As the year ends, the planet completes another orbit around the sun. The Gregorian calendar, adopted almost universally, prompts a collective pause. This is a singular moment, conceived by human rationality in our unique ability to mark time, record our history, and reflect on our own evolution. It is a time when expectation turns to celebration, reconciliation, and altruistic acts. Humanism, in its purest essence, should shine with the most intensity: the idea that “I am because the other is,” and that our differences are the threads that give texture to the fabric of humanity.
The cruel mirror
Christmas, transformed over centuries across cultures into a global phenomenon, is the ultimate embodiment of this aspiration. The Catholic narrative, which dominates its symbolism, calls for joy, peace, and harmony, placing benevolence as an imperative. It is a date that, in theory, invites us to see ourselves in the eyes of the other and to act with compassion. It was meant to be the time when we remember that we are part of a complete nature and that cooperation is our greatest legacy.
Yet, what we witness is a painful paradox. The celebration that should be the pinnacle of humanism instead functions as a cruel mirror, reflecting not our resemblance to a divine ideal of love, but the profound lack of it. We have chosen that the face of humanism would be its absence. While city lights twinkle and tables overflow, other parts of the globe are illuminated by the flash of bombs and wildfires. As we exchange gifts, we decide, collectively and silently, who deserves to live and who deserves to be helped.
The lack of empathy
The joy of Christmas thus becomes a geographical and economic privilege. In urban areas, the division is clear: on one side, those who celebrate; on the other, those who merely “take advantage” of the date as a brief respite in a constant struggle for survival. This is not a mere replication of past problems, as if “the shit were the same, only the cockroaches change.” The realisation is more bitter: modern times have potentiated the scale of our indifference. The lack of empathy, the poison of discourse, and the pride of nations and individuals are not remnants of a barbaric era; they are facets of our nature that have been refined and amplified.
In ancient times, ideas of morality and logic were forged precisely because war and violence were as acceptable as breathing. Today, we clothe these atrocities in the cloak of strategic rationality, interstate politics, or simple media blackout. The celebration, therefore, risks becoming a collective eccentricity—an elaborate theatre designed to make us forget our animal condition and our destructive irrationality. It is the moment when, ashamed of our own nature, we flee into the arms of consumption and festivity to avoid facing the void of our selective compassion.
It was supposed to be a time of unity. But what Christmas brings to the fore, most acutely, is precisely our inability to practice it genuinely and universally. The date does not create the lack of humanism; it illuminates it, exposing the fissures in a civilisational project that preaches peace in a world that still chooses, every day, war—be it armed, economic, or social.
A time for reflection
Therefore, let this Christmas not be one of empty celebration. Let it be, above all, a time for uncomfortable reflection. Let the image of our “neighbour” extend beyond our family, our neighbourhood, or our country. Only when the joy of some becomes incompatible with the suffering of others—and when this incompatibility becomes a catalyst for action, not just passing guilt—can the true humanist spirit we so ardently long for finally be born.
By Neque Alcino António João Francisco