One lone voice in the recent Halloween controversy was that of Roberto Beretta, writing in the Catholic newspaper Avvenire, who cautioned prudence when hurling anathemas and calling for pastoral crusades, for with Halloween “the Church is being paid back in its own coin. That’s right. Indeed, from at least the fourth century, the wisdom of the Church fathers . . . preferred to mediate rather than eliminate, to superimpose and transform rather than annul, annihilate, bury, censor. In other words: our ancestors knew how to ‘Christianize’ pagan festivals.”
Bear in mind that no gospel suggests Jesus was born on December 25, and indeed, according to astronomical calculations, the star must have appeared in the autumn. Christmas Day was fixed to coincide with the pagan customs and Germanic and Celtic traditions that celebrated Yule, the feast of the winter solstice. I myself prefer the traditional nativity scene, as it requires more imagination, whereas the Christmas tree can be decorated by any suitably trained ape.
The answer, therefore, instead of getting upset, is to Christianize Halloween, as Beretta suggests: “If Halloween, which literally means ‘All Hallows’ Eve,’ returned to its Celtic guise, whether actual or supposed, or cloaked itself instead in consumerist frills or even hid itself beneath more or less ‘satanic’ rituals, then all it would be doing is reappropriating a territory formerly its own; and we would be left pondering how and why we haven’t had the cultural or spiritual strength to repeat what our forefathers did.”
2011
Damned philosophy
La Repubblica recently published an extract of a forthcoming translation of The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, with a subtitle from a passage in the book: “Philosophy is dead, physicists alone can explain the cosmos.” The death of philosophy has been announced a number of times, so it’s no surprise, but it seemed to me that Hawking was talking nonsense. To be sure that La Repubblica hadn’t given an inaccurate summary, I bought the book, and my suspicions were confirmed.
The book cover describes Mlodinow as a first-rate popularizer and screenwriter of several episodes of Star Trek, and this is evident from the magnificent illustrations, which seem designed for a children’s encyclopedia of yesteryear, colorful and fascinating, but explaining precisely nothing about the complex physical-mathematical-cosmological theorems they should be illustrating. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to entrust the fate of philosophy to people with pointy ears.
The book opens with the peremptory statement that philosophy now has nothing more to say and that only physics can tell us (i) how to understand the world we live in, (ii) what the nature of reality is, (iii) whether the universe has need of a creator, (iv) why there is something instead of nothing, (v) why we exist, and (vi) why this particular set of laws exists and not another. As we can see, these are standard philosophical questions, and the book shows how physics can respond in some way to the last four, which seem the most philosophical of all.
To attempt to answer the last four questions, answers are required for the first two questions—in other words, what does it mean that something is real, and do we know the world exactly as it is? When they are taught philosophy, Italian schoolchildren start off with questions such as: Do we learn by adjusting the mind to the thing? Is there something outside us? Or are we the kind of beings envisaged by Berkeley, or, as Putnam says, brains in a vat?
The answers that this book offers are essentially philosophical, and if it weren’t for those philosophical answers, then not even physics could say why it knows and what it knows. Indeed, the authors talk about a “model-dependent realism”—that is, they assume that “there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality.” And so “different theories can describe the same phenomenon in a satisfactory way through disparate conceptual structures,” and all we can perceive, know, and say about reality depends on the interaction between our models and that something which exists outside, but which we know only thanks to the form of our perceptual organs and our brains.
More wary readers might recognize the ghost of Kant, but certainly the two authors are proposing what is known in philosophy as holism, which some philosophers call internal realism and others constructivism.
As we can see, this book is not about physical discoveries but about philosophical notions that support and justify the physicist’s research—and competent physicists cannot avoid asking questions about the philosophical foundations of their own methods. This is something we already knew, just as we already knew something about the extraordinary revelation, thanks to Mlodinow and the Star Trek crew, that “in ancient times people instinctively attributed violent acts of nature to an Olympus of spiteful and malicious gods.” By heavens and by Jove!
2011
Evasion and secret redress
There are tax evaders in every country: the reluctance to pay taxes is deeply human. But it is believed that Italians are more prone to this vice than others. Why?
For an answer I have to go back in time, and to the figure of an old Capuchin friar of great humanity, learning, and kindness, of whom I was very fond. Now, this amiable old man, while instructing me and other young people in the principles of ethics, explained to us that smuggling and tax evasion, if they are sins, can be forgiven, since they contravene no divine law but only laws of the state.
He ought to have reminded us of Christ’s recommendation to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, as well as Paul’s advice to the Romans: “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed.” Perhaps, though, he knew that some theologians, in centuries past, had claimed that tax laws bring no obligation in terms of conscience, but only by force of sanction. Reporting today on this opinion, Luigi Lorenzetti, the director of Rivista di Teologia Morale, comments: “We do a disservice to those theologians, however, if we ignore the social and economic context that caused them to come up with such a theory. The organization of society was by no means democratic; the iniquitous tax system and exorbitant taxes oppressed the poor.”
