Tag: Eco

Umberto Eco on migrations

This essay, entitled “Migrazioni”, was published in La Bustina Di Minerva in 1990

Last Tuesday, while all the newspapers were dedicating numerous articles
to the tense events in Florence, there appeared in La Repubblica a
cartoon by Bucchi: it showed two silhouettes, an enormous Africa looming
over a miniscule Italy; next to it was a Florence that was represented
only by a small dot. The caption was: “Where do we want more police?”
Meanwhile, the Corriere della Sera summed up the story of the climactic
changes on our planet over the last six thousand years. From this
review it emerged that the fertility or the aridity of a continent
inspired vast migrations that changed the face of the planet and created
the civilizations that today we know, experience directly or study
through history.

Today, with regards to the so-called problems of
the “foreigners” (a gracious euphemism that, as has already been noted,
must also include the Swiss and the tourists from Texas), an issue that
is of interest to all of the nations of Europe, we continue to reason
as if we find ourself facing a phenomenon of immigration. One has
immigration when some hundreds of thousands of citizens of one
overpopulated country want to go to live in another country, (for
example, the Italians in Australia). And it is natural that the hosting
country must regulate the flow of immigration according to its ability
to incorporate them, which is why it has the right to arrest or expel
those immigrants that prove criminal, just as it has to arrest its own
criminal citizens who rob the rich tourists carrying their precious
valuables.

But today, in Europe, we do not find ourselves facing a
phenomenon of immigration. We find ourselves facing a phenomenon of
migration. To be sure, it does not have the violent and sweeping aspect
of the Germanic invasions in Italy, France and Spain, it does not have
the virulence of the Arab expansions following the Hegira, nor the
slowness of the imprecise flows that carried the dark peoples from Asia
to Polynesia and perhaps to America. But it is another chapter in the
story of the planet that has seen civilizations form and dissolve on the
waves of the great migratory flows, first from the West to the East
(but we know very little about that), after from the East to the West
beginning with the millennial movement of the surge from the Indus to
the Pillars of Hercules, (the straights of Gibraltar), and afterwards in
the fourth century from the Pillars of Hercules to California and
Tierra del Fuego, (Argentina and Patagonia).

Now the migration,
unnoticed because it comes in the guise of an airplane trip and a stop
at the immigration office at the police headquarters, or perhaps by a
clandestine boat, comes to the North from an arid and hungry South. It
feels like an immigration, but it is a migration, a historic event of
incalcuable scope. They do not travel in such a horde that the grass
will no longer grow where their horses have trampled, but in discrete
clusters that attract little notice, nevertheless, the process will not
take centuries or millenia but decades. And like all the great
migrations, it will finally result in a rearrangement of the ethnicity
of the land of their destination, an inexorable change of costumes, an
unarrestable hybridization that noticeably mutates the color of the
skin, the hair and the eyes of the population, as even a small number of
Normans left behind their blond hair and blue eyes in Sicily.

The
great migrations, at least in historic periods, were feared: at first
they tried to avoid them, the Roman emperors erected one rampart here
and another one there, they sent the legions ahead to defeat the
advancing intruders, after they came to bargain and discipline the first
settlements, therefore offering Roman citizenship to all the subjects
of the Empire, but in the end, the ruin of the Romans formed the
so-called romano-barbarian kingdoms that were the origins of our
European countries, of the languages that we jealously speak today, of
our political and social institutions. When on the Lombardian highway,
we find places that we call, in Italian fashion names like Usmate or
Biandrate, we have forgotten that they were descendants of the
Longobards. On the other hand, from where do we get those Etruscan
Smiles we find so often in central Italy?

The great migrations cannot be stopped. We simply must prepare ourselves to live in a new season of Afro-European culture.

Umberto Eco comes to Chesterton

Umberto Eco shows himself to be a moralist in spite of himself:

Human
beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go
through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by
religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th
century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in
rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and
tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently
meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are
superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to
be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps
a priest….

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing:
“When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He
believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed
to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous
credulity.

Eco, a non-Christian but a great humanist
in the best sense of the term, herein expresses the essence of
Voltaire’s point regarding the fundamental necessity of religion. Human
beings are not capable of maintaining a spiritual vaccuum and they will
fill that void with faith in something. In some cases, they will fill
it with something harmless, in others, something silly, in still others,
something actively evil.

I see Eco’s article as tangentially
related to yesterday’s discussion, which demonstrated again how decent
atheists and agnostics raised in a Christian culture parasitically and
irrationally latch onto the greater part of the morality they reject as a
whole, causing them to react in horror as their fellow disbelievers not
privy or more resistant to such moral indoctrination behave rationally
in the manner exhorted by Nietzsche and accepted with sardonic
resignation by the existentialists.

