The statues of Christopher Columbus and Jefferson were demolished. Homer, Dante and Shakespeare ended up under accusation. But the battle for rights cannot lead to the demolition of history
What does it mean to be politically correct? These days we often hear this word to indicate a new critical look that would like to be ethical, towards the past. The great navigator Columbus is accused of having favored colonialism and his statues are thrown down. Jefferson is accused of fighting American Indians and stains his image with jets of red paint, and so on. With us perhaps the proposals of the cancel culture they seem less heartfelt than in an America still strongly linked to its Puritan past.
From the statues then we move on to language and that too is targeted. It is proposed to eliminate the differences between the feminine and the masculine by putting an asterisk in place of the vowel. Without taking that into account words are not as isolated as stars in the sky but they are linked together and express a thought, a choice, a centuries-old habit that cannot be changed with a simple mechanical operation.
The idea of reflecting on misogyny and on the racism inherent in language is a very valuable exercise. The whole grammar is strongly discriminating: if you write “the man” you also understand the woman, and she stands for human being; if we write “the woman” we mean only one gender. The first involves an idea of universality, while the second is partial and primitive. Reasoning publicly on these disparities helps us to understand the changes of the present, the new sensitivities towards sexual identity. In fact, many believe thatand sexual identity is a biological, eternal and unchangeable destiny. And they do not take into account the cultural changes that every human condition carries with it. There are no fixed and indelible identities. Nature certainly underlies our being alive, but in millennia of evolutionary passion we have created a human being aware and self-styled superior, so as to consider all other living beings as his subordinates. Well, regardless of the vulgar presumption, this means that we have dominated, controlled, transformed nature by creating cultural domains that have made the sapiens more flexible, more susceptible to change. But at the same time we have loaded him with enormous responsibilities. And above all, we have increasingly distanced him from nature, to make him a creature capable of adapting and changing.
Blame the characters and ideas of the past because they do not correspond to today’s sensibilities it means denying the great metamorphic capacity of history. It means disavowing the conquests made, it means rejecting evolution, dismantle the precious passages of time, the historical sensitivities that vary, the alterations due to scientific discoveries, medical innovations, the prolongation of life, social and economic changes. It means entering that dangerous place of the mind where, as Goya asserted: “The sleep of reason generates monsters”.
History is not an arrow that is launched towards the future, but it has sinusoidal movements, it goes back and forth, although some achievements such as the transition from Revenge to Justice have become recognized ethical bases. Just think of the twentieth century, which was also a century born in the name of new discoveries and great progressive revolutions, then ended up in racism and hatred that led to two deadly wars.
The will to change things does not automatically mean denying the contradictions of the past. A little historical awareness is enough to understand that in an environment of religious totalitarianism, for example, any scientific thought such as that of Galilei, who claimed that it was the Earth that revolved around the Sun and not vice versa, could only be heretical. It is enough to observe how societies change, popular sensibilities are permeated by the ideologies and beliefs of the moment, to get out of this moralistic and fundamentalist attitude. A right desire to adapt human language and actions to our current certainties leads us to throw great philosophers and great artists into the sea with a gesture of childish rage. There are those who have even accused Shakespeare and Dante and Homer. But the question should be: are they still capable of communicating emotions to us even though we know that they have suffered from the idiosyncrasies, vices, defects and contradictions of their time? Something from which, let’s remember, we are not exempt either. In a few decades, our grandchildren will look down on us and find that many of our beliefs were archaic and out of place. This is the wonderful vitality of our journey into the contradictions of history.
August 20, 2022 (change August 20, 2022 | 20:28)
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