These men seem to despise every symbol of wealth, and if they happen to have some gem or valuable fur, they rid themselves of it at once, donating it to the young maidens who act as vestals in the vestibules adjoining their hieratic sanctums. (These maidens gravely peHorm a sacred act similar to the spinning of prayer wheels by Tibetan monks, for they constantly tap the keys of an instrument that endlessly produces cryptic invocations to the divinity and exhortations to «productive» askesis.) The mystique of production also has a rigorous theological foundation.
We were able to reconstruct a doctrine of the «circulation of merits,» whereby the virtuous act of one member of the priestly caste can be used spiritually by another. In certain temples you witness the continuous passage of these «merits,» or «bonds,» during frenzies of religious ecstasy, when swarms of priests hasten to part with their «merits,» diminishing their own value to make a gift of it to others, in an impressive crescendo of tension and hysterical raptus.
To the researcher it is clear that in the village of Milan the power that has gained ascendancy is Industry. As a result, the populace lives in a constant state of mystic excitement, which adds to the abovementioned bewilderment, and produces a submissiveness to the decisions of the priests. The hypothesis of a magic space may therefore be not a metaphysical datum but, rather, a device of the religious powers designed to keep the Milanese faithful in a condition of detachment from all worldly values. And so the rites of passage take on new meaning, as do the pedagogy of frustration, the Sunday cannibalism, and the shamanic flight to the sea (which sacred drama seems a collective pretense, in which each player is at once conscious and helpless, convinced at heart that the solution lies not in flight but in total, loving surrender to the mystical power of production). Yet it would be erroneous to think of Industry as a power that governs the natives and the territory undisturbed.
The Italian peninsula, scene of many and various events (of which Dob u gives an unfortunately mythological reading), represents a territory constantly open to invasion by barbarian peoples, to the immigration of hordes from the south who pour into the village and devastate it, changing its physical structure, camping at its outskirts, occupying the public buildings and arresting all administrative activity. In the face of this pressure from foreign hordes and of the corrupting action of the Church in its efforts to distract the natives’ minds by tempting them with dreams of ill-conceived modernity (whose symbol can be found in the ritual game of Ping-Pong and in the electoral race, a debilitating blood sport in which even half-paralyzed old women take part), Industry stands as the last bulwark in the preservation of the old primitive civilization.
It is not the role of the anthropologist to judge whether or not such preservation is a positive thing; he must simply record the function of Industry, which has erected for its goal white monasteries in which dozens upon dozens of monks, shut up in their cells and refectories (the studia or officia studiorum), sheltered from invasion, ruin, and uproar, and in the calm, inhuman neatness of their refuge, draft perfect constitutions for communities to come. These are silent, shy men, who appear only occasionally in the arena of public activity, to preach obscure and prophetic crusades, accusing those who live in the world of being «lackeys of neocapitalism» (an obscure expression, characteristic of their mystical speech).
But once these addresss have been delivered, they again withdraw piously into their coenobia, recording their Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society hopes on faded palimpsests. Protected by the spiritual power that governs them and the village, they are, to the scientist, the only key to understanding this disturbing and savage mystery.
1962
The End Is at Hand
«Heraclitus deposited the book in the temple of Artemis, and some say that he deliberately wrote it in obscure language so only those capable of reading it would approach it, and not in a lighter tone, which would expose him to the contempt of the crowd.» Heraclitus himself said: «Why do you want to drag me here and there, you illiterates? I did not write for you, but for those who can understand me. One man to me is worth a hundred thousand; and the mob, nothing.»1
1 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, ix, 1 — 1 7
But Heraclitus is gone, and his book has been thrown open to all the savant monkeys who desire to approach it, writing reviews and footnotes. And his disciples know more than he ever did. Which means that Heraclitus has been defeated by the mob, and, much to our sorrow, we witness today the triumph of mass-man. If your spirit has not yet withered completely, you have only to cross the . agora on any ordinary day, and if you do not first choke with anguish (but is anyone left who can feel this precious emotion?) or succumb to social mimesis and join the euphorions who surround the latest philosophizer strolling in the public square, you will see those who were once the men of Greece: now perfect, smug automata crowing together amid the smells and cries, mingling with the Attic peasant who drives his flocks, the tuna merchants from Pontus Euxinus, the fishermen from Piraeus, the emporoi and the bawling crowd of kapeloi, the vendors of sausages, wool, fruit, pork, birds, cheese, sweets, spices, purgatives, incense and myrrh, plumes, figs, garlic, fowl, books, sacred fillets, needles, and coalas our writers of comedy sometimes take pleasure in listing them. And in their midst you will see public inspectors circulating, money changers, controllers of weights and measures, copyists of poems, vendors of wreaths, all gatherd in front of the humble shops, the tailors’ stands; and you will see the makers of lutes and perfumes, the peddlers of sponges and whelks, the slave traders, and, crying their wares near the hermai, the women selling trinkets, bread, peas, and the cobblers, and the pimps.
Thus you can draw for yourself the portrait of mass-man, the citizen of democratic Athens, smug in his own cheap tastes, his Philistine fondness for conversation, his satisfaction with the philosophic alibi that the Lyceum and the Peripatos kindly offe r him and with the noise in which he encloses himself like snail, the «distraction» which he has raised to the level of a religion. See the crowd as it clusters around the cockroach shape of the brand-new chariot acquired by Alcibiades, or as it rushes, sweating and vociferating, toward the latest messenger arriving from anywhere. Because the chief characteristic of massman is the desire to know, the lust for information. In contrast to the restraint of Heraclitus, who knew that wisdom was too precious a treasure to be placed at everyone’s disposal, nowadays a certain Aristotle declares that «all men naturally desire knowledge,» and the proof of this, he says, is «the pleasure they experience in sensations, which they love for themselves, independently of any profit, especially visual sensations.»2
And what need be added to the negative anthropology of mass-man after this description of this indiscriminate desire to perceive, this greed for knowing, to see clearly and pleasantly and also from afar (a teleview, in short), a need apparently confirmed by his use of both metopes and pediments, where true proportions are altered and statues carved in such a way that they seem natural only to those looking at them from below. The sculptors thus cater to mass-man’s laziness, and the prepackaged view thus relieves him of any obligation to interpret the obvious.3
In vain did our Montilides recently decry this greed for information, whereby it seems almost that the disk of our earth is enclosed in a «sphere of psychism, its density in constant expansion,» given
2 Metaphysics, 1980a.
3 See also Plato’s nonchalant remarks in The Sophist, 235 -236.
that «an ever-thicker blanket of information and of views projected from a distance covers the world we inhabit.» 4 This pervasive illiteracy no longer makes any impression on Athenian mass-man; nor could it, since from his school days his educators’ only concern was to «inform,» with no hesitation about corrupting him by the pages of contemporary poets, as we were indeed warned (but with smug, vainglorious hypocrisy) by that crony Plato, still admired by the conformist crowd, when he said that «our teachers do as they are desired to do. And when the youth has learned his letters and begins to understand what is written . . . he finds on the desk in front of him, to be read and to be memorized perforce, the works of great poets . . . so that the youth, imitating them, will desire to become like them.» 5 What is to be done? The culture industry is too content with its achievements to listen to the voice of wisdom (but isn’t that out of fashion in any case?), and so we will have to witness the development of students who, when
