Transcription
[Music] Dear audience, welcome to International Writer's Stage at the Cultural Center in Stockholm, Sweden. My name is Iggy Marvast. "Those Who Walk Away" is, uh, the title of a novel from the mid-60s by the master Patricia Highsmith. And that's what they've done over the years. The writers visiting Stockholm and this, the International Writer's Stage, they appear, they treat us with their brilliance, and then they walk away. They disappear. But let's face the facts. The wonderful fact: some of them do come back. They return.
When I contacted Joanna Colignan in May, asking whether she had the time and the possibility to lead a public conversation with tonight's guest of honor, the answer arrived very swiftly. It consisted of one word in capital letters, followed by a forest of exclamation marks. It said: "YES!!!!"
No wonder. When the right-wing question is Professor Um. And today, this very day, his latest novel is published in Swedish, translated by the, uh, by the impeccable, uh, by Brandeshon, titled "The Growing Splats in Prague." So, the audience, it's time for me to say the following. Question: Hospital? He?
[Music] Your Italian is perfect. Thank you.
[Applause] I said I would not be nervous, but I clearly am because I forgot to watch backstage. It is wonderful and terrifying to see so many of you here tonight. Terrifying to me, not terrifying to Professor Reco, who is used to this, of course. Thank you. We are here to talk about this novel primarily, "The Cemetery in the Prague Cemetery," "The Grounding Splats in Prague." And I will just very briefly tell of the content of this novel to those of you who haven't had the privilege of reading it yet.
This novel follows the diary of a man who has forgotten who he is. I, some of you may say, "I know that." Yes, yes, but it's not the same. The man turns out to be a forger and a spy. He's called Simon Simonini, and he's plagued by a man of the church who keeps coming into his apartment and, and making notations also in the same diary. We follow Simon in his life and realize that he has been at the edges of many historical events, ranging from, um, Garibaldi's invasion, invasion of Sicily, to the Dreyfus Affair. And at the same time, this, uh, novel tracks the genesis of an idea, of, of one of the most notorious, um, conspiracy fictions or conspiracy frauds of all time. And I don't think it's a secret to say which one it is. So I will, it is, uh, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Um, in Swedish, of course, this is known as "Zion's Visas Protocol," and it was also published here in Sweden in the '30s as a serious tract.
So, I would start with a childish question, perhaps. But the question, I mean, it is a question that may be childish to ask about this novel, which is about the social construction of truth. How much is true?
Everything. No, I, I'm sorry, but everything in this novel is historically true because all the characters are real persons that really existed, and that said exactly what they say in my, in my novel. So, I, I made only a patchwork of existing, of existing things. I was a plagiarist, copying texts that were already published. And even I say in the final note that the only invented character is Simonini, but he is invented in the sense that I attribute to him many different deeds that were done by different persons. But everything he does really happened. So, it is a summary of real, uh, crimes or forgeries. And in this sense, Simonini is more true than all the other characters because my persuasion in writing the book was to, to look around because I'm convinced that Simonini is always among us. And I could, uh, I could, uh, quote certain persons of our time that are real Simoninis, history forgers of different kind, history, and, yes, secret agents. If you read all the WikiLeaks texts, you see that they are produced by, partly by Simonini. I was very happy because my book was published 20 days before the blowing up of the WikiLeaks case. And one thing that I was saying in the book, it was an idea of Simonini: when you prepare a dossier, documents for secret service, don't tell anything new. Tell them what has already been published, otherwise they wouldn't believe it. If you read all the papers, the WikiLeaks papers, for instance, sent by American embassy to, to Hillary Clinton, they repeat exactly what was published on Newsweek the week before.
But at the same time, it offers a fantastic platform to, to put in things that are completely fictional and make them contextually true. And that also happens in this novel.
Yes, because an objection I received is, "But if you tell that everything is false, therefore there is no truth." That is absolutely stupid because in order to say that something is false, you have to believe that something is true, otherwise you couldn't decide that something is false. So there is a fundamental truth in my novel. There's some fundamental truth is that everything I, I narrate was true. It happened. So I, I, I tell a story of fakes, but it is absolutely true that those fakes were produced, and they were lies.
You, you tell this story in, in three voices. And at least one of these voices, the dominant voice, Simonini's voice, um, his own voice, is very difficult, I think, to read. And in some ways, this is a novel of ideas in the, in the 19th-century way. It's also an adventure novel, so it's very exciting. But it is absolutely torturous to read. I found it very, very hard work because all of these lies.
This is the most anti-Semitic book any of you are likely to read, unless you go and read the actual, uh, protocols themselves. Except, of course, that that is not the message of this book. That is the word that, that Simonini's worldview is very anti-Semitic. And I found it so difficult because normally, when I read a book, I want to accept the premise.
No, on the contrary. You, you have to be repelled, pushed away.
Okay, okay. But it makes it a little difficult to keep turning the page and go, "Oh, I don't like this man. I don't like his opinions. I have to know what happens." You know?
