by Umberto Eco
2013
From Stupidity to Folly
No, it’s not pollution, it’s impurities in the air
With the winds of war blowing, we are in the hands of the most powerful man in the world, George W. Bush. Now, no one is claiming, as Plato did, that states should be governed by philosophers, but it would be good for them to be in the hands of someone with clear ideas. It’s instructive to look at some sites on the Internet that have collected Bush’s famous sayings. Among those sayings that have no date or place, I’ve found: “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure,” “It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system,” “It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment, it’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
To journalists: “I would have to ask the questioner. I haven’t had a chance to ask the questioners the question they’ve been questioning” (Austin, Texas, January 8, 2001). “I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can’t answer your question” (Reynoldsburg, Ohio, October 4, 2000). “The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her” (Orange County, California, September 15, 2000).
Politics: “Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it” (May 20, 1996). “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy—but that could change” (May 22, 1998). “I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well” (Washington, January 29, 2001). “We are ready to work with both parties to reduce the level of terror to a level acceptable to both sides” (Washington, October 2, 2001). “I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure” (Associated Press interview, January 18, 2001). “The great thing about America is that everyone should vote” (Austin, December 8, 2000). “We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work” (60 Minutes II, CBS, December 5, 2000). “One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected” (Los Angeles, September 27, 2000). “It’s very important for folks to understand that when there’s more trade, there’s more commerce” (Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, April 21, 2001).
Education: “Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children” (September 18, 1995). “We’re going to have the best educated American people in the world” (September 21, 1997). “I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-oriented administration, because I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that’s responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country” (Washington, January 11, 2001). “The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic system” (May 1, 2002).
Science: “Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe” (November 8, 1994). “For NASA, space is still a high priority” (September 5, 1993). “Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods” (Austin, December 20, 2000). “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully” (Saginaw, Michigan, September 29, 2000).
Foreign countries: “We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease” (press conference, June 14, 2001). “I [spoke] recently with Vicente Fox, the newly elected president in Mexico. He’s a man I know from Mexico. I talked about how best to expedite the exploration of natural gas in Mexico and transport it up to the United States, so we become less dependent on foreign sources of crude oil” (first presidential debate, October 3, 2000). “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur’ ” (discussion with Prime Minister Tony Blair). “Do you have blacks too?” (to President Fernando Cardoso of Brazil, April 28, 2002). “After all, a week ago, there were—Yasser Arafat was boarded up in his building in Ramallah, a building full of, evidently, German peace protesters and all kinds of people. They’re now out. He’s now free to show leadership, to lead the world” (Washington, May 2, 2002). “More and more of our imports come from overseas” (Beaverton, Oregon, September 25, 2000). “I understand that unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region” (Washington, March 13, 2002). “My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific” (Tokyo, February 18, 2002).
2002
How to get rich on other people’s suffering
If you feel you’re not making enough money and want to change jobs, clairvoyance is one of the best paid occupations and, despite what you might think, one of the easiest. All you need is a certain charm, a minimum understanding of others, and a certain amount of chutzpah. But even without such qualities, probability still works in your favor.
Try this experiment. Approach someone at random, though it’s helpful if the person is well disposed toward your paranormal qualities. Look him or her in the eye and say: “I feel there’s someone thinking of you very much, someone you haven’t seen for many years, but who once loved you, and suffered because you hadn’t reciprocated . . . and now that someone realizes how much you have suffered, and is sorry, though perhaps it’s too late . . .” Is there anyone in the world, apart from a young child, who hasn’t had an unhappy experience in love, or at least in love inadequately reciprocated? And so your subject will be the first to run to you for help, and cooperate, telling you that he or she knows exactly whom you’ve captured so clearly in your mind.
You can say: “There’s a person who underestimates you, and speaks badly of you, but does so out of envy.” It’s most unlikely your subject will reply that he or she is admired by all and sundry and has absolutely no idea who this person could be. He is more likely to identify the person right away and admire your skill in extrasensory perception.
Alternatively, say that you can see a dear departed loved one standing beside your subject. Go up to someone of a certain age and tell him you see the shadow of an elderly person who has died of a heart ailment. Every living being has had two parents and four grandparents, and if you’re lucky, several uncles and aunts and a beloved godparent as well. If your subject is of a certain age, it’s likely these people will be gone, and probable that out of at least six dead relatives, one has died of heart failure. If you’re unlucky, and since you’ve had the foresight to approach your subject in the company of others equally attracted by your paranormal gifts, you can say you’re perhaps mistaken, that the person you see is not a relative of the person you’re talking to, but of someone standing nearby. You can bet that one of those present will say that it’s his or her father or mother, and at that point you’re home and dry, you can talk of the warmth this shadow radiates, of the love it feels for that person, now ready for your enticement . . .
