giovedì, giugno 30, 2016

Riflessioni sulla Brexit – di Luigi Copertino

Riflessioni sulla Brexit – di Luigi Copertino:

Riflessioni sulla Brexit – di Luigi Copertino
In questi giorni sembra che in Europa si sia scatenata l’“apocalisse”. Così l’eurocrazia ha vissuto e sta vivendo la “Brexit”. Queste che seguono sono alcune riflessioni a sangue ancora caldo. Che propongo ai nostri lettori.
  1. L’Inghilterra – lo si sapeva – da secoli vive nella sua regale ed altezzosa solitudine “isolana”. Già Churchill ammoniva gli alleati che gli inglesi, messi alle strette della scelta tra il continente europeo e gli oceani, avrebbero sempre preferito gli aperti spazi oceanici. Sono un popolo di corsari e colonizzatori. E tuttavia l’Inghilterra non ha mai smesso di tenere d’occhio quanto accadeva sul suolo europeo pur guardando alle vicende continentali tenendosi a debita distanza. Ma non quando ha creduto che la sua indipendenza o egemonia fosse messa in pericolo da questo o quell’attore della scena europea. In tali casi essa, l’Inghilterra, non ha esitato ad intervenire. Lo ha fatto con Napoleone. Lo ha ripetuto per due volte nel XX secolo. Quando la Germania tra il 1914 ed il 1945 è stata sul punto di affermare la sua egemonia politica ed economica sul continente europeo, l’Inghilterra  non ha esitato a combatterla nelle guerre mondiali. Detto questo bisogna riconoscere che comunque, in occasione del Brexit, gli inglesi hanno dato agli altri europei una lezione di dignità ammirevole. Una lezione che ora sta agli altri, eurocrazia o meno, imitare. Questo non significa fare la Frexit, la Spagnexit o l’Italexit. Significa, invece, porre all’ordine del giorno la chiara volontà dei popoli per un’Europa diversa, vera, autentica, contro quella delle banche e non dominata dai  diktat tedeschi. Su Avvenire di ieri è apparsa una ottima intervista a Giulio Tremonti (di cui è uscito l’ultimo libro “Mundus furiosus”) nella quale l’ex ministro ripropone il ritorno al progetto originario, confederale e sussidiario. Un’Europa dove “sopra” si decidono le cose di necessaria importanza comune – difesa, moneta, politica estera, etc. – e dove “sotto”, ossia a livello di Stati e comunità infra-statuali varie, si decidono le cose di interesse non comune. In modo da smetterla con una eurocrazia che ci inonda di direttive sulla lunghezza dei cetrioli e sul latte da usare nei formaggi. In effetti, se ci si ragiona, il voto inglese non è stato  un voto contro la moneta unica perché l’Inghilterra non è mai entrata nell’eurozona ed ha conservato la sterlina. E’ stato un voto contro questa invadenza eurocratica e contro lo strapotere tedesco nell’UE.
  2. Il modello tecnocratico-tedesco che ha prevalso non corrisponde al progetto europeo originario (quello di De Gasperi, Schuman ed Adenauer) ma è sorto per una serie di circostanze storiche che hanno posto la Germania – senza la quale comunque non si può fare l’Europa – in una posizione di leadership, per via della sua innegabile forza economica. Ma il problema, non di oggi, della Germania sta nel fatto che essa, almeno a partire da Lutero culturalmente anti-romana, non è capace di vera leadership. Il principio guida della politica estera tedesca, ieri come oggi, rimane il “Deutsche über alles”. Comandare, imperare, significa innanzitutto aggregare i popoli intorno ad un comune progetto nel quale ciascuno di essi si senta parte protagonista e non colonia, vassallo, suddito della potenza altrui. Il modello storico della Germania non è asburgico ma guglielmino. La Germania non ha imparato né la lezione guglielmina né quella hitleriana e non ha ancora compreso che se si accetta di essere parte di una comunità di popoli è necessario prendere non solo i vantaggi ma anche gli svantaggi, ad iniziare, nel caso europeo, dal mettere in comune il debito (eurobond) onde fare muro, insieme, alla speculazione finanziaria transnazionale. Troppo facile dire, come dicono i tedeschi, “fate come noi” ossia tagliate la domanda interna e vivete di esportazioni: se così facessimo tutti in Europa chi poi, senza reddito a causa della contrazione interna, comprerebbe le merci altrui? Ciò che propone la Germania può funzionare solo in un assetto asimmetrico come è stato quello europeo fino alla crisi del 2009. Persino uno dei padri della scuola ordoliberale, alla quale si ispira la politica economica tedesca, Alfred Müller Arnack lo sosteneva: i Paesi con surplus – nell’eurozona attuale la Germania – devono rafforzare la domanda interna, ossia aumentare redditi e salari (non comprimerli), per agevolare le esportazioni dei partner in una reciprocità senza della quale non si va da nessuna parte.
  3. Esaminiamo, ora, il voto inglese avvertendo che i dati sul giovanilismo dei sostenitori del remain, come ricorderemo al punto 8), devono essere presi con prudenza. Ciò non toglie che, pur nei limiti della prudenza, non si possa ragionare sulle motivazioni elettorali dei giovani inglesi filo-Ue. Per la Brexit hanno votato i meno giovani e i ceti meno abbienti. Giovani e ricchi hanno votato per il remain. Questo vorrà pur dire qualcosa o no? I giovani, l’“erasmus generation”, avrebbero voluto il remain e si comprende. Essi sono nati nel mondo globale, non hanno conosciuto il mondo antico, sono stati educati al transfrontielarismo che, ahinoi, non è l’universalismo romano-cristiano. Gli addottorati tra di essi aspirano a lavorare nella City o nella varie sue dependance nazionali e guardano al mondo come ad una rete affaristica e di flussi finanziari. I meno addottorati aspirano a girare l’Europa per fare i pizzaioli o gli idraulici. L’altra sera in tv, in una trasmissione di commento alla Brexit, da Londra, intervistati seduti allo stesso tavolo, c’erano due giovani italiani: uno studente modello della London School of Economics, tutto inappuntabile – occhiali, giacca, cravatta, barba corta e curatissima (dava un senso di tristezza da “bravo ragazzo”: un giovane perfettamente integrato nel santuario del potere finanziario mondiale e senza alcuna ansia o velleità di un mondo diverso!) – ed una giovane proveniente dal Molise che da qualche anno fa la barista nella capitale inglese. Ecco: questo è il volto duale del nuovo mondo che i giovani difendono, un mondo dove le lacerazioni di classe tornano a farsi evidenti e dirompenti. Entrambi i giovani intervistati temevano che, a conseguenza della Brexit, i loro progetti di vita possano andare in fumo. Mi veniva da dire loro: cari miei ragazzi, cosa volete? Questo è il mondo, liquido, che difendete. Ora tocca a voi subirne le conseguenze. Prima di voi le hanno subite tanti lavoratori gettati via come inutili arnesi perché le aziende delocalizzavano. Quanti pianti sui poveri dipendenti della City che perderanno il posto a causa della delocalizzazione delle banche d’affari che abbandoneranno Londra e quanti pianti sui poveri dipendenti inglesi dell’UE che potrebbero trovarsi in mezzo ad una strada. Ma quando in mezzo ad una strada si sono ritrovati operai ed impiegati delle industrie europee, quando David Cameron ha licenziato 700.000 dipendenti pubblici inglesi, quando la Grecia è stata costretta dalla Troika, per salvare le banche tedesche e francesi, a licenziare migliaia di statali ed a svendere le sue aziende, con conseguente disoccupazione di massa, e persino il porto del Pireo, nessuno ha innalzato canti funebri in eurovisione!!! Allora ben venga che anche gli agenti di borsa e i funzionari europei provino un po’ delle “gioie” della globalizzazione eurocratica. Se si guarda la mappa del voto inglese tutta l’Inghilterra, ad eccezione della zona di Londra, ha votato per la Brexit. Si tratta dell’Inghilterra popolare, ex operaia, quella dei distretti industriali distrutti dalla rivoluzione neoliberista della Thatcher e mai più tornati a produrre dato che l’Inghilterra, a partire dagli anni ’80, diventò la nazione europea all’avanguardia nell’economia dei servizi, soprattutto quelli finanziari, e nella deindustrializzazione. Esattamente come due secoli, nella seconda metà del XVIII secolo, fu la prima nazione all’avanguardia nella Rivoluzione Industriale. Le regioni inglesi che hanno votato per la Brexit sono da sempre a maggioranza laburista. Ma il partito laburista si era dichiarato favorevole al “remain”. Questo significa che la base