Why deal with Social Progress?
Andrea Farinet
Are there new ideas of Social Progress? But more importantly, from this point of view, are we progressing or regressing? Is our social fabric holding up to the repercussions of the pandemic, the energy crisis, the war on the doorstep of the European Union, the economic and food shortages, the demographic imbalance, the contrast between elites and the increasingly struggling strata of our population?
The Fondazione Pubblicità Progresso has a glorious history of civil and social communication campaigns that have transformed the civic awareness of our country. Internally, we have developed an open debate on how the theme of Social Progress can be posed today. In a form that is, if possible, original, effective and authentic. Since becoming President in 2019, together with the Board of Directors and Vice-President Giangi Milesi, we have chosen to emphasise our endemically super partes nature.
The new Pubblicità Progresso is, avowedly, non-partisan, apolitical, and religious. Our communication and social innovation campaigns identify a common and shared territory to be developed together. Divisive protagonism does not interest us. We leave factions, vested interests and opportunism outside our door.
Instead, we strive to build a common territory, a place for dialogue and confrontation. Where we can also agree to disagree. There is a verse I am very fond of by Rumi, the unforgettable 13th century Persian poet: “Far beyond the ideas of right and wrong there is a field. I will wait for you there.”
We are trying to build this kind of camp. Why? Because Italian and western history dictates it to us. Because it is beautiful to imagine it and, over time, to succeed in gradually populating it.
The crisis and the social and environmental contradictions of Anglo-Saxon capitalism are there for all to see. The cultural, dare I say anthropological, danger of digital capitalism, whether US or Chinese, can kill the depth of our lives. It enters and pervades existence to transform us, deviously, into profiles of actual or potential consumers to be capitalised and resold. This does not sound like a very rewarding prospect.
Can we create an Italian and European way to social progress that is inclusive, humanistic and also ‘digital’? We want to try, and we stand for public confrontation with our ideas, our proposals developed within our community.
That is why, almost provocatively, we became a triple AAA Foundation at the end of 2019. What does triple AAA mean? That we have chosen a thematic platform based on three central themes: Environment, Soul, Art. We like the initial A because it induces a sense of priority and urgency. Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves in a disenchanted way: what is really a priority and fundamental in our lives? What idea of society and coexistence can give meaning to our commitment?
The first A is Environment. The environment has become an everyday issue. The air we are finding it increasingly difficult to breathe, the water that is becoming scarce or, alternatively, flooding and destroying, the rise in average temperatures, the loss of arable land, the impending need to review degenerative consumption patterns as an environmental impact and, forgive me but I am from Valle d’Aosta, the crisis of our wonderful Alpine glaciers. This polarisation of climatic and meteorological events is there for all to see. We are learning to live with a new extreme of natural events. But we are the environment in which we live. And we Italians inhabit a unique, wonderful and hydrogeologically delicate part of our planet. We can be the natural candidates to encourage prevention, the development of green technologies and infrastructures, and the growth of logics and new behaviours of civil self-protection.
Advertising Progress proposes to listen to leading scientists for whom the gravity of the situation is inescapable. The ecological issue is central to our future, our lives and the lives of those who will come after us. Between catastrophists and deniers, we propose a Third Way based on scientific measurement, on the preservation of human, animal and plant life, on respect for employment, on the gradualness of the ecological transition, on the development of new green technologies. How much blablabla still prevails in the drawing rooms where the most genuine ecological demand is commodified! We still have much work to do.
The second A is Soul. When I proposed to put this theme at the centre of our attention in 2019, I scanned faces that were sometimes intrigued and sometimes bewildered.
I think that a re-humanisation of our civil and social living is necessary. From an excessively mechanistic and materialistic vision, it is, perhaps, appropriate to design socialisation paths that take into account the centrality of people and nature. Frankly, there is a widespread fatigue at being considered, predominantly, as consumers, savers and, in due course, voters. The cultural and value vacuum in too many aspects of our society fosters very dangerous social poisons. Exhibitionism, narcissism, materialism, consumerism, social envy, resentment, frustration, sense of abandonment, bewilderment.
I do not intend to evoke ancestral horizons gradually lost, or faded, in the face of the intrusiveness of technical progress. I intend to remind us who we are in order to create new foundations on which to evolve. I recall that the etymology of being human derives, in the very first instance, from the Sanskrit root bhu, the place where creatures live, which later became hu as the Latin initial of humus, i.e. Earth. East and West reminding us that being human means children, creatures generated from the Earth itself. At a time when a new type of human being, namely Homo Sapiens Digitalis, is spreading, perhaps it is appropriate to stop and reflect on the impacts and evolutions of our humanity.
How do we put our idea of anima into a social growth perspective? Why devise and foster a new sentimental education at the heart of our social behaviour?
We have identified four thematic pillars that can give rise to specific behaviours, positive or negative. Individual aspiration, participative listening, constructive attitude, social aggregation.