No, no. I did my best to render Simonini a repugnant character, obviously. You know, I am always telling the story that when my wife read the book, once finished, because I never give my novels to read to anybody before finishing them, she said, "Oh, now I understand why in the last two years you were so bad. You were identified yourself with, uh, with Simonini." Yes. I, it was the first time I tried to, to tell an entire story in which the protagonist was really an unacceptable person. But, you know, there are various ways to educate your reader. And when I wrote "Foucault's Pendulum," somebody asked me, "What do you like the reader, how the reader should react after reading your book?" I said, "I, I hope he or she would like to jump over the window." That's, uh, to, to, to understand that life is not so, so beautiful.
No, I'm almost certain that no, nobody would make that, that mistake, sir. But, but you work with your novels for a long, long time. You live with the research, sometimes for years, before starting to write. What was that process like for you, immersing yourself in this hateful material?
Yes, it was, no, it was, I, I cannot say it was disgusting because even if an artist designs an horrible animal, he feels pleasure in representing an horrible animal. So, even, even the, the, the idea of producing a disgusting character is a very, is a very pleasant experience for, uh, for a writer. But it is true that for five years, I had to put my hands really on a lot of, uh, if in the Swedish edition with the spirit of the chemist, oh yes, of course, in the Swedish edition of "Turning Back the Clock," which was called, and we just looked at it, I think "Kraft Gong" in Swedish, at the end there are some texts, uh, that are about the protocols.
But, but perhaps we could just present to those who are not familiar with this text, what are the, what is "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and why is it still relevant over 100 years later?
That, if you want, is the scandal of the mystery that encouraged me to do, to write the story. Because the, the human history is full of fakes and forgeries. Uh, the last one were the CIA papers demonstrating that Saddam was producing atomic bombs. It was untrue, but it helped to, to make a war. So we are always, but now we know that the CIA papers were false, and it has been told, everybody has accepted the idea. Uh, there were great forgeries like the Donation of the Emperor Constantine, and we know that it was a fake. Okay. But the, the story of the Protocols is that in published definitely in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, 1905, in the '21, the London Times discovered that they should have been a fake because they were partly or entirely copied by another book, which was not about the Jews, but about Napoleon the Third. So it was clear that it was a concoction. As a matter of fact, that was the first discovery. But they were made up not only with that book of Maurice Joly, but pieces of Hermann Goedsche, a lot of other things. They, they, they are like a Frankenstein monster, makeup with the different pieces of corpses. But when the, in any case, when the, the Times proved that they were false, and there was also a process in Geneva, from that moment they were believed more and more. And Hitler, in "Mein Kampf," is quoting them as a true documentary. The Nazi machinery certainly saw this as literal truth, and they are still published and republished. Not only they are in public libraries and in every bookstore in the Arab countries, this is understandable because there is an anti-Israeli reason. But here you go, in every specialized bookstore, those who sell Templars and things like that, you find, you find the, the Protocols. My German translator had to find a German version of the Protocols too, since I was quoting part of them. So he wanted, and he didn't fight them because in Germany it is forbidden to publish either the Protocols and, or, and my "Kampf," which is stupid, according to me. They should be published with footnotes, that's all. But it was enough. He pushed a button on the computer, and the internet was full of German translations of the Protocols. So they are still circulating, and every young person can find them and taking them seriously.
I think, I think I was educated by this novel because, of course, I had heard the name of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" before, but I hadn't realized. I think when, when you go to school and you are being told about the World Wars, one of the things that you are told is, there is historical anti-Semitism in, in Europe for centuries, and then the Nazis come around, come up, and they pick this up, and they are crazy, and they, they multiply this, um, exponentially, and then they try to kill everybody. But that is too simple. Of course, there had been an ideological, an ideological landscape where where this kind of intellectual anti-Semitism had a very clear place. And I think one of the most outrageous things, when I went and Googled a little after reading this book, uh, is that that there was, well, for instance, Henry Ford published a half a million print run for, of this book in the United States. But, but also that there was already an idea since the 19th century of a "final solution." Um, I think that I have always believed that that the people who write hateful things like "The Protocol of the Elders of Zion" do so naively. They are naively bigoted. But your novel makes the case that this is an industry of hate, and it is written, that this text was written with the very purpose to ultimately bring about the genocide.