del Labour non ha seguito le indicazioni dei vertici del partito, nonostante che a capo di esso ci sia un radicale come Corbin e non un trasformista come Blair. E’ un po’ come se l’Emilia Romagna, l’Umbria e la Toscana votassero, in Italia, contro le indicazioni del PD, ex PCI. Gli inglesi delle Midlands ex operaie hanno votato seguendo le indicazioni dell’Ukip di Nigel Farage, insieme a conservatori nazionalisti e socialisti nazionali. Non siamo ancora alla riedizione della “Union British Fascist” del laburista sir Oswald Mosley ma poco ci manca. Questo spostamento dei ceti popolari verso i movimenti populisti è un fenomeno che si registra in tutt’Europa (se si osserva bene anche negli Stati Uniti). In Francia il successo del Front National della Le Pen ha origine nelle periferie operaie e nei quartieri piccolo borghesi. Sono i ceti popolari ed i ceti medi, quelli travolti dalla globalizzazione e dalla crisi, a decretare il loro “no” all’UE vista come strada verso la globalizzazione ossia verso la mondializzazione del capitalismo che ha rimesso drammaticamente in discussione le loro conquiste sociali ed il loro status sociale. L’UE modello globalizzazione – nonostante tutto il cianciare di “economia sociale di mercato” e di “modello renano” –  si è ampiamente uniformata al dualismo sociale, ben descritto da Picketty, ed ha fatto della estrema polarizzazione tra il vertice e la base della società un portato della “legge di natura”, inevitabilmente riaprendo antichi conflitti anche razziali dato che la xenofobia ha le sue cause nella paura che lo straniero ci porti via il poco lavoro rimasto e quel poco di benessere che ancora possiamo godere. Marx è stato cattivo profeta perché non sono stati i proletari di tutto il mondo ad unirsi ma i capitalisti transnazionali mentre il lavoro è rimasto stretto all’interno degli Stati nazionali con la sola possibilità dell’emigrazione per fare concorrenza agli altri lavoratori autoctoni. Tuttavia è mia impressione che prima o poi il vecchio Marx tornerà culturalmente di moda. Il Marx che legge hegelianamente la storia come scontro escatologico tra due sole classi sociali. E poco importa se si tratta di una lettura inattendibile e viziata filosoficamente perché essa ha già dimostrato di essere capace di mobilitare forze mitopoietiche, attualmente soltanto dormienti ma che possono essere risvegliate non appena se ne presenti l’occasione. Il marxismo era stato sconfitto dalle vicende storiche del XX secolo laddove le società capitaliste erano state costrette, da forze culturali e politiche di vario genere, cattoliche, fasciste, socialiste, a venire a patti con le classi meno abbienti riconoscendo i loro diritti e trasformando gli Stati nazionali in Stati sociali per l’avanzamento sociale del ceto medio il quale si trascinava dietro quello operaio. L’ottocentesca profezia marxiana sulla “fine (comunista) della storia” fu smentita, nel secolo che abbiamo alle spalle, ma proprio il capitalismo, libero dalle sue catene – esattamente come Satana, secondo alcune rivelazioni private, sarebbe stato liberato nei nostri anni per tentare di distruggere la Chiesa – le sta ridando credibilità sul piano globale. Quel che invece più addolora è che i cattolici, a differenza di quanto essi e la Chiesa seppero fare nella denuncia e nel sostegno alla riforma sociale degli Stati nell’epoca nella quale Marx scriveva, sono oggi del tutto, o quasi, silenti su questi problemi. L’aver lavato il loro bucato nel milieu “teo” e “neo” conservatore li ha privati di ogni capacità di incidenza e analisi che non sia quella, certo anch’essa importante, anzi fondamentale, dei “principi non negoziabili”. Ma questi principi non potranno mai essere preservati se avulsi dalla difesa sociale dei ceti meno abbienti e da quella identitaria dei popoli in un rinnovato universalismo cristiano-sociale.
  4. Scozia: è emblematico l’atteggiamento scozzese di fronte alla prospettiva della Brexit. Certamente l’identitarismo scozzese, come quello catalano, è anch’esso un segno di rivolta contro la globalizzazione. Ma altrettanto certamente gli scozzesi guardano troppo al vicino di casa, da cui vorrebbero anche giustamente, va detto, liberarsi. Tuttavia sembrano affetti da evidente strabismo nei confronti dell’UE. Quando la Scozia votò sull’indipendenza dall’Inghilterra, poco più di un anno fa – in quell’occasione lo stesso media system che oggi incensa la Scozia il cui parlamento vorrebbe bloccare la Brexit era invece ferocissimo contro l’indipendentismo in kilt –, separarsi da Londra significava separarsi anche dalla City. Ora però che senso ha avuto votare per il remain insieme alla City? E che senso ha chiedere di rimanere nell’UE, in questa UE, per separarsi da una Inghilterra – quella descritta al precedente punto 3) – per farsi stritolare dal Leviatano di Bruxelles e Francoforte? Le ragioni identitarie, proprio perché sono importanti, dovrebbero essere meglio calibrate in certe circostanze. Se la Scozia vuol fare bene a sé stessa non deve chiedere sic et simpliciter di rimanere nell’UE ma condizionare la sua eventuale permanenza alla completa rivisitazione di tutta l’architettura europea attuale.
  5. Giorgio Napolitano, Mario Monti, Martin Schulz ed altri hanno finalmente gettato la maschera affermando che i popoli non devono essere chiamati a votare su certi temi e che devono essere guidati da consapevoli élite. Essi sono esponenti di quella cerchia che Tremonti, non da oggi, definisce degli “illuminati”. E’ in effetti un progetto giacobino e tecnocratico quello di prescindere dalla volontà popolare dacché il popolo è sempre per definizione ignorante, “sanfedista”, e quindi deve essere educato da minoranza attive, le sole che contano nella storia. Quando vi parlano dell’Europa come tutrice della democrazia, dell’Europa nata dal manifesto di Ventotene contro il nazifascismo, pensate a Napolitano, Monti e Schulz.
  6. Il progetto eurocratico – ci dicono e ci hanno mediaticamente ripetuto accorati durante questo ultimo week end – ha garantito 70 anni di pace in Europa mettendo la sordina alle sovranità nazionali sempre foriere di guerre, le guerre che negli ultimi due secoli hanno insanguinato l’Europa. Questo non è pienamente vero. Non è vero che la sovranità degli Stati porti necessariamente alla guerra. Tra il XVI ed il XVIII secolo, l’Europa aveva inventato, per mettere fine alle guerre di religione, un sistema giuridico-politico, lo jus publicum europaeum, che garantiva ciascuno degli attori sulla scena europea. Le guerre, limitate e controllate e soprattutto non di massa, intervenivano per brevi periodi al solo scopo di regolare questioni di confine o per annettere questa o quella provincia, mentre le alleanze matrimoniali tra le casate regnanti e la diplomazia spesso evitavano il conflitto. Nessuno Stato vincitore pretendeva l’annientamento dell’avversario. E’ stato a partire da quelle napoleoniche che la guerra è diventata ideologica e l’avversario divenne “nemico metafisico”, l’incarnazione del “male assoluto”, con il quale non è possibile trattare o venire a patti. Bisogna solo annientarlo, umiliarlo. Tutto questo ci è stato magistralmente spiegato da Carl Schmitt ne “Il Nomos della Terra”. Quindi non è vero che per fare l’Europa è necessario abbattere Stati o comunità minori. L’errore di Altiero Spinelli è stato proprio questo: non aver compreso che le guerre del XIX e del XX secolo non erano guerre tra Stati ma guerre ideologiche con tutta la loro carica di pericoloso millenarismo. Si illudono, poi, coloro che, come molti cattolici, credono che la fine degli Stati riapra automaticamente ad una realtà comunitaria e sussidiaria restituendoci sic et simpliciter l’assetto organicista dell’antica Cristianità. Il postmoderno è un nuovo universalismo molto diverso da quello romano-cristiano, fondato su altre prospettive che non quelle spirituali del medioevo.
  7. Consentitemi, a questo punto, anche una nota confessionale. Questa che ha fallito è l’Europa che ha rifiutato di dirsi di “radici cristiane” rispedendo, in modo oltretutto poco garbato, al mittente, ossia a Giovanni Paolo II, la proposta. Non mi meraviglia, perché credo alla Giustizia di Dio, se essa ora è sull’orlo della disgregazione.
