Prosperity-And Then What?

...Furthermore, the new phenomenon which had to be studied was not the so-called "mass," a reality and concept in all ages, but rather the fact of "massification," and one could no longer study it from outside since all of social life was saturated by it, and we ourselves were inside of it...

...A decade passes quickly, and real prosper...

...Yet we know that prosperity for all has entered the sphere of possibility and that already it is part of our historical perspective (together with its opposite, the general catastrophe of a Third World War, in which everyone now refuses to believe...

...The very leaders of the Communist world, at least those leaders converted to peaceful co-existence, never pass up an opportunity to announce to their peoples the achievement of a general state of prosperity within the next ten years...

...In spite of the greater prosperity put within the reach of the many, it was therefore a civilization without stable values and without inner checks, and thus was preparing its own catastrophe...

...Some character would ask: when we will no longer be persecuted, will we in our turn become persecutors...

...For our Tenth Anniversary Issue, the distinguished Italian writer, Ignazio Silone, has sent us a few pages from a lengthy essay upon which he is at present working...

...but this did not at all attenuate the frankness with which they criticized the defects of their own fellow-citizens and their own institutions...

...Nonsense...

...In his book, Between the Two Worlds, which appeared in 1913, that idea had been expounded through the conversations among some passengers on a luxury liner, who were returning from America to Europe...

...Even now, unfortunately, many peoples are far from that goal and live in conditions of poverty and neglect...

...What irked us most in Ferrero's gloomy vision was its blank uniformity and, consequently, the absence in it of a slight crack or flaw that might permit one not merely to affirm a different principle but also to act in accordance with it...

...but what are these problems...

...On the other hand, are not poverty and wealth correlative terms...

...And if we will be able to eat every day so as to wholly satisfy our appetites, will nothing else remain for us but to digest...

...but how should we interpret the benevolent and optimistic smile on the other face...

...The same hatred of novelty, though based on a more radical historical vision, was expressed by the Italian Guglielmo Ferrero, who also lived in Switzerland at that time, an isolated and haughty political exile, almost an exile among the exiles...

...but they had in common a number of typically Swiss characteristics which ordinarily escape foreign tourists, above all, a dislike for rhetoric and loose talk in general, which are so dear to us Latins...

...And how could I delude myself...

...And, keeping pace with it, those which in the past seemed to us the shrill voices of lone Cassandras have been replaced by a vast chorus of professors and students of sociology armed with statistics, and against these people we can only oppose an act of faith in man...

...But I could not expect from action more than it can give...

...Yet there survived in us an instinctive repulsion to any idea which excluded the possibility of fighting back...

...It was only one aspect of my reflections on the reconstructive capacities of Marxism and the varying experiences with it which were being had in Russia and the Scandinavian countries...

...It was not so much the mass-man that Ortega denounced—about whom in fact he knew very little—as it was the uncultivated man, "the mediocre spirit who knows he is mediocre and has the audacity to proclaim the rights of the mediocre and to impose them whenever he wishes...

...The insidious problem of the relationship between collective prosperity and moral life remained with me, like a flea in my ear...

...For each revolutionary action unfolds in relation to a perspective...

...I am speaking of the time when I began to write Fontamara, about 1930, at the start of my long exile in Switzerland, indeed, in the German-speaking cantons...

...They are in fact like heat and cold, and it is impossible to have a clear idea of one except as it stands in relation to the other...

...This was not, nor could it be, even for me, an abstract or negligible problem...

...First of all, with regard to myself, I can say that I have never liked those judgments of my literary work which were limited by some sociological or party concept...

...I do not think that there is anyone who does not sincerely hope for the complete fulfillment of their promises...

...America was, in Ferrero's judgment, a quantitative civilization, due to the fact that its dynamism was based on the uncontrolled and uncontrollable development of productive techniques...

...They were in fact discussing the future of industrial civilization, of which America was the model for the rest of the world, and in this civilization they discovered the elements of a dangerous instability...

...This is the real problem...

...It may well be asked: is this perchance due to the fact that for some time now these problems have become fashionable...

...If my characters are most often poor peasants, disquieted intellectuals and priests, bureaucrats of opposing apparatuses who move against an and landscape, this does not occur because of my predilection for a certain local color...

...The sense of that contrast was sharpened for me by my social contacts with some Swiss friends, with whom I enjoyed discussing the opposed situations in our two countries...

...And what then...

...So while I, goaded by nostalgia and political passion, which I could not express in any other manner, found myself at grips with that story about poor Southern Italian peasants and was trying to narrate the vicissitudes of the often tragic, sometimes grotesque clash between their still semi-feudal mentality and the new forms of exploitations and tyranny, I kept hearing from my Swiss friends no less merciless criticisms of the spiritual decadence of their country...

