Introduction
Twilight Era — Chapter 0.0
I dedicate this book to the memory of Atahualpa, last king of the Incas, and to the 70 million indios killed by ‘modern man’, in the 500th anniversary of their fatality.
Genius Loci
Precisely half a millennium ago (no month more, no month less), in 1491, within this walls where I live since a few years and where I’m about to write this pages, Pico della Mirandola spent his pre-Easter Fasting in creative retreat together with his friend Agnolo Poliziano. Here, in this Romanic Abbey that had just been restored according to Brunelleschi’s plans at the expenses of Cosimo the Old, would meet the members of the Platonic Accademy, attracted, along as by the Medici’s family wealth, also by the brand new refurnished library set up in 22 months by Vespasiano da Bisticci with the help of 45 handwriting scholars. Here, much before Erasmo, the neoplatonic students of Marsilio Ficino had tried to integrate the evangelical message, liberated from the Medieval constrictions, with the paideia of the Classical times.
Here, only 14 years old, was elected cardinal the son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Giovanni, he who under the name of Leone X was to give its name to the century of the Reinaissance, inaugurating a long sequel of headaches for the Catholic church. Here, in short, Culture and Power embraced one of the their longer lasting alliances, and in the shadow of this collusion they designed a new image of Mankind that carried the West past the Middle Ages, and handed the control of knowledge from an ideological class of clerics over to the modern class of Intellectuals.
This picture of mankind is dissolving under my very eyes, or better inside myself, being involved in such a radical anthropological shift Plato’s followers couldn’t possibly figure out by themselves, while walking around this patio. Right in the last bit of that century, not without some kind of Florentine complicity (from Florence was Paolo Toscanelli, on whose charts Columbus sketched his own routes towards China, as well as Amerigo Vespucci, who corrected the Chart and showed how Columbus had really discovered the new continent that took its name, and even the Banco di Siviglia that financed the whole project was Medici’s owned), the homo europeus crossed the Atlantic and gave start to the genocide of the indios without the echo of such crime against humanity having any resonance at all, to what I know, inside the humanists’ think thanks.
Yet the young Pico had indeed tried, four years before, to summon in Rome the entire Intellighenzia of the time to discuss 900 thesis he had written, with the intent of finding a common ground , based on the Christian doctrines, to all the theological and philosophical traditions (as well for the esoteric ones, such as the gnostic, caldaic and cabalistic) and even to that same medieval tradition he had defended in a letter to Ermolao Barbaro against accusations of lacking literary finesse. His ideas didn’t appeal to Pope Innocenzo VIII, who delayed the congress, and, what’s worse, condemned 13 of his thesis.
It was probably to recover from his frustration, that this enfant prodige (he was only 28) decided to take shelter in the Badia, after writing an Apology for his unfortunate project, in which he presented his famous speech De dignitate hominis that was supposed to inaugurate the roman assembly. Between its pages we find the solemn proclamation of this new vision for mankind by which modern man always felt represented.
After assigning man, “as marvel of indefinite nature”, “at the very heart of the world” — so imagines Pico — the Creator told him:
“I didn’t give you, o Adam, neither a determinate place, nor a finite outlook, nor any self-constrains, since you’ll get to pick that place, change that aspect, break those constrains according to your desires, and all will be subject to your wishes, and everything you will dispose and preserve. The limited nature of the other beings is contained between laws I have imposed upon them. You will determine them yourself, constrained by no limits, if not by your choices, to whom you are bound for life. I’ve put you in the centre of the world so that from there you could best see everything else around you. I haven’t made you neither heavenly nor earthling creature, not mortal yet not immortal, so that you could craft and shape yourself freely according to the forms you’ll have decided. You’ll be free to degenerate to the inferior form that are the brutes, and you’ll be able, if you will, to regenerate yourself in the higher things that are divine”.
There is already, in this exaltation of human free will, the Faustian seed of man creator of himself, not prisoner of a closely defined essence, but suspended through an arc of possibilities whose actualization depends upon his will, even when this arc is extending within the objective order that ranks humans on a hierarchical scale, from God to the brutes, the two insurmountable extremes of our self-creative edge. Today this order is not valid anymore, now that chaos swallowed up the cosmos, and along with the cosmos also mankind’s micro-cosmos. And yet that order of things is the archetype that to date secretly governs us, and that have been imposing itself in the physical world where we live, at least where I live.
