Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. A celebrated essayist as well as novelist, in this, his last collection, he explores many aspects of the modern world with irrepressible curiosity and wisdom.
A crisis in ideological values, a crisis in politics, unbridled individualism – the familiar backdrop to our lives: a ‘liquid society’ where it’s not easy to find a guiding star, though stars and starlets are not lacking.
In these pieces, written by Eco as articles for his regular column in L’Espresso magazine, he brings his dazzling erudition and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, being seen, conspiracies, the old and the young, mobile phones, mass media, racism and good manners. It is a final gift to his readers – astute, witty and illuminating.
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.
Fiction
The Name of the Rose
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Island of the Day Before
Baudolino
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
The Prague Cemetery
Numero Zero
Non-fiction
Faith in Fakes
Five Moral Pieces
Kant and the Platypus
Serendipities
How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays
On Literature
On Beauty
Turning Back the Clock
On Ugliness
The Infinity of Lists
This is Not the End of the Book (with Jean-Claude Carrière)
Inventing the Enemy
I began writing a regular column called “La bustina di Minerva” for the Italian weekly magazine L’Espresso in 1985, first every week, then every other week. Its title referred to a brand of matchbook that had two white spaces inside that were useful for brief jottings, and so I intended my articles to be short notes and digressions on ideas that came to mind. They were generally inspired by topical events, but not always, since I regarded it as topical that one evening I had decided, maybe, to reread a page of Herodotus, a Grimms’ fairy tale, or a Popeye comic.
A number of earlier articles appeared in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (1994), and others, written before 2000, were published in Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (2007). But between 2000 and 2015 I had written more than four hundred articles—roughly twenty-six a year—and felt that some of these could be salvaged.
I think that most of the “Bustina di Minerva” pieces collected in this book can be seen as reflections on aspects of this “liquid society” of ours, about which I wrote in a more recent article, placed here at the beginning of the book.
Though many repetitions have been cut, some remain, since several topics came up with worrying regularity over those fifteen years, causing me to return and dwell on certain themes that were still disturbingly relevant.
UMBERTO ECO
The idea of “liquid” modernity or society comes from Zygmunt Bauman. Those who want to understand the various implications of this concept may find it helpful to read State of Crisis, where Bauman and Carlo Bordoni discuss this and other topics.
The liquid society begins to take shape with the movement known as postmodernism, an umbrella term that brings together a great variety of phenomena, from architecture to philosophy to literature, not always in a coherent fashion. Postmodernism signaled the crisis of “grand narratives,” each of which had claimed that one model of order could be superimposed on the world; it devoted itself to a playful or ironic reconsideration of the past, and was woven in various ways with nihilistic tendencies. But postmodernism, according to Bordoni, is also on the way out. It was temporary in character, we have passed through it without noticing, and it will be studied one day like pre-Romanticism. It served to point out an event that was happening and represented a sort of ferry from modernity to a present that still has no name.
Among the characteristics of this nascent present Bauman includes the crisis facing the state: what freedom do nation-states retain when faced with the power of supranational entities? We are witnessing the disappearance of something that used to ensure individuals could resolve the various problems of our time in a homogeneous fashion. This crisis has led to a collapse of ideologies, and therefore of political parties, and to a general call for a sharing of values that allowed individuals to feel part of something that understood their needs.
The crisis in the concept of community gives rise to unbridled individualism: people are no longer fellow citizens, but rivals to beware of. This “subjectivism” has threatened the foundations of modernity, has made it fragile, producing a situation with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity. The certainty of the law is lost, the judiciary is regarded as an enemy, and the only solutions for individuals who have no points of reference are to make themselves conspicuous at all costs, to treat conspicuousness as a value, and to follow consumerism. Yet this is not a consumerism aimed at the possession of desirable objects that produce satisfaction, but one that immediately makes such objects obsolete. People move from one act of consumption to another in a sort of purposeless bulimia: the new cell phone is no better than the old one, but the old one has to be discarded in order to indulge in this orgy of desire.
The collapse of ideologies and political parties: it has been suggested that political parties have become like taxis taken by vote-controlling mob leaders or Mafia bosses, who choose them casually, according to what is on offer—politicians can change party allegiance without creating any scandal. It’s not just people: society itself is living in an increasingly precarious condition.
