bk. The edition of Current Concerns dated 28 March 2023 introduced a remarkable new book on ‘modern propaganda’. The author of “Developing resilience against propaganda” by Eliane Perret, in addition to informing readers about the methods of manipulation, calls on us to recognize our ability and responsibility as citizens and to confront all disdainful efforts to control opinion. He writes of the necessity to be courageous enough to “confront others and oneself”, these being the core empowering virtues. To sharpen one’s own thinking and to be prepared for critical dialogue – this means to become un citoyen – the author refers to classical literature. It contains the entire treasure trove of insights, values, attitudes, and other philosophical on which the achievements such as freedom, equality, tolerance, peace, and democracy are based – and all of which had to be fought for in the course of centuries.
In another contribution to Current Concerns (No 6, 28 March 2023), Karl-Jürgen Müller suggested books by Peter Scholl–Latour, the renowned German–French journalist and expert on Islam and Arabic studies, as an antidote to the infiltrating poison of deeply frightening militaristic, and at the same time racist, agitation.
Reading these two articles, I was reminded of the words and attitude of the Italian professor of literature and philosopher Nuccio Ordine, who I and my partner met in 2016 at the University of Cosenza in Calabria; we met again in 2017 in Tricase, in the extreme south of Apulia, on the occasion of a literary competition at which Ordine was invited to speak. I had heard about Ordine a few months before our 2016 visit a on the Swiss French-language radio (in the Canton of Jura). His bestselling book, On the Usefulness of the Useless, was translated into more than 20 languages within a few years (in English as The Usefulness of the Useless, Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2017) and has everywhere met with an enthusiastic response.
Ordine made his reputation as a scholar, notably as a Renaissance specialist, after studying and later teaching at Harvard, Yale, and at various English and German universities. He is among the world’s leading experts on Giordano Bruno, the 16th century astronomer, philosopher, theologian, and poet.
Ordine’s book “The usefulness of the useless” exposed him to a broad public. It contains a splendid plea for the above-mentioned intellectual wealth developed in the history of ideas, which he tries to make accessible to young people with great commitment. Ordine brings the voices of poets and philosophers from two millennia to life – from Aristotle and Ovid via Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ionesco, Heidegger, and David Foster Wallace. The classics are no longer part of the core curriculum in schools, with far-reaching consequences for the broadening of intellectual horizons and the ethical education of young people.
“What the hell is water?”
To make the reader aware of the meaning and the essence of this spiritual tradition and its importance for contemporary education, Ordine quotes a small anecdote he got from Wallace, who died in 2008. He once told it to college graduates:
Two young fish are swimming side by side, when they meet an older fish who asks them what the water is like today. The young fish swim on with a doubtful look, until suddenly one of them asks the other one, “What the hell is water?”
For Nuccio Ordine, the explanation of this parable is crystal clear: “We have no awareness of the fact that literature and humanities, culture, and education, represent the amniotic fluid in which our ideas of democracy, freedom, and justice, of secularism, equality, the right to criticism, tolerance, solidarity, and the common good can develop powerfully.” It is very worthwhile to read “The usefulness of the useless” in peace and to talk about it, especially as the reader almost inevitably develops feelings of wonder, admiration, and respect in view of what humanity, i.e., many courageous, selfless personalities, has achieved – in spite of the often-violent power elites – in terms of spiritual freedom, humane perspective and, as a result, social progress in the name of their fellow human beings. The curriculum at our secondary schools has largely abandoned the reading of these original texts. According to Ordine’s critical view of the development of the educational system in Europe, it is the utilitarian-technocratic trend, especially since the Bologna- [agreements between European countries to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher-education qualifications] and PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] reforms and the democracy-crippling of the New Public Management [the effort to make the public service more "businesslike" and to improve its efficiency by using private sector management models.] have pushed schools and universities ever further in the direction of market conformity, a trend that Ordine very clearly sees as responsible for our current cultural erosion.
“The university allows you to become better humans”
On 6 May 2017, Ordine spoke at the aforementioned literary congress in Tricase before about 100 young students, addressing them in a way that is not common for a university professor. The young people hung on his every word. In the afternoon, I had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Ordine. In it he provided a deeper insight into his thinking and his commitment as a humanist; he also made it clear why it is important to read “the classics”.
Beat Kissling: I would like to start with the question of how you, as a university professor, arrived at your point of view in your famous book.
Nuccio Ordine: There are two problems. I am a professor of literature. I have been asking myself how in my lectures to give space to the teaching of literature, i.e., classical literature. Because, as I said to the boys this morning, the majority of literature nowadays is taught through textbooks or anthologies. But that is not how to stimulate the interest of students.