  8. Aggiungo alle mie le ottime riflessioni di una caro amico, il magistrato e storico Francesco Mario Agnoli, che mi ha fatto pervenire via mail in una discussione tra alcuni amici in merito alla Brexit. Ecco dunque cosa ci dice Agnoli paventando la non peregrina possibilità che l’eurocrazia riesca a mettere, alla fine, la sordina alla volontà popolare: «Prendo spunto da un particolare in apparenza secondario. I risultati del referendum Brexit, dopo una nottata di exit-polls a favore del “Remain” (è successo lo stesso in Spagna. dove ha vinto il Ppe di Rajoi nonostante un diluvio di exit-polls favorevoli ai Podemos di Iglesias), si sono concretizzati verso le sei di mattina del 24 giugno. Già nel pomeriggio di quello stesso giorno i telegiornali di tutta Europa (seguiti il giorno dopo dalla carta stampata, appena ripresasi dalla ridicola batosta dei titoli e dei commenti tutti sbagliati del 24 mattina) hanno informato i telespettatori delle caratteristiche generazionali, sociali e culturali degli elettori del “Leave” e di quelli del “Remain”. L’individuazione dei flussi elettorali è un’arte difficile. Gli analisti del voto nelle elezioni politiche e amministrative dei singoli paesi, pur disponendo di numerosi dati di confronto con i precedenti, consapevoli del rischio di fare la stessa figuraccia dei sondaggisti, procedono con i piedi di piombo e di solito aspettano almeno tre o quattro giorni – a volte più – prima di rendere noti i loro risultati. Nel caso della Brexit, pur in assenza di raffronti specifici, sono bastate poche ore per sapere con assoluta certezza che gli elettori favorevoli al “Remain” rappresentano una larga maggioranza fra i giovani, fra i possessori di una laurea, i ceti metropolitani più illuminati, mentre al “Leave” rimangono gli operai disoccupati delle Midlands, gli allevatori di porci (culturalmente molto inferiori agli allevatori di pecore delle Highlands) e gli anziani di ogni categoria (tanto più percentualmente numerosi quanto più avanzata è la classe di età). In realtà l’unico dato certo (ma in Italia pressoché il solo a darne notizia, forse in chiave antirenziana, è stato l’ex presidente del consiglio Enrico Letta) è la scarsa partecipazione al voto degli elettori fra i 18 e 24 anni (36%) e quella altissima degli over 65 (83%). Unica deduzione logica: ai più giovani (la famosa generazione Erasmus) interessano assai poco tanto l’Inghilterra quanto l’Ue, mentre agli anziani interessa molto l’Inghilterra e poco l’Ue, per la quale provano insofferenza ed avversione. Forse ribrezzo. Chi ha amici in Inghilterra (che non lavorano alla City) viene informato di un prevalente clima di soddisfazione e addirittura di euforia nonostante le cattive notizie dal modo della finanza, mentre chi deve accontentarsi dei notiziari televisivi riceve l’immagine di un paese rintronato e in lutto. La notizia più frequentemente ripetuta dalle nostre tv è che tre milioni di elettori inglesi hanno sottoscritto via internet su un sito del governo una proposta di legge per rifare il referendum cambiandone le regole. Il che è come dire che circa un quinto degli elettori che hanno votato per “Remain” (16.141.241) ha un così scarso senso, non solo della democrazia, ma delle regole stesse dello Stato di diritto da ritenere corretto e auspicabile l’annullamento della volontà popolare attraverso l’introduzione di leggi con effetto retroattivo. All’incirca come se duecentomila elettori del candidato piddino Giacchetti chiedessero di rifare le elezioni a Roma perché al ballottaggio la partecipazione è stata scarsa. In ogni caso a uscirne malconci sono i referendum e la democrazia diretta. In Italia, telegiornali e talkshow si sono improvvisamente riempiti di politici, giornalisti, intellettuali, cattedratici tutti impegnatissimi a spiegare che le decisioni davvero importanti non vanno lasciate ai popoli (dove inevitabilmente prevalgono bifolchi e arteriosclerotici), ma riservate a chi se n’intende, personaggi indiscussi e indiscutibili come Napolitano, Monti, Schulz. Come detto, è questa una mera elencazione di quotidiane volgarità politiche sicché non vanno dimenticate le singolari giravolte del Movimento 5 stelle tese a rimediare a una gaffe di Grillo, che, ingannato come tanti altri dagli exit-polls della notte di passione, aveva tentato di riposizionarsi pro-remain. Con qualche imbarazzo il Direttorio ha accantonato la regola fondamentale “una testa, un voto” e dimenticato che al parlamento europeo i pentastellati fanno ancora gruppo con gli indipendentisti di Nigel Farage. Un giro di valzer che ha valso a Grillo la riabilitazione televisiva appena un gradino più in basso di quella concessa alla premier scozzese, Nicola Sturgeon. Quest’ultima ha ben meritato dall’Europa sia con l’attribuire al parlamento della Scozia l’inedito potere di bloccare con un proprio voto la Brexit, sia col riproporre, nella sua qualità di leader dell’Indipendent Scottish Party, il referendum per la “Scotthexit” dall’Inghilterra, bocciato poco più di un anno fa. Adesso raccoglie applausi allora l’iniziativa del suo predecessore era stata demonizzata in tutta Europa e le supreme autorità di Bruxelles avevano ammonito gli scozzesi che in caso di vittoria erano irreparabilmente fuori. Salendo di un piano, è forte il sospetto che la partita non sia affatto chiusa e che a Bruxelles si mediti la rivincita. Al pari di quella euro-asiatica l’Unione Sovietica Europea non rinuncia facilmente alle sue province. A differenza di quanto fecero Nikita Chruscev e Leonid Breznev gli euroburocrati non possono inviare i carri armati a rimettere in riga i riottosi, ma non sarebbe la prima volta che fanno ripetere un referendum con risultato a loro sgradito o che non ne tengono conto (basta ricordare i casi di Irlanda, Francia e Olanda). Senza dubbio questa volta la cosa è più seria e la strada irta di ostacoli perché è dubbio l’assenso del successore di Cameron al governo dalla perfida Albione, ma si tratta di guadagnare tempo e intanto di preparare il terreno, come si è già cominciato a fare con l’unanime aiuto dei mass-media e dei “mercati”, che fanno precipitare la sterlina. Quanto al tempo, ce n’è in abbondanza, dal momento che il premier britannico David Cameron, che deve farsi perdonare l’indizione del referendum, si è dimesso, ma con effetto ritardato a tre mesi, e ha già dichiarato che lascerà al suo successore (ancora da designare) il compito di presentare a Bruxelles la decisione/richiesta di abbandono. Quanto al resto la linea è dettata da Angela Merkel. La Cancelliera, calmati i bollenti spiriti di Renzi e Hollande, fautori di un taglio rapido per ragioni loro (probabilmente la speranza di essere elettoralmente avvantaggiati, come è accaduto in Spagna a Rajoi, dal contraccolpo), ha detto che non c’è fretta. Soprattutto ha precisato che, pur essendo verosimile che il governo inglese ne tenga conto, si è trattato soltanto di un referendum consultivo, quindi di una semplice indicazione, come tale non vincolante, degli elettori inglesi al loro governo. In ogni caso – ha ribadito – occorre una lunga trattativa fra il governo britannico e Bruxelles e nel frattempo “fino a che l’accordo non viene definito la Gran Bretagna resta membro a pieno titolo della Ue con tutti i diritti e i doveri”. Insomma niente esclude che fra due o tre anni i vincitori di oggi si ritrovino col cerino spento fra le dita e si accorgano che nulla è cambiato. In realtà gli altri partiti europei fautori dell’exit dei loro paesi ne sono consapevoli e, come Renzi e Hollande all’inizio prima di venire adeguatamente istruiti, ma per opposte ragioni, vorrebbero bruciare i tempi e promuovere propri referendum o, in via preparatoria, crisi di governo ed elezioni politiche a tamburo battente. Non gli verrà concesso».
  9. Non dobbiamo, tuttavia, alzare canti funebri se questa UE dovesse ulteriormente sgretolarsi ma sicuramente dobbiamo, nel nostro piccolo, lavorare per lasciare ai nostri nipoti almeno l’eredità culturale di un’altra Europa. Quella tradizionale, quella vera. Il resto è nelle mani dell’Eterno.
                                                                                  Luigi Copertino
L'articolo Riflessioni sulla Brexit – di Luigi Copertino è tratto da Blondet & Friends, che mette a disposizione gratuitamente gli articoli di Maurizio Blondet assieme ai suoi consigli di lettura.