Yes, absolutely. Probably those who produced the first versions of the Protocols were not thinking of the genocide. Whether it is a malicious, uh, malicious solution of mine, I make somebody to speak of the "final solution" because even though probably at that time it did, it was not very clear that the final end of the story would have been death, because there was not a Hitler about that. But every kind of, not only of anti-Semitism, of racism, presupposes a sick mind. Mais Simonini is a sick mind. He is unable to have sex, he's unable to have human affection. You have a sick mind. Sometimes the product of a sick mind can be politically useful in certain moments. Not by chance that the Protocols were finally produced in Russia, because it was a political problem to, to, to, to, to keep under control the, all the Jewish community. So there is a sort of mixture between political problems and, and the contribution of the sick minds. Political problems because in collecting all the material for my story, I came across, I must confess, I didn't know it before, the texts of socialist anti-Semitism. Because at that moment, for certain socialist movements, it was clear the identification of Jews and capitalists. And Fourier, who was one of the authors of this kind of literature, there was an identification between Jews, capitalists, and Englishmen, since he was a French, so he had the functions. So you had, there is a marvelous book that explained very well all these very complicated processes, the, the book of Hannah Arendt on "The Origins of Totalitarianism." She explained very well. First of all, a, a story that must be clear. There was a turn in anti-Semitism with the French Revolution. Before, the anti-Semitism was a theological matter. They killed Jesus Christ, okay? But they were poor people, they lived in the the ghettos. Sometimes it was useful to make a pogrom, to to kill some of them, to to steal the gold, the gold they had. But finished. They, nobody believed that the Jews wanted to conquer the world. They couldn't do that. With the French Revolution, there is emancipation. They enter the bourgeois society. So it's no more the fiddler on the roof, but it is Russian. They entered the army. The, the Dreyfus case is that the impossibility to accept the idea that Jews become officers of the army. Or the, in the, in the Dreyfus case, if you read the "Libre Parole," which was the, the journal, the, the magazine of Drumont, which is one of my characters, that was the scandal. They couldn't accept that the army was polluted by by Jews. And Dreyfus was a poor man who was chosen as a pretext to to create a case. And they entered also, that's, uh, and Arendt explains it very well in the literary society. The last case, Bruce. At this point, the anti-Semitism became no more religious, but political, social. What possible to be a socialist and to be anti-anti-Semite? So it is a very complicated story. And the intellectual anti-Semitism is introduced here, will almost, in, within, in the Simonini's grandfather's generation. And that is actually a historical person. There's somebody who wrote one letter that can be said the grandfather of the character. And that person, they must know that Simonini is called like that because there was a real Simonini. Because when Albert Brough wrote his book "Memoirs of Seville," he tried to demonstrate that the French Revolution was made by the, um, people of the Encyclopedia, the, uh, plus the Templar Knights, plus the Freemasons, at the same. But when he finished the book, a certain Simonini, who was allegedly a captain of the, of the Tuscan army, wrote him a letter saying that, "You have, you have forgot the, the Jews. They were the real, uh, author of the French Revolution." And so the modern anti-Semitism started with that letter of Simonini. Nobody knows if it was real or it was that a fake produced by, probably by Jesuits in Rome.
In one of your, the characters, and I think you put these words into the mouth of Joly, so maybe he said that also, he says, "You cannot change the world with ideas." I think that that is blatantly wrong. And actually, it's a certain point because I don't think that the Protocols have changed the mind of people. They were used as a weapon in order to reinforce pre-existing prejudices. But they are also used as proof. They are, they are also used as proof, uh, so that they enforce them. It becomes a snowball effect.
Yes, but if there was not a pre-existing layers of anti-Semitism, the Protocols would have not been taken seriously. One of the most well-known anti-Semitic writers, Nesta Webster, who wrote her book on secret societies after that the Times proved they were a forgery, speaking of secret societies all over the world, international conspiracy. At the end, she couldn't deny that they were probably fake, but her argument was marvelous. She said, "Okay, maybe they are a forgery, but since they say exactly what the Jews think, they are true." And you literally, that means to reinforce pre-existing prejudices. And that is what you let many of your characters do in this novel, which is why it is so slippery to read.
I think it's very difficult to protect yourself against this because the moment they make something up, they start to believe it. All of the characters make these forgeries, and then they immediately start to treat them as literal truths. So also they let their own actions be guided by things that they have believing. Every fake he produces, then he believes.
I, I think, and I mean, now since you have called it a sick mind, I am worried to ask this question, but Simonini is also a kind of novelist. He reads novels of fiction and he creates new fictions from them in a novelistic style. Do you recognize yourself in him at all? Something. Do you recognize yourself in Simonini at all?
No. You, we, we make, make a clear distinction between fiction in the sense of novel and, and lie. Yes, because in telling a lie or making a forgery, you want that people believe that this is the truth. Narrating, making fiction, you pretend to tell the truth, and you ask your reader to, to keep part in the game, and as Collier just said, to, to make a suspension of disbelief, and to play the game in which both pretend to take it seriously, but you know it isn't true. That she doesn't exist. Why when you lie, you want people to believe that what you say is true. So, fiction is a very, a very civilized way of lying with the complicity of your readers.
Oh, but you lie very close to the truth with this book, which is true. You, you're lying is very advanced, very close to the truth. This is a particular book.