The decisive factor is the person who mediates, the professor. A good professor of literature cannot teach literature without reading the classics. It’s as if you could teach music without listening to the concerts. You can’t teach art without showing the pictures. So, one must always start from the primary text. Once you have the students’ interest in this way, one can derive the different ways of dealing with the subject: the philological or philosophical discourse, the historical-philosophical discourse, the historical, the history of literature. But one must start from the original text. Because to attract the attention of the students, to encourage and challenge them to the point they feel a love for a text, you need the original text.
On the other hand, the problem is that in the ministry, in the government, the question on how to arouse the enthusiasm of the students is not asked.
The questions they ask themselves are bureaucratic ones – for example, how many students can pass an exam. It is about statistics, how to deal with teaching, how to reduce teaching to numbers or data, which has nothing to do with the basic fundamental pedagogical mission.
Starting from the conviction that the university is not just a place where you go to get a diploma, but to become better as a human being, I began to search for a number of quotations from classical literature that show students that you have to study for the love of knowledge itself and not because knowledge is a means to earn money. This is the right way to find a good job later on, of their own accord, because they have “improved” professionally and have become humanly “better”.
Many professors do not come to such insights or conclusions. Are there special reasons that make it understandable how you acquired this awareness?
The experience I have had year after year at the university, as an advisor to the department, doctoral advisor, or any other advisor, was horrible. We attended these meetings only with the spirit of bureaucrats. So it was the spirit that was used to advertise for jobs, to solve technical problems, to distribute resources.
Among us professors there were no discussions about our own research, about different views on education. Nobody was interested to discuss these things among ourselves. The ministry itself was not interested either. So everything became a kind of search for profit, preoccupation with bureaucratic questions, with standards. I felt isolated.
“To give something back to the community
what I myself received as a child”
I remember you saying last time we met … you said that you didn’t have many colleagues with whom you could speak openly …
Yes, I share that joy with very few. But my motivation to work with young people stems from the need to respond to a necessity. It’s about giving back to the community something that I received myself when I was small. That is the reason I feel so connected to Albert Camus’ letter [letter of gratitude to his childhood teacher after winning the Nobel Prize, 19 November 1937]. That’s why I cried when I read the The First Man. Because despite the distance and the difference – the Algeria of The First Man was not Calabria when I was a child – there is something that makes it possible to connect the two texts and the two life experiences. It is about the fact that education, school, and university can change a person’s life.
Today, no one thinks that education, specifically school and university, should have the goal of changing the lives of students. It seems, as if the ultimate goal must be to graduate, to sell diplomas to the clients who buy them. Based on this I began to think about how I could at least convince my students.
There are two levels in the discourse. There is the level of one’s own personal practice. On the other hand, there is the level of political struggle that can be waged on a larger scale. I don’t think I have much strength to fight on a larger scale.
The success of my book has shown that I am not alone in my view. I never imagined that in Italy I would sell 80,000 copies. That is extraordinary for an essay; it is astonishing in view of the crisis of the publishers. Or 50,000 in Spain or 45,000 in France.
But apart from that, I think that you have to start with small revolutions and not with the big revolutions. A metaphor for the small revolutions is the hummingbird that brings a little sip of rosewater to put out the fire – a story from my childhood. I have always published and interfered in the bureaucratic life of the university. Of course, I can afford it because I have a status that makes it difficult for a rector or anyone else to attack me. There’s a respect, a space that I’ve been able to create for myself through my reputation [and] my scholarly work. Yes, of course, reputation is a protection. Otherwise, I could easily have been attacked, from the left and from the right. My idea is that everyone has to start to launch small revolutions.
You speak of politics as a “big theatre”, the actors on stage are ignoramuses. You did not withhold this from the students this morning, even with your questions: What are they actually doing? What kind of decisions are being made? You have an extremely clear and concise political point of view.
I make a big distinction between small p politics and big P policy. Small p politics is the politics that has no relevance whatsoever. This is the politics of the small trade, the ground in the worst sense, which is what the politicians are doing just now. But everything we do at the cultural and political level has a capital P. The moment we teach the students, when we educate the people, the primary goal is to form people, to give rise to citizens.
This means educating men and women who are able to react in daily life with a free critical thinking, who can contradict, who can develop a way of thinking that allows them to say “no”. That is the problem. Education today tends more and more to produce “battery chickens”, i.e., conformists who all say exactly the same thing, who all do the same thing. The aim of education in schools and universities should be to produce heretics. And when I say “heretics”, I mean this in the etymological sense of the word, i. e., people who are able to choose. Heresy is the imposition of a choice. It is not easy to choose, because to choose one must have knowledge, be able to develop a judgement, a critical judgement. So, first of all you have to know what you're talking about, to develop a decision from this. Many people prefer to shift the decision to others: They will follow, as sheep follow the leader.
