Umberto Eco Anti-Fascist or Italy’s Noam Chomsky?
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community […] but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
Granted that Signore Eco undoubtably was qualified to write about the middle and end of the Italian Fascist period having lived through it, but he is probably best known beyond his philosophical novels for his contribution to semiotics. Similar to Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar Theory which holds to analyze all kinds of human language in a common rubric of language parts, so does semiotics seek to understand all kinds of communication in terms of meaning and the signs and symbols used to convey meaning. Likewise, many of his fascism indicators are reminiscent of conditions in pre-Mussolini run Italy and pre-Franco run Spain. I would suggest that dismissing criticisms for being Nazi Germany-centric is intellectually unkind because why is the United States of 2015–2017 any more like one example than the other?
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else”
A person with this kind of view of human virtue and the human condition generally, seems unlikely to understand American exceptionalism or our current neoliberal malaise the country is fighting through. Maybe honest cowards were all that were available as role models in Italy after its people persevered through two devastating world wars?
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
I must admit, this a brilliant critique of historicism specifically and over-intellectualization generally in a nicely worded single sentence. When considering it was probably first thought in Italian it is even more impressive. I wonder if it applies to interpreting enigmatic singular black swan political events…..?
