Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco
The second lesson was that of Father Giuseppe Celi, the Salesian priest who had taught me to play a musical instrument. It is rumored he is being considered for sainthood, but not for the reason given here, which, on the contrary, could be used against him. On January 5, 1945, I bounded up to him and said, “Father Celi, I’m thirteen today.” “Very misspent,” he replied rather gruffly. What did he mean? That having reached such a venerable age I had to begin a serious examination of conscience? That I shouldn’t expect to receive praise simply for having performed my biological duty? Perhaps it was just a normal Piedmontese manifestation of reserve, a refusal to embark on rhetoric, or perhaps these words were a fond expression of congratulations. But I think Father Celi was well aware, and was teaching me, that a master must always challenge his pupils, and not overly excite them.
After that lesson I have always been parsimonious in my praise of those who were expecting it, except in cases of superior performance. Perhaps this reluctance of mine has upset some, and if that is so, then in addition to misspending my first thirteen years, I have also misspent my first sixty-six years. But I resolved that the best way of expressing my approval was by making no criticism. No criticism means someone has done well. I have always been irritated by expressions such as “good pope” or “honest politician,” which left room only for the thought that other popes were bad and other politicians dishonest. They are all simply doing what is expected of them, and it’s hard to see why they should receive congratulations.
But Father Celi’s reply taught me not to feel too proud of what I had done, even if I thought I’d done it well, and above all not to go around being smug. Does this mean we shouldn’t aim to do better? Certainly not. But in a rather odd way Father Celi’s answer reminds me of a quote I came across from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.” It’s very important to realize you’re not God, always to be doubtful about what you do, and to feel you haven’t spent the years of your life well enough. It’s the only way of spending the remaining years better.
You might wonder why these thoughts come to mind now, at the start of an electoral campaign when candidates have to behave in a godlike fashion to win—in other words, to say of all they have done, like the Creator after the creation, that it was good, and to display a certain delusion of omnipotence in proclaiming themselves capable of doing better things, whereas God was satisfied at having created the best of all possible worlds. I don’t wish to moralize: an electoral campaign demands such behavior. Can you imagine a candidate telling future voters that “up to now I’ve made a lot of big mistakes, I can’t be sure I’ll do any better in the future, and all I can promise is to have a go”? He wouldn’t get elected. Therefore, I repeat, no false moralism. It’s just that, listening to the televised debates, Father Celi returns to mind.
2007
Once upon a time there was Churchill
I read a short article recently in Internazionale about a survey in Great Britain that suggested a quarter of Britons under twenty thought Churchill was an imaginary character, and Gandhi and Dickens too. Many of those interviewed, though the article didn’t say how many, apparently put Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, and Eleanor Rigby among those who actually existed.
My initial response was not to take the survey too seriously. First of all, I’d be interested to know what social background that quarter of youngsters who got it wrong about Churchill and Dickens came from. If they had interviewed Londoners in the time of Dickens, or those we see in Doré’s engravings of London poverty or in scenes from Hogarth, at least three quarters of those filthy, brutish, starving people would not have known who Shakespeare was. Nor am I surprised that people think Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood really existed, because there’s a Holmes industry in London that lets you visit the flat in Baker Street where he was supposed to have lived, and because the character that inspired Robin Hood did in fact exist. The only thing that makes him unreal is that in those times of feudal economy they robbed the rich to give to the poor, whereas with the arrival of the market economy they rob the poor to give to the rich. There again, as a child I thought Buffalo Bill was an imaginary character until my father told me that he had not only existed but that he, my father, had seen him when he had passed through our city with his circus: Buffalo Bill had ended up making a living from the legendary Wild West in Italy’s Piedmont.
It’s true that people’s ideas even about the recent past are vague, and we realize this when we question the young about it. Some Italian schoolchildren, when tested, thought that Aldo Moro had been a member of the Red Brigades, that Alcide De Gasperi had been a Fascist leader, Pietro Badoglio a partisan, and so on. You could say that it was a long time ago: why should eighteen-year-olds know who was in the government fifty years before they were born? Well, at the age of ten, perhaps because the Fascist schools used to test such things, I knew that the prime minister at the time of the March on Rome twenty years before was Luigi Facta, and at eighteen I also knew who politicians like Urbano Rattazzi and Francesco Crispi had been, and that stuff went back to the nineteenth century.