Indeed, my Capuchin friar quoted another case, that of secret redress. To explain it in the simplest terms, workers who feel badly underpaid commit no sin if they quietly take the extra amount to which they are entitled. But only if their wage is clearly unjust and they are denied the possibility of appealing to labor laws. On such an argument, however, Saint Thomas Aquinas (in Summa Theologiae) had his doubts. On the one hand: “If the need be so manifest and urgent . . . then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.” On the other hand: “He who, by stealth, takes his own property, if this be unjustly detained by another, he sins indeed; yet not because he burdens the retainer, and so he is not bound to restitution or compensation: but he sins against general justice by disregarding the order of justice and usurping judgment concerning his own property.” Saint Thomas’s ideas about the general justice were clear and strict, and he wouldn’t have agreed with Berlusconi’s observation that it was understandable if citizens evaded a tax that was exorbitant. For Thomas, the law was the law.
Nevertheless, the Thomist conception of the right of ownership was universally more “social,” in that property was to be considered “in terms of possession” but not “in terms of use”: if I have a loaf of bread, honestly acquired, then I have the right to be recognized as its owner, but if there’s a down-and-out person near me who’s dying of hunger, then I ought to give half of it to him. To what extent, then, can evasion be regarded as hidden redress?
On a Catholic website I found a Treatise on Moral Theology, which, while it advises people to respect the law and observes that “the more healthy part of the population” pays taxes and doesn’t get involved in smuggling, it nevertheless concedes that “evasion is not regarded as an act detrimental to honor, the law itself regards it as an administrative and not a criminal offence, even though it creates a sense of moral discomfort.” So o
ur prime minister, Mario Monti, is wrong when he says that tax evaders are thieves: they are simply people who ought to feel moral discomfort.
But the friar I mentioned earlier didn’t trouble himself with such casuistic subtleties, and limited himself to saying that tax evasion and smuggling are not mortal sins because they are “only” against the laws of the state. His position seems to reflect something he had been taught as a child, before the Lateran Treaty, that the state was bad and that no notice should be taken of it. It seems something of these old ideas has survived in the Italian DNA.
2012
The holy experiment
Pope Francis, though a Jesuit, takes a Franciscan name, lives in Franciscan simplicity lacking only sandals and a cowl, chases cardinals who drive Mercedes-Benzes out of the temple, and goes alone to the island of Lampedusa to show solidarity with refugees fished out of the Mediterranean as though the draconian laws of the Italian state did not exist. Is he really the only person who can still be described as left wing by what he says and does? At first there were rumors about his excessive prudence toward Argentinean generals, and some recalled his opposition to liberation theologians, and that it wasn’t clear where he stood on abortion, on stem cells, on homosexuals, on whether a pope should go around doling out condoms to the poor. Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?
I think it’s a mistake to consider him an Argentinean Jesuit: he’s a Paraguayan Jesuit. It’s impossible for someone with his training not to have been influenced by the “holy experiment” of the Jesuits of Paraguay. What little people know about these Jesuits comes from the film The Mission, which condensed, with much license, a hundred and fifty years of history into two hours of entertainment.
In brief, the Spanish conquistadores had committed unspeakable massacres from Mexico to Peru, supported by clergy who claimed the Indios were bestial, orangutans to a man. Only one brave Dominican priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, was prepared to stand up against the cruelty of people like Cortés and Pizarro, showing the native people in quite another light. In the early seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries decided to acknowledge the rights of the natives—particularly the Guaraní, who lived in very primitive conditions—and organized them into “reductions,” which were independent, self-supporting communities. The Jesuits didn’t round them up to make them work for the colonizers, but they taught them to look after themselves, free from slavery, sharing all the commodities they produced. The structure of the villages and the methods of this “communism” remind us of Thomas More’s Utopia or Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, and Benedetto Croce writes of “so-called Campanellian communism,” but the Jesuits were inspired more by early Christian communities. They set up elected councils consisting only of natives, though the fathers administered justice, and they taught their subjects architecture, agriculture and sheep farming, music and the arts, reading and writing, and sometimes produced talented artists and writers. The Jesuits had established a strict paternalistic regime, not least because civilizing the Guaraní meant rescuing them from promiscuity, indolence, ritual drunkenness, and sometimes cannibalism. And so, as with every ideal city, we are all ready to admire their organizational perfection, but we wouldn’t want to live there.
Their rejection of slavery and the attacks of the bandeirantes, or slave hunters, led to the setting up of a popular militia, which bravely fought against the slave traders and colonialists. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits, who were seen as troublemakers and dangerous enemies of the state, were first banished from Spain and Portugal and then suppressed, bringing an end to the “holy experiment.”