How not to feel deeply rooted in this culture whose I’m about to describe the decline? It is a privilege to be able to finally disclose ourselves to the sensational news ahead of us, at a time when we’re still apparently anchored to the old traditional principles. It’s a privilege that sometimes feels heavy, especially when the new world looks lost and immature, and we are subconsciously drawn back towards the archetypical values that once gave birth to our civilization. The new that comes forward and those deep-rooted traditions clash inside me and have come to a point when it’s a hard time finding an acceptable compromise: I advocate the end of the pact between power and culture, but meanwhile I live right inside a monument to that pact (a monument that not casually was adopted by the University of the European Union, that Europe that is really driven by the financial market’s oligopolies);
I can clearly see between the common people the potential of this novel culture emerging, but at the same time their houses are downtown, only a yellowish stripe beneath two hills covered in olive trees and cypresses neatly enclosed within the elite’s gates. But nowadays, and that’s the news, a growing number of youngsters of every ethnicity on earth climb up the hill, waking up inside me the fantasy of multicultural gatherings such as the ones imagined by Pico 500 years ago, only without the need of integrating those cultures around any central order of sorts. There is no more central order. The balance of the world has changed, and is currently in full fluctuation.
The free will praised by Pico in the early man has ventured all the way down to the recesses of the genetic code, and even to the level of the infinitesimal elements that constitute matter, moving into the realm of contingency what was once believed to be eternally tied to the Laws of Nature.
The irreverent discoveries of science reveal us that life is an ephemeral phenomenon inside the cosmos and that man, extreme example of life’s evolution, isn’t, as Pico thought, at its centre, he is instead a lost wanderer “in the indifferent immensity from which he emerged by chance at the periphery of the universe”, as writes Monod. Exposed to the risk of complete annihilation, us humans of all ethnicities are called to rediscover that common memory able to draw upon not just the ‘Ancient’ cultural heritage as found on the history books, but also upon our entire species’ remote and complex biological path.
The humanists of the Badia would get excited about the classical pieces redacted by Vespasiano and his 45 scribes, while I am marvelled today before the findings of a shinbone belonging to the Zinianthropus, the hominid that lived in the Olduvai’s gorge 1.8 million years ago, or in front of the tomb of the old Neanderthalensis, buried in France only 100 thousand back.
The issue that presently concerns me is what I find stated as the conclusion of an essay by Konrad Lorenz, a conclusion both in perfect accord and dissonance with Pico’s declarations.
“Man — he writes — is only a temporary link in a chain of evolving life forms. It’s reasonable to think he is even a mere step in the staircase that defines human nature itself. At least, it’s possible to hope so.”
Here we find outlined, unassumingly, the question I want to deal with, careful of not losing the Ariadne’s thread that since the Humanist times bridges us with our Past.
If I have chosen, to characterize the purpose of this book, this specific Lorenz’s quotation is for three reasons. To begin with, Lorenz was seldom inclined, for temperament and scientific beliefs, towards utopia. Next, he approached the main big questions about humanity not according to Plato’s Dialogues but based upon meticulous scientific research about the animal customs (Pico’s brutes), hence with a phylogenetic analysis apt to handle our biological history in perspective, being the present situation of our species more suspended than ever between life and death. And finally, being an usual guest of the metaphysical authorities and even host chez the landmark where modern humanism was born, as said, from platonic roots, I find the urgency to correct my own bias by adopting as reference some teachers from the positivistic school, when they are in turn free from the biases they are often exposed to within their scientific practices.
And so I live my share of this world transition, with the certainty that, as this trajectory of modernity that had begun at Pico’s time is ending, we are now entering with hesitant steps inside a new planetary epoch where our custom traditional knowledge won’t be enough, and we’ll need to rediscover those archaic heritages, preserved for thousands of years by the tribes we call primitive, inside a forgotten chest, covered by the thick dust of our contempt.
What if we are really at the beginning of the true history of humanity? Of mankind finally free from his pre-human impulse to domination and for this reason consciously able to comprehend, in a new (yet already implicit in Pico’s remarks) fashion, the meaning of its crucial role in the biosphere? It remains true today that humanity is called to be the author of its personal story, with no given examples to follow, opening up to all cosmic possibilities to develop them around the dynamics of life, and to unite them, without violence, in the concerted effort of a species finally adult. Even if, as affirms Monod in the same passage,
“his duty, as his fate, isn’t written anywhere”, it is in our hands, as by Pico’s words, “the choice between Paradise and oblivion.”
Badia Fiesolana, Florence,
31 of March 1991