Working for humanity:
the task of school and science
But the central idea of culture, of knowledge, of the scientific knowledge of any discipline, teaches you to do things for others. If you listen to the great men of science, if you read a book about utopia, for example, one of the first books on the utopias of science, Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”, this becomes clear: the sages who are enclosed within the temple, what do they do? They work for humanity. There are no secrets. The motto: What you have to do must not be in your personal interest, but in the universal interest, in the sense of humanity. This is the principle of Bacon, which has become a principle and has inspired the sciences.
The aim of teaching should be, above all, to understand when wrong values dominate. There are many of these, e. g., the idea that the dignity of someone is shown by the bank account. That is not true. Human dignity is about the great values that one can experience during life. Every discipline must teach students to know and understand their subject, but beyond that the discipline must also enable them to understand life in general. This is true for the humanities and also in all other fields of science.
For many centuries, people have been convinced that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth. The Bible says, “Sun, stand still!” And the Church said Copernicus was wrong. This is so because the statement of Copernicus is against the statement of God. This is an enormous stupidity. If you want to study nature, you don’t have to read the holy books. The holy books are books about morality for people who want to believe. I cannot find scientific answers in the Qur’an or the Bible.
Your ethical stance can certainly not have emerged only at the university. This must lie further back, probably in childhood … Can you tell us something about where you derive this from?
That was the reason I said earlier that it was a necessity for me to respond to a gratitude towards the teachers I had. I was born into a family in a small village in Calabria, to a simple family as far as the intellectual level is concerned. My father and my mother had both attended schools up to middle school. I was born in a house without a single book in a village with no bookshop, no library, nothing. How is such a miracle possible? It was possible because I had teachers who were very good. This was the case at all levels, during every stage of schooling, in different ways. Some one way, some another. I had some very admirable ones who were convinced of what they were doing. “If I am what I am,” as Albert Camus says, “it is because I have had the chance to meet a teacher”.
You once told me that you had a teacher who enabled you to buy your own books even though you were penniless.
That’s another thing. When I was in grammar school, I had a teacher who encouraged me create my own library. I couldn’t buy all those books: Petraca, Boccaccio, Dante, Eliot, Rilke. At that time there was a book sale you could pay month by month. But I was still a minor. I was 15 years old. My family couldn’t afford to buy me one. A publishing house at that time had representatives visiting all the villages. One of them came to the grammar school, and the teacher took over the guarantee for me, because I was still a minor, and that’s how I began to set up my first library. I paid a ridiculous sum. This was the case month after month, and so I had all the books.
How did you begin to take an interest in Petrarch and the others – this at the age of 15?
Because the teacher started to read these books with me. We read these books together. In grammar school, for one thing. In the morning I was at school, in the afternoon … with this teacher. I spent the whole afternoon at this teacher’s house. We left school together and spent the whole afternoon discussing literature, cinema, theatre. We were a group of two or three colleagues and me. So, this teacher at the grammar school became very important. And afterwards, at the university, I also found excellent teachers. I was able to attend the university because the university had just been founded in Calabria. I enrolled in 1973. If it hadn’t been for the university in Calabria I might not have gone to university. At that time, the university provided that students with the best results in the examinations didn’t have to pay anything. I did not have to pay anything. I didn’t have to pay any rent, I didn’t have to pay for food, it was free. I always got the maximum in the exam results.
“A life in which you only
think about yourself … is a lost life”
A thesis on my part: In order for a young person to have such a sensitivity for human values as you have described, one must have already experienced something in the family. Maybe not with a lot of justification, in-depth … But the parents must have exemplified or represented values such as justice, honesty, charity, etc., I imagine.
You are right in the sense that you have explained this. I have learned something that one rarely learns at school: It is simplicity. That I learned in my family.
What exactly do you mean?
I will explain it to you. Simplicity means to be happy without possessing anything. That you can be happy, for example, about the pâtes that mother made at home – it’s something very good in taste. Or you have spent a day playing in the street with your colleagues, or because you have produced something – a game – that allowed four or five people to spend a fun afternoon together.
These are always social occasions!
Exactly. It is not something that you can have on your own. And that’s why you understand: A life during which you only think of yourself is a lost life, because it is not true, it is false. You need the others; you cannot live alone. That’s the image of John Donne: People are not islands; they are a united continent. If a person disappears, it is a piece of the continent that disappears, it is a part of me that I lose. The people who cross the Mediterranean and who go down by boat, that is a part of me. Or imagine: In New York, if you have an accident, an ambulance comes from the hospital. The first thing they ask you is if you have insurance. If you don’t, they leave you to die in the street. I think a world that works like that is a terrible world. Terrible – horrible! You can’t live in a world that just lets a person die because he or she doesn’t have any money to pay for the hospital.
Simplicity and the internal richness of wisdom
Your family must have been a very open family?