...Since those days, with the industrialization of new regions and the spread of the expressive means of the so-called mass civilization, the proportions of the conditioning have extended and become much more burdensome...

...Indeed, it seems to me that this is the major issue confronting us at the present time...

...To Ferrero undoubtedly goes the credit of having criticized modern mass civilization as early as the first decade of this century, during an era of general optimism...

...ity for those immense populations, so long afflicted by privations of every kind, would be an excellent thing...

...And was it legitimate to predict that this would be the fate of any other country which might achieve prosperity...

...So, in my subsequent novels, after Fontamara, the problems of the future began to cast their gray shadows on the narrative present...

...It should also be said that the feeling of solidarity with the exiles was, for these Swiss, a consequence of their natural aversion to dictatorial governments...

...It had already been established that, in this Janus of Socialism, the cruel and enraged face shown in the East was frankly repulsive...

...The only thing which really interests me is the condition of man caught in the gear-wheels of the present-day world...

...Therefore in our discussions it was impossible to avoid the question as to whether the decadence or spiritual stagnation of which my friends complained should not really be considered the result of the growing collective prosperity...

...with others, despite our different religious backgrounds, a rather unconventional way of applying Christian ethics to the events of the day and the mores of the ruling class, to states and churches...

...This is certain...

...Problems must be faced as they arise, I repeated to myself, and it will be quite a long time before the cafoni of Fontamara would have to contend with the drawbacks and difficulties of opulence...

...And, naturally, I take my stand on the side of man and not the gear-wheels...

...We know that prosperity solves many problems, and that it creates many new ones...

...In support of their Jeremiads, they cited the most recent statistics on the increase in divorce, suicide, deafness, the growing vogue of psychoanalysis in all social classes and the mediocrity of artistic and literary production, despite a generous patronage both public and private...

...It would be hard to imagine a more flagrant contrast than that between the theme of my first novel (the poverty, exploitation and rebellion, or rather the first awakening of consciousness, of peasants in a Southern Italian village) and the social conditions of the region in which I had found refuge: a region, as everyone knows, which is among the most advanced in Europe, and where poverty, if not totally abolished, has long become a matter of exceptional instances...

...They belonged to different social classes (architects, doctors, Protestant ministers, artisans) and also espoused different ideologies...

...An attempt to define the new situation had already been made a few years before by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in his book, already then a classic, The Revolt of the Masses...

...But what rendered his interpretation unacceptable to many of us was the obvious fear, mingled with aristocratic contempt, which filled him when confronted by the popular masses' participation in public life...

...Certainly this problem did not prevent me from pursuing my duty as an exiled and therefore free Italian writer...

...With some of them, especially, I shared a sense of mourning for "the God who had failed," that is, the disappointment of the hopes for freedom placed in the Russian revolution...

...This criticism did not spare the working-class move ment, especially the co-operatives and the trade unions in the most important branches of industry, against which the charge was brought of following a completely clannish policy of the defense of high salaries and indifference to problems of general import...

...It may seem strange to some people that a writer who is chiefly known for stories set in depressed or backward regions should now turn to the problems of prosperity...

...I can, however, add some more personal details on my far from recent interest in the problems of prosperity, since this may help to clarify my point of view and its gradual formation amidst the conflicting diatribes of the specialists...

...The urgency of making a strict distinction between what should be regarded as essential to Socialism and what was only a contingent accessory, was forced on us by the horrible aping of some of its aspects on the part of Fascism and Nazism (for example, their organizations for the entertainment of workers during their free time...

...Although I was born and grew up in a region which if rather poor was not backward but on the contrary overburdened, even wearied and exhausted by a surplus of ancient and medieval history, my first reflections on and experience of the situation of man in a rich and technically advanced country go back to the very beginning of my life as a writer and proceed hand in hand with it...

...Alluding in particular to the Swiss in the richer cantons, my friends would berate their vulgar hedonism, their mental obtuseness, their technological infatuation and the boredom it inevitably entailed...

...Fundamental to his conception was the distinction between a qualitative civilization and a quantitative civilization...

...Translated from the Italian by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL...

...It is simply the reality which I know best, I bear it, so to speak, inside of me, and in it the human condition manifests itself in a starker, almost naked form...

...In fact, at the point we had reached, many principles we had believed in before this—and first among them the myth of Progress—seemed to us to have gone up in smoke and without any great regret on our part...

...Until a short time ago, the idea that prosperity, indeed wealth and the superfluous, would cease to be the privilege of a few and would be guaranteed, with a minimum of effort, to an increasing number of men through the use of prodigious sources of energy, such as nuclear energy, was still a science fiction dream...

...Was it not a bit too smug, too satisfied with itself...