mercoledì, giugno 29, 2016

Bonelli: un video per festeggiare i 25 anni di Nathan Never

Bonelli: un video per festeggiare i 25 anni di Nathan Never:



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Antonio Serra racconta in un video i 25 anni di vita editoriale del primo titolo di fantascienza della Bonelli: Nathan Never!

The post Bonelli: un video per festeggiare i 25 anni di Nathan Never appeared first on BadComics.it.

mercoledì, giugno 15, 2016

Mia figlia, una piccola apocalisse,

Mia figlia, una piccola apocalisse,

Di Raffaele Alberto Ventura


Genitori moderni: intellettuale trentenne smette di inseguire i sogni di gloria e decide di diventare padre. La carriera è a rischio, ma non c'è da avere paura

Mano a mano che Dalia cresceva nel ventre di sua madre, le cose che fino ad allora mi erano sembrate importanti hanno iniziato a esserlo sempre meno. Finalmente! Finalmente un’occasione, un pretesto, una ragione solidissima per mandare tutto a fare in culo: i sogni di gloria fuori tempo massimo, i passatempi intellettuali spacciati per incarichi di massima importanza, le vane distrazioni per scampare al vuoto dell’esistenza, insomma l’intero edificio dei valori del nostro ceto medio disagiato. Molti di noi dividono la loro vita tra il lavoro “vero” e l’esercizio di una vocazione intellettuale, artistica, sportiva o imprenditoriale; ma cosa succede quando nelle nostre vite irrompe un evento che mette in crisi questo equilibrio precario? Ci costringe a mettere ordine tra le nostre priorità. Era questa una delle ragioni che mi aveva convinto a pianificare il grande passo, cioè a diventare padre: una certa intuizione che fosse giunto il momento di cacciarmi nei guai.

Dalia è nata con un po’ di anticipo, pesa meno di tre chili e non assomiglia assolutamente a un guaio. Come potrebbe? No, di fatto come tutti i bambini è un adorabile fagottino con le fattezze di Winston Churchill. Sua madre riposa in ospedale dopo una performance straordinaria mentre a me — perché è giusto spartirsi il lavoro — non resta altro che riflettere su come cambierà la nostra vita. Ah, già, e devo anche montare la culla. Chi è già stato genitore promette gioia sconfinata e tanta fatica, ma curiosamente il discorso resta sempre vago, a metà tra il biglietto d’auguri prestampato (“goditi questi momenti magici”) e la descrizione di un’esperienza allucinogena. All’osservatore ragionevole il mito della genitorialità sembra nascondere una realtà più prosaica, da compensare con un sovrappiù di pathos. Ideologia pura, certamente, ma in fondo cosa non lo è? Forse la nascita di Dalia segna l’inizio di un’allucinazione, va bene, ma è anche la fine di un’altra.

A maggio IL dedicava la sua cover story ai “genitori moderni” e Francesco Pacifico raccontava come, superati i trent’anni, uomini e donne (soprattutto le donne) subiscono fortissime pressioni sociali per spingerli a riprodursi. Eppure nella mia esperienza ho soprattutto subito fortissime pressioni per spingermi a non riprodurmi — non riprodurmi prima di essere maggiorenne, non riprodurmi prima di avere un lavoro, non riprodurmi nemmeno adesso che ho trentadue anni perché questo avrebbe impedito di realizzare le mie aspirazioni. Il verdetto era già scritto: avrei fatto la fine di Jude l’Oscuro, l’eroe tragico di Thomas Hardy che voleva fare carriera da letterato e muore in miseria dopo un paio di matrimoni sbagliati. Non che io tenessi particolarmente a diventare padre a sedici o ventisei anni, ma a un certo punto tutta questa insistenza ha iniziato a sembrarmi un po’ sospetta. Era davvero tanto importante quella vita che stavo proteggendo dalla minaccia di un figlio? Non avere figli ha sicuramente i suoi vantaggi — e d’altronde la nostra società di tutto ha bisogno tranne che di figli disperati di figli rovinati di borghesi rimbambiti — ma questo gesto di rimandare la riproduzione è rivelatore del modo in cui concepiamo il presente: come attesa di un improbabile futuro, spot pubblicitario per una vita che non esiste.

Continua qui.

da IL magazine http://24ilmagazine.ilsole24ore.com/2016/06/mia-figlia-piccola-apocalisse/

martedì, giugno 14, 2016

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part I: Nietzsche

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part I: Nietzsche:



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Atheism, like theism, raises both theoretical and practical questions.  Why should we think it true?  And what would be the consequences if it were true?  When criticizing New Atheist writers, I have tended to emphasize the deficiencies of their responses to questions of the first, theoretical sort -- the feebleness of their objections to the central theistic arguments, their ignorance of what the most important religious thinkers have actually said, and so forth.  But no less characteristic of the New Atheism is the shallowness of its treatment of the second, practical sort of question.
 

The mentality is summed up perfectly in the notorious “Atheist Bus Campaign” of 2009 and its preposterous slogan: “There's probably no god.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  As if atheism promised only sweetness and light.  As if the vast majority of human beings would not find the implications of atheism -- that human existence has no purpose, that there is no postmortem reward to counterbalance the sufferings of this life, nor any hope for seeing dead loved ones again, etc. -- far more depressing than any purported deficiencies in traditional religious belief.  And as if the metaphysical assumptions underlying atheism would not cast into doubt the liberal and egalitarian values upheld by most atheists no less than the more traditional moral codes of the world religions. 



One of the hallmarks of the Old Atheism is that it was less inclined toward such naïveté.  You won’t find banalities like “stop worrying and enjoy your life” in writers like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Freud, or Marx.  Such thinkers were in general more sensitive to the unpleasant implications of atheism, and to the challenge atheism and its metaphysical presuppositions pose to the hopes and ideals even of many atheists themselves.


Not that this attitude is entirely dead.  Woody Allen has been giving expression to it for much of his career (Crimes and Misdemeanors being the best example, Whatever Worksbeing by far the worst).  In recent philosophy, Alex Rosenberg has certainly been willing to draw out from atheism some pretty chilling consequences.  David Stove’s atheism was even more consistently pessimistic, and unencumbered by Rosenberg’s capricious desperation to make his own atheistic pessimism as palatable as possible to egalitarian liberals.  New Atheists, however, seem in general more inclined toward delusional happy-talk of the kind indulged in by Richard Dawkins when he opined that a world without religion could be “paradise on earth… a world ruled by enlightened rationality… a much better chance of no more war… less hatred… less waste of time.” 


