Throughout the western world, not only in Italy, it is taking place a wave of negative feelings towards knowledge, education, experts and intellectuals. Anyone who has studied or had significant and formative work experience is branded as an elite and rejected. We are proud of not knowing things and we have come to consider ignoranceespecially as regards the conduct of politics, a virtue. It is a sentiment that has probably always existed in certain sectors of society, but which in recent years has forcefully come to light to the point of being accepted by a good majority of citizens. And politics has perceived and ridden it, so much so that in many countries, first of all Italy, the controversy against the professors, the multi-graduates, the technicians of the authorities independent of the will of the people, is particularly heated. But are current politicians the result of this spontaneous emergence of ignorance, or has the same political class of the past favored the emergence of incompetence as the prevailing sentiment of the mass of citizens with its behaviour?
Irene Tinagli, deputy in the past legislature, a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, tries to solve this question in a large and interesting essay published by Rizzoli "The Great Ignorance - The Rise of Incompetence and the Decline of Italy“, where, amidst delightful episodes that bear witness to the frightening advance of ignorance among the new politicians and the hypocrisy of the old ones, the very serious problem of crisis of our western democracies, the resulting damage for the citizens themselves, aiming finally to open a serious debate on these issues to identify some possible remedies.
After reviewing the progressive decline in the education level of our parliamentarians, Tinagli's essay delves into the complex relationship between the profession of politician and that of technicians, highlighting the great distance that exists between the rigor of the competent and the need to seek consensus on the part of politicians, passing through the role of the information media, through the operating methods on the basis of which the traditional parties selected their own ruling class and through the concrete practices with which governments and parliaments operate.
Among the many episodes that illustrate the growing separation between competence and politics, Irene Tinagli mentions an episode that sees me directly involved and which refers to when we were colleagues in the Labor commission of the Chamber of Deputies. During a discussion on a bill that provided for the reinstatement of Article 18, deputies from all parties argued that because of that abolition, layoffs had greatly increased. I intervened to argue that it was not true and that, on the contrary, the layoffs had decreased, without having the precise data available at the time. Data that Tinagli had managed to find in the meantime and which she therefore promptly described to the other members of the Commission and which proved me completely right. But in the end the president on. Damiano told her that in certain subjects it is not a "matter of data but of principles".
But I still remember a second episode that saw us lined up on the same side and which concerned the reform of the governance of INPS and Inail. The reform prepared by Damiano and supported both by the left and by the 5 Stars as well as, at least in part by the right, envisaged, among other things, the establishment of a Board of Directors of 5 members, all full-time. I argued that in that case an inefficient governance would have been created given that the directors would soon have transformed into as many managing directors who superimposed themselves on the president and the general manager, making the management of the Institute at least inefficient, if not impossible. But even in this case the need to satisfy the appetites of politicians and trade unionists prevailed over the more elementary rules of correct governance recommended by all the experts in the field. Luckily nothing happened at the time because the Gentiloni government firmly opposed such a reform. But now it has been taken up verbatim by Di Maio and Salvini and included in the decree for Citizenship Income and Quota 100. There is continuity in incompetence!
But is it really ignorance or is it political and patronage cunning? Surely incompetence plays tricks when laws are passed in order to obtain certain results (for example more employment), but then mechanisms are touched that actually lead to results opposite to those desired. More generally, this happens when simple recipes are proposed to get out of the crisis (spending more borrowed public money) and one does not realize that due to the distrust that this generates in the markets, the result will not be the way out of the crisis, but on the contrary, the return to the darkest phases of the recession. Just as it is happening.
But the objective difficulties for a more balanced relationship between politicians and experts are numerous. In general, it must be said that the ignorant or incompetent person is almost always more likeable, more natural, fresher in the way they present themselves and communicate, in short, closer to ordinary people. You know how to naturally convey simple, apparently effective messages, point out guilty parties, and propose solutions, perhaps unattainable, but clear, without hesitation or doubts. There where doubt is the bread and butter of the expert who tends to make nuanced, probabilistic reasoning, devoid of those certainties that the public, especially the television audience, want to hear. Thus a vicious circle is created between the ignorant politician who does not feel ashamed to tell lies because he is not aware of it, and the incompetent but disillusioned or angry public who hopes that someone will cut the knots that hold their own existence even with hasty methods.
Getting out of the risks that the era of incompetence entails for democracy (this is the title of a famous essay by the American professor Tom Nichols) will not be easy. Tinagli excludes that the solution is to replace incompetent politicians with technicians. It is a road that Italy has already experimented with and it hasn't worked. You probably need a series of changes in the institutions and their functioning with a reduction of the role of the central state in favor of local authorities and not the Regions but the Municipalities who are closer to citizens and cannot aspire to roles of general political orientation.
Parliament's tasks will have to be reformed, focusing much more on controlling the work of the Government and on monitoring the effectiveness of the laws approved, increasing transparency on the part of those called upon to hold political offices by examining not only the candidate's balance sheet, as is already the case, but also his curriculum of studies and his professional experiences. We must then focus on education reform, making it continuous not only for the needs of the labor market, but also to have citizens aware of the medium-term implications of their behaviour. The old Einaudian maxim of "knowing in order to deliberate" must come back into vogue for politicians, while voters must ask their representatives for more than small favors, greater foresight to preserve them from the big risks of crises like the one we ended up in after 2009 and from which we have not yet completely exited. Perhaps something is moving – concludes Tinagli – because we are gradually realizing that even if competent people make mistakes, incompetent people make more and more harmful ones.