Discerning readers will have identified the techniques of the charismatic personalities who appear on television shows. Nothing is easier than to convince a parent who has just lost a child, or someone who’s still grieving the death of a parent or spouse, that this good soul has not vanished into thin air and is still sending messages from the other side. I repeat, being a psychic is easy: other people’s suffering and credulity work in your favor.
That is, of course, unless you’re dealing wit
h someone belonging to CICAP (the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences). CICAP researchers investigate phenomena claimed to be paranormal (poltergeists, levitation, psychic phenomena, crop circles, UFOs, water divining, not to mention ghosts, premonitions, spoon bending, card reading, weeping Virgin Marys, and so forth), and they demonstrate how it’s done, reveal the trick, explain scientifically what appears to be miraculous, often repeating the experiment to show, once the trick is understood, how we can all become magicians. Two CICAP sleuths, Massimo Polidoro and Luigi Garlaschelli, have published some of the results in a book, which makes for amusing reading.
But I hesitate to talk about amusement. The fact that CICAP has its work cut out means that gullibility is more widespread than we might think, and the book will in the end sell a few thousand copies, whereas someone like Rosemary Altea, when she appears on television, playing on people’s suffering, has a following of millions.
2002
Miss World, fundamentalists, and lepers
Most readers, by the time they read this, may have forgotten about the Miss World riots in Nigeria, which have left more than two hundred people dead. And this would be reason enough not to let the matter drop. Or the situation may have deteriorated, even now that the Miss World contest has been moved to London, since it has become clear that the arrival of the contestants in Nigeria was merely a pretext for stirring up trouble or cultivating subversive plans of quite a different kind—indeed, it’s hard to understand why anyone protesting against a beauty contest had to murder Christians and burn down churches, as the bishops could hardly be blamed for the initiative. But if things had gone ahead, it would have been all the more important to think about the pretext that led to the hideous fundamentalist reaction.
Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner who suffered imprisonment for his attempt to defend the basic freedoms of his unfortunate country, has written an article, published in La Repubblica, in which, along with illuminating reflections on the troubles in Nigeria, he said that he felt no liking for the national and global beauty contests, but when faced with the anger of Muslim fundamentalists, he felt he had to defend the rights of women over their bodies and their beauty. I believe that if I were Nigerian I’d think like him, but it so happens I’m not, and I’d like to look at what took place from my own point of view.
To protest against a contest of young women in swimsuits by zealously killing over two hundred people who have nothing to do with it cannot be justified. Put this way, it’s clear we’re all on the side of the girls. I feel, though, that the organizers of Miss World, in deciding to hold the contest in Nigeria, have behaved appallingly. Not because they could or should have anticipated such protests, but because to hold a vanity fair, at a cost that would feed many tribes for a month, in a deprived country like Nigeria, where children are dying of hunger and women are stoned for adultery, is like publicizing porno films in a home for the blind, or handing out beauty products in a leper colony and publicizing them with photographs of Naomi Campbell. And don’t tell me a beauty contest is a way of changing traditional customs and practices, since such encouragement comes, where appropriate, in homeopathic doses and not through blatant provocation.
The whole business, aside from the observation that it was an appalling decision clearly made for publicity purposes and with absolute cynicism, is of direct interest to us, especially now, since it relates to the issues surrounding globalization. I’m one of those who thinks that five out of ten aspects of globalization can be beneficial, but one negative aspect is the violent imposition of Western models on developing countries in order to encourage consumption and expectations that these countries cannot meet. In short, if I present you with a line of girls in swimsuits, it’s to encourage you to buy Western swimsuits, perhaps sewn by starving children in Hong Kong—swimsuits that can also be bought in Nigeria by those who are not dying of hunger but have money to spend because they’re making it on the backs of those who are dying of hunger, by those who are collaborating with Westerners to exploit such people and hold them in a precolonial state.
