As has been observed, even Teed’s hollow-earth theory was difficult to refute for nineteenth-century mathematicians, because it was possible to project the convex surface of the earth onto a concave surface without noticing too many discrepancies.
Why reject the story of the Rosicrucians if it answered the need for religious harmony? And why discount the story of the Protocols if it managed to explain so many historical events with its conspiracy myth? As Karl Popper has reminded us, “The conspiracy theory of society … is akin to Homer’s theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened in the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society … comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?’ His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer.”*
Why consider it absurd to believe in conspiracies and plots, when they are used even today to explain the failure of our actions, or the fact that events have taken a different turn from the one we wanted?
False stories are above all stories, and stories, like myths, are always persuasive. And how many other false stories could we discuss…? For instance, the myth of the Southern Land, that immense continent that was meant to run along the whole of the polar ice cap and subtropical Antarctica. The firm belief in the existence of this land (certified by countless geographical maps showing the globe wrapped, to the south, by a substantial sort of land support) encouraged navigators for three centuries and from various countries to attempt to explore the southern seas and Antarctica itself.
What can we say about El Dorado and the fountain of eternal youth, which inspired mad and courageous heroes to explore the two Americas? Of the impulse given to the new science of chemistry by the hallucinations caused by the specter of the philosophers stone? Of the story of phlogiston, the account of cosmic ether?
Let us forget for a moment that some of these false tales have produced positive effects and others have produced horror and shame. All of them have created something, for good or ill. Nothing is inexplicable about their success. What constitutes the problem is, rather, how we have managed to replace these with other stories that we consider true today. In my essay on fakes and forgeries, written some years ago, I concluded that there certainly exist tools, either empirical or conjectural, to prove that something is a fake, but that every judgment on the question presupposes the existence of an original that is authentic and true, against which the forgery is compared; however, the real cognitive problem consists not only in proving that something is a forgery but in proving that the authentic object is just that: authentic.
And yet this obvious consideration must not lead us to conclude that there is no criterion of truth, and that stories said to be false are the same as those that we consider today to be true, just because both belong to the literary genre of narrative fiction. There is a practice of verification that is based on slow, collective, public work done by what Charles Sanders Peirce called the Community. It is through our human faith in the work of this community that we can say, with a certain degree of tranquillity, that the Constitutum Constantini was a forgery, that the earth moves around the sun, and that Saint Thomas Aquinas at least knew that the earth was round.
At most, recognizing that our history has been shaped by many stories that we now regard as false must make us cautious, and always ready to call into question the very stories that we now hold as true, since the criterion of wisdom of the community is based on constant wariness about the fallibility of our knowledge.
Some years ago there appeared in France a book by Jean-François Gautier, entitled L’Univers existe-t-il?* Does the universe exist? Good question. And what if the universe were just a concept like cosmic ether, phlogiston, or the conspiracy by the elders of Zion?
Gautier’s arguments are philosophically sensible. The idea of the universe as the totality of the cosmos is an idea that comes from the most ancient cosmographies, cosmologies, and cosmogonies. But can we possibly describe, as if we could see it from above, something inside which we are contained, of which we form a part, and which we cannot leave? Can we provide a descriptive geometry of the universe when there is no space outside it onto which to project it? Can we speak of the beginning of the universe when a temporal notion like that of a beginning must refer to the parameters of a clock, whereas at most the universe is its own clock and cannot be referred to anything that is external to it? Can we say with Eddington that “hundreds of thousands of stars make up a galaxy; hundreds of thousands of galaxies make up the universe,” when, as Gautier observes, although a galaxy is an object that can be observed, the universe is not, and therefore one is establishing an unwarranted analogy between two incommensurate entities? Can one postulate the universe in order to then study with empirical instruments this postulate as if it were an object? Can a singular object (certainly the most singular of all objects) exist that has as its characteristic that of being just a law? And if the story of the big bang were just a story as fantastic as the Gnostic tale that claimed that the universe was born from the mistake made by an unskillful Demiurge?
Basically this critique of the notion of the universe is like the Kantian critique of the notion of World.
Since for some people the suspicion that the sun does not go around the earth seemed at a certain moment in history just as foolish and execrable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist, it is useful to keep our mind free and fresh for the moment when the community of men of science decrees that the idea of the universe was an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians.
Deep down, the first duty of the Community is to be on the alert in order to be able to rewrite the encyclopedia every day.
Expanded version of the inaugural lecture for the academic year 1994–95 at the University of Bologna.
HOW I WRITE
The Beginnings, Remote.
I am a rather anomalous example of a fiction writer. For I began to write stories and novels between the ages of eight and fifteen, then I stopped, only to start again when I was on the verge of fifty. Before this explosion of mature impudence, I spent more than thirty years of presumed modesty. I said “presumed,” and I need to explain this. Let us proceed in the proper order, namely, as is my wont in novels, by going back in time.
When I began to write I would take a notebook and write the first page. The title would have a Salgari flavor, because his works were one of my sources (along with those of Verne, Boussenard, Jacolliot, and the years 1911–21 of the Giornale illustrato dei viaggi e delle avventure di terra e di mare [Illustrated Journal of Travels and Adventures on Land and Sea], discovered in a trunk in the basement). So they had titles like Gli scorridori del Labrador (The Pirates of Labrador) or Lo sciabecco fantasma (The Phantom Ship). Then at the bottom I would write the name of the publisher, which was Tipografia Matenna, a daring hybrid of “Matita” (Pencil) and “Penna” (Pen). I then proceeded to insert an illustration every ten pages, like those by Delia Valle or Amato for Salgari’s books.
The choice of illustration determined the story I would then have to write. I would write only a few pages of the first chapter. I wrote in block letters, without allowing myself any changes, in order to do things correctly from the publishing point of view. Needless to say, I would abandon the enterprise after a few pages. Thus I was, at that time, the author of only great unfinished novels.
Of this output (which was lost during a move) I have retained only one finished work, of indeterminate genre. For I was given a huge kind of notebook as a present, its pages faintly marked with horizontal lines and big purple margins. That gave me the idea of writing (the title page bears the date of 1942, followed by Year XXI of the Fascist Regime, as was the custom, and indeed the requirement) In nome del “Calendario”(In the Name of “Calendar”), the diary of a magician, Pirimpimpino, who passed himself off as the discoverer, colonizer, and reformer of an island in the Glacial Arctic Ocean called the Acorn, whose inhabitants adored the god “Calendar.” Every day this Pirimpimpino would note down, and with great documentary pedantry, the deeds and (what I would call today) socioanthropological structures of his people, interspersing these diary jottings with literary exercises. I have found in it a “Futurist short story,” which goes like this: “Luigi was a good man, that was why, once
