Each autumn there’s a proliferation of literary and philosophy festivals in Italy. Every city, it seems, wants a festival of its own, emulating the original success of the Mantua Literature Festival; each vies for the best minds, some of which move from festival to festival, but all in all the quality of speakers is fairly high. Newspapers and magazines are now beginning to get excited, not so much that such festivals are being held, but that they attract crowds large enough to fill a stadium, mostly young people from other cities who have come to spend a day or two listening to writers and thinkers. What’s more, to run such events requires teams of young volunteers, who give their time in the same way their parents did in 1966 when they rescued books from the mud after the flooding of Florence.
I think it’s therefore superficial and foolish of certain moralists to view these events as a sort of intellectual McDonald’s and take culture seriously only when it’s pursued by a select few. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and we ought to ask ourselves why young people go to festivals rather than clubbing. Let no one say it amounts to the same thing, as I have never heard of a carful of kids on ecstasy crashing at two in the morning on their way back from a literary festival.
There is nothing new here, though there’s been an explosion of interest in recent years. Back in the 1980s, Cattolica’s town library, on the Adriatic coast, organized evenings with the title Che cosa fanno oggi i filosofi (What Philosophers Are Doing Today), and the audience came in droves from a radius of at least a hundred kilometers. Then, too, people were wondering what was going on.
Nor do I think this can be compared with the cafés philosophiques that thrive around Place de la Bastille in Paris, where people go on Sunday mornings to sip Pernod and indulge in simple and therapeutic philosophy, a less costly form of psychoanalysis. No, in the gatherings we are talking about here, people spend hours listening to academic discussions: they go, they stay, they come back.
There are only two kinds of explanation. One was discussed during those early gatherings at Cattolica: many young people are tired of lightweight entertainment, of journalistic reviews reduced, with a few honorable exceptions, to half a column or ten lines, of television stations that discuss books only after midnight, if at all. And so they welcome more serious initiatives. Those who go to festivals number in the hundreds, even thousands, but they still make up a small percentage of their generation. They are an elite, but they are a mass elite, whatever an elite might mean in a world of seven billion inhabitants. It is the least that a society can demand in the balance between those who determine their own lives and those who allow their lives to be determined by others.
Such cultural gatherings also show that new ways of virtual socialization are not enough. You can have thousands of Facebook contacts, but in the end, unless you’re completely stoned, you realize there is no real human contact online, so you look for opportunities to share experiences and be face-to-face with people who think like you.
2013