So let’s take a look, in this post and future ones, at atheism of the grittier old time sort.  We’ll start with Nietzsche, that grandest of Old Atheists and the great hero of my own atheist years.  My favorite Nietzsche line back in the day was this:


A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions! (Cited in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 354)


You might say that the reason I’m no longer an atheist is that I took Nietzsche’s advice seriously.  Of course, your mileage may vary.  But what might a New Atheist with the courage for an attack on his own convictions yet learn, even short of giving up his atheism?


The death of God


Nietzsche famously maintained “that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable” and that this promised “a new dawn” and was thus a cause for “happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement” (The Gay Science, Kaufmann translation, pp. 279-80).  But he was not so stupid as to think that “paradise on earth,” “a much better chance of no more war,” and other such Dawkinsian fantasies would be the immediate sequel.  On the contrary, he foresaw that “shadows… must soon envelop Europe,” that a “sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm… is now impending,” indeed a “monstrous logic of terror… an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth” (p. 279).


Likewise, the protagonist of Nietzsche’s famous parable of the madman says:


“Whither is God? … I will tell you.  We have killed him -- you and I.  All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this?  How could we drink up the sea?  Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?  What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?  Whither is it moving now?  Whither are we moving?  Away from all suns?  Are we not plunging continually?  Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?  Is there still any up or down?  Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?  Do we not feel the breath of empty space?  Has it not become colder?  Is not night continually closing in on us? … God is dead. God remains dead.  And we have killed him.


“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?  What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?  What water is there for us to clean ourselves?  What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?  Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?...”  (The Gay Science, p. 181)


Why all the melodrama, if the “death of God” amounts (as the New Atheist would have you believe) to nothing more momentous than (say) a child’s coming to realize that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster don’t really exist?


The answer is that, as Nietzsche understood more profoundly than even many religious believers do, a religion is not merely a set of metaphysical propositions but embodies a culture’s highest values and thus a sense of its own worth:


A people that still believes in itself retains its own god.  In him it reveres the conditions which let it prevail, its virtues: it projects its pleasure in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks.  Whoever is rich wants to give of his riches; a proud people needs a god: it wants to sacrifice.  Under such conditions, religion is a form of thankfulness.  Being thankful for himself, man needs a god.  (The Antichrist, section 16, Kaufmann translation)


Consequently, a culture that doubts its religion comes to doubt itself and its own legitimacy. And a culture that repudiates that religion is, in effect, committing a kind of cultural suicide.  The moral and social order to which the religion gave rise cannot survive its disappearance.  The trouble, in Nietzsche’s view, is that too few see what this entails:


Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event [the death of God] really means -- and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality.  (The Gay Science, p. 279)


The New Atheist, upon hearing this, may shrug, thinking only of the heady prospect of guilt-free porn surfing, transvestite bathroom access, rectal coitus, and the other strange obsessions of the modern liberal mind.  But Nietzsche had somewhat higher ends in view.  By “the whole of our European morality,” he was not talking merely or even primarily about the rules of traditional sexual ethics against which the modern liberal has such a weird animus (and which are not unique to Christianity or Europe in any event).  He was talking about everything that has counted as morality in European culture, including the values modern egalitarian liberals still prize, and which Kant, Mill, and other modern ethicists of whom Nietzsche is harshly critical tried to give a secular foundation.  Since Nietzsche despised that morality, he thought its disappearance was a good thing and opened the door to something better.  But he knew that the transition would be ugly, that the path to a new order was uncharted, and that the precise nature of the destination was unclear.  Hence:


The time has come when we have to payfor having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the center of gravity by virtue of which we lived; we are lost for a while.  (The Will to Power 30, Kaufmann and Hollingdale translation.  The numbers cited here and later are section numbers, unless otherwise indicated.)


Against equality


What Nietzsche most hated, and the demise of which he most looked forward to, was the egalitarianism that Christianity had introduced into Western civilization.  As he writes in The Will to Power:


The “Christian ideal”: … attempt to make the virtues through which happiness is possible for the lowliest into the standard ideal of all values… (185)


Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endures only through human sacrifice -- All souls become “equal” before God: but this is precisely the most dangerous of all possible evaluations!  If one regards individuals as equal, one calls the species into question, one encourages a way of life that leads to the ruin of the species: Christianity is the counterprinciple to the principle of selection


This universal love of men is in practice the preference for the suffering, underprivileged, degenerate: it has in fact lowered and weakened the strength, the responsibility, the lofty duty to sacrifice men.  (246)


What is it we combat in Christianity?  That it wants to break the strong… (252)


And in The Antichrist Nietzsche famously says:


What is good?  Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.


What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.


What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.


Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtu, virtue that is moraline-free).


The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance.


What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity. (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 570)


The “equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this pretext for the rancor of all the base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society -- is Christian dynamite. (p. 655)


End quote.  Now, about this notion of the equal worth of all human beings, Nietzsche makes two main points.  First, it loses all intellectual foundation with the demise of Christianity.  He writes, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:


[T]hus blinks the mob -- “there are no higher men, we are all equal, man is man; before God we are all equal.”


Before God!  But now this god has died.  And before the mob we do not want to be equal.  (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 398)


And in Twilight of the Idols:


When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet.  This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together.  By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands… Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent… it stands and falls with faith in God. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 515-16)


This collapse of any reason to believe in the basic moral equality of all human beings is among the repercussions of the “death” of the Christian God that Nietzsche thinks European civilization has yet to face up to.  Modern secular moralists presuppose this egalitarianism but they have no rational grounds for doing so.  It is merely a prejudice they have inherited and refuse to question despite their rejection of its traditional basis:


[U]tilitarianism (socialism, democracy) criticizes the origin of moral evaluations, but it believes them just as much as the Christian does.  (Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!…) (The Will to Power 253)


For Nietzsche, when modern intellectuals “believe that they know ‘intuitively’ what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality,” this is a delusion, and in fact reflects nothing more than the historical “effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and… the strength and depth of this dominion” even if “the origin of [the] morality has been forgotten” (Twilight of the Idols, p. 516).


Think of the contemporary secular academic moral philosopher who appeals to our “intuitions,” the Rawlsian method of bringing moral theory and our “considered convictions” into “reflective equilibrium,” the liberal activist who glibly appeals to the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as if it were something other than a set of sheer assertions floating in midair, and so forth.  All of this, for Nietzsche, would merely confirm his judgment that secular egalitarianism is nothing more than a bundle of sentiments inherited from Christianity and incapable of being given a new rational foundation.  (“The democraticmovement,” says Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, “is the heir of the Christian movement” (Kaufmann translation, p. 116).  Cf. my argument to the effect that liberalism is essentially a Christian heresy.) 


The second main point Nietzsche makes about moral egalitarianism is that there is, in his view, not only no reason to accept it but also positive reason to rejectit.  For one thing, he would apply his famous hermeneutics of suspicion and method of genealogical critique to egalitarianism no less than to religious belief.  If there is no good positive reason to accept some view but also reason to think that the true source of its appeal is in some way disreputable, then that, in Nietzsche’s view, is good reason to reject it.  And there is such a source in the case of egalitarian moral views: They reflect, in Nietzsche’s opinion, nothing more than the interest that weaklings, mediocrities, and failures of every kind have in bringing down or hamstringing those whose power, excellence, and success they resent and envy.  Hence, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has Zarathustra say:


Thus I speak to you in a parable -- you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality.  To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful.  But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights…


“What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge” -- thus [the tarantulas] speak to each other.  “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not” -- thus do the tarantula-hearts vow.  “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”


You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.  Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy -- perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers -- erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge…


Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! … [W]hen they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had -- power…


[P] reachers of equality and tarantulas… are sitting in their holes, these poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life, they speak in favor of life, but only because they wish to hurt.  They wish to hurt those who now have power…


I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality.  For, to me justice speaks thus: “Men are not equal.”  Nor shall they become equal!...