The essential point that
continues to evade most of these decent disbelievers is that regardless
of the ethical structure he erects to rationalize his subscription to
traditional morals imposed on his consciousness by society, he has no
logic beyond simple utilitarianism to offer anyone else. His definition
of good and evil – assuming he even accepts such things – is his alone.
He can say to the rapist “what you do is evil”, but he has no
effective response when the certainly rapist says to him “what I do is
good, because I define good as that which pleases me” or ” A living
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength” nor does he have a
legitimate grounds for preventing or punishing the rapist.

Even
the ethical arguments based on utilitarianism can fail here. In a
demographically declining West, the rapist can quite reasonably argue
that he is committing an act for the good of society, even for the good
of humanity, in forcing himself on a woman who intends to remain
childless. Indeed, an honest devotee of “the greater good” would have
to at least consider supporting a policy of forcibly impregnating the
most intelligent women, accompanied, of course, with a revivial of the
historical eugenicism aimed at sterilizing the least intelligent.

This
is, of course, abhorrent to the Christian morality, which Nietzsche
rightly viewed as a defender of the weak. But on what grounds does a
utilitarian object?

There is no dearth of philosophical systems
of ethics, and they are all useless because they make no logical claim
on those who do not voluntarily accept it. This is why the atheist, the
agnostic and the pagan so readily resort to force as a substitute for
ethics, because their arguments are toothless. To be fair, one must
admit there is no shortage of Christians who do the same in their
confusion of government-mandated legality with Biblically-mandated
morality.

Eco quotes another lapsed Catholic, Joyce: “”What
kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is
logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and
incoherent?” I would add: what profits it an individual to forsake
a morality which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is
illogical, incoherent and inapplicable to others?

(In case it is not readily apparent, I did not translate this for The Telegraph.)

Umberto Eco on Jules Verne

Umberto Eco writes of the great science-fiction author on the centenary of his death in an article that was published on 11 April, 2005, in L’Espresso:

VOYAGE TO THE CENTER OF JULES VERNE

When
we were boys, we were divided into two groups: those that held to
Salgari [Italian author Emilio Salgari] and those that held to Verne. I
quickly confess that at that time I held for Salgari, and now History
compels me to revisit my opinions of that time. Salgari, retold, cited
from memory, loved for all the colors it gave one’s infancy, no longer
seduces new generations or – to tell the truth – the elders either.
When they reread him in search of a little ironic nostalgia, the reading
simply makes them tired, and too many of those mangroves and wild pigs
come to be an annoyance.

Instead, in 2005 we are celebrating the
centenary of the death of Jules Verne, and not only in France are there
daily and weekly conventions dedicated to him, searching to demonstrate
the many ways that his fantasies anticipated reality. A look at the
editorial catalogs in our country suggest to me that Verne was
republished far more often than Salgari, to say nothing of France, where
there exists an absolute industry of Vernian antiquities. The old
hardbound Hetzel editions are certainly very beautiful. (In Paris, on
the Left Bank alone, there are at least two stores possessing these
splended volumes laid out in red and gold, offered at a prohibitive
price.)

For all the merits that our Salgari must be remembered,
the father of Sandokan did not have a great sense of humor, (not unlike
the rest of his characters, with the exception of Yanez), while the
romances of Verne were full of humor. It is enough to remember those
splendid pages of “Michele Strogoff” where, after the battle of Kolyvan,
the reporter from the Daily Telegraph, Harry Blount, goes to the
telegraph office and spends thousands of rubles transmitting verses of
the Bible* to his corrispondent in Paris in order to impede his rival,
Alcide Jolivet. But Jolivet succeeds in robbing Blount of his position
at the telegraph and blocks him in turn by transmitting the little songs
of [François] Béranger.

“Hallo!” said Harry Blount.
“Just so,” answered Jolivet.”

And tell me if this is not style!

Another
reason for this fascination is that many futuristic stories, read at a
temporal distance when that future is already known, leaves the reader a
little disappointed, because the things that truly happened, the
inventions that were actually realized, are more marvelous than those
imagined by the books of the previous era. With Verne this is not so,
no atomic submarine will be more technologically wonderful than the
Nautilus and no dirigible or jumbo jet will ever be as fascinating as
the majestic helix ship of Robur the Conquistador….