Each of us comes into the world with a talent, a vocation, an aptitude. A balanced and forward-looking society tends to offer its members, especially the younger ones but obviously not only, opportunities to get to know and cultivate their deepest aspirations. What opportunities to get to know and recognise ourselves as unique human beings? Individual subjectivity is an enriching element of society that should be cultivated and fostered. We, however, are only truly and authentically ourselves within the relationships that we manage to activate and cultivate. Sincere relationality arises from participatory listening, based on a deep feeling of identification. Listening to others in a participatory manner means believing in dialogue, in the possibility that other ways of thinking exist. It means, in other words, not having pre-judgments, not arriving at the encounter pre-emptively, not feeding on stereotypes. And after we have listened, another big issue is that of our attitude. It is important that it is participative, that it is constructive, that it tends to be based on what unites, rather than on the aspects that inexorably divide. Without a constructive attitude, there is no real, authentic, reciprocal social aggregation. Social aggregation measures the feeling of belonging that each of us needs like oxygen. We need to feel part of a process of improvement. We are when we share.
It is not enough to be hedonistic, the exhibitionism widespread on social networks, the growing social poison represented by pathological narcissism that often, in a devious form too, haunts our lives is of no use. We are the quality of the relationships we experience, how much we identify with the goals of the organisations in which we study, work, or are passionate about as volunteers. Sharing, in the diversity of experiences and points of view, at the basis of a vision of a modern, eclectic, dialoguing, fraternising society.
This is where the central theme of the advertising message arises: ‘be good’ does not serve much purpose, it is belittling for those who issue it and for those who receive it. It is often even counterproductive. We need new languages, new creativity and stories to be identified and exploited. Where to cultivate this experimentation? In our opinion, the third A, that of Art, can come to our rescue. The world of artistic language and fruition constitutes the third thematic pillar of Pubblicità Progresso. But who if not us Italians can chart new paths in this field? We possess some 60 per cent of the world’s classical art and Tuscany alone has a greater classical artistic heritage than the whole of Spain. Italy is the temple of natural, scenic, artistic beauty in the world. We inhabit an open-air theatre where everything is inspirational and creative. Let us cultivate this temple, this theatre, with passion and foresight and we will have great satisfaction.
Why can the role of Art in Social Progress be so central? Another great poet that I cultivated for many years, Josif Brodskij, Russian exile in the United States, Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, buried in Venice, taught us in Escape from Byzantium a great truth. Here it is paraphrased: “……three central aspects of our lives, Love, Time and Art are not subject to the laws of supply and demand…..”. Art is necessary because it reminds us that we cannot ask visitors to a museum, spectators at a concert, readers of a book: which art do you want? Which art do you prefer? If we think about asking, researching and interviewing, what will result will be anything but Art – with a capital A – . In an era like today’s where almost everything has been commodified and corporatised, fortunately, authentic Art and its masterpieces remind us of the importance of the opposite: to be true to oneself. Empathetically proposing one’s own ideas, one’s own proposals, and then waiting for feedback that may even predispose us to failure. In this artistic alveum, the unprecedented, the unexpected can happen, we can break out of stereotypes, out of conventions and prepare ourselves for the New.
With this in mind, we organised the First Festival of Social Progress on Monday 22 May 2023 in Milan at Palazzo delle Stelline. An occasion to get to know each other, confront each other and mature more conscious convictions and opinions. In this perspective we have developed our Advisory Board where some of the most emblematic personalities of the Italian cultural, scientific and artistic panorama reside.
Here I would like to thank all the members of our Board with whom we have shared this new path. A big thank you to our young and influential Social Ambassadors who help us to propose our message to the younger universe, but not only, of our population. A heartfelt thank you to all the members of the Athena network, a creature of Rossella Sobrero, whom I would like to thank here for their commitment to our activity over so many years. My most heartfelt thanks go, of course, to our supporting members who are decisive in contributing ideas and suggestions. I would like to thank all our passionate and meticulous employees.
Their competent, professional and discreet work has been decisive for the realisation of all our initiatives, including the first White Paper.
This book is edited by the Foundation and will be published annually.
The White Paper becomes an Open Book. Anyone can be hosted with their ideas and proposals for Shared Social Progress. Our editorial board will evaluate each proposal independently and confidentially.
The White Paper will, however, always be downloadable free of charge from our website and will be a living, evolving testimony of the will to confront and propose cultural and social innovation. Naturally, the responsibility for the contents remains with the individual authors, or co-authors. These include, in this edition, Maria Vittoria Lodovichi, a member of our Advisory Board who died dramatically a year ago in a very serious car accident. Maria Vittoria Lodovichi was one of the most serious and authoritative Italian psychoanalysts. I had the honour of being able to discuss many aspects of our social life with her. An expert on the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, she gave us for this White Paper a beautiful contribution, her last unfortunately, entitled: Love and Art. Our heartfelt thoughts go out to her.
To conclude Gustav Mahler gave us a beautiful thought: ‘….the tradition is not the Worship of Ashes but the Guardianship of the Fire….’. This book is the testimony that Fondazione Pubblicità Progresso wants to try to guard the Fire of Social Progress.
