Editorial Essay: Panem et Circenses

Lorenzo Marsili

“And if a man is praised today for living ‘wisely’ or ‘as a philosopher,’ it hardly means more then ‘prudently and apart’. Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely’, above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game—”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Endless assessment, measuring and balancing, idle staring at the complexities of thought, must leave breathing space to the resurgence of commitment, the assumption of political and theoretical stands, the fist banging on the table, a yes and a no, we repudiate the idiotic acceptance of the ass that only cries yee-aaa.
The comparison may be partly misleading for the society of today, pace Nietzsche. Our thinkers are very far from being asses—at the same time, precisely in that distance lays the ass. Allow me to explain. The ass-like yea to the status quo is offspring of a refusal to engage; anarchy pervades the ivory tower, the participants to the glass-bead game – scared by uncontrollable hordes that roam the fortress, ready to refute and ridicule their thoughts, attaching a descriptive label set to commodify belief into a childish bygone –ism, a so European vanguardist tendency, transformed into the parody of itself, used like a hammer to fracture the joints of commitment – the participants to the glass-bead game, refrain from shouting, move to the suburbs, lock their door and in the dark embarrassedly confess their hearts. They refrain from shouting—they are afraid of saying too much, or daring excessively; faced with the abyss of perpetual refutation, a marked accent gives vertigo, the thinker afraid of the leap; or those who try, stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment.
As suburban philosophers, they watch television; the agora is a source of fear. The consequence: the hold of intellectual life on the life of society at large is in fierce decline. Where have all the intellectuals gone?, asks Furedi. To the suburbs.
On the one hand, the hand of praxis, such thinkers are deserting public space. With a few notable exceptions, their voices become every day minuter in the social and political sphere, their active engagement with the evolution of society on the decline.
On the hand of theoria, their voices bear less and less a distinctive tone and inclination, their accent withers, the writer disappears and his pen… merely re-channelling the present body of knowledge, or at best, a spoon mixing stale ingredients in a rusty caldron. Did someone say anything? Did I hear something? Oh, no, it is just the echo of those footnotes…
These thinkers bear clean hands; their fingerprints are not to be found in our society. Here comes the ass-like yea. By refusing to engage, they represent an abstinence that says yea to whatever course is by others chosen. In the contemporary political sphere, such convenient abstinence is being re-marketed under the banner of moderatism.
But our intellectuals are not alone in departing from the public forum; the wave invests large sectors of society. One of the most important and wide-ranging phenomenon in contemporary labour market and economic organisation is the movement away from the “Fordist-Taylorist” model. To put it simply, the phenomenal increase in “atypical” employment; from part-time to NGOs, from free-lancers to workers-on-demand, flexible occupation is replacing the traditional industrial worker. The wide range of the phenomenon can be discerned by noticing that the First of May, traditionally the Workers’ Day, has recently been re-named “European Day of Precarious Workers”; across Europe millions of young workers, representing a new emerging sector of the population, have flooded the squares demanding greater job security, access to social welfare and economic protection for the new social reality they represent. The injustices of the “flexible” market are well known – from occupational insecurity to hardship in accessing credit, – and Europe is still refusing to seriously address the new socio-economic organisation with targeted policies. I would here like instead to point to a beneficial aspect of the newly founded flexibility (which goes no way towards justifying the status quo; as a complete discussion of the problem would go beyond the limits of this writing, I merely enlighten an aspect which, do not lose faith!, will serve our original discussion).
“Even today”, writes Nietzsche in 1886, “the care to make a living still compels almost all male Europeans to adopt a particular role, their so called occupation”.
They melt with their role; they identify themselves in their occupation, their way of earning a living becomes their character, their significance (Mr. Mill-the-miller).
“But there are opposite ages”, Nietzsche continues, “really democratic, where people give up this faith, and a certain cocky faith in the opposite point of view advances more and more into the foreground—the Athenian faith that first becomes noticeable in the Periclean age, the faith of the Americans today that is more and more becoming the European faith as well: The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role, and everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art.”
Man detaches himself from his occupation, which begins to be seen as a means to subsistence and not the primal characteristic that shapes the self (interesting to notice Nietzsche’s inversion of the Marxist relation between worker and production). A wedge is driven between the I and the I’s working behaviour—this wedge, is an opportunity to be appreciated; self-construction shifts from the realm of production to the realm of, shall we say?, enjoyment. Time and resources are freed; the change in the labour process is accompanied by new social trends – late marriage leaves greater time and space to the “I” freed of family ties and relations, the possibility of spending working time in foreign countries is greatly increased, etc. – these trends leave us with a generation with greater potential for cultural and artistic endeavours, crucially, a generation with greater potential for emancipation and libero pensiero. Existence can be experienced in its presence as such with renewed strength, increasingly present is the possibility of questioning oneself and one’s position in the world without being necessarily channelled in this or that structure of (economic) relations.
Things will become ever more artistic in Europe because art, ideally, ought to intercept the energies freed from decreased economic and social constraints, channelling the flow of human expression from the hammer to the brush.
Here, too, lies the danger. Nietzsche writes: “As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; above all, the great ‘architects’: The strength to build becomes paralysed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with a genius for organisation become scarce: who would still dare to undertake projects that would require thousands of years for their completion?”
“The great architects” may remind too much of antiquated metaphysicians, but it would be a mistake to interpret Nietzsche’s passage as simply manifesting worry at the lack of a contemporary Schopenhauer. We should rather read the passage with our discussion so far in mind; the lack of ‘great architects’ translates into a lack of commitment, conviction, faith, if you like, towards one’s credence and position, the same incredulity surrounding one’s beliefs that halts many from abandoning the safe retreat of purely scholarly or academic writing for a more engaged and direct mode of communication. The worry is the spread of nonchalance, the ass-like yea we discussed above; an individualistic retreat into oneself on the part of the energies that escape economic dominion, channelled not by art but by indifference, not by the brush but by the remote controller. Studying the map of a foreign country, in the best of cases, or turning on the television, the newspaper becomes a noisy, annoying, unwanted presence. Political participation declines, the vicissitudes of society become at best the background to an exchange of lines with the barman. In a recent article, Furedi points out that even the large demonstrations witnessed during the invasion of Iraq can be characterised as individualistic and a-social. From the very slogan, “not in my name”, we can discern a refusal to take on responsibility for the act contested, while refraining from offering anything else “in my name”, a positive alternative forwards, and some may like to say a vision. The trouble is here precisely the lack of a yes-saying commitment, the stage left entirely to the “no” of mere opposition.

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With our humble forces, we try to combat the slide towards apathetic, conformist inertia we see threateningly looming over our future. Our articles can be read in different manners: they can be treated as “journal” articles or, more precisely, as essays; works to be analysed, dissected, returned to; works that, adding to the general body of knowledge, remain testaments of intellectual endeavour.
Or they can be read as “punches”; pieces that, perhaps read in the same hurry one would read a less engaging and demanding piece, nonetheless prove subconsciously efficacious, remaining in the soul of the reader, behind the scenes of a mind still reverberating from the punch. The intellect finds itself returning to the article, its content playing a role in the perception and understanding of reality, contributing to the sense-making of existence, perhaps the perpetual sense-making that existence is; they perform a constructing and constitutive role, insinuating their suggestions in the depths of the reader.
The reason why these articles become mental punches is precisely that they are naked. Opinionated, direct, they unveil their beliefs and judgements rather then endlessly listing and assessing others’; they show themselves with least intellectual clothing, refusing to hide their ideas behind inaccessible jargon and obscure endless references. They are chunky, meaty, tasteful bites.