All posts by Giorgio Baruchello

About Giorgio Baruchello

Born in Genoa, Italy, Giorgio Baruchello is an Icelandic citizen and works qua Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. He read philosophy in Genoa and Reykjavík, Iceland, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Guelph, Canada. His publications encompass several different areas, especially social philosophy, theory of value, and intellectual history. Public e-mail: giorgio@unak.is ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9933-5561

“I confini del mio linguaggio significano i confini del mio mondo”. Riflessioni filosofiche sul tema del confine

Invitato a offrire alcune riflessioni di carattere filosofico sul tema del confine, o dei confini al plurale—per il quale invito ringrazio nuovamente gli organizzatori dell’evento odierno—le prime idee ed impressioni che incominciarono a girarmi per la testa erano tanto personali quanto prosaiche.[1] Spero quindi che non Vi dispiaccia troppo se do l’avvio al mio intervento condividendole con Voi senza alcun pudore. Anzi, mi auguro sinceramente che siano di Vostro gradimento. Mi saprete dire, alla fine del mio racconto iniziale, se così sarà stato o meno.

Le idee ed impressioni in questione non sono altro che delle lontanissime e, oramai, quasi mitologiche memorie d’infanzia. Anche i professori di filosofia, benché baffuti, barbuti e ancor più spesso barbosi, sono stati bambini. Era il secolo scorso. Nato a Genova e cresciuto in Liguria, ero solito trascorrere le vacanze estive ad Andora, nella Riviera di Ponente; il Comune più occidentale della provincia di Savona, per intenderci. Più volte, un mio carissimo zio portava me, mio fratello e i nostri due cugini rivieraschi a visitare Nizza e Montecarlo, dove c’era un bell’acquario, nonché museo del mare, ben prima che ne venisse costruito uno ancora più voluminoso e, mi permetto di dire, famoso, in quel di Genova nel 1992, in occasione del cinquecentenario della scoperta dell’America da parte di Cristoforo Colombo. (Notate bene che, quale cittadino islandese, sono ora tenuto a riferire in questa sede che gli islandesi ritengono d’aver scoperto loro l’America. Al contempo, le popolazioni indigene dell’America del Nord sono ancora di un’altra opinione. Lascio a Voi dirimere la faccenda.)

Ma torniamo a me bambino. Ricordo tuttora l’emozione che mi prendeva quando arrivavamo a Ventimiglia—nota ai più oramai e, devo aggiungere, ahimè, per ben più tristi vicende legate ai difficili flussi migratori che avvengono all’interno dell’Unione Europea. Eccola là: la frontiera. Il confine italo-francese. Per me bambino, era un po’ come il Far West di Tex Willer o Sergio Leone. Le occhiatacce da parte degli ufficiali, armati e in uniforme, e i documenti d’identità da esibire, se e quando richiesti, erano di rigore. Il Trattato di Maastricht non esisteva ancora. L’essere cittadini europei, formalmente liberi di passare da uno Stato all’altro senza controlli di nessun genere, era ancora un pio ideale, un po’ come doveva esserlo all’epoca della Giovine Europa di Giuseppe Mazzini, anch’egli genovese come me, ovverosia negli anni ‘30 del XIX secolo. Ogni volta che si raggiungeva la frontiera, chissà perché, temevo che non ci facessero passare.

La memoria più strana era che ci si fermava prima ad un casello per fare i controlli del caso con gli agenti italiani. Non ricordo se fosse sempre e solo la Guardia di Finanza a farli o la Polizia di Stato. Se non addirittura i Carabinieri. Poco dopo, sempre che la memoria non mi inganni, si ripeteva la stessa cosa con quelli della gendarmerie francese. Dove si trovava il confine, esattamente, mi chiedevo: presso gli agenti italiani, presso quelli francesi, a metà strada, o in qualche altro punto tra i due estremi?

In chiave minore, la stessa domanda mi sorgeva in mente da bambino quando osservavo i cartelli situati lungo un’altra autostrada che annunciavano la fine della Liguria e l’inizio del Piemonte. Sì, lo so bene, di solito il percorso ce lo si immagina al contrario, a causa dei tanti turisti che vanno a trascorrere le vacanze al mare, accolti dall’amorevole e calorosa ospitalità tipica della gente della mia regione d’origine. Nel mio caso, tuttavia, si faceva il percorso opposto, soprattutto per andare a fare la settimana bianca sulle Alpi insieme ad altre famiglie di amici genovesi. Roba degna di Paolo Villaggio e Gigi Reder, in tutta onestà.

Crescendo, ho poi scoperto che questo genere di domanda, apparentemente stravagante se non addirittura stupida, aveva stuzzicato l’interesse di svariati studiosi. In particolare, il tema del confine o del limite estremo di un’entità sembrava avere attirato l’attenzione degli esperti in alcuni campi di ricerca dai nomi bizzarri, se non esoterici e, come i severi doganieri, anche un po’ minacciosi—senza volerlo fare apposta—ovverosia:

  1. la topologia,
  2. la mereologia e
  3. l’ontologia.

La prima disciplina non è lo studio dei ratti, anch’essi creature di degno pedigree fantozziano, ma quella branca della matematica che, grossomodo, si occupa delle figure geometriche le cui proprietà e relazioni precipue non dipendono dalla nozione di misura, ma bensì da operazioni di deformazione nello spazio logico-matematico. La seconda, invece, è la branca della logica formale che studia le relazioni e le proprietà relative al tutto e alle sue parti, o a un intero e le sue parti, e viceversa. La terza, la quale dal punto di vista lessicale è forse leggermente più nota rispetto alle altre due, è la branca della filosofia che studia l’essere o l’esistere degli enti nelle sue molteplici varietà.

Indipendentemente dai nomi un po’ curiosi di queste tre discipline, tutti e tre coniati o affermatisi in secoli relativamente recenti, la questione che mi ponevo da bambino, ovvero di dove si trovasse precisamente il confine o il limite tra due entità adiacenti, ha radici ben più antiche. Questo, almeno, per quel che riguarda la filosofia occidentale, la quale si è sempre divertita a osservare le realtà più ovvie e apparentemente banali dalle prospettive più insolite e sorprendenti, un po’ come fatto anche dalla poesia, dal teatro o dall’umorismo. Il grande Luigi Pirandello, in maniera quasi sintomatica, mescolava assieme tutte e quattro queste modalità della creatività umana con maestria straordinaria.

È probabile che molti tra di voi abbiano incontrato una sorta di parente stretto di queste antiche radici filosofiche ai tempi del liceo, studiando i paradossi della cosiddetta Scuola Eleatica e di uno dei suoi membri più importanti, Zenone. In particolare, mi riferisco al paradosso di Achille e la tartaruga, che vi illustro così come fu reso dal grande scrittore e saggista argentino Jorge Luis Borges (vd. ivi):

Achille, simbolo di rapidità, deve raggiungere la tartaruga, simbolo di lentezza. Achille corre dieci volte più svelto della tartaruga e le concede dieci metri di vantaggio. Achille corre quei dieci metri e la tartaruga percorre un metro; Achille percorre quel metro, la tartaruga percorre un decimetro; Achille percorre quel decimetro, la tartaruga percorre un centimetro; Achille percorre quel centimetro, la tartaruga percorre un millimetro; Achille percorre quel millimetro, la tartaruga percorre un decimo di millimetro, e così via all’infinito; di modo che Achille può correre per sempre senza raggiungerla.

Nel caso dei confini geografici, i due punti di riferimento non sono in movimento relativo. Achille e la tartaruga—la seconda dei quali con grande calma e ammirevole aplomb—si spostano invece nello spazio l’uno rispetto all’altra. Il caso di Ventimiglia, pertanto, è solamente analogo al loro, e di certo non identico. Tuttavia, ed è ciò che importa per noi al momento, il problema della divisibilità infinita tra due punti di riferimento nello spazio sussiste in entrambi i casi. In altre parole, se possiamo dividere all’infinito lo spazio che separa la guardia di finanza dell’imperiese—o polizia che fosse—dalla gendarmerie del nizzardo, quando e come, esattamente, possiamo dire di essere passati da un punto all’altro, ossia dall’Italia alla Francia, dalla Riviera di Ponente alla Costa Azzurra? O, ufficiali in divisa e mare a parte, dalla Liguria al Piemonte?

Non è necessario avere una striscia o un lembo di terra perché si ponga questa tipologia di problemi logico-matematici e filosofici. Leonardo da Vinci, per esempio, si chiedeva nei suoi Quaderni che cosa fosse ciò che separa l’aria dall’acqua: aria o acqua?[2] Suárez nelle sue Disputazioni di metafisica del 1597 si domandava di che colore fosse la linea di demarcazione che si trova tra una macchia nera e il suo sfondo bianco: nero o bianco?[3]

Lo stesso problema si può presentare anche in chiave temporale. Nel dialogo intitolato al fondatore della Scuola Eleatica, Parmenide, Platone si interrogava sul quesito seguente. Quando un oggetto inizia a muoversi, o un oggetto in movimento si ferma, è esso in movimento o è fermo?[4] Più tardi, Aristotele si trovò a riflettere su se e come il presente, che è il confine sia del passato sia del futuro, debba essere per necessità uno e il medesimo con essi, perché se i due confini estremi fossero delle entità costitutivamente diverse, allora l’una non potrebbe succedere all’altra.[5] E tutto questo per non tornare ai paradossi logici cari a Zenone, il quale si divertiva a dividere all’infinito anche il tempo, così da dimostrare che il moto non esiste.

Nella storia della filosofia e della scienza si sono andate accumulando le risposte più varie a questo tipo di quesiti.

  1. C’è chi ha sostenuto che il confine tra due entità distinte non appartenga a nessuna delle due. Leonardo da Vinci, per esempio, sembrava favorire questa soluzione. L’Italia e la Francia, da questo punto di vista, non coprirebbero tutto il territorio europeo di loro competenza, perché il loro confine sfuggirebbe, per così dire, a entrambi gli Stati. Sarebbe un po’ come quei confini tra orti o pascoli che appartengono a due contadini diversi. Visto che nessuno dei due ci mette mano, si riempiono di erbacce e di piante selvatiche.
  2. C’è chi ha suggerito che il confine appartenga invece a una entità piuttosto che all’altra, sebbene a volte, o addirittura tutte le volte, noi non siamo in grado di determinare con esattezza a quale delle due. Di chi è il confine tra l’Italia e la Francia, allora? Boh? E chi lo decide? E su quali basi? È un mistero. Ho qualche sospetto, però, riguardo a quale soluzione piacerebbe di più al presidente francese Macron. O a Giorgia Meloni, se per quello.
  3. C’è chi ha concluso che il confine appartenga a entrambe le entità. L’Italia e la Francia, quindi, condividerebbero il confine. Sovrapposizione reciproca. Comunione e unione. Pace e amore. Il che può piacere dal punto di vista giuridico e morale, o persino da quello politico e religioso; ma è probabilmente meno convincente sotto quello cromatico, almeno per quel che riguarda il paradosso in discussione nella versione offerta da Suárez alla fine del ‘500. Il confine tra il punto nero e lo sfondo bianco dovrebbe essere infatti sia bianco che nero, violando così il principio logico di non contraddizione.
  4. C’è infine chi ha pensato che ci siano in effetti due confini, o due estremi, ossia uno per ciascuna entità, i quali, tuttavia, coincidono perfettamente. Ancora una volta, pertanto, comunione e unione, pace e amore, ma in tal caso quale perfetta ed equipollente collocazione spaziale. Contatto senza sovrapposizione. Possibile? Forse in matematica. Suárez, benedetto metafisico, ci causerebbe un altro grattacapo. Una linea bianca che coincide con una nera, infatti, dovrebbe produrre qualcosa di grigio. La psicologia è concorde. Le illusioni ottiche studiate dai membri della cosiddetta scuola della Gestalt nel secolo scorso hanno approfittato a piene mani di queste aree grigie che noi percepiamo per il solo fatto che due oggetti neri in campo bianco siano molto vicini, così come tutti i buontemponi che ripropongono le loro illusioni ottiche su Instagram o altri social media.

Non chiedetemi di risolvere tutte queste stramberie. Se non ci sono riusciti fior di logici e matematici negli ultimi duemila anni, non c’è speranza che ci riesca io in venti minuti. Piuttosto, mi limito semplicemente a far notare che, benché queste quattro linee di pensiero si escludano l’un l’altra, non è affatto detto che ciascuna di esse possa o debba risolvere da sola tutti i casi possibili o concepibili. Difatti, anche se tutti i casi citati sono classificabili come “confini”, non tutti i confini devono per forza essere identici sotto tutti o la maggior parte dei punti di vista. (Il perché e il come qualcosa possa essere al contempo una cosa e molte cose è un altro classico dilemma della metafisica antica e moderna. Meglio lasciarlo perdere, per il momento.)

Così, tanto per capirci, possiamo distinguere tra:

  1. confini artificiali (ad es. quello tra l’Italia e la Francia) e confini naturali (ad es. quello tra l’aria del cielo e l’acqua del mare sottostante);
  2. confini ben definiti (ad es. lo spazio logico-matematico compreso all’interno di una circonferenza e quello esterno ad essa) e confini vaghi (ad es. quello tra l’aria e l’acqua, se e quando studiati a un livello di analisi subatomico); nonché
  3. confini incorporei (ad es. quelli comunemente postulati in geometria) e confini corporei (ad es. quelli dei solidi opachi studiati dagli psicologi della percezione).

Ma le stramberie non finiscono qui. Come detto, d’altra parte, la filosofia non è poi così remota rispetto all’umorismo. Sentite: C’è persino chi sostiene che i confini non esistano in sé e per sé. La cosa può sembrare folle, oltre che ridicola. Lo so. Di che diavolo abbiamo parlato sino a questo punto? E che cosa ci facevano i finanzieri a Ventimiglia? Prendevano il sole?

Per quanto questa idea appaia stralunata, o probabilmente lo sia, la si può concepire per davvero, anche se in maniera astratta, se non astrusa. E mi riferisco alla non-esistenza dei confini. Non ai doganieri che si abbronzano. Pensiamo, per analogia, ai buchi. Esistono i buchi? Pescatori, muratori e formaggiai potrebbero rispondere immediatamente di sì. I buchi sono importanti nei loro ambiti di lavoro. Qualche fisico o esperto di ontologia, però, potrebbe suggerire che esistono in effetti solo solidi o cose bucate, non buchi. O ancora: Esistono i colori? Pittori, stilisti e razzisti direbbero probabilmente di sì. Nuovamente, un fisico o un filosofo potrebbero sostenere che esistono in realtà solo solidi o cose colorate. I confini, di conseguenza, si ridurrebbero ad entità confinate, se non confinanti—come la Francia e l’Italia, appunto.

Tutti questi arzigogoli teorici e lessicali nascondono un aspetto concreto di non poco conto. I confini potrebbero essere un’invenzione della mente umana, almeno in una qualche misura significativa, piuttosto che una realtà oggettiva, ovvero del tutto indipendente da noi.[6] Nel caso di Ventimiglia, il confine italo-francese non sarebbe altro che una delle tante creature del diritto e della politica. Sparissero gli esseri umani, sparirebbero il diritto e la politica, e quindi sparirebbe anche il confine che tanto colpiva la mia immaginazione da bambino.

Non che questa sia una qualche critica. Se parliamo, pensiamo e viviamo le nostre vite in termini di “confini”, se cioè noi umani li abbiamo creati o accresciuti attraverso le nostre culture, i nostri apparati cognitivi, o la nostra immaginazione, allora detti confini avranno probabilmente avuto una qualche funzione da svolgere. Forse ce l’hanno ancora. Diritto e politica, d’altra parte, possono essere strumenti utilissimi, tanto quanto la fisica o la matematica.

Tuttavia, concedendo anche solo in chiave ipotetica che i confini possano davvero essere delle semplici creazioni umane, piuttosto che delle condizioni oggettive, nude e crude, del reale o, peggio ancora, delle divinità eterne e spietate, allora si può iniziare a non coglierli più quali aspetti rigidi del nostro universo, ovvi e immutabili, o perfino sacri e assoluti; ma, piuttosto e come detto, quali strumenti. Come le reti dei pescatori, i coltellacci dei formaggiai o i martelli pneumatici dei muratori, i confini sarebbero degli attrezzi che noi usiamo per determinati scopi e che, pertanto, ammettono usi positivi e usi negativi, potenziali o attuali che siano. Ed è qui la sola perla di saggezza che mi sento di poter fornire questa sera, se posso ardire a tanto.

Troppo spesso si discute di confini e confini no, di difendere i confini o abolire i confini, di erigere muri o abbatterli, accogliere o respingere. Piuttosto, io penserei a come distinguere tra confini buoni e confini cattivi. Così come si può distinguere tra muri buoni e muri cattivi. I muri possono infatti separare due gruppi di esseri umani, condannandone uno alla miseria perpetua e l’altro alla paura perpetua, ed entrambi all’odio. I muri, però, possono servire ugualmente a sorreggere un ampio tetto che, per esempio, protegge sia l’uno che l’altro gruppo. E, data la quantità di pioggia e di neve che ci dobbiamo sorbire qui in Islanda, credetemi: Un buon tetto è di fondamentale importanza.

Ma che cosa esattamente deve dirsi “buono” o “cattivo”? Non bisogna andare in Parlamento per sentire le opinioni più disparate sul tema. Fate un giro sui profili Facebook dei vostri amici, andate al bar all’angolo e porgete orecchio alle conversazioni che vi si tengono, od organizzate una cena con i vostri parenti—soprattutto quelli che sopportate di meno. La faccenda è chiara. Qualcuno dovrà scegliere tra le tante opzioni e decidere per il bene di tutti. E qui si rischia di nuovo il patatrac. Chi mai può decidere ciò che è buono e ciò che è cattivo: il Papa, il Presidente della Repubblica, il Sindaco, mia suocera, il capo dei Carabinieri, un qualche megadirettore galattico?

La questione è spinosa. È un’altra magagna che il pensiero occidentale discute senza requie dai tempi di Socrate. Chi ha studiato diritto può sicuramente richiamare alla mente i dibattiti tra giusnaturalisti e positivisti. Continuano ancora oggi. Gli antropologi possono pensare al tema del relativismo culturale. Sempre vivo. Gli economisti a quelli dell’ordinalismo e dell’ofelimità. Sempre intuibili. Nuovamente, non posso offrire una soluzione semplice e definitiva.

Tuttavia, dati i miei studi in un campo della filosofia che porta un altro nome fantasmagorico, l’assiologia—ovverosia la teoria dei valori—mi permetto di condividere un modestissimo esercizio mentale che, a mio avviso, può essere d’aiuto quando si vuole distinguere il bene dal male. Di fronte a uno strumento umano, tangibile o intangibile, e ai suoi possibili utilizzi, individuali o collettivi, chiedetevi: quale uso massimizzerà il benessere fisico, quello psichico e la capacità di pensiero di tutte le persone coinvolte, presenti e future? Di fronte a un muro, una barriera, un confine, chiedetevi: come lo si può utilizzare in maniera tale che la salute, la serenità e il livello d’istruzione delle persone da entrambe le sue parti ne traggano il massimo beneficio?

Siamo forse di fronte a un’altra curiosa finzione filosofica? O a un’astratta utopia? No, non credo. È l’approccio indicato nel XXI secolo dall’UNESCO nella sua Enciclopedia dei sistemi di supporto vitale,[7] nonché dalle convenzioni dell’ONU del XX secolo sui diritti civili, politici, sociali, economici e culturali.[8] Non abbiamo tempo per discuterne in dettaglio, ma vale sempre la pena ricordare come i rappresentanti dei popoli della Terra abbiano già firmato e ratificato accordi internazionali che contengono indicazioni copiose, sofisticate e articolate su ciò che si può dire “buono” o “cattivo”, nonostante il fiorire di molteplici relativismi in tante altre aree della vita umana. Non so se questo appunto finale conti come un’altra perla di saggezza, ma mi pareva quanto meno saggio concludere con un concetto carico di speranza. Grazie mille.[9]

 

Note

[1] Il titolo cita Ludwig Wittgenstein, Trattato logico-filosofico (proposizione 5.6; vd. ivi).

[2] Vd. The Notebooks; selected Eng. trans. by E. MacCurdy, London: Reynal & Hitchock, 1938: 75–76.

[3] Vd. Disputationes metaphysicae; in Francisci Suarez Opera Omnia, voll. 25–26, Paris: Vivès, 1861, 40, V, §58.

[4] 156c–e.

[5] Fisica, VI, 234a5–6.

[6] Euclide, nel libro primo degli Elementi, definiva “termine” come “ciò che è estremo di qualcosa”, e “figura” come “ciò che è compreso da uno o più termini” (definizioni 13 e 14; vd. ivi).

[7] Vd. “Philosophy and World Problems” in EOLSS (dal 2002).

[8] Vd., ad es., Baruchello & Johnstone,  “Rights and Value”, Studies in Social Justice 5:1 (2011), ivi.

[9] La fonte principale per questo mio intervento è la seguente: Varzi, Achille, “Boundary”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), ivi. Il prof. Varzi, da anni docente negli Stati Uniti, visitò la mia alma mater genuate ai tempi dei miei primi studi di filosofia, ove svolse una relazione sull’ontologia dei buchi organizzata dal compianto professore di psicologia cognitiva e informatica, Giuseppe Spinelli. È quindi una grande-piccola gioia poter rievocare quei tempi e quegli spunti, nonché i nomi di entrambi gli accademici testé citati, a così tanti anni di distanza.

March 2023 – Issue 18(1)

Nordicum-Mediterraneum becomes a grown-up. This year we publish the 18th regular issue of our pioneering Icelandic electronic journal, which thereby continues its online, free, open-access mission as a reliable scientific and scholarly source of information, understanding, communication and discovery across multiple disciplinary fields and geographic locations in the North and the in the South of Europe, which is as much a cultural construct as it is a specific place on the map. Thus, rather apropos, issue 18(1) opens with a new peer-reviewed article, penned by Kevin Perry and Mette Rasmussen, combining anthropology and business studies in the context of contemporary Greenland. We are then very happy to be able to include another new peer-reviewed article, written by Mikael M. Karlsson, who developed a study of Vilfredo Pareto’s legacy, mixing philosophy and economics. Given that 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of Pareto’s death, we are honoured to commemorate the event through the publications of this particular article and emphasise Pareto’s significance in the history of European social sciences, economics, and culture at large. The new regular issue continues with another original peer-reviewed article, authored by Rosella Perugi, who offers an investigation of Maria Savi Lopez’s 19th-century travel literature on Iceland, hence furthering the earliest chief theme and rationale of our journal, i.e., the many extant connections between Italy and the land of ice and fire. We also have a new peer-reviewed article focussing, this time, on the South, i.e., Zane Šime’s analysis of the European Union’s (EU) science diplomacy agenda, with special respect to those countries in the Mediterranean region that are not part of the EU, but that are nonetheless crucial partners of the same, especially with regard to the ongoing  and growing challenges to environmental sustainability. As usual, a substantial collection of book reviews concludes the new regular annual issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum.

Protecting Sacred Sites Is a Matter of Justice. Philosophical Remarks for Our Research Group

Any research group devoted to “sacred sites” presupposes, among other things, the recognition of sacredness, holiness, sanctity, inviolability, et similia, i.e., the logical and dialogical admissibility of spiritual and/or religious value, which is one among the many forms that value can have. Think, say, of ethical value (e.g., “war is wrong”), aesthetic value (e.g., “war is horrible”), existential value (e.g., “war dehumanises its victims”), sentimental value (e.g., “this watch is a memento of my son, fallen on the battlefield”), ecological value (e.g., “we must prevent a radioactive catastrophe, which would render this region barren for millennia”), biological value (e.g., “prolonged exposure to radioactivity causes terrible tumours”), etc. Economic value is one of them, e.g., “it is time to invest in the shares of arms manufacturers amid surging demand for new anti-tank equipment in Eastern Europe”. (At the time of writing, Russian armed forces are in the process of attacking Ukraine.)

Nevertheless, under today’s prevailing socio-cultural conditions, economic value tends to be the only type of value that is publicly recognised, institutionally endorsed and forcefully promoted on an almost daily basis, as signalled by the all-pervasive notions of: “growth” qua ultimate end of administrative agency at its highest levels; “net worth” as the defining key-feature of each person, even on some dating websites; “success” and “loss” as something to be measured by and within “the market”; “usefulness” as a matter of either “employability” or “profitability”; “happiness” as reflected in the disposable income by which one can buy the newest technological gadgets or the most applauded Veblen goods of the day (e.g., Russian oligarchs’ mega-yachts and Anglo-American billionaires’ space-rocket trips). I could cite countless examples and manifestations of this phenomenon, which is certainly a major feature of “Western” civilisation at large, in the sense of ‘liberal’ or ‘capitalist’ (cynicism, monasticism, socialism, anarchism and communism are also “Western” creations; hence the need for my clarification concerning “Western”).

Equally, I could cite several instances of awareness and criticism of this axiological monism. To be concise, I shall mention only one, i.e., the Catholic British humourist G.K. Chesterton, who quipped on this point:

In all normal civilisations the trader existed and must exist. But in all normal civilisations the trader was the exception; certainly, he was never the rule; and most certainly he was never the ruler. The predominance which he has gained in the modern world is the cause of all the disasters of the modern world.” (“Reflections on a Rotten Apple.” In The Well and the Shallows, 163–170. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006/1935, 168).

The debates and the discussions that I have witnessed as a participant in our pan-Arctic research group on explicitly stated “sacred sites” are a token of such a line of criticism, as well as a further exemplification and manifestation of this modern socio-cultural “predominance”, as Chesterton would dub it. That is, our debates and discussions have invariably revealed the unbalanced pre-eminence of economic value over other values—religious and/or spiritual one included, if not in primis. As a matter of fact, the “sacred sites” at issue in our group’s research have been repeatedly described as being in danger because of activities such as mining, tourism, salmon farming, railroad construction, hydroelectric power production, and the like. Without a single exception, the threat to these sacred sites has emerged in each and every case as the offshoot of some for-profit endeavour guided by the “money-value sequence” that contemporary life-value onto-axiology (LVOA) identifies and juxtaposes to the “life-value sequence” (for a thorough exposition and explanation of LVOA, see John McMurtry (ed.), Philosophy and World Problems, Paris & Oxford: EOLSS/UNESCO, 2011).

A money-value sequence is an economic transaction, or set thereof, whereby pecuniary value is invested so as to generate returns of the same kind. All of this being done whether or while other domains of value are also affected and/or depleted in the processes of surveying, extraction, transformation, transportation, consumption and/or disposal that are required for the eventual maximisation of the initial pecuniary—i.e., money-based and money-measured—investment. Unless there occur controlling recognitions, considerations and impositions of values that are other than the economic one (e.g., human rights and public health), then these transactions are allowed to go on unabated and unimpeded, if not even facilitated and promoted, because they are believed to be good as well as just. (LVOA takes very good care of providing the fundamental criteria allowing us to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’; hence, I refer the reader to it and, as cited, to McMurtry’s work for UNESCO.)

As far as justice is concerned, this sort of positive belief comes about because, basically, it is generally presumed that if someone has something to sell, and someone else has something to buy, and the two of them can agree on a price to be paid for this mutual exchange or commutation, then they should go ahead with their plans and do it. Why not? This intuitive logic is at the very core of the contractual model of human relations that is presupposed by our socio-economic order, much of its constitutional-legal architecture, the social sciences (especially economics), and even our culture at large. Once again, I could mention countless examples and manifestations of this contractual approach to human affairs, as well as several instances of criticism of the same. However, for brevity’s sake, I shall merely refer to an older entry in Nordicum-Mediterraneum.

This entry is the 2016 reasoned synopsis of Wirtschaftsethik, or Economic Ethics, a book penned in the 1990s by the Swiss philosopher and theologian Arthur Fridolin Utz. Utz was one of the few fin-de-siècle Dominican commentators who noted explicitly how that same “Western” civilisation that glorifies “the trader”, as Chesterton would write, does also tend and try incessantly to reduce all human relations to contractual relations. Put differently, Utz highlighted how the Western liberal-capitalist mindset conceives of all justice as commutative justice, which is that one type of particular justice applicable to exchanges between a person and another (e.g., Peter and Paul), or an economic entity and another (e.g., Eimskip and the Coca-Cola corporation). In this transactional way, as Roman law and the medieval Canonists had long enshrined in our culture, each person is rendered that which is due to him/her (“suum cuique tribuere”, as per Justinian’s Institutiones 1.1.3–4).

However, as the medieval Canonists and Utz were well aware of, justice possesses more facets than the commutative one alone. And it is to such facets that I devote my remaining philosophical remarks, for which I make use of a very old work of art. Should you ever visit the beautiful Public Palace of Siena, in Italy, you will find therein Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s (1290–1348) fresco entitled “The Allegory of Good Government” (or “Governance”; 1338–1339; fig.1). Much more concisely than any written text, Lorenzetti’s fresco captures visually the diverse facets of justice.

FIG.1 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegoria del buon governo

 

To begin with, the fresco depicts justice (“iustitia”) in the shape of an enthroned mighty woman (left third, top two-thirds), who is crowned and inspired by an angelic, suitably winged, representation of Divine Wisdom. Leaving aside the thorny issue of whether and how we can tap into such a blessed wisdom, the depiction of such a ‘special relationship’ means that justice ought to be the ruler in a community wishing to be good or, to cast the same idea in other words, rulers are legitimate if and only if they are just. Should they be unjust, then the citizens would have good reasons to question the same rulers’ continued staying in power. (It may be worth recalling the age-old theme of “tyrannicide”, which the Scholastic political thinkers inspiring Lorenzetti’s artistry were debating back then as a matter of rational and natural jurisprudence, not of confessional belief.).

The enthroned female personification of justice is general justice (aka “legal” or “social”, depending on specific authors; Utz himself opted for “social”). General justice is the justice that each citizen owes to the community at large, i.e., the legitimate institutions, both tangible and intangible, upon which the community relies for its own existence, functioning and self-maintenance. For illustration’s sake, we may list: accepting the rule of law and its attendant laws; speaking the common tongue in a way that is consistent with the prevailing rules of grammar; a certain level of personal probity (e.g., being honest and trustworthy) and/or moral integrity (e.g., aiming at virtuous conduct rather than vicious behaviour); a commitment to the spirit of the laws and not just their letter; keeping one’s own petty interests separate from the general law-making processes and aims; the willingness to defend the country if attacked; the availability of each citizen to offer assistance in case of natural disasters; respecting other people’s spiritual beliefs; and accepting a modicum of taxation qua precondition for associated living. (As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously stated in a 1927 dissenting opinion: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society”.)

Out of general justice, as visible in the fresco, emanate two distinct forms of particular justice. These being the smaller angelic personifications set under the inscriptions “distributiva” and “comutativa”, and standing on the dishes of the scale held by general justice (scales being a traditional Western symbol of fairness, impartiality and/or equity). The former angelic personification is busy crowning a person and, yes, beheading another. It represents the justice that is owed by the community at large to each citizen, depending on how the citizen has behaved, i.e., such as deserving positive recognition (e.g., a new professional title, a public commendation, a tax exemption) or punitive retribution (e.g., a fine, a suspension, incarceration). The latter angelic personification is that form of particular justice that economists and business leaders have generally been assuming, as it was intimated, to be the only extant form of justice, i.e., uncoerced contractual agreement between two parties. It is the justice that one person owes to another. (In the fresco, incidentally, commutative justice is depicted as two merchants receiving fair measuring tools, by means of which they are to conduct fair businesses—or so are they expected and encouraged to do. If they do not, then the other ‘angelic’ particular justice may come into play with its sharp sword…)

Another message is implied yet blatant, as per the personifications’ mutual proportions; general justice being much bigger than either particular justice. Essentially, general justice takes priority over particular justice, which emanates from, and depends upon, the former, whether as distributive or commutative. Particular justice, in other words, cannot be given if general justice is absent. For instance, if the laws at play are skewed, biased or unfair, then the punishments and rewards will be distributed to the wrong recipients and/or in the wrong way, e.g., the crooked rich who can afford shrewd lawyers can go scot-free, while the innocent destitute are wrongfully imprisoned. Similarly, general justice failing or being absent, the market exchanges will not be truly equitable, genuinely consensual and/or effectively uncoerced; e.g., a starving parent will accept any job as long as it can help him/her to put bread on his/her table for him/her and his/her starving family. (Medieval thinkers, who knew one thing or two about hunger and famines, duly developed the doctrine of the “just price”, which we cannot discuss here but only mention.)

The reasons for the failure or absence of general justice may be found elsewhere in the fresco. Justice, in fact, appears once more in Lorenzetti’s allegory: at the right end of it, to be precise, and on the same vertical level as general justice. Once again, “iustitia” is depicted as a female personification and, this time, it is a cardinal virtue alongside five others: peace, fortitude, prudence, magnanimity and temperance. These being rather nice-to-have traits of character that any and every half-decent citizen ought to cultivate in his/her life, no matter how imperfectly and/or haphazardly. A good society is a society where people strive to be amicable, dependable, considerate, forgiving, clearheaded and fair. They may not always succeed, for we are all imperfect, but at least they should try to succeed, to some serious extent. (Medieval Christianity knew very well that we are all capable of sin, if and when we are tempted, whether we are kings or peasants; but it was also generally believed that we would normally try to resist temptation and, not unfrequently, succeed in this attempt. We may, must and can be good in our lives, more often than not, if we will it in the first place.)

Justice, then, is a personal virtue too; i.e., it is an important trait of character. In the fresco, justice and her sister-virtues are sitting beside a male personification of the ruling institutions of the community (the only tall, big and white-bearded character in the allegory). The meaning of the compositional order being that these virtues ought to be possessed, or at least be actively cultivated, by all those persons who are entrusted with the governing of the polity. Without personal virtues, in fact, no institutional arrangement is safe. Bad individuals can betray good principles, corrupt good laws, ruin well-designed administrations, and pervert sensible institutions. The body politic is bound to be as good as the people assigned to its care.

To sum up, we can then state that there are four “justices”:

(1) Justice as a virtue or positive trait of character (i.e., ultimately intra-personal);

(2) Commutative justice as fair trade (i.e., inter-personal par excellence);

(3) Distributive justice qua receiving deserved praise and/or penalties under the laws of the community (i.e., directed from society towards each person); and

(4) General justice, which (2) and (3) presuppose, i.e., the civic loyalty that each citizen must have vis-à-vis his/her community, its public institutions, and the common good that they are mandated to pursue. (As was stated, this prior and pivotal justice is directed from each person towards the whole social body.)

Acknowledging the presence and significance of the many values whereby the members of our society and its assorted institutions lead their lives is also part of general justice, which ultimately determines the spheres, the entities and the agencies whereby economic commutations can lawfully take place, i.e., in light of these diverse values (e.g., by prohibiting slavery, facilitating surrogate motherhood, banning carcinogenic man-made chemicals and/or permitting prostitution). How each society makes these ultimate determinations is a very complex matter that I cannot tackle here—and that I can resolve nowhere, to be frank, for it is just too complex. Lorenzetti, for his part, thought that Divine Wisdom itself could lend us a hand. (Given the sorry mess that we all seem to be mired in, I pray to God that Lorenzetti’s optimism be warranted…)

Logically, the recognition that something may be sacred and therefore deserving of protection from outright commodification (i.e., reduction to economic value alone) stands, even if a specific individual may not attribute any such value to it. Indeed, it may still stand, logically, even if only a minority of people believe that such a protection ought to be so extended. For example, the specific individual at issue could be an atheist living among religious persons, who do not want to turn churches into more ‘efficient’ granaries and/or ‘profitable’ museums. Or s/he could be a single-minded pragmatic businessman facing a small elite of cultured and vocal persons, who wish to fund ‘costly’ opera and ballet via the tax-funded public purse because of their immense cultural significance and inherent aesthetic exquisiteness. (Sometimes, something and/or someone has got to give, but making changes and sacrifices complicated to achieve means facilitating compromises, moderation and gradualism. Protection is a conservative endeavour, not a revolutionary one, at least prima facie.)

The same realisation and implications stand also when and if there may be some or even many individuals who are willing to pay a very hefty price, so as to have access to this protected ‘something’ and/or turn it ipso facto into something efficient and/or profitable. Under this respect, we should then notice that, inside our prosaic price-tagging market logic whereby scarcity pushes up prices, the ‘things’ that we shelter from an otherwise almost-universal condition of thorough commodification are bound to become, potentially, the most profitable of all. Like rhinoceros’ horns, uncontaminated woodlands, non-processed meals, habitable sites safe from the unfolding climate crisis and Iceland’s pristine glaciers, their being harder-and-harder to get by works actually against their preservation. Protecting a sacred site, in a global order infused with liberal or capitalist institutions, means in fact turning the site into a totally new and untapped ‘opportunity’, which is yet to be squeezed dry of all the profits that it could generate, whether for a short period of time or for a longer one. (Let’s not forget that the history of liberalism goes hand-in-hand with the history of conquering ‘new markets’, i.e., non-commodified geo-cultural spaces, including in the originally ‘virgin’ Arctic regions.)

Unless, however, we make the sacred sites so incredibly valuable that they turn out to be “priceless” or “beyond comparison”, i.e., irreducible to economic value alone. Cultural, legal and political means can all be unleashed, and variously combined, so as to obtain such a result, which must then be defended from successive assaults by the money-value forces that are or that will be. (Given human volatility, today’s businessmen may be tomorrow’s conservationists; and vice versa.) Whatever we do, if we wish to protect that which is sacred, we must let it escape from the grasp of the pecuniary market logic.

This is the case because this entire market logic is based on an all-flattening axiological presumption allowing for very different realities, i.e., the so-called “goods” of standard economics (e.g., bread, cigars, assault rifles, plots of rainforest), to be compared with one another and attributed prices according to how much demand they command (needless to say, the more money an economic agent has got, the more demand s/he commands). An impoverished population’s sacred site can thus be transformed into a billionaire’s golf course because the latter commands more demand than the former. As passé as it may sound, value boundaries and axiological hierarchies must be established and defended, lest the ancient sin of simony finds an eerie modern reflection in highway billboards, stock-exchange indexes and YouTube commercials.

Edward H. Huijbens, Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2021)

Letting the proverbial genie out of the bottle is bad. Killing the genie after it has leaped out of the bottle is even worse. Now, and perhaps forever, the bottle is going to be empty. Our culture, to a significant extent, is a thoroughly disenchanted one. Apart from a passé and largely passing minority, notions of sacredness and divinity have mostly disappeared from the leading conceptual horizon. As Nietzsche famously asserted, God is dead—and it was us who killed Him. Academia, for one, cultivates a veritable graveyard of past ‘irrationalities’ and serves as an imposing bastion of practical atheism, especially in the Nordic countries, where the intellectuals’ secular outlook is part and parcel of the broader conventional wisdom. On Sundays, people no longer go to church. Instead, they go to the shopping mall.

Yet, hence joining a growing chorus of perplexed educated wanderers (e.g., Arne Næss, Lauren Greyson, Brendan Myers), Huijbens’ latest book reveals a thinking and feeling man who, faced with the depths and the vastness of the life-destruction brought forth by the ongoing human-made climate crisis, rediscovers a genuine sense of desecration and with it, hidden spiritual urges and half-grasped religious insights. His picture of the current state of the world is, in point of fact, worthy of the Apocalypse:

[W]e are all caught up in the climate crisis together and through globalised capitalism a veritable race to the bottom is unfolding where the rich simply float on top of the vortex funnelling the rest to a future of climatic ruin with no safeguard in the Enlightenment promises of technological fixes, public provisions of welfare or other promises of the Modern era. (119)

His picture of the correct relationship between humankind and Earth is, for its part, worthy of some time-honoured indigenous tradition, or of a younger New-Age creed:

“[A] non-social and more-than-human entity is making itself felt and heard: our planet Earth.” (152)

[…]

“In our continual conativity with nature through the solutions we propose, we support nature’s immanence. Adding deep time and the Earth itself as immanent to us, life on Earth becomes truly humbling.” (153)

[…]

“Being kind to earth is for me not about reversing progress and that which has been gained by the human technological acumen. We need to judiciously build on the past, but at the same time make space for an expanded repertoire of reason, science and humanism, and moreover the Earth itself.” (159)

As Huijbens himself admits:

“[O]ur current imagination and vocabulary betrays us. Therefore we need to reinvent the shamans of old, killed by the Moderns.” (110)

Most of the book comprises a vast array of loose reflections about insightful theoretical influences and inspiring personal anecdotes (or “vignettes”) explaining, at least in part, how Huijbens has come to think about the Anthropocene and the future of our suffering planet in ways that rub rather cruelly against the received categories of contemporary science, his own field of geography included. As Huijbens notes:

“The language of science and technology tends to obfuscate th[e human] connection [to Earth], or shroud it in darkness through the violence of abstraction and compartmentalisation of the challenges to be addressed.” (111)

Thus, Chapters 1 and 3 list and discuss a plethora of learned suggestions (e.g., Latour, Olsson, Deleuze, Žižek and Eco) that can make us think of the human condition in the natural as well as cultural world that we inhabit, both individually and collectively, as a matter of “fluid being” or, paying due homage to some trendy ‘-isms’ of our day, “post-humanism” (9 et passim) and fancy new forms of “empiricism” (21 et passim). As Huijbens writes:

“[W]e are very much creatures of the making of the strictures imposed upon us by a long history of decisions and things settled and seemingly fixed. Revealing their inherent fluidity does indeed provide ‘wiggle room’ and places emphasis on the moments of encounters, the abysmal lines where one becomes other or something else through our practices of naming and pointing and being believed in doing so.” (31)

Icelandic echoes of this fluid conception of being constitute the bulk of the materials gathered in Chapter 2 and, to a lesser extent, Chapter 4, both of which emphasise how geology itself is indeed very mobile in Huijbens’ country of birth, and how substantial human progress can be obtained without devastating the planet, e.g., by harvesting clean energy sources and by promoting “slow tourism” (104).

The fundamental challenge to the positive Icelandic experiences, and to life on Earth in general, is identified and debated in Chapter 4. The challenge being, perhaps unsurprisingly, the neoliberal institutions that pervade our world, both in tangible terms (e.g., the copious amounts of advertised junk around which orbits much of the world’s economy) and in intangible terms (e.g., the acquisitive and emulative mentalities cultivated by our cultures and exacerbated since the times of mass consumerism).

Chapter 5 adds to the mix the positive experiences coming from another European country, where Huijbens is currently active as an academic: the Netherlands. With its long and complex history of transformation and protection of the land, this nation shows how destructive peat-mining turned into a bucolic bliss of sorts, protected by technologically innovative windmills “to propel pumps that would drain water” and avoid flooding (124), and now inspiring clean-energy transformations that, like the ever-present bicycles, are significant examples of a frequently sensible approach to the environment, both materially (e.g., as means of transport that do not require fossil fuels) and immaterially (e.g., as cultural symbols of successful political campaigns for a greener way of life).

Chapter 6 concludes the book by attacking once more the aforementioned fundamental challenge to life on Earth:

“Roughly framed ‘neoliberal discourses’ have been adept at naturalising environmental degradation as a collective responsibility that demands individual, privatised responses mostly to be attained through consumptive choices. According to dogmatic market logic it is up to me to seek out the ‘earth-friendly’ chocolate and if enough of us do, it will earn its place at the supermarket checkout.” (142)

Much more is needed, as a matter of fact, according to Huijbens, who reviews and assesses a number of proposed solutions to the ongoing climate crisis. In particular, Huijbens expresses his genuine doubts about “green ideas” that do not aim at “reducing our consumption or any kind of slowing down or reduced demands.” (145) Au contraire, he advises “a further and deeper reorientation of our valuing and mindsets, rather than a simple redistribution of wealth and social egalitarianism.” (152)

Like a river of lava, or a glacial flood, Huijbens’ prose is far-reaching, unstoppable, and “meandering” (78). The logical structure and argumentative progression hereby reconstructed are certainly present in the book, but they require a fair amount of careful reading and patient ingenuity in order to be grasped. The book is, if anything, a very personal and uncommonly free-flowing account of how a secular Nordic geographer may come to realise that we need to show “responsibility, kindness and care” (162) towards Mother Earth, yet without possessing theological (e.g., siblinghood in God-the-Parent) and/or philosophical categories (e.g., life-value onto-axiology) that allow for the conceptualisation and clarification of the sacred and/or spiritual domain, to which Huijbens’ concerns truly belong.

Without categories of this ilk, it is unlikely that Huijbens may ever ground successfully powerful universal normative and axiological claims such as the following: “at our current juncture we can well afford to prioritise the wellbeing of others. How well we can do that will indicate to what extent we can be true to the Earth itself.” (158) Perhaps, this book is a first step in a much longer and much more complex journey.

Felia Allum, Isabella Clough Marinaro and Rocco Sciarrone (eds.), Italian Mafias Today. Territory, Business and Politics (Cheltenham: E. Elgar, 2019)

As an Italian academic who has lived and worked in North America and Northern Europe, I am frequently saddened, but by no means surprised, by the cavalier references that my non-Italians colleagues frequently make to the mafia. On the one hand, they somehow assume it to be a rather prosaic and obvious aspect of daily life throughout Italy, and Italy alone. On the other hand, perhaps conditioned by “TV series such as Gomorrah, the US ‘reality’ TV show Mob Wives” (1) or by Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movie trilogy, they talk of it as though the mafia were something cool, glamorous, almost enviable: the magic union of Svengali and Giorgio Armani.

In their book, Allum, Clough Marinaro and Sciarrone have competently collected an instructive introduction and, above all, fourteen original essays in criminology and the social sciences at large that, at the very least, can easily and immediately dispel such facile yet persistent conceptions of the mafia. For one, as all the essays patently exhibit, there are many mafias, not one, i.e., the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Campanian Camorra, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, and the little-known Apulian Sacra Corona Unita. Indeed, as Luciano Brancaccio and Vittorio Martone explain in the second original essay in the book, even the Neapolitan and Campanian Camorra should be understood in the plural, i.e., as “Camorras”, given their “multiplicity of groups, their internal variations and their high conflict rates.” (31)

Secondly, as many essays concurrently indicate, all such mafias are more than capable of reining in their immediately profitable and inevitably violent activities in the short run, so as to seek prolonged and diffuse influence in the communities that they infiltrate, or manage secure revenue-streams via complacent white-collar experts and professionals, whether all of this happens in Italy or abroad. This quiet modus operandi is designed not to arise suspicion among the local law-and-order institutions, already-established criminal groups, and/or the populations at large. Thus, for example, the reader can reflect on the low-profile presence of the Italian mafias in the City of London, in select cantons of the Swiss Confederation and in Luxembourg, as capably discussed in the twelfth original essay of the book, “Italian mafias across Europe”, penned by Joselle Dagnes, Davide Donatello and Luca Storti (191–207). If anything, the reduced visibility of these criminal organisations is, ironically, made transparent by the more and more secretive character of the mafias compared to what they were like in the 19th century and, possibly, up to the 1950s or 1960s, at least in southern Italy. This increased secrecy has also affected the ‘Ndrangheta’s old and quietly tolerant “[r]elationships with the Catholic Church” (56), which are discussed in the third original essay in the book, “’Ndrangheta: A (post-)modern mafia with ancient roots”, written by Enzo Ciconte.

Thirdly, there is nothing cool, glamorous or enviable in suffering the consequences of mafia-related activities, whether in southern Italy, central and northern Italy (see the ninth, tenth and eleventh original essays, dealing with, respectively, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and Rome), or abroad, meaning primarily in the Americas, Oceania and Europe (e.g., “Germany, France, the United Kingdom (UK), Spain, Switzerland, the Benelux countries and Romania” (Dagnes et al., 193)). Any half-sane reader of this book is unlikely to find anything inspiring in the mafias’ very long list of crimes against: police officers and magistrates (e.g., “Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards” (Alessandra Dino, 17) in 1992); innocent civilians; urban and rural landscapes and environments (e.g., the so-called “Sack of Palermo”, ibid., 14); Italian immigrants abroad (e.g., the sorry plight of the Calabrian community in Australia, tackled in Felia Allum’s and David Bright’s penultimate original essay in the book); honest entrepreneurs (e.g., corrupt “public officials” favouring mafia-related clients over the genuinely deserving economic competitors (Salvatore Sberna and Alberto Vannucci, 94)); and ordinary tax-paying Italian citizens, who cannot receive adequate healthcare and/or use viable garbage-disposal facilities because of the mafias’ grip on local “public services” (Alessandro Colletti, 122).

Finally, the book concludes with a highly instructive chapter on the history and main characteristics of the “anti-mafia policies” developed in Italy since the 1960s (La Spina, 225). While avoiding the intricacies and details of the legal instruments and institutions created over the past six decades in order to tackle specifically the mafias, so as to reduce and prevent their diffusion and activities, the reader can grasp and appreciate the extent of the work done by both public authorities and civil society in order to counter the nefarious influence of organised crime in many parts of Italy.

The book is not a history of the Sicilian mafia or of southern mafias. For that kind of work, the reader will have to rely on a very different literature, of which there is certainly no dearth. Instead, this relatively compact volume (x + 291 pp.) gives a thorough account of:

(A) the scrutable trends of mafia-type criminality in Italy over the past twenty years; and of

(B) the latest known developments in their inner organisational structures and criminogenic relations with productive and political agents in the so-called “grey area” of non-affiliated enablers and facilitators of mafia-type activities (e.g., lawyers, accountants, bankers, etc.), in Italy as well as abroad.

As such, this book should appeal, in primis, to criminologists and social scientists. However, I would strongly recommend it to anyone who may have an academic or personal interest in understanding recent Italian history. Above all, I would recommend it to law- and policy-makers internationally, for Italy’s long tug-of-war with the mafias has many useful lessons to teach to countries and communities that have not yet experienced the scourge of criminal power syndicates operating in their midst, or that collude with such syndicates by offering far-from-transparent financial services—hence contributing to the enormous human suffering and grave social devastation that the mafias have been causing since the 19th century.

Ananta Kumar Giri (ed.), Pragmatism, Spirituality and Society: Border Crossings, Transformations and Planetary Realizations (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

In its ordinary use, “pragmatism” is almost a pejorative term, suggesting an efficiency-driven, no-prisoner-taken concentration on getting things done, without much or any room for deeper reflection or reconsideration. Philosophically, however, the same word recalls a US-born school of thought and, in particular, the work of “pioneering thinkers and savants such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey” (xi). These thinkers and savant, according to the book’s editor, aimed at rediscovering the ancient Aristotelian spirit of praxis-centred intellectual inquiry and the Hegelian one of purposeful social normativity, neither of which is inherently inimical to deep thinking and/or to openness to self-reassessment.

The book hereby reviewed is the third instalment in the editor’s series on “Practical Spirituality and Human Development” for the Asian branch of Palgrave Macmillan, but also the companion of a scholarly tome entitled Pragmatism, Spirituality and Society: Consciousness, Freedom and Solidarity. It is, in short, part of an original, multi- and interdisciplinary attempt at bringing together the much-neglected philosophical tradition of pragmatism and that streak of contemporary scholarship, in the humanities and the social sciences, offering erudite musings and insightful meditations on known forms of spirituality arising from Western, but above all Eastern, religious traditions. As such, it falls into the domain of religious studies that, in the history of Nordicum-Mediterraneum, have frequently found room in the published book reviews and in our readers’ cultural interests.

Moving between US pragmatism and relevant tokens of spiritual wisdom from the world’s religions, novel and somewhat unexpected intellectual bridges are built in this edited volume, linking together seemingly remote thinkers and conceptions of nature, the self, moral conduct, human knowledge, and/or the pursuit of a meaningful existence, at both the individual and collective levels. All these bridges, quite obviously, comprise building materials excavated clearly and conspicuously from the pragmatist tradition, but they do not limit themselves to this tradition.

Exemplarily, the second chapter of the book (the first chapter serving as an introduction to the book), i.e., Ananta Kumar Giri’s “Pragmatism and Spirituality: New Horizons of Theory and Practice and the Calling of Planetary Conversations”, establishes a possibly unprecedented theoretical conversation involving Sri Aurobindo, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is done, with great exegetical finesse and considerable creativity, so as to cast light on the fundamentally praxis-based institution of human language, the personal self, and the social context in which these two meet and interact magmatically.

A similar syncretism and a shared focus on (A) the composite nature of and, above all, (B) the many spiritual paths allowing for the construction of transient yet long-lived forms of consciousness by way of complex interplay between the actual individuals and their socio-cultural milieu, are to be retrieved in most chapters in Part II (of two) of the book. This is the case especially with regard to chapters nine (Alina Therese Lettner’s “Peirce’s Semiotic Pragmaticism and Buddhist Soteriology: Steps Towards Modelling ‘Thought Forms’ of Signlessness”), ten (Richard Hartz’s “Spiritual Pragmatism: William James, Sri Aurobindo and Global Philosophy”), twelve (Hans Bakker’s “Gandhi, Hegel and Freedom: Aufhebungen, Pragmatism and Ideal Type Models”) and fifteen (Kanchana Mahadevan’s “Pragmatism, Spirituality, and the Calling of a New Democracy: The Populist Challenge and Ambedkar’s Integration of Buddhism and Dewey”).

The book’s third chapter is entitled “Pragmatism, Geist and the Question of Form: From a Critical Theory Perspective”. Penned by Pietr Strydom, it explores the German roots of US pragmatism. Thanks to this line of study, Strydom shows how much of the German notion of “Spirit” was preserved in its Anglophone, pragmatist rendition, and which avenues this rendition still opens up before us in order to connect, in a constructive and authentically spiritual manner, with the world of nature surrounding us, which German philosophy had frequently highlighted and prioritised in many of its Romantic expressions as well as in some of its later ones.

The ecological focus anticipated in this chapter continues in the fourth chapter (“Naturalistic Spirituality, Religious Naturalism, and Community Spirituality: A Broader Pragmatic View” by Ann K. Kegley) the fifth (“Pragmatism and the ‘Changing of the Earth’: Unifying Moral Impulse, Creative Instinct and Democratic Culture” by Julie Mazzarella Geredien) and, to a lesser extent, the sixth (Marcus Bussey’s “Towards Spiritual Pragmatics: Reflections from the Graveyards of Culture”). Taken together, these chapters provide much food for thought with regard to our generation’s greatest challenge, i.e., the planet-wide collapse of all life-support systems, natural ones in primis (e.g., unpolluted water aquifers, self-sustaining oceanic ecosystems), but often human-made as well (e.g., well-funded democratically elected authorities monitoring and controlling both national and transnational corporate businesses). As we all know, the wellbeing and, eventually, the very fate of humanity’s future generations are currently at stake, probably like never before in history.

As to the remaining chapters, they address more strictly spiritual issues (e.g., Paul Hague’s seventh chapter, “Mystical Pragmatics”) or technical aspects of pragmatism and/or related disciplinary areas (e.g., Janusz Baranski’s eight chapter “Pragmatism and Spirituality in Anthropological Aesthetics”), while retaining at large the book’s overall syncretic character and multicultural body of expert references. As such, the book is bound to appeal to, and be approachable by, cultivated persons that are versant in both Western pragmatism and recent classics in Eastern spiritual traditions, notably Aurobindo, Tagore and Gandhi. Unsurprisingly, then, as far as the present reviewer is concerned, the eleventh chapter is the one that I was able to appreciate in greatest detail, for it chiefly addresses mainstream Western philosophical conceptions (i.e., Kant and US pragmatism) and the spiritual tradition that I am most familiar with (i.e., Roman Catholicism), showing how the neo-Thomist criticism of the modern metaphysical scepticism championed by Descartes, Hume and, above all, Kant, can be applied, plausibly if not successfully, to US pragmatism as well, given its anti-metaphysical stance, which has been purported most vocally, in recent decades, by the neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty.

The book’s essential wisdom is, however, as simple to grasp as it is deep and relevant. In short, if we wish to save ourselves from the errors and the horrors of modernity, as patently displayed by the ecological devastation of our planet, then the most practical, pragmatic thing to do may well be to pay some serious attention to the cultivation of the spirit, which has been neglected, if not ridiculed and abandoned, by far too many cultures and individuals that recognise only a very limited set of contingent, this-worldly, and largely sensuous values as worth pursuing and maximising. Sometimes, new, good ideas and praxes are old, forgotten ideas and praxes.

Good Prejudice. A Passing Foray in Intellectual History

In the Latin original—praejudicium*—the usage of this notion was specific to the field of law and meant, in classical times, “a preceding judgment, sentence, or decision, a precedent” (Lewis & Short, 1879; cf. also Newman, 1979). In post-classical Latin, cognate meanings started to appear, including “[a] judicial examination previous to a trial… [a] damage, disadvantage… [and a] decision made beforehand or before the proper time” (Lewis & Short, 1879). The aspects of harmfulness and erroneousness began to emerge in conjunction with “praejudicium”. Over the centuries, they submerged the initial, neutral, technical meaning, up to the point that, today, the Oxford Dictionary defines “prejudice” as “[p]reconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience… Dislike, hostility, or unjust behaviour deriving from preconceived and unfounded opinions” and, with reference to the field of law, “[h]arm or injury that results or may result from some action or judgement.”

It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the exact time when the pejoration of “prejudice” occurred. Nor can “prejudice” be understood once and for all as being exclusively a poorly formed opinion, an unreasonable belief, a false judgement, a sentiment, an assumption dictated or corrupted by sentiment, a bad behaviour, or an admixture of them, at least as far as intellectual history is concerned. Though assuming only one particular meaning of the term ab initio may be very convenient (e.g. Penco, 2019), speakers, erudite ones included, have been using “prejudice” in many ways, the variety of which the Oxford Dictionary and researchers at large cannot but acknowledge and report to varying degrees (e.g. Allport, 1954; Duckitt, 1992; Gadamer, 1985/1960; Van Dijk, 1984). Unlike artificial technical terms—e.g. the classical legal interpretation of “praejudicium”—and like all important concepts of our natural languages—e.g. love, justice, beauty, education—“prejudice” too is polysemic, ambiguous, living, contestable and contested (Dorschel, 2000).