On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future, and ever more war and inequality shall divide them… Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low… (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 211-13)


Here Nietzsche deploys his famous distinction between “slave moralities” and “master moralities.”  A slave morality begins with its adherents’ sense of their own weakness, mediocrity, and lowliness and aims to stigmatize as “evil” anything that contrasts with this, viz. the characteristic traits of those who are powerful, excellent, or noble.  A master morality begins with its adherents’ sense of their own strength, excellence, and nobility, and judges as “bad” whatever fails to live up to that standard.  Whereas master moralities are essentially about affirming the characteristics of their adherents, slave moralities are essentially about negating the characteristics of their adherents’ opponents. 


Nietzsche despises slave moralities but respects master moralities, and thus while be famously advocates going “beyond good and evil,” he also makes it clear that he does not necessarily want to go beyond good and bad.  It is the resentment and envy he takes to underlie a slave morality’s use of the epithet “evil” that he criticizes, not the confidence and gratitude that he takes to underlie a master morality’s judgment about what is “bad.”  You might say that Nietzsche sees himself as in the business of “speaking truth to powerlessness,” unmasking the ugly motives of those who hide behind the purportedly lofty sentiments of slave morality.   To the egalitarian, he says: Don’t try to fool yourself into thinking that you are motivated by “justice.”  In reality you are simply a loser, a misfit, a failure who cannot bear the excellence and success of others and for that reason want to tear them down, while enshrouding this revenge-seeking behind a moralizing smokescreen.


Nietzsche thinks that slave moralities are not only rationally unjustified and reflect base motives; he thinks they are harmful.  In emphasizing pity for the weak, they seek to eliminate suffering, but in doing so thereby eliminate the preconditions for excellence and only make human beings weaker, softer, and ignoble.  To the slave moralist he says:


You want, if possible -- and there is no more insane “if possible” -- to abolish suffering... Well-being as you understand it -- that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible -- that makes his destruction desirable.


The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?  (Beyond Good and Evil 225)


And in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra says:


But if you have a suffering friend, be a resting place for his suffering, but a hard bed as it were, a field cot: thus you will profit him best…


Thus be warned of pity… [A]ll great love is even above all its pity; for it still wants to create the beloved…


But all creators are hard.  (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 202)


In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche sees the logic of the slave moralist’s obsession with pity for those who suffer playing out in nineteenth-century European politics:


Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts -- the imperative of herd timidity: “we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!”  Some day -- throughout Europe, the will and way to this day is now called “progress.” (201)


We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value


The over-all degeneration of man down to what today appears to the socialist dolts and flatheads as their “man of the future”-- as their ideal -- this [is a] degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of the “free society”), this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims… (203)


The end result of these trends is the undermining of the very preconditions of social order, including a “mistrust of punitive justice (as if it were a violation of those who are weaker…)” (202).  He elaborates as follows:


There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it.  “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.”  With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. (201)


Now, it is not difficult to see in Nietzsche’s account of the “tarantulas” and of “slave morality” a description of the Bern-feeling, Wall-Street-Occupying, Social Justice Warrior.  It is hardly a stretch to see a condemnation of Rawls’s “difference principle” implicit in Nietzsche’s contempt for the egalitarian’s “preference for the suffering [and] underprivileged” and for the “attempt to make the virtues through which happiness is possible for the lowliest into the standard ideal of all values.”  The modern liberal nanny state, and the advocacy of a therapeutic rather than punitive approach to criminal justice, are obviously exactly the sorts of thing Nietzsche has in mind in the passages just quoted from Beyond Good and Evil.  Furthermore, as Richard Schacht observes:


Nietzsche’s critique of pity is above all an attack upon the tendency sufferers have… to be overwhelmed by their own suffering and the similar sufferings of others, and in their preoccupation with it to take it to matter more than anything else. (Nietzsche, p. 459)


And such preoccupation is manifest in identity group politics and the tendency of those committed to it to define themselves in terms of their perceived status as victims of oppression.


Yet such left-wing attitudes and policies are embraced by many New Atheists.  If Nietzsche is right, these attitudes and policies are not only bad and unfounded, but have their ultimate source in the very Christianity New Atheists claim to oppose.  (I would say that they actually involve a massive distortion of the equal human dignity that Christianity affirms, but that is neither here nor there for present purposes.  The point is that, whether faithfully conveyed or distorted, the idea was inherited from Christianity.)


Against scientism


Though Nietzsche certainly shares with the New Atheism its commitment to metaphysical naturalism, he would nevertheless reject its scientism -- and in particular its optimism about the ability of science to capture objective, mind-independent reality -- as hopelessly naïve and indeed incompatible with a naturalistic assessment of man’s cognitive powers.  Certainly he would be unimpressed by any argument to the effect that the utility of science proves its truth, or more generally that the fact that our cognitive faculties are adaptive shows that they capture objective reality.  He writes of beliefs that are


so much a part of us that not to believe in it would destroy the race.  But are they for that reason truths?  What a conclusion!  As if the preservation of man were a proof of truth!  (The Will to Power 497)


Again, he says:


Life is no argument.  The conditions of life might include error.  (The Gay Science 121)


Nietzsche here anticipates an element of the “argument from reason” later developed by writers like Karl Popper, C. S. Lewis, and Alvin Plantinga (though of course he doesn’t draw the anti-naturalistic conclusion that Lewis and Plantinga do).  Survival value must not, in his view, be confused with truth; the idea that science gives us truth rests on a “metaphysical faith” (The Gay Science344).


Furthermore (and as other writers with no theological ax to grind have emphasized) the very notion of a scientific “law of nature” has a theological origin, and in Nietzsche’s view retains a merely metaphorical significance when the theology is jettisoned.  There cannot be a true “law” or “regularity” where there is neither a lawgiver nor a subject which literally submits to the law:


Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses.  (The Gay Science, p. 168)


“[N]ature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though -- why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad “philology.”  It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning… (Beyond Good and Evil 22)


And again, in The Will to Power:


“Regularity” in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact.  In the same way “conformity with a law.”  We discover a formula by which to express an ever-recurring kind of result: we have therewith discovered no “law,” even less a force that is the cause of the recurrence of a succession of results.  That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a creature always acted thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the “law.”  (632)


Form, species, law, idea, purpose -- in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction, as if events were in some way obedient to something… (521)


A major theme of The Will to Power’s treatment of science is the idea that, despite having largely stripped from our notion of nature that which reflects the contingent perspective of the observer, physics still -- insofar as it rests on sensory evidence -- inevitably reflects that perspective to some extent.  Of course, to remedy this, physics tries to frame its description of nature in the abstract language of mathematics.  But Nietzsche anticipates Bertrand Russell’s theme (to which I have often called attention) that insofar as physics gives us only knowledge of the physical world’s mathematical structure, it does not give us knowledge of the intrinsic character of that which has that structure, and thus actually tells us relatively little about objective reality. 


Because we have to think in terms of there being something which has the structure, the physicist postulates certain entities as the relata whose relationships are described in the structural description -- Nietzsche gives atoms as an example.  This can lead us to think we’ve actually captured something of the inner nature of the physical world as it is in itself, but in Nietzsche’s view this is an illusion.  He writes, in The Will to Power:


To comprehend the world, we have to be able to calculate it; to be able to calculate it, we have to have constant causes; because we find no such constant causes in actuality, we invent them for ourselves -- the atoms. This is the origin of atomism.


The calculability of the world, the expressibility of all events in formulas -- is this really "comprehension"? How much of a piece of music has been understood when that in it which is calculable and can be reduced to formulas has been reckoned up? (624)


It is an illusion that something is known when we possess a mathematical formula for an event: it is only designated, described; nothing more! (628)


Mechanistic theory can… only describe processes, not explain them. (660)


Much more could be said, but I’ll leave it at that.  If Nietzsche is right, the New Atheist is hopelessly naïve in supposing that the demise of religion promises only sweetness and light, that liberal egalitarian ideals can or ought to survive the demise of Christianity, and that science gives us much in the way of objective knowledge.  New Atheists are notoriously resistant to hearing out an “attack on [their] convictions” when it comes from a religious believer.  Are they willing to consider one raised by an Old Atheist?

sabato, giugno 11, 2016

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part II

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part II:



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In a previous post I examined the late Hilary Putnam’s engagement with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition on a topic in the philosophy of mind.  Let’s now look at what Putnam had to say about Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas in natural theology.  In his 1997 paper “Thoughts Addressed to an Analytical Thomist” (which appeared in an issue of The Monist devoted to the topic of analytical Thomism), Putnam tells us that while he is not an analytical Thomist, as “a practicing Jew” he could perhaps be an “analytic Maimonidean.”  The remark is meant half in jest, but that there is some truth in it is evident from what Putnam says about the topics of proofs of God’s existence, divine simplicity, and theological language.