What can replace this liquefaction? We don’t yet know, and the interregnum will last for quite a long time. Bauman notes that a typical feature of the interregnum, once the faith in salvation from above, from the state, or from revolution is gone, is indignation. Such indignation knows what it doesn’t want, but not what it does. And I’d like to mention that one of the problems the police raise in relation to Black Bloc protest movements is that they can no longer be labeled, as used to be the case with anarchists, Fascists, or the Red Brigades. Such movements act, but no one knows when they will act, or in what direction. Not even they know.
Is there any way of coming to terms with liquidity? There is, and it involves an awareness that we live in a liquid society that, to be understood and perhaps overcome, requires new instruments. But the trouble is that politicians and a large part of the intelligentsia haven’t yet understood the implications of this phenomenon. For the moment, Bauman is still a “voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
2015
When people refer to the great spiritual transformations that marked the end of the twentieth century, they immediately start talking about the collapse of ideologies, which is undeniable, and has blurred traditional distinctions between right and left. But the question remains whether the fall of the Berlin Wall was the cause of this collapse or just one of its consequences.
Think of science. People wanted science to be a neutral territory, ideal for progress shared by both liberals and socialists: the only difference was how this progress was to be managed and in whose favor—still exemplified by The Communist Manifesto of 1848, which lauded capitalist triumphs only to conclude, more or less, that “we too now want these things.” A liberal was someone who believed in technological advance, whereas a reactionary preached the return to tradition and the unspoiled nature of once upon a time. The cases of “revolution back to the past,” like that of the Luddites who sought to destroy machinery, were marginal—they had no real influence on the net division between the two positions.
This division began to go wrong in 1968, a time that mixed together Stalinists in love with steel, flower power, workerism (which expected automation to bring about the destruction of employment), and prophets of liberation through the drugs of Don Juan. It fell apart at a time when third-world populism became a common standard for both the far left and the far right, and now we find ourselves confronted with a movement like that of Seattle, a meeting point for neo-Luddites, radical environmentalists, ex-workerists, lumpen and spearhead workers, in the rejection of cloning, of the Big Mac, of transgenic and nuclear technologies.
A significant transformation came about in the opposition between the religious and the secular worlds. For thousands of years, the spirit of religion was associated with a distrust of progress, rejection of the world, doctrinal intransigence. The secular world, on the other hand, looked optimistically upon the transformation of nature, the flexibility of ethical principles, the fond rediscovery of “other” forms of religion and of primitive thought.
There were, of course, those believers, such as Teilhard de Chardin, who appealed to “worldly realities,” to history as a march toward redemption, while there were plenty of secular doom merchants, with the negative utopias of Orwell and Huxley, or the kind of science fiction that offered us the horrors of a future dominated by hideous scientific rationality. But it was the task of religion to call to us at the final moment, and the task of secularism to sing hymns in praise of the locomotive.
The recent gathering of enthusiastic young papal groupies shows us the transformation that has taken place under the reign of Pope John Paul II. A mass of youngsters who accept the Catholic faith but, judging from the answers they recently gave in interviews, are far distant from neurotic fundamentalism, are willing to make compromises over premarital relationships, contraceptives, even drugs, and certainly when it comes to clubbing; meanwhile, the secular world moans about noise pollution and a New Age spirit that seems to unite neo-revolutionaries, followers of Monsignor Milingo, and sybarites devoted to Oriental massage.
This is just the start. We have plenty of surprises in store.
2000
The following advertisement probably appeared on the Internet, but I don’t know where, since it arrived by email. It’s a modest proposal for the sale of something entirely new, Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge, whose initials spell out BOOK.
No wires, no battery, no electronic circuits, no switches or buttons, it is compact and portable—you can even use it while you’re sitting in an armchair by the fire. It’s a sequence of numbered sheets of recyclable paper, each of which contains thousands of bits of information. These sheets are held together in the correct sequence by an elegant device called a binding.
Each page is scanned optically and the information is registered directly in the brain. There is a “browse” control that allows you to pass from one page to another, either forward or back, with a single flick of the finger. By using the “index” feature you can immediately find the information you want on the exact page. You can also buy an accessory called a “BOOKmark,” which enables you to return to where you left off in the previous session, even if the BOOK has been closed.
The ad ends with various details about this innovative device and also announces the availability of the Portable Erasable-Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Stylus (PENCILS). Not only is it a nice piece of humor, but it also provides the answer to many anxious questions about the possible demise of the book with the advance of the computer.