Within philosophy, it is even possible to find positive appraisals of the term itself. For one, sensing perhaps the morally and socially paradoxical outcomes of too extreme a rejection of prejudice in all its forms, Voltaire (1901/1764) had already distinguished “different kinds of prejudices”, which he defined as “opinion without judgment.” Some of these unreasoned opinions were said to be more or less dangerously mistaken (e.g. “that crabs are good for the blood, because when boiled they are of the same color”), while others could be “universal and necessary… and… even constitute virtue.” For example, “throughout the world, children are inspired with opinions before they can judge… In all countries, children are taught to acknowledge a rewarding and punishing God; to respect and love their fathers and mothers; to regard theft as a crime, and interested lying as a vice, before they can tell what is a virtue or a vice” (Voltaire, 1901/1764). Under such social, moral and pedagogical conditions, “[p]rejudice may… be very useful, and such as judgement will ratify when we reason” (Voltaire, 1901/1764).

In his essay “On Prejudice”, Hazlitt (1903/1830) reached an analogous conclusion, but he also added two important observations: (A) that human reason may be rarely able to ratify any such opinions, thus issuing good judgements; and (B) that we may have to rely on prejudice instead, insofar as:

We can only judge for ourselves in what concerns ourselves, and in things about us: and even there we must trust continually to established opinion and current report; in higher and more abstruse points we must pin our faith still more on others… I walk along the streets without fearing that the houses will fall on my head, though I have not examined their foundation; and I believe firmly in the Newtonian system, though I have never read the Principia. In the former case, I argue that if the houses were included to fall they would not wait for me; and in the latter, I acquiesce in what all who have studies the subject, and are capable of understanding it, agree in, having no reason to suspect the contrary. That the earth turns round is agreeable to my understanding, though it shocks my sense, which is however too weak to grapple with so vast a question.

Voltaire’s case suggests that, pace very many fellow Enlightenment thinkers (cf. Dorschel, 2000) and today’s prevalent parlance exemplified by Penco (2019), prejudices may not always be bad and worthy of elimination, lest we let our children fail to acquire basic moral and social principles of conduct (cf. also Billig, 1988). Hazlitt’s reflections add that prejudices are quite simply necessary for us to function at any level. Without holding some prejudices qua tacit presuppositions of our voluntary actions, including our thinking and talking, no common person or no eminent scientist could attain anything whatsoever. Descartes (1968/1637), for instance, when engaging in radical doubt, did never stop assuming that the meaning of his own words and concepts would persist unchanged through time.

In the modern age, Pascal (1993/1670), Vico (2013/1710), Schlegel (1975/1796–1806) and Amiel (1981/1860–1863) concurred on this point, though only the last two may have used the term “prejudice” as such. In the 20th century, the great Hungarian chemist and philosopher Polanyi (1969) reached the same conclusion too. Indeed, Polanyi (1962/1958) reflected on how young persons, were they not prejudicially convinced of the value of a discipline that they do not yet know, would never endeavour to learn it, and that scientists themselves, without prejudicial faith in the actual presence of a valuable bit of unknown knowledge, would never strive to discover it, sometimes at great peril for themselves, their career, or even their wellbeing. What is more, both students and scientists may fail miserably, thus confirming the prejudicial character of their presuppositions. Had they not held them, though, then they would have not even tried. Also, had they held them lightly, then they would have been less likely to succeed. As sportsmen, soldiers and artists know well, a crucial step in achieving anything great is to believe that you can do it, even if you have never done anything like that before and would have good reasons to conclude that you are unlikely to be able to (Dorschel, 2000; it should be noted that Polanyi did not use the term “prejudice” as such).

Moreover, in spite of all the novel sciences and great technologies that thinkers such as Bacon (1902/1620) and Descartes (1968/1637) could only begin to fathom, or the revolutionary political freedoms and personal emancipations conquered since their times, Polanyi (1969) noted as well how the power and propensity of humankind for cruelty and oppression did not seem to have waned over the modern centuries. If anything, the greatest slaughters and the very imperilment of human survival as a species have characterised the most recent ones, not the distant ages that the Enlightenment thinkers would have described as filled with prejudice and superstition (cf. also Hobsbawm, 1994).

Back in 1721, Swift’s popular Modest Proposal had already reached, in a satirical tone, the murderous conclusions that his day’s allegedly enlightened and scientific rationality could lead to. Specifically, the most effective economic solution to the famine in Ireland, as he had sarcastically argued, was to breed poor people’s children for public consumption. Indeed, Swift had noted in his earlier Thoughts on Various Subjects: “Some men, under the notions of weeding out prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty, and religion.” On its part, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1923/1791: 467) reports the famous moralist to have said: “To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near to laudable that they have been often praised, and are always pardoned.”

Before both these Anglophone authors, Fontenelle (1683/1803: 92–96; translation ours) had reflected on the expediency of those “prejudices” that “philosophers” seem eager to “destroy”: “common opinions” can be very “handy” and “useful”, whenever we may have too little knowledge, time or opportunity to reason fully about things—which is far from being an uncommon experience, since “reason offers us a very small number of sure maxims”. In the same pages, Fontenelle (ibid.) observed also how “prejudices” are part of the heritage or “costume” of “our Country”: they are constitutive elements of people’s identity, the source of their sense of belonging, that is, important threads in the fabric of society itself.

The importance of prejudice for identity, belonging and social cohesion is a specific theme that other defenders of prejudice discussed at length. Duclos (2004/1751: 7; translation ours), for one, defined “prejudice… a judgment held or admitted without examination, which can be true or mistaken”. Although it may be wise to try to eradicate erroneous and nefarious prejudices, he thought it unwise, “for the good of society”, to carry the Enlightenment’s battle against prejudices much farther: why “demonstrating accepted truths”, if “recommending their practice” can be enough? (Duclos, 2004/1751: 7; translation ours) Why trying to make people reach by “reasoning” what they do already by “sentiment”, or “an honest prejudice?” (Duclos, 2004/1751: 8; translation ours) Hume (1964/1742) and Chesterfield (1847/1779) made similar points, but Duclos added: “Prejudice is the common law of men” and as such it should be respected; whereas “by wanting to enlighten people too eagerly, we teach them a dangerous presumption” that can lead to dreadful moral and social chaos (Duclos, 2004/1751: 7; translation ours).**

Moral and social chaos is precisely what Burke (2008/1790: 42 & 63) observed in France at the time of the Revolution, which he believed to have been inspired by “sophisters, economists; and calculators” who thought that they were “combating prejudice, but [were] at war with nature.” Preferring, as a general rule, the present time-tested institutions to the future ones pandered by revolutionary thinkers, Burke (2008/1790: 72) famously stated:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

Currently, it is rare to hear any philosopher speaking well of “prejudice”, whether in the epistemic context or in others, e.g., politics, morals, education. Somehow, the pejoration of this notion has reached a point such that the usages made of it by Johnson or Fontenelle sound odd to our hears. Different words should be used, e.g., “preconception, presupposition, hypothesis, presumption, presentiment, presage, premonition, foreboding, predilection, prepossession, outlook, expectation or anticipation in general…intuition.” (Dorschel, 2000: 58 & 136; emphasis removed) Yet, as Dorschel argues (2000: 136; emphasis added), “such choice of terms is a matter of rhetoric”, in the technical sense of this term, i.e. as appropriate to the circumstances (or kairos; cf. Barthes, 1988). Depending on the audience and on the point to be made, “eulogistic” or “dyslogistic” synonyms are to be preferred, if and when “prejudice” may appear inappropriate (cf. Bentham, 1824: 214).

Still, whether we use “prejudice” or not, the fact remains that “if some of our beliefs are based on reasons, there has to be something which is not based on reasons. We are able to reason in support of certain things and to prove certain things only if and because there are other things for which we do not have reasons or proof.” (Dorschel, 2000: 135). Recognising the existence and the value of this “something” or of these “things”, whether we call them “prejudices” or “intuitions” or else, is the contribution of Voltaire, Fontenelle, Burke and the other eccentric defenders of “prejudice” qua “prejudice”. They did not succeed in stopping the pejoration of “prejudice” as such, but they succeeded in preserving important insights concerning the tacit assumptions of human agency at large, the educational limits of thoroughly rational approaches, the complex sources of morality, the roots of political power, and the needs for cultural identity and social belonging.

 

* The present text is part of a longer written contribution prepared for “Remix”, an Erasmus+ online teaching project on transnational migration that should commence across several European countries in June 2020.

** This short text is being published during the Covid-19 international crisis. Thus, I wish to provide a topical example of the corrosive “presumption” that Duclos associates with the modern preference for reasoning at all costs, rather than relying on good prejudice. Specifically, the reader may want to reflect on all those individuals who, especially on ever-popular social media, feel entitled to challenge with all kinds of arguments, however faulty and uninformed these may be, the far more competent individuals and institutions that their grandparents would have treated, prejudicially, with great deference and humble respect (e.g. physicians, epidemiologists, national health institutes). 

 

References

Allport, G.W. (1954), The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Amiel, H-F. (1981/1860–1863), Journal intime, vol. 4, Lausanne : Editions l’Age d’Homme.

Bacon, F. (1902/1620), Novum Organon, New York: P.F. Collier & Son.

Barthes, R. (1988), “The Old Rhetoric: An aide-mémoire”, in The Semiotic Challenge. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 11–94.

Bentham, J. (1824), The Book of Fallacies, London: J. & H.L. Hunt.

Billig, M. (1988), “The Notion of ‘Prejudice’: Some rhetorical and ideological aspects”, Text 8 (1–2): 91–110.

Boswell, J. (1923/1791), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co.

Burke, E. (2008/1790), Reflections on the Revolution in France, Hamilton, ON: Archive for the History of Economic Thought, <https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/burke/revfrance.pdf>.

Chesterfield, P.D. Stanthorpe, Earl of (1847/1779), Letters, London: R. Bentley.

Descartes, R. (1968/1637), Discourse on Method and Other Writings, London: Penguin.

Dorschel, A. (2000), Rethinking Prejudice, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Duckitt, J. (1992), The Social Psychology of Prejudice, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Duclos, C.P. (2004/1751), Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle, npa: F-D. Fournier, <http://www.mediterranee-antique.fr/Fichiers_PdF/PQRS/Pinot_Duclos/Consid%C3%A9rations.pdf>.

Fontenelle, M. de (1683/1803), Nouveaux dialogues des morts, Köln: J. Dulont.

Gadamer, H-G. (1985/1960), Truth and Method, New York: Crossroad.

Hazlitt, W. (1903/1830), “On Prejudice”, Sketches and Essays, London: Richards, <http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Prejudice.htm>.

Hobsbawm, E. (1994), The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, London: Michael Joseph.

Hume, D. (1964/1742), “Of Moral Prejudices”, The Philosophical Works, Aalen: Scientia, pp. 371–375.

Lewis, C.T & Short, C. (1879), “Praejudicium”, A Latin Dictionary. Founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, <https://lsj.gr/wiki/praeiudicium>.

Newman, J. (1979), “Prejudice as Prejudgment”, Ethics 90(1): 47–57.

Oxford Dictionary (2019), npa: Lexico.com, <https://www.lexico.com/en>.

Pascal, B. (1993/1670), Pensieri, Milan: Rusconi.

Penco, C. (2019), “Prejudice and Presupposition in Offensive Language”, Nordicum-Mediterraneum, 12(3), <https://nome.unak.is/wordpress/volume-12-no-3-2017/conference-proceeding-volume-12-no-3-2017/prejudice-presupposition-offensive-language/>

Polanyi, M. (1962/1958), Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Polanyi, M. (1969), Knowing and Being, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Schlegel, F. (1975/1796–1806), Philosophische Lehrjahre, Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh.

Swift, J. (1730/1721), A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or the Country, And for making them Beneficial to the Publick, London: W. Bickerton, <https://books.google.is/books?id=t1MJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=is&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false>.

Swift, J. (2014/1706), Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting, Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/swift/jonathan/s97th/>.

Van Dijk, T. (1984), Prejudice in Discourse, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Vico, G.B. (2013/1710), De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda, Napoli: ISPF, <http://www.giambattistavico.it/opere/deantiquissima>.

Voltaire (1901/1764), “Prejudice”, Philosophical Dictionary, in The Works of Voltaire, A Contemporary Version, New York: E.R. DuMont, <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/v/voltaire/dictionary/complete.html#chapter379>.

The Human Rights of Privileged Victims. A Marxist Satire on Shouting Matches

Religious divides have been the source of many a bloody conflict. Even today, across the world, atrocities are committed, among others, by Hindus over Christians, Buddhists over Muslims, Jews over Muslims, Hindus over Muslims, Muslims over Hindus, Muslims over Christians, Christians over Muslims, Sunni Muslims over Shia Muslims and, in a tiny corner of Europe, Protestant Christians over Catholic ones and vice versa.[1] Who benefits from all such division and tragedy? Who gains from the attendant ruthless violation of human rights, sometimes on an egregious scale?*

Assuming here, for sheer argument’s sake, that the traditional Marxist answer to that question is correct, then there is one ‘classic’ class cui bono accrue all such division and tragedy: the bourgeoisie. Who are they? This term is a bit passé today, I must admit. “The 1%”, “the corporate elite”, “the job creators”, or just “the rich” would be more popular expressions in contemporary parlance. Had he been more articulate, even the Dude would have used the old b-word, to Lenin‘s and many classicists‘ plausible surprise.

The concept is not passé, however. The idea that the ruling class preserves its power by keeping the ruled ones internally divided by means of, inter alia, ideological decoys and distracting identities, is as old as Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BC), who lived long before  Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Marxism, and is said by ancient tradition to have uttered the momentous phrase: “διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε” (“divide and rule”). Awareness of social hierarchy, the ensuing concentration of power and the political-cultural techniques for their preservation did not wait for Engels’ and Garibaldi’s century to emerge. Fooling and frying people at will, by pitting them against one another, have been practised for millennia.

In light of today’s levels of skewed market power, de facto regressive taxation, immense wealth disparity reminiscent of the Belle Époque, fantastic unearned incomes by way of financial rent, mass unemployment, workers’ precariousness, widespread de-unionisation, technological replacement of the workforce, growing underemployment of vainly trained young minds, discriminatory substantive inequality before the law, and the concomitant absence of large-scale socio-political dissent, there seems to be no reason to believe that such a well-tested means of social control should not be at work in contemporary societies.

Therein, the class of billionaires and their various corporate manifestations have been thriving unchecked, as proven repeatedly—and at the very least—by a plethora of unpunished financial and fiscal scandals of truly global proportions: Worldcom, Enron, Forex, Libor, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, etc. Not to mention the credit lifelines and special bail-outs granted to gargantuan banks and their wealthy owners after the self-inflicted international collapse of 2008, while common people were crushed by austerity  packages across continents in order to pay for such generous rescue missions.[2] When money talks, human rights walk… off a cliff. What is more, the very same billionaires have often taken direct control of the political game qua party leaders, government officials, cabinet ministers and populist trailblazers. Not even Marx would have expected the super-rich to become so shameless in their command of political institutions.

At the same time, Marx’s ghost, the ghost of communism per his 1848 Manifesto, not to mention the now-mythical chimeras of internationalism and mass revolution, have all been eerily vacant from the world’s stage, despite Marx’s Capital being picked up from under a shuggly desk by a French data-cruncher and adapted for the 21st century, in which even the most polite and prudent British media acknowledge the resurgent affirmation of nothing less than fascism.

When religion cannot do good enough a job at keeping people internally divided, viable alternatives exist: race, nationality; region-, party-, or even football-based affiliation can be  as effective. The New York City draft riots of 1863, pitting poor Irish immigrants against poor blacks, while well-off Americans could avoid being sent to battle by paying a set fee, are just one historical example among many. (These days, that draft may lead people to the cinemas, rather than to the streets.)

Again and again, poor people that would be better off by joining numbers, forces, and concerted efforts against the tiny minority exploiting them, waste instead their best energies and, at times, their livelihood and life, by fighting among themselves—and against designated ‘others’. Frequently, trouble is taken by the truly troubled in order to suppress the much-maligned “troublemakers”, who are in fact the only ones trying to find a solution to their woes, e.g. ‘anachronistic’ trade unionists and ‘pie-in-the-sky’ left-wing intellectuals. Turkeys do love their Christmas holidays.

About twenty years before The Communist Manifesto, the liberal and Catholic novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) described most vividly the long-lived logic and common practice of divide et impera—Caesar having learnt King Philip’s lesson—in a rustic allegory of his. The novelist depicts Renzo, the poor, rural, male protagonist of Manzoni’s most famous book, I promessi sposi, holding several bickering capons by their legs. That’s the beginning; let me explain.

Renzo is carrying these poor capons as his only means of payment to a well-off city lawyer, whom Renzo intends to hire in the attempt to redress the wrongs that he and his betrothed—the poor, rural, and female Lucia—have been suffering from a local nobleman that, to the young couple’s great misfortune, fancies Lucia well beyond the boundaries of common decency and aristocratic gentlemanship. Manzoni notes that, had the capons been a little more intelligent, they would have started picking the hand that kept them captive, therefore regaining their freedom. Instead, the capons fought among themselves and ended up being delivered with great ease to their recipient. The lawyer enjoyed a few good meals out of these silly animals, but also failed to help Renzo in his human, far-too-human plight.

Rather than Christmas turkeys, Renzo’s capons, or “i capponi di Renzo”, have become a proverbial admonition in Italian culture, though little followed its inherent wisdom may be in the country’s daily habits. Despite Manzoni’s hefty novel being a mandatory reading in the nation’s secondary schools, millions of Italians can still be kept internally divided in all sorts of ways, such as: Northerners versus Southerners, natives versus immigrants, Catholic versus secular, progressive versus conservative, private-sector versus public-sector, and old versus young.

As concerns most contemporary Western nations, gender is being used in the same manner, especially within middle-class environments—even inside academic circles. Men and women spend endless time and effort squabbling about the so-called “male privilege” and an alleged set of attendant disparities, rather than combining their efforts in order to pursue traditional left-wing aims: better wages for all, better working conditions for everyone, sensible monetary and fiscal policies by State authorities, true economic security and autonomy, a life-saving stop to the all-embracing profit-motive that is destroying the planet, and emancipatory self-ownership cum democratic self-stewardship. Such squabbles split regularly the front of the exploited many into two warring fronts: men versus women, women versus men or, in the shouting matches that frequently result thereof, “radicals” versus “right-thinking” persons, or “feminists” versus “male chauvinists” (aka “sexists”, “patriarchs”, “pigs”, etc.), depending on the side one is on.

Sophisticated intellects and fair-minded individuals might plausibly avoid being tossed into these camps or reduced to either of them, but only with great effort and with no hope of broader success. First of all, even well-paid academics can utter absurdities such as “fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality and power of the phallus, of masculinity”.[3] Secondly, whatever veritable genius the elect may occasionally possess, the same elect have very little effect on the daily shouting matches within public and private bodies. As Socrates, Hypatia and Thomas More knew dangerously well, unmerciful isolation is the price to be paid for uncommon ingenuity.

Shall we mention the now-ubiquitous mass media, where the most vocal and publicised shouting matches occur? There, “male privilege” or, for that matter, “patriarchy”, are not carefully dissected analytical tools, but massive clubs to swing around and smash men’s (and a few allegedly ‘brainwashed’ women’s) heads with, whichever diverse and sophisticated sets of beliefs may be held inside those heads. Having a prick makes you a dick, or vice versa. There is no escape. There is no alternative. It sounds like Maggie Thatcher, but it claims to be ‘progressive’.

Quick and effective communication cannot operate too many distinctions, not even basic ones such as the one separating individuals responsible for certain misdeeds and the gender to which they belong. “Men do this…”, “men are like that”, “men…”; and, if young, “boys”. Black Americans, Southern Italians, German Jews and Hungarian Roma know far too well how systemically hurtful all such fallacious yet very catchy sweeping generalisations can be. Women should do too, as a sad matter of historical fact such as reduction to one big ‘lump’. Even clever individuals may fall into such sweeping prejudices, which social opinion praises already. Everyday parlance welcomes cognitive dissonance.

Under this respect, the mass media’s behaviourally instigated emulation becomes far too easily the social norm, including the ever-present social media, unlike the academically elect’s painstaking theologies, theodicies and theogonies. Snapchat is much more impactful than Spinoza’s Ethics, not even when the latter is simplified. Go to any party meeting, political rally, activist gathering or well-meaning workshop on gender relations, if you don’t believe me. Or listen to the telly, to undergraduate students, to your neighbours and taxi drivers. Or go to the movies, read your old schoolmates’ Twitter pearls of wisdom or the most popular memes on Facebook, and explore the real world of apparent common sense.

Quite simply, oversimplification is overly simple for social-media algorithmic simpletons to sample… As a sage from Savona had once observed, flesh-and-blood people make excellent straw-men, sadly enough. Or straw-women, for that matter. The same people make good harlequins too. Splitting hairy dogma and deep-thinking are the job of few, fastidious, profound Biblicists. Apart from them, most people go by a handful of simple formulas. Dogma is handy. Life gives them little room for little else. Under such far-too-human conditions, erudite subtleties get drowned into the greater sea of common slogans and, eventually, disappear from view.

Out in the open, things are even more straightforward: erudite subtleties do not count. Rhetoric, instead, matters; and it matters more than anything, for rhetoric can truly make and re-make the laws, whether written or unwritten. That is why, inside and around political parties and governments, there are more PR professionals and spin doctors than there are disciplinary experts and concerned academics. The situation is analogous to the superficial but immensely powerful liberal vernacular pervading the economic and business understanding, and decision-making, of contemporary societies at all levels, from the small entrepreneur’s self-perception to the mantras of well-dressed European commissioners. (I use “liberal” in the European sense, not the American one.) Let me explain this one too.

Bookworms and Adam Smith (1723–1790) scholars know perfectly well how critical the founder of modern economics was of corporations, the greed of business-people, their nefarious influence over law-making, or their blindness to the need for banking regulation. Nevertheless, most self-declared liberals today are ready to utter Smith’s name like the revered and wondrous name of a prophet of old, without having read a single page penned by him, and they will defend today’s de facto corporate oligopolies in the name of unfettered “free trade”. All this, it should be noted, while believing with earnest sincerity in the providential blessings of the “invisible hand”. Armed with few, well-tested commonplaces, these unthinking liberals will launch into trite pro-market-versus-pro-State tirades, or right-versus-left political arguments. More often than not, given the acquired matter-of-fact character of the commonplaces at issue, they will win the day… Plus the scary night that follows . One well-written catechism by a committed preacher is more powerful than a million great articles by the most honest scholars. Rhetoric, like love, conquers all.

In the men-versus-women analogue, the chauvinist camp includes even some women that, apparently, don’t realise that they have been duped by patriarchy and are actually not free, though they do think that they are free and act without visible restraint, committing crimes against their gender such as wearing high heels, becoming Catholic nuns, showing a cleavage on a Facebook photograph, or buying copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. (All these  cases being peculiar anecdotes that I can recall from my years in Canada and Iceland.) Even a well-educated and ambitious woman becoming a judge on the US Supreme Court can be so duped, it would seem, were we to listen to certain shouts.

Be as it may that the little sisters consent, the big ones resent; hence the former ought to repent, and nobody is content. The overall meaning is simple. Some women are more equal than others, and the former can tell the latter what is actually good for them to think, do, and be—like older sisters to younger ones, or patriarchs of old. As to those articulate, unrepentant women that complain about this peculiar state of affairs, such as Ellen Willis (1941–2006),  Christina Sommers (b. 1950), Wendy McElroy (b. 1951), Janice Fiamengo (b. 1946) or Camille Paglia (b. 1947) in today’s academia, they risk ending up being reviled as “Nazi”, akin to Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) and, inexorably, as “patriarchal”. Even Erin Pizzey (b. 1939) can find no refuge today, while Phyllis Chesler (b. 1940) is attacked cruelly by her elder sisters for admitting that women can be just as cruel as men, though in a voice of their own.

Ironically, in the midst of all this “you’re a Nazi” bantering, a duly reworded chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf got published in a proudly feminist, peer-reviewed, academic journal. A little later, the leading lesbian activist of the Gallic nation, Alice Coffin, happened to argue that male artists ought to be boycotted because, well… they are male. This is quite an eerie reminder of the hostile discrimination–albeit, luckily, not yet of the swift elimination–experienced by left-wing and Jewish artists, both male and female, in 1940s France. Just think about it. Why boycott anyone who happens to have a penis? Hasn’t discrimination because of crooked noses, skin pigmentation and red flags been enough of a cautionary lesson? Evidently not in today’s France. Alas, it ain’t Switzerland. All the while, Gallic women’s shadow projections are sold as shining progress. Maybe that’s why even noted psychotherapists have been worrying about the seething violence of some older sisters. And the fights go on…

The global lesson to be learnt from all this shouting aloud, and about, is fairly basic, and it is too far from new. Pluralism and free speech are liked by many self-styled “progressives” only insofar as, and for as long as, other people agree with them. (In line with the analogy regarding the economic sphere, try running a country without McDonald’s or no private ownership, and then check whether the ‘liberal’ countries of the world leave you alone or not.) Christianity may be a thing of the past. God Himself (Herself?) dead. Narrow-mindedness and intolerance, though, can still prosper unabated. Dogmas come veritably from all sides, in all colours, shapes, sizes, and flavours. Perhaps, it is a matter of old urges finding new channels and outer shapes to keep expressing themselves. Who knows? (Yet admitting ignorance is precisely one of the rarest attitudes to be found in these fights.)

Not that patriarchs, male prejudice and male privilege may have not existed at some point in history, or may not exist somewhere on Earth today. Saudi Arabia has remained to the very present a hellish place for women, and so do several other oil-rich countries in the Middle East that have glorious business relations with the ‘liberal’ West. (Again, when money talks, human rights walk off a cliff.) Across the globe, there are indeed some nations where women are regularly beaten, have little access to healthcare, are not allowed to pursue any education worthy of note, and cannot walk in the streets without male chaperones for fear of being assaulted. Nasty patriarchs and their stunted children are still around. There is no denying.

If I look at today’s developed world, however, I see no comparably glaring male privilege in, say, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, France, or Canada. (Please note that I do not include here my native country, Italy, where women are still being fired for such an outrageous misdemeanour as getting pregnant.) It is not a matter of there being no inequality at any level. Some inequality does exist but, if we look closely enough, it cuts both ways, not just one way. And the cuts can be sore ones. Let me be very clear on this point.

As it is deployed or implied in daily life, the much-shouted-at “male privilege” is a matter of there being—or not being—blanket better conditions for persons who were born male, similarly to the way in which a person would enjoy blanket better conditions by being born into an aristocratic family in 17th-century France, or in a 1% family today. Anyone who was born in the aristocracy back then, or who is born in plutocratic families today, enjoyed and enjoys better food, longer lives, legal and muscled protection from physical harm, access to enterprising credit, top-level education, conspicuous leisure, better healthcare, and a thousand more life-enabling resources that are regularly denied to others. The well-born person’s benefits, aka “advantages”, over the rest of society are notable and blatant. That’s privilege, in a nutshell. And that is what ordinary men and women take it to be, quite reasonably. Think, for example, of the (in)famous poisoner Marie-Madeleine Marguerite D’Aubray (1630–1676) in the ancien régime, or of the noted businesswoman Ivanka Trump (b. 1981) today. These are neither straw-men nor straw-women: they are, or were, real persons of real substance.

Logic can be of some help here. One of the standard forms of reasoning, identified since ancient times, is the so-called “modus tollens”, according to which if, from a certain condition A follows inescapably another condition B, and condition B is not the case, then it has to be concluded that A is not the case either. Formally, A -> B, –B, ergo –A. If I drink the hemlock like Socrates, then I feel ill and die shortly thereafter; I am alive and well; therefore, I have not drunk the hemlock. This much logic is not phallic. Contradicting it is, however, fallacious. If there is “male privilege”, then there must be conspicuous benefit or blatant advantage for men. If such a conspicuous benefit or blatant advantage does not occur, then “male privilege” doesn’t occur either, even if the phrase keeps being repeated ad nauseam.

In today’s advanced societies, if someone is born male, he is more likely to die younger, to suffer from mental illness leading to suicide, to die in combat, to die on the workplace, to be the victim of violent crime, to be the perpetrator of violent crime, to serve time in prison and, in prison, to suffer rape. (Go and check your national statistics.) Living nastier, brutish and shorter lives is no conspicuous benefit or blatant advantage, whatever creatively postmodern way or cunning ceteris-paribus conditions we may choose to look at it. There could be still some advantages at some level, but they would be neither notable nor blatant, and even less assuredly blanket, insofar as men’s longevity, physical integrity, mental health and law-abidingness signal losses compared to women’s.

Let me be redundant. There may well be benefits that originate from being born a man. They can be small things, such as the likelihood of being allowed to play contact sports when children or swear publicly with impunity. They can be bigger ones, such as increased chances of becoming a top businessperson or politician, smashing the c/g-lass ceiling, and belonging to the 1%—if that can be considered a good thing. (Though certainly a mainstream aspiration, I wonder what Marx would say about it.) Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Cristina Kirchner (b. 1953), Carly Fiorina (b. 1954), Theresa May (b. 1956), Christine Lagarde (b. 1956) and, for a while, Rita Crundwell (b. 1953), got up there, though being merely part of a growing minority.

Yet, even if we reached a 50/50 point of equilibrium in the upper echelons, there would be still male benefits as well as female benefits, for being born female would nonetheless increase one’s chances of wearing skirts as well as trousers, or of being addressed politely by strangers as a child—not to mention living the longer, healthier and more law-abiding lives that were just mentioned. Gender roles, as debatable and mutable as we may wish them to be in our societies, imply in concrete reality different gains, not just different losses, for both sexes. As the most important issues are rarely black-and-white matters, so is social advantage far more nuanced than the unrelenting yet simplistic male-versus-female opposition entails. When essential dimensions of human well-being are considered, such as physical, mental and moral integrity, Western women are on the winning side.

There is another way to look at this fact and appreciate its historical roots. We are no more patrician Rome or Puritanical Virginia, nor today’s Afghanistan, by any stretch whatsoever of the imagination. And that is fantastic! In many developed nations, the suffragettes, the witches-that-returned, and the brave activists that fought for women’s health and education in times of actual female segregation have finally won, big time. We should acknowledge and celebrate their achievements, for they occurred against all kinds of odds and enmities. However, their feisty descendants, as well-meaning as they may be today, repeat slogans and employ concepts that are factually anachronistic in wealthy Western nations like, say, Iceland, Holland, Canada or Norway. (How right was Veblen in claiming that today’s common sense is yesterday’s facts!) “Patriarchy”, as far as such blessed countries are concerned, belongs to history’s dustbin, like “Donatism” or the divine right of kings. There may be “vestigial patriarchal elements” that “are being weeded out”, as Laura Kipnis wrote not long ago, but “women have power aplenty”. The war was won!

Meanwhile, the Luddites, Owenites, Marxists, revisionists, Trotskyists and middle-way Swedish social-democrats have seen their battles end up in humiliating defeats, to the point that, in today’s North America, no politician dares to speak of the “working class” in public debates, lest they are accused of nothing less than frightening “socialism”. Only the “middle class” is allowed to exist, verbally, in the country that Donald Trump promised to make great again. In Europe, these dangerous two words are still audible, though a non-working class is actually the chief problem, because Europe’s working class has been emigrating to China since the 1980s, under the banner of “globalisation”. Even among self-declared “left-wing radicals”, when a picture or a video of a corporate board of directors is shown, the rallying cry is no longer “capitalists!”, “bourgeois!”, “fat cats!”,  but “men!”–or, in a seemingly more nuanced yet equally misfiring way, “white men!” That most “men” and “white men” still make up a good chunk of the “proletariat”  has evidently been forgotten. Conveniently, while rage is vented at every and any man or white man, the concentrated elite of actual exploiters still gets away scot free with their exploitation.

Classic concepts can become classified items. Despite its relevance vis-à-vis today’s gross inequality, the very Marxian notion of class has been largely silenced, while “gender” enjoys much more popularity and media attention. Race, nationality and religious creed were very popular too, in previous times. And it is not difficult to understand why, at least for Marx or for the Dude, who would ask, if he had ever read Seneca: cui prodest? Since the cruel, neglectful parents are away skiing on the Alps, or sipping Martinis in the Caribbean, then the understandably upset big sister can kick her younger brothers in the groin to vent her rage. I mean, her wee brothers have a Johnson, just like her dad, who keeps enjoying himself and forgetting about his children. That silly dangling bit of flesh must be really bad… Who do you think benefits from this sorry state of affairs: the brothers?

Though commonplace in shouting matches, most of the enduring Western talk of “male privilege” is, at heart, a remnant of a by-gone past and a misrepresentation of a much more toxic reality, where the one and only true callous and outrageous privilege is that of a few rich family networks directing everyone else’s life in order to maximise these networks’ take to a massive extent, irrespective of gender. If life is a valley of tears, then both men and women are crying aplenty. About the 99% of the entire society, we could say, while occupying Wall Street.

Who, for example, can lead his or her life without spending much, if not most of it, working for someone else, who has the power to hire, fire, disenfranchise and impoverish them?  (Back in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy had no qualms in equating this condition with that of slavery itself). Who, whether a man or a woman, can afford to be indifferent to the boom-bust hot-money cycles that financial moguls and their clients, whether men or women, have been unleashing onto the world’s nations since the end of the Bretton-Woods system? Who, after the crash of 2008, can say in good conscience to have been left untouched and undamaged by the gigantic waves of transnational speculation engulfing the global economy? Who, in constitutionally free and independent countries, has not heard the governments justify their austere, belt-tightening policies by reference to genderless  cruel deities such as “the markets”, “the creditors”, “foreign direct investment”, or “international competition”?

The notion of “male privilege” flies in the face of much theoretical and experimental literature, in which the negative consequences for men of traditional gender roles have been identified, again and again. This is something that ordinary people have no great difficulty to grasp. Stunted emotional development, personal unhappiness, limited self-expression, lack of empathy, karoshi and additional “maladies of the soul”, as Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) would dub them, have been studied and catalogued in the accounts of what exactly standard assumptions and stereotypes about men do to men themselves, from their early childhood to their deathbed, or deathdesk, whether such assumptions and stereotypes are held by women or by other men.[4]

If you have read my satirical piece to this point, then you must have realised that I am a moaning man. Ipso facto, if not ipso dicto, I am not consistent with my gender stereotypes. Real men don’t whine. Only wimps do that. But I don’t care. Quite the opposite, I believe wholeheartedly that standard, if not even archetypal, masculinity can be toxic. Nevertheless, I cannot but reason as well that, if standard gender roles are toxic to men, if not to both sexes, then they cannot be advantageous, at the same time, to men at large. Either option has to be dropped. Self-poisoning precludes self-engrossing privilege, and vice versa.

Rhetorically, speaking of “male privilege” and, for that matter, calling the bourgeois a “patriarch”, obscure, culpably, the fundamental class element at play in our societies. This is the element that is etiologically crucial to understand the suffering pervading our societies. In parallel, the same linguistic-conceptual practices overemphasise the gender element, casting undue suspicion upon men qua men, and therefore splitting the oppressed camp into mutually opposed men and women. In keeping with the business analogue, usages of “patriarchy” as oppressive of both men and women are as rhetorically flawed as the orthodox economists’ insistence on using “goods”, “efficiency” and “optimality” as value-neutral terms. Long ago, Jeremy Bentham argued that both dyslogistic and eulogistic words are springs of action. Pick a different term, please, and reduce equivocation. Rhetoric. as I said, matters a lot in the real world.

Allow me to repeat one thing. Logically, to state the negative character of traditional gender roles for men themselves, and insist at the same time on the existence of “male privilege”, is a contradiction. Worse than fallacious reasoning, however, is the persistence of traditional male gender roles, which are enforced by women too, and the combination  of these roles with the growing hypocrisy and the double standards that the much-desired empowerment of women has made possible. As the ethicist John Kekes (b. 1936) has often remarked in his works, granting more freedom to more people—empowered women included—means granting more opportunity for the evils of cruelty or, as Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) would poetically word them, the evils of ‘‘possession”, “appropriation” and “domination’’.[5] Truly, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

It all starts from an early age, by the way, as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) had rightfully lamented long ago. This time, though, it works in reverse, at least as far as genders are concerned. The list is endless. Let me indulge in it a little. It is somewhat amusing—albeit maybe not for the young men who grow up under such confusing premises, or the older men who get trapped by their paradoxes, especially in the Nordic countries that I have come to know in the last twenty years. Hopefully, my long and strange list will get someone thinking about the sadly neglected male teardrops drenching life’s valley, where they join the well-researched female ones. So, here comes the list, then… Well, no, not right away. First, I must digress a little. (After all, I like very much Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.) Fun must be earned. There is still one serious issue that we have to consider. Specifically, what’s the cure to our boys’ alleged avoidance of crying? Crying?

Boys do cry; but more often than not they do it in hiding, behind doors. Doing so openly would cause them to be derided and dismissed by women—not just by men—as unmanly moaners, in yet another crippling instance of traditional gender roles and expectations, according to which boys don’t cry unless they are sissies. Virility does not parade vulnerability. And yet boys and men are people too. They can be vulnerable. They can be victims. Crying. More crying.

Think of the levels of pain involved: failing at school, unemployed, underemployed, prone to crime or substance abuse, and likely candidates to suicide, these male human beings are losers in the competitive game of society, which is then said to be skewed in their favour. Hence, they are losers twice, for they managed to lose despite being unfairly favoured ab initio. Moreover, these twice-losers may not show openly their pain, for “real men” having any chance of impressing any self-respecting female are expected to be stoical. If men cry, which they do, then they must do it privately, and quietly, so that the rest of society, women in primis, may pretend that men are actually not crying. I mean, really, it is enough for a man to get the flu and complain about it, for this man to be scorned mercilessly, especially by women. And so thrice it goes. Losers, losers, losers.

Again, some sophisticated intellects and fair-minded individuals might avoid being so callous to suffering men. Male tears may not be dismissed indifferently by all members of the ‘fair sex’ as insufferable, privileged people’s whining.  Perhaps, behind those tears and the label “man”, there are actual living persons who genuinely suffer. Thus, occasionally, some deeply intelligent women do realise it and show genuine compassion, including some highly perceptive female sexologists in France. Many other women, who claim to be committed feminists, have openly stated that they would be happy to sip on them instead. Screw the losers! Their suffering is immaterial. What matters is that they are ‘men’. As such, they cannot but be the enemy. Conflicts don’t call for compassion. They call for aggression.

Let us be honest with ourselves. Weakness is not a selling point for men. Compassion kills passion. Every day, around the world, pained men learn this painful truth by way of additional doses of pain. Even frankly smart gals prefer fairly stereotypical guys, if you are brave enough to read the Gul’s numbers on the subject, inter alia. Statistics possess a cold kind of cruelty. Yet, they do nothing but photographing that which is already well known. As amply shown by men’s lived experiences and by mainstream media, weak men make a poor catch and catch poorly themselves. They are not simply rejected, but resented, for such men cannot be ‘relied upon’, as the old gender stereotype prescribes. And that is something that women keep expecting and demanding of their male partners. The grip of the old gender stereotype, on men’s and women’s minds, is as powerful as the ideal ‘man’ that it continues to depict.

But let us look at a longer list; the one that I had promised. Digressions end, eventually. (Even Sterne’s own bizarre novel has an end.) Here it comes:

  • Girls with trousers are normal; boys wearing a skirt are laughed at, told better, or advised a sex change.
  • Tomboys are cool; effeminate boys the butt of the joke.
  • Boisterous girls are future adventurers in the making; boisterous boys an ill-educated nuisance.
  • A girl squad is worth celebrating in pop songs; a group of teenage boys can’t even be allowed into a shopping mall playing Muzak.
  • Man-eating dancing queens and pussycat dolls can tease at will, break hearts with spears, lose them in the game, and do it again; boys are expected to endure it all and be thankful, reminiscent of male mantises and male spiders.
  • Crass humour about women is sexist; crass humour about men is universal.
  • Young girls, often drunk, vomiting innuendos, or worse, at men in the middle of a busy street on a Saturday night, are having a bit of fun; boys doing the same are intolerable pigs.
  • The same goes for hiring male strippers on a hen night versus hiring female strippers on a stag night: stags are actually pigs, and pigs should not pursue such vile objectifications; hens are excused.
  • An intolerable pig is also a man sleeping around, while a woman doing the same is exploring her sexuality or asserting her independence. While the former is routinely attacked as an emblem of ‘patriarchy’, casting doubt on the latter is ‘slut-shaming’.
  • Women making a pass are seen as a glorious sign of liberation; men making a pass as a threatening step towards harassment.
  • Even alone, a man who masturbates is nothing but a variation on the loser theme: a wanker; a woman who masturbates, instead, is a proud feminist challenging “societal taboos“.
  • Not to mention a lonely man with a sex doll, who cannot but come across as a creepy pig that is better avoided; on the contrary, a lonely woman with a dildo is a liberated person who does not need men for her self-realisation.
  • Women who enjoy porn are emancipated, like the heroines of Sex and the City; men who do the same are, again, pigs.
  • Whatever and however heterosexual men look at people or things, the “male gaze” is always taken to be bad. No such negative assumption is made when talking about female looking or the “queer eye”.
  • Something similar applies to genitalia. Whereas “vagina” is to be celebrated, even by means of monologues, the “phallus” is always bad, especially when combined with language or logic.
  • Male masturbation is a standard comic feature in movies, a truly mechanical affair à la Bergson, or even an insult—neither “wanker” nor “tosser” is ever used qua term of endearment. Female masturbation, yet another token of emancipation.
  • A woman constantly putting her hands on a muscular man sitting beside her gets no rebuke. The touched man’s doing the same, as that muscular man has actually observed, would be called “groping”.
  • Women’s menopausal crises deserve warmth and compassion; men’s midlife crises are the fodder for TV comedies.
  • A wilful man taking the initiative stifles female self-expression and reinforces implicitly gender stereotypes; a man waiting to be asked is an ill-mannered arsehole.
  • With luck, the man who takes the initiative may occasionally be thanked as helpful; without luck, he is guilty of “mansplaining”, at the very least.
  • Women can talk freely for both sexes—or more, given the alleged fluidity and plurality of genders of the human race; men, on their part, can never understand what it is like to be a woman, for they are not women.
  • Women’s unwarranted claims are female intuitions, displays of emotional intelligence, oracular truths cast in a different voice, deep insights; men’s unwarranted claims are prejudices.
  • On the job, a man seeking sexual favours in exchange for professional advantages is deemed to be harassing another—’me-too’ thinks that. A woman offering sexual favours in exchange for professional advantages, though, is still deemed to be the victim of harassment, given the enduring “patriarchy” or the “rape culture” of our age, the inherent “vulnerability” of women, and the “predatory” nature of men.
  • An older woman parading a much younger lover is cheered on: “Go Cathrine!”, says the British historian Lucy Worsley (b. 1973) in her TV documentary, The Empire of the Tsars. No TV personality would dare to utter so publicly “Go Donald!” or “Go Silvio!” on the same grounds.
  • On a similar wavelength, young adult women are (rightfully) given the right to vote, join a trade union, launch a ‘disruptive’ start-up, buy an assault rifle (in parts of the US), decide whether to have an abortion, and found a political party. If they happen to have sex with an older and/or well-established man, however, then they become all of a sudden mentally immature persons who cannot make wise choices and can only be the passive victims of seedy sexual intents. Responsible agency has vanished. Young adult men who end up in bed with the emulators (emulatresses?) of Catherine the Great are hardly ever mentioned, and never discussed.
  • Oppression may be unseen, but eyes matter: men can create a “hostile environment” by merely looking at a woman. The older and more ungainly the man is, the easier this feat of perlocutionary gazing becomes.
  • Words matter too: “cunt” and “bitch” are condemned as sexist, while “dork” and “dickhead” are used with liberality and much gusto.
  • Women who work and see to domestic chores suffer from a double burden; men who do the same are emancipated, almost Swedish.
  • Whether in Sweden or elsewhere, many men may be constantly deferring to capable and/or domineering mothers, elder sisters, grandmothers, aunts, girlfriends, fiancées and wives. These men’s bosses may be women, and so may also be their local MPs, ministers of reference, PMs, presidents and mayors. And yet, almost magically,  these men are regularly said to be reaping the benefits of power-hungry “patriarchy”. Could it ever be the case that matriarchs project their appetite?
  • Men telling women what to do are said to enjoy the privilege of command; women telling men what to do are said to experience the “emotional stress” of organisation.
  • A woman slapping a man in public leads to amused or perplexed curiosity; a man slapping a woman in public leads to cops being called onto the scene.
  • A woman working as a childminder is the image of motherly love; a man doing the same is a potential paedophile whose identity and penal record must be triple-checked—these days, many men are quite simply terrified of talking to children.
  • Female bisexuality is experimental and accepted as part of growing up; male bisexuality is unsettling and rejected as screwing up: the sure path to a woman’s rejection. Only female sexuality is truly allowed to be fluid.
  • Genders are said to be many and pliable; yet “men” are spotted with uncanny ease and blamed for the root of all evils: patriarchy.
  • The mysteries and intricacies of the human psyche don’t exist. Forget about Seneca, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Jung. The myriad motives of romance and erotic life are nowhere to be seen. Our hearts are open books. And very short ones to boot. ‘Men’ are power-hungry, sex-crazed pigs. ‘Women’ aren’t. That’s all there is to be known. (Only liberal economists have been able to produce an even more inane philosophical anthropology: Homo oeconomicus. And perhaps, quite ironically, only the most adamant patriarchal Puritans or Wahabis have ever shown as remarkable a propensity to stern moralism, judgmental self-righteousness, Manichean inflexibility and unforgiving dogmatism.)
  • A penniless woman hooked on antidepressants calls rightly for universal pity; a penniless man hooked on alcohol calls sinisterly for the epithet of “loser”.
  • A woman who kills a baby is the embodied tragedy of depression; a man who does the same is a monster to be locked away forever, or fried to a crisp.
  • A woman who commits a crime deserves the attention of teams of psychologists and social workers; a man who is found guilty of the same crime can simply be locked away and forgotten—though his prison rapists may notice him.
  • Male-only priesthood in the Roman Church is condemned as sexist by unbelieving feminists, who celebrate the creed of Finland’s SuperShe island for excluding men.
  • Tearooms packed with women are an oasis of independence; bars packed with men  are a gateway to hell. (The Spirits of Prohibition keep nurturing women’s higher ground, even as they occupy traditional male grounds now.)
  • Women who are afraid of men have good reasons; men who are afraid of women have bad problems.
  • Women’s access to the cohort of corporate multi-millionaires is a profound matter of equality to be fought for by all; the plight of poor mine workers, lorry drivers and bin-men is something that is habitually forgotten by the most vocal female activists. Corporate-executive glass ceilings trump common drone-work cellars.

One does not need to be the much-reviled psychologist Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) to abhor these more-and-more commonplace forms of misandry. (Yes, this word can make sense.) It is enough to be an old-fashioned egalitarian, a compassionate human being, or merely a concerned parent of boys.

New ideas are often old ones resurfacing in new schools and  new guises. Evidently, men still await their emancipation from gender roles that, unlike women’s, have changed little, and are now being endorsed by empowered females that keep assuming that they are still the weaker sex. This mixture makes indeed for a toxic potion, which should be cast away. Whether then to err on the side of conservative prudence and uptight censorship, or on that of liberal freedom and loose pluralism, it is not something that I can settle here. The reader is free to err as s/he wills. Who is infallible, after all?

The inequality, however, is settled. Someone is certainly benefitting immensely from the status quo, but it is not men at large, whose human rights get merrily trampled on by the 1% while, at the same time, men keep being loathed in common discourse qua men for their supposed default privilege.

 

Notes

* I thank Dr Lydia Amir, founding member of the International Society for Humor Studies, Dr Natalie Ellen Evans of the University of Guelph, Canada, and Dr Ileana Szymanski, kindred philosopher and Ignatian soul, for their feedback on early drafts of this text. Sadly, Dr Szymanski (1975-2019) did not live to see this piece published. It is therefore to her memory that my satire is dedicated: to the memory of a dear friend, first of all, but also that of a deep-reaching and witty scholar, who was ever in love with Aristotle and her own teaching vocation.

[1] The present text is based on the last chapter of my book, Thinking and Talking (Gatineau: Northwest Passage Books, 2019, pp.281–90), and is part of a set of examples of “talking rhetoric” that are included therein, i.e., “shorter works of mine penned with the aim of edifying, engaging or entertaining the reader, to an extent that is uncommon and/or unneeded in regular academic writing” (x). The chief models for my satirical writings are Carlo Cipolla and, above all, Flavio Baroncelli, to whom a previous issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum is dedicated. Readers looking for standard, stately academic prose, or little prone to tongue-in-cheek reflexive acrobatics, should simply steer clear of the present text, which is unworthy of them and their attention. Part of the rationale for its revision and re-issuing is the transformation of the NSU study circle for which it is intended, since this study circle is going to merge with another and launch a novel NSU study cycle about contemporary elites, or “the 1%”.

[2] The case of 21st-century Greece is particularly telling of these troubling trends and striking contradictions (cf. Yannis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room. My Battle with Europe‘s Deep Establishment, London: Bodley Head, 2017). Also, the readers of Nordicum-Mediterraneum are familiar with the case of Iceland’s 2008 crash, which has been covered in many contributions to the journal.

[3] Andrea Dworkin, “Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia”, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p.108. In his 1996 book, Il razzismo è una gaffe (Rome: Donzelli, p.37), Flavio Baroncelli offers a charitable interpretation of Dworkin’s denial of the possibility “for a man and a woman to just make love”. He does so by adding an important premise, which Dworkin had failed to state: there are lots of “young men”, both on- and off “campus”, who “act like bullies (that is, they try to come across as ‘normal’ in one another’s eyes) and express precisely that conception of the other half of the human race that Dworkin attributes to men in general.” At the same time, in a humorous “Dialogue between Andrea Dworkin and Nelson Mandela” (Mi manda Platone, Genoa: il melangolo, 2009, pp.136-37; the dialogue is said to replicate in fiction the real exchanges occurred between Baroncelli and Dworkin, who were both notably overweight and aging when they met in the US), the Italian humorist-philosopher depicts the titular characters coming to a secretive agreement on power and inequality. Specifically, in order to “combat their handicap” and keep “appealing to young women”, elderly heterosexual men like Mandela and obese middle-aged lesbians like Dworkin must go on relying upon “myths” such as “the wisdom and experience” of old age, or the outlandish radical theses of controversial academic “books showing that Plato… justified and strengthened male power” (ibid.). As the fictional Dworkin timidly admits in the  fictional dialogue: “I realise that in a truly egalitarian world, without differences in wealth, prestige, intellectual charm, in short, power, beautiful people would go with beautiful people… old people into the dung-heap… the fat ones…” (p.137).

[4] Julia Kristeva, Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme, Paris: Fayard, 1993. Cf. also my review of The Portable Kristeva in Symposium 5(1)/2001: 120–3.

[5] Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World, London: Continuum, 2000, 134–5. Cf. also my reviews of Irigaray’s Key Writings (The European Legacy 13(7)/2008: 879–81) and Sharing the World (The European Legacy 16(5)/2011: 668–9).

Laura Gustafsson & Terike Haapoja (eds.), A Museum of Nonhumanity (Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2019)

Launched in Finland and touring Norway and Italy (and Taiwan), the book hereby reviewed documents a significant artistic project exploring the many facets of dehumanisation and inhumanity, which the participants wish to consign to “history” in lieu of “a new, more inclusive era”, as the introduction spells out for the reader (5).

Emblematically, the introduction is followed by the text of the speech delivered by Cécile Kashetu Kyenge, Italian member of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, at the inauguration of the “Museum of Nonhumanity”—in truth a complex video-installation or multi-media exhibition—at the Festival of Santarcangelo di Romagna on 22nd February 2016. A Modenese black woman of Congolese origin, Kyenge has been the target of much misogynistic and racist rhetoric from Italy’s right-wing parties and their supporters, who have been continuing ipso facto some of the forms of dehumanisation addressed in the “museum” and, a fortiori, in this book.

Other forms are mentioned in the ensuing text, i.e. the speech delivered by the Finnish parliamentarian Silvia Modig, who recalls “child labour”, “the defenceless and the disadvantaged” and sentient or intelligent “animals” themselves as the victims of inhumane behaviours in contemporary societies, where the “tendency to categorize” them into “two camps: ‘us’ and ‘them’” is far from absent, and the reduction or removal of any bond of “empathy” made possible (9). The deeper ground of this process of dehumanisation and inhumanity in contemporary world nations is also touched upon, as the speaker refers to the “economic game” ruling over all lives, whether human or non-human, such that “our rights and opportunities are defined” on the basis of “our value to the economy, much in the same way as livestock are treated as mere numbers” with “a price tag that determines how well they are looked after.” (10)

The volume continues with a series of high-quality photographs showing the installation from a variety of different angles, as well as a detailed catalogue of the printed, artistic and other sources utilised therein (“The Archive of Nonhumanity”, 56-247). This thorough catalogue is sub-divided into twelve conceptual categories that thematise and/or problematise debated forms of non-humanity, i.e. “person” (primarily on the long-lived practice of slavery, i.e. ownership in people, contrasted with the “persona ficta” of the corporation; 72), “potentia” (in nuce, on the contested ontological status of the embryo qua person or non-person), “monster” (essentially on imprisonment and death penalties), “resource” (primarily on the little-remembered murderous sack of colonial Congo by the Belgian Crown), “boundary” (a clever juxtaposition of the management of wolves in Finland and the internment and extermination of the “Reds” in the 1918 Finnish civil war), “purity” (on the transformation of care for the mentally ill in Finland during the early 20th century, from Christian charity to eugenic control and sterilisation), “disgust” (on the colonial history and civil war of Rwanda and the rhetoric of ‘vermin’ and ‘cockroaches’ accompanying the latter), “anima” (on select philosophical sources for the sharp qualitative distinction and separation between humans and animals), “tender” (on the many cruelties of meat production and consumption), “distance” (on the technology and ideology of Nazi extermination camps), “animal” (on the etymology of the word itself), and “display” (on the Belgian Museum of Central Africa).

Two essays integrate and expand upon the previous and largest section of the book: some “condensed speculations” by Giovanna Esposito Yussif and “Empathy is part of our deepest nature” by Salla Tuomivaara. While the former explains how museums can reinforce or challenge existing ideologies, the latter shows how the cruelty of “othering practices” (256) can be countered by the kindness of our natural propensity to empathise with the living. Seemingly apt for an academic event or a scholarly journal, these two essays are very much à propos: seminars, lectures, public readings and other learned activities have been accompanying the “museum of nonhumanity” in its Nordic and Mediterranean (and south-east-Asian) itinerary.

The programme of the related events, a comprehensive list of references, credits and acknowledgments, as well as the standard colophon conclude the volume. Since the exhibition must have been missed by all who failed to attend it, this book is going to be of potential interest to this very large audience. In particular, however, persons keen on reflecting about penology, animal rights and bioethics, Finnish and colonial history, gender and minority studies, Holocaust studies, or the interplay between art and philosophy, can all find something stimulating in this volume, which is freely available worldwide on the internet as an e-book.

Lorenzo Vidino (ed.), De-Radicalization in the Mediterranean. Comparing Challenges and Approaches (Milan: Ledizioni LediPublishing, 2018)

In its very long history, the Mediterranean region has witnessed a remarkable share of cruelties and bloodshed, ranging from warfare to slave trafficking. In its recent history, jihadist terrorism has been adding its own gruesome contribution to this sorry record of human misery and misfortune. The book hereby reviewed, published under the aegis of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), comprises nine chapters dealing with the responses taken by State authorities on the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in the Middle Eastern region at large, in order to pursue effective counter-terrorist prevention and retaliation, i.e. “[c]ountering violent extremism (CVE)” (7).

The first chapter, penned by the book’s editor, tackles the paradoxical case of Italy. Despite being an active NATO member involved in foreign military actions alongside the US and a centrally situated Mediterranean country—indeed a veritable hub for migratory fluxes and an “iconic” location of Western Christendom—Italy has experienced hardly any jihadist terrorism on its soil and has contributed far less than the other major European countries in terms of radical fighters leaving its soil in order to join rebel groups in Syria or elsewhere (13). This paradox is explained by highlighting the long experience and well-tested expertise of Italian legislators, governments, courts and security bodies with regard to both internal terrorist groups and powerful organised crime, as well as the thorough use of “lengthy surveillance operations and pre-emptive raids” in conjunction with speedy “deportations” of persons that are deemed “a threat to national security” even when the courts lack damning evidence that could warrant judicial “prosecution” (15). Vidino concludes that, despite its success, Italy’s CVE approach is not designed to deal with homegrown jihadist terrorism, which might well grow in the future as the Italian Muslim community grows in numbers, and to deploy preventive measures in schools, prisons and communities where radicalisation could occur.

Vidino’s concerns sound most reasonable as soon as the reader starts considering the content of the second chapter, which deals with the long history of “international religious extremism” inside Italy’s western neighbour, France (24). Between the 1980s and the 2010s, the Gallic nation has suffered a remarkable number of violent attacks and contributed thousands of foreign fighters to conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). For a long time, the prevalent approach by the French authorities was forcefully retaliatory, but as of the mid 2010s ‘soft-power’ prevention and de-radicalisation programmes started emerging as well. Prisons, online communities, professional bodies, public administrators, civic associations, select neighbourhoods and Islamic worship centres have been targeted by a number of initiatives, both at the national and departmental levels, aimed at fostering the appreciation for the secular founding values of the French Republic, the identification of potential contexts of radicalisation, and the de-radicalisation of individuals and groups gone astray. As to “the legitimacy and effectiveness of these initiatives”, it is too soon to pass judgment (31).

