Notes on the protest against Minister Roccella

It’s an old rust, I can’t help it: from my school years I carry a stubborn and, I admit, not entirely rational dislike for the many formulas – now of journalistic origin, now of ecclesiastical coinage, now of obscure Christmases – built around the word “culture”: let’s promote the culture of solidarity, fight against the culture of indifference; for the culture of life, against the culture of death: and so on. The reference to a “culture” seems to me pleonastic at best, pretentious at worst; and I don’t like how it sounds anyway. So imagine with what enthusiasm I may have welcomed, years ago, the triumphal entry into the debate of the cancel culture formula. Wasn’t it enough to call it ostracism, pillory, censorship? Why “culture”? To complicate things, social networks have been added, pressure cookers that drastically shorten the boiling time of words: whatever they originally meant, a couple of weeks of figurative uses, slips, bickering, barrages of cross-recriminations and they end up meaning nothing. The result is that cancel culture – together with a thousand other formulas, from fake news to neoliberalism to patriarchy – today floats in the mists of the most exasperating semantic randomness. So why not abandon it?

A note in the margin of a marginal case can help us answer. Minister Eugenia Roccella’s protest at the Turin Book Fair is a minimal fact in itself, inflated almost to bursting by the bellows of resounding propaganda, among those who shouted at the fascism of the anti-fascists and who at the fascism of the fascists: usual stuff. Looking at things with a sense of proportion, the one in Turin was but a tiny example of an illiberal activism produced in the laboratories of the American left and imported here in the province with the customs duties of autochthonous illiberalism added (the same happens with right-wing imports, of course). The only revealing aspect of the whole negligible matter, which makes it sense to talk about it again after a week, are, if anything, the ex post justifications of those forms of protest coming from names in the intellectual, journalistic, literary, academic and editorial worlds. . Since reconstructing in detail discussions picked up on Twitter and precisely attributing the authorship or motherhood of each single sentence would be a thankless effort for me and a useless agony for the reader, I limit myself to summarizing the main arguments, guaranteeing that they do not come from ordinary users but by characters who can be considered, in various ways, leaders of opinion.

For example, on the page of a writer, I found a kind of syllogistic charade: abortion is not an opinion, it is a right; opposing the right to abortion is fascism; fascism is not an opinion, it is a crime. I deduced from this, I believe strictly enough, that we should thank the eco-feminist security service which prevented the consummation in flagrante delicto of a criminal and unconstitutional presentation. On another page I had to read that the minister and her government embody intolerant ideas, and that with the intolerant one must be intolerant, as the liberal Popper also wants (it goes without saying that Popper is completely hallucinatory, read perhaps under the influence of the popper). Other arguments instead betrayed the ideological conditioned reflex – also trained for a long time on American campuses – to use power as the universal key to decipher the implicit subtext of all speeches: since between the minister and the protesters there is a conspicuous “differential of power”, it is legitimate for those who have no voice to take it away for an hour from those who always have it. There is no possible “dialogue” between the powerful and the subordinates, and the subordinates by definition cannot “censor” those above them. Etc.
The reader may have guessed where I am going. Ostracism, the pillory, the censorship frenzy are universal drives that cross alignments and ideologies. But arguments like these, and others I could cite, make up a “culture” to all intents and purposes: an organic attempt at the political, intellectual and moral legitimization of some forms of intolerance as a method, not as an episodic excess to possibly be viewed with indulgence. And this – sophisticatedly justifying intolerance in the name of tolerance, oppression in the name of protecting the weakest – is, in my eyes, the secular and democratic equivalent of sin against the spirit: the only one that will not be forgiven. Then when I was about to get completely depressed in front of the spectacle of some ex-radical friends won over to the cause of social justice activism of no debate and deplatforming and ready to justify the screaming boycotts – the opposite of everything that the dialogic and nonviolent tradition has represented – it came to me, unexpected and balsamic, the news of a tiny initiative by the Adelaide Aglietta Radical Association, which while not sharing an iota of Roccella’s positions and condemning the tragedy of the deputy Montaruli, wanted to invite the minister to present her book together. A wholly symbolic chivalrous gesture – in Roccella, of course, there is no shortage of spaces and megaphones – but which for me symbolizes something very important: someone down here hasn’t canceled Pannella yet.