Today marks the one year anniversary of the death of Umberto Eco. I acknowledge with a certain sense of selfishness that Professor Eco passed at a most inconvenient time for those of us who continue to live. Given the circumstances of his birth, his life, his intellectual interests, and his political commitments, it is arguable that no public intellectual (or at least very few of them) was better equipped than Umberto Eco to speak to the political challenges of our time.
Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932 in the Northern Italian Piedmont city of Alessandria. From a historical-political perspective, this means that Umberto Eco entered the world in a place and time ruled by fascism. Benito Mussolini, the man who coined the term and shaped its Italian manifestation, had seized control of Italy less than 10 years earlier (October 31, 1922). As such, Eco’s childhood was obviously quite different from that enjoyed by those of us fortunate enough to grow up under the peaceful lawfulness of a constitutional republic, As Eco notes in the beginning of his famous essay Ur-Fascism:
“In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, he describes his experience as a child of war:
“I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.”
These facts of birth (both Eco’s and fascism’s) would play a strong role in Eco’s lifelong conviction that for average citizen and public intellectual alike, active political participation is not to be viewed as a right or a privilege, but a as a moral duty. This is in juxtaposition of to the practice of politics in the United States, where politics is understood to be “a profession.”
“I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.” -Umberto Eco
Given this juxtaposition, when asked by an American interviewer how he reconciled his writing of political pieces for newspapers with his professional life as an academic, Eco wrote, not without some impatience, that “ if there is any problem with this it was not my problem as a European intellectual; it was more of a problem of American intellectuals, who live in a country where the division of labor between university professor and militant intellectuals is much more strict than in our countries.”
Novelist, Semiotician, Literary Critic, Philosopher, Media Critic, Medievalist
Fascism is a notoriously nebulous and ill-defined political label. While there are certain common elements–extreme conservatism, authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism–it is nevertheless far from obvious what political principles or ideological aims tie together Mussolini’s Italian fascism, the Papist fascism of Franco’s Spain, the Nazism of Hiter’s Germany, and, for that matter, the disturbing elements expressed in the white nationalist movements arising today in Europe and the United States. This is due, in large part, to the fact that fascism has more to to do with the instincts of the bully than with identifiable elements of a well articulated political program.
Even George Orwell– a man clearly not lacking in imagination regarding totalitarian horror–writing in 1944 during the height of Britain’s struggle to defeat fascism in Europe, was unable to come up with a definition that was anymore nuanced or sophisticated than that of the common understanding of the time: a fascist is a bully.
By contrast, in his short essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco demonstrates an unparalleled acumen for identifying fascist elements and tendencies. This likely has more to do with the peculiar alchemy of Eco’s many and varied intellectual interests than the circumstances of a childhood lived under the rule of Mussolini. After studying medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin (and writing a thesis on Thomas Aquinas), Eco went on to becoming a novelist, essayist, literary critic, and pioneering academic researcher in semiotics and mass media.
Only a person with this particular eclectic set of intellectual interests could have authored a novel like The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder mystery written in the genre of the detective novel and employing the tools of semiotics, medieval philosophy, and biblical hermeneutics. A mash-up of William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (William of Baskerville) uses deductive methods in an attempt to solve a series of murders related to the suppression of an important, but now lost piece of antiquity: Aristotle’s work on comedy. In this way, Eco is able to explore the place of confrontation between medieval and modern worldviews.
In similar fashion, it perhaps should come as no surprise that Eco, a student of signs and intertextuality, might be able to tease out the ur (original or primitive) characteristics of a right-wing authoritarian way of governing that seemingly contains no cohesive features.
Umberto Eco the Medievalist
As a person accustomed by academic training to frame moral, practical, metaphysical, and aesthetic matters in terms of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, what I’ve always appreciated about Umberto Eco is his insistence upon looking at the world through the framework of the Middle Ages. This may well be a way of saying that as a committed modern person I find Eco’s comfort and facility with postmodernism (an almost meaningless concept at this point) to be instructive. His lessons are painful, but well worth bearing in mind.
When, for example, I see Islamic fundamentalists from al Qaeda to ISIS declare war on the West, I see an assault on the Open Society famously described by Karl Popper. In opposing this fundamentalism, I assume my fellow democratic citizens and I are defending the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment–reason, science, moral universalism, human rights, republican rule, democratic values. The American republic and its liberal constitution, after all, are living artifacts of this age. Contrary to my assumptions, a thinker like Umberto Eco would counter that my fellow citizens are recent descendants of the European Middle Ages. Viewed as neo-medievals it’s obvious that they’re not fighting to defend the Open Society. They’re fighting to defend Christendom from the infidel. I find this understanding to be unacceptable because I disagree with it morally and politically, but it likely paints a far more accurate picture of the motivations of a typical supporter of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, or Marine Le Pen.
