Ana Azurmendi, professor at Constitutional Law: "It is necessary to flee from verbal aggressiveness and polarized emotional intelligence".

"It is necessary to build a new sensitivity to respect on a daily basis and flee from the verbal aggressiveness and polarized emotional intelligence in which we find ourselves, which cancel out reasonableness," said Ana Azurmendi, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Navarra. The professor of the School of Communication intervened in a workshop organized by the Institute Core Curriculum (ICC) of the academic center titled "A new sensibility towards respect. Words matter".

The workshop began with the intervention of Ricardo Piñero, director of the ICC, who asked some questions: "Is a new sensitivity required? Have we lost respect? Do words matter?", said the Full Professor in Aesthetics.

This was followed by a roundtable, in which professors Pablo Pérez and Enrique Baquero also participated. A discussion which addressed the lack of respect in conversations on social networks, the loss of social interaction in favor of an increasingly individualistic culture or the negative impact of human action on nature. 

Full Professor of Contemporary History at School of Philosophy and Letters, Pablo Perez referred to the woke culture, as the culture of cancellation and fear of speaking about the truth and the search for the meaning of existence. Pablo Perez encouraged to "dare to think". "We are closed within the vocabulary we have been taught, language limits us and frees us and our problem is whether we want to know the truth or not," he pointed out. "When you lose meaning, words serve to dominate. The real oppression comes from the way we speak, which conditions the way we think."

For his part, the professor of Environmental Biology the School of Science, Enrique Baquero, invited us to reflect on respect for the “playing field” in which we live: nature. “We need to change our relationship with the environment, because the climate crisis is just one of the factors threatening biodiversity and our survival,” he concluded.

Language, the way to shape the world

In the second roundtable, entitled "The power of language", Ana Calvo, professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University Ceu San Pablo, defined the term as the way of "shaping the world, our way of relating and expressing ourselves to others".

Alfredo Cruz, professor of Philosophy Politics, added that "without language there is no human life". "The words we use define the way we position ourselves in the world," he said. Alfredo Cruz urged respect for the other, as a person and within a specific context, and encouraged the creation of spaces of understanding instead of spaces of judgment. 

Vocabulary provides us with facilities such as "bringing us closer to knowledge and to the truth," said Cristina Sánchez, director of the magazine Alfa y Omega. The idea of creating community and union through words shows that different languages "do not compete, they cooperate," added Mónica Herrero, Vice President of Communication at the University of Navarra.