The third chapter offers a perplexing picture of a country that, like Italy, had an extensive counter-terrorist know-how built in its institutional history and organisations but that, like France, has suffered much more carnage and exportation of volunteer fighters to conflict zones in MENA: Spain. After the shock of the 3/11 attacks in Madrid, existing procedures were thoroughly reviewed at all levels: legislative, governmental, judiciary, of policing and intelligence. Above all, more resources were poured in, which translated into more trained individuals dealing with CVE. Also, uniquely in the international context, the shifting of public investments meant that Spain adopted “an advanced model to acknowledge the moral and political significance of the victims of terrorism and effectively protect their rights and the rights of their families in the case of dead victims, including material compensation.” (46) Finally, ‘soft-power’ preventive measures started being implemented too as of 2012, analogously to the French case.

The fourth chapter outlines the CVE policies developed in MENA. The experiences of many countries are thus sketched very briefly and only in connection with specific issues (e.g. anti-radicalism online platforms, big-data screening, religious policies, foreign fighting, etc.). Some significant results of this comparative study are: Algeria’s being the country contributing the fewest foreign fighters to the Islamic State in Syria (probably the result of Algeria’s hard-nosed repression of fundamentalism during its “Black Decade”, 1991—2002; 65); Tunisia’s being the one contributing the most (possibly because of the relocation of Algerian extremists into that neighbouring country during the Algerian civil war); the widespread use of uncompromising, direct State intervention in the interpreting, teaching, preaching, publishing, broadcasting and financing of the Islamic religion (e.g. Saudi Arabia’s proposed “reform” of the “religious curriculum” by 2030; 66); and the intentionally “ambiguous” and open-ended wording of new counter-terrorism legislation, which can help the governments of these countries target potential terrorists as well as “silence critics and imprison activists.” (67)

The following and concluding five chapters examine in finer detail the CVE measures and approaches developed in five specific countries in MENA: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. While the policies pursued in all these countries but Jordan present considerable overlaps—Jordan’s uniqueness being its focus on creating a buffer zone along its border with Syria and preventing radicalism to cross it in either direction—the tone and the character of the contributions are anything but alike. The chapters about Morocco and Egypt offer an invariably dispassionate, comprehensive account of the many hard- and soft-power strategies implemented over the years, the former stressing interestingly how individual “psychological vulnerabilities” explain chiefly the radicals’ “captivat[ion] by violent extremism” (89). On the contrary, the chapter about Tunisia discusses at length the social and sociological premises of this captivation, and it suggests that without concrete progress in the State’s good-governance levels (e.g. reducing unemployment, improving the rule of law, transparency and accountability), radicalisation is bound to persist. Any critical spirit is, instead, absent in the chapters about Jordan and, above all, Saudi Arabia, both of which read somewhat like ministerial communiques reporting, respectively,  Jordan’s “foreign policy priorities” (133) and Saudi Arabia’s supreme role in “upholding Islam and Islamic law, which makes it the archenemy of all radical and terrorist groups claiming to hold a monopoly over the understanding and application of Islamic law and faith.” (139)

Together, all these nine chapters grant the reader an exhaustive account of the tools instituted and utilised by public authorities all over MENA and much of Southern Europe over the past two-and-a-half decades. Scholars in police and security studies, international politics and relations, and counter-terrorism are bound to find the volume of interest. The overall focus, it must be noted, is on nitty-gritty hard- and soft-power approaches implemented in each country or group of countries. Although references to colonial experiences, U.S. military interventions, and strategic interests or conflicts are sketchily present here and there in the volume, no serious geopolitical or historical aetiology of fundamentalist terrorism is to be found.

W. Friese et al. (eds.), Ascending and Descending the Acropolis: Movement in Athenian Religion; and T. Møbjerg et al. (eds.), The Hammerum Burial Site: Customs and Clothing in the Roman Iron Age (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2019)

Over the past thirty-five years, Aarhus University Press has been publishing and distributing high-quality books in collaboration with some of Denmark’s most prestigious cultural institutes and foundations. The quality at issue extends beyond the scholarly content of the books, thus encompassing the very craftsmanship of the physical volumes, the paper, the inks, the resolution of the images, the generous format and spacing of the printed texts, etc. Past issues of Nordicum-Mediterraneum contain several examples of the publisher’s achievements. Such formal aspects may seem redundant or secondary when reviewing a scientific publication, but they are very important when, as it is the case vis-à-vis the two volumes presented hereby, depicting archaeological and artistic evidence is of the essence.

Specifically, the 23rd volume of the Danish Institute at Athens’ monograph, entitled Ascending and Descending the Acropolis, comprises 10 essays, one introduction and one epilogue containing computer-generated figures as well as a host of pictures of wooden and stone plaques, temple friezes, wholes or fragments of ancient pottery, topographic plans and maps, physical sites, statues and statuettes, drawings, votive and other reliefs, and cult heads, all of which are as important as the words printed on the 277 pages of the book. Without them, or without well-rendered versions of them, the information conveyed by the volume would be conspicuously poorer and its potential for instruction significantly lower. While there may be essays that can do without visual supplements (e.g. the scholarly studies of Pausanias’ 2nd-century-AD pilgrimage to the Acropolis, 102-18, and the account of the 5th-century-BC “three sacred laws” on Athens’ Eleusinian mysteries, 160), the reader would find it much more difficult to interpret and appreciate the studies of organised and spontaneous mobility in the ancient religious practices of Attica, even when the source may be none less that Euripides’ Bacchae (147-51).

The same must be said of the book The Hammerum Burial Site, which comprises 19 contributions of various length and character about one of the most significant archaeological retrievals in fin-de-siècle Denmark, i.e. the 1993 “Hammerum Girl” (9). Published in conjunction with the Jutland Archaeological Society, this book contains images of many different sorts: maps, plans, photographs, drawings, reconstructions, tables, textile patterns and close-ups, microscope shots, 3-D visualisations, scans and schematics. The resulting overall scope of the book’s contents is impressive, for it manages to embrace all the difference facets of a thorough archaeological investigation in contemporary Denmark: the scientific, bureaucratic and physical history of the actual excavation; the stitch-by-stitch reconstruction of the clothing and hairstyles of the buried bodies in connection with evidence from contemporary artwork; the scans, Carbon-dating and chemical analyses of wooden specimens, soil samples, textile fibres and dyes, scalp and body hairs, DNA traces, twigs and pollen; the step-by-step replication of the deceased’s dress via yarns, looms, spinning and waving techniques analogous to the Nordic-Roman ones of the 2nd century AD; the presentation to the public of the “Hammerum Girl”, including competitions on the best reproduction of her clothes and coiffure, Hammerum-Girl-inspired artistic events, ad-hoc digital applications and supervised walks to visit the original site.

The volume on the Hammerum burial site concentrates on one highly specific excavation and develops therefrom a rich account of the many careful aspects of the sophisticated archaeological practices whereby a person who died and was interred 18 centuries ago can be grasped, re-imagined and approached today. The volume on mobile religious processions and rituals in ancient Athens has a much broader ground to explore and chart. Resulting from a 2014 workshop held at the Danish Institute in Athens under the title “Ascending and Descending the Acropolis: Sacred Travel in Attica and Its Borderlands”, this latter volume can appeal to specialists outside the sole area of Greek archaeology, e.g. scholars in classics, ancient religions, as well as historians and even philosophers interested in the classical age.

Since I am a philosopher by training, I should underline how the latter volume’s pivoting around the “mobile turn” (13) of the early 2000s in the humanities and social sciences has quintessentially philosophical roots, which reflect the 20th-century abandonment of static metaphysical conceptions and preconceptions in both analytical (cf. Neurath) and Continental traditions (cf. Heidegger), and the emergence of dynamic paradigms of thought (cf. Wittgenstein, Deleuze) that have later found reverberations in sociology (e.g. Bauman, Beck, Giddens) as well as other social and human sciences, including archaeology itself (cf. Kristensen’s introduction, 11-9, and Graf’s epilogue, 255-65). More specific philosophical concerns and references surface also in two contributions to the latter volume, i.e. the Ilissian and Kallirhoan shrines described in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (Maria Salta’s “Under the Care of Daemons”; 63-101) and the truly “classical paideia” of the educated elites in Pausanias’ times (Maria Pretzler’s “Pausanias and the Intellectual Travellers of the Roman Imperial Period”, 103-18).  

In Lightning Memory: A Philosophical Dictionary à la Baroncelli

The following definitions combine insightful personal memories and personally memorable insights that I recall from, or associate with, Flavio Baroncelli (1944–2007) qua eloquent and witty teacher, brilliant and ingenious writer, fast and sharp conversationalist, generous and kind human being, and committed promoter of the teacher- and student exchange programmes linking together Iceland, my adoptive country, and the University of Genoa, my alma mater. Not all of them must be taken literally or too seriously; besides, I would not agree with some of them myself! All of them are, however, sincere tokens of gratitude, friendship and love to a truly remarkable individual, who enjoyed entertaining and shocking his audiences, but above all liked making them think, debate, and think some more. Furthermore, these definitions are a creative and inevitably poor attempt at exemplifying for the Anglophone public the sort of pithy and humorous style that, inter alia, made Baroncelli famous in Italy in his day.

 

Actuality

Another word for potentiality.

 

Addiction

A disease mistaken for moral failure.

 

Adulation

Causing pleasure by sly words, even when the listener knows that they are lies. Philosophers, in their stately parlance, would call it a perlocutionary speech act.

 

Advertising

The daily demonstration of how little control we have over our own will.

 

Agnosticism

A polite way for educated people to be open-minded pluralists in theory but narrow-minded atheists in practice.

 

Analysis (of concepts)

The bizarre tendency to turn ambiguous profundity into unambiguous superficiality.

 

Analytic (philosophy)

A typically modern attempt at making self-conscious philosophers sound like respectable scientists.

 

Banking

The best way to acquire power in a capitalist society, especially if one wishes to destroy it.

 

Beauty (physical)

One of the most important life-defining characteristics that a person can have the good luck to possess and that philosophers keep stating not to matter.

 

Bedroom

A seemingly private place where both neighbours and State authorities seem often eager to enter.

 

Brotherhood

The least understood yet most important principle of the French Revolution: without a modicum of genuinely felt compassion among fellow citizens, both liberty and equality will get used to ruin someone else’s life.

 

Censorship

A dangerous and stupid way not to listen to dangerous and stupid claims.

 

Chickens

When rasping hopelessly and continuously on a hard road surface, they exemplify instinctual behaviour as opposed to deliberate.

 

Cigarettes

Powerful, sweet, devious killers.

 

Clarity

The curse of any philosopher who may wish to come across as deep, original and worthy of enduring attention.

 

Coherence (aka consistency)

The unhealthy obsession with getting rid of all the instances of personal diversity, creativity, capriciousness and experimentalism that make individual life interesting and collective life possible.

 

Communism

The 20th-century political scarecrow that, for the duration of about one generation, made the de iure liberal countries of the world be actually a little more liberal than their de facto oligarchic past and present flag out.

 

Compassion

The most important virtue cultivated by Christianity.

 

Competition

A much-cherished liberal value, as long as it does not apply to oneself.

 

Complaining

Generally loathed by the very same people who have most reason to complain—an instance of slave morality.

 

Continental (philosophy)

A not-so-modern attempt at making self-important philosophers sound like profound mystics.

 

Courage

Someone else’s form of madness.

 

Culture

The folklore of the rich.

 

Daydreaming

Coping with far-too-real nightmares.

 

Defecation

Its training in infancy reveals how people prefer freedom to be qualified and circumscribed.

 

Discipline (and Punish)

The most important book by Michel Foucault, who taught us that the more societies publicly incense liberty and call themselves “liberal”, the less freedom common people truly enjoy in order to do as they please.

 

Dogs

The ideal sort of loyal, selfless, hard-working and simple-mindedly grateful employees that employers would like to have.

 

Economics (contemporary)

A branch of mathematics mistaken for empirical science.

 

Economics (modern)

A branch of philosophy mistaken for empirical science.

 

Elucidation

Clarification articulating possible meanings of a pithy expression, with consequent loss of aesthetic and thought-provoking value of the latter. Sterilisation by explanation. (E.g. paraphrasing a poem, explaining a joke.)

 

Emancipation

The possibility for all people to be as bad and as silly as the rich and powerful minorities frequently are.

 

Etiquette

Aristocracy’s last ditch at controlling modern society.

 

Euphemism

See “Get lost!” below.

 

Evolution

It is only after Darwin that people understood what the heck Lucretius and Telesio were talking about.

 

Exceptions (making)

The first step towards tolerance and pluralism.

 

Faith

An option generally available only to a person who stops doubting.

 

Folklore

The culture of the poor.

 

Geese

Birds that can be confused with swans, especially in Iceland.

 

Geometry

An exact formal science that can be used rhetorically as a persuasive labelling method for inexact metaphysical reasoning.

 

Get (lost!)

Uttered in a timely fashion, it can save a person the trouble of having to answer a difficult question.

 

Greek

If ancient, it is an excellent way to display one’s own erudition.

 

Health

The true source of happiness, yet regularly forgotten until missing.

 

Hegel (Georg Friedrich)

A typical German philosopher, he wrote several tomes to demonstrate that nothing stays the same.

 

History (of ideas)

A way to find out why we think the way we think.

 

Homogenisation

The equalising social process deplored by anthropologists whereby identifying the poor, the outcast, the loathed, the derided and the downtrodden becomes a little less easy.

 

Hume (David)

An uncharacteristically prodigal Scotsman, he noticed that the only way to be sure that all matches in the box do work is to light them all up.

 

Hypocrisy

The misunderstood virtue of avoiding conflict in reality by accepting conflict in principle.

 

Ideology

A set of loosely interconnected concepts, some of which may be even mutually contradictory, that allow people to feel justified in their claims and actions, or at least to project an air of justification for them.

 

Illness

The demonstration of the bodily basis of the mind.

 

Indifference

The least acknowledged yet most important virtue in a pluralist society: by caring little about what other people believe or do, mutual tolerance can be the norm.

 

Insight (aka Intuition)

Prejudice we like.

 

Institutions

The remarkable social invention whereby to preserve the memory of past errors and make the inexorably ignorant new generations somewhat less likely to repeat them.

 

Intervention (by the State)

A much-loathed socialist value, which liberals accept as soon as they are in trouble.

 

Jokes

A valuable means of instruction that can reach even those who do not wish to be instructed.

 

Kant (Immanuel)

A typical German philosopher, he wrote two tomes to undo an earlier one.

 

Knowledge

That which philosophers seek and analyse most, and yet have the least of.

 

Language

The precious and inevitable source of all misunderstandings.

 

Lashes (by whip)

As long as someone else gets more than you do, most slaves will not rebel against slavery.

 

Latin

Another good way to show one’s own erudition.

 

Liberalism

The political wisdom teaching that State authority should be used only to protect a person from her worst enemies: her neighbours.

 

Life

A rather bothersome business, but also the only one in town.

 

Lust

An open motive among men; less so among women. Gender equality’s lewd horizon.

 

Magic

Another way to understand religion.

 

Marx (Karl)

A typical German philosopher, he wrote several tomes to demonstrate that, normally, if the employer gets more, the employee gets less—and vice versa.

 

Meritocracy

A neologism by the privileged.

 

Mixed (marriage)

The easiest and fastest way to explain why a marriage did not last. No such option is available for divorces between people of the same ethnic origin, the explanation of which may then take years of keen psychological scrutiny.

 

Montaigne (Michel de)

His essays became so famous and commonplace that later philosophers forgot to mention the source of the ideas that they discussed and, eventually, Montaigne himself. There can be such a thing as too much fame.

 

More (Thomas)

Great wisdom expressed with clarity.

 

Nietzsche (Friedrich)

An atypical German philosopher, he wrote aphorisms to acknowledge a major yet neglected motive of human thought and action: resentment.

 

Nothingness

The likeliest outcome of a person’s life, which we spend trying not to think about it.

 

Order

In practice, the supreme official principle of social life.

 

Originality

The future outcome of the present ignorance about the past.

 

Pain (and Pleasure)

The fabric of our inner tapestry.

 

Philosophy

When good, it is the playful use of our imagination and of our reason in order to break apart, toy with and recombine concepts, beliefs and habits of thought, in order to make better sense of them. When bad, it is the skillful use of our imagination and of our reason in order to do the same and, in the end, be even more confused.

 

Poetry

An artificial reminder of life’s beauty.

 

Political (correctness)

The ungainly social process whereby the less respected members of a community can have a chance to be paid a little more respect.

 

Pornography

A widespread yet uncomfortable signpost of liberal freedom.

 

Potentiality

Another word for actuality.

 

Poverty

A person’s attribute that, if conspicuous, makes other significant attributes deplorable or intolerable to the surrounding individuals: age, race, religious affiliation, ignorance, ugliness, etc.

 

Prejudice

Insights we dislike.

 

Pride

A vice leading frequently to virtuous behaviour.

 

Quality

Often confused with quantity.

 

Quantity

Often confused with quality.

 

Questions

The best instrument available to reveal how ignorant we are, no matter the number of university degrees we may have.

 

Race

A historically popular but unnecessary notion which justifies people being nasty to one another. In its absence, freckles or bad pronunciation can serve the same purpose.

 

Radicalism

The art of making outlandish ideas sound plausible, thus duly impressing unsuspecting young minds and potential sexual partners.

 

Reason

The perplexing faculty to take apart whatever solid conclusion we had reached before.

 

Rhetoric

The unjustly neglected study of how language shapes people’s life under all circumstances.

 

Righteousness

The most dangerous virtue cultivated by Christianity.

 

Scepticism

Unwise over-intelligent overthinking—it is by far too delightful an endeavour for most philosophers to resist the temptation of indulging in it despite their own better judgment.

 

Sparrows

A natural reminder of life’s beauty.

 

Spinoza (Baruch)

Great wisdom could be expressed with more clarity.

 

Stratification

Having someone below you is usually more important than having someone above—another instance of slave morality.

 

Straw-man (fallacies)

Mistaken by logicians as fictional errors, they are the far-too-real claims of ordinary men and women; if one is willing, and brave enough, to listen to real people.

 

Stupidity

The regularly underplayed yet visibly increased outcome of greater freedom in human societies.

 

Swans

Birds that can be confused with geese, especially in Iceland.

 

Syllogism

A structured way of thinking and talking that allows the person using it to come across as astoundingly intelligent and thereby force another to shut up, even if the latter may actually be right.

 

Tolerance

The socially crucial ability to endure people that we dislike.

 

Toleration

The perplexing notion whereby tolerance is not enough in society, for we must also like the people that we dislike.

 

Torture

The most efficient way to get bad information from innocent weaklings and no information at all from guilty brutes.

 

Transubstantiation

To modern eyes, an old form of cannibalism.

 

Ugliness (physical)

One of the most important life-defining characteristics that a person can have the ill luck to possess and that philosophers keep stating not to matter.

 

Unpleasantness

That from which all great ideologies wish to free us once and for all, but which all great historians tell us that we must accept for any human endeavour to have a chance to work at all.

 

Urination

See defecation.

 

Violence

Whether threatened or applied, it is in practice the supreme unofficial principle of social life.

 

Voltaire

The best example of how being a master of style condemns a man to being remembered as a minor thinker.

 

Wealth

A person’s attribute that, if conspicuous, makes other significant attributes invisible to the surrounding individuals: age, race, religious affiliation, ignorance, ugliness, etc.

 

Will

We like thinking of it as free, despite all contrary evidence.

 

Wittgenstein (Ludwig)

A Continental philosopher mistaken for an analytical one.

 

Xanadu

One of the many words for the imaginary place of endless joy that all cultures have concocted and that only some silly philosophers would state not to want to go to.

 

Youth

The time of peak performance in a person’s life, the rest of which is spent trying to make use of ridiculous concepts that can help that person to enjoy some respect and self-respect: the wisdom of old age, the charm of grey hair, the value of experience, etc.

 

Zionist

Often confused with “Jewish” and “Israeli”, it can be combined with them in the following matrix:

Jewish, Israeli and Zionist

Non-Jewish, Israeli and Zionist

Jewish, Non-Israeli and Zionist

Jewish, Israeli and Non-Zionist

Non-Jewish, Non-Israeli and Zionist

Jewish, Non-Israeli and Non-Zionist

Non-Jewish, Israeli and Non-Zionist

Non-Jewish, Non-Israeli and Non-Zionist

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin, 2017)

In the age of unembarrassed narcissistic statesmanship and pervasive entrepreneurial self-promotion, bombastic assertions have become the norm. The book’s title, under this respect, is no exception.

First of all, in a commonplace and probably unaware feat of nationalistic navel-gazing that Uruguay-born Eduardo Galeano taught scholars to keep in check, the book does not deal with America, but with the United States of America (US) alone. Secondly, the book does not deal with class in general, but rather with the economically impoverished and socially immobile working class of Anglo-Saxon (or -British) descent inhabiting that vast country. Thirdly, as the book’s own extensive endnotes reveal, their history has been told repeatedly, studied conscientiously and, whenever possible, quantified, measured and dissected in all sorts of ways. The myth of boundless opportunity and the recurrent edifying rags-to-riches tales may well constitute the backbone of the so-called “American dream”, but US journalism, scholarship, religious and party life, music, literature, drama and cinema have also paid attention to the inopportune yet indubitable rags-to-rags experiences of many poor white US citizens of Anglo-British descent.

As to the seemingly most inflammatory and contentious words in the title, i.e. “white trash”, they are actually apt and accurate, for this particular section of the US population have been identified as such for a very long time, as well as by additional hosts of no less unsavoury expressions: “Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates… Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.” (320) Following chronologically an unending streak of debasing and insulting terms that the debased and insulted cannot but internalise from childhood, the book offers a compelling history of poor, ignorant, brutalised and brutal white US citizens, from the first English colonies on the east coast to today’s “hundreds of thousands of faceless employees who work at a Wal-Mart” for pitiful wages all over the nation (321). They are the people living in bad homes in bad places, who have bad diets and bad teeth, who suffer from bad health and smell bad, who speak bad English and display bad manners. They are those who start badly, fare badly and end badly–unless they get out of this bad rap, which may mean sometimes doing very bad things (i.e. things that middle-class morality and/or the legislator disapprove of).

Isenberg’s compelling history is enlivened by a most competent combination of fluid descriptive prose and many well-chosen, intelligent quotations, typically though not exclusively from unsympathetic observers. Given the standard conditions of illiteracy and misery of “white trash” communities, hardly any testimony has reached us from their past that was not recorded by members of the superior classes, who seldom looked upon such “offscourings” with a kind eye and rarely empathised with their plight, or tried to do much to change or alleviate it. More often than not, the miserable condition of miserable people was accepted as part of God’s order or, later on, as a natural condition, whether cast in the scientific hence unassailable language of agronomy, animal husbandry, Darwinian evolution, genetics or economics. Poverty, according to these accounts, is not only inevitable socially and economically; also, it is deserved, whether morally or biologically.

If anything, fear and loathing have been the regular attitudes of the members of the upper classes, who have habitually had no qualms whatsoever about making calculated use of their inferiors qua cheap labour (e.g. indentured workers and rural tenants), co-oppressors of other poor people (e.g. native Americans and black slaves), perennial debtors, forcible inhabitants and slapdash improvers of the most inhospitable parts of the country (e.g. swamps and natives’ contested territories), cannon fodder, objects of ridicule and sexual ab/use, subjects for social and medical experimentation (e.g. eugenic programmes), users of addictive and unhealthy consumer goods (e.g. tobacco and junk food), sheep-like followers of dubious evangelical preachers, unenriched protagonists of commercially succesful fads (e.g. comic strips and TV shows), and pliable voters in skewed electoral systems allowing for de facto oligarchy and demagoguery under de iure equality and democracy. Latin America’s peones and campesinos could recount similar stories, their haciendas and fazendas showing the same forms of deprivation as the US plantations, their bidonvilles and favelas recalling eerily the Hoovervilles and trailer parks of the North, and inequitable grinding class structures replicating themselves analogously across much of the American continent.

On a more cheerful note, religiously minded idealists and philanthropists (e.g. J.E. Oglethorpe in chapter two), progressive men of science and politicians (e.g. R.G. Tugwell in chapter nine), and the sporadic successful white-trash social climber (e.g. Davy Crockett in chapter five) are also recalled and accounted for. No clear-cut, straightforward recipe is offered to explain how, when and why upward social mobility may become likelier for members of the functional underclass–as the great Canadian-born economist J.K. Galbraith characterised employable white-trash individuals and other members of the lower classes in the US. (Galbraith is cited in Isenberg’s book in connection with the notion that pockets of utter destitution continued to exist in the affluent society emerging in the US after the second world war; 265.) Beneath them, one should not forget, there is also a dysfunctional underclass of variously named knaves, prostitutes, beggars, vagrants and addicts (Marx’s controversial Lumpenproletariat), as well as impoverished old pensioners and/or ill people, whether physically or mentally or both. Such a vast group of US citizens, according to Isenberg, is also part and parcel of white trash, whose sensationally publicised record of crime and violence is a reminder of the shady roots of much English immigration in the 17th century.

Good farming practices, education, institutional aid or private patronage, diversified job opportunities, enlightened legal and fiscal systems, and the unmeasurable but essential phenomena of talent and luck are variously recalled at several different points in the book. Nevertheless, its author never commits to any clear synthesis or one-size-fits-all solution. More modestly, while displaying cases of upward social mobility, she acknowledges the conspicuous differences in relative poverty between slave-holding economies and free-labour ones (cf. chapters three and seven), as well as the considerable achievements of F.D. Roosevelt’s and L.B. Johnson’s social policies (cf. chapters nine and ten). Something can be done to reduce poverty and increase the chances for poor white US citizens to lead a better life; indeed, something has been done and proven workable in the nation’s history. Yet history, whether tragically or farcically, is not inherently bound to repeat itself.

Under this respect, in the new preface included in the 2017 paperback edition (the original publication for Viking Press having been issued in 2016), trade unions are briefly acknowledged too, this time by quoting the famous media tycoon W.R. Hearst who, in 1904, asserted: “Wide and equitable distribution of wealth is essential to a nation’s prosperous growth and intellectual development. And that distribution is brought about by the labor union more than any other agency of our civilization” (xvi). More or less revolutionary movements such as Protestant radicalism (e.g. diggers and levellers), “Jacobinism”, anarchism and communism are only mentioned as derogatory terms in connection with the wealthy’s condemnation of all rebels and threatening dissenters (166). Fear of them, somehow, is never openly presented as an effective incentive for the wealthy to grant concessions, or even temporary respite, to the underclass, even if the terror of major social upheaval, especially qua slave rebellion in the South, is discussed as an important political factor in the context of the Civil War.

No charts and numbers are to be found in this book. The historical prose chosen by Isenberg has a far more literary quality and overall tone than the run-of-the-mill academic publications to which she refers in her lengthy and valuable endnotes. This stylistic choice might explain by itself the book’s success in terms of sales. No clear-cut, explicit criteria for key-terms are presented either. “Class”, “identity” and “race” resonate all over the book, but no specific definition or theoretical foundation is given, which might be a way not to antagonise the book’s readers and therefore appeal to as many of them as possible. The same fuzziness colours the standards of poverty and deprivation or, conversely, of wealth and well-being, that should help us distinguish between and within classes. Thus, in the final chapters of the book, pathologically obese white-trash individuals appear all of a sudden, after an account of centuries of emaciated and starving white-trash ancestors, whom hunger forced into geophagy. (Not far from the US southern coastline, today’s Haitians still consume large amounts of mud cakes, aka mud pies or dirt cookies.) Such shortcomings may displease exacting academics, but that should be no major concern for the book’s author. Incisive, instructive and interesting, her book has already reached a large readership in the US.

Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room. My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (London: The Bodley Head, 2017)

Henry Kissinger, an academic turned politician, is said to have quipped that academic disputes are extremely bitter because the stakes at universities are painfully low. The book reviewed hereby is authored by Yannis Varoufakis, another academic turned politician, and it suggests, in an entirely unintentional manner, that political disputes are fairly polite and verbally restrained even if the stakes are incredibly high, such as the livelihood of millions, e.g. the common people of Greece as of 2010.

Varoufakis’ book chronicles his turbulent and short time qua finance minister of the Hellenic Republic in 2015 (chapters 6 through 17) while adding a number of reasoned observations about the world’s, Europe’s and Greece’s economic sorrows since the annus horribilis 2008 (chapters 1 through 5). Finally, it informs the reader about some of the latest developments in Varoufakis’ own recent career as a Greek MP (Epilogue), including the launch of a new political party, called “Democracy in Europe Movement” (or “DiEM25”). The idea of founding a new political party matured several months after Varoufakis left his post in the Hellenic cabinet headed by Alexis Tsipras, the young leader of the initially broad leftist alliance Syriza, which came to power during the most painful years of Greece’s economic collapse (chapter 5).

Tsipras and a now much ‘thinner’ Syriza have recently celebrated the formal end of the nation’s subjection to its creditors’ representatives—the so-called “troika” aka the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB)—and their notorious Memorandum of Understanding (cf. especially chapters 8 and 9). Therein, the socially chilling and economically contractionary conditionalities of the debtor country are cast black on white in the pursuit of three bailout agreements that future European scholars, politicians and activists ought to retrieve, peruse and reflect upon whenever contemplating how nations should deal with their creditors. Latin American and African ones are likely to be familiar with the score at issue. The conditionalities accepted by three different Greek governments included repeated rounds of cuts to old-age pensions and public expenditures on healthcare, culture and education; mass dismissals of public-sector workers; reduced funds to tax-monitoring bodies; loss of State control over public bodies that must thereafter respond directly to the creditors (cf. especially chapter 2).

It transpires from the book’s accumulated evidence that many experts, especially within the IMF, knew perfectly well that such conditionalities would strangle Greece’s economy and make it incapable of generating the revenue whereby to repay its creditors, and that only the most creative economic modelling could buttress the official position of the troika (cf. Appendix 2). Nevertheless, the creditors pressed all the same such conditionalities onto the Greek State and particularly, despite growing signs of snowballing deterioration, onto the government led by Syriza, which many eggheads in Europe’s governing elite feared qua resurgence of the political left, evidently to be snuffed out in its cradle (chapter 9).

The first and the second bailout agreements were required to salvage German and French banks that had invested in Greek bonds and were now unwilling to oblige to market discipline, which John Kenneth Galbraith had once claimed to be praised by all market sycophants as long as it applies to people other than oneself (Tout savoir, ou presque, sur l’économie, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978). The third one had a specific political mission to accomplish, whether the money involved in the process was going to be recovered by the creditors or not. Had the European authorities and the German leadership failed “to win Alexis [Tsipras] over to their side”, then they should “create such chaos that his government fell, allowing for its replacement with a compliant technocratic administration, just as they had in 2012.” (92).

Meeting by meeting, debate by debate, telephone call by telephone call, e-mail by e-mail, SMS by SMS, the actual exchanges between the protagonists of this intricate political saga come across as surprisingly civil under most circumstances and most carefully worded in public as well as in private conversations, even when great tension and palpable disagreement occur. Gallant propriety endures even when starkly opposed conceptions of the European unification project are voiced and debated, such as German conservative Wolfgang Schäuble’s plan to “ditch […Europe’s] welfare states” as no longer affordable vis-à-vis the competition of “places like India and China”, contra Varoufakis’ aspiration to the “globalization of welfare benefits and living wages” (212). Greece, in this debate, is revealed to be the starting point in Schäuble’s plan for the pauperisation of Europe’s middle class that also the IMF’s director, Christine Lagarde, seems de facto keen to facilitate, starting “with Greek pharmacies” (367).

Some nasty epithets did fly now and then, and the media’s recurrent, blatant and effective smearing campaigns are duly noted too, including a horrid “set up” scene in which an “irate businessman” attacked Varoufakis in July 2015 as the “former minister” who had ruined him (476). However, unlike the talks between Varoufakis and a long list of high-ranking European officials and politicians appearing in his book, these mucky incidents of character assassination are not worth being recalled with equal care and written all down for posterity to muse upon. Incidentally, we learn that “vulture fund” is regarded in high-level political circles as too crass a term, hence “hold-out” is preferred instead (508 n33). Apparently, strong language is not required in determining or merely discussing whether the wealthy creditors’ pecuniary concerns or the vulnerable people’s more immediate ones—shelter, food, health, survival—should be given precedence in a time of conspicuous recession. As the leading European institutions and the IMF are concerned, the former come obviously first.

Perhaps, as several passages of the book point to, the generally cautious politeness of the conversations can be explained by the way in which all these powerful individuals talking to each other seem generally aware, if not afraid, of being spied upon, recorded and/or leaked to the press. As a result, all these powerful individuals regularly hide their real meanings beneath layers of ambiguity and vagueness, which too blunt a language would impede. As an amusing account of a conversation between Varoufakis and the US economist Jeff Sachs discloses, some spies can show “no compunction whatsoever about revealing they were tapping [Varoufakis’] phone” (396).

Honest and constructive rational dialogue is thus one of the victims of the endless tactical games played by the powerful and frequently unscrupulous individuals paraded in the book. Lying is considered by many of them a sign of intelligence, deafness to argument a sensible stratagem, and the most political issues of all—who gets what, when and how—are couched dogmatically as technical matters. Time, energy, resources, decency and integrity, if not humanity itself, are sacrificed to strategies aimed at outsmarting and manipulating one another, until the point comes when a modicum of frank exchange is eventually permitted, almost as the last resort (cf. especially chapter 11).

As a scholar born and raised in Italy, this recurrent and over-intelligent lack of honesty reminds me of the (sub)culture of so-called furbizia (cunning), whereby each individual takes undue advantage of other people by way of selfish duplicity (e.g. skipping queues, double parking, giving backhanders, ignoring regulation). When this kind of seemingly smart individual behaviour is generalised, however, it results into inane collective inefficiency (e.g. delays, traffic jams, lost income, fire hazard). Game theory, in its neat complexity, confirms this simple realisation that so many southern Europeans, Greeks included, have to cope with on an almost daily basis (cf. Appendix 3).

Varoufakis’ chronicle is detailed, carefully reconstructed from personal diaries and, as a matter of fact, from recorded conversations (cf. the opening “Note on Quoted Speech”, ix). Also, it includes a substantial body of explanatory endnotes and appendixes, which remind the reader of its author’s background as a well-established university professor and an experienced economist who, in a Cassandra-like fashion, had foreseen the crisis to come because of “the bubble in American real estate and in the derivatives market” and feared a novel “Great Depression” (30).

Varoufakis’ declared and effectively “heroic” aim is to be nothing short than a “whistle-blower” and reveal the secretive workings of Europe’s top-level bureaucracy, the IMF, and the realm of transnational finance at large (12). The price to be paid for such a brazen act of defiance is quite straightforward. Varoufakis is bound to join the ranks of institutional “shooting stars” that will never again be allowed to be members of the international elite wishing—frequently in vain—to control world’s events, since in order to belong to this elite one must not let the outside know what goes on in the inside (12). Larry Summers, Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi would never write a book like the one reviewed hereby.

Once again in an unintentional manner, such a lengthy and sometimes fastidious chronicle of Euro-bureaucracy and cabinet meetings does more than what it sets itself to accomplish. Varoufakis’ book contains many informative elements allowing the reader to grasp the larger picture in which the Greek events have unfolded, namely “the myth of the ‘new economy’, popular around the turn of the millennium and centred on the claim that technological progress had made business cycles obsolete” (Jóhann P. Arnason, “Questioning Progress”, Social Imaginaries, 4(1): 180).

Specifically, the reader is reminded of how the deregulated and liberalised largest private banks and financial institutions of the world made a killing with the waves of privatisations, mergers and acquisitions kick-started by Thatcherite Britain and Reaganite US in the late 20thcentury (chapter 2). Unsupervised by State authorities and entrusted faithfully to the presumed providential invisible hand regulating the markets, these increasingly larger and larger private banks and financial institutions ended up believing themselves invincible, the true masters of the universe (chapter 1). Indeed, the best and brightest that they proudly employed thought themselves capable of such technical wizardry as to disperse risk once and for all in novel and most ingenious ways, securing at the same time further profits ad infinitum (chapter 1).

Alas, all this much-cherished and trumpeted financial genius—which John Kenneth Galbraith had famously claimed to be nothing but a rising market (The Economics of Innocent Fraud, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)—concocted bad products leading to bad investments, namely the now-forgotten “toxic American derivatives” monopolising the media’s attention in 2008 (31). This toxic kind of financial assets, which are still a threatening presence, annulled ten years ago the trust that the very same private banks and financial institutions had in themselves and in each other (cf. Michael Greenberger, “Too Big to Fail U.S. Banks’ Regulatory Alchemy“, Working Papwr No. 74, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2018). Paralysed by the fear of massive losses, their lending came to a grinding halt and a global credit crunch took place. Money was no longer available to big- as well as to medium- and small banks, and to their customers too: from States themselves down to small businesses and individuals. The financial crisis became an economic crisis, causing enterprises to go bust, people to lose their jobs, demand to collapse, and the downward spiral of depression to materialise. Pace the widespread beliefs in the end of history and financial capitalism’s unstoppable triumph, 2008 was truly the new ominous “1929” and another Great Depression could not but ensue (125).

Libertarians, whom Varoufakis often compares himself with, would leave the spiral of depression free to destroy as much of the existing economic and social life as required before finding a new equilibrium, perhaps at a lower level of civilisation, in which creative new entrepreneurs could emerge and flourish; but such libertarians are a minority even in the US that, by and large, have been spawning them in great number (cf. chapters 7 and 13). Traditional socialists, whom Varoufakis collaborated with as finance minister, would seize the opportunity to skip the middle man, i.e. the private banks and financial institutions lending money that only the State can lawfully warrant, and replace them with public ones; but few such socialists can be found in the world after the end of the Cold War: not even within Syriza is the “Left Platform” at the helm (cf. chapters 10 and 17). Old and new Keynesians, whom Varoufakis is associated with, would let the State and its central banks step in and pour fresh money into the depressed economy by way of, inter alia, large-scale public works and public investments, but the ECB is prevented from doing so by its own charter and regulations, unlike, for example, “the Bank of England, which from the moment the City went through its 2008 credit convulsion had printed billions to refloat the banks and keep the economy ‘liquid’”. (35)

What happened in the European Union is that the governments of its member States, through the ECB, decided first of all to buy worthless paper belonging to the inept large private banks and financial institutions as though it was still the gods’ ambrosia. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, not just in America, there were bankrupt conglomerates that, albeit culpable for their own toxic mess, were deemed “systemic” or “too big to fail” (138). At the same time, these bankrupt but unsinkable banks would buy the new debt issued by those States to keep funding part of the latter’s activities, i.e. saving the very same banks and institutions, while cutting other expenditures in order to pay for the rescue itself and avoid the inflation that huge emissions of new debt could engender (chapter 2).

Told suddenly that they had been living beyond their means, the citizens of Europe were imposed “austerity” measures, and their tax money was used along so-called “quantitative easing” (and “credit lifelines”, “liquidity injections”, etc.) to salvage the incompetent institutions bearing prime responsibility for the crisis (92). The burden of this crisis was shifted intentionally from the private sector to the public one: “taxpayers” from a vast rainbow of countries “were actually paying for the mistakes of French and German bankers” (27).

Soon after 2008, in a climate of growing economic precariousness for millions of Europeans, “banksters” and the “1%” were quickly forgotten as the object of general opprobrium. As the crisis’ burden got shifted from the private to the public sector, “PIIGS” and “profligate” States became the new target for media-fuelled public anger. Later still, it was the turn of foreign migrants coming from countries that had already been squeezed in previous decades by unsustainable debt, the IMF’s heavy-handed technical advice, and the dubious wisdom of currency unions (e.g. the French-Franc-tied CFA currencies in Central and Western Africa). In an eerie recurrence of the 1930s, “the deepening crisis would produce a xenophobic, illiberal, anti-Europeanist nationalist” reaction (482). To add scorn to injury, “it is one of history’s cruel ironies that Nazism is rearing its ugly head in Greece” with the electoral success of the ultra-right Golden Dawn party (215).

As a scholar and a citizen of Iceland, which despite its geographic isolation and economic peculiarities (e.g. energy security by geothermal power) experienced a complete financial collapse immediately after the 2008 credit crunch, Varoufakis’ account of the recent “Greek tragedy” flags out significant differences that are worth thinking about (49; Iceland’s woes have been covered extensively in Nordicum-Mediterraneum, especially issues 6(1), 7(1) and 8(1)).

  • Iceland, after a failed attempt at rescuing its national banks, opted essentially for letting them go bankrupt. Greece and the whole European Union committed themselves to saving them at any cost, even if it meant letting Greek pensioners starve, Greek citizens die because of unaffordable healthcare, and Greek homelessness explode (i.e. the “humanitarian crisis” denounced by Varoufakis, 37).
  • “[C]apital controls” were reintroduced in Iceland “in the wake of its own financial collapse in 2008” and kept in place for a decade in order to prevent capital flight and allow the Icelandic State to have a manageable monetary mass whereby to restart and reorganise the national economy (121). The European Union did nothing of the sort, and actually allowed financial speculation between member countries to take place as well as the continued siphoning of large amounts of money into non-EU countries and tax havens (cf. the recent Panama Papers and Paradise Papers scandals).
  • A new Icelandic government not tainted by collusion with the banking sector came eventually into power in 2009. Their role was to clean up the mess left by the conservative parties that had always claimed to be the business-savvy ones. The new Icelandic government proved genuinely disposed and overall adept to serve the common good, even if it meant conflicting with the IMF or pushing for what Rachael Lorna Johnstone and Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir call “progressive regressive measures”, i.e. austerity for the better off so as to pay for the welfare needed by the worse off in times of dwindling resources (“Defending Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Iceland’s Financial Crisis”, The Yearbook of Polar Law3, 2011: 454-77). Syriza’s new and largely untainted government in Greece, under its creditors’ enormous pressure, did much less to alter the regressive-regressive measures that the previous two governments had already enacted. Varoufakis regrets that his own achievements as finance minister were, in this respect, meaningful but scarce, given the extent of his country’s gruelling humanitarian crisis (e.g. the prepaid “plastic card[s]” providing for the needs of the poorest families, 476).
  • Iceland’s currency could be devaluated and was devaluated, first by sheer speculative pressure and then by central bank’s fiat, thus making the nation’s export goods and incoming tourism more attractive. Greece’s Euro, which is also the currency of its chief creditor countries with a very different set of post-2008 problems, could not and was not devaluated.
  • In Iceland, the new government, the central bank, the trade unions and the industrialists’ representatives participated in largely cooperative and constructive behaviour to keep unemployment in check and favour the nation’s recovery. In Greece, not to mention within the EU, bitter divisions affected all interest groups and prevented the same synergy from being firmly established. The pulverising atomism of selfish furbizia trumped comprehensive cooperation: the common good, consequently, agonised.
  • Debt bondage by foreign loan or so-called “rescue packages” became a likely outcome of the Icelandic crisis too. The international pressure towards this dubious solution was noteworthy, as epitomised by Gordon Brown’s Labour government invoking in 2008 the UK’s anti-terrorism legislation so as to freeze the assets of all Icelandic nationals and businesses based on British soil. Against all odds, the Icelandic nation rejected debt bondage, i.e. getting loans to repay other loans to repay other loans to repay other loans and so on ad nauseam (French economist Gérard de Bernis used to call it “the usury model” of State funding: cf. his 1999 essay “Globalization: History and Problems“). This refusal occurred via two referenda promoted by a president of the republic in search of lost popularity—this long-time president having been too vocal a cheerleader of the banks that, a mere five years after their privatisation, had brought the country to its knees. Only one allegedly ‘populist’ centre-right party supported the rejection of the “Icesave” agreement with the Dutch and British governments on both occasions (i.e. the Progressive Party), while the self-proclaimed “responsible” parties spoke favourably of it, on either occasion (e.g. the Left-Greens) or even on both occasions (e.g. the Independence Party). In 2015, the people of Greece voted by a sizeable majority against the third bailout agreement that the Syriza government had itself opposed but ended up accepting nonetheless—a U-turn that Varoufakis defines aptly as “the overthrowing of a people” (467).

Varoufakis’ new book is most interesting, well-written and, above all, it constitutes a political memoir that future scholars, politicians and activists should consult in order to be ready for the next major crisis that, sooner or later, will come to pass. On top of that, it is an apology, in at least two senses. First of all, it is a self-defence by a politician who, in the panic and confusion of the Greek depression, has been accused of all sorts of nasty schemes and treacherous actions, sometimes grotesquely. Secondly, it is a token of self-promotion, for Varoufakis has now a Europeanist party to sponsor, with the aim of making European institutions much more democratic and considerably less technocratic.

Apologetic partiality aside, there is no doubt that the conversations and the events reported in Varoufakis’ book did occur as we are told, or at least the vast majority of them, as the robust critical apparatus of the book can help confirm. Any person interested in current socio-political affairs should read them and meditate upon the astounding amount of deceitful cynicism, harmful cleverness and obtuse pride that they display. Every attempt at improving the world’s economic order and political praxes—and Varoufakis’ book spots good will, intelligent leadership and responsible policy too, in both Nordic and Mediterranean nations, as well as on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—is bound to have to face and, hopefully, surmount such obstacles. Varoufakis, on his part, has been trying hard for years, but to no avail.

Religious Belief, Human Rights, and Social Democracy: Catholic Reflections on Abortion in Iceland

In a secular world, religion is an antidote to dogmatism. Like religious societies before them, today’s secular societies take many things for granted. There are beliefs, even life-and-death ones, that hardly anybody challenges seriously or thinks through, if not even about. Such beliefs are secular dogmas.

In the Nordic countries, for example, abortion is as much a long-secured legal right as it is an obvious fact of life and daily practice for hospitals and their personnel. Academic debates on the ethical nature and status of abortion are, nomen omen, academic. Students do not get particularly excited about them, unlike what a philosophy teacher would experience in, say, North America or Great Britain. In these Anglophone parts of the world, instead, the debate can be so heated that it often degenerates in the opposite way: two factions scream aloud (“murder!”, “patriarchy!”) and nobody listens to any reason but their own–or better, they listen to prejudice that is supposed to count as reason. Yet, British champions of liberalism such as John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) or Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) claimed that unchallenged belief, even if true, is worse than challenged belief, for which one must retrieve and think through solid reasons. Let contrary belief, even false belief, be heard, so that the human mind may not acquiesce into shared habit, prejudice, or de facto dogma.

Roman Catholicism, with its insistence on equating the destruction of embryos to the destruction of human life, serves as a token of contrary belief. Whilst heathen religions demanded life sacrifices and allowed infanticide, Christianity, at least in its declared intentions, stopped them, to the surprise of peoples that had been exposing children since time immemorial—Christ’s death on the cross being ideally the last human sacrifice to the heavens. Contra the conventional wisdom of civilised peoples such as the Egyptians and  the Romans,  the radical Jewish sect initiated by Jesus Christ (or Yeshua ben Yosef) became the unlikely ideological conqueror of the ancient world and ushered an age in which the parent-child relationship, which noted Jewish historian of early Christianity and bioethicist Hans Jonas (1903–1993) regards as the veritable archetype of all moral responsibility, acquires powerful ramifications.

In the Nordic countries, whenever I voice my doubts about the comprehensive and commonsensical ethical legitimacy of abortion, I am quickly dubbed an “Italian Roman Catholic”, as though that label could put an end to the issue. It does not, however. Uttering disqualifying predicates may be popular and even effective (e.g. “fascist”, “populist”, “communist”, “chauvinist”, etc.), but it is cheap rhetoric nevertheless. Generally, I am regarded on almost all issues as a die-hard leftist. Personally, I consider myself a feminist, or at least I have been happily married and co-working with one for many years. Whether I am a leftist, a feminist, an Italian Roman Catholic, an Icelandic one, a Greek Orthodox, Jew or Buddhist, though, my doubts must be countered first through proper critical analysis, not put aside without thoughtful consideration by uttering some sort of supposedly negative or self-explanatory label that, in the mind of the utterer, means that the brain can be switched off in good conscience. If not a classic token of ad hominem attack, the standard reply that I receive in the Nordic countries is a case of fallacy of relevance. Let me articulate my doubts, then, and engage active reason, not automated numbness.

First of all, whatever a fertilised egg may be—a person, a cluster of cells, a magmatic centre of biological energy, a monad—we can all be certain of one thing: all persons have been precisely that at some early stage of their biological development. One does not have to deploy the full force of Aristotelian or scholastic metaphysics to grasp this fact, even if the notions of “potency” and “actuality” may appeal to her. After all, they appeal to engineers and physicists when dealing with energy; or to sport coaches and teachers when gauging the likely achievements (or failures) of a young athlete or pupil. But they do not appeal to me. Infinite regress seems excessive for something as temporally confined as a person, whom we know to have a beginning and an end, however blurry those may be. Besides, my doubts do not start with the reproductive cells taken independently, but with the fertilised egg. Plenty of sperm cells and, fairly regularly, of eggs, are disposed of without ever becoming a person. Far fewer fertilised eggs do not evolve into a foetus, which later becomes, often, a person. In any case, no person has never been a fertilised egg.

Could then a fertilised egg be a person? I do not know for sure. Though I do know that it might. Hence abortion might be prenatal infanticide. As such, on merely prudential grounds, I am strongly inclined to suggest that we should be cautious with regard to how we treat a fertilised egg, for it might be the case that we are dealing with a person, and I myself as well as all of my Nordic interlocutors (I have yet to meet an inveterate sceptic, social Darwinist or sadist outside philosophy books) wish to treat persons respectfully. Annihilating them is, with rare and typically tragically painful exceptions, something that we do not wish to do.

Secondly, when I look back at my personal experiences, and especially at whether growing up in a largely Roman Catholic country did make any difference, I can clearly see two things. One: on the most counterfactual level imaginable, I would be most displeased if my parents or just my mother had decided to abort me; I would have been deprived of my existence and all the experiences, bad as well as good, that have made it worth living. Two: when debating the legalisation of abortion in Italy, one of the most frequently heard arguments from the pro-abortion side was that, as painful and possibly harmful as it could be, it would have saved nonetheless the lives of many women, who would have otherwise sought illegal abortions.

Like several advocates of legalised drugs or prostitution, many who have favoured State-sanctioned and operated abortion suggest a choice in the face of empirical inevitability between two evils—one greater, another lesser—rather than between an evil and a good. Saving life, rather than contributing to destroying it, is a paramount aim to be attained by allowing and regulating abortions, even when it is found profoundly unappealing. Thus, the question arises: were we to find a way to save life to a higher extent, could we try to reduce the frequency of abortion, or establish conditions that could lead to the same result?

Please note that I have stated nothing so far about women’s fundamental rights and liberties. I am not indifferent to them. Quite the reverse, they are so obviously paramount to me that I have not wasted any time debating them or their legitimacy. I do not wish to see them diminished, not least in the medical sphere. Rather, as with all cases of possible limitation of anyone’s liberty and self-direction, such as penal law and traffic regulations, one can only intervene if some serious harm could be the case if no intervention takes place. Given that the ontological nature of the fertilised egg might be that of a person, or be so closely related to being a person as to entail some serious moral consideration, how could one ever intervene with all the authority, impersonality, clumsiness and yet inevitable necessity of State regulation in such an intimate sphere as a woman’s control over herself, her body, her earthly existence?

Certainly, since I have not ascertained with much certainty that fertilised eggs are real persons and, at the same time, I do know that all reasonable human beings would avoid harming persons as far as plausibly possible, whilst granting them as much freedom as possible, I cannot allow the State, in principle as well as in practice, to be heavy-handed. While it can be hypothesised academically that legal abortion is a modern woman’s equivalent of the ancient Roman pater familias’ having ius vitae necisque over all living beings that happened to be sub mano, the State’s ability for murderous power is far more empirically certain and we are reminded of it by each and every war that occurs on our planet.

The solution that I propose is therefore a fairly indirect and, in the lack of certainty, prudential one, which is bound to prove dissatisfactory to many pro-life advocates. It is partly the result of the theoretical considerations spelled out above, as tentative and imperfect as they may be. And it is partly the result of personal and, if one wishes to be a little more ‘scientific’, socio-cultural observations that I have made in different European countries over many years of professional and personal life.

These observations can be summarised fairly quickly: in Iceland, compared to the United Kingdom, there is a similar abortion rate and at least as easy an access to lawful abortion, coupled with a high rate of unplanned pregnancies, especially among young women. Overall, however, more children are born in Iceland of younger mothers, even in comparison with the other Nordic countries. Emblematically, while I never had young students with children when I was teaching in England, that has been a most commonplace experience in my long professional life in Iceland. Why?

Several factors are at play, all of which are relevant, though I cannot say which ones carry more weight than the others. To begin with, the social stigma attached in Britain to unwanted and teenage pregnancies is almost non-existent in Iceland. Secondly, Icelandic women can continue to study or work without fear of dismissal, for the existing legal provisions protect them; besides, such provisions might actually facilitate the commencement of a young, double- or single-parent family via tax credits, free public childcare, maternity leaves, and affordable education for children up to adult age. Also, many young Icelandic women seem to regard motherhood as a fundamental step in their personal growth, self-realisation and long-term well-being, whether there will be a father available or just the State qua surrogate parent. Finally, Icelandic families, as mixed and crisscrossing as they may be, tend to be willing to help young parents and many generations come together to raise the new baby.

Given this picture of the situation, my suggestion is as follows: let the United Kingdom and any other nation on Earth be more like Iceland, for the welfare State is actually pro-life. While changing local cultures may be complicated, changing taxation, labour law, access to education and healthcare provision is a fairly common practice, at least as the history of the past hundred years or so has shown across the globe. Moreover, the financial resources needed for these changes are undeniably available. It is enough to consider the vast amounts of tax-avoiding money that have been siphoned for years into well-known tax havens or that Central Banks have “injected” into the world’s economies over the past decade in order to keep failed private banks afloat. Whenever any talk of limited funds are heard, one should recall the exemplary and staggering 700-billion USD bailout package passed under George W. Bush’s administration in October 2008.

If only a tiny fraction of that huge monetary mass were created to support family policies along Icelandic lines, then the worries about budgets could be easily overcome (I do not discuss here the details of the funding process, for they would obscure the simple fact of the actual availability of funds, given a positive political will). If Iceland managed to achieve all of this, despite being one of the poorest countries in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, it is bizarre to think that at least all other high- and middle-income countries could not do the same. The Roman Catholic can thus conclude, in a spirit of hope: give us more Icelandic-style, or for that matter, Scandinavian-style social democracy in family policies, love thy children and thy nation’s children, and more births should occur. That, in turn, can translate into fewer abortions though, I must admit, it is no strict guarantee of it. After all, we do live in a secular world, in which career considerations or Down-syndrome diagnoses do routinely lead to terminating pregnancies. Nonetheless, better conditions for life-enablement can certainly be established, granting personal liberty and free conscience more room as to whether make full use of them or not, consistently with constitutional human-rights provisions. The imperfect knowledge of imperfect humankind can only usher imperfect solutions, but different degrees of imperfection matter as well and can well make a difference.

 

References

Alþingi, Lög 25/1975.

Duvander, Ann-Zofie et al., “Gender Equality Family Policy and Continued Childbearing in Iceland, Norway and Sweden“, Stockholm Research Reports in Demography, #2, 2016.

CESCR, General Comment No. 14: The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health (Art. 12), ref. E/C.12/2000/4, 2000.

Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawny, Liberalism, NDA (originally published in 1911).

Hognert, Helena et al., “High birth rates despite easy access to contraception and abortion: a cross-sectional study”, Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 96(12)/2017: 1414-22.  

John Paul II, Pope, Evangelium Vitae, 1995.

Jonas, Hans, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die Technologische Zivilisation, 1979.

Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, 1993 (Collier & Son 1909 edition; originally published in 1859).

OECD, “A Progress Report on the Jurisdictions Surveyed by the OECD Global Forum in Implementing the Internationally Agreed Tax Standard“, 2009.

Sedgh, Gilda et al., “Adolescent Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion rates Across Countries: Levels and Recent Trends“, Journal of Adolescent Health, 56(2)/2015: 223-30.

US Senate, H.R. 1424, ref. AYO08C32, 2008 (as made available in The Wall Street Journal).

 

Brendan Myers, Reclaiming Civilization: A case for optimism for the future of humanity. A Study of the Sacred, Part Three (Gatineau: Northwest Passage Books, 2016)

After addressing the phenomenon of the sacred from an individual (Loneliness and Revelation, 2010) and interpersonal perspective (Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear, 2012), Canadian philosopher, novelist, poet, gamer, trade unionist and neo-pagan acolyte Brendan Myers tackles it now from a socio-political perspective.

Continue reading Brendan Myers, Reclaiming Civilization: A case for optimism for the future of humanity. A Study of the Sacred, Part Three (Gatineau: Northwest Passage Books, 2016)

Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet, What Is To Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016)

Translated from the French by Susan Spitzer, this book reports three sessions held in 2014 and moderated by Martin Duru and Martin Legros, during which two of the most celebrated French philosophers of our time discuss the future of democratic institutions. Alain Badiou, perhaps the more famous of the two, offers a defence and reinterpretation of communism. Marcel Gauchet, instead, outlines a social-democratic approach. Their differences and disagreements are palpable and vocal; they are nothing short of “battle lines” (66). Both, however, agree on the utter and cruel untenability of capitalism, especially after the collapse of international finance in 2008 and the many years of austerity imposed upon the innocent for the sake of keeping a broken system afloat at any cost.