I wouldn’t say that only about my family. It is the context of the small village. I think the others have learned this, too. And after that I had this attitude. … It helped me, for example, to understand the great teachers I met in my life, the real, great masters. They were humble, they were simple people who did not consider themselves great, wise people. But in reality, they were. There is this beautiful metaphor used by Erasmus and others, which comes from Plato’s table. When Plato was asked to speak about Socrates, Alcibiades said that Socrates resembled a Silenus. What is that?
The Selini were Greek statues. Outwardly they appeared as divine hybrid beings, as a kind of horse and human at the same time. So they were very hybrid, erotic and rather ridiculous. But if you opened the statue, you would find the hidden divinity in there. This means: The external never corresponds to reality. To look at Socrates, he appeared to be an insignificant man. But when you open Socrates, you find a treasure. And vice-versa: With people who pretend to be great, wise people, you find emptiness inside if you open them.
This means that the appearance blinds us and leads us astray. Unlike people who speak in the manner of great professors, the great personalities I have known were very humble people. So they did not act as if they were great, wise men. They were always simple people. This is what I meant when I talk about simplicity. Simplicity means that you are who you are. Being who you are without acting when you speak, to keep your humanity at all times. Success can unsettle people’s humanity.
University professors generally belong to the category of the knowledgeable, the elaborate, who, according to Machiavelli, differ from the mass of “simple” dependents. The question is what changes in culture and society when a society develops in an inhumane direction. I find it very interesting how you analyse the change in thinking, in the way of living …
Power has always had a very conflictual relationship with knowledge. If you want to keep power, you have to be elite. And usually, it is an elite that knows, that has education. If you don’t know how to read and write you don’t know anything; it’s difficult to hold power. This elite has always thought the easiest thing is to keep people in ignorance. Then it’s easy to manipulate them. You can tell them stories, that … That’s what happens from time to time on the internet. They say that on the internet you find truth, it contains information. That is not true. On the internet, lies are there day after day.
Of course, there is also the possibility of spreading a contrevérité via the internet. I’ll give you an example: when the revolts in Libya, in Tunisia, in Egypt took place, the internet was the source or medium, by which the insurgent population could communicate with each other.
The internet is a tool. You can use it like all things: for better or for worse. Wanting to gain knowledge about the internet is a problem. Because, as I have often explained, the internet is made for the people who already know, not for the people who don’t know. The problem with the internet is to be able to distinguish between valuable information and ignorance or disinformation. That is a big problem today. A young person who knows nothing about Giordano Bruno and will study Bruno on the web, will find 90 per cent of entries are completely demented. This is made by people who waffle about anything. Anyone can write something there. You don’t have to study at Oxford to write about Giordano Bruno on the internet. If I write an article for an encyclopaedia, there’s a scientific committee that reviews the content. I always advise my students: Read a good book, read Bruno, get to know him, and only then consult the internet and profit from it.
That’s actually a problem, because many students tend to look up material very quickly on the internet to find material when they have to write a paper.
They copy-paste. They do it uncritically, without critical reflexion, just to fill the pages. That’s why I say I’m not against it, but in school it is better to “detoxify” the students. Because already at home they spend hours and hours in front of the computer, in front of an iPhone, in front of Facebook and games. So it’s better if they do something at school that has nothing to do with it.
The privilege of having a school,
a teacher for whom no sacrifice is too great
In connection with the inestimable importance of school for our children and young people, I am reminded of the film “On the way to school”, in which children from the age of 8 to 12 are shown on their demanding, sometimes dangerous school route. They take on enormous difficulties as a matter of course, because they want to go to school.
Yes, that’s because it’s a great privilege for them to have a school, a teacher, for whom no sacrifice is too great. Our children have a bus to take them to school. Everything is given, everything is free, which is a big mistake. I believe that in education you have to grasp the idea that knowledge is not a gift that is dropped into your lap. Knowledge is a conquest. I have learned to read and write in my life – a completely different perspective from my parents who could neither read nor write properly. You understand that reading and writing can change your life. And that’s why you do it, because you know it will change your life, not to get a diploma. This is the opportunity. This, what you’re about to do, will change your life completely. Today, students have no idea, no imagination, they come, there are lecture halls, the professors and computers, everything is given. They lack the effort to conquer all that. Professors would have the task of showing students that they have to accept the challenge of learning, i. e., that they have to make an effort.
There is a beautiful passage on this in Rilke. On the question of what one needs to be a good poet, Rilke says that a good poet must, above all, be able to wait and have patience. It is slowness that allows things to emerge or grow, not the fast. But Rilke also adds: One must always seek life, the most difficult path, because it is the difficult path that better shapes us. The simply achieved does not shape us.
There is also a very beautiful passage by Wittgenstein on this subject. He says: “I am not proud of the things I have learned. I am proud of the sacrifice I had to make to learn something. And it this effort that gives me the right of the word today, the right to speak.”
Thank you very much for the enriching conversation! •
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