Yes, because, no, no, it's true, because, uh, when you, when you narrate and you make a historical novel, you introduce fictive characters, and your readers should know that they didn't exist. But you want that the people understand that the, the general landscape, on the contrary, is true. Let's take, in order to cite some important writer, the name of "The Name of the Rose." My readers know that William of Baskerville, for Malcolm, do not exist. But they are encouraged to think that the general picture, where made of the medieval monastery, of the, the fight between the Emperor, the Pope, they are there too. So the, the fiction plays a double, double role in this novel. Probably everything wants to be, wants to be true, except the fact that the, the, the, the antiquarian shop of Simonini exists in that street or not. So the, the things I ask the reader to take, to pretend to, to believe a very little. For the rest, I want they take it seriously. Yes, it's a new. My promise is the first or the last time. And do that. I, I think it's interesting though that you have written two novels which are about the dangers of inventing conspiracies. Because this book, just as "Foucault's Pendulum," they are both about people who invent, um, who invent conspiracies and start to take them literally, and it has bad consequences. So are you also, I mean, you keep returning to this topic. Do you have you thought about why that's true?
Everybody has a particular passion. There are people who narrate only about sex. Okay, that is a very serious enterprise. Others narrate about crimes or love. I, I am really interested by by the paranoia of conspiracy because I see it around me continuously. Since I am a skeptical person, I belong to the, to the Skeptics Society for Scientific Inquiry, or that's trying to demonstrate that there are no, no unidentified flying objects or circles in the fields. Well, I am always irritated when I see people always obsessed by mythologies. And so I, I tell about about that. There are people who, I repeat, that my friend Moravia told about sex all his novels. I, I am unable to do too. I, I rank him with the great author of the Italian 19th century, Manzoni, who says, "No, I cannot put sex in my books because there is so much sex around in the world that it is useless to put it in a novel." But it's useful to put conspiracies in novels.
And, um, I, I think I have a theory about your writing. What if you, you return to the topic of conspiracy because the creation of conspiracy is a picture of bad science? As you said, it's the opposite, opposite of academic research. You take all the evidence and you make it believe, you make it mean what you want it to mean, not what it actually means. You, it's science without the criticism, and then it becomes fiction. And your writing is constantly on these borders. Of course. I mean, most of your output is non-fiction.
No, you suggested to me in this moment a reason why I am so sensitive about all the, the conspiracy theories or, as it happened in "Foucault's Pendulum," against all the occult. Because I am a scholar, scholar, and as a scholar, I know that every scholar, be it as a chemist, physician, physicist, or a philologist, we have to control our assertion and to control the logical steps between one assertion and the other. If you read all these occult material, you see that every assertion comes by itself. There is no logical connection. And since all along my life, I've been fascinated by stupidity, uh, I'm not interested in genius, okay? Einstein was a genius, but the stupid, fussy, because they are the majority. And so, and in all the, the, the occult conspirational material, there is the, the logical structure of stupidity. In the, in the "Foucault's Pendulum," I make at a certain point, Jacob, Elbow to talk with Casabo, a proposal of the division of mankind in idiot, imbecile, fool, and stupid. The idiot is completely, is the one who eats the, the ice cream putting it on his forehead, okay? They don't interest you. The fool or imbecile is the one who makes blunders, who says the wrong thing at the wrong moment. This stupid is the one who makes always a, a wrong syllogism. All the people of the Pirell, or cats, animal, or dogs are animal, therefore all dogs are cats. There is something wrong. You immediately that. But sometimes the stupid, the reasoning is more complicated. You have to control it many times. You, you feel that there is some stupidity, but it's not easy to, to find it immediately. Or all the material you, you find in this, uh, in this, uh, section, or the, I have a collective of rare books on occultism, by chemistry, they are all stupid, all based on wrong or wrong syllogisms. And so it's a scandal for me, and I want to, to denounce it.
I understand. But I do have to ask, is there also a sense of carnival for you? To like immerse yourself in this stupidity and think, speak with the voice of the stupid? Do you enjoy it secretly, a little?
Probably I am stupid, fundamentally, and so I feel at home there. No, you know, there, there is, there is people who are who like to students, to to study only snakes. There is one of the most important scholars who studied the snakes. He has the face of a serpent. My God, I don't know if he started studying snakes because he had the first, at the face of a serpent, or the face grew up slowly, in the sense in which when two persons marry each other, step by step, at the end, they have the, the same face. I don't know. But so, I, I was always fascinated by, by that, and I, I feel a sort of moral duty to explain that there is stupidity somewhere.
Yes, it strikes me now that Arthur Conan Doyle, who created, of course, Sherlock Holmes, he gave us the foremost literary champion of logical thought, but then he went and started to believe in fairies. Is there any threat that you will start to believe in conspiracy?
No, I miss the boy. Oh, sorry. Conan Doyle. He gave us Sherlock Holmes, who is a rational thinker, but later in his life, he started, Conan Doyle started to believe in fairies and to believe in the supernatural. Uh, so I worry now about you. Do you think you will go the way of Conan Doyle?
No, no. I am, I am a real skeptical. Good job. That's true. He was telling about the, the lucid mind of Sherlock Holmes, and then in the evening, he went to, to make the tables dance. He was a spiritist. That was typical of many positivists of the last century. They spent the public life in, in supporting science against every kind of superstition, and then in the night, they, I met many scientists that secretly cultivated the occult, uh, science. It's a sort of, of reaction to, to an excess of rationalism. It happened. No, I am the most, the most impermeable people to every kind of super superstition. I like black cats. That reverses the problem.