Putnam is not unsympathetic to some of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, such as those defended by Aquinas and Maimonides. He rejects the assumptions, common among contemporary secular academic philosophers, that such arguments are uniformly invalid, question-begging, or otherwise fallacious, and that it is absurd even to try to prove God’s existence.  He notes the double standard such philosophers often bring to bear on this subject:


[T]he majority of these philosophers take it to be quite clear what a “proof” is: a demonstration that something is the case using the standards (or supposed standards) of, if not science, then, let us say, analytic philosophy.  In addition, it is supposed that a sound proof ought to be able to convince any rational person who sees it.  (Why the arguments of analytic philosophers themselves -- not even the philosophical, as opposed to technical logical, arguments of Frege, or Russell, or Quine, or Davidson, or David Lewis -- all fail to meet this test is not something that analytical philosophers discuss a great deal.) (pp. 487-88)



Putnam also says that “the view that the traditional proofs are fallacious rests, I think, on a straw-man idea of what those proofs are” (p. 488).  In fact, he holds, “each of the traditional proofs can be stated in a form in which it proceeds validly from its premisses [and] ones which… are not simply question-begging…” even if an atheist would not accept the premises (Ibid.). In particular, Putnam thinks that causal proofs like those of Maimonides and Aquinas can be given such a form.  And he thinks that the proofs’ contention that any ultimate explanation of the world of contingent things requires a necessary cause, and that this necessity is not merely conceptual, reflects “a very natural conception of reason itself” which “expresses intuitions which are very deep in us” and that the notion that modern science has somehow “refuted” these intuitions “deserves critical examination” (p. 489).


Indeed, in Putnam’s view, the notion that science has refuted religion reflects “a deeply confused understanding of what real religious belief is,” because religious belief is not a matter of trying to explain or predict this or that particular empirical phenomenon, and because theological and scientific modes of description are “incommensurable” (though he cautions that he does not mean to be bringing to bear everything Thomas Kuhn famously had in mind when using that term) (p. 491).  This brings Putnam to the topic of theological language, and in particular to accounts like Maimonides’ negative theology and Aquinas’s notion of the analogical use of language. 


The development of such accounts reflects the fact that, as Putnam puts it, “the monotheistic religions passed -- irreversibly, I believe -- from thinking of God in anthropomorphic terms to thinking of God as a transcendent being” (p. 493).  Putnam notes that some contemporary religious thinkers seem to have forgotten the reasons for this development.  He cites “a distinguished Christian philosopher” -- Putnam doesn’t name the person -- who once opined to Putnam that worries about theological language were due to a “hang-up” the medievals had about divine simplicity.  When asked by Putnam whether God might be said, then, to have distinct states of consciousness which succeed each other in time, this philosopher responded “Why not?”  When Putnam suggested that thereby putting God within time would implicitly be to deny God’s transcendence, this philosopher, Putnam says, had no reply.


In fact, in Putnam’s view, the medievals’ concern with divine simplicity was no mere “hang-up” but has a serious theological basis.  Giving up simplicity threatens not only God’s transcendence but his necessity too, and thus threatens to turn God into a mere “gaseous vertebrate” (as Putnam puts it, borrowing a vivid phrase from Haeckel), one mere creature alongside others.  But divine simplicity does make theological language problematic, which is what led thinkers like Maimonides and Aquinas to their respective theories of such language.


So far Putnam sounds very close indeed to a Thomist, speaking up as he does for a correct understanding of causal proofs of God’s existence and for the classical theist conception of God’s nature.  However, he refrains from going the whole hog, in two respects.  For one thing, though he thinks that theological language is, despite its problematic nature, both intelligible and different from other sorts of language, he is skeptical of both Maimonides’ and Aquinas’s specific ways of understanding it.  For another, he seems to think the Thomist position a bit too rationalist. 


Consider first Putnam’s criticisms of Maimonides’ and Aquinas’s accounts of theological language.  Putnam briefly comments that Maimonides’ negative theology “leaves it unintelligible why we should say the things we do about God” (p. 495).  He does acknowledge that Maimonides allows that we can speak of God in terms of his different actions, but to Putnam this “seems like a failure to carry though his negative theology to the end” (p. 496).  (Putnam had more to say about Maimonides’ negative theology in another 1997 article, in Faith and Philosophy.) 


Regarding Aquinas’s account of analogical language about God, Putnam thinks that, at least read one way, it collapses into Maimonides’ position that we can speak of God in terms of his actions.  But this, I think, is not correct.  As I understand Maimonides’ account of our talk about God’s actions (which I discussed in this post from a couple of years ago), when we speak of God’s various actions we are in the strict sense not really saying anything about God himself, but rather only about his effects.  But on Aquinas’s analogical account of theological language, we are (at least often) saying things about God himself, and not just about his effects (even if the different predications we make do not pick out distinct parts of God).  That is to say, on Maimonides’ position, theological language, even in the case of descriptions of divine action, does not really tell us anything positive about the divine nature itself, whereas for Aquinas it does, at least to a limited extent. 


However, Putnam does also consider the role “proportion” plays in Aquinas’s conception of analogical language, and offers as an example the claim that God’s knowledge is to God as Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates.  But the problem with this, Putnam says, is that there is no single way Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates, and surely God’s knowledge is not to God in every way that Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates. 


The trouble with Putnam’s objection, though, is that it is difficult to know what to make of it, because it is underdeveloped.  Both his description of Aquinas’s position and his criticism of it are brief and vague. 


The kind of proportionality that Thomists think is relevant to understanding theological language is what is called proper proportionality, of which there are three key features.  First, with the analogy of proper proportionality, a term is being used to name something that is intrinsic to all the things being referred to.  For example, when we say that a plant, an animal, a human being, an angel, and God all have life, we are using the term “life” analogically, but we are nevertheless referring to something intrinsic to each of the things talked about.  (Contrast this with the analogy of attribution, where a term is not being used to name something intrinsic to all the things referred to.  For instance, if I say that Socrates is healthy and that his food is healthy, it is only Socrates who has health intrinsically, and his food is “healthy” only insofar as it causes health in him.)


Secondly, with the analogy of proper proportionality, a term is being used literally rather than metaphorically.  In the example just referred to, each of the things named is literallysaid to have life, even if “life” is not being used univocally or in exactly the same sense.  (Contrast this with the analogy of improper or metaphorical proportionality, as when we say “That tree is an oak” and “Wyatt is an oak” -- meaning, in the second case, not that Wyatt is literally a kind of tree, but that he has a steadfast character.)


The third feature (and the one Putnam cursorily refers to) is that with the analogy of proper proportionality, a term is not being used to name something that is exactly the same in each thing being talked about (as it is when we are speaking in a univocal way) but rather to name something in one that bears a “proportional similarity” to something that exists in another.  For example, when I say that “I see the desk in front of me” and “I see that Aquinas’s argument is valid,” the term “see” is not being used univocally, since the “seeing” the eyes do is very different from the “seeing” that the intellect does.  Still, the eyes are to a tree as the intellect is to the validity of an argument, so that the word “seeing” properly applies to both.  (See pp. 256-63 of my Scholastic Metaphysics for further discussion of analogical language.) 


