Qual è il guaio della Sinistra? I suoi intellettuali.
Prendete il catalogo di saggistica Einaudi (una prestigiosa casa editrice con una chiara storia di militanza): metà è da buttare, e sono generoso. E un caso? No.
Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left) cerca di mappare il ciarpame prodotto da certa intellighenzia. E’ ammirevole il coraggio con cui mette le mani nella discarica:
… for example the stunning ‘nonsense machine’ invented by Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, the scorched-earth attack on our ‘colonial’ inheritance by Edward Said, and the recent revival of ‘the communist hypothesis’ by Badiou and Žižek…
L’ autore ha un dubbio:
… there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it?…
Non si capisce perché classificare la discarica “di sinistra” e parlare quindi di Intellettuale di Sinistra (IS) accomunando cose eterogene. Scruton ha una risposta:
… Why, therefore, use the word ‘left’ to describe the writers considered? Why use a single term to cover anarchists like Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Žižek and American-style liberals like Dworkin and Rorty? The reason is twofold: first the thinkers I discuss have identified themselves by that very term. Second, they illustrate an enduring outlook on the world, and one that has been a permanent feature of Western civilization at least since the Enlightenment, nourished by the elaborate social and political theories that I shall have occasion to discuss in what follows…
La caduta del Muro ha fatto sperare che questa creatura molesta (IS) ci avesse liberato della sua presenza. Speranza vana, dopo pochi anni è tornato alla grande:
… Within a decade the left establishment was back in the driving seat, with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn renewing their intemperate denunciations of America, the European left regrouped against ‘neo-liberalism’, as though this had been the trouble all along, Dworkin and Habermas collecting prestigious prizes for their barely readable but impeccably orthodox books, and the veteran communist Eric Hobsbawm rewarded for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union by his appointment as ‘Companion of Honour’ to the Queen…
Sebbene IS ami la rivoluzione, non manca in lui la vena del burocrate (recentemente riscoperta grazie alla manna della cultura sussidiata):
But for whatever cause, left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture…
La critica al neo-liberismo è ormai un filone che tira più del fantasy:
…As a result, books critical of market economics began to enjoy a new popularity, whether reminding us that real goods are not exchangeable (Michael Sandel: What Money Can’t Buy) or arguing that markets, in current conditions, cause a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest (Joseph Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality, and Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-first Century)…
Oltre a non funzionare, il neo-liberismo (naturalmente con spesa pubblica al 50%) ci degrada moralmente:
… And from the ever-fertile source of Marxist humanism thinkers extracted new arguments to describe the moral and spiritual degradation of humanity in the condition of free exchange (Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde: vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste; Naomi Klein, No Logo; Philip Roscoe, I Spend, Therefore I Am)…
La storia raccontata dall’ Intellettuale di Sinistra è una storia di Buoni contro Cattivi, forse è per questo che non convince i più avveduti:
… Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed…
Il potere è sempre malvagio quindi criticando non sbagli mai. Nemmeno le vittime non finiscono mai quindi il facendo del vittimismo non sbagli mai. La loro liberazione è una faticaccia infinita, l’ IS non rischia certo la disoccupazione:
This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order. Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void…
L’agenda rinnovata dell’ IS (lo schema è sempre quello marxista) basta inserire nuovi soggetti):
… The liberation of women from male oppression, of animals from human abuse, of homosexuals and transsexuals from ‘homophobia’, even of Muslims from ‘Islamophobia’ – all these have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas…
Peccato per quella cattiva convivenza tra eguaglianza e libertà: oggi come ieri è il sassolino nella scarpa dell’IS:
… The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?…
Fortunatamente, contro le difficoltà teoriche, l’ IS ha forgiato un’arma segreta: il diritto a non spiegarsi. Tanto la storia è con lui, questo fin dai tempi di Marx:
… Marx dismissed the various socialisms current in his day as ‘utopian’, contrasting ‘utopian socialism’ with his own ‘scientific socialism’ that promised ‘full communism’ as its predictable outcome. The ‘historical inevitability’ of this condition relieved Marx of the necessity to describe it…
Ovviamente una storia di “buonicontrocattivi” finisce con l’ “evisserofeliciecontenti”: Marx lui no, non era utopico, lui era sc-sc-scientifico:
There will be no division of labour and each person will live out the full range of his needs and desires, ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner’…
Ma finché IS fantastica nella sua cameretta nulla di male, i guai cominciano quando esce e intende realizzare l’impossibile: a quanto pare occorre un bel po’ di violenza per assecondare il normale cammino della storia:
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible….