There are many objects that, once invented, cannot be further improved, such as the cup, the spoon, the hammer. When Philippe Starck decided to change the shape of the lemon squeezer he produced a magnificent object, but it lets the pips fall into the glass, whereas the old-fashioned squeezer holds them with the pulp. I was annoyed the other day, in class, to find I had to use an expensive new electronic machine that projects hazy images—the old luminous blackboard, or even the ancient overhead projector, does a better job.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, I wonder whether in fact we have invented so many things—so many new things—in recent years. The objects we use from day to day were all invented in the nineteenth century. Here are some of them: the train (though the steam engine dates from the eighteenth century), the car and the oil industry that came before it, propeller-driven steamships, reinforced concrete, the skyscraper, the submarine, underground railways, the dynamo, the turbine, the diesel engine, the airplane, the typewriter, the gramophone, the Dictaphone, the sewing machine, the refrigerator, canned food, pasteurized milk, the cigarette lighter and the cigarette, Yale security locks, the elevator, the washing machine, the electric iron, the fountain pen, the eraser, blotting paper, the postage stamp, the pneumatic tube, the water closet, the electric bell, the electric fan, the vacuum cleaner (1901), the safety razor, the folding bed, the barber’s chair and swivel office chair, friction and safety matches, the raincoat, the zipper, the safety pin, fizzy drinks, the bicycle with inner-tube tires, wheels with steel spokes and chain transmission, the omnibus, the electric tram, the elevated railroad, cellophane, celluloid, artificial fibers, department stores to sell all this stuff, and—please note—electric lighting, telephone, telegraph, radio, photography, and cinema. Charles Babbage invented a calculating machine capable of doing sixty-six additions per minute, and we are therefore partway to the computer.
The twentieth century has, of course, brought us electronics, penicillin and many other life-prolonging drugs, plastic materials, nuclear fission, television, and space travel. Perhaps I’ve left something out, but it is also true that today’s costliest fountain pens and wristwatches try to duplicate the classic models of a hundred years ago, and I have noted before that the Internet, the latest step forward in the field of communication, overtakes the wireless telegraphy invented by Marconi with a telegraphy that uses wires—in other words, marking the return (backward) from radio to telephone.
In the case of at least two twentieth-century inventions—plastics and nuclear fission—there are attempts to disinvent them because it’s now clear they are harming the planet. Progress doesn’t necessarily involve going forward at all costs. I’ve asked for my luminous blackboard to be returned to me.
2000
Some time ago I warned that we were witnessing an interesting technological regression. First of all, the disturbing influence of television had been put in check thanks to the remote control, enabling viewers to channel-hop and thus ushering in a phase of creative freedom. Final liberation from television came with the video recorder, which was a step toward cinematography. The remote control could also be used to mute the sound, so returning to the delights of the silent movie. In the meantime, the Internet, an eminently literate form of communication, had disposed of the dreaded Culture of the Image. At this point pictures, too, could be eliminated, inventing a sort of box that just emitted sounds and required no remote control. I thought I was joking at the time in imagining the rediscovery of radio, but I was prophesying—evidently through some supernatural inspiration—the advent of the iPod.
We reached the final stage when, after broadcasts on the airwaves, the new era of cable television arrived with pay-TV, passing from wireless telegraphy to cable telegraphy, a phase completed by the Internet, thus superseding Guglielmo Marconi and going back to Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell.
I expounded this theory about the march backward in my book Turning Back the Clock, where I applied these principles to political life—and, what’s more, I recently noted that we are returning to the nights of 1944, with military patrols in the streets and teachers and children in school uniform.
Then something else happened. Computers become obsolete in three years. Anyone who has had to buy a new one recently will have found that computers now have Windows Vista already installed. Now, you only have to read the various Internet blogs about what users think of Vista (I won’t go any further for fear of ending up in court), and hear the views of your friends who have fallen into that trap, to come to the perhaps mistaken, but absolutely firm, conclusion not to buy a computer with Vista installed. And yet, if you want an up-to-date computer of reasonable dimensions you have to put up with Vista. Or make do with a clone as large as a trailer truck, put together by an eager seller who will still install Windows XP and earlier versions. Your desk will then look like an Olivetti laboratory with the 1959 Elea computer.
