The essays that appear in Five Moral Pieces are far more serious and far more weighty than those that appeared in Eco’s Misreadings. But while the tone is substantially different, the essays are no less provocative and no less insightful. As the title indicates, the focus here is on values, morals, and ethics, and in the context of the increasing interconnectedness of the world – the very process and project of globalization – tolerance is the most supreme of all. Eco notes the fragility of ethical/moral principles in our postmodern world, and he argues compellingly that it is the intellectual responsibility of all people to confront directly the most difficult and challenging moral problems of our time. Robust and compelling, these essays move us effectively and proactively in that direction.
In “Reflections on War” (1991), Eco questions the very utility of war itself, arguing that war is both useless and impossible:
“There is a more radical way of thinking about war: in merely formal terms, in terms of internal consistency, by reflecting on its condition of possibility – the conclusion being that you cannot make war because the existence of a society based on instant information, rapid transport, and continuous intercontinental migration, allied to the nature of the new technologies of war, has made war impossible and irrational. War is in contradiction with the very reasons for which it is waged” (pg. 6).
“The discovery of atomic energy, television, air transport, and the birth of various forms of multinational capitalism have resulted in some conditions that make war impossible” (pg. 7).
So, what, then, are the alternatives? As it turns out, the Cold War, it seems, wasn’t so bad after all:
“It is an intellectual duty to proclaim the inconceivability of war. Even if there are no alternatives. At most, to remind people that our century has known an excellent alternative to war, and that is ‘cold’ war. In the end, history will have admit that cold warfare, the source of horrors, injustices, intolerance, local conflicts, and widespread terror, has proved a very humane and mild solution in terms of casualties, and cold warfare can even boast victors and vanquished” (pg. 16).
As I read this, I could not help but be reminded that, while he did not argue that it was necessarily a good thing, John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, did argue that we would certainly soon (and quite profoundly) miss the Cold War. And he made this argument even before the Cold War officially ended. See his “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” Atlantic Monthly 266, no. 2 (August1990): 35-50. In some sense, then, Eco “misses” it as well.
In the end, Eco succinctly claims: “War cannot be justified, because – in terms of the rights of the species – it is worse than a crime. It is a waste” (pg. 17).
Eco, of course, is not the first to argue that war is useless, impossible, irrational, irrelevant, taboo, obsolete, etc. Most prominently, philosophers, political scientists, and international relations theorists have for decades made this case, albeit from a variety of unique and nuanced perspectives. See for example, John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York, New York: Basic Books, 1989, 1990, 1996) and a corresponding review, Carl Kaysen, “Is War Obsolete?: A Review Essay,” International Security 14, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 42-64. Interestingly enough, all this flies in the face of the ideas developed in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York, New York: Anchor Books, 2002). Hedges argues that war often seduces entire societies, its very experience being both exhilarating and addictive, thus ultimately making it integral to our lives and our identities.
In “Reflections on War” (1991), Eco questions the very utility of war itself, arguing that war is both useless and impossible:
“There is a more radical way of thinking about war: in merely formal terms, in terms of internal consistency, by reflecting on its condition of possibility – the conclusion being that you cannot make war because the existence of a society based on instant information, rapid transport, and continuous intercontinental migration, allied to the nature of the new technologies of war, has made war impossible and irrational. War is in contradiction with the very reasons for which it is waged” (pg. 6).
“The discovery of atomic energy, television, air transport, and the birth of various forms of multinational capitalism have resulted in some conditions that make war impossible” (pg. 7).
So, what, then, are the alternatives? As it turns out, the Cold War, it seems, wasn’t so bad after all:
“It is an intellectual duty to proclaim the inconceivability of war. Even if there are no alternatives. At most, to remind people that our century has known an excellent alternative to war, and that is ‘cold’ war. In the end, history will have admit that cold warfare, the source of horrors, injustices, intolerance, local conflicts, and widespread terror, has proved a very humane and mild solution in terms of casualties, and cold warfare can even boast victors and vanquished” (pg. 16).