So I wouldn’t have been too sorry if, during the contest in Nigeria, the more aggressive antiglobal lobbies had arranged a gathering of the Tute Bianche and Black Bloc movements. The Tute Bianche could have peacefully, though firmly, seized the contest organizers, stripped them to their underwear like their contestants, smeared them with honey, covered them with feathers from ostriches and other local birds, and paraded them through the streets, making fun of them as appropriate. And the Black Bloc would have had to deal with the local fundamentalists—accomplices of Western colonialism who are perfectly happy for their countries to remain underdeveloped—and could have used all their fighting skills to prevent them from carrying out their massacres, and perhaps we would all have applauded such warriors of peace (for once, and only once), not least because if you are violent, then you need to have the courage to pit your strength against worthy adversaries.
And the aspiring Miss Worlds? Perhaps, having been persuaded to join the more moderate ranks of the antiglobal movement, they might have been retrained to waggle their well-clothed buttocks once in a while around the village square, handing out cans of meat and bars of soap, along with antibiotics and cartons of milk. We’d have pronounced them to be truly magnificent.
2002
Return to sender
An old saying had it that war is too serious to be left to the military. These days it needs bringing up to date: the world has become too complex to be left to those who used to run it. As though the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb were to be left to the engineers who had dug the Mont Blanc tunnel. I was thinking about such matters in Washington two weeks ago at the very instant a sniper was blithely shooting people who had stopped at a gas station or were leaving a restaurant. He was perched high up, with rifle and telescopic sight, working away on a highway intersection or a quiet hillside. The police turned up, closed the streets for two or three hours, but failed to find anyone, since the sniper had moved on. So people couldn’t leave their homes or send their children to school for days afterward.
Some say this is happening because of the open sale of firearms, but the gun lobbies see it differently. It’s not about possessing weapons but using them properly. As though shooting to kill were not a proper use of arms.
The Washington sniper was eventually caught. He had left his tracks everywhere. In the end people only want to get into the newspapers. But anyone not wanting to be caught could have carried on until he had killed more people than were massacred in the Twin Towers. This is why America was, and still is, in such a state of nerves: if a terrorist organization, rather than wasting time hijacking airplanes, let thirty or so snipers loose to wander about the whole country, it could paralyze the nation. And not only that: it would spark off a copycat contest among those who are not terrorists but would happily join the party.
What do those who are no longer able to run the world propose? To manufacture weapons that automatically “sign” the bullet and the cartridge case, so that the projectile removed from the body practically contains the assassin’s address. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that if I am intent on murder, I won’t use my own gun, but one I’ve stolen. And if I’m a terrorist, I’ll know people who are able to get hold of a gun stolen or manufactured outside America.
But that’s not all. I read recently in La Repubblica that at the Federal Reserve they are worried about deflation: people are not spending as much, prices are falling, a crisis worse than in times of inflation. So they propose a perishable dollar—in other words, a banknote with a magnetic strip that gradually loses value, and also loses value if you keep it in the bank.
How would Mr. Smith, who works hard to earn a hundred dollars a day, respond? He would become less productive. Why should he flog himself working to earn something that gradually becomes worthless, and which he can’t even put into his savings account toward the cost of a small ho
use? He’ll work hard enough to earn thirty dollars a day to buy himself a beer and a steak. Or he could invest his hundred dollars a day on useless items—T-shirts, pots of jam, pencils—that he could then use as barter: three pots of jam for a T-shirt. In the end, people would have to hoard a mass of useless stuff at home, while money would almost stop circulating. Or Mr. Smith could buy a small house, and pay for it in installments each time he has a hundred dollars to spare. Not only would the house, with interest and everything else, cost him ten times the price, but why would the current owner want to sell, since he would end up without a house and with lots of dollars that he has to spend fast? And so the construction industry would come to a standstill. And since the currency depreciates even when saved, who will put money in the bank?
All in all, the initiatives that are being taken, including the war in Iraq, to hold back the thousands of potential fundamentalist snipers, fall into the category of “the world has become too complex to be left to those who used to run it.”
2002
Give us a few more deaths
La Repubblica recently carried the news that the French government had introduced a point system on driver’s licenses, as has now been done in Italy, and in the course of one year the number of accidents had fallen, with fewer fatalities. Excellent news. But the president of the Groupement National des Carrossiers Réparateurs, an association of mechanics, having said that as a citizen he was of course pleased about the fall in the death rate, nevertheless, as a mechanic, he had to report that it was causing hardship to his members. Fewer accidents, fewer repairs. And it appears that as a result of this major economic blight, not only are mechanics in distress and asking for state assistance, but some are even urging less strenuous controls. In short, if the report is accurate, they’re asking for fewer fines so that more cars get damaged.