While Badiou became a communist after being raised and being active in a social-democratic milieu, Gauchet followed exactly the “opposite” itinerary (3): he began his life as a political activist and a scholar in the communist camp, but later moved to the social-democratic one. Philosophy was always a central concern for them both. Rousseau, Marx, Sartre and structuralism are the shared influences of Badiou and Gauchet, who do not seem to fully realise in their exchanges how much they both have been trying to recover the notion of a meaningful human subjectivity vis-à-vis the seemingly objective “linguistic, economic, and psychic structures” into which the successful structuralist schools of thought of their youth had dissolved it (12).

As concerns the idea or hypothesis of communism, which both thinkers distinguish from its historical manifestations, Marx and Lenin are regarded as the key-references on the subject. Their reciprocal continuity in thought is, grosso modo, agreed upon, while disagreement starts unfolding more clearly between Badiou and Gauchet with regard to the particular historical consequences that the successful 1917 Bolshevik revolution had for Russia and the world at large. Gauchet stresses the “totalitarian” character of the Soviet experience that emerged thereof, very similar in this to the fascist experiences of the 20thcentury, all of which reveal how the great hopes of 18th– and 19th-century modernity in popular self-rule—the “autonomous mode of structuration”—produced so many novel conflicts in practice and engendered such a dismay in theory that a return to the “heteronomous mode of structuration” characterising pre-modern religious societies was sought once again, though by novel and terrifying political means (16-17).

Badiou, on his part, stresses the profound differences between Russian communism and the fascist experiences and fascist experiments, which both thinkers believe will never “happen again” (66), as well as those inherent to the communist camp (Soviet Russia and “the People’s Republic of China” in particular; 35). Unlike the fascist countries, these communist nations were far less unified internally, and whatever despotic, tyrannical or totalitarian character may be attributed to them has more to do with the traditional “criminal dimension” of State power than with communism as such (39). It may be rhetorically commonplace to list “the number of victims” of communist revolutions and regimes, as Gauchet eventually does, but Badiou believes it to be a cheap trick, given the far worse human losses caused by liberal revolutions and capitalist horrors, such as “colonial wars and global conflicts” such as the so-called Great War (44). It is curious, as Badiou notes, that such horrors are never used to disqualify liberal, republican and parliamentary principles; only communist death tolls are, to disqualify the communist hypothesis.

History, however, cannot have the last word about communism. Both authors agree on this point. Seventy years of Soviet history cannot be in any logical sense the means for the decisive refutation of a much older and far more general hypothesis. Nobody would use the much-longer terrors of “the Spanish Inquisition” in order to reject the Christian religion or religion per se (48). “Moving monolithically and violently from private property to state ownership”, as it was done in Soviet Russia, may have been a major mistake, but “local, progressive, multi-layered experiments” can, have been and are being tried all over the world (e.g. workers’ “self-management”, 119-120). Badiou and Gauchet agree also on the chief characteristics of communism that they derive from Marx, i.e.: “the conviction that it is possible to extricate the becoming of all humanity from the evil grip of capitalism” (50); “the hypothesis that the state… is not a natural, inevitable form of the structuration of human society” (51); and the claim “that the division of labor… is in no way absolute necessity for organizing economic production.” (51) Additionally, Badiou emphasises “four teachings” of Marx that he regards as crucial to comprehend the communist hypothesis and the possibility of its success: “communists are… directly involved in a pre-existing general movement that they’ll later be responsible for directing” (52); “the bearers of the communist Idea are characterized by an ability to communicate what the next step is” (53); which “must follow an internationalist logic” (54); and “a global strategic vision… whose matrix is anti-capitalism.” (54)

If the communist Idea or hypothesis–both expressions appear frequently in the book–can be separated from historical events and circumstances, so does Gauchet believe that “democracy” can be distinguished from “capital’s control over it”, which is certainly the  sad norm in today’s societies (69). According to him, “democratic pluralism” can be a fruitful means of progress and “moderation”, especially when it comes to smoothing strong differences of interests and opinions by including “opposition” rather than fighting it violently (72). This time, history can teach useful lessons, according to him. “[T]he Thirty Glorious Years” following World War II and displaying strong unions, political participation, redistributive progressive taxation and financial regulation are still a case worth studying, though it should never turn into a “blind faith in the progress of capitalism” which, rather, can be modified and civilised (78). The post-1970s culture of individualism, on the one hand, and global “financial liberalization”, on the other hand, show also that modifications can occur which make capitalism more barbaric (82).

Badiou is, under this respect, most sceptical. Individualism and globalisation are, in his view, of the essence; without them, capitalism would cease to exist. Today’s world, marked by astounding inequalities and planet-wide eco-destruction, is nothing new under the sun. It is “the normal, that is, imperial, state of capitalism” (89), in which big powers compete for resources and opportunities at the service of “the financial oligarchy” benefitting from it (101). Even major financial crashes are part of it, whether we look at the 1920s or the 2000s. Badiou finds simply absurd Gauchet’s notions that today’s polycentric capitalism is somehow essentially different, that parliamentary institutions and liberal conceptions have changed substantially, and that piecemeal reformist alternatives may be open within the current global order (e.g. business accounting standards, 114). Gauchet’s “de-imperialization” and “veritable neoliberalism” sound catchy; but they are, according to Badiou, mere slogans (109-110). Party politics, parliaments and liberal institutions in general do not grant genuine chances for “the individual to become a subject”, namely an authentically autonomous person, and even less so do capitalist economies based upon individuals’ manufactured “personal appetites” and superficial “petty freedoms” that do not challenge the status quo (136-137).

In the end, Badiou and Gauchet find an uneasy terrain for agreement: political tactics aimed at defying and defeating “the financial oligarchy’s overwhelming power” (140). On the one hand, communists like Badiou can be active and can be heard in their polity thanks to the democratic institutions that Gauchet defends. On the other hand, a strong and vocal movement promoting communism can “scare the hell out of” the financial oligarchs and lead them to accept compromises that could make societies more democratic, more prosperous, more egalitarian and less oppressive (148).

The debates reported in this book are lively and interesting. The readership familiar with Badiou’s and/or Gauchet’s writings will find some of their better-known theses formulated or exemplified in mundane terms and charged with a lively tone that is not typical of their usual, stately academic prose. The readership unfamiliar with the two French thinkers, instead, will find a wealth of clever considerations, insights and informed short arguments. As to the future of democracy, or of the communist Idea, history alone can and shall tell.

Poets/Trump/Philosophers: Reflections on Richard Rorty’s Liberalism, Ten Years after His Death

Starting with a prescient 1998 quote on the impending decline of US liberal democracy into right-wing, strong-man-based demagogy, this paper outlines Richard Rorty’s political philosophy, which I believe can help us understand perplexing political trends in today’s political reality well beyond the US alone. Specifically, I tackle three key-terms encapsulating the thrust of Rorty’s political philosophy, i.e. “liberalism of fear”, “bourgeois” and “postmodernism”. Also, I address a contraposition that explains how Rorty would approach and attempt to defend liberal democracy from contemporary right-wing, strong-man-based degenerations, namely the priority of “poetry” over “philosophy”. Essentially, if one wishes to win in the political arena, she must be armed with the most effective rhetorical weaponry, however good, solid and well-argued her political views may be. Finally, some remarks are offered on the role that “philosophy” can still play within the same arena.

 

Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was probably the most famous American philosopher at the end of the last century. As I pen this introduction, ten years after his death, his name has re-appeared on the pages of many newspapers, at least in the Anglophone press, and some aspects of his political thought are going ‘viral’ across the world-wide-web. We live in the age of Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, after all. Various passages of his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), have been ‘unearthed’ and variously circulated. Among them we read what follows:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else… At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen. [However, o]ne thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet… [e.g. in] socially accepted sadism… directed toward people such as gays and lesbians[.] (ibid., 81ff)

To past European generations and probably most modern historians, a socio-political picture like the one portrayed above is likely to recall the rise of autocratic demagogues such as Napoleon III or Benito Mussolini. Today, however, this passage sounds like an eerily accurate prediction of the bitter conclusion of triumphant post-Cold-War globalisation and its ‘inevitable’ sacrifices, epitomised by the rise of Donald Trump. And so it has been taken by media outlets and opinion-makers, e.g. Stephen Metcalf’s 10th January 2017 “cultural comment” for The New Yorker, entitled “Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Argument for National Pride” and discussing also the media attention received by the passage above.

 

Donald Trump

Fresh US President and long-time billionaire, Mr Trump won in 2016 a harsh electoral campaign against a seasoned politician, Ms Hillary Clinton, who, it should be noted, was the publicly vocal and politically proactive US First Lady when Rorty’s book was published qua, inter alia, scathing critique of the increasingly right-wing, free-market policies promoted by the Democratic Party, which Rorty regarded as his own party of choice in the US. Whilst describing the leading 20th-century Democrats, from F.D. Roosevelt to L.B. Johnson, as outright social-democrats, Rorty did not approve of several decisions taken by the Clinton’s administration, such as the controversial 1994 NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico and the 1999 repealing of the long-lived Glass-Stegall Act, a child of the Great Depression and a piece of legislation that had limited the systemic threat of unbridled finance (cf. Richard Rorty, “Una filosofia tra conversazione e politica”, interview by Giorgio Baruchello, Iride, 11(25), 1998, 457–84; translation mine). Those of us who remember the roots and the fruits of the 2008 financial collapse, namely the Great Moderation at one end and the Great Recession at the other, should not find it difficult to realise what momentous consequences the Clintons’ friendliness toward Wall Street has been outpouring. It is in fact in a climate of unresolved under- and un-employment, globalisation-induced economic insecurity, and increasingly strong anti-immigration and anti-establishment feelings that Donald Trump came to prominence qua political leader.

Prominent, if not brazen or simply unusual, were his language and many of his declared stances throughout the electoral campaign of 2016. As recorded and frequently criticised by mainstream media, Mr Trump often: (1) uttered racist, sexist and homophobic slurs; (2) fashioned himself qua anti-establishment champion of the impoverished, economically insecure, and primarily white working class of his country; (3) paraded his willingness to cooperate with foreign dictators and political leaders whose human-rights record is far from spotless; and (4) insouciantly condoned words and concepts that make violence, torture included, seemingly acceptable in the public sphere, both domestically and internationally. Evidence of all this is not hard to find. Trump’s electoral speeches are archived and available online (cf. also a selection of his statements by The Telegraph). In power for only few weeks at the time of writing, Trump has already started delivering on his electoral agenda, at least as regards tightening immigration rules in the US, though it is far too soon to pass any trenchant judgment yet. Cruelty, in the shape of “socially accepted sadism” or worse (e.g. extensive warfare), might regain the front stage as a major ingredient in the political life of the world’s sole nuclear super-power, whose 500 and more military sites outside US borders and territories span across most continents, and a fortiori in the political life of all countries at large. I write “front stage” because Trump’s predecessor did not halt, say, police violence in the US or the bombing of the populations of foreign countries by US drones (e.g. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen), but he never spoke publicly of such issues in as cavalier a manner (concerning the US military foreign sites, cf. Department of Defense, Base Structure Report – Fiscal Year 2015 Baseline). Bombs may have been dropped throughout the two-term Obama administration, but not verbal ones.

For all we know, the new US presidency might prove less prone to endorse the highly destructive forms of legally termed humanitarian intervention and politically proclaimed promotion of Western-style democratic institutions seen, say, in 21st-century Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan under George W. Bush and Barak Obama (e.g. military occupation, air raids and killings by remote-controlled drones). On the domestic front, Trump himself might succeed in becoming an effective tribune of the common people, or at least of a large segment of it. Chronically disenfranchised blue-collar Americans might end up enjoying more and better jobs than they have over the previous three decades. Who knows? They might even witness the end of the gross – when not grotesque – imbalance in incomes and influence between Wall Street and Main Street that Ronald Reagan’s economic policies kick-started in the 1980s, and that Bill Clinton’s aforementioned abolition of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act definitively entrenched. Rather than christening involuntarily a shantytown, as some of his predecessors did (i.e. post-1929 “Hooverville” and post-2008 “Bushville”), the name of a flamboyant US billionaire might go down in history for reverting the forceful re-affirmation of patrimonial capitalism that has been occurring in most countries on Earth since the days of Thatcherism. Unlike Obama, Trump might not “stand between [the bankers] and the pitchforks” (Lindsay Ellerson, “Obama to Bankers: I’m Standing ‘Between You and the Pitchforks’“, ABC News, 7th April 2009). Alternatively, as Rorty suggests in the same foreboding pages of Achieving Our Country, the elected “strongman” will just “make peace” with “the international super-rich” and appease the masses via jingoistic militarism and charismatic posturing. Time, as always, will tell. Cruelty, whether in the shape of petty humiliation of minorities or military extermination of scores of people, is never too far away.

 

Poets

Cruelty matters a lot, at least for Richard Rorty, who championed one specific school of political thought that, in the late 20th century, made this notion central to the understanding of social and political life, claiming that Western liberalism is characterised by a unique abhorrence of cruelty in the public sphere. Called “liberalism of fear”, this school of thought was a theoretical creation of Harvard political scientist Judith Shklar (1928–1992), but it is commonly recalled today in connection with Richard Rorty, who was and still is far more famous than Judith Shklar. The quintessence of their political stance is simple to express: “liberals… think that cruelty is the worst thing we do” (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 73). Therefore, they draw a clear distinction “between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen” (Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, Cambridge: Belknap, 1984, 237). Liberals opt for the latter option and defend all those institutions (e.g. parliaments, constitutions, human rights, judiciary independence, freedom of the press, etc.) that foster peaceful coexistence over violent oppression, debate over force, individual liberty over State control, and people’s safety over their systemic endangerment.

Rhetoric also matters a lot for Rorty. Ironically, it is of the essence. According to Rorty: “The principal backup [for liberals] is not philosophy but the arts, which serve to develop and modify a group’s self-image by, for example, apotheosizing its heroes, diabolizing its enemies, mounting dialogues among its members, and refocusing its attention” (“Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”, The Journal of Philosophy, 80(10), 1983, 587). The art of rhetoric must be understood in a catholic manner here. In his texts, Rorty would normally speak of “arts”, “narrative”, “poetry” or “literature”. What he means, however, is that he does not trust traditional philosophical argument and repeated appeals to reason to do the job. Reason matters, of course. Rigour too. But relevance vis-à-vis the context and the audience is the actual key, hence the ability to persuade that one can attain by reaching people’s hearts as well as their minds, especially when fundamental social values are at issue, rather than the day-to-day activities of tribunals or elected councils. Only in this manner can liberals hope to achieve any progressive aim. Truth does not imply per se any victory whatsoever in the public arena; nor does it matter much, in the end. Speaking and writing well in favour of liberal principles and institutions do, instead; they are much more crucial, even if we may not be able to demonstrate once and for all why we should prefer liberalism to Nazism or Social Darwinism. As Rorty writes: “Whereas the liberal metaphysician thinks that the good liberal knows certain crucial propositions to be true, the liberal ironist thinks the good liberal has a certain kind of know-how. Whereas he thinks of the high culture of liberalism as centering around theory, she thinks of it as centering around literature (in the older and narrower sense of that term – plays, poems, and, especially, novels)” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 93).

Rorty did actually speak of “rhetoric” as well, but only occasionally. Nonetheless, it has been argued that, as far as the 20th-century American academic community is concerned, the ancient art of rhetoric regained ground primarily thanks to him, pace Kenneth Burke’s (1897–1993) efforts in this sense since the 1930s. First came the 1979 publication of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press), by now a widely acknowledged modern classic, which excavated the metaphorical roots of all objectivist, rigorous, scientific and pseudo-scientific terminologies. Then, a series of conferences were held in the mid-1980s at Iowa and Temple Universities, out of which was launched the “Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry” (POROI). Richard Rorty participated in them and another participant, Herbert W. Simons, credits him with coining at one of the meetings the now-popular slogan “the rhetorical turn” (The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990, vii).

Interested in persuading wide audiences rather than producing bullet-proof arguments for academic circles, Rorty declares himself to be candidly partial to “the Hegelian attempt to defend the institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies… [i.e.] ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’.” (“Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”, 585). As he writes: “I call it ‘bourgeois’ to emphasize that most of the people I am talking about would have no quarrel with the Marxist claim that a lot of those institutions and practices are possible and justifiable only in certain historical, and especially economic, conditions.” (ibid.) Money matters too, then. Liberal institutions, high and low, depend upon appropriate material conditions. This is the fundamental insight and theoretical legacy of Marxism, according to Rorty. We must take the “structure” seriously into account, if we wish to make sense of the “superstructure”, even if we consider the latter to be partially independent from the former and not fully determined by it, i.e. a sort of mere epiphenomenon. That is why economic insecurity and inequality matter so much in liberal polities, as Donald Trump’s election has further confirmed.

Rorty’s acknowledment that material conditions are important does not mean that he subscribed to Marxism, Chicago-style liberalism, Randian Objectivism or any fundamental claim about the nature of the human soul and human societies. According to Rorty: “There is no answer to the question ‘Why not be cruel?’ – no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible … Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question – algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort – is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician.” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv-i). A self-declared champion of American neo-pragmatism, Rorty followed this tradition in believing that “morality is a matter of… ‘we-intentions’… the core meaning of ‘immoral action’ [being] ‘the sort of thing we don’t do’.” (ibid., 59) There is no grand narrative; no ultimate vocabulary as Kenneth Burke understood this term, i.e. a theory or discourse capable of ordering all relevant conceptual elements, including apparently conflicting ones, into one synthetic vision, account or system. As Rorty explains: “I use ‘postmodernist’ in a sense given to this term by Jean-Francois Lyotard, who says that the postmodern attitude is that of ‘distrust of metanarratives,’ narratives which describe or predict the activities of such entities as the noumenal self or the Absolute Spirit or the Proletariat. These meta-narratives are stories which purport to justify loyalty to, or breaks with, certain contemporary communities, but which are neither historical narratives about what these or other communities have done in the past nor scenarios about what they might do in the future.” (“Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”, 585)

Let me add that, according to Rorty, postmodernism is not relativism: “Relativism certainly is self-refuting, but there is a difference between saying that every community is as good as every other and saying that we have to work out from the networks we are, from the communities with which we presently identify. Post-modernism is no more relativistic than Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that we stop trying for a ‘God’s-eye view’ and realize that ‘We can only hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate from within our tradition’.” (ibid., 589) One thing is to say that we can, in theory, set all moral or political options beside one another and state that they all have the same value. Another thing is to say that we cannot do it, because we can only and must operate from within one option at the time, building or burning bridges with the others. The latter being Rorty’s stance on the matter.

 

Philosophers

We are philosophers, scientists, academics. Rational argumentation is our bread and butter. Yet, it is ours. It is probably also the judges’, the lawyers, the engineers’ and some others’. It is not theirs, though, i.e. ‘common’ human beings’ at large. Talk to your relatives; your neighbours; the ‘man of the street’; have a conversation in a bar, shop, or parish hall. Arguments matter, generally, but only to a point. Sometimes, it is plainly futile to even present one and expect it to be listened to, not to mention being taken so seriously as to change the listener’s beliefs. Let us ask ourselves, why do we engage in rational debate? Because we expect it to bear fruit. In other words, we do so under two major assumptions: (1) we can find reasons; and (2) reasons matter. As Rorty once stated: “To take the philosophical ideal of redemptive truth seriously one must believe both that the life that cannot be successfully argued for is not worth living, and that persistent argument will lead all inquirers to the same set of beliefs” (“The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture“, 2000).

Perhaps we can find some reasons. Perhaps even good reasons. No final, ultimate reasons can be found, though, according to Rorty, who claims chimeric any conclusive philosophical grounds of agreement that correspond to a universal and unchanging human nature, the essence of things, pure rationality, the hidden structure of historical dialectics, God’s plan for the universe, etc. According to Rorty, when we look deep and hard into ourselves, the most profound things that we can get a glimpse of are the most entrenched prejudices of our own culture, our ethnos or, as quoted above, “our tradition”. But this is not everything. Even if there were any such deeper, ultimate reasons, who would listen to them? Some people would. Perhaps a fair amount. Not most human beings, however. Religion, politics, marketing, economic history, psychology and many ordinary experiences bear witness to the limits of human rationality. Albeit not irrational, people are frequently unreasonable, impervious to logical thinking, biased in many ways, and unwilling to reconsider their basic, often deeply engrained and sometimes blissfully unaware assumptions. If this is a plausibly correct assessment of humankind under contemporary democracy, how can liberals win in the public arena? Rorty’s answer is patent: a “turn against theory and toward narrative” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xvi). In other words, rhetoric is needed. A good one, of course, in both content and form.

As regards the content, Rorty’s own political plans and works show what it should be: the principles and institutions of liberalism. To them, he then adds specific projects that liberals should focus upon (e.g. universal healthcare; cf. “Una filosofia tra conversazione e politica”). As regards the form, that is where “poets” excel or, as Rorty also calls them, successful “agents of love” (i.e. ‘missionaries’ reaching non-liberals) and “justice” (i.e. enforcers of liberal principles within liberal ethnoi; “On Ethnocentrism”, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth – Philosophical Papers vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991[1981], 206). Let us learn from them: read good books; watch good films; read good books; practice your communication skills; read good books; engage in your own ethnos’ ongoing moral and political conversation (e.g. by joining a political party, charitable organisation or a trade union); and, to top it all, read good books. There are no ideal Platonic philosopher-kings here; poets are the kingmakers. “Poets” too must be understood in a catholic manner, though. They can be priests, film-makers, propagandists, teachers, political leaders, etc. They may not be able to produce a definitive demonstration of why liberalism is to be preferred and pursued; however, at least for us children of liberal institutions, it is not a serious issue. What really matters is to keep them going; and that is what poets can help us with. What is left for us as philosophers? I have three suggestions:

(A) We can and, perhaps, should join the ranks of the “agents of love” and “justice”. Become better at speaking and writing well, and use your skills to fight the good fight—the liberal fight, according to Rorty. Be an engaged intellectual. Be a promoter of democracy in the schools, as the US pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952) had already tried to do and let American teachers do. If you cannot be a leader, help one to emerge. Rorty himself regarded his work as making room for, or paving the road to, greater minds, such as Jacques Derrida (1930–2004; cf. “Una conversazione tra filosofia e politica”).

(B) As Rorty never denied, there are people, a minority of course, who do respond to philosophical arguments; philosophers can still be useful in finding ways “of making political liberalism look good to persons with philosophical tastes” (“On Ethnocentrism”, 211).

(C) My personal contribution is that philosophers can provide ideas, social legitimacy and psychological encouragement to poets. In our culture, pace Rorty’s “turn against theory”, poets are not expected to give us rational arguments and axiological foundations, whereas philosophers still are. Then, even if such an aim is ultimately utopian and as long as this division of intellectual labour holds in our culture, poets can find things to say and work upon. The rhetorician’s inventio and topoi can unfold in close contact with the texts by philosophers that they admire and may decide to rely upon. Dante Alighieri had Thomas Aquinas, Ugo Foscolo Condorcet, George Bernard Shaw Friedrich Nietzsche, Luigi Pirandello Henri Bergson, Mahatma Gandhi Lev Tolstoy, James Joyce Giambattista Vico, and Zeitgeist’s Peter Joseph John McMurtry. Through their association with established philosophers and philosophies, moreover, the same poets can obtain a higher degree of social acceptance, insofar as their ethnos still acknowledges the special status of philosophers as those members of society who grasp ‘deeper’ or ‘higher’ things. Poets themselves may be reassured and sustained in their fights by the knowledge that there are thinkers who, in more analytical and articulate ways, agree with them.

(A)–(C) may not seem much, prima facie, especially if one recalls the Platonic ideal of philosopher-kings; but they are more than enough for a meaningful existence, both personal and professional, in a contemporary liberal ethnos, which political leaders like Donald Trump would seem to endanger and, at the same time, reveal to us all – as sceptical and blasé as some of us may have become – as awfully valuable.

Thinking of the Shadow. Conceptions of Cruelty in the History of Western Thought

As regards thinking of the shadow, I can contribute to the present discussion qua intellectual historian who, together with the theologian Michael Trice, has reconstructed in recent years the understanding of a particular manifestation of the shadow in the long life of Western philosophy: cruelty. Between 1998, when I started investigating Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s liberalism of fear, and 2017, when I completed a volume of collected essays of mine to be published by Northwest Passage Books under the title Philosophy of Cruelty, I devoted considerable time and attention to retrieving, mapping and reflecting upon the conceptions of cruelty developed in the history of Western thought. What follows here is a concise overview of the five most common and/or most articulate conceptions that I have identified in the course of my studies, and repeats almost verbatim what I state in the aforementioned collection of essays of mine. Longer and more detailed analyses can be retrieved in my older publications on this subject. Please note also that my research is intentionally limited to explicit uses of the terms “cruelty” and “cruel” in the languages accessible to me.  Extending it to cognates such as “violence” or “aggressiveness” would make the project unmanageable.

Cruelty as Vice

Cruelty has been regarded very often as a quintessentially human vice affecting specific individuals. This conception of cruelty is characteristic of ancient and medieval philosophers, whose approach to ethics typically centres upon the notion of personal character rather than upon the notion of rightful or good actions and norms—the latter being predominant amongst modern and contemporary thinkers. Also, this former conception of cruelty takes a chief interest in observing what consequences cruelty has for the perpetrator, rather than for its victims, as commonplace instead for modern and contemporary approaches to cruelty. In particular, ancient and medieval philosophers suggested that cruelty is a vice affecting persons involved in punitive contexts, e.g. courtrooms, schools, armies and households. In De Clementia, Seneca claims that “cruel are those who have a reason for punishing, but do not have moderation in it”.[1] Besides, he claims that, as concerns the person who “finds pleasure in torture, we may say is not cruelty, but savagery – we may even call it madness; for there are various kinds of madness, and none is more unmistakable than that which reaches the point of murdering and mutilating men.”[2] “Cruelty” is thus defined as “harshness of mind in exacting punishment”, rather than unrestrained lust for blood.[3] As a vice, ‘”cruelty” is said to be “an evil thing befitting least of all a man”,[4] and it can take private forms (e.g. family feuds) as well as public forms (e.g. tyranny, insofar as “[t]yrants”, unlike kings resorting to cruelty “for a reason and by necessity[,…] take delight in cruelty”).[5] Cruelty is the opposite of clemency, yet “it is as much a cruelty to pardon all as to pardon none.”[6] Clemency, according to Seneca, does not mean indiscriminate forgiveness, but rather a balanced blend of moderation and justice.

As famously discussed by Aristotle, our vices are said to spring from a lack of balance within the human soul; to exceed in forgiveness is as conducive to vice as to exceed in harshness. Aquinas’ Summa Theologica echoes Seneca’s position and combines it with Aristotle’s ethics:

Cruelty apparently takes its name from “cruditas”[rawness]. Now just as things when cooked and prepared are wont to have an agreeable and sweet savour, so when raw they have a disagreeable and bitter taste. Now it has been stated… that clemency denotes a certain smoothness or sweetness of soul, whereby one is inclined to mitigate punishment. Hence cruelty is directly opposed to clemency.[7]

Also for the doctor angelicus [angelic doctor] of the Catholic Church is “cruelty… hardness of the heart in exacting punishment”,[8] hence a form of “human wickedness”; whereas “savagery and brutality” are a form of “bestiality”.[9] Cruelty contains an element of rational deliberation, which “savagery” and “brutality” do not possess: these, in fact, “take their names from a likeness to wild beasts… deriving pleasure from a man’s torture.”[10] Cruelty is therefore something evil that we do intentionally and which corrupts our character by exceeding in what would be otherwise acceptable; but it is also something that we can do something else about, for all vices can be remedied by proper self-correction. As Aristotle and the medieval pedagogues used to teach, whatever the initial endowment of inclinations and talents in our character, each of us is responsible for the kind of person she becomes.

Cruelty as Sadism

The distinction drawn by Seneca and Aquinas between cruelty and bestiality, epitomised by sadistic pleasure, seems to vanish with several modern thinkers, who actually take sadism as the paramount, if not the sole, example of cruelty. This is a second, fairly common conception of cruelty, according to which cruelty turns into something worse than a vice, indeed something devilish or extreme. To some, cruelty becomes so extreme a tendency that it transforms into a sheer figment of our imagination, i.e. some kind of philosophical or literary ‘ghost’. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, argues that “Contempt, or little sense of the calamity of others, is that which men call cruelty; proceeding from security of their own fortune. For, that any man should take pleasure in other men’s great harms, without other end of his own, I do not conceive it possible.”[11] Bishop Joseph Butler, on his part, states that “[t]he utmost possible depravity, which we can in imagination conceive, is that of disinterested cruelty.”[12] David Hume, on this point, affirms: “Absolute, unprovoked, disinterested malice has never, perhaps, had place in any human breast”.[13]

The element of rational deliberation that Seneca and Aquinas observed in cruelty is adamantly underplayed in this second conception of cruelty, as Thomas Hobbes’ understanding reveals once more:

Revenge without respect to the example and profit to come is a triumph, or glorying in the hurt of another, tending to no end (for the end is always somewhat to come); and glorying to no end is vain-glory, and contrary to reason; and to hurt without reason tendeth to the introduction of war, which is against the law of nature, and is commonly styled by the name of cruelty.[14]

Rather than a vice, for which a person must take responsibility, cruelty morphs into a malady of the soul, the result of a poor, incompetent or broken mind, which reduces the humanity of its carrier and makes her closer to wild animals. Perhaps, this malady can be cured, or at least confined by appropriate measures of social hygiene. After all, animals can be tamed and trained; though sometimes they are put in cages or butchered. And the cruel human person, now likened to the beast, can be treated instrumentally, like commonly practised with horses and pigs; all this, naturally, being the case for the greater good of the commonwealth to which she and her victims belong.

Cruelty as Avoidable Harm

The idea of cruelty as something sick, if not even something sickening, colours also the work of the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne observes that “cowardice is the mother of cruelty”[15] and states:

I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of a hare in the teeth of my dogs… Even the executions of the law, however reasonable that may be, I cannot witness with a steady gaze.[16]

As for wars, it is worth repeating that Montaigne remarks: “I could hardly be convinced, until I saw it, that there were souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the mere pleasure of it… For that is the uttermost point that cruelty can attain.”[17] The conceptions of cruelty as vice and sadism are accounted for in Montaigne’s reflections, but they are also subtly advanced to a broader condemnation of cruelty as harm to be avoided: capital punishment might be reformed, hunting abandoned, and wars prevented. In this perspective, his contribution to the understanding of cruelty in Western history is momentous, just as momentous were his Essays for the West’s intellectuals in the three centuries following their publication, and it connects the modern conceptions with the ancient one. Moreover, Montaigne is the first Western intellectual to devote an entire essay to the topic of cruelty—a stark sign of how genuine was his hatred for cruelty. “Montaignesque” is therefore the third conception of cruelty to be presented, i.e. cruelty as harm to be avoided.

The champions of the European Enlightenment are probably the most vocal and best-remembered members of this approach. Montesquieu, for example, labels as “cruel… torture” and gruesome “punishments”, legal servitude for insolvent debtors and colonial occupation.[18] In his essays On Tolerance, Voltaire describes as eminently cruel all wars of religion, whilst in Candide he condemns as such rape, corporal punishment and mutilation, even when lawfully administered in the name of justice.[19] Adam Smith, champion of the Scottish Enlightenment, ascribes the attribute “cruel” to infanticide,[20] personal vendetta,[21] economic monopolies,[22] burdensome taxes of succession or of passage of property,[23] the suffering of the “race of labourers” in periods of economic recession,[24] and mercy to the guilty.[25] In Italy, Pietro Verri argues that “[r]eason can show [what] is unjust, extremely dangerous, and immensely cruel”—and reason led him to condemn “torture” as “cruel”.[26] Cesare Beccaria, the most influential penal reformer of all times and both a friend and a student of Verri’s, condemns torture as cruel too, whilst also noting: “man is only cruel in proportion to his interest to be so, to his hatred or to his fear.”[27] Hence, it ought to be a duty for the legislator to “[c]ause men to fear the laws and the laws alone. Salutary is the fear of the law, but fatal and fertile in crime is the fear of one man of another. Men as slaves are more sensual, more immoral, more cruel than free men”.[28] For Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, instead, “cruel” is the institutional neglect of “the progress of education”, for it constitutes nothing but the shameful misdeed of “abandoning men to the authority of ignorance, which is always unjust and cruel”.[29] Even the non-instrumental Enlightenment thinker par excellence, Immanuel Kant, does espouse the spirit of reformation of his age, and calls “most cruel” the institution of “slavery” exercised in the “Sugar Islands” by Dutch landowners,[30] whereas merely “cruel” are the “duels” fought in the name of “military honour”, which, like “Maternal Infanticide”, lead to cases of “Homicide” as distinguished from “Murder”.[31]

19th– and 20th-century political and legal reformers followed in the footsteps of the ‘enlighteners’ of the 18th century. Amongst them are also Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty. Judith Shklar, who was a Montaigne scholar, defines cruelty in two ways. The former reads: “Cruelty is… the wilful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear… [it is] horrible… [it] repels instantly because it is ‘ugly’… and disfigures human character”. The latter reads: “Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter.” Judith Shklar believes that cruelty, to a meaningful extent, can be controlled by appropriate doses of liberalism, which is itself in many ways a child of the 18th century: “the first right is to be protected against the fear of cruelty. People have rights as a shield against this greatest of human vices. This is the evil, the threat to be avoided at all costs. Justice itself is only a web of legal arrangements required to keep cruelty in check.”[32] Good laws and good political arrangements can reduce the pain that we impose upon/suffer from weaker/stronger creatures like us. That is the hope animating the American and the French Revolutions, as well as many of the emancipatory struggles fought during the following two centuries. Still, additional cruelties can be retrieved—and rejected—in other areas too. Giacomo Leopardi, for one, aims at a different target. He associates cruelty with the rewards and punishments awaiting us post mortem [after death], which he claims to be nothing but the sorrowful fictional creations of tragically misguided philosophies and religions. Whether “healthy or sick”, these creations are, in his view, signs of “cowardice” and mere “childish illusions” that were developed in the face of “the absence of any hope, …the desert of life, …men’s infelicity[,]… and destiny’s cruelty”.[33] Though living as such is cruel in and for itself, even crueller it is to live in fear of the priest’s gloomy superstitions or the philosopher’s hollow concepts.

Tom Regan sketches a fascinating taxonomy of cruelty, which he derives from yet another area that seems engulfed with cruelty: the human treatment of animals. As Regan writes:

People can rightly be judged cruel either for what they do or for what they fail to do, and either for what they feel or for what they fail to feel. The central case of cruelty appears to be the case where, in Locke’s apt phrase, one takes ‘a seeming kind of Pleasure’ in causing another to suffer. Sadistic torturers provide perhaps the clearest example of cruelty in this sense: they are cruel not just because they cause suffering (so do dentists and doctors, for example) but because they enjoy doing so. Let us term this sadistic cruelty… Not all cruel people are cruel in this sense. Some cruel people do not feel pleasure in making others suffer. Indeed they seem not to feel anything. Their cruelty is manifested by a lack of what is judged appropriate feeling, as pity or mercy, for the plight of the individual whose suffering they cause, rather than pleasure in causing it… The sense of cruelty that involves indifference to, rather than enjoyment of, suffering caused to others we shall call brutal cruelty…Cruelty admits of at least four possible classifications: (1) active sadistic cruelty; (2) passive sadistic cruelty; (3) active brutal cruelty; (4) passive brutal cruelty.[34]

Whichever class of cruelty we encounter in life, Regan believes that we must try to eliminate it. In particular, he focuses on (3) and (4), i.e. the types of cruelty that seem to characterise the human-animal relationship in contemporary societies. Persons are not only cruel to other persons: as long as pain is taken to be a relevant ethical factor, then also animals can become victims, and maybe even perpetrators (though Regan does not explore this avenue).

Cruelty as Paradox

As inheritors of the projects initiated in the 18th century, we can find Shklar’s and Regan’s definitions rather appealing. However, how many types of cruelty and cruel areas of behaviour can be actually tackled? How many revolutions, with their load of gunpowder and dynamite, should be fought? If three centuries of worldwide-expanding liberalism, culminated with Francis Fukuyama’s post-Cold-War proclamation of “the end of history”, have not eliminated it, what reasonable expectations can be entertained vis-à-vis the future?[35] Few are the philosophers who have pondered upon the paradoxical character of cruelty—a fourth conception that can also be retrieved in the history of Western thought. Cruelty persists within our lives and societies despite its being commonly denounced as something extremely negative and, above all, despite the recurring attempts to promote social progress and reform existing institutions. Judith Shklar herself admits that “cruelty is baffling because we can live neither with nor without it” and this is probably the reason why:

Philosophers rarely talk about cruelty… I suspect that we talk around cruelty because we do not want to talk about it… What we do seem to talk about incessantly is hypocrisy, and not because it hides cowardice, cruelty, or other horrors, but because failures of honesty and of sincerity upset us enormously, and they are vices which we can attack directly and easily. They are easier to bear, and seem less intractable.[36]

Philip P. Hallie marks a notable exception to the commonplace avoidance of the subject denounced by Judith Shklar. Firstly, Hallie defines “cruelty” as “the infliction of ruin, whatever the motives”[37] or, in two alternative versions, “the activity of hurting sentient beings”[38] and “the slow crushing and grinding of a human being by other human beings”.[39] He then distinguishes the instances of “cruelty upon humans” between those “fatal cruelties” that are due to nature and the far from uncommon “human violent cruelty” that is due to our fellow human beings.[40] To the latter he adds “implicit” or “indirect” cruelties, i.e. cruelties arising from “indifference or distraction” rather than from evident “intention to hurt”.[41] Thus understood, human cruelty can be further divided into “sadistic” and “practical”: whereas the latter refers to forms of instrumental cruelty, the former is “self-gratifying”.[42] By way of this articulate taxonomy, richer than Tom Regan’s itself, Hallie attempts to encompass and map the vast, polymorphous universe of cruelty, whose intricate nature explains perhaps its little permeability to philosophical analysis. Secondly, Hallie cuts the Gordian knot of cruelty’s intrinsic complexity by referring to it as a paradox, candidly and straightforwardly—in a book’s very title. Why simplifying something that cannot be simplified? Why misrepresenting it, in the attempt to represent it clearly? Hallie has in mind five particular cases of paradoxical cruelty:

  1. Cruelty brought about without any open “intention to hurt”, but in the name of altruism, happiness, justice, etc.[43] “Substantial maiming” can derive from “wanting the best and doing the worst”.[44]
  2. Cruelty caused by genuine “intention to hurt”, but aimed at educating and therefore avoiding worse cruelties, e.g. “in terrorem” [terrifying] literary techniques.[45] As 20th-century French literary scholar André Dinar also observes: “The cruel authors cauterise the wounds that can be healed and mark with hot irons the incurable ones, so to expose their horror”.[46]
  3. “The fascinosum [lure] of cruelty”,[47] as well as its ability to titillate “sexual pleasure”,[48] higher “awareness”,[49] the liberation of sensual “imagination”[50] and “masochistic pleasure”,[51] are all pursued willingly and proactively, very often, by fully conscious persons.
  4. Cruelty implied by the “growth” or maturing of any individual through painful “individualisation” for the sake of “human authenticity”.[52] No person becomes mature, well-rounded and responsible without facing a significant amount and variety of pain in her life, and without learning how to face probable, if not inevitable, later doses of the same bitter medicine.
  5. “Responsive” cruelty enacted in retaliation to “provocative” cruelty,[53]g. penal chastisements and just wars, although “mitigation” is recommended.[54]

Being a devout Christian, Hallie has no desire to promote cruelty. Quite the contrary, his work on this topic begins as an effort to reduce it. Nevertheless, as he deepens his understanding of it, Hallie comes to recognise that not all cruelty ought to be avoided, for its disappearance would be more harmful than its persistence. This is particularly true of the painful processes of growth and maturation, as well as of artistic disclosure of sorrowful truths or extreme sexual elation. Moreover, in an implicit reminder of Beccaria’s own wisdom, Hallie admits that cruelty may be a necessary evil in the public sphere. As baffling as this may be, cruelty seems to find rather easily assorted justifications for enduring in many aspects of life.

Cruelty as Good

Some philosophers have stepped beyond the sole acknowledgment of cruelty’s paradoxical character and entertained plainly the seemingly contradictory notion that it might be good. This is the fifth and last conception of cruelty, which comprises two main groups of thinkers.

In the first group are included those thinkers who have argued that cruelty does not need to have intrinsic value (or disvalue), but instrumental value alone and, as such, that cruelty may be capable of fulfilling a positive function. For instance, cruelty can be a tool to promote the common good. Niccolò Machiavelli is among them. According to him:

Every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. And if this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed [by the rioting between the Cancellieri and Panciatichi factions in 1502 and 1503].[55]

Jacques Derrida states something analogous when he writes in recent years: “Politics can only domesticate [cruelty], differ and defer it, learn to negotiate, compromise indirectly but without illusion with it… the cruelty drive is irreducible.”[56] Instead of combating cruelty at all costs, one ought to learn how to draw as much good as possible from it. After all, the initiation of social life makes itself use of cruelty: why should its continuation be devoid of it? This is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari seem to suggest, for example. The acquisition and continuation of the shared semiotic abilities that allow for human communities to develop is never devoid of cruelty. Schooling and socialisation are no free meal: “Cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belabouring them.”[57] Sharing a similar awareness, Clément Rosset explores the instrumental role of cruelty in the private sphere, rather than the public one, and writes provokingly: “Joy is necessarily cruel”.[58] According to him, “[c]ruelty is not… pleasure in cultivating suffering but… a refusal of complacency toward an object, whatever it may be.”[59] Now, “the ‘cruelty’ of the real… is the intrinsically painful and tragic nature of reality.”[60] For instance:

[T]he cruelty of love (like that of reality) resides in the paradox or the contradiction which consists in loving without loving, affirming as lasting that which is ephemeral – paradox of which the most rudimentary vision would be to say that something simultaneously exists and does not exist. The essence of love is to claim to love forever but in reality to love only for a time. So the truth of love does not correspond to the experience of love.[61]

For Rosset, the answer to cruelty’s paradox lays in the nature of reality, which is ultimately cruel. Rosset’s thought could then be regarded as belonging legitimately to the fourth conception of cruelty as well, i.e. cruelty as paradox. In truth, the distinction between the fourth and the fifth conceptions is not clear-cut, and the same can be said of the distinctions between the other conceptions previously presented (especially between the first and the third, and the second and the third). These distinctions are mostly a matter of different conceptual emphasis, rather than of mutual incompatibility; and as we emphasise the fifth conception, it can be stated that, to a relevant extent, persons are shaped by cruelty and are bound to encounter it also and above all if they wish to derive a modicum of satisfaction from their mortal existence. The only way to live well, for Rosset, who was a Schopenhauer scholar, involves learning to embrace the suffering that life unavoidably unloads upon us. In the field of drama, Antonin Artaud echoes and expands Rosset’s tragic awareness: “Death is cruelty, resurrection is cruelty, transfiguration is cruelty… Everything that acts is a cruelty.”[62] To be is to be cruel—there is no way out of cruelty, which, however, must be conceived anew: “Cruelty is not just a matter of either sadism or bloodshed, at least not in any exclusive way… [It] must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that is customarily given to it.”[63] Although never as clear as Rosset on what this novel understanding of cruelty may be like, Artaud developed a new set of shock- and scandal-filled stage techniques and communication devices, i.e. his Theatre of Cruelty, which was aimed at eliciting higher levels of personal awareness in the audience: “All this culminates in consciousness and torment, and in consciousness in torment”.[64]

In the second group are included those thinkers that have argued that cruelty might be intrinsically valuable, maybe even a virtue, which enriches our lives in a unique way and allows for the full realization of our nature. The most ‘in-famous’ example in this sense is that of the Marquis de Sade, who argues: “Cruelty is imprinted within the animals… that can read the laws of Nature much more energetically than we do; [cruelty] is more strongly enacted by Nature among the savages than it is among civilized men: it would be absurd to establish that it is a kind of depravity”.[65] Sade, who approves also of more refined forms of cruelty (i.e. the civilised libertine’s), infers from the naturalness and unavoidability of cruelty a reversed Rousseauvianism:

Remove your laws, your punishments, your customs, and cruelty will not have dangerous effects any longer… it is inside the civilized domain that it turns into a danger, as those capable of it are almost always absent, either because they lack the force, or because they lack the means to respond to the offences; in the uncivilized domain, instead, if it is imposed over the strong, then he shall be able to react to it, and if it is imposed over the weak, it will not be else than conceding to the strong according to the laws of nature, and this will not be inappropriate at all.[66]

Equally notorious is the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom the reader has already met repeatedly in this book. Idealising and idolising primeval societies, barbaric bravery and warrior mores, Nietzsche wishes to:

[E]mpathise with those tremendous eras of “morality of custom” which precede “world history” as the actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind: the eras in which suffering counted as virtue, cruelty counted as virtue, dissembling counted as virtue, revenge counted as virtue, denial of reason counted as virtue, while on the other hand well-being was accounted a danger, desire for knowledge was accounted a danger, peace was accounted a danger, pity was accounted a danger, being pitied was accounted an affront, work was accounted an affront, madness was accounted godliness, and change was accounted immoral and pregnant with disaster![67]

If Sade reverses Rousseau’s bon sauvage [noble savage (the term was never used by him, but is commonly associated with him)], Nietzsche reverses Seneca’s treatment of cruelty as vice. For Nietzsche, cruelty used to be a virtue in prehistoric or barbaric times, it is a fixed element in the human make-up, and it survives in countless rarefied forms today:

Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy. And what pleases us in so-called tragic pity as well as in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate of metaphysical tremblings, derives its sweetness exclusively from the intervening component of cruelty. Consider the Roman in the arena, Christ in the rapture of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the stake or the bullfight, the present-day Japanese flocking to tragedies, the Parisian suburban laborer who is homesick for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who unfastens her will and lets Tristan und Isolde “wash over her” – what they all enjoy and crave with a mysterious thirst to pour down their throats is “cruelty,” the spiced drink of the great Circe.[68]

Given all this, as Nietzsche concludes, cruelty should be recovered in an honest and healthy way, for human beings are cruelty-prone animals that live in the mundane world, not the God-like, spiritualised, ‘fallen’ and heaven-seeking creatures of which religion and philosophy have pointlessly blared about for centuries. Just like all other animals, so do human beings have bodies, selfish selves, and ‘knightly’ instincts calling for competition, predation and domination. Humans are born to race against one another and the most deserving ones, in the end, ought to survive and lead. Any departure from this natural logic is a concession to degeneration and, essentially, an unhealthily indirect manifestation of repressed cruelty, which cannot but harm our species by letting slaves dominate over masters, priests over knights, and ignorant masses over cultured elites. Instead of understanding and embracing the cruel but actual reality of the world, which is the only place where true existential meaning can be found, the degenerate pursue mystification and escapism. Exemplarily, the loathed magician/pope of Nietzsche’s grand and initially ill-received philosophical allegory, i.e. his 1883–91 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, discovers this hard truth in his delirium, as he realises that his own pantheon of abstract instruments of power (angels, demons, God, etc.) is the utmost and most cruel betrayal of any chance for real fulfilment. Nothing of what he has been preaching during his life, in order to lead his flock, is true and truly valuable: “In vain! / Pierce further! / Cruellest spike! / No dog – your game just am I, / Cruellest hunter! /…/ Speak finally! / You shrouded in the lightning! Unknown! Speak! /…/ Surrender to me, / Cruellest enemy, / – Yourself![69]

Concluding Remarks

This brief overview of the five most common and/or most articulate conceptions of cruelty that can be retrieved in the history of Western thought shows already how diverse the interpretations of this term can be. Cruelty, like many other concepts that we employ regularly in our language, whether in ordinary or technical discourses, is inherently contested, i.e. it allows for a variety of readings, usages and applications. As Michael Polanyi used to argue in the 20th century, it is important for concepts to be adequately ambiguous, insofar as they are meant to grasp a plethora of subsidiary details that we are only tacitly aware of, and of some of which we may become aware by subsequent processes of analysis, elucidation, comparison, critique, reflection, study, etc. These processes may even lead to a breakdown in the applicability of the concept, which is then abandoned in lieu of alternative ones. This abandonment does not mean that the concept is mistaken or useless. Quite the opposite, a concept is correct and useful insofar as we successfully interact with other persons by referring to it, that is, by referring to phenomena by means of it. As a concept in both ordinary and philosophical language, cruelty is no exception to the way in which several conceptions can be produced of any such item, and an array of diverse realisations about human affairs can be unpacked from it by reflecting upon it—in this case, by thinking of the shadow.

 

Endnotes

[1] Lucius A. Seneca, De Clementia, translated by John W. Basore, London: Heinemann, 1928–35[55 AD], II.iv.1–4. Whenever possible, given the great variety of editions over the centuries of Latin classics, I use the standard referencing system for such sources.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid. I.xxiv.1–xxv.2.

[5] Ibid. I.xii.1–4.

[6] Ibid. I.ii.2–iii.3.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920[ca. 1268], <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/>, part II of part II, question 159, art. 1. I utilise here the standard scholarly referencing system for Aquinas’ Summa.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., art. 2.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London: Andrew Crooke, 1651, <http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/Leviathan.pdf>, part I, chapter VI.

[12] As cited in British Moralists 1650–1800, edited by D.D. Raphael, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, vol. 1, 334–5.

[13] As cited in ibid., vol. 2, 72.

[14] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, chapter XV.

[15] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by Donald Frame, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998[1580], II, 27.  Given the great variety of editions of Montaigne’s essays, I do not refer to page numbers and use the standard scholarly system instead, i.e. book and essay number.

[16] Ibid., II, 11.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated by Thomas Nugent, New York: Cosimo, 2011[1748], book VI, chapter, 12; book XV, chapters 1, 7 & 15; book XXVI, chapter 22.

[19] Cf. Voltaire, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, Paris: Garnier, 1877[1769].

[20] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edition, London: A. Millar, 1790, <http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html>, part V, chapter I, §25.

[21] Ibid., part VI, chapter III, §12.

[22] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by Edwin Cannan, Indianapolis:  The Online Library of Liberty, 1901[1776], <http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html>, book IV, chapter 8, §17.

[23] Ibid., book V, chapter 2, §§116 & 125.

[24] Ibid., book I, chapter 11, §263.

[25] Ibid., book II, chapter I, §27.

[26] Pietro Verri, Osservazioni sulla tortura, Rome: Newton, 18 (translation mine).

[27] Cesare Beccaria, Crimes and Punishments, translated by James Anson Farrer, London: Chatto & Windus: 1880[1764], 140–1.

[28] Ibid., 243.

[29] Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, Xème & IIème époque, 2004[1793–4], <http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/700/condorcet/index.html> (translation mine).

[30] Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf, part II, chapter 2, §3 (translation mine).

[31] Immanuel Kant, Philosophy of Law. An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as Science of Right, translated by W. Hastie, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1887[1796], part II, section I, chapter 49, art. E.

[32] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, Cambridge: Belknap, 1984, 237.

[33] Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali, “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico”, <http://www.leopardi.it/operette_morali.php>, (translation mine).

[34] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 197–8 (emphases removed).

[35] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press, 1992.

[36] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 3, 7 & 44.

[37] Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, 14.

[38] Encyclopaedia of Ethics (edited by Lawrence C. Becker, New York: Garland, 1992), s.v. “Cruelty”, by Philip P. Hallie, 229–31, 229.

[39] Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There, New York: Harper & Row, 1985[1979], 2.

[40] Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty, 5–6.

[41] Ibid., 13–4 & 29–31.

[42] Ibid., 22–4.

[43] Ibid., 15–20.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid., 20–2.

[46] André Dinar, Les auteurs cruels, Paris: Mercure de France, 1972[1942], 7.

[47] Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty, 70–5.

[48] Ibid., 41 & 46.

[49] Ibid., 43.

[50] Ibid., 42 & 50.

[51] Ibid., 48.

[52] Ibid., 55–8 & 60–2.

[53] Ibid., 33.

[54] Ibid., 79–82.

[55] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by W.K. Marriott, 1908[1515], <http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm>, chapter XVII.

[56] Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002[2000], 252.

[57] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: The Viking Press, 1977[1972], 144.

[58] Clément Rosset, Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, translated by David F. Bell, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993[1988], 17.

[59] Ibid., 17–20.

[60] Ibid., 76.

[61] Ibid., 98 (emphases removed).

[62] Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, New York: Grove Press, 1958[1938], 101–3 & 85.

[63] Ibid., 102.

[64] Ibid., 114 (emphasis removed).

[65] Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir ou Les Instituteurs immoraux, Paris: Larousse, 1966[1795], 139 (translation mine).

[66] Ibid., 140–1 (translation mine).

[67] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997[1881], §18.

[68] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002[1886], §229.

[69] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, 1891[1883–91], part IV, §65, section 1 (generally known and translated as Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

Asger Sørensen, Capitalism, Alienation and Critique (Aarhus: Nordic Summer University Press, 2016)

As concerns the main contents of the new book by prolific Danish philosopher and social scientist Asger Sørensen, they are certainly relevant and urgent, for they constitute an articulate critical reflection upon the grim reality of avoidable human degradation and suffering within the capitalist order, as well as upon their callous and hopeless acceptance therein, all of which are important features of contemporary social life worth thinking about and, possibly, acting against.

Building upon a variety of essays written independently of one another and published individually elsewhere on previous occasions (e.g. the prestigious scholalrly journal Philosophy & Social Criticism), the book is internally diverse, but it is neither contradictory nor overwhelmingly heterogeneous. Rather, the book’s structure is sensibly and comprehensibly open, for it comprises:

(A) An introduction, a presentation and an interlude that, somewhat redundantly but very usefully, lead the reader into the rich intellectual panorama to follow, highlighting above all: (1) the common conceptual threads linking together the two subsequent, admittedly uneven parts; (2) their being the result of a single process of intellectual growth and maturation lasted many years; and (3) their more or less direct impinging upon the Continental school of thought known as Critical Theory, to which the book’s author claims to belong himself.

(B) A first part, entitled “Economy” and focussing on the classic social thinkers Émile Durkheim and Bataille, whose reflections provide a profound and complex theoretical backdrop for the correct understanding of the axiological significance of the emancipatory movements emerged in capitalist countries in our young new century (e.g. the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, the Indignados of Spain, etc.). Although admired and mined for important insights in existing realities and problems, neither classic social thinker is idealised and extensive criticism of their views, especially Bataille’s, is offered too;

(C) A second part, called “Dialectics”, covering a much wider spectrum of intellectual sources in all senses, i.e. disciplinary, geographical, historical and linguistic. It is also a more complex section, which requires closer attention to detail and serious efforts of synthesis in order to appreciate how the different notions of dialectics explored and explained in its five chapters (i.e. Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, Marx’s, Bataille’s, Tong Shijun’s, Mao’s, and the Frankfurt School’s) can be combined together so as to shed light on contemporary capitalism, its many woes and their possible solutions;

(D) A postscript that expands upon and integrates (A), developing a critique of key-aspects of liberal and neoliberal political economy, especially Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage and the macroeconomic practical manifestations of the Austrian school of economics in pre-2008 developing countries and in post-2008 Europe, under the banner of austerity. Somewhat disconnected from both (A) and (B), it is per se a very interesting piece of intellectual reflection, and one that should appeal to open-minded economists as much as to social scientists at large and philosophers.

Noteworthy and original is the book’s attempt to give a better-contoured and more positive shape to the notion of cultural Marxism, which has been used very loosely in contemporary social discourse and, typically, with an almost taken-for-granted negative connotation. In this manner, the book can be useful both to the friends and to the foes of the broadly humanitarian, democratic and socialist (i.e. not liberal, as the book’s author vehemently states in his postscript) cultural tradition that goes under this name and that the book’s author identifies, investigates, interrogates and invigorates. Whether trying to promote it or to demote it, both sides can benefit from having a conceptually more refined version of it to dissect, debate and disagree upon.

From a scholarly perspective, the book is verily informed and informative. If anything, it is scholarly thorough and thoroughly scholarly. Its main arguments are sensible and sensibly constructed, but a reader unfamiliar with the classics of philosophy and of social thought that are so frequently referred to therein is unlikely to be able to grasp such arguments with ease, if at all. The spectrum of ideas and ideologies presented and toyed with in the book is immense, even if inevitably partial, and what is presented and toyed with is done so in a competent, intelligent and perceptive manner, as well as in an articulate, meticulous and subtle one. The overall style of the book is plainly academic. Positively clear and professionally tailored, no reader will find thrilling passages, stimulating wit or spiritually inspiring prose to ponder upon. Yet, it is unlikely that any reader but an academic one will purchase the book and read it.

Twelve Years an Editor – Almost. Nordic-Mediterranean Perspectives on Iceland’s International Image

Introduction

Since the year 2015 I have been working as editor in chief of Nordicum-Mediterraneum: Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies, published by the University of Akureyri (<http://nome.unak.is>). As such, I have received, read, reviewed and released a number of contributions by foreign and, in particular, by Italian scholars, dealing with Iceland under a broad variety of scientific perspectives. Also, especially during and immediately after Iceland’s 2008 financial meltdown, I was contacted and interviewed by a number of media outlets, primarily Italian. Thanks to these experiences, I can contribute to today’s discussion with an eminently personal yet qualitatively rich account of Iceland’s image among Italian and foreign academic circles. Above all, I believe the materials accumulated in the long life of Nordicum-Mediterraneum to be a truly interesting source of insight in the academics’ interest points, if not even the educated commonplaces, about Iceland.