As I read this, I could not help but be reminded that, while he did not argue that it was necessarily a good thing, John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, did argue that we would certainly soon (and quite profoundly) miss the Cold War. And he made this argument even before the Cold War officially ended. See his “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” Atlantic Monthly 266, no. 2 (August1990): 35-50. In some sense, then, Eco “misses” it as well.
In the end, Eco succinctly claims: “War cannot be justified, because – in terms of the rights of the species – it is worse than a crime. It is a waste” (pg. 17).
Eco, of course, is not the first to argue that war is useless, impossible, irrational, irrelevant, taboo, obsolete, etc. Most prominently, philosophers, political scientists, and international relations theorists have for decades made this case, albeit from a variety of unique and nuanced perspectives. See for example, John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York, New York: Basic Books, 1989, 1990, 1996) and a corresponding review, Carl Kaysen, “Is War Obsolete?: A Review Essay,” International Security 14, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 42-64. Interestingly enough, all this flies in the face of the ideas developed in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York, New York: Anchor Books, 2002). Hedges argues that war often seduces entire societies, its very experience being both exhilarating and addictive, thus ultimately making it integral to our lives and our identities.
Eco wrote this essay during the Gulf War I era. Since then, we have had, Afghanistan, Gulf War II, and the incredibly amorphous, all-encompassing, misnamed War on Terror. Perhaps he remains a bit ahead of his time…
“When the Other Appears on the Scene” (1996) derives from an exchange of four letters between Eco and the now Archbishop Emeritus of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. In this nonbeliever-believer exchange, the two do not engage in a game of rhetorical one-upmanship. Rather, the full exchange, published as Belief or Nonbelief?, is thoughtful and civil, and deals with four questions/issues/debates that divide official Catholic teaching and secular opinion: (1) hope and apocalyptic expectation, (2) when life begins, (3) the ordination of women, and (4) how the nonbeliever can be committed to moral and ethical absolutes. This essay deals with that fourth issue, and Eco’s stance can be pinpointed most directly when he argues: “The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene… Just as we cannot live without eating or sleeping, we cannot understand who we are without the look and the response of the other” (pgs. 22, 23).
In “On the Press” (1995), Eco indicts the media for its complicit role in creating widespread disillusionment with politics. Setting the backdrop, but now considered obsolete, are two major themes:
“(1) the difference between news and commentary, and therefore the need for objectivity; (2) newspapers are instruments of power, run by political parties or economic groups, which use deliberately cryptic language insofar as their real function is not to give news to the citizens but to send messages in code to other power groups, passing over the heads of the reader” (pgs. 33-34).
Having set these aside as being far less relevant today than they were about 30 years ago, Eco turns to the more contemporary concern for and impact of the “ideology of entertainment,” which transforms “what is not news into news” (pg. 42). Newspaper editors and reporters have come to create and construct stories that do not really exist, because newspapers have “to fill too many pages devoted to the arts, variety, and society, pages dominated by the ideology of entertainment” (pg. 43). And the consequences, he proceeds to point out, are immense: “What lingers on to affect social mores is the tone of the debate, the conviction that anything goes” (pg. 52).
There is not really much new here, and Eco’s critiques are perhaps more directly applicable to Italy; but he does address an issue that is still playing out: the decline of published daily newspapers in the face of easily accessible, on-demand information and news. With technological developments as they are (and will be in the future), each individual can set up (and print, if they so chose) their own daily newspaper. “The dailies might die,” Eco warns, “…but a homemade paper could say only what users are interested in, and would cut them off from a flow of potentially stimulating information, judgments, and alerts; it would rob them of the chance to pick up, on leafing through the rest of the conventional newspaper, unexpected or undesired news” (pg. 60). I agree, but I don’t think Eco expressed this jeremiad strongly enough. Readers would, perhaps, be well-informed on some level, but their hand-picked information is really better characterized as cherry-picked – again, with immense consequences on judgment and informed decision-making that should not be overlooked.