Our relationship with the past has in fact changed, and probably also at school. At one time we had great interest in the past because there wasn’t much news about the present. A newspaper used to report everything in eight pages. Now, with the mass media, there’s a vast amount of information on the present, and just think how much news there is on the Internet about millions of things, even the most irrelevant, happening at this very moment. The past as described by the mass media—the exploits of Roman emperors, for example, or Richard the Lion-Hearted, or the First World War—is viewed, through Hollywood and similar industries, along with the flow of information on what’s going on now, and it’s hard for a film audience to appreciate the difference in time between Spartacus and Richard the Lion-Hearted. Likewise, the difference between imaginary and real gets blurred or at least loses its significance: tell me why any child who watches a television film should think that Spartacus actually existed and Marcus Vinicius in Quo Vadis didn’t, that the Countess of Castiglione was a historical character and Emma Bovary wasn’t, that Ivan the Terrible was real and Ming the tyrant of Mongo wasn’t, seeing that each much resembles the other.
In American culture this flattening of the past onto the present is viewed casually, and you sometimes come across a professor of philosophy who tells you it’s irrelevant to know what Descartes had to say about our way of thinking, seeing that what interests us is what cognitive science is discovering today. He is forgetting that, if the cognitive sciences have come as far as they have, it is because a particular discussion had begun with seventeenth-century philosophers, but above all there is a failure to use the experience of the past as a lesson for the present.
Many dismiss the old saying that “history is life’s teacher” as banal, but we can be sure that if Hitler had made a careful study of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia, he wouldn’t have fallen into the trap that he did, and if George W. Bush had properly studied the British wars in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, or even the most recent Soviet war against the Taliban, he would have planned his Afghan campaign differently.
You might think there’s an enormous difference between the British idiot who thought Churchill was an imaginary character, and Bush, who goes to Iraq convinced he can wrap up the war in fifteen days, but there isn’t. They are both examples of the same phenomenon: losing sight of history.
2008
A generation of aliens
I think Michel Serres is the finest philosophical mind in France today, and like every good philosopher, he can also turn his thoughts to current affairs. I’m making shameless use here, apart from a few comments of my own, of a wonderful article of his, published recently in Le Monde, where he recalls things that relate to the children of my younger readers, and for us older people, to our grandchildren.
For a start, these children or grandchildren
European children haven’t known war for over sixty years; with the benefit of medical advances they haven’t suffered like previous generations; their parents are older than ours and most of them are divorced; they go to schools where they sit side by side with children of a different color, religion, or customs—and, asks Serres, how much longer can they continue to sing “La Marseillaise,” which refers to the “impure blood” of foreigners? What literary works can they still enjoy, as they haven’t known rural life, grape harvests, invasions, monuments to the dead, banners riddled with enemy gunshots, the urgent need for morale?
They have been educated by media fashioned by adults in which the length of a visual image has been reduced to seven seconds, and the time to answer questions reduced to fifteen seconds, and where nevertheless things are seen that are no longer seen in everyday life—blood-soaked corpses, destruction, devastation: “By the age of twelve, adults have already forced them to see twenty thousand killings.” They learn from advertising peppered with abbreviations and foreign words that cause the native language to lose its meaning, the school is no longer a place of learning, and these children, now computer literate, live much of their lives in the virtual world. Writing with just the index finger rather than with the whole hand “no longer stimulates the same neurons or the same cortical areas,” and they are forever multitasking. We adults live in a discernible and measurable space, and they live in an unreal space where proximity and distance no longer make any difference.
I won’t discuss Serres’s reflections on the possibility of managing the new requirements of education. His scenario, in any event, gives us the picture of a period that is comparable, in terms of its upheavals, to the invention of writing and, many centuries later, of printing. Except that today’s new technologies are changing at great speed, and “at the same time the body is metamorphosing, birth and death are changing, and so too are suffering and treatment, jobs, space, habitat, being-in-the-world.” Why weren’t we prepared for this transformation? Serres concludes that perhaps it’s the fault of philosophers, whose job it is to predict changes in knowledge and practice, but they haven’t done enough because, “having been involved in everyday politics, they haven’t felt the arrival of contemporaneity.” I don’t know that Serres is entirely right, but there’s truth in what he says.
2011
Online
My email doubles
I was trying to reach an American colleague by email and found an Internet service that gave the addresses of those who are registered under a particular name. I checked my colleague’s name and came up with ten different addresses, including one in Japan. Was that possible? It occurred to me to check out my own name, and I found twenty-two addresses. I recognized two, now defunct, in which my name did not appear in the address but had been given at the time I had registered. The others looked quite normal, such as [email protected], or [email protected], but I was struck by [email protected], which had been registered using my name.
