Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
For us Westerners - men and women alike -
gift-giving always requires a reason.
Let’s say it is not something we are accustomed to do regularly.
It is not part of our daily lives.
It is an act that calls for special occasions.
We have purposely created occasions on which to exchange gifts:
birthdays, name days in the South of Europe,
special events such as Confirmations and Holy Communions,
wedding anniversaries – gold or silver anniversaries.
Christmas itself is a huge event created by the westerners
and it's announced by the appearance of fairy lights in our cities,
that brings together secular and religious people and even different religions,
was introduced in our culture
to consolidate this social custom of the gift-giving.
Why is it that the Western culture
lacks a natural aptitude for gifts?
Because our culture – and this is by no means a form of ethical criticism
but rather a cultural and anthropological observation –
is based on the possession of things, the purchase and the exchange of things.
We lack the distinctive trait of the gift-giving
for Western society has always been ruled by the culture of the ego,
a strong ego, a complete ego,
an ego that defines itself through its own autonomy.
Think of your territory, think of your city,
which since the 18th century
has witnessed the rise of exceptionally solid entrepreneurs,
who created wealth and work,
indeed, facing life with a strong and autonomous self,
which is typical of entrepreneurs.
There are also other cultures,
we could split the world into two geographical regions.
On one side we have the Western world,
somewhat obsessed with profit and money-making –
suffice it to think of Wall Street –
and in recent times excessively focused on a financial view of life.
On the other there are a Second and Third World -
I almost lost count of them -
where the self is less strong:
this happens in the Indian or Zen culture
and also in some countries in South America.
There solidarity and exchange prevail.
It's the culture of gift-giving.
Mind you, I'm not passing an ethical judgment
on either of the two systems, on this dichotomy.
These are simply cultural facts.
Max Weber, a great sociologist from the last century,
used to say that fundamentally
industrial development and Protestant ethics are closely linked.
There are exceptions, though.
I'm from Veneto.
I was born on the Garda Lake and raised in Verona.
In recent years, north-eastern Italy has become the land of money
in the popular imagination of our country,
where people are insanely obsessed with money.
Yet, and this is really worthy of note,
Veneto ranks first when it comes to voluntary work,
which is particularly common among younger generations.
Now, how is this?
Well, we can think about it by putting it this way:
gifts under the form of a service in a sense "disappear",
and only the service is left.
This service is not seen as a gift,
but rather as a voluntary and individual action
whose collective component becomes something temporary and unstable.
Voluntary work - a gift made in the form of a service -
sometimes turns this gift into an unconscious action.
My friends from the North-East who do voluntary work
don't realise they are actually offering themselves as gifts.
They simply do it with the same spontaneity
that during the day drives them to buckle down for their company,
for their job and for the increase of their individual wealth.
What is a gift?
According to an American sociologist,
gifts are goods or services provided with no guarantee of return.
This is the key factor: we make gifts without expecting to be paid back,
aiming at creating, recreating or fostering social relationships.
So, there is an oblational attitude towards other people.
We establish bonds
by offering ourselves, objects or services.
There is no expectation of return nor exchange.
Having said that, I would like to move on to the second part of my talk
by introducing the concept of the ambiguity of gift-giving.
I'm not giving the term “ambiguity” any ethical connotation.
Ambiguity is a psychological speciation.
It combines many different interpretations of the same reality,
retaining which we are able to grasp some of the aspects we generally overlook
because they make us feel ill, at ease, or upset us.
There is a first-order ambiguity
that we often experiment in our country through the media.
Father Alex Zanotelli,
a Comboni Missionary of great value and a great man also,
recently said: "the poor actually don't need our charity
but rather structural changes."
Yet, we make donations.
We donate two Euros or five Euros with our own phones.
We watch telethons.
Why do we do this?
Father Zanotelli says: "Probably, we do so
to clear our consciences from our warm and comfortable houses,
with an anyway generous and altruistic action, we donate,
and by doing so we take part in a collective effort
of which we are not authors, but followers."
If we think about it,
this doesn't solve the problems of those who get our donations.
What they need is very different.
Yet, all of this still happens rather frequently,
and is quite a widespread practice throughout the Western World.