I would like to ask now a little bit about memory. Because this book is about a person, um, recovering his memory. And, and so, of course, was also the mystical flower, "Fire of Queen Loan," the previous novel, which in which a person goes home and finds his memory. In some ways, he does not find it, but in some ways he does find it through printed matter, through books and magazines and the albums of his youth. He can reconstruct the history that he has lived through, and some little elements of his own participation. I think that is a beautiful book, and I think that is a beautiful, uh, topic as well. And I wonder if you could, it was the less, less successful of my books because it was the easier one to read. So it means that my, my audience wants only the difficult books. "Luana" was too easy. But it was also physically beautiful, I think. That also helps. But is it memory? It seems to be something that you are concerned.
Yes, yes. Memory has always interested me. And as a collector of ancient books, I collect a complete collec, I have a quiz, crazy complete collection of mnemotechnics, or the books of memory. And memory interests me because I am convinced that memory is soul. If you lose your memory, you have no more soul. Memory is fundamental also to go to paradise or to hell. Because the hell is interesting if, when suffering, you remember of the sins you have committed. If you don't remember anything, you, you are like a fly, to which for the eternity, you, you, you take the wings. That is. And even in the paradise, I think that you, you need your memory to compare it with the memory of God. And in this sort of conversation, if you lose your memory, you, you are an animal, maybe less than an animal, because animals have a sort of memory. So, and it's, it's very important for an old man to control continuously the functioning of his own memory. I am pretty proud to have a good memory, but I am discovering the, the strange mnemonical maneuver by which, getting older, you remember a lot of things of your childhood. Probably in the moment of dying, you will remember everything. I am waiting for that marvelous moment. But you, you lose some of the immediate memory. You go in the, in the other room to pick up something, and when you, uh, arrived there, you had to forgot what you were looking for. And that memory is an important, is an important part of human, of human life. But I would say, is a mere accident. Why the two books are about memory? Because the first one was exactly about memory. I also said, send the first chapter to a friend of mine who is working on brain, the MIT, to be sure that there were those phenomena of losing the personal memory and keeping the cultural memory, and so on and so forth. With this book, it was an accident. You know, I try always to introduce in my novels some constraints. Art is based upon constraints. Rhyme is a constraint. To use oil instead of another, user constraints. And I'll make you an example. I wanted that my Baldolino started with the siege of Constantinople. Why? Because I have never been in Constantinople, so I wanted to go there, and I needed, I needed the reason, the pretext. So I went to Constantinople, explored. But it was very difficult to, to start with the siege of Constantinople. Now, it's very complicated to explain, explain you why. But Baldolino was born in the, the middle, before the middle, or in the '30s of the 12th century, and the, and the Constantinople is the beginning of the 13th century. So I didn't know how to, to fill up a lot of empty, uh, years. But at the end, that helped me to invent a given story, because I wanted to start to visit Constantinople with that book. I wanted my character to go to the school of Charcot. Why like that? I wanted to do that. Interesting, crazy people. So we started all what happened with Charcot. That's why I introduced Freud, because Freud was visiting Jacob at that moment. And so and so forth. And Charcot himself was studying hysteria. He was the first to suppose that hysteria was not only a female sickness, but also a male sickness, because the name hysteria comes from uterus, first idea that only, only women were hysterical. And there were many other students, people, scholars, starting the split personality. And there was the famous analysis of a certain woman called Felida, who had the two lives. And I attributed to, to all the things of Felida to Die, and Rome. At that point, it was, I don't know whether indispensable, but very encouraging to decide that even my character, being a forger, had a split personality. And so I was obliged to invent La La Piccola, and so on. So only because I wanted him to visit Charcot. If not, the story would have been another one. So there is a lot of, of, uh, hazard. And you know, I mean, that in the story, you put something. This man must be a fisher. Okay? After that, he's obliged to do something, something to go to the river to fish, and not to, to fly. So the story goes by itself. And you stay like Joyce said of God, after the creation, bearing your fingernails, and you let the story go home and to decide what, what must happen. But, but it is the first reader of your story.
Yes, but it is also so that the, the idea of memory and the reliability or unreliability of memory is very closely connected to these ideas of truth and historical truth that you have been working on. So the personal analogy of that. So thematically, it seems that there is something that they do go hand in hand, even though you say it's coincidence.
But you have mentioned the truth. You know, I am professionally a philosopher, and even though the Pope says that contemporary philosophers don't believe any longer in truth, this is false. And this is the problem of truth. It cannot be naive in the sense that we know exactly what is the case. That finished. Truth is a matter of interpretation. But we, we must believe in truth, or otherwise. That's why I am so interested in fakes.
You know, there are two aspects. Well, as somebody who works in the mass media, which I do, I couldn't help noticing that the perpetuation of lies in this novel is very dependent on mass media. The newspapers and scandal papers already exist in the 19th century. And I started to think that we who do media criticism and who engage with these things, we often presuppose that there is some kind of earlier golden age when the media reported the truth, and now the media have gone down, and the media no longer report the truth. So I ask you, as an expert, has the media ever reported the truth?