I think the computer manufacturers are realizing that sales are falling significantly as customers decide not to buy a new computer so as to avoid Vista. So what then? To find out, go to the Internet and look for “Vista downgrading” or something similar. There you will learn that if you’ve bought a new computer with Vista, spending whatever it cost, then by paying yet more, and going through a complex procedure that I gave up trying to follow, you could go back to using Windows XP or earlier versions.
Computer users know what upgrading is. So downgrading is taking your highly advanced computer back to the happy condition of the older system—for a price. Before the Internet had invented this magnificent neologism, a normal dictionary defined the word “downgrade” as a noun meaning a downward gradient or descending slope, or a downward course or tendency in morals, religion, etc., while as a verb it means to reduce to a lower grade, rank, or level of importance. We are therefore being offered the opportunity, with much effort and for a certain amount of money, to lower the grade, rank, or level of importance of something for which we have already paid a certain sum. This would be unbelievable if it weren’t for the fact that it’s true: hundreds of poor computer buffs are working away madly online and paying whatever it costs to downgrade their software. Are we ever going to reach the stage when, for a reasonable sum, we can exchange our computer for an exercise book with an inkwell, pen, and Perry & Co. nib?
But the whole thing is not so paradoxical. Some technological advances cannot be bettered. A mechanical spoon cannot be invented: what was invented two thousand years ago is still fine as it is. The Concorde has been abandoned even though it flew between Paris and New York in three hours. I’m not so sure it was the right thing to do, but progress can also mean moving back a few steps, such as reverting to wind power instead of using oil, and so forth. Be prepared for the future! Full speed backward!
2008
Life is but a slow remembrance of childhood. Fine. But what sweetens this remembrance is that, looking back with nostalgia, we have a fond memory even of moments that seemed painful at the time, like the day we fell into a ditch and sprained an ankle, and had to spend a couple of weeks at home plastered in gauze soaked with egg white. I fondly remember the nights I spent in an air raid shelter. We’d be roused from our deepest sleep, dragged in our pajamas and coats into a damp, reinforced-concrete cellar lit with dim bulbs, and we’d play and run around with the dull thuds of explosions overhead, unable to tell whether they were antiaircraft guns or bombs. Our mothers shivered, cold and frightened, but for us it was a strange adventure. That’s nostalgia for you. We’re therefore ready to accept all that reminds us of the dreadful years of the 1940s, and it’s the tribute we pay to our old age.
What were cities like at that time? Dark at night, when the blackout compelled the occasional passersby to use lamps powered not with batteries but with dynamos, much like an old bicycle lamp, which was operated by friction, by rather clumsily setting in motion a sort of hand trigger. Later on, though, a curfew was imposed and you weren’t allowed onto the streets.
During the daytime the city was patrolled by military units, at least until 1943, when the Royal Italian Army was stationed there, but more heavily during the Republic of Salò, when squads and patrols of marines from the San Marco Regiment or the Black Brigades used to pass through continually, while in the villages there were more likely to be groups of partisans—both sides armed to the teeth. In this militarized city, people were not permitted to congregate at certain hours, Black-shirts and girls in Fascist uniforms swarmed about, and children in black smocks came out of school at midday. Meanwhile, mothers went off to buy what little there was in the grocery stores, and you had to pay considerable sums on the black market for any kind of bread that wasn’t vile and made of sawdust. At home there was hardly any light, and the only heat was in the kitchen. At night we slept with a warm brick in the bed, and I even fondly remember the icy temperatures. Now, I’m not suggesting we are back in those times, or certainly not completely. But I’m beginning to have some sense of this. For a start, there are Fascists in the government—not just Fascists, and no longer exactly like the old Fascists, but what does it matter? We know perfectly well that history is played out first as tragedy and then as farce. There again, in the old days we used to see posters on the walls showing a drunken black American with his claw hand clasped around a white Venus de Milo. Today, on television, I see the faces of thousands of emaciated black people arriving in our countries and, frankly, the people around me are much more frightened than they were in those days.
