But what kind of Italy are we? At the end of the year, a check-up is a must, a general check on the state of our country; and the ritual has arrived on time for 58 years Censis annual report which is the only national autobiography “in progress”, a kind of self-awareness that crosses statistical data and sociological analysis. Usually the mass media extrapolate a couple of slogans and a couple of suggestive images from the report of the research institute founded by Giuseppe De Rita, on the day it comes out; but then who takes the trouble to read and comment on the volume published by Franco Angeli?
The starting consideration is of a political nature. As we have also written several times, “we have tried them all” between technical or transitional governments, sovereignists and populists, “asphalting anti-politics” and centre-right, centre-left, left-five-star governments, now right-centre governments. But these formulas, the report says, did not work. “It’s unclear who will be able to make difficult collective decisions, and above all implement them.” The impossible decisionism, therefore. Which derives, in our opinion, above all from the impossible political sovereignty and national independence in which we live. A deficit that comes before the quality of leaders and governments.
And the Italians? They float, says the Report, they are good at moving water to keep themselves afloat; social groups resist thanks to “a continuous adaptive radiation”, that is, they make do. They resist the crisis but do not move forward. By adapting, “we have lost increasing portions of identity”, living on the brink of a decline with no return. Italy, says Censis, is “a strange homeland” with a thousand-year-old sense of provincial belonging, but now a pulverized people with little sense of history. And this translates into an absence of goals and courage, and a poverty of intentions. We can’t get our hands on the new, but we can’t get off this boat. Italians are withdrawing from public life, and abstention is one of the most obvious symptoms.
But who are the Italians? Censis sees not only an anthropological but also a morphological mutation of Italians. They change shape. The factories of the ignorant are functioning at full capacity; an ignorance that is “sometimes overflowing, besieges everyday life and produces serious cognitive distortions”.
And then there are the social malaises; inequalities, or rather, unjust inequalities; the collapse of the health system and of welfare in general – which is not something of this government, but has been a growing trend for years – but also of the school and university system; the impact of political correctness and woke ideology especially on language. The report adds, surprisingly, “the silent racism” of Italians and in any case the difficult integration in a multi-ethnic society, with migrants going from one million and 300 thousand to five million in the space of twenty years. Then a series of scenarios, supported by tables and significant data that affect daily life, marriages, the birth rate, and opinion orientations.
But in the end it is not possible to find a key word, a final synthesis that can summarize the state of Italy today.
Censis has always offered generous and often creative images to summarize our present state. However, this time the synthesis cannot be found in an expression, as if we had reached that “unnameable present” of which Roberto Calasso wrote. Sending me the Censis report, De Rita wrote: «Let’s continue to think of Italy». I dedicated essays and articles to the theme and the expression “thinking about Italy” and even promoted a conference more than thirty years ago. Sacrosanct hope, but I feel the Subject, Italy, is failing. For some time now I have no longer been able to think about Italy, I consider it an out-of-time, out-of-place, impracticable task, aimed at a now ineffable and liquefied entity. Indeed, I note that every attempt to think about the country, as Censis does, confirms that Italy is no longer thinkable. Perhaps what I define as “the infinite global present” has absorbed the thought of an identity, of a nation, of a country-system and of Italianness itself. I stopped repeating with Ezra Pound: «Creed quia absurdum. I believe in the resurrection of Italy». No, I no longer believe in the “resurrection” of Italy. The Censis report concludes with a hope: rather than hoping to see our ills disappear we should rather have “the grace to transform them”. A necessary and prohibitive undertaking.
Not even ten years ago I published one Letter to the Italians and I toured Italy with about eighty evenings at the theater in the form of “love rallies for Italy”; I wouldn’t be able to do them today, I wouldn’t have the motivation or desire, it would seem out of context to me, the time is up.
At the time it was the call for an awakening, before it was too late, and the show was resolved in a symbolic gesture: overturning the hourglass, that is, when time is about to end, you have to overturn the hourglass and start over again. Now, that the hourglass has been continuously overturned with a series of apparent political changes – “we have tried them all”, it was said at the beginning – the impression is that thinking of Italy is vain, empty or deaf talk with the gaze turned elsewhere. After doing this for a lifetime, I can’t think of Italy. The hope is that it is just a passing malaise or an overcoming of the person speaking to you. n
© all rights reserved
