Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco
What would have happened if I’d had a cell phone with a camera in it, as every child has today? Perhaps I’d have recorded it to show my friends I was there, and then I’d have loaded my visual gem onto YouTube to give pleasure to other disciples of schadenfreude. And then, who knows, by continuing to record other tragedies I might have grown indifferent to the suffering of others.
Instead, I have stored all of it in my memory, and that picture, after seventy years, continues to obsess me and to teach me, yes, to make me a non-indifferent participant in the suffering of others. I don’t know whether children of today will still have these possibilities of becoming adults. Adults, with their eyes glued to their cell phones, are now lost forever.
2012
Evolution: all with just one hand
The other day, five people of both sexes walked past me on the street: two were telephoning, two frantically texting and in danger of tripping over, one was walking along holding the object, ready to answer any sound that promised human contact.
One cultured and eminent friend of mine has thrown away his Rolex because, he says, he can now check the time on his BlackBerry. Technology had invented the wristwatch so human beings didn’t have to carry a pendulum clock around their neck or pull a pocket watch out of their waistcoat pocket every few minutes, and now my friend has to walk around, whatever he’s doing, with one hand perennially busy. Humanity is losing the use of one of its limbs, and yet we know how much two hands with opposable thumbs have contributed to the evolution of the species.
It occurred to me that when people wrote with a goose quill they needed just one hand, but with the computer keyboard we need two, and so the telephone addict cannot use a telephone and PC at the same time. But then, I thought, cell phone addicts don’t need their PC, which today is prehistoric, since the cell phone can connect to the Internet and send text messages, nor do they have to send emails when they can talk directly to the person they wish to pester or by whom they wish to be pestered. It’s true that their consultations of Wikipedia will be more difficult and therefore more rapid and superficial, their written messages will be more telegraphic—whereas with email they can even write The Screwtape Letters—but telephone addicts no longer have the time to gather encyclopedic information nor to express themselves clearly because they’re too busy in conversations. These are conversations about whose syntactical consistency we learn a great deal from those much-criticized instances of telephone interception, from which it can be deduced that phone addicts, spurning moreover all concerns about secrecy, express their plans with ellipses and a few such Neanderthal interpolations as “shit” and “fucking hell.”
This reminds me of the film Love Is Eternal While It Lasts, directed by Carlo Verdone, in which a pert young woman transforms sexual intercourse into a nightmare: as she rides on the stomach of her partner she’s forever answering urgent messages. In an interview I gave to a Spanish journalist, who seemed otherwise bright and intelligent, he commented with amazement that I hadn’t interrupted our conversation once to answer my cell phone, concluding therefore that I was most courteous. He couldn’t imagine that either I had no cell phone or I kept it switched off because I didn’t want it for unsolicited messages, only for checking my diary.
2013
The cell phone and the queen in “Snow White”
I was walking along the sidewalk and saw a woman approaching me. She was glued to her cell phone and wasn’t looking where she was going. Unless I stepped aside we would have bumped into each other. I have a hidden wicked streak, and so I stopped and turned and she collided with my back. I had braced myself for the impact and remained firm, but she was taken aback, dropped her cell phone, realized she had hit someone who couldn’t see her. She muttered a few words of apology while I, in an affable tone, said, “Not to worry, such things happen these days.”
I only hope her cell phone broke when it fell, and I advise anyone in a similar situation to do as I did. Cell phone addicts should be dealt with when they are young, but since a Herod doesn’t turn up every day, it’s better to punish them at least as adults, even if they’ll never understand into what chasm they have fallen, and will carry on regardless.
I’m well aware that dozens of books have been written on the cell phone syndrome and that there’s nothing more to add, but if we think for a moment, it seems inexplicable that the bulk of humanity is made up of people caught in the same frenzy, people who no longer talk face-to-face, no longer look at the countryside, no longer reflect on life and death, and instead talk obsessively, invariably with nothing urgent to say.
We are living in an era in which humanity, for the first time, can fulfill one of the three wishes that magic has been trying to satisfy for centuries. The first is the desire to fly, but by levitating with our body, flapping our arms, not climbing into an aircraft; the second is being able to influence our enemy or the person we love by pronouncing arcane words or pricking a clay figure; the third is communicating at a great distance, passing over oceans and mountain ranges, having a genie or miraculous object that will take us from Frosinone to Pamir, from Innisfree to Timbuktu, from Baghdad to Poughkeepsie, communicating instantly with those who are thousands of miles away. Communicating directly, personally, not as still happens with television, which is dependent on someone else’s will, and where things don’t always happen live.
What is it that has inclined people for centuries toward magical practices? Impatience. Magic promised the chance of short-circuiting from a cause to an effect, with no intermediate steps: utter a magic formula and transform iron into gold, summon angels and get them to send a message. Faith in magic didn’t disappear with the advent of experimental science, since the dream of simultaneity between cause and effect has been transferred to technology. Technology today provides everything immediately ; you press a button on your cell phone and talk to Sydney, whereas science moves cautiously and its prudence doesn’t satisfy us because we want the universal remedy against cancer now, not tomorrow—which leads us to trust the doctor-guru who instantly promises the miraculous potion.
