A Simple Truth
Roberto Casati: “We simply need to help them. It is not politics,
it is not sociology, it is not ideology. It is the sea itself that asks us.”
When a government member of a democratic country closes the seaports and limits room for manoeuvre of a rescue ship, condemning it to roam the sea with a “load” of shipwrecked people, and exerts pressure on the countries under which flag it sails, some of us see an inhuman act against migrants, others an institutional sloppiness, still others feel that something is not quite right but they accept it for one or another reason.
But this is not the real wound. We are not only talking about an omission, about turning our heads elsewhere: what is at stake here is a new ban on rescue which punishes those who help.
To forbid rescue at sea is to deny — on account of sheer ignorance — the culture of the sea, a tradition that has been built and consolidated over millennia in which humans have crossed the deserts of water.
A history that, although it has alternated between the opening of peaceful routes and the unleashing of bloody wars, has always recognized the asymmetry between a natural element with unlimited powers and the fragility of human lives that are confronted with its strength — be it a challenge, work or disaster. Italy has a long maritime tradition which has nourished the imagination of generations and which we will not accept to be humiliated and denied.
© UNHCR | Markel Redondo
This is not just a question of wounded national identity. The open sea is not a simple world. It is, in fact, a universe in itself, a planet within a planet, a never-ending challenge to perception, imagination, thought, action, social rules. There have been many attempts to legislate the sea, in practice every civilization of the sea has sought and formalized directives to give meaning and guidance to the human activity offshore, each time bowing to the fundamental asymmetry between nature and humans. The rules of the sea sound strange to people ashore: a boat drifting without a crew becomes the
property of those who take it. But behavior at sea escapes the simple logic of retribution. In Melville’s account, Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner, immediately dives into the water to save a drowning man who insulted him only a few minutes earlier — no questions asked. It is a world in which the law is enforced without witnesses; in which only strong bonds of behavior, hierarchy, attention can redress the balance of power with nature and make possible navigation, discovery, life itself.
The sea cannot be tackled without preparation. The irresponsibility of those who carry human lives on inadequate vessels is unacceptable.
There is immense compassion for those who find themselves facing a crossing of the Mediterranean without fully understanding the risks or without having any other choice. There is a duty to all to provide help, a duty towards others but also towards ourselves.
And perhaps the sea itself, as if it were a filter or a pair of glasses, should help us to see these people, just them, for what they are: individuals, admirable tenacious self-entrepreneurs, people who have been able to contract a debt, invest their last resources, separate themselves from their families, cross a desert and then a sea, learn a new language, look for a job, imagine a future; who have a history that speaks of resilience, of the ability to get organized, of long-term vision, speaks to us in short of people who we would really like to have as fellow citizens one day. The sea divides us from them, but in the end, it can only unite us. In these movements, these individuals truly show us the
sea for what it is. For too many years, the Mediterranean has been thought of as a frontier, and the time has come to find it again as a common sea. Nostrum, in the broadest sense.
The discourse on the human factor at sea is therefore a simple one. A really
simple one. If today this means talking about groups of people crossing the sea in search of salvation or a second possibility, I think that a better knowledge of the sea, of this extreme elsewhere, could make us see a very neglected aspect of the problem, in itself very mediatized, of migrants. Because the problem itself is of luminous simplicity, and the fact that it is not perceived as such says a lot, unfortunately, about many things, and about how we have blinded ourselves.
There may be political differences in the assessment of the consequences of the so-called migrants’ crisis. And they should be, democracies feed on these differences.
There may be technical complexities in how to address the humanitarian causes of the crisis. Here, too, it is natural to fundamentally disagree, precisely because there are many factors at play.
But whatever the political consequences, whatever the humanitarian causes, the fact remains that there are people, even at this very moment, who are in peril at sea. And we simply need to help them. It is not politics, it is not sociology, it is not ideology. It is the sea itself that asks us. Not helping them means forgetting or ignoring the millennia of knowledge of the sea, and after all, forgetting ourselves.
Roberto Casati is a senior researcher with the French CNRS and professor at EHESS, and currently the director of Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. A philosopher of the cognitive sciences, he has made contributions to the study of visual and auditory objects and of spatial representation. His latest book,
The Visual World of Shadows, with Patrick Cavanagh, was published in 2019 by MIT Press. His work on Digital Colonialism has spurred debate in France and Italy. He is currently working on spatial disorientation and on a book on the philosophy of the sea.
This article was originally published in August 2020 in Folios n.3 “Golden Sea”, the Moleskine Foundation cultural publication.