I don't think so. I, I, I don't think so. I mean that, uh, hoaxes and the invention always existed from, from the invention of the gazette, uh, in the 18th century. And so the media are, they are a mixed product in which you can find the real news, and you can find the, the falsities, and in order to, to cheat people. So media are not a category in itself. There are various kinds of media. I think that Pravda didn't, didn't tell the truth. So you see that there was a media, a medium that was specialized in, in telling what is, uh, for a, for a small sum, for a few years, I can quote some Italian newspaper that do not tell the truth. You could just tell us, we promised not to tell anybody. It's just us and the internet here. So media, a mixture of everything. Also, also also what in Italy we are adoring the so-called Anglo-Saxon notion of, to separate opinions from facts. Okay? If you look at the New York Times, the opinions are in a given page, and the rest looks as a report, as a report of facts. But what happens when reporting a fact? In order to look very objective, they question two persons, one who's who says A, and the other who says B. But why they did choose those persons and not others? That's already an interpretation. It's not reporting facts. So it's very difficult to believe that there is a newspaper that reports only, only facts.
But how do we go about being, how do we go about being good citizens when the media is unreliable, and we cannot go and see everything for ourselves? What do we do?
You have to read the three newspapers every morning. So you make a comparison. That is a good citizen. Is that what you do? Do you read three newspapers?
Yes, at least. Otherwise, you don't know who is right. It's like with internet. If you look for some a date in Wikipedia, you find a date. You cannot swear the date is true. You visit other two sides on the same subject. If all the three same the same date, and it is clear that one of them is not translating from Wikipedia, otherwise it doesn't work. More or less, you are sure that the data is true. That culture, confrontation, comparison, the rest is a superstition.
That's why what we try to teach our students about. I was going to ask, everybody says we have to teach media criticism in schools. Can it be taught? Can, can media criticism be taught to children?
Yes, I, I think so. I want one of those who who encourage the use of newspapers in the school to, to, but once again, to educate young people to, to read the newspaper means to educate them to read at least two newspapers, to, to make a confrontation, to see how the same event can be seen from two opposite point of view. There are many publications for, for teachers to how to use newspapers in the school. I, I believe in it. Now, but now we have another problem. Is how to educate to filter internet information? Because, because with, with newspapers, you, you know more or less, this is a rightist or leftist newspaper, and so you can measure. But internet, even if you are a very cultivated person, you can check and filter the information on your specific, specific field. But in other fields, you, you don't know which side is reliable, which is not. So if I check on philosophy of languages, let's say medieval philosophy, okay, I, I understand, I realize if society is reliable or not. But if I have to check on chemistry, so imagine young people. My grandchild now, eleven, is surfing all the day. They are unprotected. And there is no filtering practice, no filtering theory, because it should be taught in the school. But the schools, but there is no teacher able to teach the filtering practice. There is only a way in, in the sense in which the young, the, the, the young artist went to the atelier of the old artist and looked how he worked, and they step by step learned something. So young people should be staying all the day with a more prudent teacher, exploring internet and to see how the teachers say, "I know, I don't trust him." So a long, long and time-consuming practice. But it's a real tragic problem of, of our time. How to filter information.
Well, now you seem to suggest that perhaps it is a role for intellectuals, for instance, to teach critical thinking in the public sphere. And you have written in an essay about Norberto Bobbio, which is also in, in, "Turning Back the Clock," and or you quote from Norberto Bobbio, Swedish translator, people who work with culture. Their task is to sow doubt, not to reap certainty. And I always thought, and this just shows how young I am, I always thought that academia left certainty only in the '80s when postmodernism started. But certainly, there clearly there have been thinkers before like Bobbio who say, well, we shouldn't be about certainty, we should be about doubt. But if intellectuals go around dispersing doubt, or or spreading doubt, rather, who will stand for certainty? Where will truth come from?
Listen, if you are a good teacher, you, you have the, the task of educating people to, to doubt. But it doesn't mean that you have not to, to communicate also what is considered a definite truth. Two plus two makes four, okay? You know that the difference between the neurotic, the mad, and the normal person. The normal person believes that two plus two makes four. The mad person believes that two plus two makes five. The neurotic knows that two plus two makes four, but he's so upset. Okay, that was a joke. [Laughter] Well, Paris is the capital of France. And you have to teach also that there are a lot of things that, but, but those are natural, natural sciences. But what do we do outside the natural sciences? But look, they have just discovered that maybe neutrinos travel at a higher speed than the light. That is a way to, to produce a doubt. Science goes, science proceeds by falsification, not only by, by proofs. It is a, a continuous, it's a continuous oscillation because what can be proved and what can be, or must be cast in doubt. That's science. So when Bobbio said that, he was a political scientist and a philosopher. So he was not concerned with the fact, with the distance between the Earth and the Sun is so and so, and on human, human, humanistic affairs. It was more important to, to, to produce doubts than than truth, because it is less evident what the truth is in political science. So, but it has to be understood in the way he spoke, okay?