There is a close relationship between technological enthusiasm and magical thought, and it is linked to the religious faith in the lightning action of the miracle. Theological thought spoke, and speaks, to us about mysteries, but used, and still uses, arguments to show that they are conceivable, yet unfathomable. Whereas faith in the miracle shows us the numinous, the sacred, the divine, which appears and operates without delay.
Can there be a link between someone who promises an immediate cure for cancer, Padre Pio, the cell phone, and the queen in “Snow White” ? In a certain sense there is. That’s why the woman on the sidewalk in my story was living in a fairy-tale world, bound by the spell of an ear rather than a magic mirror.
2015
On Conspiracies
Where’s the deep throat?
It’s widely known that there are many conspiracy theories around September 11. There are extreme theories found on Arab fundamentalist and neo-Nazi sites that claim the conspiracy was organized by the Jews, and that all Jews working in the Twin Towers had been warned the previous day not to turn up for work, despite the fact that around four hundred Israeli or Jewish American citizens were among the victims; there are the anti-Bush theories claiming the attack had been organized so that Afghanistan and Iraq could be invaded; there are those who point the finger at more or less deviant American secret services; there’s the theory that it was an Arab fundamentalist plot and the American government knew the details in advance, but they let things go their own way, to provide a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, rather like the suggestion that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked but did nothing to save the fleet because he needed a pretext for declaring war on Japan; and lastly, there’s the theory that the attack was orchestrated by bin Laden’s fundamentalists, but the authorities responsible for the defense of America reacted wrongly and late, demonstrating their incompetence. The supporter
Anyone wanting to find out about the conspiracy theories can read Zero: Perché la versione ufficiale sull’11/9 è un falso (Zero: Why the Official Version of 9/11 Is False), edited by Giulietto Chiesa and Roberto Vignoli, which includes interviews with such eminent figures as Franco Cardini, Gianni Vattimo, Gore Vidal, Lidia Ravera, and many foreign contributors.
But anyone wanting to consider a different view can thank the same publisher, who, with admirable fairness, and proving its ability to capture two opposing sectors of the market, published in the same year a book against conspiracy theories, 11/9: La cospirazione impossibile (9/11: The Impossible Conspiracy), edited by Massimo Polidoro, with equally eminent contributors including Piergiorgio Odifreddi and James Randi. The fact that I am also in the book should be neither to my credit nor to my detriment, since the editor simply asked to republish a previously printed article that wasn’t so much about September 11 as about the eternal conspiracy syndrome. Nevertheless, since I believe that our world was created by chance, I have no difficulty believing that most of the events that have racked it over the course of thousands of years, from the Trojan War to the present day, have happened by chance or through the concurrence of a series of human follies, and I am by nature, out of skepticism, out of caution, always inclined to doubt any conspiracy, since I believe my fellow human beings are incapable of dreaming up a perfect one. All this despite the fact that—for reasons certainly of temperament, but also of irrepressible impulse—I’m inclined to regard Bush and his administration as capable of anything.
For reasons of space, I won’t go through the details of the arguments used by the supporters of both positions, which may all seem persuasive, but I appeal only to what I would describe as the “test of silence.” One example of the test of silence can be used against those who allege that the American landing on the Moon was a television sham. If the American spaceship hadn’t arrived on the Moon, then there must have been someone in a position to check this out, and who had an interest in revealing it, and this was the Soviets. And if the Soviets have kept silent, this is proof that the Americans actually got to the Moon. And that’s the end of it.
As regards conspiracies and secrets: experience, as well as history, tells us, first, that if there’s a secret, even if only one person knows about it, this person, perhaps in bed with his lover, will reveal it sooner or later. Only naïve Freemasons and followers of bogus Templar rituals believe in a secret that remains unbroken. Second, if there’s a secret, there’s always a price at which someone will be prepared to reveal it. A few hundred thousand dollars in publishing rights was enough to persuade a British army officer to recount all he’d done in bed with Princess Diana, and if he’d done it with the princess’s mother-in-law, it would have been worth double the sum. Now, to organize a false attack on the Twin Towers, to mine them, to warn the air force not to intervene, to hide embarrassing evidence, and so forth, would have involved the collaboration of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Generally speaking, the people used for such undertakings are never gentlemen, and it’s inconceivable that at least one of them, for a sufficient sum, wouldn’t have spoken. In short, what’s lacking in this story is the “deep throat.”
2007
Conspiracies and plots
The conspiracy syndrome is as old as the world, and its philosophy has been superbly described by Karl Popper in an essay on the conspiracy theory of society in Conjectures and Refutations: “This theory, which is more primitive than most forms of theism, is akin to Homer’s theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of this theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?’ His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer . . . Only when conspiracy theoreticians come into power does it become something like a theory which accounts for things that actually happen. For example, when Hitler came into power, believing in the conspiracy myth of the Learned Elders of Zion, he tried to outdo their conspiracy with his own counter-conspiracy.”