Many Enlightenment thinkers attacked this theocratic government as the most monstrous and tyrannical regime the world had ever seen. But others, such as Ludovico Muratori, spoke of “voluntary communism of high religious inspiration,” while Montesquieu said that the Company of Jesus had begun to heal the wound of slavery, Gabriel de Mably compared the reductions to the government of Lycurgus of Sparta, and Paul Lafargue would later speak of the “first socialist state ever.”
Before attempting to interpret Pope Francis’s actions, we should bear in mind that four centuries have passed and that the notion of democratic freedom is now shared even by Catholic hardliners. The pope doesn’t go to Lampedusa to carry out holy or secular experiments, and it would be for the best if he got rid of the Vatican Bank. But it’s no bad thing, every now and then, to see the glimmer of history in what is happening today.
2013
Monotheisms and polytheisms
There is a threat of war in the air, no small local war but a conflict that could involve several continents. The threat now comes from a fundamentalist notion that seeks to Islamize the known world as far, it is said, as Rome, though no one has as yet threatened to take their camels to drink from the holy water stoops of St. Peter’s.
All of this leads to the thought that the great transcontinental threats always come from monotheistic religions. Greeks and Romans didn’t seek to conquer Persia or Carthage in order to impose their own gods. They had territorial and economic concerns, but from the religious point of view, as soon as they came across new gods in exotic countries, they welcomed them into their pantheon. You’re Hermes? Fine, I’ll call you Mercury and you can become one of us. Did the Phoenicians worship Astarte? Well, the Egyptians translated her into Isis, and for the Greeks she became Aphrodite or Venus. No one ever invaded any land in order to stamp out the cult of Astarte.
The first Christians were martyred not because they recognized the god of Israel—that was their own business—but because they denied the legitimacy of other gods.
No polytheism has ever instigated a large-scale war to impose its own gods. That doesn’t mean that polytheistic peoples haven’t fought wars, but these were tribal conflicts that had nothing to do with religion. The barbarians of the north invaded Europe, and the Mongols invaded the lands of Islam, but not to impose their gods—in fact, they soon converted to the local religions. It’s curious that the barbarians of the north, having converted to Christianity, and having established a Christian empire, then set off on crusades to force their god on Islamic peoples, even if in the end, monotheism for monotheism, it amounted to the same god.
The two monotheisms that have fought wars to impose one sole god have been Islam and Christianity. Among the wars of conquest I would include colonialism, which, economic interests aside, has always justified its conquests through the virtuous plan of Christianizing the conquered peoples, beginning with the Aztecs and the Incas, up to Italy’s own “civilizing” of Ethiopia in the 1930s, conveniently forgetting that the Ethiopians were already Christians.
Jewish monotheism is a case in point. By its nature, it has never proselytized, and the wars described in the Bible were intended to secure a land for the chosen people, not to convert other populations to Judaism. Nor have the Jewish people ever incorporated other cults and beliefs.
With all this I don’t want to suggest that it’s more civilized to believe in the Great Spirit of the Prairie or the gods of the Yoruba than in the Holy Trinity or the Only God of whom Muhammad is the prophet. All I’m saying is that no one has ever tried to conquer the world in the name of the Great Spirit or of one of the gods in the Brazilian Candomblé ceremonies—nor has the voodoo Baron Samedi sought to urge his followers beyond the narrow bounds of the Caribbean.
One could say that only a monotheistic belief enables the formation of large territorial areas, which then tend to expand. The Indian subcontinent has never sought to export its own divinities. The Chinese empire covered a vast area yet had no belief in a single entity that had created the world, and so far it has never sought to expand into Europe or America. Perhaps China is doing that now, but through economic means, not religion. It is engaged in acquiring industries and stocks in the West, regardless of whether people there believe in Jesus, or in Allah, or in Yahweh.
Perhaps we can find an equivalent to the classic monotheisms in secular ideolo
gies, such as Nazism, though its inspiration was pagan, and Soviet atheist Marxism. But with no military god to galvanize their followers, their war of conquest came to naught.
2014
A Good Education
Who gets cited most?
When we discuss the standards of Italian universities, the talk is about criteria used in other countries. One of these is to look at the number of times the works of a lecturer or candidate for a post have been cited in the academic press. Some institutions provide detailed figures, and this kind of check seems at first sight a good idea. But like all quantitative measures, it has its limits. It’s rather like the idea that has also been proposed, and sometimes applied, of establishing the efficiency of a university on the basis of the number of graduates. A university that churns out a lot of graduates gives the appearance of being efficient, but it’s easy to see the limitation of such statistics. You might have a very poor university that attracts many students by giving free credits and not being too strict about the quality of its theses, so a numbers criterion would then be of negative value. What about a university that has exacting standards and prefers to produce fewer, better graduates? A more reliable criterion, though also open to criticism, would be to compare the number of graduates with the number of students who enroll at the start of the course of study. A university that has only a hundred enrollees but produces fifty graduates would seem more efficient and exacting than another that has ten thousand enrollees and two thousand graduates.