The philosophy of “what’s the harm?”

But we need to be clear about experience, because we often run into glaring misunderstandings.
The most striking one is this: we call everything a young person might do an “experience,” without distinction.
But it’s not true that the more things you try, the more experience you gain.
It’s the culture we’re immersed in that makes us say such glaring nonsense.
The example that comes to mind right away is girlfriends.
From many conversations with kids, it seems, to hear them tell it, that the more girlfriends you’ve had, the more you’ve tried out, the more experience you have.

(FRANCO NEMBRINI, Di padre in figlio. Conversazioni sul rischio di educare, Ares, Milan, 2011, p. 66)

It’s utter nonsense, because many people’s personal stories prove exactly the opposite: they show that burning yourself out in a string of shallow relationships, never carried through to their ultimate consequence, is exactly what often keeps you, sometimes for the rest of your life, from having a relationship that is what it should be.
So they reach twenty or twenty-five with these so-called “experiences” behind them, which add up to an endless series of scars, the scars of open wounds…

(FRANCO NEMBRINI, Di padre in figlio. Conversazioni sul rischio di educare, Ares, Milan, 2011, p. 66)

Experience is the depth and truth of something you really go all the way into.
It is the relationship with reality taken to its ultimate judgment, reality embraced in all its dimensions.
Meanwhile, this world would have us believe that the more things people try, the more richness and experience they gain.
As if, to choose the right woman, you had to try them all!
And anyway, if we look at it this way, judgment is always left hanging, because there’s always the suspicion that the right woman might be the one who turns your head on the street tomorrow.
So the relationship with reality is always in doubt: it’s never grounded, never certain.
To know good and evil, you don’t need to experience evil!
If I need to teach a child that fire burns, that doesn’t mean I have to put his hand on the stove ten times or so, because then he’d really get burned; it’s enough to help him understand the right thing to do.

(FRANCO NEMBRINI, Di padre in figlio. Conversazioni sul rischio di educare, Ares, Milan, 2011, pp. 66-67)

A person is first and foremost awareness.
Therefore, what characterizes experience is not so much doing […]: that is the error implicit in the familiar phrase “having experiences,” where “experience” becomes a synonym for “trying.”
What characterizes experience is understanding something, discovering its meaning.
Experience, therefore, implies an understanding of the meaning of things.

(LUIGI GIUSSANI, Il rischio educativo, BUR Rizzoli, Milan 2016, Kindle edition, 84-85%)

[…] the journey has to be made in depth, not by being a “surfer” of life, always skimming the surface of things, always looking for something new.
Newness is in you.
Newness lies within the particular situation you’re living.
In other words, you have to go deep into one point if you want to see the Truth.
You shouldn’t go searching by spinning like a top, far and wide.
Stick with the circumstances God gives you, because they are an inescapable factor in your vocation.
That is where the encounter between you and what you’re called to takes place.

(FRANCO NEMBRINI, Nel mezzo del cammin, episode 12 – Inferno XXVI (Ulysses))

Woe to parents who reason by asking, “What’s the harm?” They’ve already been defeated, they’re already lost.
If, from the day your children are born, your criterion for the choices you make with them is the question “What’s the harm?” you’ve already lost: the environment will win, the environment will take your place, because you’re standing still.
The educator’s question is never “What’s the harm?” but “What’s the good in it?”
What can I offer my child right now? What is my child looking at? What is my child getting attached to? What proposal of good am I making to my child?
“What’s the good in it?” is the great question of the educator who challenges the environment his child is growing up in.
By asking “What’s the harm?” he has already lost; he has already handed his child over to the environment, in the harmful sense of the word […].

(FRANCO NEMBRINI, Di padre in figlio. Conversazioni sul rischio di educare, Ares, Milan, 2011, p. 85)

Saying certain things, behaving in a certain way, looking at certain things rather than others is not without consequences: it generates a mentality.
Here, too, let me offer an example from my own experience.
One evening I go to dinner at the home of a group of young people who live together because of their jobs; and there, in plain sight, is a calendar of buxom women going about “mostrando con le poppe il petto” (“showing off their bosoms, nipples and all”), to use the expression Dante uses in this very canto (v. 102).
I voice my doubts, but they seem unbothered: “What’s the harm?” they answer.
I try to explain to them, as usual, that this is the wrong question; the right question is always “What’s the good in it?”
“If you keep a calendar like that in your room, it means that’s how you look at women. So how can you look at your female coworkers, your girlfriends, any differently, with a gaze that doesn’t tend to ‘devour’ them, to reduce them to objects?”

(FRANCO NEMBRINI, from his commentary on Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XXIII, Mondadori, Milan 2020, p. 523)

Worldliness is a culture. It is a culture of the transitory, a culture of appearances, of maquillage, a culture of “today yes, tomorrow no; tomorrow yes and today no”.
It has superficial values.
A culture that does not know fidelity, because it always changes according to circumstances, everything is negotiable.
This is the worldly culture, the culture of worldliness.
And Jesus insists on defending us from this and He prays that the Father might defend us from this culture of worldliness.
It is a “use it and throw it away” culture according to whatever suits you.
It is a culture without faithfulness, it has no roots.
But it is a way of life, even a way of life for many who say that they are Christians.
They are Christians, but they are worldly.

(POPE FRANCIS, from the homily at Santa Marta of May 16, 2020)

This is the anguish of a man of my generation, who saw the war, the Nazis, the SS, and suffered a trauma from them that he never fully overcame.
When I see the young people around me losing the old popular values and absorbing the new models imposed by capitalism, thus risking a form of inhumanity, a form of atrocious aphasia, a brutal absence of critical faculties, a partisan passivity, I remember that these were precisely the typical traits of the SS: and so I see the horrendous shadow of the swastika spreading over our cities.
An apocalyptic vision, certainly, mine.
But if, alongside it and the anguish that produces it, there weren’t also an element of optimism in me, that is, the thought that it is possible to fight against all this, I simply wouldn’t be here among you, speaking.

(PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, Il genocidio, talk given at the l’Unità festival in Milan, September 27, 1974, in Scritti corsari, Garzanti, Milan 2011, Kindle edition, 88%)