And if we
do not have the money to buy the old Hetzel editions from antique
bookstores and we are not satisfied with the contemporary re-editions?
You can go on the Internet, to the address http://jv.gilead.org.il/.
There a gentleman by the name of Zvi Har’El, a collector of all the
news of Verne, has a list of the worldwide celebrations, a complete
bibliography, an anthology of sayings, 304 incredible stamps dedicated
to Verne from various countries, translations in Hebrew, and most of
all, a virtual library where you can find integral texts of Verne in
various languages and see the original French editions as well all of
the engravings to save and afterwards enlarge as you like because,
sometimes, we are even more captivated the second time.

One
of the most decent things about writers, a famously indecent lot, is
that they are one of the few disciplines who trouble to remember those
who went before.

*Eco makes an uncharacteristic mistake here,
as “the verses learned in his childhood” do not refer to the Bible, but
rather “the well-known verses of Cowper”, which is to say, William
Cowper, the English poet.

Umberto Eco on the end of democracy

Big Chilly once told me that he greatly respected how I often use my
public platform for mysterious and seemingly nonsensical purposes. In
that light, it gives me great pleasure to present more of that for which
no one is asking, a translation of an article by Umberto Eco which
appeared on June 25th in L’espresso: Apparire piu come essere.
 

To appear more than to be

Sixty-four years before Christ, Marcus Tullius Cicero, already a
celebrated orator but the epitome of a New Man, estranged from the
nobility, decided to declare himself a candidate for Consul. His
brother, Quintus Tullius, wrote for him a manual in which he was
instructed how to make an impression. In the front of the current
Italian edition, (Manuele del candidato – Istruzioni per vincere le elezioni, editore Manni, 8 euros),
are comments by Luca Canali, in which he lucidly describes the
histoical circumstances and the personalities of that campaign. Furio
Colombo writes the introduction, with a reflective essay on the First
Republic.

In fact, there are many similarities between our Second Republic and
this Roman Republic, in the virtues, (very small), as well as the
defects. The example of Rome, over the course of more than two
millenia, has continued to hold much influence on many successive
visions of the State. As Colombo records, the antique model of the
Roman Republic inspired the authors of the Federalist Papers, which
delineated the fundamental lines of the American Constitution. They saw
in Rome, more than in Athens, the example of what was truly a democracy
of the people. In their pragmatic realism, the neocons around Bush
were inspired by the image of imperial Rome and many of their actual
political discussions gave recourse to the idea of an empire, that of a
“Pax Americana” which makes explicit reference to the ideology of the
“Pax Romana”.

I must note that the image of electoral competition that emerges in
the 20 pages of Quintus is of extremely small virtue compared to that
which had inspired the federalists of the 18th century. Quintus does
not seem to even consider the possibility of a political man who boldly
confronts the electorate in the face of dissent with a courageous
project, with the hope of conquering the voters on the powerful strength
of a utopian idea. As Canali also notes, totally absent from these
pages is any notion of debating ideas; instead, there is recommendation
to never expose oneself on any political issue, so as to avoid making
enemies. The candidate envisioned by Quintus must only be sure to
appear fascinating, doing favors and other self-promotion, never saying
no to anyone but leaving everyone with the impression he will do what
they want. The memory of the electorate is short, and before long they
will forget old promises….

At the end of the letter we ask: but is democracy truly only this, a
form of conquering the public favor that is founded on nothing but
appearances and a strategy of deceit? It is certainly so, and it cannot
be differently if this system, (which, as Churchill said, is imperfect,
but is less imperfect than all the others), allows one to arrive at
power only through consensus and not through force and violence. But we
must not forget that these instructions for a political campaign were
written at moment when Roman democracy was already in crisis.

It was not long after when Caesar definitively took power with the
assistance of his legions, and with his life Marcus Tullius paid the
passage from a regime founded on consensus to a regime founded on the
fist of the State. But one cannot avoid the thought that Roman
democracy had begun to die when its politicians understood that they no
longer had to be serious about their policies but had only to engineer
the obtaining of the sympathies of those we might well call television
viewers.

This demonstrates that there is truly nothing new under the sun. In
our modern arrogance, we believe that we are different, that our
pseudo-democracy, (as false in every way to the democratic ideal as was
its Roman predecessor), is a light illuminating all mankind. Quintus
Tullius might easily have been Dick Morris or Karl Rove, advising
hollow-suited frauds such as Bill Clinton and George Bush.

The laws of history are not as easily discerned as the laws of
physics, but they are every bit as inexorable. Eco gives us one more
reason to believe that we are living in the last days of the American
Republic.

