by Umberto Eco
What’s unreasonable is the value that literary history and literary criticism often place on such artifacts. Does our knowledge that the twenty-six-year-old Fleming was writing letters typical of a randy adolescent make any difference to our enjoyment of the James Bond stories, or to our critical assessment of the author’s style? To understand Joyce’s eroticism as a literary fact, read Ulysses, especially the final chapter, even if the person who wrote it lived a chaste life. With some great men, it was their writing that was salacious and their lives virtuous, but with others their writing was virtuous and their lives salacious. Would our view of Manzoni’s The Betrothed change if it came to light that the author was a naughty boy in bed and that his two wives died as a result of his sexual excesses?
2014
Napoleon never existed
I have owned for some time a late translation, dated 1914, of a pamphlet by a Jean-Baptiste Pérès entitled Napoleon Never Existed. A few days ago, however, I came across the first edition of 1835, which bore the title Grand Erratum, source d’un nombre infini d’errata (Grand Erratum, Source of an Infinite Number of Errata). The author demonstrates that Napoleon is merely a sun myth, and supports his argument with plenty of evidence, finding analogies with Apollo, the Sun: “Napoleo” is said to mean “true Apollo the destroyer”; both were born on a Mediterranean island; the name of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia, is said to mean “dawn,” and Letizia is derived from Latona, which is the name of Apollo’s mother. Napoleon had three sisters who are evidently the three Graces, four brothers who symbolize the four seasons, and two wives who are the Moon and the Earth. His twelve marshals were the signs of the zodiac, and, like the Sun, Napoleon ruled the south and was overshadowed in the north.
He brought an end to the scourge of the French Revolution, which reminds us of Apollo’s killing of Python. The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and Napoleon came from Egypt to govern France and died in the western seas, after a reign of twelve years, which are none other than the twelve hours of daylight. “It is therefore proven that the supposed hero of our century is no more than an allegorical character, whose attributes are all loaned out by the Sun.”
Pérès knew how to talk nonsense, but he did so to parody Origine de tous les cultes (1794) by Charles-François Dupuis, in which it was argued that religions, fables, myths, and mysteries were no more than physical and astronomical allegories.
After Pérès came one Aristarchus Newlight (Historic Certainties Respecting the Early History of America, 1851), who used similar arguments to challenge David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and his critical rationalist interpretation of the gospels. But before Pérès, Richard Whately had published Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte in 1819, of which I have a first edition. Whately was an English theologian and the archbishop of Dublin, and had written many serious works on religious and philosophical arguments—his book on logic had influenced Charles Sanders Peirce. Whately had set out to refute the rationalist writers, in particular David Hume, who rejected pseudo-historical events, such as those in scripture and the stories of miracles, because there was no empirical evidence to prove them. Whately didn’t challenge Hume and others, but carried their arguments to their logical conclusion. Following these principles, he demonstrated that the stories about Napoleon’s exploits, which also have something miraculous about them, were not always firsthand accounts, and that not many of Napoleon’s contemporaries had actually seen him.
The antiquarian trouvailles I have described are by three writers who satirize not so much those who hunt out mysteries as thinkers who seek to debunk mysteries. But their method is interesting: carry the ideas of others to an extreme and they’ll be laughed out of existence.
2014
Are we all mad?
Over the past few weeks we have witnessed acts of undoubted madness. The German airline pilot was mad when he crashed his plane into a mountain, killing all the passengers on board. The Milanese businessman was undoubtedly mad when he committed multiple murder in a courtroom. It’s also unsettling to read about another pilot who started firing a gun in his own home. I leave aside that he had been accused of causing a road accident while driving intoxicated, something that might happen to anyone, except that driving when drunk might raise concerns about the habits of a man who had recently piloted the Italian president.
The policemen accused of beating up protesters at the Armando Diaz School in Genoa during the G8 meeting in 2001, were they mad? They were regular officers. What frenzy possessed them to run riot, as if oblivious to the fact that someone in the end would find them out?
This reminded me of the words of the nineteenth-century social reformer Robert Owen: “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.” After all, we live in the belief that wisdom is the normal state and that madness is the exception. At one time the madhouse was the answer. But is it true? Might we not think that madness is the normal condition and that so-called normality is a transitory state? Paradox aside, wouldn’t it be prudent to persuade ourselves that every human being has a dose of madness, which remains latent in some throughout their lives, but which in others explodes without warning? It explodes in nonlethal and at times positive forms in those we regard as geniuses, innovators, and visionaries, but it manifests itself in others as actions we condemn as criminally insane.
