Rosalía and the return of spirituality

In this week's article Ferran Sáez was taking advantage of Rosalía's new album to warn us against the temptation to interpret the popularity of a certain type of spirituality as if it were "the drift of a search for meaning in an ultra-fragmented world." The mysticism with which the singer from Sant Esteve Sesrovires works in her new project is what Sáez would call a "postmodern spirituality," which, due to its imbrication with market logic, would be directly incompatible with the transformation of consciousness that the album itself invokes. I agree with the diagnosis, but I would like to take advantage of it to talk about the world toward which this artistic endeavor is directed, because we can be sure that the great pop divas are very attentive readers of the times in which they live, and that Rosalía wants to make art and business out of a certain return to spirituality means that this certain return has not been properly shaped and capitalized upon.

Oscar Wilde wrote De profundis (in Catalan, published by Ediciones de la Ela Geminada) during a very harsh prison sentence. The text is a letter addressed to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, because Wilde spent two years in prison precisely because of this homosexual relationship, which the courts condemned as "repugnant indecency." During this time, Wilde developed profound spiritual convictions and, at the same time, said that he remained incapable of believing in the traditional sense: "When I think of religion, I feel as though I should found an order for those who cannot believe: the Fellowship of the Faithless, we might call it, where on an altar, nothing burns unblessed, and an empty chalice of wine. Everything, to be true, must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its rituals no less than faith."

What does it mean that "Everything, to be true, must become a religion"? Here, Wilde is establishing a crucial difference between the reality of facts and our way of relating to them. It is much more easily understood with the double meaning that the word "trueThe idea is that factual truth alone is insufficient for human beings to know how to act in the world; rather, action is the result of taking truths seriously, even if they are taken out of context, which is perhaps the kind of attention to truth that the current internet fosters.

It goes without saying that the world is talking about spirituality again because there is a political crisis. This is nothing unusual, because history tells us that spirituality always returns in times of material hardship, precisely because faith is the possibility of remaining faithful to principles and truths in the absence of an obvious and immediate reward for following them. Conversely, it is understandable that during decades of prosperity, categories such as sacrifice, redemption, and hope were consigned to the dustbin of history in favor of utility, gradual reform, and optimism.Homo economicus In the ethics of care, in recent years we have seen that the prevailing theories of human nature left us without certain fundamental tools to understand and combat burnout.

As we know, this comeback is ambivalent. At first glance, it seems to be capitalizing on a conservative sensibility. There are already a thousand criticisms in the music video of Berghain to show Rosalía doing housework because it could be interpreted as an endorsement of an individualistic and depoliticized spirituality. However, if we continue with the idea that spirituality is a certain way of relating to truths, everyday experience can be the first step on a much more radical path.

In its most rigid form, religion understands fidelity as an uncritical adherence to one's own group against another group identified by its adherence to a contrary and incompatible religion. Here, the objective is perpetual war. In a version that I find far more radical, and therefore far more demanding and moving, religion is fidelity to universal principles that bridge the gap between one's own particularism and the possibility of acting together with others. And, above all, religion is also the possibility of creating bonds of solidarity strong enough not to be betrayed at the first opportunity. The crisis of the left today could be traced back to the moment it allowed the set of practices and rituals that kept its most radically universal truths alive to wither away and delegated their implementation to the bureaucracy and the market.