Even when faced by terrible catastrophes – such as the Tahiti earthquake –
we donate a few liras or euros,
and by doing so we somehow clear our Western consciences.
"With respect to this mysterious world where bad things happen,
we are only able to intervene from a distance, says Father Zanotelli,
without caring about the root cause
of the dramatic needs of those suffering populations."
Moreover, there is a second-order kind of ambiguity
that is perhaps even more deceitful and disturbing,
which we should discuss this morning.
As homo sapiens specimens,
we were born missing something.
It's a biological fact, it's not necessarily good or bad.
Nature simply is, and what it does
cannot be classified in terms of defectiveness or superiority.
Due to some evolutionary causes,
related to the speciation of the human being
and to the evolution that brought us to the Homo Sapiens,
men and women are born with biological shortcomings.
What does it mean?
It means that unlike the cubs,
of other members of our super-class – mammals –
our offspring are not capable of surviving by themselves.
Our young ones need a moderately good mother
or whoever takes her place to pick them up and breastfeed them.
This is how they survive.
This fundamental action, which is often forgotten,
is determined by a shortcoming which accompanies us throughout our lives,
giving rise to a feeling of incompleteness.
This sense of incompleteness cannot be relieved by possession.
but only by the social interaction with others,
which recalls the original relationship with our mother
that gave us life and allowed us to survive.
Relationships turn into gifts and altruistic exchanges.
Nothing can be more altruistic
than a mother offering her breast to a small hungry mouth.
When giving a gift we implicitly recognise the other person,
and this contributes to the shaping of identity,
which basically allows our state of incompleteness
to move towards an evolutionary turning point.
Through this circle - a virtuous circle and not a vicious circle -
we have evolved into what we are.
We are here, in a place as sophisticated as this theatre,
in such a beautiful city as Como is,
taking part in an event like TED,
an event of high, collective and adult culture.
Yet, all of this conceals an ambiguous trait,
by which I mean something
that can bring us to analyse this relational situation.
Take a look at these two words: “hostis” and “hospes”.
These are Latin words with opposite meanings,
respectively "enemy" and "guest".
la prima nemico, la seconda ospite.
Yet, they have the same root: “hos-”,
which goes back to "hof-",
an Indo-European root that means home, warmth.
In modern German, "hof"
indicates everything that has to do with hotels or inns,
where they give you good things,
like a bed, something to eat, hospitality.
The house simultaneously unveils the enemy and the guest.
There are also hidden dangers in our homes: guests are intrusive.
After some time, they invade us in a way.
They take our place, sometimes they say unusual things
compared to what we are used to hear about our houses and ourselves.
They unsettle us.
This kind of gift comes as unexpected in this specific case.
It can be intrusive,
interpreting aspects of our personality that we were completely unaware of
or that we may have been aware of
but decided to hide because we found them disturbing.
A gift can unearth these hidden aspects of ourselves,
turning into an instrument with two possible effects:
a positive one,
and another that is not necessarily negative
but that is disturbing, as it reveals what is disturbing within us,
because it probes and interprets us.
It allows us to grasp aspects of ourselves,
which, as I said,
we at best only knew about unconsciously
and that the act of giving, the gift itself -
be it an object, a service or an action -
is able to bring back from a remote past
in all its original vividness and truthfulness.
At times, this process has a certain charm to it,
other times it may be unusual or unsettling,
as if something was being hidden from us,
leaving us with a feeling of embarrassment and unusual affective trouble.
Let's revive an old saying of our rural culture,
of the culture of the past century.
After three days, the guest:
"Oh my God, Mum is coming!
He says he doesn't know when he is going to leave,
he’ll be staying with us a long time, what can we do now?"
The other day they were broadcasting "Blue Jasmin" a film by Woody Allen on TV,
the story of two sisters.
When the non-sophisticated one is hosted by the sophisticated, wealthy one,
the latter is worried about her private life being disrupted
by the arrival of her sister, which by the way pleases her.
This Christmas, when we unwrap our presents
and discover that what's inside doesn't actually meets our taste,
let's try to remember this event
in this sad yet fruitful morning.
Thanks.
(Applause)