own responsibility, namely to the duty of giving a reply to the other, above all as persons. A gap of models, which sometimes looks beyond remedy

Idolater conformists

This is how the religious dimension finishes by mattering more than the dimension of faith. Just as if salvation, for a world that walks on the margin of a ravine, may derive from an obligatory crucifix in public places, or by the number of times we pronounce the name of God in the TV talk shows, or in the parliamentary hall,  or by the quotation of the Christian roots in the European Constitution.

The abuse of the second Commandment is much more than the clue of the spreading profanation of the word, which finishes by profaning even the supreme, unutterable and ineffable Word common to all cultures: the Word,  before which man must stop with fear and mystery, with t a sense of the depth. In fact he can hardly catch fragments of its infinite significance, like Jacob in his fight with the Angel, only in the suffered tension of mystical experience.

The prostitution of the name of God is the proof that the tentative of reducing the message is at work, of reducing the Kerigma of the man from Nazareth,  centred on the experience of faith as an irreplaceable experience of life, on a code of belonging valid for a specific culture, our own, indeed.

This is a tentative destined to be vain. In fact, we know that the intentions of abusing the name of God, in reality, are always others, like: covering discriminations, legitimating injustices, justifying wars. Like all others, this tentative also will leave behind only the memory of an nth crusade. But the Jesus who goes on beating in the heart of the totally secularised man, with a multiple, changeable, liquid belonging, to use an efficacious metaphor of Bauman, is the Hebrew capable of arousing the interior fortitude which lies as a reserve in everyone and which takes us back to the fullness of love,  to the fullness of relationship which does not run along the boundary of the law established by the priests or by the kings. It is the Hebrew who takes back the law to its fundamental, but never absolute function of instrument, of means, never of end. This is because the person remains the end, the only end. The Hebrew who listens to the woman with haemorrhage, who forgives the prostitutes, who heals also on the Sabbath, eats with the Publicans, praises the Samaritans and not the Scribes and the Pharisees, brings about a more radical, more unbearable and subversive revolution than that of Copernicus: it dismembers the power of authority to replace in its centre the power of the Spirit which acts in the conscience.. It is the Jesus who breaks all the invisible barriers of conformism to set each one free and responsible, which is, of course, not a light load.  Fromm has well explained why we have the tendency to escape from the weight of freedom, and Dostoevskj, in one of his most memorable pages, has left to a great inquisitor the task of describing the superior fascination of slavery, before the freedom of Christ.

Conformists, it is the end!

The best advertisement on the primacy of the conscience's responsibility is that transmitted to us by S. Paul in his letter to the Romans. His "do not conform yourselves to the mentality of this century, but transform yourselves by renewing your mind" ( Ro 2,12), remains the most beautiful eulogy of our autonomy and responsibility, which has ever been written. It is not the law that justifies, not even the biological or ethnic law, but only the adhesion to the experience of faith, which is always, and above all, an experience of justified life. Jew is not just a bond of blood or of race, but one who, answering the call of Jesus from Nazareth, matures the interior capacity of choosing what is right, he who is more than the one "who does good".

Conformism is over. This is because each man  does no longer dwell in his own life, in a single village, but goes constantly through many of them, with different codes: also because in a uniform world, conformism is no longer the clothes of a culture, the code of the majorities. The function of conformism coincides today with the production of banality, of nonsense, of the trash. Conformism is no longer thinking as the other thinks. It is:  "not to think at all". "The main problem of our times is stupidity", Bonhoeffer bitterly concluded, and he was right.

The answer of conformism is no longer possible. We need -urgently- solid consciences, capable of keeping the rod of events and of choices anchored towards a moral direction, towards an idea of the future. Why? Because, after all, the Covenant is nothing else, but the promise of a future.

1. E. Cassano, Paeninsula, Laterza, Bari (1998), p. 34.