“Americans and Europeans,” Eco argued, “are inheritors of the Western legacy, and all the problems of the Western world emerged in the Middle Ages: Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (along with banks, checks, and prime rate) are inventions of medieval society.” So are “the rise of modern armies” and “the modern concept of the national state.” For modern persons to look at the Middle Ages, then, is to look at ourselves qua modern, in our infancy.
Given the challenges and contradictions of the modern world which are born in the Middle Ages then, a modern fascination with the Middle Ages is a manifestation of a search for our roots. In this regard Eco was already remarking in the early 1980s that “America, having come to grips with 1776, is devouring the Real Past.“ This was expressed in a renewed fascination with the Middle Ages, which was already a repeat of the 19th century romantic backlash against the Enlightenment. Eco saw signs of it everywhere, including in “such postmodern neomedieval Manhattan new castles as the Citicorp Center and Trump Tower, curious instances of a new feudalism, with their courts open to peasants and merchants and the well-protected high-level apartments reserved for the lords.”
As much as it grieves me to admit that it is so, I think that Eco was right to point out that these are the cultural ideations we’re dealing with. These are not–for the most part anyway–autonomous moral persons you can successfully reason with by appeal to their commitment to modern principles and ideals.
In an essay called Dreaming of the Middle Ages, Eco goes so far as to enumerate ten species of Middle Ages, arguing the importance of clarify which Middle Ages one is expressing nostalgia for. Versions that resonate with particular poignancy in the current age’s neonationalist backlash against globalism are #6: “The Middle Ages of national identities,” understood to be a kind of political utopia, a past grandeur to aspire to in Making America Great Again. Also # 9: “The Middle Ages of so-called Tradition,” an “occult philosophy” that is mystical, anti-scientific, and “drunk on reactionary poisons sipped from the Grail, ready to hail any neofascist Will to Power.” This model, Eco tells us, turns modern cognition upside down, such that post hoc ergo propter hoc becomes propter hoc ergo ante hoc and modus ponens become modus indisponens. That is to say, this Middle Ages is irrational and caustic to democratic governance. Finally, also #10: “The Middle Ages of the expectation of the Millennium, which is to say the arrival of the end times where “the Antichrist, in plainclothes, is knocking at the door.”
As much as it grieves me to admit that it is so, I think that Eco was right to point out that these are the cultural ideations we’re dealing with. These are not–for the most part anyway–autonomous moral persons you can successfully reason with by appeal to their commitment to modern principles and ideals.
The Twilight of Pax Americana
What is required to make a great Middle Ages (i.e., how do we Make America Great Again?)? In his essay Living in the New Middle Ages, Eco tells us: “First of all, a great peace that is breaking down, a great international power that has unified the world in language, customs, ideologies, religions, art, and technology, and then at a certain point, thanks to its own ungovernable complexity, collapses. It collapses because the “barbarians” are pressing at its borders; these barbarians are not necessarily uncivilized, but they are bringing new customs, new views of the world.”
This is, at any rate, how the Great Pax Romana ended. And thus Eco reminds us that, apart from our concerns about the rise of fascism–which are very real and which we are duty-bound to resist with all of our might–we would be smart to view current events within the framework of a broader cultural-historical crisis: we are living in the twilight of the Pax Americana. There are broad, world-historical pressures at play. For purely selfish reasons I hope this twilight drags on a good deal longer. This is a hard pill to swallow–particularly for proponents of American exceptionalism (thus their increasingly fascistic misbehavior), but also for modern liberal persons like myself. Like the Romans before them, Eco notes that “the Liberal is disappearing today, the Anglophone entrepreneur whose folk epic was Robinson Crusoe and whose Virgil was Max Weber.”
If there is any silver lining to this characterization, it is Eco’s insistence that, just as the barbarians at the gates weren’t so barbaric in the end, the so called “Dark Ages” weren’t really so dark. The Middle Ages were actually a time of incredible intellectual vitality. The Middle Ages were, Eco argues, “where modern man came to maturity.”
While it may be tempting to console oneself with the idea that the modern Western liberal democratic world is “going under”, Nietzschean style, to make way for some anthropological revolution on the other side of the new Middle Ages, the prospect of nuclear winter and the unchecked devastation of global warming quickly cast a sobering shadow. Umberto Eco was aware of this as well. “Naturally the whole process is characterized by plagues and massacres, intolerance and death,” Eco warns. “Nobody says that the Middle Ages offer a completely jolly prospect. As the Chinese said, to curse someone: ‘May you live in an interesting period.'” This seemed kind of humorous when I read it some twenty years ago. In 2017, under the reign of President Trump, it is not.
