Reading Auden and Leopardi to understand our belated yearning for modernity

Have we not realised this yet? In the triumphant history of progress, there is always something to curse. If I had to choose something to curse today, I would choose the high road leading from the Internet to Artificial Intelligence. And cursed be the industrial engineering of Silicon Valley, which has invented and produced the most modern and safest way to drive the human race mad. Cursed, then, be Silicon Valley, and Artificial Intelligence with all its engineers and industrialists of this brand-new global capitalism. I shall therefore emulate the magnificent and deeply human poetic curse of Wystan Hugh Auden, which appears in his final book Thank You, Fog!, published in 1974. That wrathful testament of his went like this:

“Dark was the day when Diesel / conceived his hideous machine which / brought forth you, vile invention, / more malignant, more criminal / even than the camera, / metallic monstrosity, / sad poison of our Culture, / capital evil of our Community. // How dare the Law ban / hashish and heroin whilst at the same time permitting your use, / you who inflate / all those feeble, inferior egos? / Drug addicts harm only / their own lives: you poison / the lungs of the innocent, / your din overstimulates the peace-loving, / who in the congested streets die / by the hundreds every day in the chaos and by chance. // You diligent technologists, you ought to be ashamed. / You are capable of producing wonders: / you have landed men on the Moon, / you have replaced brains with computers, / you know how to build magnificent bombs, / yet you cannot manage to produce an electric wheelchair / that is odourless and silent.”

A surprising vehemence, attributable to a poet who was more intellectually and culturally modern, and committed to interpreting the historical events of the last century, particularly during its most diabolically dramatic decades, from 1920 to 1950. Auden, a poet and writer, was born in England but lived for many years in New York and was influential in American culture – that is, rooted in the most advanced modernity. We Italians, on the other hand, have always had a problem with modernity. We have lived through belated and forced ‘modernisations’, always with the fear of falling behind. Our industrialisation only caught up with us and took us by surprise in the mid-twentieth century, with Fiat, Pirelli, Olivetti… And this whilst having ignored the great tradition of criticism of modernity that emerged precisely in the most developed countries such as England, France, Germany and the United States, from William Blake and Goethe right through to Dickens, Baudelaire, Ruskin, Thoreau, Lawrence, Wilde, Valéry, Kraus and Eliot, Kafka, Huxley and Weil… No capitalist country has developed without the condemnation and anti-modern criticism of its finest intellectuals. We Italians, on the other hand, have feared our classical humanist past as a burden from which we must free ourselves in order to be, or appear to be, in step with the times.

Our most lucid and perceptive modern intellectual was the anti-modern Leopardi, appreciated more for his lyric poetry than for his superb moral and social essays. It is worth quoting a few lines whilst re-reading the short work on the Accademia dei Sillografi, in which the satire of modern man coincides with the satire of mechanical civilisation or the age of machines:

“Not only because people today go about their lives perhaps more mechanically than in any past era, but also because of the vast number of newly invented and adapted machines that are constantly being devised and adapted to so many and such varied tasks, that it can now be said that it is not men but machines that deal with human affairs and carry out the work of life”. After the lightning conductor, perhaps the ‘envy-protector’, the ‘slander-protector’, the ‘treachery-protector’ or the ‘fraud-protector’ will be invented. Convenience, convenience ‘in understanding not only material things, but spiritual ones too’.

There is therefore no escape for human intelligence. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking we can maintain a spiritual life alongside Artificial Intelligence. Humanity will no longer be magnificent if it strikes a pact with AI.