Historia magistra vitae

This is the paper version of a column by Francesco Grillo (and adapted by Claudia De Sessa) published on Italian newspapers Il Messaggero and Il Gazzettino del Nord Est

Scan of the paper edition 

One of the greatest ventures of History was born out of a mistake.

Christopher Columbus apparently ignored the calculations of Earth circumference made, 17 centuries prior to his departure, by geographer Eratosthenes, in Alexandria of Egypt. He also seemed to ignore Marco Polo’s tales about Catai (China) that the explorer wanted to reach. If America hadn’t been in between Europe and Asia, the crew of the Genovese captain would have died of starvation. However, thanks to a wrong estimation of distances, he arrived on the other side of the world, catapulting humanity into the modern age. This is, after all, what History is made out of: passions, mistakes, outcomes different than predicted, great conquests. The message with which the President of the United States has dedicated Columbus Day to the bravery of Italian explorers and, at the same time, to the massacre of natives is an attempt – imperfect but useful – to remind us of the constant ambivalence of humanity, divided between greatness and misery.

It is this ambivalence that “cancel culture” would like to see simplified and obliterated with the risk, however, of seeing us all fall into a sterile conformism.

Biden is right in worrying about the drift of the “politically correct”, even though the ladder has played a key role in the 70s and also nowadays in giving a voice to the revendication of oppressed minorities such as the African American one. Cancelling historical memory is, however, a part of a wider structural phenomenon that is not limited to the US and that has only been complexified and exacerbated by the internet. This tendency has been theorized and denounced in a letter published by 150 American intellectuals warning against answering to alt right demagogy with dogmas of an illiberal left. Linguist Noam Chomsky has dedicated his entire life at BOSTON MIT to understand the science behind prejudices, concluding that they help us make sense of a reality we no longer understand or control. Preconstructed ideas have the merit of comforting us, but they also have the side effect of creating conformism, self-censorship and killing new ideas. The University of Sussex, one of the best establishments in the country that invented tolerance (see figure), recently had to put under escort philosopher and feminist Kathleen Stock who was guilty of writing that, in some circumstances, biological sex may override self-declared gender identity. The inability to think critically has made a lot of legitimate issues into divisive symbols: this is the reason why extremism arises and it has existed well before social networks, even though they are now being amplified by out-of-control algorithms.

Figure - Percentage of university professors declaring to systematically self-censor (UK, 2020)

Source: Vision on Policy Exchange data 

After all, while the President of the United States tried his hand at a difficult cultural mediation, in Richmond, Virginia and in Minneapolis, Minnesota, statues of Christopher Columbus were being tore down.

The first city has been the Confederate capital that in 1800s went to war against the Northern States in order to defend slavery. The second one was the city that witnessed the tragic death of George Floyd, killed because of the pressure exerted upon his neck by the policeman who was arresting him.

This is already a sign of how rightful anger doesn’t target the right culprit, aiming at an historical figure that came well before the first African deported slave even put foot on US land. Cancel culture knows no limits: in Parliament Square in Westminster, London, Winston Churchill statue was vandalized by those accusing someone at the head of an admittedly colonialist empire, of racism (a man who also, on the other hand, became one of the main opponents of Nazi atrocities). In Milan, red paint was smeared all over the statue of one of the greatest Italian journalists of the 20th century who literally bought a slave child in a fascist Italian colony (although Montanelli regretted his early affiliation to the Fascist party and was about to be executed for it by Germans, who in the end didn’t manage to implement the death sentence just for a matter of a few hours).

Biden is right in worrying about the drifts of cancel culture because it may result in two main collateral effects.

Forgetting about the past may offend entire ethnic groups

(and electors, like Italian Americans that adopted, although with some heavy historical licenses, Christopher Columbus as a symbol of their pride) and divide communities that are part of a society who already suffers from divisive forces like the ones who are pushing California out of the Continent.

Secondly, left extremism fuels - like an equal and opposite reaction – alt right extremism (keeping alive the shadow of Donald Trump).

To these electoral considerations, I would add that forgetting the sense of history itself - which is intrinsically contradictory - may contribute to spread a kind of ignorance that annihilates a country’s identity and their vision for the future which is based on said identity. To reduce everything to a battle of symbols means forgetting the substance of problems and the necessity of finding solutions. We would need leaders capable not of creating short term narratives, but rather able to engage us in projects that need to start from a self-reflection on who we are. Moro, Roosevelt and Churchill himself managed to do just that. That Berlinguer, who would have “given his life” to allow his opponent Almirante to “support an idea different than his own”. And we would need citizens enthusiastic about interpreting their role in the project as a great intellectual adventure, a chance to learn how to navigate – much like Columbus - new seas.

Citizen engagement is not, however, created without a conscient effort. Vandalizing statues is, in itself, a sterile act, but it can help us reflect on the shortcomings of the education system, which can be argued is at the very basis of extremisms. Painting Columbus statues red is indeed an effort – perhaps as imperfect but useful as Biden’s - at reclaiming a narrative, at introducing – by force in the absence of a serious educational effort in this sense – the history of the defeated into public conscience.

This form of protest creates, interestingly enough and perhaps unconsciously, a shift in the role of statues as an object of art and as symbols. Statues stop being only celebratory objects but are used to convey a message, becoming educational objects in the public space. The message that is right now being conveyed by protestors is extreme and divisive, but this can be used as an idea to actually operationalize the cultural mediation Biden is aiming at. To this end, complexifying statues with complementary installations may be a solution. A good example of how to conjugate new historical perspectives and historical memory can be found in Italy, in the city of Bolzano, where a fascist bas-relief is now being accompanied by a light installation quoting Hanna Arendt “nobody has the duty to obey”. While school programs catch up in telling a more complex version of history, we can start by complexifying and thus uniting the symbols that are nowadays so divisive.