Brandishing the rosary from the stage of a rally, invoking the immaculate heart of Mary to help the government or whistling Pope Francis in front of the Cathedral are gestures that indignant a part of the electorate, but delight another, unfortunately prevalent today, although not yet majority. The “Italians First” Party, of "Brussels cannot teach us lessons", of "no one will walk on us". A current of thought (if one can say so) according to which the Homeland and the Captain are by definition right, and it is always the others who are wrong: the EU, Macron, the NGOs, immigrants especially if they are Muslims. It's a bad habit, very bad, but it has a long tradition behind it. That tradition that Giancarlo Bosetti tells us about in a beautiful book that has just come out for Bollati Boringhieri: The truth of others.
More than an essay, sort of thought show, an arena of ideas that compares the protagonists of the eternal struggle between monists and pluralists, between those who maintain that there is only one truth and those who accept the existence of different truths, with the author openly deployed alongside the latter . The heroes of pluralism (Bosetti offers us ten, from antiquity to the present day) all belong, in one way or another, to the elite of their time, bishops like Las Casas, theologians like Origen or Cusano, liberal philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. There is also the aristocrat Michel de Montaigne and even an enlightened emperor, the Indian Ashoka. All people who today would be targeted on social media: professors, do-gooders, radical chic, exponents of the caste, privileged with well-paid positions and luxurious homes.
But they have had the merit of raising their voices against dominant ideas, against the fanaticism of the people or the arrogance of the powerful. And for this, they often paid a very high price, they were persecuted, excommunicated, denigrated. Apostles of tolerance and openness that we badly need, but which would probably not be heard. Let us think of Montaigne, who at the end of the sixteenth century urged not to call anyone a "barbarian": it is more barbaric to eat dead enemies, as the cannibals of the New World do, or to burn one's fellow citizens alive, as was the custom in our parts in the wars of religion? Or to Niccolò Cusano, for whom the quarrelsomeness between the different faiths is only a consequence of human fallibility, of our "learned ignorance". Christians and Muslims, Orthodox and heretics, even if they slaughter each other, have in common a hidden God, whom they are not able to know, but who is the same for everyone.
No attitude is stupider than "we are better": flaunting the superiority of one culture over another, of one race over another, of one nation over another. Or even of one food over another, like when the Captain drops the rosary to hold the Nutella, or when Giorgia Meloni defends made in Italy clams and sea zucchini against the interference of European barbarians. We live in an era of anger and pride, between the rhetoric of closed ports and the constant complaints of sovereigns and supremacists about the "cowardice" of the West, which would have lost the courage to fight in defense of its values. We have forgotten the lesson of Voltaire and Popper: tolerance is an indispensable corollary of the human condition, for which "we must forgive each other our follies". Cromwell, who was hardly a moderate, said: "Please by the bowels of Christ, think you could be wrong."
The monist never thinks he is wrong. He is so convinced that he possesses the key to the truth that he is ready, in the name of the truth, to smash everything. Bosetti takes up a famous joke by Isaiah Berlin: "The revolutionary (and the deputy prime minister who no longer wants to be deputy, in his own way he is) believes that to create the ideal world you have to break eggs, otherwise you can't get the omelet. This is how the eggs certainly break, but the omelette is far from reaching the table”. To achieve the Bengodi promised in the electoral campaign, it is necessary to leave the euro, but by leaving the euro the Bengodi soon turns into hell. And then you want to rely on Madunina. But do we want to be honest, with the graphic brutality of a tweet, so that everyone can understand, even the functionally illiterate? Whether they are fundamentalists or sovereignists, monists say (and do) only monate.