From my reading, “Ur-Fascism” (1995) is the most important essay in the collection.
In the first half of the essay, Eco reflects on his own personal experience as a young boy living with Mussolini’s brand of Italian Fascism. In this discussion, I was drawn to several things. First, his use of the terms “freedom” and “liberation,” which, Eco rightly points out, do not always mean the same thing (pg. 65). In fact, freedom and liberation were (and are!) complicated, multifaceted phenomena, defined and experienced differently by different peoples, and this is exactly what William I. Hitchcock, Professor of History at Temple University, examines and analyzes in his recent book, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York, New York: Free Press, 2008). Hitchcock, moving beyond the much-written-about battles of World War II, captures the experiences not of combatants, but of ordinary Europeans as Allied forces liberated the Continent in the closing months of the war. But Eco, writing more than a decade earlier than Hitchcock, has important insights to offer as well, especially these two: Europeans did not wait passively for liberation – there were active (if not always effective) resistance movements in several countries (p. 67); liberation “was a common undertaking achieved by people of different colors” (p. 68).
Second, I was interested in the way Eco captured and characterized Italian Fascism:
“Mussolini’s Fascism was based on the idea of a charismatic leader, on corporativism, on the utopia of the ‘fateful destiny of Rome,’ on the imperialistic will to conquer new lands, on inflammatory nationalism, on the ideal of an entirely regimented nation of Blackshirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, and on anti-Semitism” (p. 69).
“[Italian] Fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not wholly totalitarian – not so much for its moderation as for the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to commonly held belief, Italian Fascism did not have a philosophy of its own…. Mussolini had no philosophy: all he had was rhetoric” (p. 71).
“It can be said that Italian Fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship to dominate a European country, and that all similar movements later found some sort of common archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian Fascism was the first to create a military liturgy, a folklore, and even a style of dress – which enjoyed greater success abroad than Armani, Benetton, or Versace today…. It was Italian Fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was implementing interesting social reforms capable of providing a moderately revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat” (p. 72).
All of these developments, of course, were embodied in and epitomized by Il Duce himself.
[NOTE: For more on Mussolini as iconic symbol of the Italian Fascist movement, and embodiment of the Italian nation and its people, see, Sergio Luzzatto, The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy (New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998, 2005). For a good springboard into the academic study of fascism more broadly (and comparatively), see Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).]
Third, I was interested in Eco’s development of the concept of Ur-Fascism, or “eternal Fascism” (p. 77). He enumerates 14 characteristics, stating that: “These characteristics cannot be regimented into a system; many are mutually exclusive and are typical of other forms of despotism or fanaticism. But all you need is one of them to be present, and a Fascist nebula will begin to coagulate” (pgs. 77-78). I will not replicate that list here (it is, however, available in a slightly abridged format here), but it is worth close examination because of its relevance – at times, direct relevance – to the ways that the term are deployed today. Two ways, in particular, come to mind.
Eco’s analysis is foundational for some who see fascism taking root in the United States. Chris Hedges, in fact, begins his recent book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York, New York: Free Press, 2006), by invoking Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” (Hedges, pgs. xv-xx). A key difference to make note of, however, is that Hedges is interested less in the political facets of fascism (although there are clearly plenty of political implications) and more in the religious facets of fascism.
Simultaneously, Eco’s analysis is relevant to similarly highly-charged labels, perhaps most importantly, Islamofascism. For those interested in how this term is defined and deployed, see:
Christopher Hitchens, “Defending Islamofascism,” Slate.com (22 October 2007).
Walter Laqueur, “The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism,” OUPblog (25 October 2006).
William Safire, “Language: Islamofascism, Anyone?” New York Times Online (1 October 2006).