Albeit in charge of the journal since its inception, I am not its real father, who is instead a scholar that has been working for many years at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, Maurizio Tani. Eleven years ago, one year short of the title’s twelve, he approached me with the idea of a scholarly journal devoted to the many and diverse historical exchanges between the North and the South of Europe and, in particular, between Iceland and Italy. Nothing of the sort existed on the academic scene. Needless to say, his suggestion was taken aboard. Then, thanks to the small yet vital financial support of the University of Akureyri, plus the crucial help qua webmaster of Mr. Fabrizio Veneziano of Schiller International University in Paris and of Ms. Sigrún Magnúsdóttir qua Akureyri-based editorial assistant, the journal was officially born.

Foreign contributions about Iceland: Numbers and titles 

A true pioneer in open-access scholarly publishing in Iceland, the journal aimed primarily at serving as a forum and an archive for scholars interested in Nordic and Mediterranean mutual connections. Progressively, pressured by its growing readership, the journal expanded its scope to Nordic and Mediterranean matters at large, rather than remaining confined to the exchanges between the North and the South of Europe. At the same time, the journal continued to publish a variety of other contributions as well, ranging from reviews of recent literature to interviews and personal memoirs. The break-up of the publications listed below does not include the special issues 11(2-3), due this year and already in the pipes, editorially speaking, and reads as follows:

Regular issues: 11 (2006-2016)

Special issues: 12 (2006-2016 i.e. up to 10(3)/2016)

Of which:

Conference proceedings: 11 (2008-2016)

Other subjects: 1 (2006)

New articles: 42

Reflections on Iceland’s economic crisis: 13

Conference proceedings: 102

Conference-related notes: 11

Review essays: 5

Book reviews: 121

Interviews: 6

Memoirs: 6

Translations: 5

Republished books: 2

Degree theses: 1

Other contributions (short notes, reports, surveys, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.): 19

Total publication: 333

Of all these published materials, 45 contributions can be said to deal with Iceland’s image in the eyes of foreign scholars, whether directly or indirectly, e.g. as reported in books reviewed for the journal (in the case of book reviews and review essays, I attribute each entry to either the reviewer’s nationality or the book author’s nationality, depending on who emphasises Iceland more). Longer pieces (e.g. articles, conference papers) amount to 21, while shorter ones (e.g. book reviews) to 24. Most of them are in legal studies (12), linguistics and/or literature (7) and history (5). Then we have contributions in philosophy (4), economics (4), geography (4), politics (3), psychology (2), art history (1) and personal memoirs (3). The countries of relative observation can be listed as follows:

  • Argentina: 1
  • Faroe Islands: 1
  • Finland: 1
  • Germany: 3
  • Ireland: 2
  • Italy: 25
  • The People’s Republic of China: 2
  • Romania: 1
  • Russia: 2
  • Scotland: 6
  • Spain: 1

True to the original spirit of the journal, publications by Italian scholars on Icelandic or Italian-Icelandic matters stand out as far more numerous than the others. This geographical predominance and the limited overall as well as specific number of published contributions make a quantitative analysis unlikely to provide valuable information. Their qualitative value as academic exploration of Iceland’s heritage and historical experiences persists, however.

The typology, depth and length of these 45 contributions varies enormously. I list them below in chronological order, specifying their category, in accordance with the journal’s internal system of classification. In the pages following the list below, I refer to the underlined authors and the relevant year of publication in the journal; when Icelandic-foreign collaborative projects are included, I underline and count for the country list above only the foreign specialists involved:

1(1)/2006

Article

Antonio Casado da Rocha, “Narrative Ethics and the Ecology of Culture: Notes on New Italian-Icelandic Sagas”

Note on conference proceedings

Maurizio Tani, “Italo Balbo, Iceland and a Short Story by Halldór Laxness. Notes on the Conference ‘La trasvolata Italia-Islanda del 1933’ (Reykjavík, 7 June 2003)”

Interviews, memoirs and other contributions

Francesco Milazzo, “Teaching Roman Law in Iceland”

1(2)/2006

Translations

Maria Savi Lopez (1848-1940), “Akureyri”, Nei paesi del Nord, Torino: Paravia, 1893

Italo Balbo (1896-1940), “Nella terra dei Vichinghi”, La centuria alata, Milano: Mondadori, 1934

3(1)/2008

Articles

Emanuela Finocchietti & Luca Zarrilli, “Paesaggio naturale e politiche di sviluppo territoriale in Islanda”

Conference proceedings

Manuela S. Campanini, “Iceland as a Landscape Investigation Pattern”

Book reviews

By Antonio Calcagno: Paolo Borioni, Cesare Damiano & Tiziano TreuIl modello sociale scandnavo. Tra diritti e flessibilità (Roma: Nuova Iniziativa Editoriale, 2006)

4(1)/2009

Interviews, memoirs and other contributions

Federico Actite, Ancient Rome and Icelandic Culture – A Brief Overview

5(1)/2010

Articles

Diego Ferioli, “On the Oral-Formulaic Theory and its Application in the Poetic Edda: The Cases of Alvíssmál and Hávamál”

Manuela S. Campanini, “Imagine a Collective Landscape”

Viola Miglio, “Old Norse and Old English Language Contact: Scandinavian Legal Terminology in Anglo-Saxon Laws”

Reflections on the economic crisis

Giorgio Baruchello, “Eight Noble Opinions and the Economic Crisis: Four Literary-philosophical Sketches à la Eduardo Galeano”

Maria Pia Paganelli, “Learning from Bjartur About Today’s Icelandic Economic Crisis”

Interviews, memoirs and other contributions

Antonio Costanzo, “Fyrirlestur um bókina Hávamál. La voce di Odino”

Marinella Lorinczi, “Dracula in Iceland”

6(1)/2011

Article

Adriana Di Stefano, “Northern Steps of EU Enlargement: The Impact of ‘Cohesion’ Policies on Iceland’s Accession Process”

Book reviews

By Rachael Lorna Johnstone: H. Beale et al., Cases, Materials and Texts on Contract Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010); and T. K. Graziano, Comparative Contract Law: Cases, Materials and Exercises (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009)

By Rachael Lorna Johnstone, Natalia Loukacheva (ed.), Polar Law Textbook (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2010)

Dissertation

Fabio Quartino, La Costituzione Islandese: storia ed evoluzione

6(2)/2011

Article

Garrett Barden, “Responses to the contributors”

7(1)/2012

Article

Birgir Guðmundsson & Markus Meckl, “’Karlson’ – A Stasi ‘Kontakt Person’. An episode of Iceland’s Cold War legacy”

Book reviews

By Andrea Hjálmsdóttir: Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir & Rachael Lorna Johnstone, Mannréttindi í þrengingum: Efnahagsleg og félagsleg réttindi í kreppunni (Akureyri-Reykjavík: Háskólinn á Akureyri og Mannréttindaskrifstofa Íslands, 2011)

By Anita Einarsdóttir & Tiantian Zhang: Herman Salton, Arctic Host, Icy Visit: China and Falun Gong Face Off in Iceland (Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010)

Interviews, memoirs and other contributions

Jorge Mejía, “Some impressions after a quick visit to Iceland”

8(1)/2013

Articles

Hjálti Ómar Ágústsson & Rachael Lorna Johnstone, “Practising what they Preach: Did the IMF and Iceland Exercise Good Governance in their Relations 2008-2011?”

Irina Zhilina, “The Security Aspects in the Arctic: the Potential Role of NATO”

Review essay

By Carlo Penco: Juha Manninen & Friedrich Stadtler (eds.), The Vienna Circle and the Nordic Countries. Networks and Transformations of Logical Empiricism (Vienna: Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook vol.14, Springer, 2010)

Book reviews

By Gísli Aðalsteinsson: Maurizio Tani, La chiesa di Akureyri: Guida storico-artistica alla parrocchiale luterana della «capitale del nord» (Grafarvogur: Snorri Sturluson, 2010)

By Guðmundur Heiðar Frímansson: Brian Lucey, Charles Larkin & Constantin Gurdgiev (eds.), What if Ireland defaults? (Dublin: Orpen Press, 2012)

By Herman Salton, “‘Arctic Host, Icy Visit’: A Response” (cf. Tiantian Zhang)

By Rachael Lorna Johnstone: Jesús Ballesteros, Encarnación Fernández Ruiz-Gálvez & Pedro Talavera (eds.), Globalization and Human Rights: Challenges and Answers from a European Perspective (Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives of Law and Justice, Vol. 13, Leiden: Springer, 2012)

By Rachael Lorna Johnstone: T. Kue Young (senior ed.), Rajiv Rawat, Winifred Dallmann, Susan Chatwood & Peter Bjerregaard (eds.), Circumpolar Health Atlas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012)

By Tero Mustonen, C. Raudvere & J.P. Schjödt (eds.), More Than Mythology – Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2012)

Translation

Luana Giampiccolo, “Leiðarvísir, an Old Norse itinerarium: a proposal for a new partial translation and some notes about the place-names”

9(1)/2014

Article

Matteo Tarsi, “On Loanwords of Latin Origin in Contemporary Icelandic”

Book reviews

By Federica Scarpa: Natalia Loukacheva (ed.), Polar Law Textbook II (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2013)

By Giorgio Baruchello: Þorlákur Axel Jónsson, Dagur Austan. Ævintýramaðurinn Vernharður Eggertsson (Akureyri: Völuspá, 2009)

Interviews, memoirs and other contributions

Birgir Guðmundsson & Markus Meckl, “Regaining Iceland for the Catholic Church in the mid-19th Century”

9(2)/2014

Conference proceeding

Giorgio Baruchello, “The Picture—Small and Big: Iceland and the Crises”

10(1)/2015

Conference proceeding

Thomas Hören, “IMMI and Whistleblowing in Iceland – the new regulatory framework”

Book reviews

By Giorgio Baruchello: Sven-Olof Olsson (ed.), Managing Crises and De-globalization. Nordic foreign trade and exchange 1919-39 (New York: Routledge, 2014 pbk.)

By Giorgio Baruchello: Gaetano Roberto Buccola, Forme del centro. Percorsi analitici dal “Viaggio al centro della Terra” al nucleo dell’uomo (Palermo: Nuova Ipsa, 2013)

By Rachael Lorna Johnstone: Kári á Rógvi, West-Nordic Constitutional Judicial Review: A Comparative Study of Scandinavian Judicial Review and Judicial Reasoning (Copenhagen: Djøf Publishing, 2013)

Interviews, memoirs and other contributions

Roberto Buccola, “The Unconscious and the Island: Fragments of Research on the Self”

10(2)/2015

Conference proceeding

Giorgio Baruchello, “Enemies of Interculturalism: The Economic Crisis in Light of Xenophobia, Liberal Cruelties and Human Rights“

 

Foreign contributions about Iceland: Recurring themes

What sort of recurring themes can be found in this collection of diverse scholarly and scientific texts? I have identified four.

  1. Iceland as “the land of the Vikings”

This is the title given by the aviator Italo Balbo (2006) to the chapter on Iceland in his 1933 memoirs, who also recalls how the Vikings discovered America before Columbus himself. Spanish-Portuguese philosopher Casado da Rocha (2006) mentions too the Vikings’ “stories of warriors and wise men, poets and politicians of the golden age of settlement and commonwealth.” The marauding hordes, their adventures and their legacy are very much a focus-point for many commentators. They are a reason for distinctiveness, if not distinction. For instance, law professor Milazzo’s (2006) account of his teaching experience emphasises how Iceland is not as much part of the legal tradition based on Roman Law as most other European countries. Legal scholar Johnstone too, in her 2011 review essay on comparative law, mentions the enduring island-centric character of mainstream legal education in Iceland. This is not to say that classical culture did not reach or influence Iceland’s cultural development. Quite the opposite, Actite’s 2009 text offers a concise account of the deep, extensive and sometimes surprising impact of the Latin tradition on this island: “For instance, the Latin phrase Rustycus es, Corydon gave origin to the Icelandic words rusti [farmer] and dóni [rude people]”. Tarsi (2014) offers an even longer account. Even some elements of the later Catholic Christianitas endure, as noticed by Cardinal Mejía (2012) and Tani (2013). Still, the land of the Vikings is distinct and original, which is shown by the interest of foreign scholars, and Italian ones in particular, in the history, development and influence of Old Norse or ancient Icelandic, and its literary accomplishments in the Edda and the Sagas, e.g. Ferioli (2010), Miglio (2010), Costanzo (2010), Lorinczi (2010), Tani (2006), Barden (2011), Mustonen (2013), Giampiccolo (2013),

  1. Iceland as a Nordic State

Former Italian governmental ministers Damiano and Treu, together with the historian Borioni (2008), lump Iceland together with the other Scandinavian countries, as though Iceland had as strong a social-democratic tradition as Sweden, Denmark or Norway. However, Iceland does not have it. It was never a welfare State, in the sense and to the extent these other countries have historically exemplified. The right-wing Independence Party has marked its history much more than the various incarnations of democratic socialism in Iceland (cf. also Meckl’s 2012 article on Iceland’s Cold-War history and Baruchello’s 2014 book review), as also reflected by the largely unnoticed repression of Falun Gong demonstrators in Iceland in 2002 (cf. Tiantian Zhang, 2012 & 2013). Difference does not mean intransigence, however. Thus, Hören (2015) and Johnstone (2013a) reveal significant changes in a more Nordic direction led by the historically weaker left-wing forces of the country, in freedom of the press and in human rights provisions respectively. Perhaps, the most obvious manifestation of the “un-Nordicness” of Iceland was the neoliberal boom-and-bust hot-money cycle that led to the notorious kreppa of 2008, about which a number of contributions have been published, i.e. Baruchello (2010), Paganelli (2010), Johnstone (2013), Lucey, Larkin & Gurdgiev (2013), Johnstone (2013a & b), Baruchello (2014 & 2015b). Penco (2013) adds another layer of “un-Nordicness” by noticing how Iceland’s philosophical tradition owes more to Anglophone and Dutch academic traditions and establishments than to Scandinavian ones. Still, there exist clear connections with Scandinavian political experience, notably the Danish roots of Iceland’s constitution (cf. Quartino, 2011). In fact, in addition to its linguistic-literary roots and heritage, the legal tradition of Iceland seems to be, at large, the most Nordic feature of Iceland’s culture, at least according to Kári á Rógvi (2015). Baruchello (2015) adds another line of continuity, i.e. the cartelisation of strategic industries during the 1930s.

  1. Iceland as an Arctic State

Less controversial is this third commonplace notion. Iceland is located in the North Atlantic, after all, which is cold, dangerous to navigate upon, remote. This is the tone of the account by Savi-Lopez (2006), who pioneered the study and dissemination of Icelandic literature in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. As to later accounts, it would appear that being located in the North Atlantic is strategic. It is so for NATO (cf. Zhilina, 2013), for the EU (cf. Di Stefano, 2011), but above all for the Arctic nations and the governance of the region, as emphasised by Loukacheva (2011), Johnstone (2013c) and Scarpa (2014). Indeed, Meckl’s 2014 studies on the Catholic Arctic mission of the 19th century show the Catholic Church being the first international institution to conceive of the Arctic as a geographically, politically and culturally strategic region of the World. The number of submissions and publications pertaining to this third notion have been growingly steadily over the years, reflecting Iceland’s own growing institutional and intellectual self-characterisation as an Arctic State, not least as manifested by the developments within the University of Akureyri, which is part of the University of the Arctic consortium and hosts a most successful Master’s programme in Polar Law.

  1. Iceland as a dimension of the spirit

Iceland’s unique landscape, the result of equally unique and rather extreme geographic, geological and climatic conditions, lead to awe and deep existential reflection. Scientific observations are the beginning of more profound considerations about the relationship between humanity and the natural environment, the struggle for survival that we have fought throughout our journey on this planet, and the most disturbing question of all: why do we keep fighting? More or less explicitly, this is the tone of the contributions by literary scholar Finocchietti (2008) as well as geographers Zarrilli (2008) and Campanini (2008 & 2010). The same applies to those of Jungian psychologist Buccola (2015a & b). Numerically, we are not talking of a large number of contributions. However, and here the qualitative character of the present account comes to the forefront, the number of authors that have been interested in Iceland because of its mystique is conspicuous. Methodologically unlikely to reflect upon and disclose the motives for their own research, scholars and scientists have often discussed them with me qua editor and a southern European expatriate in the far north. The fascination with Iceland’s lunar vistas and its seemingly prohibitive inhospitality, combined with the sense of authenticity that such conditions inspire, are a frequent reason for Mediterranean minds to develop an interest in Nordic matters, even if these may have little to do with the island’s vistas, inhospitality or authenticity.

Concluding remarks

The literature by foreign experts published over the years in Nordicum-Mediterraneum pertains to many different disciplines. Prominent are literary, linguistic and legal studies. These disciplinary areas of emphasis are the result of many factors, not least the network of scholars and researchers who have found the journal a suitable venue for their work and that of experts willing to review the books that we receive from publishers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to gauge with certainty how representative they are of the stereotypes of, and commonplace conceptions about, Iceland. Nonetheless, I believe that they do offer considerable food for thought, which is an adequate and relevant aim for the present contribution.

Rikke Andreassen & Kathrine Vitus (eds.), Affectivity and Race. Studies from Nordic Countries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

The book’s title announces that two concepts are of crucial importance in this publication: affectivity and race. The book’s subtitle places its content geographically: in the Nordic countries; or better, in Scandinavia, since there are no studies comprised in the present book that deal with Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Continue reading Rikke Andreassen & Kathrine Vitus (eds.), Affectivity and Race. Studies from Nordic Countries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

Tom Houston, My Story with Governance. What I Have Learned from Running Christian Organizations (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2014)

— Hold fast (only) what is good. Discuss it among yourselves. Search the Scriptures (48)

I have been teaching and researching issues concerning “good governance” (1) for a number of years in connection with the Master’s programme in Polar Law of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. Moreover, since my youth, I have been involved with a Christian charity operating in Genoa, Italy. It is the first time that I come across a book that tries to combine together an articulate Scripture-based, faith-imbued understanding of good governance aimed at persons working within organisations of all stripes (esp. parts 3 and 4 of 4: 43-101), and a deeply personal Christian meditation (esp. parts 1 and 2 of 4: 1-40).

Continue reading Tom Houston, My Story with Governance. What I Have Learned from Running Christian Organizations (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2014)

Enemies of Interculturalism: The Economic Crisis in Light of Xenophobia, Liberal Cruelties and Human Rights

I was invited to present some reflections on my own intercultural experiences as an Italian philosopher who emigrated to Iceland, especially in the context of the latter’s much-televised banking collapse of 2008, without neglecting my own research on political theory. Thus, in what follows, I try to bring such seemingly disparate themes together, and discuss the notion of interculturalism, or at least some aspects relating to it within “the Nordic context” (NordForsk, “Interculturalism and Diversities: Developing intercultural models and thinking in the Nordic countries (IDIN)”, n.d.), such as:

  Continue reading Enemies of Interculturalism: The Economic Crisis in Light of Xenophobia, Liberal Cruelties and Human Rights

Reflections on Castoriadis’ “The Crisis of Modern Society”

In his 1965 talk “The Crisis of Modern Society”, Castoriadis retrieves five crises or dimensions (107): (1) axiological; (2) productive; (3) political; (4) familial; (5) educational. While Castoriadis discusses the notion of crisis in other works of his, he focuses therein on one or two of these five specific elements (e.g. (1) in “The Crisis of Culture and the State”, (1) and (3) in “Un monde à venir”, (5) in “Entretien avec Cornelius Castoriadis”). Thus, what makes this particular 1965 talk so interesting is its broader, perhaps more superficial, but undoubtedly more comprehensive scope. In essence, it is as synthetic a picture of what Castoriadis understood as crisis, and particularly as modern crisis, as there can be. Also, it must be noted that Castoriadis revised his assessment of (4) in a later work of his focussed upon crisis (“The Crisis of the Identification Process”), which seems to reduce considerably the relevance of this element. Later assessments of (1)-(3) and (5) do not differ much from what he stated in 1965, instead.

  Continue reading Reflections on Castoriadis’ “The Crisis of Modern Society”

Pia Guldager Bilde & Mark L. Lawall (eds.), Pottery, Peoples and Places. Study and Interpretation of Late Hellenistic Pottery (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014)

 

The volume hereby reviewed springs from a conference held at the Sandbjerg Manor in Denmark in late November 2008, dealing with the study of ceramics in the second-century BC Mediterranean and Pontic regions, hosted by the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Black Sea Study. It comprises seventeen essays, plus a preface, an introduction, an extensive bibliography and a detailed analytical index. The essays, authored by a number of scholars from several different countries, are organised in three fairly broad but to most appropriate sections.

  Continue reading Pia Guldager Bilde & Mark L. Lawall (eds.), Pottery, Peoples and Places. Study and Interpretation of Late Hellenistic Pottery (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014)

Pieter Bevelander & Bo Petersson (eds.), Crisis and Migration. Implications of the Eurozone Crisis for Perceptions, Politics, and Policies on Migration (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014)

 

The volume addresses some of the consequences for the European Union (EU) of the prolonged economic crisis resulting from the 2008 implosion of Wall Street’s financial wizardry. One particular consequence, or area of concern, is at the heart of the essays included in the volume, i.e. migration, meaning chiefly, though by no means exclusively, the movement of people from outside the EU into the EU. Albeit clear, relevant and useful statistics are offered both in the introductory chapter by the book’s editors (pp. 9-24) and in the second chapter, penned by economics professor T. Hatton (pp. 25-47), theoretical issues of socio-cultural perception are given more room in the book’s studies than empirical issues of demographics, econometrics and/or specific legislative acts.

  Continue reading Pieter Bevelander & Bo Petersson (eds.), Crisis and Migration. Implications of the Eurozone Crisis for Perceptions, Politics, and Policies on Migration (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014)

Sven-Olof Olsson (ed.), Managing Crises and De-globalization. Nordic foreign trade and exchange 1919-39 (New York: Routledge, 2014 pbk.)

 

Historical memory is unwelcome by people who have too much at stake in the short term to realise that they may have much more to lose in the medium and/or long term. Historical memory is also unwelcome by people who wish that economic history could fit neatly within the theoretical constructs that they favour because of ideological, political, moral or pecuniary commitments of theirs (cf. Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  Continue reading Sven-Olof Olsson (ed.), Managing Crises and De-globalization. Nordic foreign trade and exchange 1919-39 (New York: Routledge, 2014 pbk.)

Gaetano Roberto Buccola, Forme del centro. Percorsi analitici dal “Viaggio al centro della Terra” al nucleo dell’uomo (Palermo: Nuova Ipsa, 2013)

The passage above contains, in a nutshell, the core theme, the valuable strengths and the somewhat obvious weaknesses of the book reviewed hereby. 

  Continue reading Gaetano Roberto Buccola, Forme del centro. Percorsi analitici dal “Viaggio al centro della Terra” al nucleo dell’uomo (Palermo: Nuova Ipsa, 2013)

The Picture—Small and Big: Iceland and the Crises

 

0. Introduction

I was invited by the organisers of this Winter Symposium of the third research group of the Nordic Summer University (NSU), devoted to the concept of crisis, as an Icelandic citizen and scholar to offer a concise picture of the events in our country, which experienced in the year 2008 a much-televised economic crisis or kreppa, as it is called locally. In what follows, I provide two succinct and inevitably selective pictures: one small, another big. The small picture is a three-step account of what led essentially to the economic crisis, what this crisis consisted primarily in, and what followed it that induced a recovery. I focus upon the third step in particular, since it is less known abroad than the prior kreppa. The big picture is a brief twofold reflection on how the Icelandic experience fits within larger global trends, i.e. I assess it from an economic-historical perspective and from an axiological one. Under both perspectives, I make use of two chief intellectual reference points, both Canadian, namely the work and wisdom of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and of the value theorist John McMurtry. Given that the audience at this symposium is not fluent in Icelandic, I make use only of English-language sources (and spelling of Icelandic names) and as far as possible, given the electronic format of the journal in which this paper is going to be published, of sources that are easily accessible online.

Continue reading The Picture—Small and Big: Iceland and the Crises

What is Morality? Pascal’s Heartfelt Answer

 

 

Introduction

I had the good fortune and privilege of meeting Mike when I was a student, back in 1995, and I owe him so much in so many ways, both as a man and as a scholar, that no words of mine will ever be able to convey my gratitude, my admiration and my friendship. A bottle of red wine might do instead. Also, as a humble token of recognition and a heartfelt recollection of the times when we first met, I decided to answer the question that he has chosen for this symposium by going back to an author, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who was influential in making me interested in philosophy as a boy, but whose work I have not dealt with as a scholar. Thus, what follows is both old and new, being a first step into a terrain which I have not trodden for many years.

In effect, had I been asked to give an immediate answer to the question ‘what is morality?’ I would have said: ‘an instance of civil commons’, that is, an instance of “social constructs which enable universal access to human life goods without which people’s capacities are always reduced or destroyed.” (John McMurtry, “Human Rights versus Corporate Rights: Life Value, the Civil Commons and Social Justice” Studies in Social Justice 5(1): 11-61, 2011, p.17) In line with my academic studies over the past decade, I would have placed myself in the ideal position of an external observer and determined what role morality has been playing vis-à-vis the most regular aim displayed by human beings, both individually and collectively: to lead a tolerable life. Now, referring to the civil commons would give a description of morality that focuses upon its life-enhancing function. It would be a description of morality from the outside. Another description is also possible, however, that focuses upon the feelings of outrage, remorse, shame, distress, empathy, pleasure, pain, as well as the calls of duty and the spontaneous sense of what is right and what is wrong that populate at least my experience of morality—inside. All these emotions, the related beliefs, the reasoning processes that they set in motion, the subsequent acts of will and the corresponding physical actions that one imagines and hopes to materialise constitute the domain of morality as felt being, or lived personal experience.

It is primarily within this domain that Blaise Pascal develops his reflections on morality, which, despite his enduring fame as a scientist and a thinker, have received very little attention by modern Anglophone ethicists, who have written instead endless volumes on the epistemology of his wager or le pari (“the machine”, 680)[1]—itself a piece of apologetics and an early example of game theory. They have labelled Pascal a ‘philosopher of religion’ and pretty much left him there, as marginal as religion itself seems to be these days.[2] Yet, Pascal did have a moral philosophy of his own and one that can help us answer the question ‘what is morality?’ from the perspective of lived personal experience.[3] It is not an easy one to detect, for it is scattered across his unsystematic maxims, short reflections and aphorisms, themselves scattered across a number of differing manuscripts. Reconstructing and outlining it here today is the chief aim of my paper.[4] Knowing that some of today’s participants are greatly interested in French philosophy, literature and culture at large, Mike himself included, I hope you will appreciate my effort.

Pascal’s Moral Philosophy

According to Pascal, morality is behaviour consistent with the correct apprehension of moral value, i.e. goodness, through “the heart, which perceive[s] wisdom” (339). The heart [coeur] is the faculty that feels or senses good and bad or, in other words, it is the moral sense, perhaps an organ of perception, analogous to hearing (41) or seeing—hence Pascal’s writing in the same passage about “the eyes of the heart” (cf. also 804 [from the Manuscript Guerrier, not Copy B]). And if the eyes can see many things, so does the heart deliver much more than just the immediate apprehension of moral truths or values, whether ‘explicitable’ (e.g. “homicide is wrong”, 450) or not, since all forms of knowledge rely upon first principles that cannot be rationally demonstrated, but only intuited:

We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to challenge them. The skeptics, who have only this for their object, labor uselessly. We know we are not dreaming, however powerless we are to prove it by reason. This inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, and not, as they claim, the uncertainty of all knowledge. For knowledge of first principles, such as space, time, motion, number is as firm as any we derive from reasoning. Reason must use this knowledge from the heart and instinct, and base all its arguments on it. The heart feels that there are three dimensions in space… Principles are felt, propositions are proved; all with certainty, though in different ways (142).[5]

Analogous remarks appear in his 1658 Art of Persuasion (Harvard: Harvard Classics, 1993-2013 [1909-14]), where Pascal distinguishes between knowledge that enters the heart through the spirit, and knowledge that enters the spirit through the heart.[6] Perhaps the heart should be better described as a skill than a faculty, indeed one relying upon long-internalised skills, such as seeing or hearing; this is certainly a difficult issue to resolve, given the ambiguity of many passages in Pascal’s work. However, the actual crux of Pascal’s emphasis is the following: sane human beings grasp and believe in the existence of, say, space, time, extended bodies, moral wrongfulness, and upon them build their sciences, whether these eventually reflect adequately the original intuition or not.[7] “Ethics” itself, albeit “special”, is, for Pascal, a “universal science” (598).[8] What is important in it, is to rely upon correct intuited principles, which we may have experienced in childhood if we had good enough a natural disposition (157-9, 527), and before education, local customs[9] or excessive faith in discursive or demonstrative reason could lead us astray (97-8, 132, 171): “Wisdom leads us back to childhood” (116).[10]

It is important to highlight that the heart’s sentiments combine emotional, intellectual and volitional elements. We may separate them in abstracto, but they are joined in actual experience.[11] These sentiments are “internal and immediate feeling[s]” (360; emphasis in the original), but they are also forms of comprehension, insofar as they engender certain beliefs and interpretations (287), and they prompt us into action, including successive discursive or demonstrative rational processes (662). As Pascal famously asserted: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” (680; emphasis added) Typically, philosophers have emphasised the negative part of this statement. However, the positive is at least as important. Pascal was an intuitionist and believed sentiments to be the springboard of morality, but he was no sentimentalist or, to use a 20th-century label, no emotivist. “Religion”, as he writes, “is not contrary to reason” (46). Echoing old scholastic wisdom on this matter, Pascal states that “[t]he principle of morality” is “to think well” (232; cf. also 106, 117). Pascal does not posit an impassable contradiction between blind subjective bodily passion on the one end, and cognising objective disembodied reason on the other. Rather, he tries to reveal how different types or levels of belief, certainty and knowledge, wisdom included, can be acquired through our different faculties, one of which, the heart, also characterisd as “instinct” (187), can grasp fundamental truths that discursive or demonstrative reason cannot grasp.[12] Indeed, science itself would not be possible if we were not trustful enough in our intuitions (cf. also 455). Thus, Pascal condemns “Two excesses. Excluding reason, admitting only reason.” (214).[13]

True to his intellectual hero, Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), and to Augustine’s motto “credo ut intelligam”,[14] Pascal sees the limits of human reasoning and believes our sentiments to be able to spur (142 cited above), integrate (e.g. 287) and, when necessary, substitute our discursive or demonstrative reason (e.g. 662). A famous mathematician and physicist, Pascal reminds himself nonetheless to “write against those who delve too deeply in the sciences. Descartes” in primis (462). There are much more important subjects than the scientific ones, such as “the study of man” (566), to which science can contribute nothing, for it cannot address the ultimate questions of our existence (57). The strictly rational conceptual tools of science are inadequate: “The heart has its order; the mind has its own, which consists of principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we should be loved by displaying in order the causes of love. That would be absurd.” (329).[15] Thus, gifted with intuition, a humble child may attain moral truths that an adult, even the keenest scientist or theologian, fail regularly to grasp (13). As Pascal puts it: “The greatness of wisdom… is invisible to carnal or intelligent men. These are three different orders. Of kind.” (339). The most intelligent philosopher’s reason may demonstrate, while the libertine’s embodied will may desire; but the sage’s heart loves, allowing for forms of understanding that escape reason. After all, to expect that one faculty or one mode of reasoning suffices for all possible domains of experience and investigation is a foolish form of “tyranny” (92).[16] For Pascal, there are “different kinds of right thinking: some in a certain order of things, and not in other orders, where they talk nonsense” (669).[17]

Let me emphasise once more that Pascal is not advocating irrationalism, rather a form of understanding that does not rely primarily upon abstract conceptual expression (e.g. Descartes’ ethically “useless” rationalism, e.g. 445), logical reasoning (e.g. the “corrupt” Jesuits’ casuistry attacked also in his Provincial Letters, e.g. 498; 770 [from the Manuscript Périer, not Copy B], 800 [from the Recueil Original, not Copy B]) and algorithmic computation (e.g. his own calculations of utility for the libertine’s sake, 680). As difficult to pinpoint as it may be–for he never offers more than a sketchy phenomenology of the heart in action (cf. 87, 544)–Pascal’s account of moral experience entails an embodied rationality that is intuitive rather than discursive or syllogistic, as well concomitant and intertwined with emotions and willfulness, and capable of grasping objective truths about the world. As Pascal writes, “We know this in a thousand things” (680).[18]

Immediate, intuitive apprehensions of good and bad are not the end of Pascal’s moral philosophy. Rather, they are its beginning. In primis, there is the issue that we might be mistaken in our apprehensions, which may then require correction, as when we hear ‘cabbage’ instead of ‘baggage’ inside a noisy place, or claim to have seen Woody Allen when in fact we had seen Mike. Yet this is not an issue that Pascal is interested in as such. His focus is moral and apologetic, not epistemological. As Richard Rorty would possibly put it, it is relevance, not rigour, that which guides Pascal’s endeavour (cf. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth Cambridge: CUP, 1990). Pascal wants to help his fellows to lead a better life, not to get entangled into technical debates. Indeed, Pascal cautions us against over-rationalisation as a path leading away from our intuitions’ potential clarity: “Reason acts slowly, and with so many perspectives, on so many principles, which must be always present, that it constantly falls asleep or wanders, when it fails to have its principles present. Feeling does not act in this way; it acts instantaneously, and is always ready to act. We must then put our faith in feeling, or it will always be vacillating” (661). Consistently, he warns his readers against people who no longer have any “common sense”, such as “academics, students, and that is the nastiest type of man I know.” (662)

Pascal is much more intrigued by the fact that despite our possible immediate grasp of moral value, human behaviour is all but consistent with it. Even moral philosophers, who might be inclined to making morality an important feature in their lives, fall prey of professional pride, pettiness and resentment. A devout Catholic, Pascal was well aware of the endless list of sins that human beings are capable of. How can we sense what is good and bad and, between the two, opt for the latter? Pascal’s penultimate answer to this crucial ethical question lies in his account of imagination, which reshapes and reinterprets the immediate givens of the heart. And this is bad. Far from extolling the virtues of this faculty, which Romantic and post-modern philosophers have done aplenty in later centuries, Pascal worries about the imagination’s “dominant” role within the human psyche (78) and its ability to distort in self-serving fashions the data of sentiment, which is particularly prone to being twisted in over-intellectualising minds: “I am not speaking of fools; I am speaking of the wisest, and they are those whom imagination is best entitled to persuade. Reason may well protest; it cannot determine the price of things.” (Id.)

Reason does not fix values within and around us; imagination does. Appealing to our “proud” and selfish thirst for power, knowledge and pleasure, “imagination… has established a second nature in man” and “disposes of everything. It creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the whole of the world.” (Id.) Instead of allowing the humble acknowledgment of our helplessness and imperfection, which is grounded in our feelings (689) and is rationally as undeniable as our mortality (e.g. 195-8, 686), imagination leads each person to attribute an overwhelming amount of value upon herself and “makes [her]self the center of everything” (494), when it is quite obvious that she is not (cf. also 509-10). Far from the exaltation of amour-propre or “self-love” that will characterise much French and Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy, Pascal writes:

The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self. But what will it do? It cannot prevent the object it loves from being full of faults and wretchedness. It wants to be great and sees itself small; it wants to be happy, and sees itself wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees itself full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its defects deserve only their dislike and contempt… No doubt it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since this adds the further evil of a deliberate illusion. (743).

The power of imagination can be so deep-reaching that we may no longer be able to distinguish between sentiment and the fantasies that imagination—also called “fancy”—delivers in order to please our self-love:

All our reasoning reduces to giving in to feeling. But fancy is similar and opposite to feeling, so that we cannot distinguish between these two opposites. One person says that my feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule. Reason is proposed, but it is pliable in every direction. And so there is no rule (455)… It is a nothing that our imagination enlarges into a mountain: another turn of the imagination makes us discover this without difficulty (456)… We need a fixed point in order to judge… The harbour decides for those who are on a ship. But where will we find a harbour in morals? (576)

In the midst of such uncertainty and confusion, which are epitomised by the madness of human love affairs (cf. “Cleopatra’s nose”, 31-2, 228), given that intuition itself can become as unreliable a source of belief as reason is, tradition can come of use and help us. When something is not “demonstrable” and “doubting” leads nowhere, “submission” becomes reasonable (201; cf. 203-13). In Pascal’s case, that means submission to religious tradition, and specifically to the Catholic one (cf. “Luther: everything outside the truth.” [791] {from the Recueil Original, not Copy B}); in this sense, then, “all morality is concupiscence and grace” (258).[19] “Religion is such a great thing”, as Pascal writes, also because it grants “[c]omprehension of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’.” (709-10). Submission to religious tradition means, in essence, to follow “[t]wo laws” that “suffice to rule the whole Christian Republic better than all political laws” i.e. to love God and to love one’s neighbour, as per Matthew 22:35 (408); “charity” or love “in morals” being able “to produce fruits against concupiscence” (458) and turn the energy of potentially sinful “passions” into “virtues” (500; cf. 759 [from the Manuscript Périer, not Copy B]).[20]

Still, even within religion does imagination make moral life difficult: “Men often take their imagination for their heart, and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.” (739); they can therefore remain “duplicitous in heart… neither fish nor fowl” (451); their “blinded” minds leading to quarrels, schisms and sectarianism that “destroy… morals” (447-8); their misplaced self-confidence making them “sinners, who believe themselves righteous” (469; cf. 753 [from the Manuscript Périer, not Copy B]), “corrupt the laws” of “the Church” (558), and “do evil… completely and cheerfully… out of conscience” (658). Consistent with his picture of the human being as an erring wanderer prone to error yet also capable of greatness, Pascal offers no easy path to wisdom, which may be perceived at times, even patently exemplified in saints and sages, yet still eludes us in spite of our best efforts to grasp it and make it truly ours.

Furthermore, according to Pascal, imagination is the first step in a process of moral self-deception, which reasoning can take farther by: (A) adding the uncertainty of sceptical considerations to the distortions of the imagination; and (B) making religious self-correction ineffective. We may even be most thoughtful and honestly good-willed, but without divine grace there is little likelihood of success. The good may still escape us—even the brightest and most celebrated minds among us can fail. As Pascal remarks, there are “[t]wo hundred eighty kinds of supreme good in Montaigne” (27; cf. also 16, 714).[21] Starting a theme that will play an important role in the moral philosophy of 20th-century French existentialists, Pascal deems self-deception the main springboard of immorality, not our inability to perceive what is right or wrong, or our incapacity to comprehend what is good and what is bad. Quite the opposite, according to Pascal, we would appear to have the faculties needed to perceive and understand all this; but we also possess another, imagination, which, combined with our passions and with self-love in particular (e.g. 699; 744 [from the Manuscript Périer, not Copy B]), distorts our perceptions and understanding to the utmost degree.[22] More than religion itself, then, we need God’s help: His grace alone can save us, “enlighten” us, and help us make proper use of the faculties that we are endowed with, and upon which we rely in order to lead a good life, religious life (335).

 

Conclusion

Reading a classic is always a worthy endeavour, especially if it offers opportunities for genuine philosophical meditation. However, there are some more specific reasons why I think that rediscovering Pascal may be advisable for today’s Anglophone ethicists.

First of all, his moral conceptions and his celebrated literary style highlight the importance in human morality of sentiments. This is no minor issue, for the impact of sentiments upon people’s actual behaviour tends to be much stronger than that of abstractions or complex reasoning.[23] And yet philosophers have been pursuing relentlessly the path of abstraction and complex reasoning, leaving that of sentiment to others. Now, if we wish to engage in meta-ethics alone, such a division of labour may be fine. But if we want to change the world a little, whether as educators or public intellectuals, then some familiarity with the realm of sentiments may be a boon, since we may aim at “impassioning” rather than just “instructing”, as Pascal would word it (329; cf. also 496, 702).

Secondly, moral intuitionism has been on the rise over recent decades because of its recurrent empirical substantiation in psychology (e.g. J. Haidt (2001), “The Emotional Dog and its Rational TailPsychological Review 108:8, 14-34). Still, as far as I know, the only philosopher who has taken seriously Pascal’s notion of a different, heartfelt understanding—embedded, embodied, united with sentiments—and built an ethics upon it was Max Scheler (1874-1928). Amongst contemporary Anglophone intuitionists, Pascal is as absent as Scheler himself, who has long lost the enormous popularity that he enjoyed in the early 20th century. Yet Pascal’s moral philosophy is based upon the notion of intuition and constitutes an attempt that treads upon the tight rope set between rationalism and sentimentalism, and one that could be mined for insights and for the enduring rhetorical power of his writings.

Thirdly, Pascal’s approach is relevant because it makes the ground of moral value independent of the individual, who can only apprehend it for what it is, lest her imagination is so corrupt as to distort apprehension. In that case, Jesus Christ, that is, revealed religion is the fixed point of equilibrium that Pascal opts for (e.g. 570). Since the global affirmation of industrial society, we live in the first age in human history in which our species has become a threat to its own survival, as another religious-minded ethicist, Hans Jonas (1903-1993) underscored repeatedly in the 20th century (cf. The Imperative Responsibility Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1979]). Pascal’s moral philosophy is relevant in this respect because, like Jonas’, it reminds us of the possibility that the ground of moral value may not be individualistic, relativistic, or even anthropocentric. The risk of species-wide annihilation may reveal something much more objective, such as planet-wide life-conditions and eco-system-wide life-needs, which we can only acknowledge and comply with, lest we prefer perishing to living, hence destroying the fundamental precondition for all preferences. As such a reminder, Pascal’s moral philosophy can then serve as a token of civil commons. And there I am, again: civil

 


[1] All references are by fragment number as they appear in the latest complete English translation of the 1976 Sellier edition of the so-called “Copy B” of Pascal’s thoughts, that is, the second copy prepared for his sister and least likely of having undergone third-person reordering (Pensées, edited and translated by Roger Ariew, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2005). When preparing this paper, I have also made use of the original French and related Italian translation of Pascal’s thoughts by Adriano Bausola contained in Pensieri (Milan: Rusconi, 1993).

[2] A valuable and possibly unique recent exception is constituted by: William D. Wood (2009), “Axiology, Self-deception, and Moral Wrongdoing in Blaise Pascal’s PenséesJournal of Religious Ethics 37(2): 355-84; the first footnote in Wood’s essay contains also a brief account of the negligible record of Pascal studies in modern Anglophone ethics.

[3] Pascal’s religious focus is as much a result of his moral philosophy as his moral philosophy is the result of his religious focus: “Man’s true nature, his true good, true virtue, and true religion, are things that cannot be known separately” (12).

[4] The main difference with regard to Wood’s own commendable 2009 attempt is my further avoidance of strictly epistemological and theological considerations, to either of which Pascal’s moral philosophy is regularly reduced. Also, I attempt hereby to provide more numerous references to relevant fragments in Pascal’s Pensées.

[5] Pascal’s emphasis upon intuition vis-à-vis first principles is analogous to Aristotle’s epagoge in connection with the fundamental laws of thought that cannot be obtained through any set of syllogisms but that underpin them all nevertheless (Anal. Post. II, 99b-100b; Meta. 980a-981a).

[6] This is not to be confused with Descartes’ distinction between empirical and innate knowledge. Rather, Pascal wishes to separate knowledge that we can reach through explicit reasoning processes of demonstration, whether deductive or inductive, and the indemonstrable fundamental principles that make them possible.

[7] Henri Bergson, probably, would be sceptical that they do so (cf. Time and Free Will London: Allen, 1910 [1889]).

[8] Given the regular use of “wisdom” rather than “knowledge” in connection with the moral considerations expressed in his Pensées, I would venture to argue that this different object is one of the reasons why “ethics” is said to be a “special” science.

[9] Customs, for Pascal, are very powerful, to the point of establishing causality itself (661), though theyr are neither absolute (e.g. 527) nor certain (e.g. 94-6).

[10] Some human beings, according to Pascal, are fortunate enough as to be able to attain religious faith through the same mode of apprehension: “As if reason alone were capable of teaching us! Would to God, on the contrary, that we never had need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition. But nature has refused us this good, giving us instead very little knowledge of this kind… That is why those to whom God has given religion by intuition of the heart are very fortunate and, in fact, properly convinced” (142). The least fortunate, instead, who are devoid of a piously “incline[d] heart” (412; cf. also 443, 448, 450, 646, 717) or have been hardened (580) or corrupted to the extreme point of cynical disinterest for the most important things, such as the fate of our immortal soul (2, 5), may have to think through Pascal’s wager or “machine” and determine whether it is advantageous to lead a pious life rather than a selfish one (680).

[11] Pascal’s account is reminiscent of Mihail Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002 [1958]); perhaps morality is an eminent example of tacit knowledge that is difficult to make explicit and cannot be turned into a neat system of axioms, theorems and corollaries.

[12] On repeated occasions (e.g. Gesammelte Werke, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1971-97, volume V, p.104) did Max Scheler praise Pascal and his spiritual mentor Augustine for attempting to overcome Western thought’s long-standing prejudice that grants epistemic objectivity and evidential value to rational proofs alone, ignoring sentiment and religious revelation or, worse, condemning them as subjective and dangerously irrational.

[13] The notion of a golden mean between too much and too little of something is a recurrent theme in Pascal’s thoughts and it applies, inter alia, to the effect of age on judgment (25), thinking (25), the distance from an object of observation (25), the speed of one’s reading (75, 601) and the constitution of virtue (645). Whether it can be attained, however, is doubtful, given the dual nature of man (cf. especially 145-67, 230-4, 690, 707-8; 753 [from the Manuscript Périer, not Copy B]), who is a “thinking reed” cast between two opposed infinities (i.e. meaninglessness and all-embracing thought), experiencing opposed tendencies (e.g. fear and courage, pain and pleasure) and possessing two opposed natures (i.e. animal and angelic). Jesus Christ alone seems capable of embodying opposites successfully (e.g. 736; 749 & 771 [from the Manuscript Périer, not Copy B]).

[14] “I believe in order to understand”; cited in Perry Cahall, “The Value of St Augustine’s Use/Enjoyment Distinction to Conjugal LoveLogos (8)1: 117-28, 2005, p.117; under this perspective, Pascal’s heart can be seen as opening a hermeneutical horizon, which embraces much more than just the knowledge that can be rationally demonstrated.

[15] This is another notion that Pascal derives from Augustine, i.e. the “order of love” [ordo amoris].

[16] One generation after Pascal, Vico would describe reason’s hypertrophic disregard of bodily and emotional components of life and related understanding the “barbarism of reflection” (The New Science, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948[1744]). Today, faced with the notion of a particular mode of reasoning (e.g. scientific ‘Method’, homo oeconomicus‘ self-maximisation) being regarded as the only one possible, we would speak of cultural or disciplinary imperialism.

[17] There is no lack of vagueness and ambiguity in Pascal’s writings. For one, “heart” itself is not used only as the term denoting our faculty of intuition, but also more loosely as referring to will or desire (182, 536, 681-2; cf. also 544 in which “the will” is said to be the human faculty that “loves”), mere feeling (210), and a person’s soul or character (especially in connection with the Old Testament’s use of it, e.g. 309, 311, 378, 504; cf. also 707). Furthermore, it does not help that Pascal stresses so often the opposition between heart and reason, as though they were irreconcilable enemies at “war” with each other (29; cf. also 144, 164, 203, 414, 503, 514)—and here we get truly to the negative part of the cited famous statement about heart’s “reasons”.

[18] Whether in matters of mathematics, love, or religion, intuition anticipates, grounds and eludes whatever subsequent reasoning we may attempt to build upon it. As morals are concerned, Pascal believes logical reflection to be inadequate within the domain of the intuitive spirit for fine things, or “ésprit de finesse”, as opposed to the logical spirit of geometry, the “ésprit de géometrie”. Whilst the former is subtly acute, delicately nuanced, highly personal, and mixed in its being both cognitive and affective, the latter is forcefully trenchant, rigorously explicit, methodically interpersonal and allegedly purely rational. These two forms of comprehension are not mutually exclusive in absolute terms. For example, a mathematician may sense analogies or truths and conjure thereof new hypotheses, which he can test according to standard geometric methodology. Moreover, explicit knowledge may be internalised to the point of becoming intuitive, as with the acquisition of a skill (531; cf. Polayi, supra). Still, Pascal knew that these two forms of comprehension could subsist separately. A mystic, for one, could cultivate the former to the point of becoming unfamiliar with the latter: “Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand matters involving reasoning. For they want first to penetrate at a glance, and are not used to looking for principles.” (622) On their part, persons relying upon logical reasoning can become so removed from their own heart and the realm of intuition that they end up quite ignorant of them both and incapable of ascribing any order or intelligibility to them: “And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles and being unable to see at a glance” (Id.)–one is reminded here of hardcore orthodox economists, who no longer perceive the blatant immorality or ugliness of the self-maximising conduct that they deem rational and commendable.

[19] Pascal does seem to allow for cases of commendable moral virtue in non-Catholic and non-Christian settings, e.g. “the Jewish religion” (276; cf. 692-6, 715).

[20] Christ’s two laws go to the very heart of human behaviour towards oneself and others, hence they can make the eradication of vice fairly effective, since “[t]here are vices that take hold of us through other ones, and that, when the trunk is removed, are carried away like branches”. (457)

[21] Humbly, Pascal remarks: “It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find everything I see in him.” (568)

[22] Wood (2009) argues convincingly that the imagination’s detrimental deceptions are, for Pascal, one of the consequences of the Biblical fall, i.e. the ultimate cause of immorality. For Pascal, having tasted perfection before the fall, we are condemned to sense and seek truths that, however, escape us (e.g. 25, 62, 90-1, 165-6, 180-1).

[23] Abstraction and complex reasoning are relied upon in somewhat particular circumstances, such as bioethical committee’s deliberations about technology-driven dilemmas and adjudications by courts of justice. Under normal circumstances, mothers, teachers, priests, novelists and TV stars affect people’s sentiments to a much greater degree than any ethicist or judge, shaping a fortiori people’s moral and immoral behaviours. As Richard Rorty noted in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did much more to let Americans see the true horror of slavery than all liberal philosophers since John Locke’s day were ever capable of.

Erik S. Reinert & Francesca Lidia Viano (eds.), Thorstein Veblen. Economics for an Age of Crises (London: Anthem, 2012)

Frequent yet allegedly unexpected crises, the sudden meltdowns of recently praised free-market ‘tigers’, and large-scale social unrest keep surfacing in the post-Thatcherite world of ‘free-trade agreements’, ‘globalisation’, ‘deregulation’, ‘privatisation’, monetary ‘great moderation’ and similar catchwords for the so-called age of ‘neo-liberalism’. Given such circumstances, a few mainstream economists have been willing to reconsider at least some of the premises upon which their discipline has operated and to rediscover the long-forgotten wisdom of a famous but largely uninfluential mind, whose contribution to the discipline’s textbooks has been reduced to a class of odd goods that moneyed people want all the more the costlier they get (i.e. so-called ‘Veblen goods’).

In this perspective, part four (of four) in Reinert’s and Viano’s book contains six exemplary chapters, penned by five seasoned academics and two outstanding young students, that focus upon the usefulness of Veblen’s diverse and different categories of thought for today’s economists, legislators and policy-makers.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s “Thorstein Veblen: The Father of Evolutionary and Institutional Economics” compares mainstream economics’ current usage of notions that were crucial for Veblen—such as “institutions” and “evolution” (283)—with Veblen’s original understanding of them. His conclusion is that the former, corrupted by rational choice theory and a simplistic interpretation of Darwinism, has reduced these notions to “apologetic” descriptors within a grossly distorted picture of “market competition” that pleases the adherents of “laissez faire” economics (292). On the contrary, Veblen’s understanding of them is much more nuanced, empirically perceptive, open to revision, and disciplinarily ecumenical. He therefore concludes: “We can still learn a great deal from his writings and build on them for the future.” (292)

Paul Burkander’s “Veblen’s Words Weighed” dissects the full complexity of meaning in a famously convoluted passage in Veblen’s essay “Why is Economics is Not an Evolutionary Science”, showing its author’s commitment to replace “neoclassical economics” (297) with a novel approach that may truly “scrutinise the economic actions of man” (300).

L. Randall Wray’s “The Great Crash of 2007 Viewed through the Perspective of Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise, Keynes’s Monetary Theory of Production and Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis” brings three heterodox classics into dialogue, highlighting mutual similarities and differences, so as to provide insights in the structural economic conditions that do actually cause financial crashes like the 2007 one.

James K. Galbraith’s “Predation from Veblen until Now: Remarks to the Veblen Sesquicentennial Conference” makes use of a largely neglected concept in Veblen’s understanding of socio-economic phenomena, i.e. predation, in order to explain the historical origins and the well-tested beneficial functions of regulation within market economies. As he writes: “A functioning structure of regulation is the instrument… of that part of the business community that wishes, and chooses, to play by a common set of rules” that keep market economies from “predatory self-destruction.” (327)

Sophus A. Reinart’s and Francesca Lidia Viano’s “Capitalising Expectations: Veblen on Consumption, Crises and the Utility of Waste” addresses another economic notion, i.e. “expectations” and how Veblen was capable of explaining its centrality in “systemic financial collapses” as well as “patterns of individual consumption.” (329)

Robert H. Frank’s “Thorstein Veblen: Still Misunderstood, but More Important than Ever” takes its moves from Veblen’s enduring textbook relevance in the very specific field of positional goods. Then it proceeds to emphasising his relevance vis-à-vis the much more general claim that “evaluations of all types depend heavily on social context”, hence on the necessity for “economic models” to stop assuming “that consumption decisions take place in social isolation” and start differentiating amongst the ways in which social factors affect economic evaluations and actual choices. (358)

Elements of the fourth part of the book colour the third one, in which three more social scientists explore in as many chapters Veblen’s importance for the field of politics.

Sidney Plotkin’s “Thorstein Veblen and the Politics of Predatory Power” focuses upon Veblen’s understanding of predation in human affairs and its applicability to phenomena such as social coercion, alienation, instrumental rationality, warfare and institutional development.

Stephen Edgell’s “Veblen, War and Peace” tries to fill a gap in the scholarly literature about Veblen, since the economists interested in his work are said to have largely neglected Veblen’s studies on World War I and the ensuing peace agreements. By doing so, Edgell does not only offer an account of this lesser known component of Veblen’s legacy, but also an application of Veblen’s insights to the contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

Eyüp Özveren’s “Veblen’s ‘Higher Learning’: The Scientist as Sisyphus in the Iron Cage of a University” approaches Veblen’s research from the perspective of Veblen’s assessment of the history of modern sciences, the development of academic institutions, and the failure of the latter to be truly beneficial to society at large. According to Özveren’s “account, Veblen was highly sceptical of the universities’ ability to produce skilled and constructive minds, because of enduring archaic habits of thought, ritual functions in costly displays of wealth and status, enslavement to short-term business goals, and the prevalence of institutional competition over institutional cooperation. Additionally, Özveren’s account offers a depiction of academics as Sisyphus-like figures, who engage in the production of knowledge and fame that are bound to be overcome by the future academics that they nurture and instruct.

Parts one and two of the book belong primarily to ‘Veblenite’ historiography, as they deal with Veblen’s personal biography, his family and cultural background, his education in the US, and his own controversial teaching experiences. Of the six chapters comprised in these two parts, the readers of Nordicum-Mediterraneum are going to find the first four (i.e. part one of the book) of particular interest, for they focus upon Veblen’s Norwegian and Scandinavian background, especially in the context of late-19th-century Nordic immigrant communities in North America. These four chapters being: Kåre Lunden’s “Explaining Veblen by his Norwegian Background: A Sketch”; Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger’s “Valdres of the Upper Midwest: The Norwegian Background of the Veblen Family and their Migration to the United States”; Knut Odner’s “New Perspectives on Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian”; and Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley’s “The Physical World of Thorstein Veblen: Washington Island and Other Intimate Spaces”.

The book hereby reviewed is the result of the conference held in Valdres, Norway, upon the 150th anniversary of Veblen’s birth. It contains essays that differ considerably in length, topic, methodology, and reader-friendliness. Most of them presuppose a modicum of familiarity with Veblen’s work. Therefore, this volume cannot be recommended as an introduction to it. Rather, taken together, the book’s essays offer a very interesting token of Veblen scholarship and an eloquent exemplification of the cross-disciplinary appeal of Veblen’s genius. Furthermore, the essays comprised in the first part of the book reflect extensively upon the Nordic elements in Veblen’s life experience and intellectual interests, and should appeal to our journal’s Scandinavian readership, particularly in Norway.

Dom Holdaway & Filippo Trentin (eds.), Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape (London & Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2013)

Rome qua its sprawling peripheries, immortalised by Italian literature and cinema in their bleakest and most dramatic aspects (e.g. Pier Paolo Pasolini), has also become a well-known aesthetic trope, which is itself parasitic upon Rome’s paradigmatic historic centre, whose time-honoured beauty and wealth stand in stark contrast to the more recent peripheries. Whilst the former aesthetic reception of Rome is tied indissolubly to the classical age and later classicism, the latter is a standard case of modernity qua urban phenomenon, i.e. the pre-modern city centre being surrounded and eventually dwarfed by ever-growing circles of newly populated areas marking the inexorable advent and advance of the modern age.

The contributors of the volume hereby reviewed attempt to overcome this aesthetic dichotomy and present a postmodern understanding of the city, drawing primarily from architecture, psychoanalysis, art history and film studies, the book’s cinematographic references spanning from Enrico Guazzoni’s 1913 Quo vadis to Michele Placido’s 2005 Romanzo criminale. Whereas classical and modern narratives aim at establishing fixed points of reference and final evaluations, a postmodern one contents itself with their plurality, which reveals implicitly the irreducible variety of perspectives characterising human affairs and the incessant flow of human life, individual as well as collective, which no abstract concept or conception can truly grasp once and for all.

