Starting from the extraordinary measures put in place by the Italian government, as well as by the rulers of countless other states by now, first of all the lockdown of 9 March 2020, the authors of the book “The world you will have. Viruses, Anthropocene, revolution” conduct a detailed analysis of the current state of Italian society. A comparison with those systems that have always been too hastily labeled primitive. And a look to the future that must pass, without nostalgia, from a more or less recent but always important past. Reflections that also want to be a warning to young people, the only ones you can really count on, in the hope that they will find the necessary cohesion and awareness as soon as possible.
Different cultures predispose “escape routes” as indispensable and healthy solutions to the "cage" effect that each of them tends to produce. Western megaculture, identifiable as belonging to the Anthropocene, not only has not foreseen escape routes or alternatives to itself but continues to have a distorted vision of the world.
The authors emphasize as a useful coexistence among human beings is actually possible only on condition that we also realize it in the first place a useful coexistence with nature. This aspect has always been overlooked by the Anthropocentrism prevailing in civilized society.
Apart from the curfew during the Second World War, the Italian company had never had direct experience of such drastic and restrictive measures like a complete shutdown. For us, closures or suspensions are usually attributable to periods of rest, holidays, leisure, entertainment... in short, they are a break, a stand-by from the routine. Generally expected, welcome and pleasant.
THEEkyusi of the BaNande of North Kivu – Congo and lo Shabbat of the Jews are "traumas" that a culture imposes on itself, self-suspensions by which a culture forces itself to "bracket" itself and its claims to domination. A valid way to recognize that, in addition to itself, there are other realities (the earth, the forest, ...) from which human beings obtain resources and which could very well exist even without the work of men.
The lockdown, this suspension as unexpected as it is destabilizing and yet inevitable and necessary, has fearfully arrested the gears of a mighty economic machine that we are used to thinking not only as unstoppable but also as universal, as something sacred and untouchable.
What our civilization lacks, the authors remind us, is exactly the idea of the limit, of your limit. Our culture, so full of enlightenment provided by science, lacks the enlightenment that comes from the practice of self-suspension, from the practice of stopping it. This desire, also defined as "the evil of the infinite", is the source of the problems that afflict modern society: unregulated, anomic, pathogenic.
Traumatic self-suspensions introduce a strong sense of limitation into the cultures that practice them. They force them to return to nature, they make them see the end, they make them accept arrest, they make them incorporate death. But it is not a death of desolation, a desertification: the death of cultural enterprises coincides with the recognition of the rights of nature.
We are so trapped in the dense meshes of this hyperculture that, as Fred Vargas says, we do nothing but advance blindly, unaware and naivei.
Remotti does not exclude the possibility of acquiring a critical and farsighted vision, but in the absence of an authentic cultural suspension it is not certain that the critical vision will be followed by a corresponding modifying action. The lockdown is an unwanted, unplanned shutdown. An arrest from which one is only in a hurry to get out to return to normal as soon as possible.
Viruses and confinements have a long history in humanity, even recently. Just think of AIDS, Ebola or the measles epidemic of 2019. Favole underlines the peculiarities of Sars-Cov-2, which are that it has spread globally with extraordinary speed but, above all, that it has subverted a widespread imaginary that links epidemics to poverty.
The coronavirus has broken into a world that thought itself immune to these kinds of attacks. The Western world, convinced that it belongs to a powerful and effective modernity against epidemic diseases, has been forced into a rapid contraction of space.
But how much, the author wonders, the suspension from the coronavirus made us think really about how we were and how we would like to be in the future.
This very virus, which should also make us feel biologically belonging to a common humanity, has instead revived the hotbed of nationalist and sovereignist policies.
The sense of helplessness that we all felt after the first closures is, in the detailed reconstruction made by Favole, the same that many human beings felt well before the arrival of the coronavirus, faced with a thousand real and symbolic borders that separated them from their desired goals. Because the truth is that while we Westerners, for decades, have been theorizing the wonders and charm of an open and globalized world, other humanities have lived in perpetual confinement.
And, without having to look too far, in the darkest days, while the intensive care units were saturated, we all wondered who would have had the right to save themselves before others.
This is because sharing, solidarity, social bonding are never definitively guaranteed in human affairs.
The lockdown made us reflect on the fact that a society imagined as a set of isolated individuals, each of whom in a spasmodic search for their own personal interest, is an aberration and not an ideal to strive for.
The long months of lockdown have fully confirmed what anthropology scholars define re-enchantment of the world, a return to religiosity even in its fundamentalist and intolerant forms, a denial of the myth of the secularized society that pervaded the generations of the sixties and seventies.