Now, with all of this in mind, what exactly is Putnam’s objection?  He says that there is no single way Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates, and that God’s knowledge is not to God in every way that Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates.  But what exactly is it that he has in mind that would apply to the case of Socrates but not to the case of God?  In particular, if we exclude features that some things have only relationally rather than intrinsically, or only metaphorically rather than literally -- as we would have to do when we are talking about the analogy of proper proportionality rather than the analogy of attribution or the analogy of improper proportionality -- what exactly is left that Putnam thinks would still apply in the case of Socrates but not in the case of God?  Moreover, even if God’s knowledge is not to God in every way that Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates, why wouldn’t there being someways that God’s knowledge is to God as Socrates’ knowledge is to Socrates suffice to justify the predication of knowledge to God according to the analogy of proper proportionality?


Putnam doesn’t address such questions, so, again, it is hard to know what to make of his objection.


Now, despite his criticisms of Aquinas, Putnam nevertheless holds that it is possible to talk intelligibly about God, that we have to understand theological language as “sui generis” rather than either equivocal or straightforwardly univocal, and that contrary to the simplistic conception of the literal use of language presupposed by too many contemporary philosophers, “there is no oneform of discourse which is in some absolute sense ‘literal’” (p. 497, emphasis added).  So far that might make his position sound close to Aquinas’s view of analogical language after all.  But Putnam also says:


In my view, if there is one thing that there isn’t going to be a scientific theory of (either in the Aristotelian or in the contemporary sense of “scientific theory”) it is how religious language works, and how it connects us to God. (p. 497)


and


I feel that insofar as I have any handle on these notions, I have a handle on them as religious notions, not as notions which are supported by an independent philosophical theory.  (Certainly not by the theory of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.)  For me the “proofs” show conceptual connections of great depth and significance, but they are not a foundation for my religious belief… Nor are “proofs” the way in which I would try to bring someone else to Judaism, or to religious belief of any kind. (p. 490)


It is this resistance to theory, and to understanding philosophy as an intellectual bridge between the religious believer and the non-believer, that marks the key difference between Putnam and Thomism.  As he sums up his position:


I would say that I cannot explain how [theological language] works except in religious terms, by showing how the use of those terms figures in my religious life, showing how projecting those terms from my non-religious to my religious life is an essential part of that life.  And neither can I explain what I mean by ‘God’, except by showing how my use of the term figures in my religious life -- and that is not something I can do at just any time or to any person.  Of course, this disbars me from claiming that I can “prove” that God exists to an atheist. But I have already indicated that that is not a claim that I think a religious person should make. (p. 498)


Rather, says Putnam:


I am inclined to say…  that while the potentiality for religious language, the possibility of making it one’s own, is a basic human potentiality, the exercise of that potentiality is not a real possibility for every human being at every time… I myself believe that it requires something experiential and not merely intellectual to awaken that possibility in a human beingBut what if the belief in God were simply a belief in the strength of a certain philosophical argument?... On the supposition that that is all that was going on, I would say that this was not belief in God at all, but a metaphysical illusion. (p. 492)


Once again, Putnam’s position is a bit too vague to know exactly what to make of it, but it seems clear enough that what he evinces here is the very common attitude that religion is ultimately more a matter of the heart than of the head.  The idea seems to be that proofs of God’s existence and philosophical analysis of the divine nature, while salutary and important, are, ultimately, compelling only when viewed from the standpoint of someone already attracted to a religious way of life.  How one comes to be attracted to it in the first place is, in Putnam’s view, an “experiential” matter. 


What sorts of experience Putnam has in mind is not entirely clear -- perhaps it is ethical experience or aesthetic experience, or perhaps he sees religious experience as something sui generis.  The fact that he uses the specific term “religious” to pick out what he wants to distinguish from philosophy and metaphysics, and the influence that Wittgenstein’s writings on religion have had on him (as is evident from some of Putnam’s other work), incline me to think that he probably regards religious experience as sui generis.  In any event, variations on this “more heart than head” theme are a staple of modern theology, from Pascal to Schleiermacher to Maurice Blondel to David Bentley Hart.


There is, from a Thomistic point of view, a deep problem in this, and also a deep irony.  The problem is this.  From the Thomistic point of view, Putnam’s bifurcation of religion and metaphysics, and of the “experiential” and the “intellectual,” is simply false, and certainly question-begging.  For according to the doctrine of the transcendentals -- a key part of Thomistic metaphysics -- being, unity, truth, goodness, and (on at least some versions of the doctrine) beauty, are all convertible, the same thing looked at from different points of view.  Hence when the will is drawn toward God as the highest good, or our affective nature delights in God as supremely beautiful, they are not grasping something different from what the Thomist theologian describes as Being Itself, or the Neo-Platonic philosopher characterizes as the supreme unity, or the rationalist philosopher conceives of as the Sufficient Reason for the existence of things. These are all just different avenues to one and the same divine reality. 


Hence it simply cannot be the case (contrary to what “more heart than head” types seem to think) that to yearn for God as the highest good or to experience him as supreme beauty is necessarily deeper or more profound or genuine than to know him intellectually as the First Cause, as Being Itself, etc.  And while it is true that when we are drawn to God, the will and affective side of our nature do indeed tend to operate no less than the intellect does, that is not because the former alone are doing the “real” work, but rather because since being, truth, goodness, beauty, etc. are convertible, what the intellect grasps as true and real is, unsurprisingly, also going to attract the will under the guise of goodness, and our affective nature under the guise of beauty.  To be sure, human beings being as diverse as they are, some people are bound to be drawn to God more under the guise of goodness or beauty than under the more philosophical guises of First Cause, Sufficient Reason, or what have you.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that.  But the more metaphysical conceptions are hardly less legitimate, or somehow second-class -- nor could they be given that we are essentially rational animals. 


Indeed, there is a sense in which the metaphysical conceptions are more fundamental.  The transcendentals are transcendental properties of being -- truth is being as intelligible, the good is being as desired by the will, and so forth.   But being is the characteristic subject matter of metaphysics.  Hence to understand how the various guises under which we grasp God -- as Being Itself, as the highest good, as supremely beautiful, etc. -- all fit together requires metaphysical inquiry.  Moreover, to understand why goodness, beauty, etc. are not mere subjective reactions that we project onto the world, but are genuine features of reality itself, also requires understanding their relation to being. 


Hence while Putnam is certainly correct to think that a purely philosophical approach to religion would be gravely deficient, it goes too far to suggest that it would be a “metaphysical illusion.”  On the contrary, without metaphysics, it is the purely ethical and/or affectiveapproaches to religion which stand in danger of being exposed as illusory.  This is by no means to say that most or even very many religious believers ought to be expected to pursue philosophy, or are even capable of doing so.  But somebody had better be able and willing to do it.  Metaphysics must always be a part of religion even if it is not the whole of it.


So, from a Thomistic point of view, the “more heart than head” attitude to religion, in its various forms -- fideist, voluntarist, relativist, Wittgensteinian, etc. -- reflects various philosophical errors, and certainly begs the question against Thomism, which rejects the bifurcations that the attitude rests on. 


I also said that there is a deep irony in Putnam’s position, and the irony is this: Putnam himself attacked at least one of the philosophical errors that often underlies the “more heart than head” attitude toward religion, namely the “fact/value dichotomy.”  (This attack even gave Putnam the title for one of his books.)  If we think, as Hume does, of “value” as something essentially disconnected from the objective “facts” grasped by reason, then naturally the ethical and aesthetic side of religion (the “value” or “heart” side) is going to seem essentially disconnected from the metaphysical side (the “fact” or “head” side).  But to reject this Humean position is to open the door once again to the doctrine of the transcendentals, and to see thereby that the ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical aspects of religion -- the “heart” and the “head” -- cannot be separated.


Hence, from a Thomistic point of view, Putnam -- whose defense of the legitimacy of the traditional proofs, attack on the fact/value dichotomy, and critique of contemporary naturalism all evince a willingness seriously to question the orthodoxies of modern philosophy -- should have pursued this questioning just a little bit further. 


More could be said about Putnam’s engagement with analytical Thomism -- for example, about the exchange between Putnam and John Haldane in the recent Library of Living Philosophers volume on The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam -- but I’ll leave it at that for now.