italian version

Culture, Fools, and Swindlers

Giovanni De Sio Cesari

www.giovannidesio.it

It is often, very often, said that the political side opposed to the one we believe in is made up of fools and swindlers; that their elites are consciously deceitful, and the masses who follow them are composed of fools. But historians do not proceed with such simplistic and naive schematization.

Let us first clarify what we mean by masses and elites.
The masses are made up of people with very different levels of education, critical capacity, and preparation—from professors to illiterates. The elites, that is, the ruling class, are composed of individuals with very different orientations; they are not a compact block with the same political ideology.
Then there are the experts in politics, economics, etc., who generally disagree in their opinions.

In reality, elites, masses, and experts generally believe in what they say, even though in all three categories there is always a significant degree of opportunism, just as corruption exists everywhere—though its extent may vary according to circumstances.

There are cultural, economic, and all sorts of causes that lead certain ideologies to prevail while others collapse: it is not a matter of fools and swindlers, and there is no conspiracy of the ruling classes.

At a certain point in history, entire peoples of great civilization and culture (the Germans, for example, but many others as well) believed in fascisms; others believed in communism and supported Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.

Democracies certainly have the advantage that everyone can express themselves freely, so nonsense is more easily exposed, whereas dictatorships of any orientation control all the media and thus manage to spread their political ideas both among the ruling class and among the less educated public.

But it is also true that politicians succeed when they manage to interpret what the masses want.
If in the last century the masses applauded Mussolini and Stalin, it is because they expressed what the masses believed in. Indeed, imagine if someone today said the same things that Stalin or Mussolini once did: they would be buried in ridicule.

In the end, it is like advertising: it is truly effective only if it matches what people want to hear.
This does not mean that everything is false and everything is true, as the sophists claimed, but it depends on the perspective from which it is evaluated.

Every civilization, every era has its own reference points, its own interpretations—what we call its culture.

However, the concept of culture is used in two different senses. In everyday language, it refers to education: for example, the professor has (or should have) more culture than the janitor.
In sociological-political terms, on the other hand, it refers to the set of beliefs of a human group (commonly called "mentality"). In the first case, it is the result of study (thus elitist); in the second, it belongs to everyone (the mentality of the general public, of the masses, we could say).

Everyone has a culture in the sociological sense, both the Hottentots and the Swedes, and the idea of superiority depends on the parameters we choose: one might even think that the savage Hottentot (Rousseau’s noble savage) is better than the civilized Swede.

Subculture (better: subculture) refers to particular traits of a group within a broader culture: for example, within Italian culture, we have the Neapolitan subculture (with pizza, pastries, songs, warm hearts, and chaotic traffic).

More relevant to our discussion are the different political cultures (religious, ethical) that exist within a single general culture, especially in modern democracies: we have left-wing and right-wing cultures, atheist and religious, progressive and traditionalist ones. Each of these then branches into various strands, resulting in a continuous, uninterrupted spectrum.

Historically, we can give many examples of cultural differences of which we are often scarcely aware.
Take the beginning of the Iliad, which used to be read by all middle schoolers without much concern for its meaning. Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel, endangering the entire army, over the possession of a girl—that is, the right to rape a girl whose family they had slaughtered—and they are considered great heroes. But can we realize that for us they would be criminals of the worst kind? Nothing would seem TODAY more despicable, more vile. Yet in the Iliad, even Briseis doesn’t seem all that upset and later mourns the death of Patroclus, Achilles' friend.

Likewise, in Classical Greece, we find Aristotle—considered for millennia the master of those who know—arguing that slavery is completely natural, with slaves compared to animals or animated tools. In fact, barbarians—those who babble because they don’t speak Greek—were, by nature, destined to be slaves of the Greeks.
The entire Greco-Roman civilization was based on slavery, which seemed completely natural at the time.

Obviously, slaves yearned for freedom, but they didn’t necessarily think slavery should be abolished; if they became freedmen, they too often had slaves.
In the famous movie, Spartacus is portrayed as an enemy of slavery, but that’s an anachronism.
Today, on the contrary, no one would dare to advocate slavery, because culture has changed.

Now, we can judge ourselves as better or worse than the Romans based on the criteria we adopt regarding slavery—just as we might compare the cultures of the Hottentots and the Swedes.
We cannot evaluate the past with the criteria of the present, just as we cannot evaluate the present with the criteria of the past.

Slavery is just one of countless examples of cultural differences.
We could mention the ius necis (the right to impose the death penalty) that the pater familias (head of the family) had over members of his household in ancient Rome.

But we don’t need to go back thousands of years to the Greeks and Romans: we can just look a few decades back. For example, a few days ago, I rewatched Napoli Milionaria and noticed the drama of Gennaro's daughter over losing her virginity, or how the wife regretted not dedicating herself entirely to housework and, above all, to her role as a mother. Who would think that way today? Yet Eduardo De Filippo was even a communist leftist: imagine what someone like Elly Schlein would say about the same topics today.

In the last century, communism, fascism, and democracy clashed: the first two have practically disappeared from history, save for small and insignificant groups.
At the time of Mussolini's rise in Italy, popular mass culture was deeply infused with nationalism, and elitist culture was neo-idealist. Part of it, represented by Croce, was (moderately) opposed to fascism; the other part, represented by Gentile, supported it (Gentile even joined the RSI and was killed by partisans). Imagine a politician today saying we must follow in the footsteps of the Roman Empire, make the nation great with wars of conquest, bring down the Western plutocracies, crush Greece, and the like: the masses would surely mock him, and no one would follow him.

Nor is it necessarily true that the ignorant are always wrong and the educated always right: elitist culture (of educated people) is not always right compared to the culture of the masses (in the sociological sense).
Take, for example, the Neapolitan Republic of 1799 or the post-unification brigandage. Highly educated men—Neapolitan Enlightenment thinkers and unitary liberals—believed they were liberating the people. But the people clearly understood that the ones benefiting from the new order were the bourgeoisie.
The only thing that mattered to them was land ownership, and unlike in France, this didn’t happen in the Kingdom of Naples. The poor and illiterate certainly couldn’t aspire to govern public affairs, which ended up entirely in the hands of the wealthy class.

Ultimately, the post-unification brigandage in the South was above all a civil war between poor peasants and landowners: liberty and democracy had little to do with it.

Similarly, communist intellectuals—who had a broad cultural dominance after the war—believed they held the scientific truth of communism, as it was then called, and viewed those who didn’t vote communist as naive proletarians deceived by the bourgeoisie.
In hindsight, we can say that the people were right not to believe in communism, and the intellectuals were wrong—even though they were undoubtedly people of great intelligence.

It is only in hindsight that we know fascism and communism are ideologies that failed spectacularly, and no one really believes in them anymore (except for a few fringe groups—there are always some).