Stephen Schwartz, “What Is ‘Islamofascism’?” TCSDaily (16 August 2006).
The term, despite being problematic and reductionist, has been used at the highest levels, including by President George W. Bush. The connotations are so overloaded, so supercharged, and critical, nuanced discussion is so often lacking (or stifled) that is difficult to deploy the term as an effective analytical tool. Words matter, however, and we cannot be reminded of that enough.
Finally, in “Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable” (1997), Eco – after providing some insightful jabs directed at dating systems [“the various dating systems in force in different cultures reflect different theogonies and historiographies” (p. 90)], conceptualizations of time, and the coming of the third millennium [“the year 2000 is ours, it is a Eurocentric date, our business” (p. 91)] – turns toward the paramount importance of tolerance in an era of hyper-globalization and the “great cross-breeding of cultures” (pg. 92).
To explain some of the demographic and cultural transformations occurring in Europe, Eco sets out the distinction between immigration and migration:
Immigration: “occurs when some individuals [even many]…move from one country to another” (pg. 93); it “may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, or accepted” (pg. 93); “immigrants…accept most of the customs of the country into which they have immigrated” (pg. 94).
Migration: a more-or-less “natural phenomenon” that “no one can control” (pg. 93); “occurs when an entire people, little by little, moves from one territory to another,” where what matters “is the extent to which the migrants change the culture of the territory to which they have migrated” (pg. 93).
So here it is, then: “What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration…. The problem is that in the next millennium…Europe will become a multiracial continent – or a ‘colored’ one, if you prefer. That is how it will be, whether you like it or not” (pgs 95-96).
As a result, intolerance will be on the rise: “Intolerance for what is different or unknown is as natural in children as in their instinct to possess all they desire. Children are educated gradually to tolerance, just as they are taught to respect the property of others and, even before that, to control their sphincters. Unfortunately, while everyone learns to control his own body, tolerance is a permanent educational problem with adults, because in everyday life we are forever exposed to the trauma of difference” (pg. 100).
Therefore: “uncontrolled intolerance has to be beaten at the roots, through constant education that starts from the earliest infancy” (pg. 103). While incredibly daunting, this task is essential.
If intolerance is not “beaten at the roots,” but rather taken to the extreme, the new intolerable becomes genocide. Thus, a whole host of other questions of great significance and consequence arise, especially this one: When and by what criteria, standards, and objectives can one state intervene in another when the intolerable happens? Ultimately, in deciding a course of action, this consideration becomes paramount: “Accepting the intolerable means casting doubt on our own identity. It is necessary to assume the responsibility of deciding what is intolerable and then taking action, ready to pay the price of error” (pg. 108).
“When the Other Appears on the Scene” (1996) derives from an exchange of four letters between Eco and the now Archbishop Emeritus of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. In this nonbeliever-believer exchange, the two do not engage in a game of rhetorical one-upmanship. Rather, the full exchange, published as Belief or Nonbelief?, is thoughtful and civil, and deals with four questions/issues/debates that divide official Catholic teaching and secular opinion: (1) hope and apocalyptic expectation, (2) when life begins, (3) the ordination of women, and (4) how the nonbeliever can be committed to moral and ethical absolutes. This essay deals with that fourth issue, and Eco’s stance can be pinpointed most directly when he argues: “The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene… Just as we cannot live without eating or sleeping, we cannot understand who we are without the look and the response of the other” (pgs. 22, 23).
In “On the Press” (1995), Eco indicts the media for its complicit role in creating widespread disillusionment with politics. Setting the backdrop, but now considered obsolete, are two major themes:
“(1) the difference between news and commentary, and therefore the need for objectivity; (2) newspapers are instruments of power, run by political parties or economic groups, which use deliberately cryptic language insofar as their real function is not to give news to the citizens but to send messages in code to other power groups, passing over the heads of the reader” (pgs. 33-34).