Umberto Eco on political correctness

This article, entitled La pistola dell’Ostrega, appeared on 11 June 2004 in L’Espresso:

Political
Correctness is a true and proper movement born in the American
universities of liberal and radical inspiration, therefore of the Left,
with an eye towards acknowledging multiculturalism and reducing some of
the ingrained linguistic vices that established lines of discrimination
confronting various minorities. And therefore they began to say “blacks”
and later “Afro Americans” instead of “negroes”, and “gay” instead of
the thousands of other notorious appellations reserved for disparaging
homosexuals.

Naturally, this campaign for the
purification of the language has produced a true fundamentalism, which
has led to the notable case in which some feminists proposed to no
longer say “history” since it begins with the pronoun “his”, as they
thought this meant that the story was “his”, but instead to say
“herstory” – her story – obviously ignoring the Greco-Latin etymology
which has no gender implications.

However, the tendency
has assumed also neoconservative, or frankly, reactionary aspects. If
you decide to no longer call people in wheelchairs handicapped or even
disabled, but “differently abled” and after do not construct access
ramps in public places, it is evident that you have hypocritically
removed the word but not the problem. And the same is true if you
substitute saying “indefinitely unoccupied” for fired or “in a program
of transition to change careers” for dismissed. Who knows why a banker
isn’t ashamed of his title and doesn’t insist on being called an
operator in the field of savings. If it’s not working, changing the name
won’t fix it.

On these and an infinity of other
problems, Edoardo Crisafulli amuses in his book “The Politically Correct
and Linguistic Liberty”, which strips naked all these contradictions.
He takes on both sides, pro and con, and is always very entertaining.
Reading it, however, I came to reflect on the curious case of our
country. While Political Correctness exploded elsewhere, in our case it
was diffused and instead we are always developing more and more
Political Incorrectness. If, at one time, one would read a newspaper and
a politician would say: “As a politics of convergence is emerging, one
would prefer an asymptotic choice that eliminated single points of
intersection”; today he prefers to say: “Dialogue? To Hell with that
dirty son of a bitch!”

It is true that at one time in
old Communist circles they used to label the adversary as “horseflies”
and in speaking during a fracas, they might have chosen to use a lexicon
more incontinent than that of a longshoreman, but that was in a time
when there were no limits to what one could say – it was accepted as an
affectation – as was once the case in the gentlemen’s clubs of venerated
memory – where the gentlemen were not verbally inhibited. Today,
instead, the technique of an insult is televised, a sign of unconcious
faith in the valor of democracy.

It probably began with
Bossi(2), in which his manly hardness obviously alludes to the softness
of other people, and the appellation of “Berluskaz(3)” was unmistakable
but the thing spread widely. Stefano Bartezzaghi, writing under the
name Venerdi di Repubblica, cites the play of insults today in
circulation, but in good fun, all things considered

Therefore,
I too must contribute to the sweetness of Politically Incorrect
Italian, and as I have consulted a series of dictionaries and dialects,
permit me to suggest some polite and good-natured expressions with which
to insult your enemy, graceful words: pistola dell’ostrega, papaciugo,
imbolsito, crapapelata, piffero, marocchino, pivellone, ciulandario,
morlacco, badalucco, pischimpirola…[long, long list of like insults
removed for the sake of brevity].

(1) Ostrega can’t
be found in most dictionaries. I thought he was playing off the term
“strega” witch or “ostrica” oyster. This led me to wonder if there
wasn’t some deeper profundity there, but Vittorio emails to explain:
“ostrega” is an old exclamation in Venetian dialect. It may be a
euphimism for “ostia!”

(2) Vittorio also adds: in the
1980’s the Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, had a celebrated
slogan “The League is the one that is hard” used against PC. That’s
where “celodurismo” comes from. I don’t know about “celoflocismo”. My
undestanding is that Eco is implying overtones of hardness and softness
as they relate to male tumescence. Alessandro also writes to explain:
Celodurismo is a neologism in Italian politics derived from the
(in)famous phrase by Umberto Bossi: “ce l’ho duro” meaning “I got an
hard-on and I can keep it up for hours!”, so that celodurismo means a
rough and boasting attitude which is typical of Umberto Bossi and his
mates of the Lega Nord political party. Actually, I never heard of
celoflocismo, but it surely derives from “ce l’ho floscio” which is
quite the contrary of “ce l’ho duro” so that celoflocismo means the
contrary of celodurismo.

(3) “Berluskaz” is likely a
combination of “Berlusconi” and “catzo”, saying that Silvio Berlusconi,
the Prime Minister and owner of AC Milan, is a motherf—–. Well, they
won the Scudetto this year, so deal.