From Erri De Luca’s boycott to the ‘anti-fascist’ licence to ‘Più libri più liberi’. Suffocating stupidity

Ivan Illich called it ‘paradoxical counter-productivity’. It is the curse of industrial society. Once a certain threshold of complexity is exceeded, any activity designed to achieve a goal begins to produce the opposite of what it seeks: information confuses citizens, the education system perpetuates ignorance, the fast pace of life wastes time, urban planning creates chaos, and medicine exacerbates symptoms or creates new ones. Well, I believe the time has come to pair the notion of iatrogenic illness – caused by doctors – with that of ‘sofogenic stupidity’, that is, generated by intellectuals. Whatever one means by ‘intellectual’, we can all agree on one basic requirement: their social function – whether they make it their mission (as a populariser, a socially committed intellectual, or a civic educator) or whether they attain it without seeking it, as a by-product of a selfless activity – should be to socialise intelligence, to disseminate it and to multiply it.

But what happens when an intellectual class – or rather, its most prominent section, its avant-garde – systematically forces the society that hosts it, including other intellectuals, to deal with serious matters in a foolish way, or with foolish matters in a pedantic way? This is the situation in Italy. It has been going on for years, but the paradoxical counterproductiveness of the publishing-media-festival circus has, in recent weeks, exceeded the danger threshold, with writers being boycotted for refusing to utter the G-word and publishers being asked to sign a declaration of anti-fascism in order to take part in a book fair. These are textbook cases of suffocating stupidity: they force intelligent people to deal with daft initiatives, they intellectually demean the cause they wish to promote, they do not harm the enemy but rather unexpectedly offer them a stage on which to show off, and they fuel a game of roles as predictable as a wind-up puppet show (turn the handle and out pop the Vannaccis). At the end of the day, they waste everyone’s time and brain cells. Shall we talk about something else?