But I, I think for me, this is a serious question because we live in a world which is capitalist, or even hyper-capitalist, and we have many of our governments are dominated by a sort of, I don't know, neoconservative or maybe anti-intellectual, even idea that there is truth which comes from the natural sciences, and truth is productive, and it can be measured, and it will make you money down the line. And then you have everything else. And everything else which is not useful, there is culture, and there is also the humanities. And I think for you, who I have to ask you, because your, your whole career, your academic career, and your career as a novelist has been such a celebration of the value of the humanities. How do we respond when people tell us culture is not important, humanity is, it's not important?
How do we say humanity is also work with truth? It's the typical anti-intellectualism which dominates a lot in the United States, more than than here. I, I have received a 500 pages book of a friend of mine, an American, who is speaking, is really American anti-philosophical country, and he tries to demonstrate that not, but there is the common idea that, yes, not only the, the American politicians. There was an Italian minister that it seems that recently in a meeting, probably to please his audience, said, "We, we don't read books." And he was lying because he had a university degree, so he had to read that a book in order to copy it to make his doctoral thesis. And our premier said, he's 20 years, I don't read a novel, which is evident from the, the way he tells the jokes, right? Okay. But so there is always in the political media form, so that the intellectual is, okay, you have to, to prove that knowledge is productive. But the argument I always use is that if Bush read books, he could have discovered that no country succeeded in conquering Afghanistan. And the English were, they were defeated, the Russians were defeated, Alexander the Great was defeated. So there is something in this country, the structure of the mountains, that makes that with the modern army, you cannot, you cannot. It was enough if Bush picked up the telephone and called the professor of Harvard University to, to suggest to him that the right, he didn't do that. Okay? While, uh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an intellectual. Before starting the war with Japan, asked the greatest anthropologist living in America at the time, Ruth Benedict, to write an enormous report on Japanese culture, that then become a book, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword." And it seems that since even generals were invited to read it, that made them to decide not to throw the atomic bomb on Kyoto. Otherwise, they would have done so, because they understood that in doing that in Kyoto, it was like to throw an atomic bomb on the Vatican City, you know, to, to, to, to destroy every possible relationship with the Japanese. So it was possible to be a politician and have the sense of, of culture. But the, the, it's easier to, to, to pretend that there is only the elementary root of the nature of science, which is false, because real scientists are always ready to, to doubt of the result. But it is the same ideology of advertising. Oh, sorry. Advertising. Advertising says Tide washes better. That, that's true. You cannot discuss it. That's, if you cast in doubt the, the assertion of advertising, the market is completely destroyed. So it is that elementary, uh, notion of objectivity which dominates in the, in the business domain. But at a certain moment, you are defeated by, by reality, which is more intellectual than people, than people.
I wonder, are you, do you consider yourself an apocalyptic writer? Because in many of your novels, in one way or another, the world is about to end, or something awful is about to happen. And I thought, am I reading this into these books, or do they say something about our time, or about you, or perhaps is it just that humanity always thinks that the world is about to end?
But you know, I, I wrote once in '64, a book called "The Apocalyptic Integrity," and I called the apocalyptic old the anti-mass media prophet, saying that the world is. And at the time, I was very, very critical towards those prophet, prophets of these graces, growing order. I, I'm getting a little more pessimistic. And while you say that maybe my, my books have this shade of apocalyptism, but there is something that saves me for being totally apocalyptic. I write the books instead of waiting for the end of the world. Now, we're back with Norberto Bobbio, says, "Do something." He's a great man. In one of his aphorisms, "Don't expect too much from the end of the world." Still, we look at the news today, and it doesn't look very promising for Europe. I mean, for the European Union, it feels a little apocalyptic. For the economy, it feels a little apocalyptic. And even for some nation-states, uh, it seems that nations are now smaller than companies. A state is smaller than many companies.
States can go bankrupt easier than, than perhaps. Yes, okay. But it is three months that they try not to meet my banker in order to still believe that they are all lies told by the newspapers. He says, "I am not apocalyptic. I am an optimist, and I know that money is the devil." I still would ask, "What do you believe? That the nation-state is getting stronger or weaker?" Because nationalism is, of course, surging all over Europe. Yes, until recently, I was believing that there was a decline of modern nations in the sense that they were born at the beginning of the millennium. They were absolutely interesting for the development of the states. But now, since it was easier to establish a virtual contact between Barcelona and so that we are, I was convinced that we were going toward a sort of an acid archipelago of regions and cities, and the national state will, will step-by-step decline. But in the last years, it seems that probably the national egoism is already very, very strong. What happened in Libya with all the European states trying to do each their their own job in order to to pick up the oil? It seems that there is a new insurgency of the national pride, which is pretty discouraging for me.
