Corriere della Sera leaves Herodotus alone

In the never-ending battle it has waged for the rebirth of the sacred idea of ​​the West, the Corriere della Sera , in an editorial signed by Ernesto Galli della Loggia , is now enlisting none other than Herodotus. The targets are Catholic and progressive thought, guilty of believing that "the world is one thing ." Through a quote from the historian of Halicarnassus, the newspaper, now captured by the myths of the radical right, believes it has found the justification for the postulate according to which only this strip of land (the West, precisely) possesses the tools for understanding its own and other people's past.

In fact, the reference to Herodotus shows in itself how there is something ambiguous at the foundation of the longed-for clash of civilizations: is the West a space or a value? If the territorial dimension counts, the one who is considered the founder of historiography, as knowledge anchored to documentation and travel for the knowledge of even micro-events, is not properly a native of the West. The Greek (by culture) Herodotus, who praises the laws of the city as the linchpin of the contrast between East and West, is in fact originally from a coastal location in Asia Minor. Although tied to the model of Athens, in his approach to dark-skinned barbarians he does not reveal any contempt in the name of a preconceived scale of values. For him, on the contrary, the “ most scrupulous Egyptians” are “by far the most learned men I have ever come to experience ”. Furthermore, declaring that he had " set forth the results of what I had seen, reflected upon, and learned by my researches" , Herodotus noted that " Egypt contains very many wonders, and presents, in preference to any other country, works that surpass all description". It is no coincidence that certain religious customs, artistic sensibilities, and medical practices "came to Hellas from Egypt".

It is difficult to force the passage of a historian so pluralistic and tolerant towards diversity, to make him a champion of the West to be understood as an armored fortress invested with the mission of defending itself from the more narrow-minded mentalities that come from the African shores and the Asian deserts. Minister Valditara, among other things, would have the means to suggest to his advisor the pitfalls of a static concept of the West, given that ancient Rome absorbed those uncultivated areas of Africa from which, according to the government historian, Europe should immunize itself: Libya provided, as is known, a tanned emperor. And in the 1930s, to trace the cause of the decline of Roman primacy, it was not for nothing that Giorgio Almirante took aim at Caracalla, " son of the African Septimius Severus " and bearer of the "French disease ", emblem of the advancing multi-ethnic uprooting. Thanks to the famous Edict, a multilingual empire, with multiple religions and ethnic groups, achieved political unification with the extension of citizenship to the provincial novi cives . It was in its own way a precedent of the civic patriotism so disliked by the Corriere today. This is why Almirante railed against the dynasty that had made “Rome like the New York of ancient times: an immense melting pot of civilizations, rites, races”.

The Milanese daily newspaper, also driven by the identitarian fury in the name of an excluding Western culture, even fears the conquests of constitutionalism. After having railed against the “abstractness and formality” of law, it then denounces its “ presumed universality ” which is nothing if not “ the disembodied, cold prescription of rules”. On such bases, a West stripped of democratic forms and constitutions proves to be nothing but earth and blood (in this sense, “ the past so disturbing for the blood it drips with ” must be reclaimed). The spectre of Almirante is haunting Via Solferino. To orient themselves in the category of the West, however, a few years earlier there were also those who from prison had grasped an essential point: " It is evident that East and West are arbitrary and conventional (historical) constructions, since outside of real history every point on earth is East and West at the same time: conventional and historical constructions not of man in general, but of the European cultured classes, who through their world hegemony have made them accepted by the whole world" . By virtue of such a hegemony, the representations of European intellectuals have assumed the mask, not always credible, of universalism.

When the centrality of the Old Continent was already beginning to decline, Weber questioned the eclipse of rationality in the modern. Gramsci also touched on the theme when he observed that the unitary notion of the West, “rests on three pillars: the critical spirit, the scientific spirit, the capitalist spirit (perhaps it would be better to say “industrial”). The last two are solid (if “capitalism” = “industrialism” yes), the first however is no longer so, and therefore the spiritual elites of the West suffer from imbalance and disharmony between critical consciousness and action”. With a critical spirit that then seemed everywhere to be in decline, and yet he certainly did not lack it, Gramsci studied not only Americanism and Fordism, but also Japan, China. And he noted in this regard: “ Atlantic-Pacific. Function of the Atlantic in modern civilization and economy. Will this axis shift to the Pacific? The largest masses of the world's population are in the Pacific: if China and India were to become modern nations with large masses of industrial production, their detachment from European dependence would break the current balance: transformation of the American continent, shift of the axis of American life from the Atlantic shore to the Pacific shore, etc. See all these questions in economic and political terms (trade, etc.)”.

In light of today's epochal changes, which in perspective affect geopolitical, cultural and wealth structures that arose decades or even centuries ago, it is clear that conceptual maps must be updated, disobeying ministerial obscuration regarding the past of other regions of the planet that have become undisputed protagonists. At Corriere they make pure ideology when, hinting at a right-wing Italian-style cancel culture , they wave a nostalgic vision of the West completely alien to actual historical processes, which announce that the world has become one.

FROM

Michael Prospero