Luca Sofri
7 June 2020
Trying to improve the world can be a means or an end, and it’s actually both. There are those who do good things in their own small way, hoping that they will be a precious piece of common work that improves the world, and that is their ambition: a better world to look at and be happy and satisfied with. There are those who do good things that try to improve the world hoping that these have repercussions on the lives of many (and therefore of all), on the pieces, on their own child. The biggest disincentive of these times is the feeling that participation in this commitment is not extended enough, and that it is diminished and discouraged by those - leaders, representatives of relevant and authoritative institutions, Ruling classes - who should instead be inspirers and multipliers. They try to empty a lake with a bucket, and meanwhile the pumps remain stationary along the shore.
The absence from the Italian progressive political offer of any promising alternative proposal to the current swamp - I speak of support for a government led by opponents, and the absolute design silence - is an example of this, spectacular, but I will not reduce this reflection of Sunday to these little things. We should look beyond that.
Little can be seen beyond. We have all been absorbed by the spirit of the millennium, the limited horizons. We spend our days writing controversial handfuls of words about this or that social network, signing online petitions to watch the numbers grow, to claim declarations of belonging with what we read or watch, to exhibit "resistances" that sound failures, to please us with volatile stage victories, and so go the days. Of course, many do precious and useful things, but as I said at the beginning their result seems to apply to limited areas: Indian reserves of different scales of common good and awareness of the common good. The dominant thought is another, the cultural hegemony today is of a selfish, resentful and warlike culture.
Shall I give another example of local smallness? Among the twenty best-selling Italian newspapers only two are left-wing, and are respectively of Fiat and the bishops. Or take a look at the properties and proposals of television, then. Mass media.
Progressive thinking is minority and defeated, and in order to understand whether it will recover one would have to understand what progressive thinking is in 2020. I think it’s a bit the things I had written at a certain point here, but today above all it’s any search for a way to defeat - defeat, not "resist" - the dominant thought retrograde and divisive "populism", sovereignisms and various companies. Which is a thought essentially fueled by one thing: ignorance.
The winning "populism" is the thing that has eradicated the idea of "good of the people" of the leftists and has done another thing, easier and more fraudulent. The way in which the progressives have always thought about the good of the people is to give people kept away from education, culture, awareness, the same opportunities and opportunities to possess them that the privileged elites have. I will not be the thousandth who will say to go and reread Don Milani, although it is true that then no one ever goes there: The poverty of the poor is not measured on bread, at home, in heat. It measures the degree of culture and social function».
Or, in a summary by Michele Serra:
"Knowing is a privilege and the deepest discrimination is cultural. As Don Milani said, the master is master because he knows a thousand words, while the worker a hundred. Ignorance is subalternity, although unfortunately today the subalternity is almost claimed."
This idea is very up-to-date today, even if it must be adapted to a society in which the great part of ignorance is no longer produced by a lack of access to education, information, culture, but by a usurpation of their space by an informative and cultural offer of poor quality and inadequate education and with little means and ideas. Goffredo Fofi had said this well, instead, a few years ago, in a book that - this yes - I dare to tell anyone to read:
"But I believe - and I want to insist - that in Italy we must also think of other types of «poor», the oppressed of conscience, all people who live in a condition of moral anomy or material servitude […] It can be used as meat for slaughter not only for the conquest of a territory or the defense of a hypothetical frontier: it is treated as meat for slaughter, whether you like it or not, even in front of a trivial election booth."
Those who are today called "populists" and who seem to me only exploiters and cultivators of ignorance for their own interests of self-promotion and power, have cancelled the progressive ambitions to give everyone the opportunity to know and understand things, and thus to become part of the "power", with a preaching that told and tells those people a deceptive and bankrupt shortcut: you do not need tools nor opportunities, you go well so. You are right, as a people, as yourselves. And if you fail, it is someone else’s fault, and you must be angry: do not understand. Populism cultivates the ignorance of people and uses them just as the aristocracy of the past did. And the oppressed of today - the "oppressed of conscience" - are the victims of lying information and mediocre cultural models, promoted by newspapers, books, television programs, music, influencers, or so on.
Again Fofi, in an article on the Unity of 2010, criticizing the indolence of progressive intellectuals.
"The gray area should be awakened and recovered to a left culture. But if this culture is dead and buried? All that remains is to wait for her to wake up alone, or for there to be small minorities who know how to turn to the less addicted and anesthetized within her. For example, to the youngest, and the «pedagogical project» of these few refractory and non-acceptant should be to snatch from the majority sleepwalking at least a part of their children and grandchildren. Obviously, thinking and studying, to propose an adequate idea of the world and the future, which means reconstructing a body of ideas of the left, which will happen only if you give up to please the mass and you will even agree to displease it for a long time. Indicating the true and the right, especially in Italy after thirty years of yields and corruptions of all kinds, will not be easy, and will not bring much «consent» for a long time."
This, even today, is a progressive thought and project: to work on the long to create informed, curious, aware people, who improve the world and the world improves them. And to create a society where individual ignorance is not rewarded to the detriment of communities. Thank goodness there are many who work there, without representation. To love them, to people, and to want their good. And to thin the basin of ignorance and lies instrumentally nourished by the worst winning of these years. It will take some time.
