If the last quarter of the past century was the reign of haste, in the first quarter of this one vertigo triumphs.

We live in fast-paced, frenetic times, years of acceleration that is more progressive than constant, of hearts and minds in a continuous and unrestrained state of agitation, of personalities driven more by impersonal spasms than by free and subjective wills. The self has become decentered due to a speed tending toward infinity; it dwells on the edge of the abyss and catastrophe, and both exert upon it a powerful, hallucinatory effect of alluring seduction.

For centuries, at least in the West, self-understanding of one's own biography was associated with sustaining projects and purposes, even multiple projects and purposes, but the pandemic gave us among its legacies that the human condition has become multitasking, none of them excusable, all of them urgent and, above all and therefore, none susceptible to being postponed.

In the age of smartwatches, the future has ceased to be an existential horizon and has become merely an anticipatory name for the past. Thus, the future is not now, but rather the past we have yet to live. If this is so, if, due to this dizzying pace of change, the future has lost its status as an existential horizon, as a structuring element of the present in the form of its foreshadowing and prophecy, if it becomes evanescent and devoid of consistency, of structure, of depth, then the present itself loses one of its most promising dimensions: precisely that of being the space-time from which we are capable of making promises.

Promising, Hannah Arendt argues, is the only possible remedy to the unpredictability of the consequences our actions may generate; it is the free capacity of the human condition through which we conquer “islands of safety” in the future, also in the happy form of commitment, which is nothing other than promising oneself to others.

Similarly, without a promise from the present, there is no project to prepare us for the future, nothing to inspire us, no hope to excite us. However, unlike Hegel, who insisted on the emancipatory and linear dimension of “cunning of reason”Ernst Bloch proposed, in a much more modest, simple, close and humble way, the “the cunning of hope.”

Indeed, hope is crafty, first of all with regard to itself, “hope against all hope”, wrote Saul of Tarsus, and secondly with regard to the establishment of “slow tempo”, the time proper to what is awaited with admiration, what is harvested and germinates, what is born and grows, a temporality exactly opposed to the sterile acceleration of time.

In her delightful novel The Danube The Italian writer Claudio Magris states, in a manner as vehement as it is provocative, that “The devil is a conservative”Magris is certainly not speaking of that figure so prevalent in the most diverse religious worldviews around the globe, but rather of the spirit of negativity, that diabolical perspective according to which neither the best is possible nor has it been given to us to achieve it. The devil, in Magris's view, is pure negativity, the utterly hopeless, the one devoid of a future, and, for that very reason, the great and definitive conservative.

And that is the great paradox of our frenetic society: a race to nowhere, where nothing is transformed, everything remains exactly as it was at its starting point. Conversely, hope—the smallest of virtues, as the French poet Charles Péguy called it—is precisely what the devil doesn't expect, and it is what allows us to gaze without vertigo upon the essential beauty of everything.