Just before I started writing our weekly “dialogue”, I read an interview with Peter Frankopan, a young and acclaimed professor at Oxford, author of a book that, in some way, helped to change an already anachronistic Eurocentric paradigm. In 2015, when he edited The Silk Roads – A New History of the Worldthe discussions between European and North American academic elites were never the same again, the center of power ceased to be the Mediterranean and began to be much further to the East. Frankopan, in a conversation with Visão magazine yesterday, advised organizations and politicians to stop and read and think.
I couldn’t agree more. I grew up with the idea that growth is achieved through ideas, processes and always putting people at the center. The Banco Português do Atlântico Study Center was mythical, a place where young professionals revealed themselves through their thinking, their originality, the search for new paths that led them to new procedures. People like Artur Santos Silva and Rui Vilar belonged to this think tank.
As I have written here, and as Caixa Agrícola de Torres Vedras has proven, there is no reason why cooperativism should not grow and prevail in a society that has never been in greater need of a new ethic, of effective cooperation, of a proximity that saves us from an abyss of distancing. We will lay the first stone of a study center embodied in the birth of a publishing house.
We will launch the “Proximity” collection next year. A title that defines us and is a provocation to this era of technologically mediated communication. The Portuguese built the first transport and communications network on a global scale and – certainly as Frankopan knows –, even in the 18th century, astronomical observations made by Portuguese Jesuits in China were published throughout Europe and the New World, from London in the first modern scientific magazine, the Philosophical Trasactions. It was the time when time coincided with the time of nature and the cycles of life. Then Benjamin Franklin was born and captured electricity in a storm. All technological revolutions were born afterwards. In just over two hundred years we have not stopped creating, inventing, evolving. Very little time passed between the first train and the birth of the internet. Conversation for another chronicle.
Slowness has died in our public space and even indoors. We lose a lot from this. We lose thought, we lose humanity and empathy. Cooperativism and the ambition of Caixa Agrícola, and of true cooperative members, have shown results and have ratios well above average, but we need to create the conditions to have thinking that promotes the future. This will be our contribution. A collection that excels in creative syntheses and capable of overcoming the situation of existential distance in which many find themselves today, so that we can come together again in the proximity that characterizes the only relationship that truly allows us to build authentic bonds and human development. We will be faster in the future, but to do so it is urgent to resurrect the slowness.
Life is not a hundred-meter sprint, or much less a ten-thousand-meter run at the pace of the Ethiopians, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Life has a natural breath that is important to respect.
President of the Torres Vedras Mutual Agricultural Credit Bank
manuel.guerreiro@ccamtv.pt