The psychology of the conspiracy is spawned by dissatisfaction with the obvious explanations for many disturbing occurrences. Think of the theory about the “Grand Old Man” who was supposedly behind the kidnapping and murder of Italy’s prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978: how is it possible, people asked, that such a perfect operation could have been devised by a group of thirty-year-olds? There had to be sharper brains behind it. Not taking into account that other thirty-year-olds at that time were running companies, piloting jumbo jets, or inventing new electronic equipment, and therefore the crucial point was not how a group of thirty-year-olds managed to kidnap Moro in the center of Rome, but that those thirty-year-olds were the offspring of someone who had dreamed up the story of the Grand Old Man.
Such a suspicion absolves us from our own responsibility, since it leads us to think that hidden behind what concerns us is a secret, and that the concealment of that secret amounts to a conspiracy against us. Belief in the conspiracy is rather like believing one has been cured by a miracle, except that in this latter case one is trying to explain not a threat but a mysterious stroke of fortune. (See Popper: the origin is always in turning to the intrigues of the gods.)
The irony is that in daily life, nothing is more transparent than the conspiracy and the secret. The conspiracy, when effective, sooner or later has its own repercussions and comes to light. And the same can be said about the secret. Not only is the secret usually revealed by a series of “deep throats,” but, whatever it relates to, provided it’s important enough (whether it’s the formula for a miraculous substance or a political maneuver), it will sooner or later come out in the open. Conspiracies and secrets, if they don’t rise to the surface, are either lame conspiracies or empty secrets. The power of someone letting on they have a secret is not in hiding something; it’s in making people believe there is a secret. In that sense, a secret and a conspiracy can be effective weapons in the hands of someone who doesn’t believe them.
Georg Simmel, in his celebrated essay “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” recalled that “secrecy gives the person enshrouded by it an exceptional position . . . It is in principle quite independent of its casual content, but is naturally heightened in the degree in which the exclusively possessed secret is significant and comprehensive . . . The natural impulse to idealization, and the natural timidity of men, operate to one and the same end in the presence of secrecy; viz., to heighten it by fantasy, and to distinguish it by a degree of attention that published reality could not command.”
A paradoxical consequence: hidden behind every false conspiracy there’s perhaps a conspiracy by someone who stands to gain from presenting it as true.
2007
Fine company
Every time I return to the subject of the conspiracy syndrome I receive letters from indignant people who remind me that conspiracies actually exist. Of course they do. Every coup d’état was a conspiracy, people conspire to take over a company by gradually buying up shares, or they conspire to plant a bomb on the subway. There have always been conspiracies: some have failed without anyone knowing about them, others have succeeded, but what they have in common is that they are limited in their purposes and scope. When people refer to conspiracy syndrome, however, they are talking about the idea of a universal conspiracy, in certain theologies even of a cosmic dimension, so that all or almost all the events of history are moved by a single and mysterious power that operates in the shadows.
I’m sufficiently clearheaded to suspect at times that by complaining about conspiracy syndromes, I’m
Nineteenth-century Jesuits were among the main instigators of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, from Abbé Augustin Barruel to the creation of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica and the novels of Father Antonio Bresciani, and it was fitting that they should be repaid in the same way by Italian liberals, Mazzinians, Freemasons, and anticlerical movements, with the theory of a Jesuit conspiracy popularized to some extent by satirical pamphlets or such famous books as Pascal’s Lettres provinciales, Vincenzo Gioberti’s Il gesuita moderno, or the writings of Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, but much more by two novels of Eugène Sue, Le Juif errant and Les Mystères du peuple.
Nothing new, therefore, but Labruyère’s site raises the Jesuit obsession to fever pitch. My list is just a bird’s-eye glimpse, since space here is limited, whereas Labruyère’s conspiratorial fantasy is Homeric. And so, according to him, the Jesuits had always intended to establish a world government, controlling the pope as well as the various European monarchies. Through the notorious Bavarian Illuminati, whom the Jesuits themselves had created before condemning them as Communists, they sought to bring down those monarchies that had outlawed the Company of Jesus. It was the Jesuits, he says, who had sunk the Titanic, because from that disaster they could set up the Federal Reserve Bank through the mediation of the Knights of Malta, whom they control, and it is no coincidence that three of the world’s richest Jews, John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus, who opposed the founding of the bank, were drowned on the Titanic. Along with the Federal Reserve Bank, the Jesuits funded the two world wars, which have clearly brought advantage only to the Vatican. As for the assassination of John F. Kennedy (and Oliver Stone has clearly been manipulated by the Jesuits), if we remember that the CIA was also created as a Jesuit program inspired by the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, and that the Jesuits controlled it through the Soviet KGB, then it’s clear, Labruyère concludes, that Kennedy was killed by those who had conspired to sink the Titanic.