The Bloc Notes of Michael the Great
“Dark times both for intellectuals and for the means they use to make themselves heard. If ‘one is worth one’, one is worth the other, there is no difference between the wise and the ignorant. If everyone can dialogue with everyone, if the Internet gives a voice to two thirds of the inhabitants of the planet, if the traditional media (one to many), which intellectuals usually use to reach their audience, are in crisis, those who listen to them intellectuals We must resign ourselves to the triumph of the
apedeuti
, as it was called in the France of the Enlightenment who, unable or not inclined to follow a severe course of study, conspires to discredit knowledge, thus taking credit for his own ignorance . of the intellectual is still recognized
Intellectuals are listened to or marginalized
”(Sabino Cassese,“ Intellettuali ”, il Mulino, 2021).
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We have such left-wing intellectuals for whom the left that exists is never “their” left. They spent a lifetime demolishing Craxism, Berlusconi, prodism, Renzism and, today, the “government of the masters” by Mario Draghi (copyright by Tomaso Montanari). Always on the side of the oppressed, they have written vibrant books of indignation against the eternal authoritarian, compromising, subordinate, transforming, premodern vocation of the Italic ruling classes. On Sundays they preached new models of development, naturally alternatives to blind and inhuman capitalism. On weekdays they explained to us that there is an incurable contradiction between democracy and the market. In leap years it was the turn of the great utopias: from liberation from work to Kantian perpetual peace.
Strict guardians of the most beautiful Constitution in the world and inflexible guardians of any institutional immobility, they then converted to the ethics of responsibility. They then started courting those who wanted to open Parliament like a can of tuna. And now, in order to save their virginity, they are lashing out against the health dictatorship of the green pass. So much for baking soda, Toto would say. In fact, the thing is a grotesque comic. But history is full of heterogenesis of ends. Shortly before his death, Eric Hobsbawm observed with a touch of nostalgia that the age when intellectuals were the main public face of the opposition to power was now a thing of the past. The British historian of the “short century” thus described the decline of one of the central figures of the twentieth century, were in the service of the ruling elite, a party-based, a maverick. But the intellectual has always been a strange beast. What is in fact his profession
According to Luciano Bianciardi, intolerant of any cultural establishment, it was indefinable. For the author of “Vita agra” the true intellectual, after all, and – or should be – a slave to everyone and a servant to no one. He may be, but not an acrobat of the national equestrian circus.
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Written between 1612 and 1614, “Fuente Ovejuna” is perhaps the most famous comedy by Lope de Vega, one of the most prolific playwrights in Spanish literature. It is set in the second half of the fifteenth century in Andalusia, during the struggle between the pretender to the throne of Castile, Giovanna la Beltraneja, and the Catholic sovereigns Isabella and Ferdinando. Fuente Ovejuna is the name of a village that is part of a “commenda” (a kind of lordship) of the military order of Calatrava. His “comendador” (commander) and a partisan of Beltraneja, Fernan Gomez. An overbearing and cruel despot, he imposes the “ius primae noctis” on all the local girls. When he imprisons the young Frondoso and kidnaps his betrothed Laurenzia, the people rebel and behead him. Won the war of succession, Isabella and Ferdinando send a judge to instruct the trial against the rioters. Despite the torture, when they are questioned, they all reply that it was Fuente Ovejuna, its three hundred inhabitants, who killed the tyrant. The judge, unable to discover the real perpetrators of the murder, then acquits them for lack of evidence. Rather than imprison the innocent, in fact, he prefers to let the guilty go free.
Ps. I sent a copy of “Fuente Ovejuna” (Introduction by Andrea Baldissera, preface by Mario Socrate, Garzanti, 2007) to dr. Marco Travaglio.
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Exactly two years ago, Beppe Grillo on his blog proposed to deprive the elderly of the right to vote because they do not care – for age reasons – of the country’s political, economic and social future. At the time it was considered as the boutade of a comedian in the mood for a gag (but Charlie Chaplin, who perhaps knew more than him, once said that “after all, everything is a gag”). Only the Hon. Giorgia Meloni and a few others took it seriously, accusing him of attacking the Constitution and of questioning the principle of universal suffrage. Well, I confess that I am among those who do not find the idea inconvenient. Over seventy-five years old, I took a look at my pension and I realized that I would have benefited quite a lot. Because Grillo, if he wants to take away my right to vote, it must also exempt me from the duty to pay taxes. In fact, “no taxation without representation”.
It may be objected to me that the old slogan of the American colonists, cornerstone of the liberal states, is largely circumvented by us by virtue of mass tax evasion; and it has even been overturned by a law that allows Italians residing abroad, but who are not taxpayers of our treasury, to elect eighteen parliamentarians. True. However, putting aside any easy irony, pay attention to it: in every imaginative provocation of the co-founder of the pentastellato movement, the congenital inclination for what could be called a “despotic democracy” is inevitably manifested. The wolf loses its fur, but not its vice.