Having set these aside as being far less relevant today than they were about 30 years ago, Eco turns to the more contemporary concern for and impact of the “ideology of entertainment,” which transforms “what is not news into news” (pg. 42). Newspaper editors and reporters have come to create and construct stories that do not really exist, because newspapers have “to fill too many pages devoted to the arts, variety, and society, pages dominated by the ideology of entertainment” (pg. 43). And the consequences, he proceeds to point out, are immense: “What lingers on to affect social mores is the tone of the debate, the conviction that anything goes” (pg. 52).
There is not really much new here, and Eco’s critiques are perhaps more directly applicable to Italy; but he does address an issue that is still playing out: the decline of published daily newspapers in the face of easily accessible, on-demand information and news. With technological developments as they are (and will be in the future), each individual can set up (and print, if they so chose) their own daily newspaper. “The dailies might die,” Eco warns, “…but a homemade paper could say only what users are interested in, and would cut them off from a flow of potentially stimulating information, judgments, and alerts; it would rob them of the chance to pick up, on leafing through the rest of the conventional newspaper, unexpected or undesired news” (pg. 60). I agree, but I don’t think Eco expressed this jeremiad strongly enough. Readers would, perhaps, be well-informed on some level, but their hand-picked information is really better characterized as cherry-picked – again, with immense consequences on judgment and informed decision-making that should not be overlooked.
From my reading, “Ur-Fascism” (1995) is the most important essay in the collection.
In the first half of the essay, Eco reflects on his own personal experience as a young boy living with Mussolini’s brand of Italian Fascism. In this discussion, I was drawn to several things. First, his use of the terms “freedom” and “liberation,” which, Eco rightly points out, do not always mean the same thing (pg. 65). In fact, freedom and liberation were (and are!) complicated, multifaceted phenomena, defined and experienced differently by different peoples, and this is exactly what William I. Hitchcock, Professor of History at Temple University, examines and analyzes in his recent book, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York, New York: Free Press, 2008). Hitchcock, moving beyond the much-written-about battles of World War II, captures the experiences not of combatants, but of ordinary Europeans as Allied forces liberated the Continent in the closing months of the war. But Eco, writing more than a decade earlier than Hitchcock, has important insights to offer as well, especially these two: Europeans did not wait passively for liberation – there were active (if not always effective) resistance movements in several countries (p. 67); liberation “was a common undertaking achieved by people of different colors” (p. 68).
Second, I was interested in the way Eco captured and characterized Italian Fascism:
“Mussolini’s Fascism was based on the idea of a charismatic leader, on corporativism, on the utopia of the ‘fateful destiny of Rome,’ on the imperialistic will to conquer new lands, on inflammatory nationalism, on the ideal of an entirely regimented nation of Blackshirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, and on anti-Semitism” (p. 69).
“[Italian] Fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not wholly totalitarian – not so much for its moderation as for the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to commonly held belief, Italian Fascism did not have a philosophy of its own…. Mussolini had no philosophy: all he had was rhetoric” (p. 71).
“It can be said that Italian Fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship to dominate a European country, and that all similar movements later found some sort of common archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian Fascism was the first to create a military liturgy, a folklore, and even a style of dress – which enjoyed greater success abroad than Armani, Benetton, or Versace today…. It was Italian Fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was implementing interesting social reforms capable of providing a moderately revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat” (p. 72).
All of these developments, of course, were embodied in and epitomized by Il Duce himself.
[NOTE: For more on Mussolini as iconic symbol of the Italian Fascist movement, and embodiment of the Italian nation and its people, see, Sergio Luzzatto, The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy (New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998, 2005). For a good springboard into the academic study of fascism more broadly (and comparatively), see Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).]