Agartha is the capital of Rex Mundi, a well-known occult legend quoted in my Foucault’s Pendulum. It then occurred to me that those who register with an email service can, of course, call themselves whatever they like. They can take the name of a favorite writer, and can even choose Dante Alighieri if they wish. Caught by the jealous doubt that Dante might be more popular than me, I went and searched for him. Result: fifty-five addresses, including [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
I then tried out the name of a contemporary writer who might stir some excitement, and naturally I hit on Salman Rushdie. There are thirty-six addresses, including not only the plain and simple [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], but also, far more disturbing, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]—I’d be worried about contacting anyone with addresses of that kind. But the problem is not so much these bizarre addresses as those that are seemingly normal. No one will imagine that Dante is going to answer an email, but how many gullible people might contact [email protected], perhaps receiving some ruinously compromising answer in Rushdie’s name? There is obviously only one solution: not to trust email addresses. And therefore a service that the Net might usefully have provided loses all effectiveness. It would be the same as tampering with telephone directories by putting the number of a left-wing politician under the name of Berlusconi, or giving the address of a strip club as that of a well-known journalist.
The principle of caution is taken for granted by anyone who gets involved in chat rooms, since everyone knows that a young man can make amorous advances online to a certain Greta Garbo who turns out to be a retired policeman. But this principle is now officially true in all circumstances after the recent case of the ILOVEYOU virus. We must now be suspicious not only of every message whose exact provenance we don’t know, but also of those from our regular correspondents, since the virus could have been passed on in their name.
A newspaper that by definition published only false news would not be worth buying except for entertainment, and we wouldn’t pay a cent for a railroad timetable that told us to take a train for Milan that was in fact going to Naples. Newspapers and railroad timetables have an implicit pact with their readers, which cannot be violated without compromising every social contract. What is going to happen if the main instrument of communication in the new millennium cannot respect this pact and ensure that it is enforced?
2000
How to elect the president
First the good news: as I pointed out in a recent article, if you go to the website www.poste.it, you can register for a service that allows you to send a letter or telegram from your computer. The post office will then print and deliver it to the correct address at a cost of 1,700 lire, or 85 euro cents, thus eliminating the whole business of its being carried by train and held up in station depots. Congratulations—incredible as that may sound—to the Italian postal service.
Now the bad news: it’s the story of the American elections, of course, where the vote-counting mechanism has proved less efficient than the Italian postal service. And yet there was a solution, and it was the great Isaac Asimov who provided it in the 1950s story “Franchise,” which appeared in Italian in Galaxy magazine in December 1962. Reducing the story to its bare bones, it describes how, in what was then the far-off year 2008, in the United States, the choice was between two candidates who were so alike that the votes of the electorate were split almost fifty-fifty. The opinion polls, then carried out by extremely powerful computers, could calculate endless variables and get close to the actual result with almost mathematical precision. But to reach a scientifically exact decision, the vast Multivac computer, half a mile long at that time and the height of a three-story building—and here’s an example of how science fiction failed to predict future progress—needed to take into account “various imponderable aptitudes in the human mind.”
Since the story assumes that human minds in an advanced and civilized country are all very much the same, Multivac had only to carry out a few tests on a single voter. And so, at each yearly election, the computer identified one state, and one c
Asimov gives a delightful description of the excitement in the family of the chosen one, who became famous, signing lucrative contracts and making a career of it, like a survivor of the reality show Big Brother. There’s an amusing scene in which a young girl is amazed as her grandfather explains how at one time everybody used to vote, and she can’t understand how a democracy could function with millions and millions of voters, a system far more fallible than Multivac.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already ruled out the possibility of a collective democracy, except in a small country where the citizens all knew each other and could easily meet. But a representative democracy that calls on its people to choose their representatives every four or five years is now also having a hard time. In a mass civilization dominated by electronic communication, opinions tend to level out to such an extent that the policies of the candidates become similar. The candidates are not chosen by the people but by party members, and the people have to choose between just two candidates selected by others, who are as alike as two peas in a pod. It’s reminiscent of the Soviet system, but in that case the party members chose only one candidate and the voters elected him. If the Soviets had offered voters not one but two candidates, the Soviet Union would have been much the same as American democracy.
Yes, I know, in a democracy, even after the pointless ritual of elections, those who govern are controlled by the press, by pressure groups, by public opinion. But that could also be done using the system proposed by Asimov.