 

The first three essays in the book pursue their postmodern interpretation of Rome by focussing upon: (1) the ever-changing urban landscape around, against, through, within, beneath and upon the Aurelian Walls (“Between Rome’s Walls: Notes on the Role and Reception of the Aurelian Walls”, by Marco Cavietti); (2) the impressionistic and idiosyncratic depiction of ancient and modern Rome in Federico Fellini’s cinema, which has itself become part of the internationally shared imagery of the city (“The Explosion of Rome in the Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography: Federico Fellini and the Forma Urbis”, by Fabio Benincasa); and (3) the further expansion of the re-presented Rome in recent Italian films, which bear witness to the gradual cultural acceptance of more and more sections of the modern city in the same imagery (“Centre, Hinterland and the Articulation of ‘Romanness’ in Recent Italian Film”, by Lesley Caldwell).

The second lot of three essays focuses instead upon specific places and notable artefacts in Rome, the fame of which may often hide the very different meanings that they have had in the course of their history or with regard to their observers. The chosen items are: (1) a number of famous buildings, monuments and neighbourhoods in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1979 film entitled La luna (“Topophilia nd Other Roman Perversions: On Bertolucci’s La luna”, by John David Rhodes); (2) the 2nd-century equestrian bronze statue of emperor Marcus Aurelius and emperor Augustus’ 1st-century BCE Ara Pacis (“Marcus Aurelius and the Ara Pacis: Notes on the Notion of ‘Origin’ in Contemporary Rome”, by Filippo Trentin); and (3) the gigantic gas holder built in the Ostiense area in the 1930s to provide the citizens of Rome with cooking gas and street illumination (“A Postmodern Gaze on the Gasometer”, by Keala Jewell).

The concluding three essays discuss Rome’s two-way links with foreign architectural experiments. Specifically, they address: (1) the growingly innovative and daring architecture of the churches built outside Rome’s historic centre in the 20th and 21st century, especially after the 1962-5 Second Vatican Council, in line with analogous developments in Glasgow (“Ecclesiastical Icons: Defining Rome through Architectural Exchange”, by James Robertson); (2) the thirty-year-long international success of the itinerating architectural exhibition called Roma interrotta, in which twelve architects from different countries reinterpreted Giambattista Nolli’s seminal 1748 Great Plant of Rome (“’Roma Interrotta’: Postmodern Rome as the Source of Fragmented Narratives”, by Léa-Catherine Szacka); and (3) the influence of Rome’s architectures on two of the most influential 20th-century American architects, i.e. Charles W. Moore and Robert Venturi (“Las Vegas by Way of Rome: The Eternal City and American Postmodernism”, by Richard W. Hayes).

 

The volume edited by Holdaway and Trentin is the second instalment of the Warwick series in the humanities and it offers an engaging exploration of Rome as an evolving cultural hub of important significations for architects and artists, well beyond the firmly established waves of classicism that, recurrently, have swept the shores of Western creativity. Also, it offers a convincing example of coherent application of “postmodernism” as a useful hermeneutical tool and an established category of academic thought. Although the level of scholarly detail of the chapters is not homogenous, the overall quality of the volume is noteworthy, since this book offers many a refreshing perspective over a city about which countless perspectives have already been offered. Moreover, interesting considerations about the city’s demography, politics and economic life punctuate the chapters and make this book even more appealing. Above all, a genuine fascination with Rome’s vast and complex architectural and artistic history informs the whole endeavour, turning the book into an erudite act of love for the city. The reader who has never visited Rome will feel compelled to do it. The one who has already visited it will wish to do it again, in order to savour it in a new way.

Þorlákur Axel Jónsson, Dagur Austan. Ævintýramaðurinn Vernharður Eggertsson (Akureyri: Völuspá, 2009)

Þorlákur Axel Jónsson’s slender volume (104 pages in total) is written in Icelandic and inaugurates a book series devoted to the history of northern Iceland’s Eyjafjörður and its inhabitants: Safn til sögu Eyjafjarðar og Eyfirðinga. Yet, in a way that is commented upon in the following paragraphs, this book is relevant to Nordic and Mediterranean studies and it has therefore been decided that Nordicum-Mediterraneum should carry a belated review of it, given the book’s relatively old year of publication, i.e. 2009.

 

Vernharður Eggertsson (1909-1952) was known also as Dagur Austan, a marginal contributor to 20th-century Icelandic literature, to whom serious critics and well-established literary reviewers have paid hardly any attention. Despite his vivid depiction of police callousness, or his groundbreaking references to homosexuality and child abuse by Catholic priests (79), the author’s little fame between the 1930s and the 1950s was due primarily to infamy or, to put it more correctly, to notoriety. Before and during the years in which Dagur Austan published one book (An Icelandic Adventurer in the Spanish War, 1938), one booklet and a handful of short stories (including the 1950 “The Dog and I”, perhaps the most successful of them), the name “Vernharður Eggertsson” appeared repeatedly in Iceland’s newspapers and even more frequently in the official records of Iceland’s police, courts of law and prisons for a long string of petty crimes, often related to alcoholic beverages. 

Since at least 1931, when he experienced a stint in a Canadian jail for a somewhat mythical case of prohibition-era smuggling (24-7), Vernharður Eggertsson’s life was marked by the homelessness, poverty, instability, mendacity, proneness to self-harm and the erratic behaviour that are often associated with excessive drinking amongst working-class men. On top of that, his professed adherence to communism made him a target of exemplary toughness by Iceland’s police authorities (60-3). During a remarkable dry spell facilitated by the Salvation Army in the early 1940s, Vernharður Eggertsson did succeed in finding a wife and fathering a host of children, from whom he was eventually separated by his overwhelming propensity for the bottle (see esp. 64-70). What is more, before and after this spell, he worked in the family brewery (9-18), travelled the world as a sailor (21-3, 82-7), witnessed and probably fought in the Civil War in Spain (44-59), walked rarely trodden paths in his native country after a jail break (35-43) and managed to charm and befriend many fellow Icelanders, including young artists, journalists and literati (78-81, 101).

In the end, Vernharður Eggertsson suffered a tragic death in a shipwreck off Caithness’ perilous coasts, probably after sailing in the treacherous Pentland Firth (87), crowning a tempestuous existence with the kind of salt-water tragedy that fate reserves to the true adventurer, which is the way chosen by the book’s author to refer to Vernharður Eggertsson, i.e. Ævintýramaðurinn (“the adventurer”), and possibly the one in which Vernharður Eggertsson liked thinking of himself as well.

Certainly, the gritty tales that Dagur Austan recounts in his book on the Spanish Civil War—passages of which are included in Þorlákur Axel Jónsson’s text—are worthy of the most audacious adventurer, if not of a hero, which is the term used by the Swedish communists’ journal Ny Dag to salute in 1936 the brave Icelander that was reported to have fought for the Republic in the International Brigades (57). Besides, Dagur Austan’s matter-of-fact, adventure-centred outlook on the bloody fights between Republicans and Monarchists, as well as between Anarchists and other Republicans, offers an unusually fresh, ideologically uncompromising and little-known account of the Civil War itself. Historians that are interested in what happened in Spain during those terrible years may well find it a valuable integration of more commonly cited sources.

 

The author of the volume hereby reviewed is a historian and social scientist. His style is dry, unadorned and non-evaluative. He is careful in the selection of, and the references to, the sources utilised for his biography of Vernharður Eggertsson aka Dagur Austan. Photographs (mid-book insert, 1-8), a thorough critical apparatus (88-94), a poem (2) and a short story penned by Dagur Austan himself (95-100), plus a 1952 obituary by Sverrir Þórðarson (101) complement it effectively, giving a concrete sense of the times and the lives that are touched upon. The resulting volume is not big, its short chapters offering a dozen of highly effective sketches, rather than a lengthy account, of salient moments in the life of Vernharður Eggertsson and of his family. If neorealism were a literary style, rather than a cinematographic one, Þorlákur Axel Jónsson’s book would be an instantiation of it.

One may wonder why such a peculiar citizen of northern Iceland should have been chosen to launch the book series on Eyjafjörður and its inhabitants. Though unquestionably exciting and romantically eccentric, Vernharður Eggertsson’s story is neither enviable nor edifying. As Sverrir Þórðarson wrote, he was “a son of the street” (73). Yet, it is true that Icelandic literature has never eschewed the darker margins of the island’s society, whether by devoting entire sagas to famous outlaws or by celebrating the most poetically talented psychotic murderer of the Viking age, Egill Skallagrímsson. If divine wisdom informs the entirety of God’s creation, then lessons can be learnt from all walks of life. Thus, pondering upon Vernharður Eggertsson’s tribulations may remind the reader of how healthily insignificant is a comfortable middle-class life.

Michele Renee Salzman, Marvina A. Sweeney & William Adler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World (2 vols.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

However variously and perhaps even ambiguously understood the term “religion“ may be, all ancient civilisations inhabiting the lands surrounding, or surrounded by, the Mediterranean Sea have left ample material and textual evidence of their widespread and regular acknowledgment of the supernatural as a dimension of individual and collective existence, the personal and social need for relating to it in structured meaningful ways, and the articulation of these relations to the supernatural within the wider socio-political, economic, cultural and artistic contexts. The two-volume publication hereby reviewed charts and discusses recurrent religious phenomena (e.g. ritual worship, erection of temples and shrines, priesthood, etc.) in the ancient world, organised by geographic region and time period.

Continue reading Michele Renee Salzman, Marvina A. Sweeney & William Adler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World (2 vols.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Cruelty and Austerity. Philip Hallie’s Categories of Ethical Thought and Today’s Greek Tragedy

Quels crimes ? Quelle faute ont commis ces enfants sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants ?

(Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, 1756)

Cruelty

As 20th-century scholarship about cruelty is concerned, Philip Hallie’s research is possibly the most extensive. Working for many years as an ethicist at Wesleyan University, Hallie wrote no less than three books on this largely neglected topic, the most famous of which being Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, published in 1979. In this book, Hallie recounts and discusses how the inhabitants of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small village in South-eastern France, protected more than six thousand Jewish refugees from fascist persecution during the 1940s. The inhabitants were led by the local Protestant pastor, André Trocmé, who believed firmly that, albeit extremely risky, such a line of conduct was the only justifiable one, i.e. in line with the morals dictated by the Christian faith.

In his many works on cruelty, Hallie defines this term in somewhat different ways, such as “the infliction of ruin, whatever the motives” (1969: 14), “the slow crushing and grinding of a human being by other human beings” (1979/1985: 2) and “the activity of hurting sentient beings” (1992: 229). Besides, echoing Saint Augustine’s classical distinction between natural and human evil, Hallie distinguishes between the “fatal cruelties” caused by nature and the “violent cruelty” caused by humans (1969: 5-6). Violent human cruelty is distinguished further into “sadistic” and “practical”: the former is “self-gratifying”; the latter is instrumental, i.e. cruelty qua means to ulterior ends (1969: 22-24). Concerning “practical” cruelty, Hallie adds to the picture the subtler form of “implicit” or “indirect” cruelty, which arises because of sheer “indifference or distraction” to the pain that has been caused, rather than because ofanyexplicit violence or direct “intention to hurt” (1969: 13-14 & 29-31). “Implicit” and “indirect” cruelty can grow in time and mutate into “institutionalized cruelty” (1981/1989: 11), i.e. a persistent pattern of humiliation that can often endure over many years or generations, and yet is downplayed by the perpetrator as well as the victim, both of whom take it for granted and may even justify it by appealing to the laws of science, the natural order, or religiously sanctioned traditions.

In addition to these distinctions among different forms of cruelty, all of which would appear to be evil, Hallie (1969) offers a puzzling reflection on some types of cruelty that might be better not to avoid altogether, for their disappearance could generate more harm than their continuation. For one, the processes of individual “growth” and maturation can be horribly painful and, in all honesty, “cruel”, but Hallie (1969) thinks that they are a most valuable component of the long and tortuous road that leads to higher human fulfilment (55). Then he considers the artistic insights and particularly the disclosure of sorrowful truths that can be obtained through in terrorem techniques, as well as many other aesthetic forms of elation, including “sexual” ones, that cruelty is capable of bringing about (41). On top of that, Hallie (1969) admits that cruelty may be a necessary evil in the public sphere, since “responsive” cruelty is entailed by the national and international systems of law and order; although such a “responsive cruelty” can be mitigated, it cannot be avoided entirely (33). Finally, Hallie (1969) notes how cruelty can be brought about in the name of altruism, happiness and justice, since “substantial maiming” can derive from “wanting the best and doing the worst” (15-20). For all these reasons, he deems cruelty to constitute a “paradox” (1969: book title): we may well regard cruelty as one of the most horrible things in life, perhaps even the worst thing we can do, yet we cannot and may not want to rid ourselves of it completely.

Hallie (1969) offers us what is to date the richest philosophical study on the paradoxical character of cruelty. As I discussed years ago (cf. Baruchello 2010), this is one of the five broad conceptions of cruelty that can be retrieved in the history of Western thought, the other four being: (I) “Cruelty… as a quintessentially human vice affecting specific individuals” such as “persons involved in punitive contexts, e.g. courtrooms, schools, armies”, that show no propensity for “clemency” (172-73); (II) “Cruelty” as “sadism”, namely “a malaise of the soul”, possibly “the result of a poor, incompetent or broken mind, which reduces the humanity of its carrier and makes her closer to wild animals” (173-74; emphasis removed); (III) “cruelty as harm to be avoided”, as exemplified most notably by “[t]he champions of the European Enlightenment” and a long string of successive “political and legal reformers” (174-75; emphasis removed); and (IV) cruelty as something good, whether instrumentally or intrinsically, as exemplified respectively by Machiavelli’s acceptance of extremely evil means (e.g. war) for good ends (e.g. the State’s stability) and Sade’s glorification of our natural propensity to violence.

No univocal interpretation of “cruel” and “cruelty” applies to the five conceptions listed above, especially if we consider the fact that they are themselves only broad categories applicable to a large variety of more or less refined reflections on cruelty that started with Seneca’s De clementia and have continued up to Michael Trice’s 2011 theological work entitled Encountering Cruelty (the present paper is actually a preparatory work for a larger reflection on the unacceptable cruelty of austerity from a Christian perspective). In my past research (cf. Baruchello 2010), I identify seven frequent connoting elements for what is deemed “cruel”, which amount to little else than family resemblances among usages of a term that is deployed very frequently, defined very rarely and, even so, conceived of in different ways, as the five broad conceptions just mentioned bear witness to.

Still, taken together, these connoting elements and broad conceptions chart a vast realm of linguistic expressions located inter alia in the fields of philosophy, theology, politics, economics, social theory, psychology, jurisprudence and literature. Referring to my own 2010 work, the seven connoting elements are (171-72; emphases removed):

1.Pain: Whether only physical or also psychological, serious or minimal, justified or unjustified, cruelty implies pain

2.Excess: Whether of pain as such or of its usages to acceptable ends (e.g. penal sanctions), or of our hopes in a tolerable life, or of our abilities to understand reality, cruelty eventually steps “beyond”—acceptability, tolerability, comprehensibility

3.Roles: Whether directly or indirectly established, cruelty requires the roles of victim and perpetrator, even when the latter is institutional, impersonal or unknown

4.Power: It is only by means of power differential that the roles of victim and perpetrator can be established

5.Mens rea: Whether delighted in or indifferent to the pain inflicted, the perpetrator possesses a culpable mental attitude. Interestingly, when tackling impersonal and institutional perpetrators, several thinkers have personified the universe or the State

6.Evil: Cruelty is a species of evil. Even when conceived of as good, it is either an instrumental evil or an apparent evil, the goodness of which must be revealed and justified

7.Paradox: Cruelty horrifies and, at the same time, fascinates. This is just one of the many contradictions contained within cruelty, which can be aptly described as paradoxical. The array of diverse conceptions collected below further substantiates this point

Keeping cruelty’s shifting semantic area in mind, let us focus nonetheless upon Hallie’s (1969) claim that cruelty can be: (A) practical, in the sense of being a means to an end and not an end in itself; (B) implicit, in the sense that it is not a manifest attribute of the end being pursued; and (C) indirect, in the sense that it results from the choice of means by which the end at hand is pursued. As such, cruelty can inform complex forms of social agency in which much dread, destruction, deprivation, loss of dignity and life are visible, and yet in which no explicit violence, no patent intention to hurt, no delight in other people’s misery and no non-human constriction can be discerned.

Austerity

The austerity policies that have been implemented in a number of countries since the collapse of deregulated private finance in the year 2008 can be regarded as contemporary examples of practical, implicit and indirect cruelty. I believe that this can be shown by addressing a representative case, namely that of Greece, where leading constitutional lawyer Giorgos Kasimatis (2010: Foreword, 2nd par.) writes:

“The Loan Agreements (the Loan Facility Agreement; the Memorandum of Understanding between Greece and the Euro-area Member States and the agreement with the IMF for the Participation of Greece in the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism to the purpose of obtaining the approval of a Stand-by arrangement by the International Monetary Fund) form a system of international treaties the likes of which… the cruelty of the terms and the extent of breach of fundamental legal rights and principles… have never been enacted in the heart of Europe and the European completion; not since the World War II.” (emphasis added)

Constitutional lawyers are not renowned for their rhetorical flamboyance or heated prose. So, where does Kasimatis’ “cruelty” come from? In the 100 pages of the Loan Agreements of May 2010, annexes included, no mention whatsoever is made of cruelty, pain or suffering as the stated aims of the signed agreement, not even as a salient characteristic of the chosen means of implementation. Any possible ruin, crushing, grinding and hurting of victims is nowhere remarked upon in the document, although it is conceded that provisions must be made to protect “the minimum earners” and compensate “the most vulnerable… for possible adverse impact of policies” that include, inter alia: layoffs of public employees; “pension” and “wage bill reductions”; decreased job security; and lessened provision of public services and “social security benefits” (54)—i.e. policies that, combined together, are liable to weaken “social cohesion”, cause “poverty” and shrink “employment” (54). The intermediate and ultimate aims stated in the agreements are the granting of loans “in conjunction with the funding from the International Monetary Fund” (3), to be duly repaid according to the schedule specified in the document, so as to “correct fiscal and external imbalances and [therefore] restore confidence” that alone is said to make “growth… buoyant” and let “the economy… emerge… in better shape than before [i.e.] with higher growth and employment.” (52; emphasis added)

These three ultimate aims—buoyant growth, an economy in better shape and a higher rate of employment—are said to be the expected and projected result of the “economic and financial policies” (51) listed in the agreements, which express grave concern for “the recent deterioration in market sentiment” (54) and recommend ways to re-hearten it, such as: “fiscal adjustment” by novel and “special taxes” (53-4); reducing “incomes and social security” provision—old-age pensions included—so as to make them “sustainable” vis-à-vis the new debt obligations of the State (53); increased supervision over the banking system during a forecast “period of lower growth” (53); reforming “ambitious[ly]” the Greek “public sector” to “modernize” it by reducing its size and funding though “oriented to providing better services to its citizens” (53-4); making local “labor markets more efficient and flexible” (53); withdrawing the public role “in domestic industries” (53) and managing or owning a large variety of “assets” (59); reforming the “health sector” (55); sustaining a “safety net for the financial system” (58); reducing “minimum entry level wages” and “employment protection” levels (58); and “facilitate greater use of part-time work” (59). The details for the implementation of these policies are spelled out qua “specific economic policy conditionality” (69) for the disbursement of funds and make it clear that “elderly people”, “workers in heavy and arduous professions”, recipients of “disability pensions”, “social security, hospitals”, “existing social programmes” (73-4) and the recipients of “unemployment benefits” (79) are to bear a share of the burden towards debt repayment.

Given the conditionality and the policies specified in the agreements, it does not take much to infer that much pain, both physical and psychological, has been bestowed upon the Greek population or a conspicuous portion of it. The signatories themselves admit in the documents that the immediate effects of the measures specified therein are likely to be a “growth” that is not “buoyant” (52) and that the expected and projected positive outcomes would take place in the “future” (54), though nowhere it is said when exactly that will take place. Similarly, it does not require much imagination to realise that all this pain has exceeded the pain that most Greek citizens would have been likely to encounter in their life under normal circumstances. In point of fact, these policies have been implemented within the context of considerable diplomatic and economic pressure both at the international level (e.g. public indictments of the Greek government and citizens at large by representatives of the French and German governments, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund; cf. Alktenhead, 2012) and at the national level (e.g. street riots, general strikes and public demonstrations quenched by police force; cf. Smith, 2011). There have been, in other words, perpetrators, both at the national and international levels, who have used their power in order to have these policies and conditionality implemented despite popular protests and, above all, the visible ruin, crushing, grinding and hurting of victims leading to these protests. The perpetrators have intended to pursue the policies listed in the agreements in spite of all this ruin, crushing, grinding and hurting. Evidently, such a cruelty was either not their main concern, or not sufficient enough a concern to stop them in their pursuit.

It can be argued whether the ruin, crushing, grinding and hurting, in short, the cruelty of these policies was a necessary, bitter medicine; or a deserved punishment for prior errors (i.e. a form of “responsive” cruelty); or a failed attempt to do good. What cannot be argued, however, is that there was no cruelty. That is where Kasimatis’ “cruelty” comes from. As the italicised words in the comments above flag out, all the connoting elements are at play here, including that of paradox, for the declared ends of these policies have not only failed to materialise, but have been made more difficult to achieve, as the successive amendments to the loan agreements of 2010 have eventually revealed (cf. Blanchard & Leigh, 2013). Today, the Greek economy shows no sign of buoyancy, the shape of its economy is among the worst in the EU and the rate of unemployment among the highest (cf. IMF, 2013).

The bitter medicine has sorted no positive effect, at least as the declared aims of the May 2010 Loan Agreements are concerned. On the contrary, there has been a plethora of nefarious side-effects, such as: a sudden suicide spike, especially amongst men (Kentikelenis et al., 2011); a considerable increase in mental illnesses (Economou et al., 2012; Faresjö et al., 2013) and infectious diseases like HIV, TB and malaria (Stuckler & Basu, 2013); and higher infant mortality (Stuckler & Basu, 2013). If it ever was a form of “responsive” cruelty, the punishment has indeed reached “the most vulnerable”, i.e. children, who cannot be deemed responsible for any pre-crisis errors made by the adults, of whom only some could be regarded as legally, politically or morally guilty. In essence, were we even to admit the possibility of this cruelty being “responsive”, it would constitute nonetheless a case of collective punishment. In short, if any genuine good was ever intended as the main aim, such a good has become harder and harder to come by, to the point that leading IMF economists have admitted that, not unlike former experiences in the developing world (Stiglitz, 2002), the austerity policies originally recommended for Greece have failed the test of reality (Blanchard & Leigh, 2013).

Paradoxical is also the fact that, while such dramatic side-effects materialised, special credit lines and liquidity injections have been operated repeatedly by the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to safeguard the viability of the Continent’s largest private banks, while no special intervention of this kind has been made in order to sustain, say, healthcare provision to Greek children (cf. Reuters, 2013). As the language of the 2010 Loan Agreements would read, the ECB has provided funds for the “safety net of the financial system”, which feeds on money that is not spent on meeting genuine life needs (McMurtry, 2013), but has provided none earmarked for the safety net of the Greek children, whose life needs are being met less and less (Stuckler & Basu, 2013). “Lifelines”, as they are called in the financial world, have been thrown to private banks, their managers and shareholders; nothing comparable has been done for the Greek children, who needed them in no metaphorical way, i.e. in order to live (cf. McMurtry, 2013).

Conclusion

Given the evidence above, I believe that it can be reasonably stated that austerity policies like those witnessed in Greece constitute a token of cruelty in its social manifestation, as this can be conceived of thanks to Hallie’s categories of ethical thought. There have been the infliction of ruin, the slow crushing and grinding of human beings, the hurting of sentient beings—all as a means to an end that does not focus upon the ruin, the crushing, the grinding and the hurting as such, and yet brings them about inevitably and remains de facto indifferent to them, for the ruin, the crushing, the grinding and the hurting are allowed to continue and the original end is not abandoned nor are the employed means revised.

 

 

References

Alktenhead, D. (2012, May 25) “Christine Lagarde: can the head of the IMF save the euro?”, The Guardian, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/25/christine-lagarde-imf-euro

Aquinas, T. (1264-75/1947), Summa Theologica, Einsiedeln: Benzinger Verlag. [English translation by he Fathers of the English Dominican Province available at: http://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/FP.html]

Baruchello, G. (2002) Understanding Cruelty: From Dante to Rorty, PhD Thesis, Guelph: University of Guelph, Department of Philosophy. [Abstract published in Gateway. An Academic Journal on the Web, Winter 2002-2003, available at: http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/abs_Baruchello-win_02.pdf]

Baruchello, G. (2010) “No Pain, No Gain. The Understanding of Cruelty in Western Philosophy and Some Reflections on Personhood”, Filozofia 65(2): 170-83.

Blanchard, O. & Leigh, D. (2013) “Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers”, IMF Working Paper ref. WP/13/1, available at: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp1301.pdf

Economou, M., Madianos, M., Peppou, L.E., Theleritis, C. & Stefanis, C.N. (2012) “Suicidality and the Economic Crisis in Greece”, Lancet 380: 337.?

Faresjö, Å., Theodorsson, E., Chatziarzenis, M., Sapouna, V., Claesson, H.-P., Koppner, J. & Faresjö, T. (2013) “Higher Perceived Stress but Lower Cortisol Levels Found among Young Greek Adults Living in a Stressful Social Environment in Comparison with Swedish Young Adults” PLoS ONE 8(9): e73828. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073828.

Hallie, P.P. (1979/1985) Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There, New York: Harper & Row.

Hallie, P.P. (1969) The Paradox of Cruelty, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Hallie, P.P. (1981/1989) “From Cruelty to Goodness” in Sommers, C. & Sommers, F. (eds.) Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, San Diego: Harcourt College Publishers, 9-24.

Hallie, P.P. (1992) “Cruelty” in Becker, L.C. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Ethics, New York: Garland, 229-31.

IMF (2013), “Greece: Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access under the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement” IMF Country Report No. 13/156, available at: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2013/cr13156.pdf

Kasimatis, G. (2010) “The Loan Agreement between the Hellenic Republic, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund” [Research paper prepared for Athens Bar Association, English translation by Vryna, S.G. available at: http://www.kassimatisdimokratia.gr/index.php/law-science/item/129-the-loan-agreements-between-the-hellenic-republic-the-european-union-and-the-international-monetary-fund]

Kentikelenis, A., Karanikolos, M., Papanicolas, I., Basu, S., McKee, M. & Stuckler, D. (2011), “Health Effects of Financial Crisis: Omens of a Greek Tragedy” Lancet 378: 1457– 1458.?

McMurtry, J. (2013), The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 2nd ed., London: Pluto.

Montesquieu (1748/1949) The Spirit of the Laws, English translation by Nugent, T., New York: Hafner.

Nietzsche, F. (1881/1911) The Dawn of Day, English translation by McFarland Kennedy, J., New York: Macmillan. 

Nietzsche, F. (1908/1911) Ecce Homo, English translation by Ludovici, A.M., New York: Macmillan.

Reuters (2013, September 13) “Bankers call for third LTRO”, Reuters, available at: http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USL5N0H820C20130912

Smith, A. (1776/1904) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London: Meuthen, available at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html

Smith, H. (2011, July 1) “Greek police face investigation after protest violence”, The Guardian, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/01/greek-police-investigation-protest-violence

Stiglitz, J.E. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton.

Stuckler, D. & Basu, S. (2013) The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, London: Allen Lane.

Trice, M. (2011) Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart, Leiden: Brill.

Vv. (2010) The Loan Agreements (or The Loan Agreements between the Hellenic Republic, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund) [Formerly confidential governmental and inter-governmental documentation, distributed to the participants in the conference “Sovereign debt and fundamental social rights”, organised by the International Association of Constitutional Law and held in Athens, Greece, June 28-29, 2013]

 

The Hopeful Liberal. Reflections on Free Markets, Science and Ethics

[T]he idea of a self-regulating market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society

(Polanyi, 1944: 3)

Introduction

The international economic crisis following the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers unleashed a flood of fiat money by selectively prodigal central banks that have seen fit to plunge the world into a recession in order to keep over-indebted private banks afloat (cf. Hudson, 2012). Also, it unleashed an outburst of academic literature on the crisis itself, its causes, its effects, and its possible solutions. With this literature, a modicum of doubt has re-entered the mainstream of public discourse on topics such as globalisation, capitalism and the free market, to the point that even corporate newspapers have reported renowned liberals’ and conservatives’ statements that, until few years ago, would have been associated with leftist ‘radicals’ and ignored by mainstream media:

 

  1. “The doctrine of the dictatorship of the market is dead” (Nicolas Sarkozy, former French president, 2008);[1]
  2. “We need…  humaneness…  rules…  and abandoning the idea of… massive pro?ts” (MIT Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Samuelson, 2008);
  3. “The dictatorship of the [credit] spread… nullifies… universal suffrage… [for] those who hold economic power… have every decisional power” (former liberal MP and current head of Italy’s securities and exchange commission [CONSOB] Giuseppe Vegas, 2012);
  4. “There emerge… in civil Europe the first signs of a new type of fascism: financial fascism, white fascism“ (Italy’s liberal MP and former finance minister Giulio Tremonti, 2012).

 

Aims and methodology

International crises and their dramatic outcomes notwithstanding, certain long-lived, deeply rooted beliefs are hard to die. Thus we keep hearing leading politicians and revered economic advisors who call for a return to growth and assert that structural reforms are imperative so that market confidence may be re-established and increased competitiveness achieved, without ever pondering upon the fact that these aims are precisely those that guided the global economy before the crisis. Could it ever be that endless growth, market confidence or competitiveness are misguided aims for the world’s economies?

In these reflections of mine, I wish to address one of these resilient beliefs. Specifically, in the traditional philosophical way initiated by Socrates, I shall assess some logical knots arising from a hypothesis, that is, the commonplace liberal notion that the so-called “free market” possesses a unique capacity to generate prosperity.

This hypothesis is highly generic, diversely instantiated and potentially vague. Nevertheless, it pervades the whole spectrum of the liberal conceptions of the economy, such as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, whereby the individual’s pursuit of self-interest results often into collective wellbeing (1776, IV.ii.9), or the textbook category of “market imperfections”, according to which explaining is needed when the outcomes of market transactions are not optimal (e.g. Sloman, 2006). There exists an extensive literature for each of these conceptions, which I could address in a book, but not in a short piece like the present one. Rather, I shall select one representative liberal formulation of the hypothesis at issue and deal with those logical knots that I deem most likely to be of interest to a scholarly audience.

 

Rhonheimer’s formulation

The formulation that I now refer to is a recent book chapter written by the Swiss liberal thinker Martin Rhonheimer (2012),[2] who claims that the “free market” is “a necessary condition” of human prosperity (9; emphasis in the original). In his eloquent account of Eucken’s ordoliberalism and the related critique of laissez-faire liberalism, Rhonheimer offers in support of his claim:

 

(A) one elucidation; and

(B) one generic token of empirical proof.

  

(A) The elucidation is that no central planner would be able to coordinate all economic activities as efficiently as the “free market”, in which individual agents pursue their own particular self-interest and, by so doing, unintentionally produce prosperity, in accordance with Smith’s principle of the “invisible hand” (9-10). Though not all conditions for prosperity may arise this way, none would arise without it. The “free market” is a necessary condition for prosperity, albeit not a sufficient one, which is what more trenchant laissez-faire liberals believe. States must also be involved, according to ordoliberalism and many other streaks of liberalism, to secure fair market transactions, enforce beneficial rules, correct market distortions, and redress socially and morally harmful market outcomes. However, to think that “central planning and state regulation… through several government-run agencies” could ever achieve any prosperity without the “free market” is discarded at once (5).

 

(B) The generic token of empirical proof is that “history teaches” all this: “a capitalist economy based on a free market, entrepreneurial activity, and free trade without tariff barriers is more realistic and in the long run beneficial for everybody” (24). In this respect, the unrealised failure of Roosevelt’s New Deal and a passing reference to Soviet Union are the two cases of “socialism” that the author utilises to give strength to his point (4-7).

  

The critique

1. Indemonstrable necessity

Rhonheimer’s elucidation, though very commonly heard, is not much of an empirical proof. At best, it is an enthymeme, i.e. a rhetorical proof. To make it stick more convincingly, it would require itself many empirical proofs for adequate scientific substantiation. Yet here emerges a severe and unflinchingly by-passed methodo-logical issue. How can anyone prove a thesis as comprehensive as the one presented in Rhonheimer’s essay and, in general, upheld by the liberal community?

The necessary character of any economic system cannot be determined in a scientific way, for we have only one planet, one humankind and one very short historical span at our disposal for any empirical verification and/or falsification of the “free market” and, for that matter, of “socialism”. Apart from mere logical possibility, which cannot exclude a plurality of ways to prosperity, it should be observed that for any claim of such a necessary character to be ascertained, we should investigate a set of entirely alternative and separate systems over a certain period of time, probably a very long one, so as to determine that only the ones operating upon the “free market” produce prosperity, whatever this may be like. Unfortunately, to this day, such a test has been impossible to perform.

Moreover, focussing onto the “market” versus “socialist” dichotomy can be misleading, for it shifts the gaze away from what is undeniably necessary for the meaningful survival of our species, i.e. the continued satisfaction of human needs across generational time. That is the prime end, whatever additional feature we may wish to add to the notion of prosperity. Economies are the means to attain in primis this prime end.[3]

As the past is concerned, we know that some civilisations have made it this far. In this connection, we might think of prehistoric, ancient and medieval Earth, let us say before the age of European exploration, as a plausible set of sufficiently separate and alternative economic systems to conduct a comparative study. Yet, apart from the fact that hardly any of the known ones would count as a free-market system, we know far too little, if anything, about most of them to make any valid scientific comparison, whatever notion of prosperity we may wish to employ (cf. Boldizzoni, 2011). If we look at what history has produced until now, we may be in a better position to determine which system has been the most ruthless, hence the one that has imposed itself over the others. However, that would be a banal and, I suspect, rather degrading notion of superiority, not to consider the very thin or quite absent link that such a superiority may have to human needs or prosperity (cf. Castoriadis, 1997).

As the present is concerned, there may be alternative but no separate systems, given that even the most isolated indigenous communities in the world are being affected by the environmental changes produced by the advanced economies of the planet (e.g. Itkadmin. 2007).

As the future is concerned, unless we deny the ability of humankind to change creatively its collective organisation, which has varied enormously throughout the known history of our species, we cannot even begin to fathom what awaits our descendants: a Star-Trek-like society without money, need and greed; or a Mad-Max-like post-atomic age of barbarism? But this is the territory of science-fiction, not of science.

 

2. Lack of prosperity

If we follow Rhonheimer’s representative formulation and understand prosperity as “consumption, that is, the satisfaction of the needs of all the persons living in a determinate territory” (19; emphasis in the original), we quite simply lack information about most human communities in most parts of the world throughout most of human history. Presently, the past is closed to us; and so is the future, for we cannot predict what will happen on our planet tomorrow, not to mention in two years or two centuries.

As the history of today’s world is concerned i.e. the so-called ‘global market’, which is usually claimed to be an imperfect instantiation of the “free market”, we know for sure the following: it fails regularly to satisfy the needs of all the persons living on the planet, as the UN’s annual statistics on death by malnourishment and starvation regularly report. And while failing these persons’ needs, the current imperfect instantiation of the “free market” also caters to artificially instilled wants of others, including the desire for carcinogenic cigarettes and life-shortening junk food. In other words, the global market fails not only to secure planet-wide need-satisfaction, which is what Rhonheimer appears to be taking as genuine consumption, but also to distinguish between, say, the need for bread of the starving paupers and the desire for golden toilets of oil tycoons, so as to prioritise the former above the latter. What sets in motion the “free market” in both theory and practice is money-backed demand, i.e. preferences or wants of market agents endowed with pecuniary means, not the genuine needs of humans or other living beings, whose possession of pecuniary means may be nil. Money, not need, is what determines consumption in today’s world, pace Rhonheimer’s noteworthy equation (cf. McMurtry, 1999).

Revealingly, many liberal economists and, above all, the actual economy treat both bread and golden toilets as marketable ‘goods’. No axiological compass is present for basic distinctions between that which is of real value and that which is not, or that which is good and that which is bad. Neither any economic ‘good’, nor all economic ‘goods’ are good. Some are bad. For example, financial speculation over the price of staples such as rice and wheat may be deemed “rational” and a form of “wealth creation”, but it does increase malnutrition and illnesses. In other terms, the invisible hand seems to possess an invisible brain, which is why ordoliberals à la Rhonheimer, unlike libertarians and radical laissez-faire liberals, have long recognised the importance of at least some State intervention.

 

3. Imperfect imperfections

In connection with the importance of State intervention, Rhonheimer introduces a number of additional qualifications that cause the “free market” to come across as more inefficient than initially stated in the thesis. Albeit a necessary one, this mechanism is not a sufficient condition for prosperity or consumption. It is said that it “frequently” leads to prosperity, i.e. not always (10). It is incapable of providing many “public goods” (14). It is prone to “failures” (13). If the State does not intervene, it generates “cartels” (15). Indeed it possesses “a tendency to destroy itself” (15), given also that it causes major social “problems” such as “inequality” (25).

These qualifications are unlikely to sound surprising to most liberals, for, in varying degrees, the near-totality of them acknowledge that some imperfections do affect the market system. However, it is perplexing to notice that, under their perspective, qualifications of the actual market economies such as the ones listed by Rhonheimer are not seen first of all for what they are, i.e. features of the existing markets. On the contrary, they are seen as exceptions to the implicit rule, which assumes markets to be perfect, even if they are clearly not perfect. Indeed, a few years before his death, liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2004) stated the very talk of “free market” to be nothing but a “fraud” (in the title) aimed at hiding the historical fact of capitalism, that is to say, a much more fitting term to describe Western economies, inside which there has always been a dominant group planning the economy to its own advantage (e.g. merchants, industrialists, absentee owners, managers, financial managers), conspicuous market manipulation (including creating demand by operant conditioning techniques) and extensive conditions of monopoly and oligopoly.

Textbooks often refer to methodological convenience when explaining why economists assume perfect markets. Though understandable, such a prioritisation of methodological convenience over empirical evidence is a grave departure from standard scientific methodology. Galileo may have invited the scientific inquirer to reason ex hypothesi, but he never maintained that contrary evidence should be systematically side-stepped in order not to change the starting hypothesis. In the natural sciences, hypotheses are meant to be tested and revised in light of empirical evidence. Only the formal sciences content themselves with coherent theoretical constructions (cf. Hintikka et al., 1981).

 

4. Vaguer and vaguer referents

The absence of exact instantiations of the clearly unempirical “free market” is only the beginning. If we allow for some State intervention, as Rhonheimer does, what should count then as truly “free market” and “socialist” economies? Where should we draw the line of demarcation?

These two terms are almost omnipresent in both recent political history and scholarship, yet their actual separation is far from obvious. Indeed, from a 19th-century conservative perspective, liberals and socialists were hardly distinguishable from each other, as the political critiques by Pope Pius X or Friedrich Nietzsche exemplify. Furthermore, before the 19th century, most societies in human history had not been market societies. They may have contained some markets (e.g. slave trade in the ancient Mediterranean), but most of their members did not participate in them (cf. Boldizzoni, 2011). As far as we can ascertain, subsistence and reciprocity were their main features, as reflected also in their culture, which kept the analogues of today’s economic rationality as limited secondary instruments to other primary social goals, such as community status, personal honour, or the salvation of each believer’s immortal soul.

Great achievements were possible in these older societies, whether in the arts, philosophy, mathematics, law, engineering or religious life. Such human accomplishments seem to have little to do with “free markets” or the size of a country’s GDP, and perhaps may be unrelated to whatever prosperity the hypothesis at issue implies. Still, it is not aimless to ponder upon the fact that even the great scientific discoveries that led to the technologies whereby 20th-century human populations boomed worldwide, in both self-proclaimed “capitalist” and “socialist” economies, were made in countries with smaller GDPs than today and limited “free markets” (cf. Galbraith, 2004). Moreover, modern societies, in which commercial and financial markets have become much more extensive and influential, have often retained—sometimes up to the present day—significant elements of subsistence and reciprocity (e.g. small-scale farms in Scotland, Poland and India), as well as many development-spurring elements of public ownership and public planning (e.g. Venice’s publicly owned merchant and military fleets; George C. Marshall’s post-WWII ERP; Germany’s, Brazil’s, North Dakota’s and China’s public banks).

Additionally, it should be noted that Ronheimer himself claims that genuine free markets existed worldwide only for a brief period of time, i.e. “between 1850 and 1870”, and that self-proclaimed “free market” post-WWII USA has resembled post-WWI Germany in maintaining the State-centred structures inherited from their war economies, which still allow the State, for example, to bail out bankrupt private firms (21). In short, the issue of identifying genuinely “free-market” and “socialist” economies is not an easy one. Not even post-war USA may count as a decent token of the former type of economy, at least according to Ronheimer, who compares them to the historical champion of cartel-friendly organised capitalism, i.e. Germany (cf. McGowan, 2010).

Any firm, trenchant scientific evaluation of the historical experience of concrete societies seems therefore less and less likely, at least if we take Rhonheimer’s considerations seriously, for we lack clear referents for the key-terms of “market” and “socialist” economies.

 

5. Non-existence

The distance from concrete societies increases further whenever liberals like Rhonheimer assert that the “free market” is an ideal, i.e. something that does not truly exist in reality (I shall not dwell on the contradiction entailed by the claim that he makes about free markets having existed worldwide only for a brief period of time). In other words, it is a purely theoretical construct, an empirical impossibility, for the human being is actually incapable of operating according to it. Perfect markets as such, in whatever Hyperuranus they may be located, are therefore not to be blamed for crises, unemployment or whatever other misfortune may befall upon us. People are. The former are not around. The latter are.

Liberals seem not to notice the troublesome logical implications of such an approach, for not only does it mean that there is no clear empirical evidence that free markets are the one and only way to prosperity, but also that there cannot be any, for they have never been truly present, since they are not suited to “the human condition” (15).

Moreover, liberals do not seem generally to notice that their approach is analogous to that of many 20th-century Marxist zealots who, when confronted with the failures of Eastern Europe’s “real socialism”, argued that their theory was correct, since its practice alone had failed, given various and varying human flaws. In short, no amount of contrary evidence could disprove their stance.

 

6. Unfalsifiability

The Marxist zealots’ case leads us to the most fundamental and most intractable logical knot of the liberal position with regard to the markets’ unique ability to generate prosperity.  If (a) the genuine “free market” cannot be established, for it is a theoretical construct inconsistent with “the human condition”; and if (b) the actual historical experience of what is commonly referred to as the “free market” or “capitalism”, i.e. the history of mostly Western developed countries over the past three centuries, is one of considerably imperfect applications involving significant elements of State intervention and ownership (e.g. post-bellic Germany and USA), why is the market necessarily responsible for wealth and, to some extent, well-being, whereas significant State intervention and ownership are not? Why not the two of them together, on a par? Or why not either of them, depending on the specific circumstances of each particular case, duly investigated by means of close historical, economic, medical, sociological, anthropological, environmental and axiological analyses? Principled comparisons are possible, but they must rest on solid empirical ground. And why should we ignore other factors altogether, such as gifted individuals, fortunate circumstances, scientific discoveries, cheap energy sources, literacy levels, or religious dispositions? Must it be always the markets that save the day?

By his own account and qualifications, Rhonheimer has no real answer to these questions. Quite simply, he states his thesis and uses it to read history so as to be allowed to state it. In other words, Rhonheimer is assuming a priori that the “free market” produces necessarily wealth and, to some extent, wellbeing. By means of that assumption he then proceeds to read human history as its verification—State-led development, recurrent crises, environmental degradation and social tragedies notwithstanding. Verification is open; falsification is not. This is a profound methodological flaw not just in Rhonheimer’s essay, but also in much economic thinking. In fact, it does begin with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and reaches its highest peak in laissez-faire economics, which argues that the “free market” is the necessary and sufficient condition for human prosperity. In all of its forms, it is an example of scientific unfalsifiability, or pseudo-science, for such an assumption, whereby “free markets” are bound to generate prosperity, admits of no counterevidence. Let me explain better how this unfalsifiability is the case:

 

  1. In the first place, insofar as it is assumed that unhindered markets bring about prosperity, if we do not have prosperity now, then we must simply wait and abstain from causing undue hindrance. As Christians and Marxists have long known, eschatology calls for patience; hence the recurrent phrases commonly attached to so-called “market reforms”: “in the long run”, “future generations”, “long-term benefits”, etc.
  2. Secondly, if waiting is not a credible option and we do not have prosperity yet, then we can always blame the government (e.g. ‘corruption’, ‘red tape’) or some dishonest private actors (e.g. ‘crony capitalism’, ‘State capture’ by special interests) for being unfaithful to the actual spirit of “free markets” and therefore causing hindrance. Markets fail not, people do—although one can legitimately wonder what markets may be if not people transacting with one another within a certain normative setting (cf. Barden & Murphy, 2010).
  3. Furthermore, insofar as Smith’s followers and ordoliberals à la Rhonheimer argue as well, though often reluctantly, for the desirability of some, however limited State intervention (e.g. Smith’s progressive taxation, Presbyterian-style education of the youth, public regulation of banks and mentally destructive working conditions; Eucken’s redressing of socially detrimental unfavourable market outcomes), they corner public authorities in a hopeless argumentative position. Given the starting point, growth and prosperity can always be seen as the result of the markets’ enduring degree of freedom—i.e. not of the State’s intervention—while crisis and misery can always be blamed onto the State—i.e. not onto the markets being actually unable to generate growth and prosperity.

 

Operating under such an assumption, markets can never be wrong, whatever environmental or social ills may have arisen. Thus, not only can prejudicial favour for the free market go on unchallenged. Also, if the markets do not deliver the promised bounty, the cure can be said to be only more of the same. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what happens in Rhonheimer’s essay: “markets”, he writes, are “normally and as a matter of principle the solution” (12; emphasis in the original). And equally unsurprisingly, many leadings statesmen and politicians seek too more of the same (e.g. Italy’s PM Mario Monti, 2012).

 

Conclusion

Rhonheimer’s essay is fallacious, given the self-contradictory confusion that results from insisting upon the markets’ necessary beneficence whilst also piling up observations and qualifications that point precisely to the opposite conclusion. Like all analogous liberal assessments, it is built upon an unfalsifiable hypothesis that makes liberals highly unlikely to:

  

(a) Read historical experience in ways that may render more complex or contradict the original assumption (e.g. Earth-wide ecologic collapse, recurrent crises, continuing unemployment, the wasteful failure of most enterprises and products launched every year, successful development by public planning of industrial production or strategic public subsidies), so as to acknowledge that capitalism à la Galbraith is at work and, though driven by the same principles of the “free market” (e.g. growth, market confidence), it is not necessarily beneficial to societies at large and must be therefore integrated, constrained and/or contrasted by other principles (e.g. sustainability, human rights; cf. Polanyi, 1944)

 

(b) Avoid engaging in pseudo-scientific ad hoc explanations, or de facto exculpations, so as not to revise the original assumption (e.g. people fail markets and not vice versa; the State’s pro-market legislation, liberalisations and privatisations are to blame, for they were erroneous, corrupt or insufficient; State institutions are to blame for financial crashes, because of some minor change in the laws that unleashed an otherwise impossible flood of private greed; Mexican, Korean, Russian, Icelandic…, X culture or human nature itself is not suited for the actual application of the “free market” and therefore leads to its historical failure)

 

(c) Envision different, hybrid, pragmatic, contingent or case-specific solutions to economic problems (e.g. mixed economies; voluntary communes, cooperatives and social enterprises; State ownership of crucial assets qua cost-abating fourth factor of production; Georgist taxation of economic rent from natural resources; constructive cooperation with cartels and oligopolies; ecologically sound rationing in view of gradual retreat from the environment and life-sustaining de-growth)

 

(d) Conceive of possible major alternatives, whether based on past experiences (e.g. monastic communities, the Israeli kibbutzim) or untested and novel ones. Human freedom entails creativity and change that cannot be predicted in advance. (cf. Castoriadis, 1998)

 

(f) Realise clearly that by assuming the markets’ beneficence as necessary, promoting freedom to trade as paramount and reinforcing scepticism vis-à-vis public intervention and regulation, liberals make it more difficult, if not impossible, to discriminate effectively between good and bad growth, good and bad market confidence, good and bad markets, and good and bad goods. Thus, ecologically and biologically destructive economic growth keeps being pursued instead of growth in life-capacity alone; wealthy investors’ desiderata keep being prioritised over the life-needs and related demands of deprived local communities; and cigarettes, junk foods, armaments and speculative assets keep being traded because profitable (cf. McMurtry, 2013).

In nuce, the fictional notion of free markets impinges upon reality by buttressing in theory and fostering in practice unfettered capitalism, which has led to disastrous results on economic, social and environmental levels. Yet none of them is blamed upon free markets, since free markets are already assumed to be the paramount way to prosperity, with all good results numbered as proofs of this assumption and all bad results blinkered out—the self-enclosing frame of mind behind all possible interpretations of past and present experiences. Blame for the disastrous results is, in turn, shifted onto other agents, especially the State, on which the near-totality of free-markets adherents first of all depend and the limited intervention of which, albeit grudgingly, they require. It is then easy to use the State as the scapegoat whenever things do not work out as the doctrine assumes they must. And since things do not work out the way they should, then more free market, hence more unfettered capitalism, can be the only answer within such a closed metaphysical circle, which reduces from the beginning all possible solutions to itself.

Yet there is more. Given how pervasive the hypothesis at iusse has been, it follows that politics, policies and entire academic programmes have been built upon a fundamentally unscientific assumption. I do not object to having unscientific assumptions. Indeed, some of the most important dimensions of human existence are built upon unscientific assumptions, such as intimate love and religious life. I do object to doing so, though, and not admitting it. Were liberal economists to state that they offer an essentially religious interpretation of reality, based upon some successful partial instantiations—analogous to the proofs of reasonability of scholastic theology—and the hope that the markets left largely unhindered may provide us with prosperity, then they would be intellectually honest. They could follow in the steps of Richard Rorty (1998), who advocates political liberalism qua civil religion of democracy. They would be consistent with Friedrich Hayek’s (1992) characterisation of the market order as “transcendent” and analogous to the religious one in assuming that its own unfathomable will, “not mine” i.e. humankind’s, “be done” (72). They would be reminiscent of the likely Providential character of Adam Smith’s (1776, IV.ii.9) “invisible hand” (e.g. Oslington, 2011).

But economic liberals do not. Economics textbooks say nothing of the sort. They assume the free markets’ existence, which is itself empirically doubtful and at best historically limited, assume away any flaw by way of a priori methodological perfection, and ascribe to them the necessary generation of human prosperity, whatever contrary evidence there has been in human experience, such as State-led development (e.g. Communist China), prosperous cartel-intensive economies (e.g. Bismark’s Germany), the collapse of the first age of market globalisation (1870s-1914) and the ensuing Great War and Great Depression, the booming populations of 20th-century socialist nations (e.g. USSR), or the on-going worldwide depletion of natural and human systems upon which “the life and health of the billions [are] supported” (Hayek, 1992: 75). Their reticence and assumption are not only unscientific; they are also unprofessional. In truth, they are a nothing less than a lie. And lying is, under normal circumstances, unethical.

 

 

References

 

Barden, G. & Murphy, T. (2010), Law and Justice in Community, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Baruchello, G. & Johnstone, R.L. (2011), “Rights and Value. Construing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Civil Commons”, Studies in Social Justice, 5(1), 91-125.

 

Boldizzoni, F. (2011), The Poverty of Clio, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Castoriadis, C. (1997), “The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism”, Figures of the Thinkable, available at http://www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf

 

Castoriadis, C. (1998), The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

 

Galbraith, J. K. (2004), The Economics of Innocent Fraud, Boston: Allen Lane.

 

Hayek, F.A. (1992), Collected Works, vol. I, London: Routledge.

 

Hintikka, J. et al. (eds. 1981), Theory Change, Ancient Axiomatics, and Galileo’s Methodology, vol. I, Leiden: Springer.

 

Hudson, M. (2012), The Bubble and Beyond, Dresden: Islet.

 

Itkadmin (2007). Inuit Recommend Changes to Canadian Environmental Protection Act, Inuit Nunangat: Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.

 

McGowan, L. (2010) The Antitrust Revolution in Europe: Exploring the European Commission’s Cartel Policy, Cheltenham, UK & Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar.

 

McMurtry, J. (1999; 2nd ed. 2013), The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, London: Pluto.

 

Monti, M. (2012, 10 September) “Italy to return to growth in 2013”, Reuters, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/10/italy-gdp-idUSL1E8KAH6720120910

 

Oslington,P. (2011), Adam Smith as Theologian, London: Routledge.

Polanyi, K. (2001/1944), The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon. 

Rhonheimer, M. (2012), “Capitalism, Free Market Economy, and the Common Good: the Role of State Authorities in the Economic Sector”, first chapter in Martin Schlag & Juan Andrés Mercado (eds.), Free Markets and the Culture of Common Good, Dordrecht: Springer.

 

Rorty, R. (1998), Achieving Our Country, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

 

Samuelson, P. (2008), “È’ l’ultimo regalo dell’era  Bush“, La Repubblica, retrieved from http://rassegna.governo.it/testo.asp?d=33912628

 

Sarkozy, N. (2008, 23 October), “Morta ideologia della dittatura dei mercati”, La Repubblica. retrieved from http://www.repubblica.it

 

Sloman, J. (2006), Economics, 6th ed., Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

 

Smith, A. (1776/1904), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations available at http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

 

Tremonti, G. (2012), Uscita di sicurezza, Milan: Rizzoli.

 

Vegas, G. (2012, 14 May), “Vegas: ‘C’e’ il rischio dittatura dello spread’”, Il Sole 24 Ore, retrieved from http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/finanza-e-mercati/2012-05-14/relazione-consob-vegas-lancia-110722.shtml?uuid=AbXHvNcF

 

 

 



[1] All translations are mine, unless stated otherwise.

[2] I have published a critical essay of this volume in the fourth 2012 issue of Economics, Management and Financial Markets.

[3] On this point, the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has long espoused an aim-driven approach: the specific economic system of each member nation is not important, as long as human rights are protected, respected and fulfilled (cf. Baruchello & Johnstone, 2011).

Giulio Tremonti, Uscita di sicurezza (Milan: Rizzoli, 2012)

The first chapter of the book (19-41) discusses the “three tragic errors” (19; all translations mine) that led to the current international economic crisis, that is to say:

 

(a) the blind faith in financial globalisation as a path to prosperity that caused Western political leaders not to acknowledge either the nature or the magnitude of the 2008 financial crisis, thus misinterpreting it as a sheer downswing of a normal business cycle;

 

(b) the same leaders’ willingness to rescue the world’s de facto bankrupt financial giants instead of liquidating them and substituting them with public banks; not doing so meant socialising private losses that have escalated into the alleged sovereign debt crisis (i.e. as though the crisis were public rather than private in essence);

 

(c) the same leaders’ irresponsible and subservient decision to allow the de facto bankrupt financial giants to see to the much-needed task of writing new global rules on the products and modalities of virtual trade, which have translated since then into “finance dictating its own rules to the governments” (35).

 

 

The second chapter (43-56) tackles the history of the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, so as to reveal the thorough shift in overall economic value and political influence from the real economy to the virtual one or, as Tremonti dubs it, from a “productive economy” to a “speculative” one (14). The third chapter (57-66) sketches an insightful and at times humorous picture of the utter disconnection between the aims of the “speculative economy” and those of the real economy, upon which rest the livelihoods and lives of billions of human beings. The fourth chapter (67-76) denounces the complete failure of mainstream economics and leading economic institutions to foresee, forestall and address effectively the ongoing crisis. Not only does he criticise the majority of professional economists, who have lost sight of the real world in lieu of the abstract realm of deductive models. Also, Tremonti criticises the private rating agencies and the Bank of International Settlements’ (BIS) Basil Committee and Financial Stability Board. These emanations of the BIS have been characterised by a “hypertrophy” (69) of official guidelines and recommendations that have been not solely egregiously ineffective, but also a proud display of obtuseness, given that they dare suggest, for one, that banks and financial institutions should follow the “best practices… of the hedge funds” (69; emphasis removed) involved in the “speculative economy” of the planet.

  

 

The fifth chapter (77-86) flags out the European Union’s (EU) structural deficiencies in managing and protecting its rather young new currency, the Euro, which the “American will to power” has possibly targeted as a threatening rival to the US dollar qua “reserve currency of the world” (84). While assessing such deficiencies, Tremonti highlights the profound political character of the EU’s economic policies, which are regularly depicted as sheer technical issues. The sixth chapter (87-92) dwells further on Europe’s systemic weaknesses and so does the seventh (93-8), which offers a masterfully concise yet insightful overview of European economic history. The overall picture that the author offers to his readers is one in which all European countries are inextricably interconnected and bound to succeed or fail together. According to Tremonti, the age of national self-interest and isolationism belongs to the past. Consistently, he argues that Europe would be better off, and certainly more likely to cope with crises like the current one, by seeking a higher degree of integration than a lesser one.  

 

 

The eighth chapter (99-106) recalls Tremonti’s first-hand experiences at a number of highest-level 2010 gatherings of EU State officials, who were not able to buttress the Euro with adequate defence policies and financial instruments. The ninth chapter (107-20) deepens the analysis of the EU’s inadequacies vis-à-vis its own currency. The tenth chapter (121-30) adds to the previous one a number of considerations on the positive and negative aspects of the policies promoted as well as opposed by the EU’s leading member, i.e. Germany.