The black smock is being brought back in schools, and I have nothing against it; better that than the tough-guy designer T-shirts, except that I sense a taste of madeleines dipped in tea. I have just read a news story that the mayor of Novara, in Piedmont—a member of the Lega Nord (Northern League)—has banned gatherings of more than three people in the park at night. I wait with a Proustian thrill for the return of the curfew. Our soldiers are fighting against rebels in various parts of East Asia. But I also see military units, well armed and wearing camouflage jackets, on the sidewalks of our cities. The army, as then, doesn’t fight only at the frontiers but carries out policing operations. I seem to find myself in a scene from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. I read articles and hear discussions very much like those I used to read in the magazine La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race), which attacked not only Jews but also Gypsies, Moroccans, and foreigners in general. Bread has become expensive. We are warned to save on oil, to stop wasting electricity, to switch shop window lights off at night. There are fewer cars, and bicycle thieves are reappearing. For a touch of originality, there will soon be water rationing. We don’t yet have separate governments for southern and northern Italy, though certain politicians are working on it. I miss a leader who hugs and kisses buxom farm girls chastely on the cheek. But each to his own taste.
2008
As I become conscious of global warming and the disappearance of spring and fall, and find it confirmed in various authoritative writings, I wonder how my grandson, who is not yet two, will react one day when he hears mention of the word “spring” or reads poetry at school that describes the first languorous moments of autumn. How, in the future, will he react to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Perhaps he will live in another world to which he is fully accustomed, and won’t miss the spring, watching berries form on hot winter days. After all, as a child I had no experience of dinosaurs and yet I could imagine them. Perhaps springtime is just an old person’s nostalgia, like nights spent in air raid shelters playing hide-and-seek.
And will this child of the future think it normal to live in a world where the prime virtue is being seen, a value more important now than sex or money? A world where people will be ready to do anything to be seen on television—or whatever will have replaced television by then—so as to be recognized by others and not to vegetate in a frightening and unbearable anonymity. A world where more and more respectable mothers will be ready to recount the most sordid family tales in a sob-story broadcast, so that they can be recognized the next day in the local supermarket and sign autographs. A world where young girls will say they want to be an actress, as they do today, but not to become a Dietrich or a Garbo, not to perform Shakespeare or to sing like Josephine Baker, wearing nothing but bananas on the stage of the Folies Bergère, and not even to do a graceful high kick like the dancers of a bygone time, but to become a television quiz girl, purely for show, with nothing in the way of talent.
Someone in the future will then explain to this child at school, along with lessons about the kings of Rome and the fall of Berlusconi, or films titled Once Upon a Time There Was Fiat, how human beings have always, from earliest antiquity, sought to be recognized by those around them. And how some would try to be good company at the local bar in the evening, others to excel at soccer or clay-pigeon shooting at local festivities, or boast how they hooked a fish this long. And how girls wanted to be noticed for the pretty bonnet they wore to church on Sunday, and grandmothers for being the best cook or seamstress in the village. And heaven forbid that it shouldn’t have been so, for human beings, to become known, need to catch the eye of an Other, and the more they are recognized, or think they are recognized, the more they are loved and admired by the Other—and if instead of one Other there are a hundred or a thousand, then so much the better. They feel satisfied.
And so in an age of great and ceaseless movement, when people leave their villages and lose their sense of home, and the Other is someone with whom they communicate via the Internet, it will seem natural for human beings to seek recognition in other ways, and the village square is replaced by the global audience of the television broadcast, or whatever comes next.
But perhaps not even schoolteachers, or those who take their place, will recall that in that bygone time there was a rigid distinction between being famous and being talked about. Everyone wanted to become famous as the best archer or the finest dancer, but no one wanted to be talked about as the most cuckolded man in the village, for being impotent, or for being a whore. If anything, the whore would claim to be a dancer and the impotent man would make up stories about his gargantuan sexual exploits. In the world of the future, if it is anything like what is going on now, this distinction will be lost. People will do anything to be “seen” and “talked about.” There will be no difference between the fame of the great immunologist and that of the young man who killed his mother with a hatchet, between the great lover and the man who has won the world competition for the shortest penis, between the person who has established a leper colony in central Africa and the man who has most successfully avoided paying his tax. Every little bit will help, just to be seen and recognized the next day by the grocer or the banker.
I’d like to ask anyone who thinks I’m being apocalyptic why people now position themselves behind a person being interviewed so as to be seen waving ciao ciao to the television audience, or why they go on a quiz show not even knowing that one swallow doesn’t make a summer. What does it matter? They’ll be famous just the same.