Third, I was interested in Eco’s development of the concept of Ur-Fascism, or “eternal Fascism” (p. 77). He enumerates 14 characteristics, stating that: “These characteristics cannot be regimented into a system; many are mutually exclusive and are typical of other forms of despotism or fanaticism. But all you need is one of them to be present, and a Fascist nebula will begin to coagulate” (pgs. 77-78). I will not replicate that list here (it is, however, available in a slightly abridged format here), but it is worth close examination because of its relevance – at times, direct relevance – to the ways that the term are deployed today. Two ways, in particular, come to mind.
Eco’s analysis is foundational for some who see fascism taking root in the United States. Chris Hedges, in fact, begins his recent book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York, New York: Free Press, 2006), by invoking Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” (Hedges, pgs. xv-xx). A key difference to make note of, however, is that Hedges is interested less in the political facets of fascism (although there are clearly plenty of political implications) and more in the religious facets of fascism.
Simultaneously, Eco’s analysis is relevant to similarly highly-charged labels, perhaps most importantly, Islamofascism. For those interested in how this term is defined and deployed, see:
Christopher Hitchens, “Defending Islamofascism,” Slate.com (22 October 2007).
Walter Laqueur, “The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism,” OUPblog (25 October 2006).
William Safire, “Language: Islamofascism, Anyone?” New York Times Online (1 October 2006).
Stephen Schwartz, “What Is ‘Islamofascism’?” TCSDaily (16 August 2006).
The term, despite being problematic and reductionist, has been used at the highest levels, including by President George W. Bush. The connotations are so overloaded, so supercharged, and critical, nuanced discussion is so often lacking (or stifled) that is difficult to deploy the term as an effective analytical tool. Words matter, however, and we cannot be reminded of that enough.
Finally, in “Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable” (1997), Eco – after providing some insightful jabs directed at dating systems [“the various dating systems in force in different cultures reflect different theogonies and historiographies” (p. 90)], conceptualizations of time, and the coming of the third millennium [“the year 2000 is ours, it is a Eurocentric date, our business” (p. 91)] – turns toward the paramount importance of tolerance in an era of hyper-globalization and the “great cross-breeding of cultures” (pg. 92).
To explain some of the demographic and cultural transformations occurring in Europe, Eco sets out the distinction between immigration and migration:
Immigration: “occurs when some individuals [even many]…move from one country to another” (pg. 93); it “may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, or accepted” (pg. 93); “immigrants…accept most of the customs of the country into which they have immigrated” (pg. 94).
Migration: a more-or-less “natural phenomenon” that “no one can control” (pg. 93); “occurs when an entire people, little by little, moves from one territory to another,” where what matters “is the extent to which the migrants change the culture of the territory to which they have migrated” (pg. 93).
So here it is, then: “What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration…. The problem is that in the next millennium…Europe will become a multiracial continent – or a ‘colored’ one, if you prefer. That is how it will be, whether you like it or not” (pgs 95-96).
As a result, intolerance will be on the rise: “Intolerance for what is different or unknown is as natural in children as in their instinct to possess all they desire. Children are educated gradually to tolerance, just as they are taught to respect the property of others and, even before that, to control their sphincters. Unfortunately, while everyone learns to control his own body, tolerance is a permanent educational problem with adults, because in everyday life we are forever exposed to the trauma of difference” (pg. 100).
Therefore: “uncontrolled intolerance has to be beaten at the roots, through constant education that starts from the earliest infancy” (pg. 103). While incredibly daunting, this task is essential.
If intolerance is not “beaten at the roots,” but rather taken to the extreme, the new intolerable becomes genocide. Thus, a whole host of other questions of great significance and consequence arise, especially this one: When and by what criteria, standards, and objectives can one state intervene in another when the intolerable happens? Ultimately, in deciding a course of action, this consideration becomes paramount: “Accepting the intolerable means casting doubt on our own identity. It is necessary to assume the responsibility of deciding what is intolerable and then taking action, ready to pay the price of error” (pg. 108).
As Darfur, Sudan, remains a prominent fixture in our daily headlines, Eco’s arguments should draw careful scrutiny.