 

 

The eleventh chapter (131-49) discusses four hypotheses on what is likely to lie ahead for the EU, depending on the decisions that its member States will take or fail to take in the near future:

 

(a) waiting passively for its demise;

 

(b) separating weaker and stronger areas within it;

 

(c) reorganising the EU and providing it with new and better instruments, such as a more flexible Central Bank and the Eurobond;

 

(d) advancing a “New Alliance” between Europe’s nations, along the lines of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

  

 

The twelfth chapter (151-63) articulates and explores the implications of the fourth hypothesis, which Tremonti favours. Although he opposes an inflationary way out of the sovereign debt crisis, which resulted from a suicidal subservience of the world’s government to the banking industry, Tremonti does believe that co-ordinated action by the same governments could lead to a positive solution. The thirteenth and final chapter (165-84) explains in finer detail Tremonti’s “exit strategy” (151), which builds upon three pillars:

 

(a) “placing the State above finance and finance under the State” (167);

 

(b) “letting rules prevail over the anarchy” of finance, as done in the past with the Bretton Woods agreements (173);

 

(c) “launching great public investment projects for the sake of the common good”, thus following in this case the example and the wisdom of the age of Keynesianism (177) or, to find cases that are closer to us in time, the unorthodox economic policies of Malaysia in 1998 and, to a lesser extent, Iceland in 2008-12. 

 

 

The book comprises a closing appendix (187-260) containing several intriguing reflections and original documents, including a 2008 letter written by Tremonti to the then French Minister of the Economy, Industry and Labour, Christine Lagarde, i.e. today’s director of the International Monetary Fund  (IMF; 187-97). Excerpts from his previous book, La paura e la speranza – Europa: la crisi globale che si avvicina e la via per superarla (Milan: Mondadori, 2008 [Fear and Hope – Europe: The Approaching Global Crisis and the Way to Overcome It]) are also published in the closing appendix. These excerpts remind the reader of the progression of Tremonti’s criticism of financial globalisation. Over the years, he moved:

 

(A) away from his earlier positive acceptance of the new economic world order (cf. his contribution to the book Nazioni senza ricchezza, ricchezze senza nazione, co-authored with Galgano, Cassese and Treu; Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993 [Nations without Wealth, Wealth without Nation]),

 

(B) towards a less serene reading of its implications for Europe at first (cf. Rischi fatali – L’Europa vecchia, la Cina, il mercatismo suicida: come reagire, Milan: Mondadori, 2005 [Fatal Risks – Old Europe, China, Suicidal Market Freedom: How to Respond])

 

(C) and, eventually, for the entire world.

  

 

The book is complemented by a dedicated website, which readers can access in order to discuss select topics in contact with the author himself. However, the book as such lacks a comprehensive list of references and a critical apparatus of scholarly notes. As a consequence, the reader of this volume is left to speculate about the sources of Tremonti’s current views and the inspirers of the revision of his older, much more mainstream positions. These positions are exemplified not only by the publication cited above, but also by the finance-friendly policies that he promoted qua Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance in the 1990s and early 2000s.

 

 

Minor imperfections notwithstanding, it is highly unusual and equally significant that Tremonti’s book be so open and so forceful in denouncing how a global “financial élite has been left to hold power’s reins” (40) on the international stage. Combined with the severity of the ongoing economic crisis, Tremonti claims this power shift to be morphing into nothing less than “financial fascism, white fascism” (14 & 120; emphasis removed). This new form of fascism would be the consequential, most undemocratic expression of the dangerous “monster” unleashed by globalisation, as Tremonti characterises it, that is to say, a “financial market, based upon a powerful and dominating ideology, which tends towards the annihilation of the best part of human nature, reducing life to the economic sphere, and the economic sphere to finance… devouring us and eventually devouring itself.” (8). For Tremonti, behind the threatening power structure bringing forth “white fascism” lurks a life-blind, economicistic reductionism that prevents the most valuable dimensions of human existence from being considered, respected or promoted. Grave conceptual inabilities thus reflect onto the real world, causing havoc and suffering.

  

 

Tremonti’s book highlights how the paramount guiding principle in the economic order that has been built under the banner of “globalisation” is whatever profit the accountant may jot down in the books of a corporate firm. Everything else, if perceived in any measure, does not seem to matter much, whether it is the environment, the welfare of families and children, well-established industrial networks, centuries-old cultures, or even Western democracy itself. This chilling axiology is commonly revealed each and every time political leaders do not describe their paramount task as fulfilling their constitutionally mandated duties to the citizenry, but rather as “reassuring the markets”, “reducing the spread” levels, making or keeping a country “competitive”, or “attractive to business” and to “foreign investors”. However, the analyses offered in Tremonti’s book spell out in their complexity the profoundly un- and anti-democratic implications of such business-oriented interpretations of political life. This interpretation has been embodied by a long series of either myopic or conniving political leaders that opened the door, over the past “twenty years” (27), to the actual marginalisation of representative institutions. Even the German philosopher Juergen Habermas, usually quite cautious and rather indirect in his public statements, has described in 2011 the EU’s “embedded capitalism” as “post-democracy”. Oligarchy, not democracy, is the name of the game. The representative institutions of many nations have been overtaken by a technostructure emanating in primis from the world’s largest financial holdings. As Tremonti remarks, for instance, just nine such holdings have come to dominate today’s US financial market and exercise an enormous influence over US politics and policies (38). And if “oligarchy” is too mild a descriptor for this sort of reality, the English-language brochures of Tremonti’s book include a subtitle that makes use of an even stronger one: “tyranny” (12). What is more, this tyrannical oligarchy has proved even more myopic than the national governments permitting its affirmation over the past two decades, since the world’s largest financial holdings have been patently unable to operate sound business models and caused their own collapse in 2008. Still, as their gravy train came to a sudden halt, these incompetent financial holdings have nevertheless succeeded in compelling the world’s governments and central banks to operate as their pork-barrel and rescue them from themselves. This rescue operation has been conducted whilst withdrawing much-needed resources from the domains of real-economy credit and public services. No clearer instance of their overwhelming power could be given.

 

 

That Tremonti may call this power as the path leading to “fascism” should not be entirely surprising: this is the sort of private power over public institutions that none less than F.D. Roosevelt decried in 1938 as quintessential to “fascism” (cf. Luciano Gallino, Con i soldi degli altri, Milan: Einaudi, 2009, p.i [With Other People’s Money]). After many years spent (A) preaching about market discipline via their associated think-tanks, opportunistic academics, affiliated journalists or privately funded university chairs; as well as (B) after lobbying successfully for de-regulation and reduced State intervention in the economy, the State was called in by the largest financial holdings in order to fix their own failures and let them continue to operate as recklessly as before. All the mantra-like principles of ‘competition’, ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘toughness’, ‘merit’, ‘efficiency’ and the ‘invisible hand’ were forgotten overnight in favour of the very visible hand of State aid and State protection – though seemingly reserved for such financial ‘giants’ only. Schools, hospitals, scientific research, public housing and poverty relief programmes, national opera companies and local cultural centres had been starved of funds for decades, under the banner of ‘free markets’, ‘business-friendliness’ and ‘liberalisation’. Now, they keep being starved. In 2008, as Tremonti’s book candidly observes, the world witnessed a glaring contradiction between the words and the deeds of the so-called ‘masters of the universe’; a contradiction that shows the sort of impunity that truly powerful hypocrites can enjoy.

 

 

It should be noted that these hypocrites are in great part the same managerial class that regularly pay themselves stellar salaries and huge bonuses irrespective of performance, whilst opposing better salaries to the average employee for the microeconomic sake of remaining competitive and the macroeconomic imperative of price stability. Somehow, as John Kenneth Galbraith stated long ago while distinguishing between actual economic behaviour and the fictional one presumed by the ‘science’ of economics, market discipline is always expected of others, never of oneself (Sapere tutto o quasi sull’economia, Milan: Mondadori, 2000/1979 [To Know Everything, Almost, About the Economy]). As he kept recording proofs of this fundamental distinction over the years, glaring contradictions emerge at every level of the actual business world (cf. The Economics of Innocent Fraud, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). Thus, one can still see how MBA students are taught to praise the pioneering entrepreneurial individual above and against any corrupting State interference. Once employed, the same students are required to lobby State representatives of all kinds, under the banner of public-private partnerships. This way, public money is to be spent on hefty commissions for their corporate masters, which have been known to profit enormously and, in the case of Galbraith’s USA, especially from the most evident form of State interference into the lives of private individuals: warfare. The same MBA students are taught to respect consumer sovereignty and admire the way in which it determines production and prices. Later on, these students are employed alongside the most ingenious minds that society can offer in order to survey, predict, condition, programme and brand, like slaves of old, actual consumers. Similarly, any MBA student can soon distinguish between the private sector and the public sector, typically equating the former with positive notions (e.g. efficiency, discipline) and the latter with negative notions (e.g. inefficiency, corruption). Later on, nearly all of them serve in corporate bureaucracies, whose heads command crucial State institutions through a system of campaign funding, advertising strategies, media ownership, legal advice, scientific lobbying, capital strikes, kickbacks and revolving doors. Competition and merit may be said to be the Northern Star of the market system, hence of progress and well-being. Still, even if progress and well-being were its actual by-product, in the real market economies:

 

(A) wealthy shareholders care not about their businesses as long as they get their dividends;

 

(B) managers pay themselves stellar salaries and bonuses irrespective of performance;

 

(C) entrepreneurs seek and obtain by hook or crook any special legislation that they may wish in order to be sheltered from more efficient competitors; and

 

(D) workers follow their bosses’ example by unionising so as to enjoy stable and well-paying jobs without having to be productive.

 

Unsurprisingly, after at least two centuries of market economies, progress and well-being remain elusive for a lot of people.

 

 

Some of the contradictions highlighted by Galbraith and discussed in the previous paragraph do surface in the new volume by Tremonti. Nevertheless, his focus remains fixed upon the one between former claims about the financial markets’ beneficial ‘freedom’ from State ‘interference’ and the subsequent involvement of the State to save the financial markets from their own incompetence. Within this area of analysis, Tremonti’s book reveals another glaring and important contradiction, that is to say, the one concerning the actual liquidity available on the global market and the recurrent notion — aired by politicians, pundits and media outlets alike — according to which there is no money (esp. 29-31). Tremonti remarks that, due to many years of low interest rates by the world’s main central banks, liquid capital was already far from scarce before the 2008 crisis. After 2008, the world has become awash with money. Specifically, an ocean of cheap fiat money has been created via special subsidies and credit lines, quantitative easing programmes and further various ‘liquidity injections’ by the most important central banks, whose coffers could become so generous thanks only to the States’ unprecedented and promptest emission of novel waves of public debt. These central banks, sanctioned by governments and visibly forgetful of their public functions, have therefore assisted the world’s overindebted gargantuan private banks to stay afloat in spite of their own recklessness (following Tremonti, I am using here the term “bank” quite loosely, for it applies also to institutional investors, very high net value individuals, and the most important financial managers). Indeed, their recklessness has been allowed to go unpunished as well as to grow further through ensuing and enduring waves of speculation, which have included speculation upon the very debt of those States that saved such inept private banks from themselves.

 

 

No drop of this flood of cheap fiat money has reached either the productive structures of the world, i.e. most firms and households, or the States’ own budgets, upon which depend vital programmes for the poor, the elderly, the infirm and the youth. The former received no credit from private banks that were too afraid of one another and of the mess that they had created to lend anything to anyone. The latter have long self-emasculated by granting boundless freedom of movement to private capital — including from and to tax havens — and by setting up finance-friendly fiscal systems. Thus, firms, households and States have been hit by a deadly drought during a Biblical flood. Tremonti does not say much of the well-paid sycophants of the dominating banks that have resisted any alternative course of action, for such a course could create inflation, which is taken to be the worst of all evils under any circumstance. Inflation, though potentially eating away the accumulated debt that strangles today’s “productive” economy, would also reduce the value of the assets listed on the books of the banks entangled within the “speculative” economy — and the banks wouldn’t like that. Rather, Tremonti remarks that, given the nature of the response to the crisis, enterprises have been forced into extinction, jobs destroyed, social programmes slashed, poverty and destitution increased, while those chiefly responsible for the ongoing crisis have often avoided bankruptcy, returned to profit and further concentrated their control over the world’s capitals, both financial and political. In short, national sovereignty, genuine economic prosperity, human wellbeing and actual lives have been sacrificed to the whims of a handful of ruthless gamblers playing a dangerous game in what Tremonti terms a “financial casino” (16), thus recalling Keynes’ famous indictment of reckless speculators in his 1947 General Theory (16 n4).

  

 

That such a high-profile member of the world’s political élite, indeed one associated with Italy’s liberal and conservative parties, may use so strong a language should lead us all to ponder.

 

 

First of all, Tremonti’s choice of words reveals deepest preoccupations about the composition and the reliability of the international power structure. Not only is it clear for Tremonti that democracy has been side-stepped, if not suspended altogether. Also, it has not been replaced by an alternative system that can deliver any concrete wellbeing to the world’s populations. Despotism is back and it is not an enlightened one.

 

 

Secondly, such a choice of words reveals that major political leaders of the world, with whom Tremonti himself co-operated throughout the 1990s and 2000s, did accomplish to a significant extent the demise of forms of democratic self-government that Tremonti hails as the mark of distinction and honour of the Western nations. Rather than defending or promoting them, these political leaders, whom Tremonti does not name individually and describes as feigning knowledge of the financial universe, allowed a silent take-over by the planet’s banking giants. This is no small incident or institutional faux pas. Indeed, Tremonti writes of a present “financial autocracy” (168) begetting a future “white fascism” (14 & 120) headed by the same financiers.

 

 

However, Tremonti is not the first one to have done so. The bankers’ tacit coup d’état had already been denounced in the 1990s and the 2000s by a few scholars and fewer dissenting politicians, whom mainstream academia and mass media had however either neglected or accused of ‘radicalism’ and ‘incompetence’. Intellectuals like Cornelius Castoriadis (cf. Figures of the Thinkable, Paris: notbored.org, 2005), Eduardo Galeano (cf. Upside Down, New York: Picador, 2000) and John McMurtry (cf. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, London: Pluto, 1999), or political ‘eccentrics’ like Oskar Lafontaine and Mahathir Mohamad had long been right on at least some crucial issues, such as the establishment of a finance-centred worldwide oligarchy, the life-threatening effects of financial globalisation, and the mainstream economists’ trained incapacity to address either of them as major factors of actual economic life as well as of economic instability. Tremonti, who started expressing some degree of concern over these phenomena in the early 2000s, has eventually come to agree with long-time neglected and/or loathed ‘incompetents’ and ‘radicals’ who had been, so it would seem today, right.

 

 

History’s lessons notwithstanding, and despite the ongoing economic crisis and its aetiology, most countries are still resorting to the alleged wisdom and leadership of the same agents that were in power while the maelstrom was in the making. For example, institutions like the IMF and the BIS had been promoting international financialisation for decades and yet they enjoy today even more clout upon the world’s governments than they did before the crisis. Treasury secretaries and national central bankers that sponsored massive waves of speculation for twenty years, or that reassured the world about the international financial system’s ability to self-manage without State interference, have been promoted to more prestigious positions. Revealingly, as a member of Italy’s governing cabinet, Tremonti conflicted on several occasions with the president of the Bank of Italy, former Goldman Sachs vice chairman Mario Draghi, who serves today as president of the European Central Bank. Re-regulation of the banking industry, which had successfully lobbied for de-regulation in the decades preceding the 2008 collapse, has been mostly postponed and generally left in the hands of the very same industry that should be bound by it. Can we expect anything good from this perplexing decision of the world’s leaders? Tremonti does not, and laments: “Five years after the explosion of the crisis, if we consider and add together the little and often damaging actions that have been taken, as well as all the inaction that has occurred, it is clear that its causal factors have not only persisted, but increased” (70).

 

 

To make things worse, mainstream newspapers and media outlets seem to have forgotten Lehman Brothers, the deadly bubble of “toxic assets” and, in general, where exactly the crisis comes from. Rather than addressing the fountainhead of all problems, public debates have veered away from the “financial casino” deplored by Tremonti. Instead, they have been focussing upon particular effects of the casino itself, whether outstanding public debt during a recession or individual private frauds at Wall Street. Instead of denouncing the lethal and criminogenic character of the economic system established by the financial oligarchy and their obedient political servants, journalists and pundits have been attacking what little is left of the welfare State as ‘unsustainable’ and particular criminals as dangerous black sheep (e.g. Bernard Madoff). Whether this shift of the media’s spotlight is the direct result of the pervasive power of the “financial autocracy” (168) denounced by Tremonti, or yet another sign of a bourgeoning “financial fascism” (14 & 120), is something that the book does not address. 

 

 

These unanswered questions notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that Tremonti’s book, alongside a growing number of publications on global economic trends, does highlight how much need there is on the planet for an “emergency exit” like the one that he announces in the title. Whether this exit will be taken is not yet clear. The grip of the financial oligarchy upon the nations’ governments and many super-national institutions is still very tight, as exemplified by the recessive austerity and deflationary anti-labour policies implemented after the 2008 crisis all over the EU. Banks on the verge of bankruptcy were granted lifelines. Citizens were told to tighten their belts. Autocracy, not to mention fascism, was never a paper tiger; why should it be so in the 21st century? 

 

 

That an emergency exit may eventually be taken, however, is possible. Signs of forthcoming change abound. Many of them are far from reassuring. Growing unemployment, popular protests, the resurgence of terrorism, looming wars in the middle East as politically viable spending programmes, diplomatic tensions within the EU, BRIC’s complaints about currency wars initiated by Western countries, and the electoral success of xenophobic parties in civil Finland and France cast dark shadows upon the future of Europe and of the world at large. The emergency exit awaiting us may be a truly dramatic one. Though terrifying, this is no surprising possibility. World War I followed the first prolonged global experiment in free capital trade (i.e. 1870s-1914; cf. Michael D. Bordo, “The Globalization of Financial Markets: What Can History Teach Us?“, 2000), whilst World War II (WWII) concluded the Great Depression that was begotten by Wall Street’s ‘roaring twenties’ crashing down upon the notorious ‘black Friday’ of 1929. The night of finance is the mother of social nightmares.

 

 

On his part, Tremonti offers an exit that is civilised, not only because it does not rely on State violence for its accomplishment, but also because it calls upon the world’s governments to be “leaders” once again, rather than “followers” of the “financial economy”, and therefore regain the awareness of the civic function that is expected of them by constitutional mandate (22). No longer must power be left to “ventriloquists of finance, lobbyists, replicants according to the liturgy of the mercantile word and financial orthodoxy” (23). States can and actually ought to play a much more significant role, also with regard to the economic sphere, as indicated by the third pillar of his exit strategy. Tremonti believes that today’s political class must learn to resemble “the old political leaders [of the post-WWII era], forged in social struggles, ideological conflicts, human adventures, even incarceration and wars; but capable, because of this, of deciding for better or worse upon the destiny, the future, the fate of their peoples.” (22 n5). 

  

 

Politicians of formally democratic nations can be corruptible and even loathsome at times, yet they must respond, in the end, to their peoples. International financiers must not; at best, they may have to respond to their largest shareholders, who are anyway a tiny proportion of the world’s population and are frequently deprived of any genuine instrument to restrain the managers’ self-serving control of the actual firms (cf. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud). Despite its imperfections, Tremonti does believe “democracy” to be the best political system available (168). Therefore, if democracy is going to have any meaning in the 21st century, power must be wrested away from the financial oligarchs and restored to constitutionally elected politicians, who themselves are to regain their forgotten ability and duty to lead. If this is not done, then we are likely to experience the full force of “financial fascism, white fascism” (14 & 120). The 2010s may be the new 1930s. As dramatic as it may sound, this is Tremonti’s warning and call to arms. Will anyone listen, or will he be discarded into the bin of those ‘radicals’ and ‘incompetents’ that were, however, right? Will his keen observation of economic phenomena be taken seriously, or will it be labelled ‘anecdotal’, ‘journalism’, ‘sociology’, ‘activism’ and ignored? History alone will tell.

 

Federico Sollazzo, Totalitarismo, democrazia, etica pubblica. Scritti di filosofia morale, filosofia politica, etica (Rome: Aracne, 2011)

In the first part, Sollazzo tracks recent evolutions in the theoretical and historical understanding of social and political control of human collectivities, such as: (1) “totalitarianism” (17) in the work of Vaclav Havel and his mentor Jan Patocka; (2) “system” (20) in that by Herbert Marcuse; (3) “terror” (25) in Max Horkheimer’s; (4) “stereotyped reasoning” (28) in Theodor Adorno’s; (5) “rationality deficit” (28) in Juergen Habermas’; (6) “empire” (30) in Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s (30); (7) and “culture” according to Pier Paolo Pasolini (34). This initial section is followed by an exposition of the philosophical anthropology of three great minds of the 20th century, namely Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner and Max Scheler. A common theme is retrieved in their thought about human nature and the human condition, that is, the uniqueness of humankind’s inextricable admixture of biological and psychical elements, which allow the human being to be part of nature as well as to transcend it through its “peculiar” (43) intellectual—for the first two authors—and spiritual—for the third—abilities. The ensuing chapter stresses the crucial role played by the species-wide biological and emotional make-up in providing a valid ground for the establishment of credibly universal philosophical anthropology and ethics. Remarkable is the attention paid to the notion of vital “needs” (47) as a stark and straightforward reminder of our common humanity. The field of ethics is further explored in a chapter devoted to communitarianism as a representative reaction to utilitarian individualism, which fails to acknowledge the deeply interpersonal preconditions for any meaningful human existence.

 

In the second part, Sollazzo explores the issue of totalitarianism with special reference to the seminal work of Hannah Arendt and her ability to perceive the totalitarian threat of numb conformism in modern mass cultures, and not just in the key examples of totalitarian regimes, namely Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. This line of analysis is deepened by means of a discussion of the notion of “bio-power” (84) and of different conceptions of totalitarianism beyond Arendt’s one, such as Marcuse’s, Horkeimer’s and Neumann’s. Sollazzo then returns to Arendt’s work and her study of the anonymous, grey “model citizen” (108) of modern societies, who is incapable of challenging the received views of her socio-political community and participates dutifully in whatever life-destructive systemic horror such received views may entail. This study is followed by a reflection on genuine democracy as Alexis de Tocqueville and Arendt would have it, so that model citizens be not as incapable of Socratic critical reflection as previously discussed. Considerations on democracy are furthered by a presentation of Karl Popper’s ideal of democracy as open society and his profound distrust for any “utopian engineering” (135) that may prevent tolerant coexistence of different worldviews in peaceful conversation with one another. Adorno, Norberto Bobbio and Zagrebelsky are then utiklised to criticise Popper’s seemingly wilful blindness to the darker areas of actual democratic communities, such as techno-scientific “chains” (150) to free human agency, dehumanising “mass conformism” (150), economic “commodification” (150) of human relations—including political ones—and “political apathy” (153). Zagrebelsky’s work is also utilised to assess the issues of social justice and human rights in allegedly democratic societies, whose enduring and entrenched inequalities fail regularly large sectors of the population.

 

The third part of the book opens with a survey of the so-called “rehabilitation of practical reason” in the German-speaking philosophical world of the 1960s and 1970s, especially with reference to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Habermas. The threat to social cohesion and human well-being emerging from pseudo-rational individualism is presented and then addressed in a chapter on leading libertarian thinkers, such as Robert Nozick and Friedrich Hayek. Bobbio and John Rawls are introduced and presented as attempts to rectify from within the liberal tradition the many weaknesses and blind spots of several libertarian stances. Communitarianism is addressed subsequently as an attempt to rectify them too, though this time from without the liberal tradition. Ferdinand Toennies, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre are the pivotal references in this context. Amartya Sen is used eventually to propose a tolerant, pluralist form of communitarianism that describes cultural identities as inherently diverse, “always in fieri” (212) and analogous to an ever-shifting mosaic requiring the person’s free consent and critical self-reflection. The theme of a species-wide ground for life-enhancing social and political self-organisation is brought back in a chapter devoted to Hans Jonas and his call for human ethical responsibility vis-à-vis the planetary environment, which human ingenuity and techno-scientific advances are threatening as never before in human history. The final chapter outlines the understanding of human alterity in the works by Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida.

 

The book is most erudite and shows how well-versed the author is in the works and terminology of the many thinkers that he cites and presents to the reader. Still, after reading the book, it is not clear what the author wished to accomplish with it, apart from charting a number of interesting issues and related reflections by famous thinkers. In short, the book has no clear thesis to offer. Also, the critical assessment of the thinkers tackled in the book varies considerably, thus a few thinkers are duly presented and equally criticised for what Sollazzo argues to be their theoretical weaknesses (e.g. Jonas), whilst others are just outlined and never criticised (e.g. Havel) or timidly rebuked in a few footnotes (e.g. Arendt). By this lack of critical evenness and courage, Sollazzo comes across as sharing claims by some of the thinkers that he refers to (e.g. Arendt’s negative assessment of the modern political emphasis upon human biological necessity) that do not sit well with those of other thinkers that he includes in his book (e.g. Jonas’ call for immediate global ethical responsibility in the face of the modern techno-scientific threat to the continuation of biological life on Earth). Analogously, it is not clear whether some rare yet conspicuously superficial analyses, such as the one that he provides about human rights (159-65), should be ascribed to him or to the thinkers that he makes use of therein. Specifically, as human rights are concerned, they are reduced to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which is claimed to be “universal, modern and Western” (163), as though there had never been thereafter any advancement, such as the actually binding sister covenants on civil and political rights on the one hand, and economic social and cultural rights on the other; or the pronunciations of the related United Nations’ human rights committes. Finally, the book would have benefitted from an analytical index and a bibliography.

 

Franceso Giacomantonio, Sociologia e sociosofia. Dinamiche della riflessione sociale contemporanea (Trieste: Asterios, 2012)

This task is humble, for the author explores the main tenets of well-established schools of thought within the recent history of this discipline and its closest cognates, such as social philosophy and socio-political theory. As such, the book is the shorter analogue of a common undergraduate textbook, since it touches upon the most influential theoreticians and traditions, highlights their crucial contributions and summarises their pivotal methodological and conceptual assumptions. The book’s task is equally bold, though, for it aims at bringing together a vast array of “giants”, whether major (e.g. Habermas) or lesser (e.g. Bauman), and offering an overall account of today’s sociology qua family of variously self-aware views of late modernity.

 

The book comprises an introduction, three chapters, and an epilogue.

Apart from outlining what is to follow, the introduction offers interesting considerations concerning the close relationship between sociology and philosophy, which is both the spring whence sociology came into existence and the sea that receives sociology’s deepest ethical, political, epistemological and ontological implications. Also, the introduction stresses sociology’s “theoretical polytheism” (17), meaning the pre-paradigmatic status of sociology as a science, whose many adherents have not come to an agreement upon the fundamental methodological and epistemological assumptions to be taught and utilised. Giacomantonio is not critical of this status that, for one, sociology shares with other social sciences too, such as psychology and economics, even if major efforts have been made therein over recent decades to attain the semblance of a paradigmatic status by preventing unorthodox specialists (e.g. Thorstein Veblen, Cornelius Castoriadis) and alternative schools of thought (e.g. critical economics, psychoanalysis) from receiving consideration within official academe and therefore survive within teaching curricula.

In the first chapter, Giacomantonio reviews “the condition of social thought today” (19) and surveys several conceptions of the fast-changing social meanings pertaining to reality, social relations, space (e.g. Marc Augè’s “non-places”, 22), time, knowledge, rationality and identity. The result is a picture of late modernity as a profoundly chaotic, individualistic, possessive and fear-driven age, which finds adequate representation in relativist conceptions of social phenomena, essentially sceptical scientific epistemologies (e.g. Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend), and case-specific applications of sociological skills and knowledge that eschew altogether larger theoretical knots.

In the second chapter, Giacomantonio furthers his account of the late modern age as a troublesome time obsessed with its own finitude, incapable of producing or believing in comprehensive theoretical systems, run by “the brutal imposition of economic interests” (45), pervaded by apocalyptic visions, anomie, alienation, numb hedonism, and deafened by the roaring sound of billions of meaningless words. If Marx, Simmel, Durkheim and Weber had already detected the malaise of the modern age, late modernity would seem to be in even poorer health.

The third chapter offers a tentative way out of the malaise: “sociosophy” (59). Its inspirers are Berger’s and Luckmann’s “social constructivism” (63), the “critical theory… of the Frankfurt School” (65) and Foucault’s “post-structuralism” (77). Together, these three inspirers provide Giacomantonio with a conception of human knowledge as irreducibly diverse—indeed polytheist—yet capable of constructive communication and caring. Thus, “articulation, openness, care” are the three pillars of Giacomantonio’s reconceptualisation of contemporary sociology as a sociosophy that, even if aware of its own epistemological limitations, can attempt to provide the modern mind with a modicum of social hence existential meaningfulness.

 

Giacomantonio’s account is most erudite. In particular, the first two chapters of his book provide the reader with an interesting map of several issues addressed by leading sociologists and social thinkers with regard to a number of troubling aspects of late modernity. The third chapter is somewhat perplexing, for sociosophy is outlined in so abstract terms that it is actually impossible to determine what it is. Indeed, abstractedness characterises the whole book, which never descends from the heights of theoretical speculation by providing, for instance, a concrete example, a token of practical application, or a reference to a particular episode or event. Any reader that is not well-versed in social theory is bound to find this short book (109 pages, bibliography included) a daunting challenge. The expert reader, instead, will have more than a chance for some serious reflection upon contemporary sociology and late modernity. 

 

Joseph Femia (ed.), Vilfredo Pareto (London: Ashgate, 2009)

However, apart from Pareto’s posthumous peak of fame in the 1930s and 1940s, when his work inspired a generation of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, genuine engagement with his studies has been actually quite rare over recent decades. To most contemporary researchers, Pareto is primarily little else but a name in the “rosary” of great dead white men encountered during one’s undergraduate studies, and then a label for two mathematical notions that young academics must familiarise themselves with. Even Pareto’s crucial contribution to political science, namely his theory about the circulation of the elites, seems to be poorly known these days.

Perhaps, as Joseph Femia—editor of the volume hereby reviewed—suggests in his concise yet comprehensive introduction to the life and work of “the hermit of Céligny”, it is true that Pareto’s cynical notion of social equilibrium, his lack of faith in human progress and collective enlightenment, his elusion of the comfortable categories of normal science, and the overwhelming theoretical as well as historical analyses in which he indulged for the sake of scientific completeness, scholarly precision, intellectual integrity, and academic pedantry make of Pareto one of the least inspiring authors that ever reached the status of “classic” in any discipline.

Yet, several scholars of the 20th century did read his work, no matter how uninspiring, depressing, tedious and taxing it could be. And they did not only read it, but also recognised its remarkable character and its profound insightfulness. In particular, many seemed to find Pareto’s work extremely appealing in connection with the general decline in individual liberty, social wellbeing and collective hope informing the aftermath of the First World War and of the ensuing boom-bust financial cycle of the 1920s, which unleashed the Great Depression and the affirmation of fascist regimes all over Continental Europe.

Some scholars, albeit fewer than in the inter-war grim interlude, have kept finding Pareto congenial after that time. Amongst them, Femia has proved himself to be one of today’s main experts on Pareto within Anglophone academia. In addition to the volume reviewed hereby, to him we owe two further recent books on Pareto: Pareto and Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries (London: Ashgate, 2012). Whereas the former, as the title indicates, focuses upon the work of Pareto as a political thinker, the latter, co-edited with Alasdair Marshall, explores the ramifications of Pareto’s contribution for contemporary areas of inquiry, whether sociological (e.g. stratification research), economic (e.g. monetary issues) or humanistic (e.g. rhetorical reasoning).

The 2009 volume that Femia edits comprises three parts, each containing essays on Pareto by variously influential scholars of the 20th century. Specifically, Part I focuses upon methodological aspects of Pareto’s contribution to the social sciences, most notably sociology rather than economics, written in the 1930s and 1960s. Part II explores broader aspects of his social theory and includes studies written between the 1960s and 1990s. Two of them deserve a special mention, i.e. “Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology in his Letters to Maffeo Pantaleoni” and “Introduction to Pareto’s Sociology” (pp. 67—87 and 89—112), for they were authored by Italy’s leading liberal thinker Norberto Bobbio and constitute a sort of “classics” in Italian Pareto studies. Noteworthy is also “Pareto, Vilfredo: Contributions to Sociology” (pp. 171—80), written by US action theorist Talcott Parsons, who is probably the most famous heir of Pareto’s in the Anglophone world. Part III discusses Pareto’s politics, especially with regard to English-speaking countries, and offers reflections over the last three decades of the 20th century by, inter alia, Nobel-prize economist Amartya Sen (“The Impossibility of a Paretan Liberal”, pp. 267—72) as well as Joseph Femia himself (“Pareto and the Critique of Justice”, pp. 317—29). All together, these essays represent the most articulate introduction to Pareto’s social and political thought, as well as its reception over the past 70 years, currently available in the English language.

What is more, given the high quality of the scholarly work selected by the editor, such an introduction avoids the unfortunate yet widespread oversimplifications and blatantly erroneous depictions of Pareto’s thought, which is often “pigeon-holed” into science-worshipping positivism, psychological reductionism and proto-fascist authoritarianism.

Certainly, Pareto did attempt to apply the induction- and experiment-based scientific methods of physics and chemistry to the study of social phenomena. He did so in order to stress and charter the uniformities of human behaviour due to fundamental instincts and mental dispositions characteristic of our species, as well as to criticise much-venerated democratic regimes qua demagogic plutocracies. Nevertheless, he never denied the limitations intrinsic to the observation-constrained, abstraction-prone, descriptive, probabilistic hypotheses of the natural sciences. Indeed, even the field of economics, which he himself had contributed to formalise by adopting elements of the mathematics used in physics, had been abandoned by Pareto because of its inability to grasp the non-rational elements of the human psyche, which caused rationality-based economic models to fail regularly and inevitably in their predictions about the future. As Pareto had come to realise, the actual social man was not much of an homo economicus. C.B. Macpherson’s 1937 essay “Pareto’s ‘General Sociology'” (pp. 3—16) in Part I of Femia’s book is most relevant in this respect, as it accuses Pareto of adhering too much to the allegedly value-free methods of empirical science, yet revealing as well Pareto’s awaraness of the profound differences existing between the study of inanimate or animal phenomena and the study of value-driven human beings.

Analogously, Pareto researched and categorised the fundamental instincts or sentiments (“residues”) determining human action within societies and commonly rationalised post-factum into fallacious arguments (“derivations”) and doctrines (“derivatives”) in order to please yet another sentiment of ours, that is, our desire for explanations that sound logical to us. However, he never denied the ever-changing creative power of the human being as a semiotic animal, who is capable of activating and intensifying certain instincts and dispositions by engaging in symbolic activities. The tension between the fundamentally non-rational universal constant of “residues” and the possibility for self-reflective, cunning minds to manipulate them intelligently is discussed in Bobbio’s work as well as in the 1972 essay by Vincent Tarascio chosen for this collection (“Marx and Pareto on Science and History: A Comparative Analysis”, pp. 145—58), which also belongs to Part II.

Even less did Pareto deny the dangers to social order and public wellbeing stemming from political doctrines fostering despotism, censorship, nationalism and racism. Indeed, Pareto was very much an old-fashioned 19th-century liberal, who certainly disapproved of universal suffrage and other socially “dangerous” socialist aims, but commended the peaceful, direct male democracy of small Swiss cantons as the best example of political life in his age and regarded the liberty of the individual as paramount. In nuce, Mussolini’s deification of the State and his charismatic leadership of the masses did not belong to Pareto and their common association is, as S.E. Finer called it, “a misfortune” (“Pareto and Pluto-Democracy: The Retreat to Galapagos”, pp. 305—15; 305).

A scientist but not a devotee of scientism, a pessimist about human reason but not an irrationalist, and a conservative liberal but not a fascist: Pareto was a complex man and a complex thinker. He tried to mirror in his work the complexities of human phenomena themselves, thus avoiding explanatory shortcuts and ideological simplifications that would have probably granted him a much wider audience and a much broader appreciation. Femia’s book, which contains selected essays by some of the most eminent intellectuals who have written about Pareto over the last seven decades, bears witness to such complexities. It is therefore no easy book to read; yet no more candid depiction of Pareto’s approach and investigations would be possible.

Francesco Giacomantonio, Introduzione al pensiero politico di Habermas. Il dialogo della ragione dilagante (Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2010)

Our age of crisis has taken many more forms than just the widespread rejection of Enlightenment ideals. Possibly, its most visible contemporary manifestations are: (a) the devastation of the planet’s “ecological equilibrium” (25); (b) the consistent anthropological impoverishment and individualistic atomisation of human societies (e.g. “social conflicts” read as individual “psychic problems” [26]; “anomie” [31]; “confusion between… [individual] success and… [collective] understanding” [32]); and (c) the undiminished international instability (e.g. religion’s “self-destructive forms” [63]; “Western military interventions in various areas of the planet” [77] ).

Patiently and laboriously, Habermas has addressed in his complex oeuvre all of the aforementioned forms of crisis of our age. It is Giacomantonio’s task to survey Habermas’ accounts in this slender book (99 pages).

Specifically, Giacomantonio praises the erudite, articulate and abstract “theoretical wealth” of leading German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) as a rare exception to current scholarly and scientific trends (78). Avoiding academic partisanships and specialist parochialisms, Habermas is said to have scrutinised and engaged with an “ample spectrum of stances” in the attempt to provide a reasoned, synthetic as well as analytical understanding of the enduring age of crisis (77). Swimming against the current, Habermas believes the Enlightenment project—modernity itself—to have to be brought to completion, not discarded.

Habermas’ first major intellectual accomplishments are claimed to be his 1960s and 1970s studies in the economic and administrative structures of late-modern Western industrial societies. Then, Habermas focused primarily upon the legitimisation of such structures via political procedures of mass participation, as well as upon the growing class fluidity, which Giacomantonio describes as the “dissolution” and “fragmentation” of traditional class consciousness and discourses (25).

According to Habermas, the post-war decades had seen capitalist societies benefiting from large-scale entrepreneurial pursuits, under the cooperative scrutiny and sophisticated direction of the State, which allowed these pursuits to serve vastly accepted inclusive social aims (e.g. “urban and regional planning”, “research and development”, “unemployment benefits”, “public welfare”; 25). These aims facilitated the legitimisation of the pursuits themselves, as well as the State’s own authority. Then, this virtuous circularity ended. For Habermas, the 1970s mark the beginning of the age of crisis.

The 1970s “late” or “mature” capitalism (23) continued to display massive State intervention in the economy. Yet, an increasing outgrowth of private interests started to escape from State control, leading to “systemic” failures (24) and to a generalised loss of faith in the State. This reduction of legitimacy was indicated by declining political participation, which was due too to the opacity of class consciousness in now tertiary-dominated economies. A variety of rescue plans were implemented by national governments, often via ever-increasing State intervention and techno-scientific legitimisation thereof. Regularly, these plans proved of little success, at least as the previous inclusive social aims were concerned.

Rather, the recurring reliance upon science and technology as grounds for political action induced considerable “de-politicisation” (28) of collective life and institutional decision-making. Within this novel frame of reference, whereby political issues were turned into “technical problems”(28), the public opinion was morphed into a passive spectator or sheer recipient of the diktats of a self-enclosed—and often self-serving—“expert” bureaucracy. In any case, the vastly accepted inclusive social aims of the post-war decades started to wane, becoming a more and more remote memory of better, foregone times.

It is Habermas’ opinion that the highly educated “expert” bureaucrats of recent decades have failed consistently to perceive the unavoidable connection between factual scientific investigation and value-driven technical application. To counter this phenomenon, Habermas has recommended the establishment of a more open critical exchange amongst experts and between experts and the public at large. In this perspective, communication should serve as an antidote to the former’s intellectual insularity and to the latter’s political disaffection.

Concerned with the de-politicisation of socio-political phenomena and populations of democratic countries, Habermas began to explore the socio-political relevance of “communication and linguistic dimensions” that were to become the hallmark of his later intellectual production (31). Indeed, the 1980s witnessed a vast output of studies by Habermas on the deeper structures of anthropological impoverishment and atomisation in modern nations. In them, Habermas came to conceive of “society” as comprising: (a) the “system” of professional, formal networks of “strategic behaviour”; and (b) the personal, informal “life-world” of existentially meaningful behaviour (“Lebenswelt”; 31). On the one hand, human activity was being described by Habermas as the “success” or “influence” of the competitive individual; whilst on the other stood the truly life-defining, cooperative linguistic (“communicative”) praxes seeking mutual “understanding” and engendering shared “identities” (32).

Initiating the age of crisis, the former dimension had been invading the latter by using communication instrumentally, i.e. the shared linguistic means for genuine self-expression and social cohesion were turned into sheer means of self-maximisation. To respond to this invasion, Habermas has recommended the overcoming of national barriers and the creation of a “cosmopolitan… deliberative democracy” centred upon ethical and normative issues and aims (35). Roughly speaking, more conversation about justice, the common good and the like–as already anticipated in his reflections on science and technology of the 1970s–would mean more democracy; more democracy would mean more legitimacy; more legitimacy more effective laws; and more effective laws more social and socially acceptable results. All of this, however, should be taking place on a global scale.

Habermas’ reflections on democracy became even more relevant in the 1990s. Then, in the face of an even faster-paced post-Cold-War economic and cultural globalisation, it was the very cradle of modern democracy that was to experience its deepest crisis, i.e. the nation State as such. Apart from intensifying the problems that Habermas had already tackled in the 1970s and 1980s, fin-de-siècle globalisation further deprived States of the crucial means of control over the “economic dimension” (40). In particular, free capital trade robbed the State of those vital “fiscal” resources that were needed for its administrative functions (44). Weaker States became even less credible to the populations, whose interests they were still expected to serve. The legitimacy of their power and even their own raison d’être became shakier. In the process, the vastly accepted inclusive social aims of the post-war decadeswere even openly rejected by leading parties and statesmen, who engaged actively in the persistent reduction of the public sphere. Deprived of the State’s support, larger and larger sectors of the population found themselves poorer, marginalised, and more vulnerable.

In the final decade of the 20th century, Habermas stressed further his commitment to a “cosmopolitan” solution of the ongoing crisis (43). In his view, a global economy needs a global deliberative democracy. This is not the same thing as to say that the world needs a world State. Rather, the world needs actual world politics and actual world policies. International organisations are already in place (e.g. the “United Nations”, the “World Trade Organisation”, the “International Monetary Fund” [46]). What is missing is the democratic appropriation of those institutions as positive means for global governance.

Interestingly, the “European Union” has been described by Habermas as an example of existing trans-national coordination and a possible force for progress, which he understands as the generation of a new political community reflecting truly democratic values and substantial ethico-political aims, such as solidarity and social inclusion (45). As an opposite model of global governance, Habermas has often highlighted the “hegemonic unilateralism” of the United States of America, which has accompanied throughout an economic globalisation capable of producing a “more unjust… more insecure” world and a threat to our “survival” as a species (48).

In particular, Habermas has stressed of late the centrality of the rule of law for the proper functioning of any complex social arrangement. As opposed to the brutal force exemplified by military intervention, a binding legal framework springing from democratic deliberation would constitute in his view a powerful means to a noble, desirable end: “to include the other without assimilating him” (50).

As further explained and substantiated in Habermas’ works of the 2000s, democracy should be thought of as much more than just a set of public institutions and formal procedures, for it is also an array of informal social praxes and individual forms of conduct. Within his deliberative and cosmopolitan model of democratic rule, Habermas has ended up combining the “liberty of the ancients” with the “liberty of the moderns” (51). In other words, both republican active participation and liberal individual-rights-protecting public guarantees are embraced as important components of actual democracy. Societies need both enduring compromises amongst rights-endowed self-interested individuals and the formation and expression of collective will via societal “self-clarification” (37).

Habermas resolves in an analogous manner the tension between liberals and communitarians on the much-debated issues of multiculturalism (51-6) and religious tolerance (61-8). Both universal, trans-cultural principles and cultural rights are said to be important for the socially inclusive survival of democratic States in a more and more inter-connected international reality. Disagreements and problems are bound to arise; still, what matters most is to have enough institutional and conceptual resources as to be able to tackle such disagreements and problems without falling into either coercion or social disintegration, which destroy genuine social cohesion and solidarity (54-6).

This, albeit sketchy, is the overview of Habermas’ intellectual production that Francesco Giacomantonio offers in his new book. It is indeed a clear and effective account of Habermas’ nearly unique oeuvre, as the author of the Introduction to the Political Thought of Habermas cites Touraine and Castoriadis as the only other equally daring grand theorists of recent times (80). The book comprises six chapters, an introduction, some final considerations and an appendix by another author. The presentation waves between a thematic subdivision and a chronological organisation of the material. Either way, the book addresses all the essential aspects of Habermas’ vast production. By this feat alone, it deserves much praise.

If any criticism is to be passed on it, then it must be pointed out that the book could be even more slender: the appendix by Angelo Chielli is redundant and unnecessary (83-90); whilst the 6th chapter, which deals with Habermas’ relevance to contemporary academic pursuits (69-75), could have been reduced to, and included with, the author’s final considerations (77-81). Also, the book would benefit from an analytical index of cited topics and authors.

Giulio Santagata, Il braccio destro. Quindici anni di politica con Romano Prodi (Bologna: Pendragon, 2010)

Perhaps, the nearly three dozens of foreign citizens–British, Canadian, American, Icelandic, German, Mexican, Taiwanese and Scandinavian–who asked me this question were simply devoid of the knowledge, the economic interests, the political background, or the spiritual attitudes that have led millions of Italians to choose Berlusconi as their national leader and international representative. On the contrary, far from being a neutral question, all of these inquisitive foreign citizens displayed invariantly their genuine astonishment at Berlusconi’s electoral success, for they were unable to perceive in his public persona anything positive or appealing.

Most commonly, their negative perception of Berlusconi was associated with sad, stereotypical notions about Italy and the Italians, such as being lecherously over-sexed, endemically corrupt, and in bed with the Mafia. Sometimes, however, their negative perception was more sophisticated. In particular, there appeared to be recurrent concerns that billionaires or media moguls à la Berlusconi could establish new parties and seize self-servingly the democratic processes of their own native countries. In this perspective, my interlocutors seemed worried that some sort of “Berlusconism” could cross Italy’s boundaries and take over the rest of Europe, analogously to the historical experience of fascism, which emerged in Italy and was later adopted in as different countries as Portugal and Germany.

Giulio Santagata’s new book offers a different answer to this frequent, value-laden question that I was put so often over the past fifteen years. It does so by recounting with great analytical skill, vivid personal participation and significant intellectual honesty his own experience as Romano Prodi’s “right hand” over the past two decades of Italian political life—Romano Prodi being the one and only left-wing candidate to ever beat, twice, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’s general elections.

The book comprises three sections, which are devoted respectively to: the history of the political alliance called “the Olive tree” (13-46); Santagata’s organisation of numerous electoral campaigns (49-87); and Romano Prodi’s two short-lived governments (91-146). Together, these three sections reveal the inner frailty and the limited outreach of the political coalition that supported Prodi’s candidacy and governments.

The main factor at play with regard to the coalition’s inner frailty would appear to have been the sheer number and variability of the political parties that formed it. Many, short-lived, endlessly reinventing themselves in search for an invariably evanescent appeal, these parties shared a common fear and a common fault. First of all, they were all afraid of a strong leadership, whether Prodi’s or anyone else’s. Secondly, they regarded each other not much as allies, but as competitors. Eventually, the need for visibility of so many parties and party leaders worked against Romano Prodi, given that his alleged supporters were busier attacking each other than striking jointly at Berlusconi and at his right-wing agenda.

The limited outreach of the same parties was due in primis to the limited resources and media connections available to them. In this respect, Berlusconi’s being a media mogul and billionaire running for office who, more or less manifestly, told newspapers and TV broadcasters what to say, did make a difference. Still, the obstinately self-referential aims of left-wing professional politicians does strike Santagata as equally relevant, for these quarrelsome political leaders claimed incessantly to know better than their own voters, who clearly liked the notion of a unified Italian left. Inevitably, such better-knowing strategists were shown to be tragically out of touch with their potential voters’ hopes and demands.

It must be realised that some of the hopes and demands of the Italian voters were likely to be the result of cunningly induced dreams and fears, which right-wing politicians were better able to exploit. After all, these politicians had contributed decisively to give shape to them, thanks to Berlusconi’s tight grip on Italy’s mass media. Similarly, some hopes and demands were clearly the expression of the vocal plethora of small- and medium-scale interest groups that Prodi’s government was trying to overcome in the name of liberal “modernity” and ever-useful “national interest”. Others could be even the desiderata of Italy’s organised crime and endemic corruption—sad stereotypes are not necessarily off the mark all the time.

Yet, a third element should be considered as well. Santagata hints at it in the final section of the book, in which he discusses the disastrous effects of the ongoing global economic crisis. The recipes that were proposed in the fifteen years of Prodi’s political career were very much in tune with those of, say, Britain’s New Labour or Germany’s social-democrats. Prodi’s governments were eager to liberalise the economy, privatise what little was left of public banks and State-owned industrial concerns, and, to a significant extent, ride the wave of rampant financial activities. Like Blair and Schroeder, Prodi was willing to embrace globalisation as a positive force. In this economic perspective, the difference between his novel “post-communist” left and Berlusconi’s right was not so pronounced.

On the contrary, the only voices to criticise left-wing liberalisations, privatisations and the embrace of globalisation were a handful of so-called “radicals” on the left of Prodi’s left, and even fewer old-fashioned nationalists on the right. Everybody else, the “moderate” and “right-thinking” majority, had taken aboard the “univocally liberal and free-market thought” that had once characterised staunchly right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (144).

In brief, a monolithic faith in the correctness of free trade and free-market economics was established in Italy too, both left and right of the political spectrum, soon after the collapse of the USSR. Certainly, there were the few exceptions noted above, but they were marginalised as a nostalgic leftover of the Cold War era. The seventy-year-old Soviet alternative to liberal capitalism had been proven utopian by the collapse of the Eastern bloc and, with it, any serious challenge to free trade and free-market economics. As a result, liberal capitalism was glorified not solely as the only path ahead, but also as the right one, as though the failure of the Soviet remedy meant that there had never been any pathology to begin with. Yet, after twenty years of “moderate” and “right-thinking” Thatcherism, the global economy entered in 2008 such a dramatic global crisis that even Berlusconi’s own minister of financial affairs was heard calling for “more public intervention” in the economy and “the unspeakable communist word ‘nationalisation’.” (144)

Possibly, as Santagata suggests, the result of this global crisis is that the left will stop being ashamed of its traditional socialist lexicon and reformist aims, thus rediscovering “ethics, equality, welfare, labour, solidarity… capitalism, sustainability, redistribution of wealth.” (144) Whether Romani Prodi will be the most credible Italian political leader to be at the helm of this counter-counter-reformation, though, is far from clear.

Maria Moog-Grünewald (ed.), Brill‘s New Pauly. Supplements 4. The Reception of Myth and Mythology (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010)

This encyclopaedia served literally as a pivotal reference work for several generations of students and academics, especially though not exclusively in Continental Europe. However, being as massive as it was impressive, this important source of knowledge was never translated into English in toto. On the contrary, such a fate awaited the newer and thoroughly revised version of the same encyclopaedia, i.e. Der Neue Pauly, published by J.B. Metzler over the period 1996-2003. While the translation of Der Neue Pauly is reaching its completion with the publication of the supplementary volumes, Brill’s already twenty-six-volume New Pauly has become one of the richest encyclopaedias of Western antiquity in today’s Anglophone world, and possibly the most consulted reference work in its field. What is more, the New Pauly provides not only an extensive coverage of the cultures and events in the ancient heart of Europe from early Aegean times to late antiquity, but also a multi-disciplinary study of the reception of classical antiquity in the following centuries—indeed up to the present day. Particular attention has been paid in the New Pauly to the changes and trends in classical scholarship itself, which has witnessed as diverse and turbulent an existence as the Graeco-Roman civilisations themselves.

The supplementary volume reviewed hereby belongs to the latter, multi-disciplinary study area. As the subtitle highlights, it is devoted to the reception of classical myth and mythology. Its original version was published in German in 2008: a two-year backlog for translation in today’s lingua franca of scholarship is not blameworthy. The volume reads as a one-book lexicon of the most important characters in ancient mythology. Each lemma tackles one (e.g. Achilles, 1-14; Zeus, 616-20) or, in alternative, famous pairs (e.g. Agamennon and Clytaemnestra, 37-42) and groups (e.g. Nymphs, 433-43). Information is offered concisely and in a fairly standardised manner: Greek and Latin names come first; then a brief summary of the character’s/s’ main features; a presentation of the relevant myth(s) involving it/them, inclusive of historical and geographical variants; the character’s/s’ relevance in ancient religion(s); and eventually its/their literary and artistic reception in ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary times, inclusive of references to significant philosophical, artistic and political usages and conceptualisations.

A complete overview of all the known receptions of each character would have been impossible or, at least, impractical. However, the lexicon of this Supplement is generous enough with representative varieties of interpretations concerning each mythical character concerned. As such, this volume serves also as a concise history of Western ideas, which means that the fourth Supplement of the New Pauly should appeal not solely to classical scholars and historians, but also to students and academics in the humanities at large. In particular, art historians and cultural theorists may find this volume a very useful reference book; one of those books that should be kept on top of one’s office desk. Still, a more extensive overview would have been possible and, in all probability, even more practical to the academic community. The editorial choice of favouring “the need for brevity and lexical usability” (viii) over the comprehensiveness of the lexicon may be well-intended, yet at the same time it does strike as naïve, especially if one considers the encyclopaedic nature of the whole enterprise to which it belongs. Besides, given the considerable amount of money that university libraries, research centres and individual scholars are expected to disburse for each volume, including the Supplement at issue, not to mention for purchasing or accessing the whole New Pauly online, then it would have been wiser to make the lexicon “fatter” rather than “slender”.

Pecuniary considerations aside, the scholarly fitness of the fourth Supplement remains excellent. It is highly recommended to all humanists and scientists that may need or benefit from expert accounts of ancient myths and their reception in Western culture.

Eight Noble Opinions and the Economic Crisis: Four Literary-philosophical Sketches à la Eduardo Galeano

I.

Until control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognised as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile… Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws… Usury once in control will wreck any nation.

            William Lyon Mackenzie King

Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

      Albert Einstein

Philosophers are often and rightly accused of dealing too much with the past, pondering endlessly upon origins, reasons and causes, and too little with the future, leaving hardly any room to proposals, solutions, or calls to arms. To prove myself capable of the latter kind of activity, and despite the unavoidably old noble opinions quoted above, I shall keep Minerva’s owl nailed to a perch. Though Pythonesque, this little cruelty should delay any backward-looking blathering of mine, which is to come eventually in the other sketches.

After all, we are facing a dramatic twofold crisis, ecological and economic, which even uninfluential public figures like the current UN Secretary and US President have acknowledged and denounced as deadly. As for the title under which I allow myself to do so, I shall be content with declaring myself a professor of philosophy who has studied value for some time, i.e. what is important and what is not. In this pursuit, which I regard as valuable, I have reached a fairly simple conclusion: that which keeps all of us and our descendants alive and well is very, very important indeed. Those who deny it or claim my claim to be unscientific can do so because they are tacitly doing all that is necessary in order to stay alive and well enough to be able to talk a lot of nonsense.

But let us dwell no further on this simple subject, about which I have written around fifteen complicated essays in the past ten years—I need another nail… Worthy of Epicurus, I can offer a tetrapharmakos to today’s world, confident to be received by no-one in useful time, for that seems to be the fate for all who dare criticise—as I am going to do—large-scale private banking, the profit motive as paramount,  the private ownership of strategic resources, deregulation, and the managerial mind. Some may even call me a “socialist”, as though it were a derogatory and disqualifying term, similar to “criminal”, “pervert” or “rascal”. Probably, given the notoriety of Italians and academics, “old pig” or “bore” would be more fitting insults. Politically, however, I would describe myself as “life-grounded”, not “socialist”. Still, I shall not mind and endure the epitaph with grace, even gratefulness. I shall keep company with Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte of Saint-Simon, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell. An aristocrat, a physicist, and a logician…

(1)

First, fundamental medication, upon which all else depends: nations should establish, or in most cases re-establish, good public banks. Why? Well, here is something that should have become obvious to anyone who has eyes to see and a fat wallet. As stated by Russian President Vladimir Putin when speaking last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the economic crisis that we are witnessing today has destroyed, in about one year, approximately twenty-five years of pecuniary wealth, i.e. the sort of wealth that our intrepid yet “virtual” capitalists were aimed to produce in the first place. Private banks and financial institutions, left to their own devices by prolonged tidal waves of worldwide deregulation, brought themselves down and, with them, much of the world’s “real” economy. Do you remember the real economy? If it goes down, down go also the starving children of unemployed sub-Saharan family fathers. Down into the earth they go, whilst shareholders moan for lost profits and fire a few more people to ease their pain.

Clearly, many private banks cannot do their job unaided. As they were busy concocting mathematically byzantine derivatives and variously vehicled securisation packages in the deregulated shadow of global finance, they forgot about honest bookkeeping, sound reserves, mutual trust, and other basic old-fashioned principles of chronically anachronistic banking. They even forgot about that primitive slave invention, morality. Alas! Such is the genius of the invisible hand free from State direction or, as Icelandic philosopher Mikael Karlsson dubs it, “the invisible brain.” This is not meant to be an insult to anyone, unlike “socialist” or “pervert”. The so-called “Free Market” promoted by “deregulators” has no visible brain, insofar as State-centred social and public planning is regularly rejected as anathema. Still, who came to the rescue of self- (and other-) destructive private banks? The State.