But I’m not being apocalyptic. Perhaps the child I’m referring to will become the follower of some new sect whose purpose will be concealment from the world, exile in the desert, withdrawal into the cloister, the dignity of silence. After all, this has already happened, at the end of an age when emperors began to appoint their own horse as senator.
2002
The other morning in Madrid, I was at lunch with my king. Don’t misunderstand me: despite my proudly republican allegiance, two years ago I was appointed a duke of the Kingdom of Redonda with the title of Duque de la Isla del Día de Antes. I share this ducal dignity with Pedro Almodóvar, A. S. Byatt, Francis Ford Coppola, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, John Ashbery, Orhan Pamuk, Claudio Magris, Ray Bradbury, and several others, all of whom share the common quality of being liked by the king.
The island of Redonda lies in the West Indies and measures thirty square kilometers, the size of a handkerchief. It is completely uninhabited, and I don’t think any of its monarchs have ever set foot on it. It was acquired in 1865 by Matthew Dowdy Shiell, a banker who had petitioned Queen Victoria to establish it as an independent realm, which she graciously did—she could see it posed no threat to the British colonial empire. Over the decades the island had been passed down to various monarchs, some of whom had sold the title several times over, causing disputes between the various pretenders. If you want to find out more about its multidynastic history, look up Redonda in Wikipedia. The last king abdicated in 1997 in favor of the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who set about appointing dukes left, right, and center.
That’s the whole story, which of course has a slight whiff of pataphysical folly, though, after all, becoming a duke doesn’t happen every day. The point, however, is another: in the course of our conversation, Marías said something that struck me as interesting. We were discussing how people today are prepared to go to any lengths to appear on television, even if only to be the idiot who waves ciao ciao behind the person being interviewed. Recently in Italy, the brother of a young woman who had been brutally murdered, after the sad privilege of a mention in the crime columns of the newspapers, approached a television celebrity asking to be hired so he could exploit the tragic notoriety—and we know of some individuals who, to catch the limelight in a news story, are prepared to declare themselves cuckolded, impotent, or fraudulent, nor is it a secret to criminal psychologists that what moves the serial killer is his desire to be discovered and hence become a celebrity.
Why this folly? we asked. Marías suggested that what is happening today stems from the fact that people no longer believe in God. At one time they were persuaded that everything they did had at least one Spectator, who knew their every thought and deed, who could sympathize with them or, if necessary, condemn them. They could be outcasts, good-for-nothings, losers scorned by their fellow men. They were people who would be forgotten as soon as they were dead, but who nourished the belief that there was at least One who knew all about them.
“God at least knows how much I’ve suffered,” the sick grandmother abandoned by her grandchildren would say. “God knows I’m innocent,” the person unjustly convicted would say in consolation. “God knows how much I’ve done for you,” the mother would say to her ungrateful child. “God knows how much I love you,” the abandoned lover would shout. “God alone knows what I’ve had to deal with,” complained the wretch whose misfortunes everyone ignored. God was always invoked as the all-seeing eye, whose gaze brought meaning to the grayest and most senseless life.
Once this all-seeing Witness has gone, has been taken away, what remains? All that’s left is the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity, into the vortex of oblivion, even at the cost of choosing the role of village idiot who strips down to his underpants and dances on the pub table. Appearance on the television screen is the only substitute for transcendence, and all in all it’s a satisfying substitute. People see themselves, and are seen, in a hereafter, but in return, everyone in that hereafter sees us here, and meanwhile we too are here. Think about it: to be able to enjoy all the advantages of immortality, albeit swift and ephemeral, and at the same time to have a chance of being celebrated in our own homes here, on earth, for our assumption into the Empyrean.
The trouble is that “recognition” is ambiguous. We all hope that our merits, or our sacrifices, or whatever good qualities we have, are “recognized.” But when we appear on the television screen and people see us afterward at the local bar and say, “I saw you on television last night,” they are merely saying “We recognize you”—in other words, we recognize your face—and that’s a different proposition altogether.
2010
I’m not on Twitter, not on Facebook—the Italian Constitution allows me not to be. But there is evidently a false Twitter account in my name, as there seems to be for other well-known people. I once met a woman whose eyes brimmed with gratitude as she explained how she read me all the time on Twitter and sometimes corresponded with me, reaping much intellectual benefit. I tried telling her that it was a false me, but she gazed back as though I were telling her I wasn’t really who I am. If I was on Twitter, then I existed. Twittero ergo sum.