Beliefs, rites, utopias, religions, charismatic leaders, urban legends... crowd a modernity that no longer represents itself as "secularized". In this framework Favole also places the re-evaluation of collective rituals.
The coronavirus, in moments of maximum aggression, also prevents the celebration of funeral rites.
Who would have thought that in Italy - and in many other parts of the globalized world - such a thing could happen in the XNUMXst century?
Yet for the author it is not something really so unexpected and unpredictable. The impossible rituals and disappeared bodies of 11 September, like the faceless dead of the Mediterranean, should have given a first jolt, a powerful warning to a blinded contemporary world wrapped up in its bubble of well-being, surrounded by growing poverty and despair.
And here again Favole wonders if the emergency rites of the Covid-19 they will leave traces in the humanity of the future.
The impression, however, is that, once again, modernity consists in rush to archive and remove memory traumatic, returning to the beaches and shopping malls.
Maybe, as Giovanni Gugg's studies show, we are unable to “go back to the future”, that is, unable to imagine ourselves different, creatively building a future starting from a "good" - and non-identifying - memory of the past.
And perhaps this rush to get back to normal is also motivated by another type of fear, perhaps an unconscious one. Confinement is a robust plant with deep roots which has often been nourished, rather than by fears and fears of viruses, by operations of a political nature. Without even going around it too much, there have been several intellectuals who have warned us in recent months against the danger that the virus could become a pretext for a reduction of freedoms well beyond the pandemic. For political reasons, the emergency often risks becoming everyday life. On the other hand, the "liberation" from confinement cannot and must not be motivated by mere economic reasons, to the detriment of citizens' health.
Read in terms of economic growth, development is nothing more than the planetary expansion of the market system. The problem, in Marco Aime's analysis, lies not only in the simple indiscriminate adoption of this model, but in thinking of it as natural, ineluctable, almost a destiny from which it is impossible to escape.
An example of how the idea of development is closer to a faith than to the expression of a presumed rationality is given by the fact that, despite the repeated failures, the growth of inequalities and the increasingly evident environmental crisis, we continue undeterred in same direction.
The goal of raising all human beings to the standard of living of Westerners is, Aime concludes, materially unattainable. And yet, to support the faith in the inevitability of progress, understood as an increase in production and the accumulation of goods, it is necessary to do "as if" all this were possible.
Gandhi himself seemed to have come to similar conclusions when he stated that the world cannot bear for India to become like England.
Aime invites you to look critically at the most important revolutions of the modern era. It will then be noted that, in most cases, the most incidental effort was in destroying the existing rather than in planning a real and proper future. A new perspective is therefore required which, in order to be realised, requires two elements: the first is a new vision of the future, a project which looks ahead and not only at the narrow horizon of tomorrow; the second is a collective awareness of being part of an endangered species.
The pandemic has bare nexus the extreme fragility of our system: a few months of closure and slowdown brought it to its knees. And this, for Aime, is a clear sign of the fact that we have not been able to foresee an uncertain future, that we have no stocks of any kind, no shock absorbers. We have built a system based on today. And then we must ask ourselves what tomorrow can there ever be for a society that does not think about the future.
Politics with all its parties is directly called into question due to its almost total lack of prospects and large-scale projects.
Without a future project or even a clear knowledge of the past, we rely on something atavistic, which is lost in the mists of time, a sort of founding myth: identity, corroborated by the comforting metaphor of roots and autochthonous primacy.
Blinded by the cone of shadow created by this unstoppable race, we have stopped thinking about what the finish line is and what is the meaning of our race. That is why the authors consider it necessary to develop a new culture on'Anthropocene and young people will have to do it, in fact they have the arduous task of changing course.
Luciano Gallino has highlighted how, in our era, the social classes that had characterized politics and society of the twentieth century seem to have disappeared, but in reality what has disappeared above all has been class consciousness, the perception of belonging to a community of intentions, founded on a common basis.
The young people who have mobilized following Greta Thunberg, or the Sardine movement are examples, albeit limited, of mobilizations that have hoped for and implemented actions of mobilization and protest "from below" and within a predominantly youth class, against the spread of hate speech. And it is from them that, for Aime, we must start or restart. Because in a crisis of thought, like the one that runs through the present, the only solution is to start thinking about the future again, which however is a common tomorrow.
One can argue about these indications, but what one cannot do is not stop and reflect.
Reference Bibliography
Marco Aime, Adriano Favole, Francesco Remotti, Il mondo che avrete. virus, anthropocene, revolution, Utet, Milan, 2020
The authors
Marco Aime: professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Genoa.
Adriano Fables: teaches Culture and Power and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin.
Francis Remotti: professor emeritus at the University of Turin, member of the Academy of Sciences of Turin and of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
