The health emergency has confronted us with a “cultural, epistemological deficiency”. The rector of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart Franco Anelli said this at the Rimini Meeting. «After delegating power to scientists in a kind of Platonic society with the mantra ‘we do what science says’ people began to regard scientists as stupid and incapable because they said they ‘contradicted themselves’. In reality – he observed – that is the scientific method: making hypotheses, verifying them or falsifying them. But an uneducated society does not understand this phenomenon, this dynamic, it does not trust the knowledge of others. Because to trust the knowledge of others, one must in turn be the bearer of some
different knowledge “. Rings recalled the “formative and educational function of universities” which “are not producers of new, basic or applied knowledge, but are bearers of knowledge, they generate new people”. And so, he observes, today it is necessary, more than ever, to “build a society with a more widespread and educated culture” precisely because everyone recognizes that they are at the turn of epochs of great changes. “The ecological and digital transition are, in my opinion, the end of industrial society as we have known it for a little more than two centuries – explained the rector of the Catholic University – Adam Smith’s ‘pain factory’ is
to no longer exist because that industrial society that we have built on fossil fuels over time will have to lead us to something else ».
Furthermore, as it was possible to experience during the Covid emergency, «digitization is not
it’s just a quicker and faster and leaner way of doing certain things, it’s something profoundly different, it has to do with the way people communicate, with the way decisions are made ». But the “way in which the
political consensus “. According to Anelli “it is evident that the ‘clash of civilization’ we have been talking about for the past twenty years is marking, if not the shattering, at least the retreat of the socio-political world we face: many are beginning to think that the rulers of the future they will no longer be powers in which power is organized and chosen and built according to the processes that are constitutional democracies for us, but will be in the hands of subjects who are organized in a different way ».