If this is so, there is a seed of madness in every living person, all seven billion of us, a seed that might suddenly sprout, and only at certain moments. Part of the time, ISIS cutthroats are probably faithful husbands and loving fathers—perhaps they spend several hours a day watching television or take their children to the mosque. Then they get up in the morning, sling a Kalashnikov around their neck, perhaps their wife prepares an omelet sandwich for them, and they go off to behead someone or machine-gun a hundred children. After all, wasn’t that how Adolf Eichmann lived? There again, even the most brutal assassin, if you listen to his mother, was an exemplary child until the day before, and at most mildly irritable or gloomy.
If that’s the case, we ought to live in a continual state of mistrust, fearing that at any moment our wife or our husband, our son or our daughter, the neighbor we say hello to on the staircase each morning, or our best friend is suddenly going to produce a hatchet and sink it into our skull, or put arsenic in our soup.
But then our life would be impossible. If we could no longer trust anyone—not the loudspeaker at the railroad station that tells us the train for Rome is leaving from platform five, because the announcer might be mad—we’d become permanently paranoid.
To survive, we have to trust someone. But we have to convince ourselves that absolute trust, of the kind that sometimes happens when people fall in love, does not exist—that the only trust is probabilistic. If a best friend has been dependable over the years, we can wager that he is a person to be trusted. It is rather like Pascal’s wager: it’s more advantageous to believe in eternal life than not to believe in it. Nevertheless, it’s a wager. Living on a wager is risky, but living without such a wager, on friendship if not on eternal life, is essential to our mental health.
I go along with Saul Bellow that in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is itself a form of madness. So don’t take the things you have just read as pure gold.
2015
Idiots and the responsible press
I’ve been much amused by a story on the Web about idiots. For those who haven’t been following it, it was reported online and in the press that in a so-called keynote lecture I stated that the Internet is full of idiots. This is not true. The lecture was on an entirely different subject, but it demonstrates how news becomes distorted when it circulates among newspapers and the Internet.
The story about idiots came up at a press conference when, in answer to some question or other, I made a purely commonsense observation. Out of the planet’s seven billion inhabitants there’s an inevitable number of idiots, many of whom used to communicate their ravi
ngs to friends or relatives at a bar, so their opinions were confined to a limited circle. A substantial number of these people now can express their opinions on social networks. Such opinions therefore reach large audiences, and merge with the many other opinions expressed by reasonable people.
Please note that my notion of idiots contained no racist connotations. No one, with a few exceptions, is an idiot by profession, but someone who is an excellent grocer, an excellent surgeon, or an excellent bank clerk can say some silly things about matters he knows nothing about, or has given insufficient thought to. Reactions on the Internet are immediate, with no time for reflection.
It’s right that the Internet should allow space for those with nothing sensible to say, but the excess of stupidity is clogging the lines. And certain unseemly reactions I have seen on the Internet confirm my reasonable contention. Indeed, someone reported me as saying that the Internet gives the same prominence to the opinions of a fool and those of a Nobel Prize winner, and suddenly there was a pointless discussion that went viral over whether or not I’d have accepted the Nobel Prize—without anyone going off to check Wikipedia. All of this shows to what degree people are inclined to talk without pausing to think. In any event, the number of idiots can now be quantified: at least 300 million. Wikipedia is reported to have lost 300 million users in recent times. These are all surfers who no longer use the Internet to find information, but prefer to stay online chatting with their peers, and probably without pausing to think.
The normal Internet user ought to be capable of grasping the difference between incoherent and well-articulated ideas, and here the problem of filtering information arises. It doesn’t relate just to opinions expressed in blogs or via Twitter, but is an urgent question for all websites, where you can find information that is reliable and useful, but also—and I defy anyone to deny it—ravings of every kind, accounts of nonexistent conspiracies, Holocaust denial, racism, and information that is culturally false, inaccurate, or slipshod.
How do you filter information? Each of us has the capacity to filter information when we look at websites that deal with topics we know about, but I for one would have a hard time telling whether or not a website on string theory is accurate. Not even schools can teach pupils how to filter information, since teachers are in the same position as I am, and those who teach Greek are likely to find themselves defenseless when they look at a site on catastrophe theory or the Thirty Years’ War.
There is only one solution. Newspapers are often slaves to the Internet, as that is where they gather news and stories that sometimes turn out to be false, thus giving voice to their major rival—and doing so always later than the Internet. Instead, they ought to devote at least two pages each day to an analysis of websites, in the same way they review books or films, pointing out the sites that are virtuous and reporting those that carry bogus stories and inaccuracies. They’d be providing a valuable public service and might even persuade those many Internet users who are turning away from newspapers to return to them.
To launch an enterprise such as this, a newspaper would need a team of analysts, many of whom would have to come from outside. It would cost money, but would provide a valuable cultural service and give the press a new purpose.
2015
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About the Author
UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and novels, including The Name of the Rose, The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega, and was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government. Eco was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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