I wasn’t too worried about trying to convince her, whatever she might have thought of me, since she was evidently pleased with what the false Eco was telling her, and this whole business was hardly going to change the history of Italy, nor that of the world—nor my own, for that matter. At one time I regularly received large dossiers from someone who stated she also sent them to the Italian president and other illustrious figures in protest against a person who was persecuting her. She was sending them to me, she said, because each week in my L’Espresso column, I came out in her defense. She therefore interpreted everything I wrote as relating to her personal problem. I never tried to contradict her, as it would have been pointless, and her own grave paranoia would have done nothing to solve the Middle East crisis. Eventually, because I didn’t reply, she turned her attention on someone else, I’ve no idea who.
The opinions expressed on Twitter have no relevance, since everyone is talking—those who believe in the appearances of Our Lady of Medjugorje, those who go to fortunetellers, those who claim that September 11 was planned by the Jews, and those who believe in Dan Brown. I’m always fascinated by the Twitter messages that appear at the bottom of the screen during television shows. They say anything and everything.
Twitter is like a village or suburban bar. You hear the village idiot, the small landowner who reckons he’s being persecuted by the tax authority, the local doctor who resents not getting the post of professor of comparative anatomy at a big university, the passerby who has already had too much grappa, the truck driver who talks about the beautiful women he has picked up on the highway, and occasionally there is someone with a few sensible ideas. But it all ends there. Barroom gossip has never changed international politics, and it was only the Fascists who worried about it and banned the discussion of high politics in bars. On the whole, though, what the majority of people think is reflected in the statistic that emerges at the moment when, after due reflection, they vote, at which point they ignore what’s been said at the bar and vote for the views expressed by someone else.
And so the ether of the Internet is crossed by irrelevant opinions, not least because, even though great ideas can be expressed in fewer than 140 characters, such as “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” rather more are needed to describe Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and still more to explain the meaning of E=mc2.
Then why is Twitter being used by leading politicians, who could simply send out a press release and be quoted in newspapers and on television, reaching also the multitude who aren’t connected to the Internet? And why does the pope get a few seminarians employed by the Vatican as temps to write short summaries of what he has already said Urbi et Orbi in front of millions of television viewers? Frankly, I don’t know. Someone must have persuaded them that it all helps to stir faith among a large number of Web users. But then, apart from politicians and the pope, why does anyone else use Twitter?
Perhaps to feel important.
2013
Privacy is one of the problems of our time—it concerns more or less everyone. Privacy means, roughly, very roughly, that we are all entitled to go about our business without the rest of the world—and, in particular, agencies linked to the organs of power—knowing what we’re doing. There are of course institutions that try to protect privacy. And so it’s all the more worrying that it’s possible out there to discover through our credit cards what we’ve been buying, which hotel we’ve stayed at, and where we’ve dined. The same is true with telephone tapping, except in cases where it’s essential for identifying criminals; indeed, Vodafone has recently warned that agents from every country can find out more or less secretly whom we are telephoning and what we are saying.
Privacy therefore seems a right that each of us should want to defend at all costs, to make sure that we don’t find ourselves in a world of Big Brother, the real Big Brother, where the universal eye can monitor all that we do or even think.
But the question is whether people are really concerned about privacy. At one time the threat to privacy came from gossip. The fear of gossip, or the washing of dirty linen in public, came from the impact it had on our public reputation. But perhaps in the so-called liquid society, where people suffer from lack of identity and values, and have no points of reference, the only means for obtaining social recognition is through “being seen” at all costs.
And so a woman today who goes out and sells herself, who at one time would have tried to keep her vocation hidden from her family and neighbors perhaps by describing herself as an “escort,” happily performs her role in public and even appears on television; the couples who once jealously guarded their differences now take part in trash broadcasts, telling everyone about their adultery and unfaithfulness, to public applause; on the train, our neighbor yells into his cell phone about what he thinks of his sister-in-law and what his tax consultant ought to be doing; those under criminal investigation, instead of with-drawing to the countryside until the wave of scandal has died down, now generally prefer to appear in public with a smile on their face, since it’s better to be a dishonest celebrity than an honest nonentity.
