The present without a past. The myth of modernisation between Scylla and Charybdis

What is the present without its past? And what sort of future can it possibly anticipate? The increasingly widespread erasure of historical meaning is one of the most characteristic and alarming cultural phenomena of the 2000s. If there is a turning point in the history of world civilisation – whether Western or Eastern, in Europe, the Americas, China or India – this turning point is due to the destruction of historical memory.

Giulio Ferroni’s latest essay, Tra Scilla e Cariddi. Panegirico per lo Stretto (Laterza, 154 pp., 16 euros), opens as follows: “This age of absolute presentification entails a forgetting of history: images of the past, multiplied by the media, are stripped of their distance, of their otherness, and dragged into speaking of the present”. It is as though the ways of contemporary life were to be imposed by destroying – both culturally and physically – the natural and cultural environment. The present-day perception of the past is a value in itself; it is valuable because the past is past, not because it foreshadowed the present. The bridge over the Strait is a form of destructive modernisation that erases any awareness of the need for limits on development, dominated by technology – that is, by the ‘greed’ of economic interests that impose the application of the most diverse techniques on all spheres of individual and collective life. The meaning of history is supplanted by the relentless barrage of commercial advertising, which has now become the most widespread and dominant of ideologies: the ideology of standardisation, which tolerates neither diversity nor otherness. The human relationship with nature is discussed only insofar as it serves to promote a form of tourism that is itself destructive in the name of economic interest. Nature is viewed as a reality to be dominated, subjugated and manipulated through the powers acquired by technological development. The range of issues in this regard is varied and global, but it is also worth focusing on one particular aspect, such as the project to fill in the Strait of Messina to speed up traffic flow. Convenience, speed and economic efficiency will be the benefits of the future bridge, which, it is hoped, will be celebrated throughout the world.

The stated reason for this venture is, yet again, obedience to the enduring myth of modernisation – which is, in truth, rather belated, given that historians were already discussing post-modernity in the last two decades of the twentieth century. But then, what would become of the marketable and widely promoted advertising myth of Italy as a ‘land of beauty’, of poetry, art, and natural and historical landscapes?

Much of the book is devoted to the classical and literary myth of the Strait of Scylla and Charybdis, beginning with the Odyssey and the Aeneid and spanning centuries of history, featuring Ovid and Seneca, Dante and Petrarch, Cervantes and Manzoni, Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche. Not to mention, finally, more recent authors such as Pirandello, Vittorini and Tomasi di Lampedusa. Sparing no effort or erudition, Ferroni, the literary historian, guides us right up to the present day and its most immediate precursors.

A book of two halves, Ferroni’s work offers an exhaustive mythological and literary history of the famous myth of Scylla and Charybdis, the two archaic monsters that devoured sailors, and concludes with a scathing critical pamphlet in two chapters that bring the myth into the present day, entitled “Natura offesa” and “Vita offesa”.

Here, the most lucid exposé and analysis of the monstrous realities in which we currently live answers the question ‘But what has happened?’, asking when and how we crossed the line beyond which destruction replaces and overtakes innovation and so-called progressive improvement? The new Pope, in his encyclical, has clearly understood that the surest criterion by which to judge technological development and its effects is the extent to which what is human and our earthly habitat is lost and destroyed. “I am convinced,” says Ferroni, “that the bridge over the Strait is an affront to nature and life, to myth, history and culture, and as such is not so far removed from the endless affronts and damage that plague our times. Why build such a bridge in an area that leading geophysicists and volcanologists have identified as dangerous due to the tectonic fault lines between Europe and Africa – a danger that defences and anti-seismic structures certainly cannot neutralise?” Meanwhile, the already entrenched “digital dictatorship” controls every aspect of our lives.

Life under attack? Indeed. And yet no one seems to take offence, neither at artificial intelligence nor at new military technologies. If we no longer know what nature is or what life is, we will no longer understand what it means to harm or offend them. Accustomed to fiction, to lies, to mind-numbing entertainment, to advertising hoaxes, to the unreality of the media, to make-up, to cosmetic surgery, to indifference and the blurring of the lines between true and false, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, life and death.

Ferroni concludes: “Some may smile at the notion of an offence against the mythical imagination, in our time when ancient myth no longer seems to speak to us, when all continuity with the tradition that has handed it down to us has been lost – who could possibly care about an offence against the realms of myth, amidst all the tensions and conflicts of the present, when the whole world is being offended? (...) Yet another humanistic plea? When are we moving away from what it means to be human?’”

These words from a lifelong friend like Ferroni, whom I met at school, recall an elder brother who has since passed away, Piergiorgio Bellocchio, who in 2020 published his essays on the novel – almost as if to apologise – under this title: Un seme di umanità. What else should memory and culture be?