I would like to read a quote from the novel. I will read it in Swedish and I'll summarize in English. The quote is, "Rajkovsky from the Russian secret police says, says like this: Patriotism, a brothel's sister, then some into her moralistic principle." Well, essentially, the final sentence is, "National identity is the last resource of those who have nothing." Do you believe that is true? Uh, no. I believe that there are a lot of people thinking like that. And I have to confess that Rajkovsky was a real character, but since he was a spy and nobody knows what he exactly thought, so the thought of Rajkovsky are mine. And it seems to me that he reflects current opinion in the political life. Even his is a large, his appraisal of hatred, which is a hatred that is a fundamental instrument for a political power to keep people united against somebody else. It is difficult for dictatorships, evidently, but even even for democracies. Some directly think of the hatred against the Russians living in America, and the hatred against Americans cultivated in Russia. They were important elements to obtain an interesting result, the balance of the powers and the Cold War. But it was based on the depiction of the enemy as something terrible, horrible. And Rajkovsky knows this job, and he does it a lot. But we always like to think that it's getting better, people are getting wiser, we are getting more rational. And then the Protocols of the Elders of Zion pop up again as truth. So there seems to be some kind of tension where progress doesn't help. We can't stop stupidity, as you call it. We can't stop the conspiracies. I think that there is a dark side of the human soul by which they will always. There is an interesting sentence attributed to Chesterton, because the source is imprecise, as when people do not believe any longer in God, it doesn't mean that they believe in nothing. They believe in everything. Yes. And so is typical of the secular mentality. But there are more people now believing in astrology than in the Middle Ages. Is that just because there are more people on Earth? Maybe, maybe yes. But there are a lot of people going to Medjugorje to look for the Madonna, even though the Church has not recognized this apparition. And there are buses, there are caravans going to there. Let's see, a lot of people are going to Rennes-le-Château because they read The Da Vinci Code and so on. Yes, we had, but also this is a serious question because, of course, we had an act of terrorism in Norway this summer from a terrorist who was a conspiracy believer, who believes apparently very sincerely in some huge conspiracy of feminists and Marxists, and I think also Jews. And of course, but it's allied with, it's primarily it's an anti-Islamic idea that he has. So he believes, for instance, that are very obscure to normal people, that the feminists are allied with the people who want Sharia law and so on. And he proclaimed himself a Knight Templar. So there it is again, it's the Da Vinci Code, it's Foucault's Pendulum, it's the same ideas are being rehashed over and over and over as reasonable truths. And I despair. How do we fight this? Because if we try to be rational, they will say, "Oh, it's a conspiracy, you are lying." No, but you mentioned terrorism in Italy. We are out, things at least 20 years, but terrorism reappears here there. Once I wrote a sort of science fiction story in the period in which there was terrorism in Italy. I imagined that immediately after the end of the Second World War, all the fascists went to Turkey, and there was a fascist state in Turkey, and all the western democracies were in war with Turkey. And I mentioned the names of the famous terrorists as heroes of the new war fighting against the Turkish fascism. And the Pope saying, "Are these terrible wars? Imagine if we had 20 years of peace, we would be so happy." It means terrorism is a product of a period of peace. There are portions of violence in everybody. If you have a good war, you send them to war, and you kill most of them. And that is in this sense, I am favorable to parachutism. Albinis, all these people. Okay, okay, let me stay to watch television, and you, when you fall down. But war, they were the futurists to say that the war was the only "giorno del mondo" hygienic aspect. So I wanted to, I wanted to, if there was a continuous war after the end of the Second World War, there would have been no terrorism because all the polluted violent pollution would have been oriented in another direction. So terrorism, I think, I am sure that at least for in the occidental countries, is a result of peaceful periods. In the Middle East, it is probably also the result of a young frustration, humiliation, and other things. But if Norway was in war with, let's see, Sweden, that man would have been a very courageous fighter, yes, for the glory of this current.
There's, you've written that the goal of the terrorists is to awaken a fire in the heart of the like-minded. So the terrorists always assume that there are great masses of people who believe the same things as they do. And if those people do not exist, then the terror will have the opposite effect, which is not revolution, but is upholding of the status quo. And there is something, this is like all that dogs are cats now, but there is something stupid in the Norwegian terrorism, which I can't put my finger on. He is the reactionary terrorist. He tries to fight change. He tries to prevent multiculturalism and things that have already happened. He tries to undo them through terror. And I can't put my finger on why that's stupid, but perhaps you can. No, you have not to believe that all the terrorists are red terrorism. In Italy, we got both. We had the red terrorism and the black terrorism. Those are pretty, pretty no, they are two, two the same phenomenon from two different points of view. I find it very normal, unfortunately. There, we are. Normality is not consoling. No, but then how do we have hope? I will return to Norberto Bobbio here at the end. And he said, it's better that you do, that you're a pessimist and you do something, than being an optimist and doing nothing. At least you react in some way. Yes. So what will you give us some advice at the end before we finish? Oh, read my books, ladies and gentlemen.
[Applause] [Music] It's four glasses for Swedish snaps. Thank you so much. [Music] Goodbye to Ekko and Johanna Collier. [Applause] You.