A recent article by Zygmunt Bauman in La Repubblica reported that the social networks (especially Facebook), instruments for keeping an eye on other people’s thoughts and emotions, are being used by the organs of power, but with the enthusiastic endorsement of those taking part. Bauman also talks about a “confessional society, promoting public self-exposure to the rank of the prime and easiest available, as well as arguably the most potent and only truly proficient proof of social existence.” In other words, for the first time in the history of mankind, those who are being spied upon are helping the spies to make their work easier, and gain satisfaction from being observed as they live, even if at times they are behaving like criminals or idiots.
It is also true that, as soon as everyone is capable of knowing everything about everyone, and everyone identifies with the sum of the inhabitants of the planet, the excess of information can produce only confusion, noise, and silence. But this ought to worry the spies, whereas those being spied upon think it’s a good thing that their friends, their neighbors, and perhaps their enemies know their most intimate secrets, as this is the only way they feel themselves to be a living and active part of the social body.
2014
I wonder whether many Italians remember this poem by Edmondo De Amicis:
Beauty is not always canceled out by time
Or marred by toil and fever;
My mother is sixty and past her prime,
Yet more beautiful I think than ever.
It’s a hymn not to female beauty but to filial devotion. A devotion that ought now to be shifted toward the bounds of ninety years, since a woman of sixty, provided she’s in good health, is still lively and active—and, with a little plastic surgery, can look twenty years younger. Yet I remember asking myself as a child whether it was right to go on living beyond sixty, since it would be terrible to end up weak, dribbling, and senile in an old people’s home. And thinking about the year 2000, I imagined, with Dante in mind, that I might live to seventy, and therefore till 2002, but it seemed such a remote conjecture, since rarely at that time did people reach so venerable an age.
I was reminded of this a few years ago when I met Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was then one hundred. He had traveled a long way for a conference, and was tucking into his meal with gusto. I asked him how he was, and he replied with an almost mournful smile that his legs were getting creaky. I felt like thumping him for his cheerful impudence. Indeed, he remained in excellent health for another two years.
We continue to think we are living in an age when technology is making great strides forward each day; we wonder where globalization will eventually lead us; but less often do we consider that the greatest advance achieved by humanity is in prolonging the average lifespan. After all, the idea that mankind could control nature was once vaguely understood by the troglodyte who managed to make a fire, not to mention our more advanced ancestor who had invented the wheel. Ideas about the future construction of a flying machine were put forward by Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, and Cyrano de Bergerac; the prospect of increasing the speed of travel was apparent from the invention of steam power; the advent of electricity could be foreseen back in the days of Alessandro Volta. But people for centuries had been dreaming in vain about the elixir of long life and the fount of eternal youth. In the Middle Ages there were excellent windmills, still good today for producing alternative energy, but a church was the place for pilgrims looking for the miracle of reaching the age of forty.
We landed on the Moon more than thirty years ago and cannot yet get to Mars, but at the time of the lunar landing many people of seventy had reached the end of life, whereas today, heart attack and cancer aside, it’s not unreasonable to hope to reach ninety. In short, the great progress—if we want to call it progress—has been in the field of life expectancy more than in the field of the computer. Computers had been heralded by Pascal’s calculating machine, and Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, which was then a good age. There again, Alexander the Great and Catullus died at thirty-three, Mozart at thirty-six, Chopin at thirty-nine, Spinoza at forty-five, Saint Thomas Aquinas at forty-nine, Shakespeare and Fichte at fifty-two, Descartes at fifty-four, and Hegel at the ripe old age of sixty-one.
Many of the problems we face today result from the extension of the average lifespan. I’m not talking about pensions. The enormous migration from the third world to Western countries is surely due to millions of people hoping to find food, work, and all that cinema and television promise, but they are also hoping to reach a world in which people live longer—and in any event to escape from one where they die too young. And yet, though I don’t have the figures at hand, I believe the amount we spend on geriatric research and preventive medicine is infinitely lower than what we spend on military technology and information. Yet we know more than enough about how to destroy a city and how to move information around cheaply, whereas we still have no exact idea about how to reconcile collective well-being, the future of young people, global overpopulation, and the prolongation of life.
Young people might think that progress is what allows them to send text messages from their phone or fly at low cost to New York. But the amazing fact, and the unresolved problem, is that they plan, if all goes well, to reach adulthood at forty, whereas their ancestors became adults at sixteen.
Certainly we have to thank the Lord, or our lucky stars, that we are living longer, but we have to regard this not just as a self-evident fact, but as one of the most dramatic problems of our time.
2003
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