Concentrato sull’utopia IS ha avuto l’accortezza di inserire tra i diritti umani quello di non rispondere alle obiezioni mosse:
Marx’s theory of history had been put in question by Maitland, Weber and Sombart; his labour theory of value by Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, and many more; his theories of false consciousness, alienation and class struggle by a whole range of thinkers, from Mallock and Sombart to Popper, Hayek and Aron. Not all those critics could be placed on the right of the political spectrum, nor had they all been hostile to the idea of ‘social justice’. Yet none of them, so far as I could discover when I came to write this book, had been answered…
Perché perdere tempo con risposte e spiegazioni quando abbiamo stabilito che la verità non esiste e che è tutto un gioco di potere?
… The theories of the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right of property, and so on, as these had been expounded by ‘bourgeois’ thinkers like Montesquieu and Hegel, were shown, by the Marxian class analysis, to be not truth-seeking but power-seeking devices…
Se “obiezioni” e “spiegazioni” sono fuori gioco, questo non deve ritenersi per il “mito”, che invece è centrale nella messa a punto della dogmatica di sinistra. Ecco un esempio preclaro:
Since the class-theory is a genuine science, bourgeois political thought is ideology. And since the class-theory exposes bourgeois thought as ideology, it must be science. We have entered the magic circle of a creation myth…
Il diritto a non rispondere alle obiezioni, il diritto a non spiegarsi hanno fatto dell’ IS un vero illuminato d’altri tempi:
This Gnostic revelation was so clear that no argument was necessary, and no argument possible, that would provide it with a justifying proof. All that mattered was to distinguish those who shared the vision from those who dissented… It is this feature that justifies the charge made by Eric Voegelin, Alain Besançon and others, that Marxism is a kind of Gnosticism, a title to ‘government through knowledge’…
Naturalmente a un tipo del genere spetta un posto di tutto rilievo:
…Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
Un’ altra arma segreta della New Left è la centralità delle “parole” (ovvero: i fatti sono secondari). Nulla di nuovo sotto il sole:
… the communist conviction that you could change reality by changing words…
La nuova rivoluzione sarà una congiura parolaia:
… They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument…
L’ IS sa bene come bisogna lavorare sodo per respingere un nemico quanto mai insidioso:
… to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things…
Noi siamo “parlati”, solo l’IS “parla”. Noi non contiamo, contano le forze parolaie che ci manipolano:
… Newspeak prefers to speak of forces, classes and the march of history, and regards the actions of Great Men as acceptable subjects for discussion only because Great Men, like Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler, are really the expression of abstract forces, such as imperialism, revolutionary socialism and fascism…
Quando i fatti s’incaricano di smentire l’ IS, lui come reagisce? Di solito con l’arroganza del risentito, in questi casi adotta Nietzsche come nume tutelare:
… Looked at with the superman superciliousness of Nietzsche, resentment may seem like the bitter dregs of the ‘slave morality’, the impoverished loss of spirit that comes about when people take more pleasure in bringing others down than in raising themselves up…
In casi del genere è necessario annichilire tutto: i fatti non esistono. IS si trasforma in Mefistofele:
… call to mind the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, when called upon to explain himself: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint – I am the spirit who always denies, the one who reduces Something to Nothing, and who thereby undoes the work of creation. This essential negativity can be perceived in many of the writers whom I discuss…
Come non sentire in molti IS la “voce del nulla”?:
And when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had ‘capitalism’ as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice…
CONCLUSIONI PERSONALE
Scrivere questo post è stata una passeggiata, il tono sarcastico è il più facile da mantenere, non richiede sforzi, tutto fluisce naturalmente. Ma forse proprio lì casca l’asino.
Il libro di Scruton è meticoloso, brillante, chiarificatore, semplice, credibile, verosimile, ha letto tutto cio’ di cui parla (impresa titanica)… ma è anche il tipico libro che ho deciso di non leggere più: manca del principio di carità. Se si puo’ parlare in modo costruttivo di Hitler e delle molte cose ammirevoli proprie della società che ha forgiato, si potrà salvare qualcosa nell’opera di Althusser? E vabbè, ogni tanto bisogna prendere un po’ di ossigeno, le mie viscere pensano in realtà proprio quello che Scruton dice a chiare lettere e ogni tanto è mio diritto farle sfogare. Prometto però in futuro di non indulgere troppo a queste pratiche, e nel frattempo mi dissocio sia dal libro che dal post (nonostante le viscere).