Turned into the banks’ pork-barrel, the State has thrown trillions at the banks in order to keep them afloat—in the Land of the Free, in Great Britain, in Benelux. Was it necessary? No, for the State could have simply taken over the banks. Was it desirable? No, for public banks, still run in communist countries such as China and North Dakota, can spur development, employment, and take far fewer risks than private ones.

It must be emphasised that it is not enough for the State to own the banks; these must be run like public banks i.e. banks for the public good. Some morality is required in the process. Prudently restricted by various strings, these public banks can respond more easily to the needs and aims of actual populations, rather than to the whims and fancies of absentee owners or of their volatile servants, that is to say their bonus-benefitting managers.

What am I saying? Have public banks and run them as such. They must spur real development, not inflate bubbles that transfer wealth from the bottom to the top. Will it hurt the shareholders and wealthier customers of private banks? Certainly. They have already enjoyed the State’s helping hand; it may be time to repay the State with gratitude. Doesn’t anyone remember how to do it? Read history books, study the European Payments Union of the 1950s, ask retired Italian or French bank managers, use your imagination. A few rules of thumb may assist those who lack enough imagination:

(a)  Ban financial and currency speculation, at least within and via public banks: the casino belongs to “competitive” gamblers. Yes, people who used to claim that they would succeed or fail like Promethean heroes… Before they all asked for help to the Great Nanny, of course, lost as they were on their er-rand. And please, let the State never again salvage these hypocrites from their own myopic greed. They are now trying to wash their guilty conscience by returning one hundredth of what they have received from the public purse, whilst re-filling their pockets at the State’s expense, with fierce bearish appetite

(b)  Lubricate the real economy, if forward-looking, so as to launch much-needed public works, create long-term employment, and generate steady streams of income within the nation. Public banks can do so, at low interest rates: they must be profitable, but not at all costs

(c)  Monitor inbound and outbound capital flows, so as to direct investments to socially beneficial areas, and counter tax evasion as well as tax avoidance: far too much has been denied in the past to the very public purse that has then saved the incompetent affluent from themselves. And remember that a stable currency and genuine economic sovereignty can only be secured by abandoning the disastrous freedom of capital flows that has flooded the world with crisis upon crisis since the 1980s: tequila, vodka, whiskey or brennivín, ouzo, they all taste the same

(d)  Secure reserves by compelling the capitals of public bodies, pension and social security savings, and the revenues of public banks to be invested in the public banks themselves. The State must be as free as possible from the bondage and the blackmail of its current masters i.e. foreign direct investment and international bondholders

(e)  Pay bank managers State salaries comparable to those of other leading promoters of public wellbeing—surgeons, health-&-safety inspectors, judges—and avoid attracting the covetous, self-indulging, big-jet and big-penthouse penis-length-comparing “best and brightest” who plunged the world into a massive crisis. Communities need not such beastly best and brittle brightness. Forget them and their barbaric macho ethos—made of turrets of money, performance-enhancing bonuses (as though they alone were working), fee-demanding buddies-consultants, and PR companies using invariably words like “aggressively” and “targets”.

Finally, do not underestimate the fact that it is difficult to deal with cronyism by voting new governments into office. Yet it is much more difficult to do the same thing by waiting for anonymous and short-lived shareholders to reform their servants, who are so free from supervision as to jot down any number they like in the books without anyone finding out. As Adam Smith forewarned us some time ago, the corporation is amongst the least competitive and the most corruptible of human institutions, hence amongst the most damaging to the proper functioning of capitalism.

And inflation? Don’t worry. Nobody talks about it—a sudden silence. After all, common people are no longer able to buy anything, not even on credit. If anything, the real problem to come will be deflation. Besides, more than 90% of the money circulating around the globe is the result of financial leverage by private institutions. (And that is why, to prevent inflation, common people’s demand must be chocked. Hence stagnant wages, mass unemployment, etc.) Still, old-fashioned, knee-jerk reactions may be reoccurring soon: pensions and salaries must not go up, for the poor must repay the money lost by the rich; States must rein in public expenditures, which they have been doing for thirty years, unless there was a war to be fought; public assets must be privatised, so as to further enrich the incompetent and further weaken their only saviour; cheap money must stop (now), lest we tax the wealthy to give some jobs to the restless youth, etc. By the way, how is it that bonuses for bank managers could always go up? It must be the same people who think that only private firms can be valid multipliers…

It is ironic that, after two decades during which we had been told that the State and, for that matter, its independent Central Banks could not issue money for schools, hospitals, public works and social projects, quite mysteriously they started printing so much money. Sure, they now tell us that we need private banks to keep credit flowing, for credit is the life-blood of the economy. Without it, there shall be no green-spanning across the meadows. And yet, enterprises and households worldwide are still struggling to get the credit that they need. In truth, the selectively generous Central Banks’ cheap money benefits financial speculation, which is where the trouble started in the first place. How could ever a heartless economy pump any actual life-blood?

Indeed, in California, the local government is at risk of being terminated by the refusal of private banks to subscribe local public bonds because they are deemed “unsafe”: the State of California could go bankrupt. “What a cheek!” my mother would say, and she has dealt with banks for most of her life. The banks refusing to purchase these sunny bonds today are the same banks that were saved by public money yesterday, when it was raining. But there is more.

Were even these banks to provide enterprises, households and public authorities with the credit they need, they would not do it for free, for the common good, or for a little interest; they would do it for profit, and for as much of it as they can get. Thus, things would be so arranged and, sadly enough, they are being so arranged, as to have public money given very prodigally to private banks, so that these banks may give it to the public far less prodigally.

What is more, in order to be worthy of the bailed-out banks’ money:

  • Enterprises have been reducing their workforce to be more “competitive”
  • Households have been returning their homes to banks that had sold highly reliable mortgages towards the purchase of… homes
  • The State has been thinning out its already skinny body in order to be attractive to the banks, which the State has just rescued from themselves

After decades of TINA-like reduction of all that is public, public money is being given to glaringly incompetent private banks so that their losses be made public and their profits, which were always private, recover and be still private. In the process, public money is not used to counter dwindling employment, secure houses, and, say, fund hospitals, schools, university research, care for the elderly and the mentally ill, public gardens, public football fields, archaeological preservation programmes, amelioration of penal institutions, better garbage collection, sanitation and, why not, aid to starving children. How many tramps will get trapped in the revolving doors of the wealthy’s tower?

That the State may have money for the bankrupt banks but not for its own social functions, it is something that defies imagination, morality, and even legal obligations. Many of them ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, didn’t they?

(2)

Second, life-saving medication: if you skip the middle man, operate good public banks, and have money to use for the common good, then launch a vast programme of green public works. More severe and threatening than the economic crisis itself is the ecological crisis. Ask the United Nations about that. The former crisis threatens fat wallets at the top and starving children at the bottom, yet at different degrees of dangerousness. The latter crisis threatens all equally with death. The grim reaper is the great leveller. Since so much private enterprise has caused the ecological crisis in the first place—the smoky days of the Industrial Revolution—and has continued it in the face of scientific alarm calls as old as Britney Spears, then it is advisable that the State be able and willing to step in and, both by regulation and by direct economic action, reverse the tide.

Forget speculative carbon emission quotas and reduce carbon emissions; ban outright or force rapid conversion of the most obvious forms of life-destructive economic activity; tax the remaining polluting activities and de-tax non- or less-polluting ones; have a major public company undertaking proper refitting of houses on a massive scale so as to make them less energy-consuming; create large public recycling facilities so as to counter illegal dumping of waste at large; found and fund new public research centres for the development of green technologies, free from the yoke of short-term corporate desiderata; ration carbon-based power and use it only for vital and life-enhancing activities…

There are so many tokens of environmentally constructive planning, yet so few that have not been resisted as “too costly”, “too rigid”, “too much for us, who have already done so much”, etc. Were only the people uttering such phrases to consider seriously the fact that they can be so garrulous because the environment is still, barely, able to support them, their bodies, their minds, and the natural and social infrastructures that have allowed them to grow, socialise and, limitedly, mature…

In addition to a life-enabling aim and a counter-cyclical alternative to depressing austerity, politics would also regain its dignity by having a green mission. Strangled by powerful yet incompetent lobbies, and fettered by incompetent yet powerful central banks, politics has been reduced for far too long a time to day-to-day management of production costs in the domestic market and salesmanship in the foreign ones.

(3)

Third, important medication: since some neighbours may not like your policies and your currency, then they might respect your resources. States should increase or secure public control of strategic assets: water, oil, gas, the knowledge of its own population—this knowledge having been fostered by public education, healthcare provision, and cultural activities.

Whether by safeguarding the revenues originating in natural resources that would otherwise enrich few and often foreign shareholders, or by reclaiming a knowledge-based industry that would otherwise be outsourced by corporate giants, the State must secure a steady source of income for itself and for the nation’s economy. This income alone should help democratic governments to respond to their constitutional sovereigns, not to rating agencies and “markets” whose lords regularly reside offshore.

As Norway’s long experience in State-run oil extraction and refining illustrates, it is the one and only “trickle-down” strategy that has produced tangible results for an entire nation. States’ assets are not a factor of market distortion, but a factor of production—and one that can help businesses to grow by providing cheap goods and services, as opposed to the endless and costly bloodsucking of postmodern privatised economies. Ideally, it would be good for States to regain control over money-creating central banks, but there are limits even to one’s dreams.

Incidentally, even the many wars paid by the American public purse to secure control over other nations’ oil, or at least force its trade in US dollars, indicate that the public control of strategic assets is not so foolish an idea. And yes, also that getting bombed may be a risk for the nations pursuing the path recommended hereby: when the purse is at stake,  even liberals can stop wearing a tie and put on a black shirt instead. Apart from the landowners, cunning agents and financial moguls, who have charged prices well over any real cost of production, for all others there is no such thing as a free lunch—Miltons have always known the devil very well.

(4)

Fourth, integrative medication: since some powers-that-are may not be pleased with your plans, make sure you can deal with them. Create a just fiscal and regulatory framework, which empowers the population at large and weakens the usual lobbies: close tax loopholes and tax breaks for the usual lobbies; withdraw passports and freeze assets of tax fugitives; tax rents (land, inheritances, capital gains) and de-tax hard work, so as to reward merit and distinguish sharply between earned and unearned income; end subsidies, legal privileges (e.g. limited liability) and tax-breaks to private companies, lest they never compete in a truly free market; nationalise the companies that are too big to fail, as John Kenneth Galbraith advised us to do long ago; reclaim research and development grants and whichever other public credit given to private firms leaving the country; confiscate the assets of companies outsourcing to countries with lower labour and environmental standards; put regulatory agencies and grassroots associations on the boards of private and public companies to fight corruption; inspect constantly and reward those inspectors who discover illicit activities.

Taxes matter. Especially when there is an ever-richer tiny elite of super-rich whose fortune comes as a long free lunch over accumulated wealth, whether in property or capital. They hardly ever pay taxes. They pay fewer than most, since someone else paid taxes before them: those who actually earned that property or capital in the first place. In truth, they may quite simply avoid taxes by shoring their assets off to tiny islands or Alpine valleys. The members of this tiny elite are above and beyond the common citizen, whilst their trusted and highly paid managers rarely go to jail when guilty of fraud or cheating. Above-and-beyondness is a transferrable asset too. If and when hijacked by this elite, States are likely to commit suicide by taxing those who work instead. And if the people sweating and bleeding don’t have enough money, then State activities are to be reduced in the name of, say, the Big Society–of the hopeless and of their hopeless resilience.

In brief, internalise costs that have been externalised regularly and mercilessly at the expense of natural and societal well-being; and effectively re-regulate the disastrously de-regulated playground of the free enterprise–especially but not exclusively of the virtual type–whose only known freedom is that which cages every possible aspect of reality into the life-blind logic of profit-making.

Will anyone undergo this cure? History will tell. The past is known or, at least, it should not be forgotten: by way of poetic license granted by decades of financial deregulation, “2008” rhymes with “1929”. What happened after 1929? As some clever graffiti on a wall near my home in Italy did state crudely but concisely: “The bourgeois bitch makes fascist puppies”; all that she needs are a severe crisis and the stubborn refusal to take the medication outlined in this sketch of mine. Yet history does not have to repeat itself. If anything, it is full of surprises. Who would have ever thought, for example, that little furry animals could outlive giant dinosaurs and become the first species ever capable of destroying the ecological structures that allow them to live!

II.

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.

         John Maynard Keynes

There are two ways of conquering a foreign nation. One is to gain control of its people by force of arms. The other is to gain control of its economy by financial means.

       John Foster Dulles

In the year 2003 I published a review of Value Wars, written by Canada’s leading value theorist John McMurtry. In it I provided an account of the stunning whistle-blowing by World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz vis-à-vis “deregulation” and “globalisation”, two terms that had been dominating economic and political discourse for some time. Quite unexpectedly, and rather shockingly, a well-connected, mainstream, Nobel-prize-winning economist denounced the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for implementing over a period of at least twenty years a merciless four-step process of re-colonisation of independent nations by international private capital. This was the sort of suspicion that radicals like pop singer Bono Vox and Polish actor Karol Woitila, better known as Pope John Paul II, had been voicing for a long time. As for John McMurtry, he took due notice, since Stiglitz’s revelation was consistent with his own description of world affairs as directed by the profit-motive of the few versus the vital interests of all others. Preferring truth to originality, I endeavoured to spread this description of world affairs around me. In fact, I had given lectures about it, also in Iceland, before 2003.

Nobody seemed to care, however, at least here in the north. Stiglitz’s views were not widely discussed and even less were they taught at the university level, except by a few—sometimes foreign—eccentrics. McMurtry’s views, hadn’t it been for the same eccentrics, would have been left to gather dust in local libraries. Meanwhile, the policies of deregulation and enthusiastic participation in globalisation were not halted. On the contrary, in the year 2003, the three largest public banks were privatised. Immediately, they started to sail the seas of international speculation, never seen before in Icelandic history. “Carry trades” and “financial leverage” became mantras recited on the first page of all newspapers, whilst the businessmen who were dubbed the “new Vikings” set out to raid foreign banks, enterprises, supermarkets, and football clubs, with money that they did not have. But such is late- (or post-) modern capitalism, or “the Icelandic way of doing business”, as I was told back then. Besides, it would appear that only professional economists are entitled to teach about why they, unlike a mere philosopher like McMurtry, got it so wrong. And there’s so much to learn!

What did Stiglitz’s whistle-blowing describe? And how does it apply to the Icelandic case?

First, the permeability of the nation’s borders to private foreign capital is increased by deregulating capital trade and privatising strategic national assets. Barriers, bottlenecks, and “obsolete” protections are removed, whether material or immaterial. Nobody quite remembers why they were there, and even fewer wonder why. Above all else, money must flow. That’s the consensus, at least in the district of Columbia, which is obviously populated by zealous reformers. Their principles are crystal-clear: “public is bad, private is good.” They believe in “The Free Market”, whatever that may be thought to be; and they believe in it so ardently and unflinchingly that Stiglitz and others refer to them as “market fundamentalists.” They even set complicated rules at roundtables to force dissenting markets to be free. Anyhow, this very first step, which may take some time, is achieved by lubricating slow-moving and slow-thinking local politicians, business leaders, present and future ideologues with adequate amounts of grease. Grease, yes, such as co-opting these people into the international jet- and yacht-set, promising or securing that they will have their own golden toilets, washing their brains at spectacular conferences and exclusive think-tank meetings, baptising their best-and-brightest first-borns in the sacred founts at the sacred shrines, stirring their simmering jingoistic sentiments, or bribing them straightforwardly—indeed Stiglitz talks of this process as “briberization”.

Secondly, money flows into the country. A bubble ensues; in fact, a cyst. Depending on the country’s economic conditions, the cyst can take different forms, but all of them eventually become painful. In the case of a reasonably well-off country, glittering streams of foreign capital inundate the land, turning modest entrepreneurial fields into a glorious harvest of unprecedented projects. Thus refreshed, the local currency and the local shares pupate into surprisingly light-winged and seemingly fertile young fairies, whose well is said to be full of diamonds. Moreover, the nation’s financial institutions become large fountains that can quench the thirst of anyone who is eager to drink from them, including those who do not need it, but have the misfortune to possess a belly. New buildings spring up like mushrooms in the vast new wetlands, luxury and consumer spending—mostly dependent upon credit—fly high like gleaming droplets out of a geyser’s mouth. So mesmerising is this sight, that more permeability is actively sought.

Then, the cyst bursts. As swiftly as it flew in, so does the money flow out. A rumour, a token of gossip, an unfortunate diplomatic incident, a well-paid expert report, or a speculator’s premeditated signal to his colleagues rapidly reverses the tide. The flood ends. A drought follows. Projects—and buildings—remain unfinished, half-mast, like flags at a funeral. The wombs of local currency and local shares reveal themselves sterile; it was all make-up, they now say, even the wings; you should never trust the books. The well in the garden is dry, and full of stones. Moreover, the fountains are dry too. Around them, stunned, jobless, emaciated peons, indebted up to their eyeballs, drown into whirling sand clutching their plasma TV sets. And their TV heroes have not come to save them, be they crusading party leaders or Viking raiders. Who will?

Nobody is without friends, especially after having become part of the international jet- and yacht-set, educating his own children in the best schools, or attending eye-opening conferences and meetings. Not to mention those friends who have already proven so generous in the past. In truth, after having advised on how to render the country prosperous, they now spare no saliva explaining what can be done in order to rescue it from its unfortunate plight. Thus, money is poured back into the nation. High interest rates are, however, de rigueur. One does not give much to drink too easily to a friend who has already drunk too much. What kind of a friend would he be?

The third step is therefore to make up for the mistakes of the past and repay one’s generous friends. Whatever wealth remains must be scrupulously collected so as to honour the debt—or so as to secure further loans. Debt gives salvation from debt, as gamblers understand so well. Certainly, the wealth of the wealthy is better left untouched: they are the producers, the life-givers, blessed fountainheads of the nation’s wellbeing, which needs them so badly under the burning sun of the new sad day. They must be treated kindly, lest they or their wealth be forced to flee by too rapacious and visible a hand—some have already fled, they whisper. The wealth of the poor—or of the poor-to-be—is a better starting point. After all, they may have little, but there are many of them. Besides, since they have little, they cannot flee as easily as the rich, nor can their wealth flee. And whereas the wealthy can go bankrupt and be resurrected cleansed of their debt, like the imperishable Phoenix, ordinary mortals honour their debts, willingly or not. They may protest, but law and order are the last two public sectors whose resources are cut off, unless successful ways are found to privatise them too.

Finally, as the nation struggles in debt and turmoil, groaning so loudly as to disturb its neighbours, the generous friends come back to help. They cannot remain untouched in the face of so much poverty and violence. They have new “plans”, “strategies” and “packages” to sort things out. Yet, to implement them, national borders must be removed completely and an iron framework of conditions for investment and development must be imposed in order for the nation to become a proud participant in fully liberalised, multinational free trade. For example, its tax environment must be suited to foreign investors—may God bless them—and its population as flexible as unthinking reeds in gushing new brooks, to which they contribute sweat and tears.

By the way, where does Iceland stand now? Probably it stands at the threshold of deciding whether to plunge headlong into step three, with signs of the fourth step already lurking behind the waterfalls harnessed for hydropower.

III.

In all normal civilisations the trader existed and must exist. But in all normal civilisations the trader was the exception; certainly he was never the rule; and most certainly he was never the ruler. The predominance which he has gained in the modern world is the cause of all the disasters of the modern world.

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that.

  Lawrence “Larry” Summers

It has been long known that Europe catches a cold whenever the United States sneezes. Yet things get even worse when the immune system of rules and restrictions to international capital and currency trade has been removed altogether. Iceland and some young, yet already former, free-market miracles on the Baltic Sea did catch pneumonia this time. Ironic indeed, as they are just another group of market miracles turned into meltdowns—Asia had a few of them in the 1990s. Miracles seem short-lived these past few decades… Though if truth be told, even Lazarus died, after having been brought back to life.

Historians of the future, if there shall be any and if they will be honest, are going to wonder and ponder upon how such intelligent and highly educated “knowledge economies”, capable of the finest mathematical-financial wizardry via the fanciest computer technologies, could bestow upon themselves so much avoidable pain, destroying in the process not solely further scores of planetary life support systems, but also man-made social infrastructures that have generated, depending on the country, genuine welfare for up to three or four generations. These future historians will be at pains to conceive of powerful, well-off, democratically elected representatives who listened to foreign bankers, and not to their own citizens, rushing to implement, whenever they could, multilateral agreements on investment robbing their own cabinets of much of their power.

These future historians will probably fail to empathise with and understand such bizarre people, very much like Voltaire, who could not really explain why our forefathers were willing to slaughter one another over the correct interpretation of the Holy Trinity. After all, they had never seen it (or them?) and Jesus himself had never said anything clear, if anything, about it (or them?). Not to mention the centuries that humankind spent warring, raping, disembowelling, burning, maiming, chaining, flogging and excommunicating one another because of errors of interpretation. Obtuseness is incredibly resilient. And we are not so different today. Check the Athenian cradle of our civilisation if you don’t believe it.

Yes, embodied and expressed by the very same conventional people at the helm of the world’s public and private financial affairs, the wisdom arising from the ashes of the current crisis is astoundingly similar to the one that caused the crisis. Are you indebted? Take on another loan. The private banking sector has betrayed you? Restore it with public money and run it as before. The world’s economy is a gilded cage run on behest of under-taxed oligopolists, tax-evading rentiers and idle absentee owners that squeeze money out of the real economy through banking charges, debt repayments, service fees, monopoly and land rents? Keep it going and call it a “free market”. People are suffering, jobless, and with their tax money siphoned to the creditors that inflated the bubble? Show them tough love and deprive them of further healthcare, education, culture, wages, pensions, childcare, subsidised water and power. Austerity measures turn a crisis into a depression? Implement more of the same measures. The environment is running amok in the so-called free-market environment? The market will fix it; in the meantime, profit will keep being extracted from increased prices in oil, gas, polluting consumer goods, and cancer treatments due to the ecological collapse of the planet. Apparently, the only green rules acceptable are those that transfer further money from the public purse into private pockets. All others are resisted as “costly”, “distorting”, “rigidifying”, “liberticidal”, which may be true—and good. The one and only truly binding international environmental regulation that, so far, has saved us from extinction, preventing excessive UV-irradiation, was a top-down imposition from Montreal.

But life, not to mention a happy and healthy life, has never been the paramount goal of the pursuit of profit. War was and still is a major source of profit, towards which public subsidies to private firms are given generously… Well, they call them “research & development” grants or “national security” strategies… Disease-causing pollution has been mostly an externality that had nothing to do with profit, until pharmaceutical conglomerates found a way to exploit that too. Slaves and their children were most profitable for many, many centuries. Wage slaves… Oops! The flexible working poor and their children are very profitable today too.

And for what must all this wisdom be endured? To give money to people who have money. They have enough, one would believe. They should start communicating it to those who have nothing… little… less. Jesus and Aquinas regarded this as obvious. No, it is not obvious. Money is never enough, especially to those who need yet another fancy dress. But why are these people non-satiable? Why do they complain, lobby and shift electoral allegiance whenever taxation on capital gains is vented? Why do they transfer their fiscal residence to tax havens, whilst benefitting from handouts of the State they are deserting? Why do they outsource productive structures to countries squeezing labour out of turnips, if youngsters are not available? Why do they say that “they have already done enough” whenever life-saving regulation is discussed? Why do they care more about the interest rate they can get, than they care about how their money is invested? Why do they oppose healthcare, old-age pensions, education and culture for all, while they enjoy it for themselves?

It is competition, they answer. There isn’t enough around for all of us, only for the really tough ones, who can then live in much-deserved luxury. But why do people compete for having more for themselves, instead of, say, competing for beauty, generosity, selflessness, equal distribution, full employment? There can be so many different and more constructive competitive aims in life: just look around. Nuns, school teachers, barefoot physicians, rocket scientists, marine biologists, old fishermen, young artists… They may not all dislike some cash, but they do not live for it, or at least they try not to. Since Divine Will is out of fashion, and if you press them long enough, the luxury-deserving competitors are going to tell you, eventually, that we are cruel wolves. How naïve was I! I thought that they were cruel wolves… The world is a cruel place—those ferocious nuns… Nobody waits for those left behind—and they don’t. The market forces accept no barrier. As one of their fairest ideologues so frequently stated, there is no alternative; it is human nature. A hidden philosophical anthropology…

And yet, none less than their poorly understood hero Adam Smith taught us long ago something very different in the opening page of his greatest book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

This is certainly not the one and only betrayal of Smith by current capitalism. After all, his market was meant to be free from rentiers, who now run the show. Anyhow, why so much mercilessness, then? Have we become worse human beings? Have we lost our humanity? Have we found ways to outcruel the cruel, underfed, superstitious peasants, who, when not breaking skulls in the name of God or King or Country, killed and maimed animals on a farm? Well, as modern and proud of our science-technology as we can be… Well, yes… Overall, subtly, we have. The thinning of solidarity that embraces the whole humankind, which a German-sounding French warmonger studied in depth, is a weaker barrier to the undergoing evil drives.

Or, at least, we have done our best to train impressionable young minds to being ordinarily callous and participating in the most spectacularly life-destructive economic system ever seen on Earth—a system that, as denounced by the scientific community for the past thirty years, has turned the survival of our species into a big question mark. Much is done in this direction, routinely, thousands of times a day, so that our youth may become more beastly than ruffians and more abrasive than criminals. But how? Simple. We (mis-)educate them, and we have tools for (mis-)education that no emperor or church of old has ever owned or mastered. Only a couple of totalitarian dictators gave it a go or two in the blood-drenched century of Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen… But how, where? Open your eyes. Watch.

Our TVs and media are replete with commercials. They are meant to accompany you from the cradle to the grave. Selectively and scientifically trained marketing strategists, creative psychologists and advertising gurus are paid to induce desires in the subtlest and most effective manners, starting with our children’s delicate souls. These desires will blossom into poisonous “new needs”, as these “experts” call them. These weed-like flowers being sheer wants perceived as genuine individual needs, the delayed satisfaction of which is to generate a sense of inadequacy, anguish, frustration, isolation, or envy towards those who do satisfy them. And these are the only flowers that must grow; hence they are everywhere. Children no longer need an imagination. Marketing strategists make sure that the only pictures that children can have in their mind are those that sell. They speak already like TVs: why shouldn’t they replicate TVs in their brain? Eventually, as grown-ups, these children will be branded, like slaves of old, or cattle still is today. Perhaps, like the slaves of old, they will enjoy freedom one day a year. Or maybe all the days will have been taken away by marketing strategists, who wish to celebrate the sales of Valentine’s Day, Mother’s day, Father’s Day, Marketing Strategist’s Day…

You don’t believe me? Go to any primary school and you will meet hordes of little creatures dressed according to the latest fashion code, or pestering their parents to be so dressed. Those who are not there, because they are busy sewing the actual fashion items, may well try to rob them from the horde one day. These little brats! They want and want and want scores of items that they do not need, the possession of which, moreover, does not grant happiness at all, despite the glittering promises. Were it so, no new purchase would be “needed”, and that would be bad for business. Certainly, one may learn to control such a powerful impetus, but it takes years of self-re-training. Not even hunger and utter destitution placate it. Not even the full awareness of not being able to afford those consumer goods. Nothing will ever erase the deep-rooted psychological mechanisms implanted into our souls when we were little. Is this enough? No, there is more to it.

Our TVs and media are replete with role models—and the medium is the message. Rich and wanna-be-rich people of all sorts shine even when performing the most ordinary activities, such as shaving or concealing their stench with perfume. From slutty heiresses to pimping rappers, from cosmetically mummified bad actors to ignorant footballers, from divorce-addict hair-died tycoons to soon-to-be-millionaires answering questions or showing their private parts in public—these are the saints and blessed inspirers of the modern secular creed. They may be confessing their own sins to a TV host, confident that their words will be forgotten. What remains, instead, is the scent of money that perspires through their placenta-creamed pores. A powerful aura.

The same aura surrounding the action hero, who fights, kills and kidnaps for the sake of justice, peace and freedom…  There he comes! Dressed in an Armani suit, he jumps out of a Mercedes, talking briefly on his Nokia. He checks his Rolex, then gets into a Ferrari and drives to Chez Maxim’s. There, he meets a beautiful young lady, whose Valentino dress will soon be ripped at the Hilton’s. And there he’ll kick the guts out of the villain, smashing his Patek Philippe and ruining forever his Dolce & Gabbana jacket… Justice is served. Peace is conquered. Freedom triumphs. That’s the message, isn’t it? And if not much of the beautiful young lady is shown, then children can watch too.

Poor people are less frequently shown. They don’t sell as well as our hero. Moreover, they don’t buy. There exist notable exceptions, though. Poor men and poor women are sometimes on display, like animals at the zoo, to be observed, mocked and, on Christmas day, to feel sorry for. Other times, they are actively humiliated on screen by policemen, judges and other masters of entertainment. Crime, ignorance, savagery: what a show! Once again, as long as it sells, keep it up. There, in the spotlight, for less than fifteen minutes and amidst commercial ads, the poor can shine like greasy piglets on spits, or like the tin their most unfortunate children collect in garbage dumps.

What is the result of this Blendungsroman? Go to any secondary school and you will meet cell-phone-talking walking replicas of the rich, parading themselves in the corridors. Give them an opportunity to put down a “loser”, and they will savour it like their own parents, whose SUVs and triple-mortgaged houses are punches into the Joneses’ stomachs. Even poverty is a risk worth taking to cast the rich’s aura.

The silent walking replicas of the poor are usually in other schools, unless they have dropped out of school already to find a job that will secure their poverty. Some are hiding in the toilets. They are poor and they know it. They look poor. It is not only their clothes that say it, but their bodies. They have bad teeth, small tits, big noses. Their parents have wrinkles. They can’t get fixed, like those people on TV, or their replicas and the replicas’ parents. To cope with this obvious inferiority, they breathe in. In Italy, they sniff cocaine to think that they too are rich. In Rumania, they sniff glue to think that they too are sniffing cocaine.

Either way, none of these kids must worry about being politically active. It is too dangerous. Yes, youngsters still remember how to bark: they haven’t been beaten up into silent submission, yet. Some will have to be locked up, so that trade be free. Don’t give them any wrong ideas. That’s socialism—or any bad “ism” of the day. Don’t give them hope. That’s socialism. Politics is best left to corporate employees, who siphon public money to their shareholders and, God be gracious, to their own bank accounts. That’s the free market. These employees alone are capable of understanding why unemployment is natural and inequality good. They’ve got talent. They’ve got the degrees that get you good jobs. Therefore, unless they are corporate employees, not even the kids’ parents have to worry about politics. Like these happy few, the kids’ parents can take happy pills too or, if pills are too expensive, drink themselves out blind.

Drunk, the poor parents can cope better with the trauma of seeing their children die. Each country has its own special way of sending new winged angels to God. In high-tech market-miracle India, they die of cholera in open-air sewers, where they were looking for edible scraps. In coup-idity-ruled Honduras they die poisoned by pesticides in a free-market plantation, so that the bananas people eat in Canada be not too pricy. In revolutionary France they die stabbed by an angry pusher in a dark alley, but they were not really French after all. In peace-loving America, they die fighting for human rights in another country, since their own country denied them a future. How was it possible? They had trained them at killing people since they were three, on a stolen X-box… Maybe they should have trained them at doing something else, but there is no videogame that teaches you how to free a political party from corporate diktats or join a trade union… Is this enough? No, there is more.

Our TVs and media are replete with experts telling us that greed is good. They are the most interviewed and consulted members of the intelligentsia of our community. Sometimes they even become our presidents, ministers, mayors and godfathers. Go to any university. Some of them feed on tenure and enjoy healthcare and pension benefits, whilst arguing that you shouldn’t have them. You will discover that there is an entire discipline built upon that notion.

If truth be told, a few of its adherents do remind their students, on leap years, that the profit-motive of the homunculus œconomicus is just one drive amongst many. This drive becomes one and insatiable for the sake of toying with mathematical formulae, not for the sake of describing reality, which never works quite like the models do. Facts can be so obstinate. Theory is much more flexible. Occasionally, on elective days, these beautiful souls mention even mysterious, metaphysical, unscientific words: “ethics”, “morality”, “duty”, “respect”, “goodness”, “virtue”, “governance”, “responsibility”… They don’t fully grasp them, though, for they slip out of books and balance sheets. Sometimes they even get their students to learn some history, thus half-stuttering what sort of devastation this homunculus and its leit-motive have caused. Still, these are exceptions, divagations, and the students, between the end of their studies and the beginning of their careers, know it very well.

Our MBAs and the many branches of science and engineering dependent upon private sponsors and future corporate employers are the convent-barracks where our crusading novices, more or less geeky and asocial, are told that only numbers really matter. The fate of a paterfamilias and of his family does not. They are told that persons are not persons: they are costs, opportunities, capital, markets… They are all sorts of things that can be converted into monetary units—numbers, in fact—though most definitively they are not persons. In fact, such things, be they free individuals or free communities, can turn into dependent variables. And if some of these things are laid off by a firm that rationalises an otherwise irrational workplace—what a madness it must have been!—then it may be time to invest money in that firm. If the right numbers go up, then things are just as they should be. If they don’t, they can be massaged. If they still don’t, they can be fixed. If they still refuse to go up, then a couple of hospitals plus half a university, as long as they are public, can be sacrificed to a return to growth.

In the streamlined world there can be recoveries without jobs, business opportunities in famines, increased flexibility via insecurity of employment and future bread, full employment at the natural unemployment rate, goods that do a lot of bad things, and market miracles that melt into destitution because of something bad but the pious market. What lesson is learnt? Everything in the world exists in order to maximise the money of investors and/or their managers. Even old, wrinkly countries must be attractive to such people or face their own demise. Make the rich richer. That is the one and paramount commandment. Such merciless homunculi are no fiction; they are science-fiction: they drive around in Dalek machines. Indeed, to those who do not simply rob and run, being merciless is a fiduciary duty. Apart from this, everything else goes.

Yes, everything else, unless you get caught and cannot pay the best lawyers—what a shame. Business words of the business world tell no lies: lack of scruples is “determination”, mercilessness is “having balls”, inhumanity is “being committed”, callousness is “professionalism”, locust-like behaviour is a “hedging”, stealing traditional knowledge is a “patent”, depriving people of knowledge is a “copyright”, poisoning the destitute is “mutually beneficial trade”, taking public-sector resources to guarantee private profits is “hard work”, threatening employees with unemployment is “personnel management”, gambling is “trading futures” and other cabalistic formulae “over the counter”, oligopolies are “economies of scale” and cartels are “free markets”, sending knowingly drivers to die because of a few faulty cars is a “cost-saving measure”, sending knowingly air passengers to die because of reduced safety controls is a “cost-saving measure”, corruption of inspectors is a “cost-saving measure”, corruption of politicians is “lobbying”, and rent-exacting parasites are “the productive class”. The list goes on and on. Read the news and enjoy the game: destroying peoples is “restructuring”, keeping them poor is “preventing inflation”, colonising a nation is “opening markets”, withdrawing rights is “reform”… By the end of it, you almost believe what they say. Such is the catechism of the beast and brightest.

Has any student still doubts or feels uneasy? Then he is told that all is well, for all ends well. Yes, those things that we unscientifically call “people” may seem to be suffering, poor things. And the others, crony criminals who have nothing to do with the free market, are the exception, though the rule just wants to be like them. After all, those exceptional exceptions were on the cover of glossy magazines like Capital, the Cosmopolitan of people who “have balls”… Don’t worry. Everything will be alright. Just wait—that’s what my old priest and the party commissar would say… The invisible hand of the self-regulating market is going to look after all of them. Free from State intervention and from trade unions—for only capitals may associate and go on strike if they don’t like a government—the invisible hand is to generate endless bounty for all—the invisible bounty? Most of the world’s trade is virtual, after all…

Such is orthodoxy today, for which even a Pope’s distribution chests are heresy, utter hilaireous bellocs… If you claim that small is beautiful, the giants get angry: go make your shoes elsewhere! Today, you no longer need to be red to be a danger. It is enough to be as white as a dove. The Market God likes hawks, whose endless preying is the source of all that is good. His transparent hand turns into water all the blood that these hawks spill. As to the tallest shrines, they are no longer erected for the glory of the Sun, Athena or Almighty God, but for the likes of Morgan Stanley. Behind all this, a hidden theology… Maybe Divine Will should be in fashion again.

IV.

The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

   Franklin Delano Roosevelt

 To avoid glaring inequality or widespread misery I am ready to sacrifice some, or all, of my freedom… I should be guilt-stricken, and rightly so, if I were not.

Isaiah Berlin

 

The child empathises with the dying bird. The adult empathises with the starving child. The nurse attempts to ease the pain of the terminal patient. The teacher smiles patiently at the pupils playing in the courtyard. The schoolmaster hides his unease as the ancient oak is felled. The gardener watches wildlife documentaries on the TV. The mayor goes on holyday to his cottage on the lakeside. None of them likes to be ill. All of them fear death. All of them experienced curiosity or elation as they held a newborn creature in their arms. All of them have been compassionate at some point. All religions have praised divinity as the fountainhead of all that is. Whether physically, emotionally or mentally, all of the above have exemplified the ultimate source of all values.

Years of research about value have led me to conclude that nothing is more valuable than that which allows value itself to emerge: life. Without life—biological, emotional and mental—there can be no value, whether ethical, aesthetic, economic or political. Those that deem life’s value instrumental acknowledge its value nevertheless. Besides, none of them seems likely to prefer beauty or other values to eating every day and being in good health: take away their bread, and they will sell their dearest painting… Of all crazy philosophers ever alive, only a handful rejected life as a value and one alone behaved in a way that denounced actual indifference to life: Pyrrho the sceptic, whom his friends prevented from walking under carts and falling off cliffs. One. As for the few who told us that life is a valley of tears and an endless stream of horrors, none of them ever stopped eating, drinking, and philosophising, i.e. one of the activities that they clearly enjoyed the most. But what can the lives of crazy philosophers teach us about economic matters?

As usual, philosophy can reveal the heart of an issue. If life is so crucial, indeed the source of all values, then it can be inferred that a successful economic system provides universal access to vital goods across generations. Economic efficiency means that the lives of all benefit from it and nothing is spoiled to the point that those who come after us may not benefit too: resources are left for others the way in which we would like to have them left for us, if not better. Improvement is a possibility. An economic system that achieves its vital aims more effectively, thus opening the door to a richer fulfilment of planetary and human potential, is yet a better system. On the contrary, an economic system that does not fulfil its vital aims, either because access is limited to few or some, past or present, or because it delivers goods that are deadly, detrimental to life or irrelevant to life needs, whilst leaving some of these needs unanswered, is a failure.

The current economic system is a failure. As repeatedly denounced by the international scientific community at its highest and most representative levels, human civilisation has become for the first time in its history a threat to the planetary environment that allows for humanity’s own existence. There is no aspect of the Earth’s environment that has not been depleted in the three centuries that have seen the affirmation of capitalism worldwide: the biosphere-protecting Ozone-layer, breathable-air-producing and reproducing pluvial forests and oceanic life-systems, self-regenerating water aquifers, nourishing-food-producing arable spaces, and natural-equilibrium-maintaining and science- and technology-inspiring biodiversity. The continuation of life as we know and enjoy it is at risk.

Much has already been destroyed beyond repair, to the point that bioengineering is being discussed as a tool to cope with the most tragic consequences of “development” awaiting us. Emblematically, one nation of the world is planning already the purchase of land in India in order to transfer its entire population there upon the day when the ocean will have swallowed their ancestral islands. And yet, in the face of current profit losses, all this is treated as secondary. Just read the news and you shall see that the focus of collective action is upon a “return to growth”, as though the sad and deadly harvest of greed were not still vivid before our eyes.

What is more, the mantra of competition goes on unchallenged. But competition for what? To generate profits? And why? Why should rich people become richer? There’s more than enough to go around. Even more ludicrous is the idea that schools, healthcare, free time, old-age security, peace of mind and all those gains for life that people acquired in decades of blood and humanity should be dismantled so that competition be won. By whom? What sort of victory is the augmentation of the money heaps of people who already have it, whilst the quality of life and the living conditions of most are worsened?

F.D. Roosevelt told us seventy years ago that greed is not only bad morals, it is also bad business. When business’ sole purpose is to make as much money as possible as soon as possible, then the somewhat constructive role that business may play in society disappears altogether. It doesn’t matter if any private business actually makes a lot more money, gets bigger internationally or pervades even more diffusely the lives of millions: the standards of evaluation and appreciation for the constructive role of private business belong to the sphere of public wellbeing. And public wellbeing cares about long-term indicators: happy workers retiring in good health, healthy mothers making plans for their children’s education, educated youngsters looking forward to playing on the beach with their grandchildren. If this horizon disappears, then you’d better start to worry. Private business is known to have played far too often a destructive role, as everything, the long-term survival of private business included, can be sacrificed to man-eating Baal.

Short-termism, combined with the relentless pursuit of profit, characterised roaming Goths, wooden-legged pirates and cigar-loving gangsters. The entrepreneur, the glorious creation of modern capitalism, has always been expected to be something different. Restrained by family and personal pride, religious morals, annual dividends, trade unions and other 20th-century legal suasions, his horizon has been defined as a somewhat distant future, his playground the real world of flesh-and-bone persons like him, his reward the admiration of affluent or fully employed fellow citizens that participate in and benefit from his endeavours.

As long as alternative economic systems were either widely discussed or experimented with, the entrepreneur had to justify his existence by creating some tangible, albeit sometimes debatable, token of social worth, such as employment, community networks, or nice new gadgets. Only the speculator, hardly distinguishable from fraudsters, trotted relentlessly upon a different path. But speculators were said to be the exception, not the rule…

Yet the day came when Gordon Gekko and his friends got to control more than three quarters of what is still incautiously dubbed “world trade”. The decades of my life, infested by Maggies, yuppies and wall-less oligarchs, launched “The Financial Revolution”, a pivotal process in contemporary history that no historian has yet so baptised: let this label be my grand legacy to international scholarship.

An equally bombastic historian used this term in the 1960s to describe the emergence of public creditors in 18th-century England… It doesn’t quite compare, I’m sorry. We’ve just witnessed thirty long years of national barriers coming down—and how long it took for both nations and their barriers to come into existence!—so as to allow for a gigantic flood of miraculously leveraged liquidity springing out of… books and vast pools of capital formed by privatising public money in all of its shapes, squeezing profit from de-unionised workforces threatened by—what a coincidence!—unbarred international competition, and such ingenious tokens of financial engineering that only professional mathematicians could make sense of them. All this money travelling much faster than any good or service ever before: computers have replaced the pens and ink of old. The world of Gekko and other reptilian inhabitants of city hedges and wall streets is indeed a very bizarre world.

Originally, these creatures were meant to trade pieces of paper granting a share of the profits made by fairly large private companies. It is something that had begun in Genoa a long time ago and that their trading partners, the Dutch, had brought to the North Sea around the year 1600, sailing thence to the New World, another Genoese discovery… But a share of the profits may be less remunerative than profiting from shares. Gekko’s forefathers started betting on rises and falls in the price of those pieces of paper, sometimes causing them by moving massive amounts of money or dropping a few words into the nearest ear…

In the days of poor old Nixon, in the Big Apple, they traded about 20 million stocks every day. Today they trade 1600 million or so—and there’s more fruit in the basket than just a big apple. Also, as of Nixon’s time, they started playing games with the world’s currencies, namely the money with which common people buy their bread. Again, they started slowly, about 20 billion USD a day, but now, after “freeing” trade worldwide, they are up to 2 trillion. It is by far the largest chunk of trade in the world and it has one severe drawback: it makes the form of trade that normal people think of when they hear the world “trade”—buying and selling bananas, timber, cars, computers, etc.—much more complicated. Not to mention buying bread. But the reptiles don’t worry: they own the future. They buy and sell it.

Actually, they take bets—only a tiny fraction of trade in existing “futures” fulfils the official excuse that these are ways to hedge against risks on purchases of actual goods—on nearly anything that can be grown, mined or brought into existence, influencing the price of all sorts of goods, including the bread that common people wish to buy. Still, since even this casino was not big enough, the reptiles added onto the table the so-called “derivatives”, which are pieces of paper whose value is derived—hence the name—from something else, whether another piece of paper or a price arising from combining a few of them. Anything goes. Also because you can buy or sell these pieces of paper any way you like—over the counter, under the counter, beside the counter… You can actually buy and sell the option to buy or sell them, for short-termism can be so short that, to spare time, it allows certain persons to sell what they don’t have.

Is this too complicated? Too silly? Well, today, around the globe, there’s an ocean of derivatives, for a value of about 500 trillion USD. It is a lot of money… Strangely enough, however, the reptiles that invented them also felt the need to insure themselves against any risk that may ensue from trading in… derivative paper. So they started buying “credit default swaps” from insurance companies and let their friends and colleagues, the bankers, pile them up as assets, claiming that these “swaps” were as sound and good as gold itself. Probably they would have started taking major bets on them as well, had the entire mathematically engineered and economic-science-backed system failed from collapsing under its own virtual weight. Too much genius had been spent for the business world to bear. Under so much talent and foresight, the reptiles’ joints felt suddenly empty of market force. Amazingly, the invisible hand was nowhere to be seen. Fortunately, the State ran to their rescue and gave them a visible, reinvigorating bailout with other people’s money, lest the bank’s own mouthpiece uttered “BBB” or some other silly rating. And that’s where we stand today. The real suffering surrounding us, from the unemployed Spanish worker to the starving Senegalese farmer, is due to a virtual catastrophe. And if the starving Senegalese farmer tries to move to Spain, he shall meet a wall and possibly drown in the sea, while frustrated unemployed Spaniards, trained by modern corporate journalists, will hate guts those that didn’t. Strangely enough, these migrants are to be loathed, not the freely migrating virtual capital that cannibalised both Senegal and Spain.

Like all human endeavours, business can be either good or bad. To know what makes it good or bad, what is nobler than money, means to know how to measure real growth, real development, real utility, real goodness. Who, though, after Pareto’s Protagorean reinvention of economics, is allowed to know what real value is? Certainly not serious economists, who can only acknowledge preferences… The Pope may know, perhaps. He claims to be right like no-one else and that’s maybe why so many people cannot stand him: who likes an old moralising grandpa, in an age in which we are told by our media gurus to give into any juvenile urge of ours that can make them a buck?

Or maybe any living creature knows: they’re all God’s creatures, after all. Yes, even by watching slugs and bugs we can evince something important, which degree-honoured geeks may have neglected while sitting in front of an inanimate computer screen. They are not forgivable, though: no matter how much you masturbate, avatars are not human beings. Here comes the slap; Zen masters should love it: entomology can rescue economics from its value slumber. Vade ad formicam. What a twist! Or maybe not. It all started with Mandeville’s bees, to be honest…

Let me be brief and clear on this. What consistent pattern of behaviour can be observed amongst slugs and bugs? Watch them in your garden, if you have one. Or go and watch them in a public garden, if it hasn’t been sold to developers. As small and allegedly stupid as they are believed to be, all invertebrates try to do their best to survive at all times. And when they take risks, it is because they either look for food, shelter, safety, or attempt to ensure the survival of their species. As economically irrational as animals can be, these small beings can even sacrifice individual utility—one’s safety, food or head—for the sake of keeping, indeed at times just making, their young. Future generations matter, to them. Some seem even to care for their fellows in the anthill, hive or nest in which they live… Life, in truth, matters to living creatures, and yet life can be sacrificed, for more life may thus ensue. The only higher value that life acknowledges is, in fact, life.

And yet, in today’s world, money is still prioritised over life. Listen to our leaders, and with the exception of a pair of Caribbean politicians that corporate media describe regularly as lunatics, what matters most to most who matter most is to keep “growth” going. Capitalism or the “free market”, as they like labelling it despite its dictatorial logic, must keep generating profit, free from State intervention, which does not serve that one paramount end. All this is held, despite the well-known biocide implications of such a process. Yes, capitalism is responsible for the ecological degradation that we are living in with, and leaving to, our children. Has nobody really put together the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of the planet’s life support systems?

I shall help you: the causal link between the pursuit of profit and environmental degradation becomes visible every time environmental regulation is resisted as “too costly” or by-passed by illicit behaviour or by off-sourcing to countries that have actually little such regulation or none at all. Unless business is forced forcefully to comply with existing regulation, which is much more difficult in a barrier-free worldwide market, common praxes show that the primacy of profit persists over, say, not killing other people by dumping toxic waste onto them.

Indeed, in economics, it is methodologically impossible to address the environmental preconditions that make life possible and can secure its long-term flourishing. To the eyes of the economic observer, bread is as much and legitimately a “good” as nuclear waste, as long as a lawful market exists for both of them. It is only through direct State intervention that a bad “good” becomes officially what it is: a bad—and that is just the first step, for enforcement is yet to be secured from lobbying and bribes.

States alone can ban slavery, organ trafficking, child labour, exploitation, air pollution or aquifer poisoning as the bads they are. States alone can make the real economy and earned income primary, and the virtual economy and unearned income secondary. There is nothing intrinsic to market mechanisms leading to that and we have known it for nearly two hundreds of years. Read Charles Dickens’ subversive novels to get a clearly bleak picture. Also, ecosystems are “externalities”, as the language of economics reveals, at least as long as they are not turned into a cost by environmental legislation, into a loss of profit by reduction in reputation and actual sales, or into a market opportunity by persistent spoliation of it—see the oxygen cans sold in the subway in Tokyo.

Protecting life and the environment is something that runs against the logic of profit, even if some business leaders may themselves desire it ardently. Profit can only relate to the value of life instrumentally: as a means to further profit. Money is a fetish, and one that eats living creatures and their dwelling spaces if that generates revenue. Nothing leads profit-driven “rational” agents to doing that which is necessary for planetary survival and, for that matter, for a decent social life on a vast scale. Even public health, the most obvious case of socially beneficial public agency, is opposed as unprofitable hence bad. Not to mention all the money that is made by “growth” via sales of carcinogenic “goods”.

As the world’s money is controlled by gargantuan private institutions and managed to enrich their rich shareholders, even if it means strangling debt-ridden public authorities and diverting resources from public sewers to private coffers, there is little hope that the dominating logic may change. Some used to argue that money should be controlled by public authorities and managed for the public good, as written in certain constitutions… But we have already talked about such a peculiar notion. For the moment, let’s see whether the Philosopher-Kings of Greece will crumble because of the Goths, after being failed by Chelsea-resident haven-seekers and the advice of Goldmen-sackers.

Flavio Baroncelli, Mi manda Platone, edited by Annalisa Siri and Emilio Mazza (Genoa: il melangolo, 2009)

Flavio Baroncelli’s posthumous collection of short pieces by il melangolo is a splendid exception to standard philosophical literature. It is a slender book (157 pp.) that can be read purely and simply. Indeed, to the extent available to hopeless academically minded professional philosophers like myself, it can be enjoyed as a string of exquisite literary-philosophical vignettes. These short pieces, originally published in various Italian periodicals and newspapers, range from scholarly debates on Plato’s role in Western culture to the pride of showing scars and tattoos on one’s own body. They are divided in two parts, the former dealing with philosophical themes (15-83) and the latter dealing with ordinary life and socio-political affairs (87-149). Witty and concise, they retain the inventiveness and the curiosity that characterised Baroncelli’s life, of which Armando Massarenti, Emilio Mazza, Annalisa Siri and Gürol Sagiroglu Baroncelli provide a useful account via the preface (5-8), a short biography (151-3) and an editorial note (155-7).

Some professional philosophers, like the undersigned, may attempt to make some use of Baroncelli’s book, e.g. by writing a review of it. However, the review is bound to be fairly unorthodox. What can one say of a book that reads: refreshingly colloquial yet deep; humbly self-depreciating but highly learned; ironically sceptical though warmly humane; both open to the general public and pregnant nonetheless with precious insights for actual academics? Baroncelli’s prose, full of abstraction-averse, real-life examples and academic-pomposity-shattering vernacular gems, flows like the prose of his eighteenth-century role-models. Most of all, it recalls Voltaire’s prose, whose humour and compassion it evokes when dealing with topics such as tolerance, liberty, dignity, multiculturalism, religion and scientific realism.

Perhaps, the author of this slender book would have preferred to be compared to David Hume, whom Baroncelli admired and studied. Or even to Hume’s and the French philosophes’ much older mentor, i.e. Michel de Montaigne, to whom Baroncelli devotes a delightful sketch (23-6). Still, it is Voltaire the name that springs to mind when Baroncelli combines together, with a few touches of his pen, experience, irony, linguistic analysis, moral wisdom and intellectual acumen.

Professional philosophers may fear such a facility of expression. Clear and pleasant language is often seen as a threat to an argument’s poignancy and visibility. Long, tedious, difficult passages abound in philosophical literature. This happens not solely because philosophers are not poets or novelists, though they may be failed ones, but also because philosophers want the full load of reasoning poured into their works to be felt and borne by the reader. Whenever reasoning seems too unhindered and beautifully rendered, professional philosophers are likely to accuse it of being either “shallow” or “rhetorical”, if not even both. Nonetheless Baroncelli was a professional philosopher, and a good one. His arguments are sound, they stand on solid ground, and they are written so well and humorously – there is enough to become bitterly envious.

Certainly, the same philosophers that treat as “shallow” and “rhetorical” their literarily gifted colleagues are likely to accuse me of being partial. After all, I knew personally Flavio Baroncelli as a teacher, mentor, and friend. That is why I shall invite them to attempt to read simply his latest and, probably, last book. They should follow the advice that he himself gave with regard to Plato, whom one should read “because he is useless” (66). Hopefully, they will appreciate Baroncelli’s gentle and humorous way of being a genuine, unpretentious source of enlightenment.

Francesco Giacomantonio, Minima cura. Lunario del filosofo sociale (Rome: Aracne, 2008)

Modernity has never been easy. In its early stages, it had to fight gruesome battles against the feudal order. In its successive stages, it has had to fight against itself. Liberty—the elusive aim and defining character of modernity—liberated an array of novel individual and collective dimensions of existence, many of which have proved to be rather unpleasant. Scores of Western intellectuals have acknowledged modernity’s unpleasantness by scores of different names: anomie, alienation, absence of recognition, ennui, blasé attitude, inauthentic life, relativism, ejection, meaninglessness, etc. Giacomantonio dubs it “existential uneasiness” (15).

By demolishing the mythical totems of all previous systems and augmenting the individual’s perceived opportunities for choice and self-definition, the modern person has had to face a greater degree of uncertainty and responsibility vis-à-vis her life. At the same time, the modern person has felt threatened and even dwarfed by the broader, cosmopolitan reality of the new global order unleashed by countless and never fully successful revolutions: English, French, Russian, industrial, sexual, dot com. In other terms, modernity has advanced in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, it has increased the felt scope of individual self-determination. On the other hand, it has diminished the actual importance of the choices we make. Ironically, as Giacomantonio states, “the factors whereby individualisation is accomplished produce standardisation” (23).

Post- or late-modern consumer society is, in this sense, most representative and unsettling. Then, it is exactly the section of modern Western history that Giacomantonio focuses upon in the first part of the book. Specifically, by means of a comprehensive overview of philosophical and sociological critiques of modernity as well as of post- or late-modernity, Giacomantonio endeavours to show how “the I and personhood” are seen no longer as expressions of “linearity, univocity, precise identity, autonomy” (18). Rather, “the individual… perceives her own identity as pulverised, fragmented, troubled, isolated” (18) and condemned to bleak “anonymity” by the affirmation of the impersonal structures of “bureaucracy” (20) and “technological production” (21) in “all the traditionally most relevant sectors of social existence: work, education, communication, emotional ties” (21). The modern person is claimed to be forced by “the society of risk” (24) to strive endlessly for an eventually ungraspable “control” over her own “disenfranchised” and “disenchanted” condition (24). Frustration and a quasi- yet not always pathological “existential uneasiness” cannot but be commonplace.

Nevertheless, Giacomantonio wishes to cure the modern malaise, even if only to a limited extent, as the title of his book suggests. The medicine he decides to employ is a mixture of Wissenssoziologie, critical theory and post-structuralism. The first ingredient should help the modern individual to realise that the social and ideological structures that surround her are not at all natural and inevitable. The second ingredient should lead the modern individual to “act”, whether to accept or deny her “collocation” within society, the contingency of which she now recognises (31). The third ingredient should make the modern individual understand that her self-perception qua individual is itself part of the problem, insofar as modern society has created a certain type of individuality, which is said to be free while is in fact “enslaved to one’s own desires” (39). Eventually, if the medicine takes effect, “social philosophy” should enable the modern individual “to find herself and deal with the world, even the post-modern, unequal, pulverising and precarious world of the 21st century” (49).

In this perspective, the second part of Giacomantonio’s book offers a rich, diverse array of applications of his proposed medicine. Fields of individual and collective existence as mutually remote as religious belief, football, international law, welfare policies, fast love and spoiled teenagers are discussed in the light of explanatory and hermeneutical criteria derived from the three “ingredients” mentioned above. The outcome of these applications should be a deeper, wiser, healthier understanding of contemporary society and of one’s own place within it. And this is probably the outcome that the author must have experienced himself when confronting post- or late-modern phenomena with his armoury of socio-theoretical notions. Will the same outcome be available to anyone reading Giacomantonio’s book? This is an empirical question, to which each individual reader is bound to answer for herself.