The year 2000 is almost upon us. I do not intend to discuss whether the new millennium begins midnight 31 December 1999 or 2000, as mathematics and chronology would encourage us to believe that it does. From a symbolic standpoint, both mathematics and chronology are an opinion, and there is no doubt that 2000 is a magical number, whose glamour is hard to resist after all those nineteenth-century novels that hailed the marvels of the year 2000.
On the other hand we know that, even from a chronological point of view, computers and their dating systems will hit a crisis on 1 January 2000 and not on 1 January 2001. Our feelings may be impalpable and erratic, but computers do not make mistakes even when they do make mistakes: if they are wrong about 1 January 2000, then they are right.
For whom is the year 2000 a magical one? For the Christian world, evidently, given that it marks two thousand years from the presumed birth of Christ (even though we know that Christ was definitely not born in the year 0 of our era). We cannot say "for the Western world," because the Christian world extends to oriental civilizations too, while the so-called Western world includes Israel, which thinks of our system of recording time as the "common era," but keeps a quite different count of the years.
In the seventeenth century the protestant Isaac de la Peyrière observed that Chinese chronologies were much older than Jewish ones and conjectured that original sin involved only the descendants of Adam, not other races, born far earlier. Naturally he was declared to be a heretic, but, immaterial of whether he was right or wrong from a theological point of view, he was reacting to a fact that no one today doubts anymore: the various dating systems in force in different cultures reflect different theogonies and historiographies, and the Christian system is merely one among many (and I should like to point out that the calculation ab anno Domini is not as old as people think, because as recently as the early Middle Ages years were counted not from the birth of Christ but from the presumed creation of the world).
I believe that the year 2000 will be celebrated even in Singapore and in Beijing, owing to the influence of the European model on other models. Everyone will probably celebrate the coming of the year 2000, but for most of the peoples of the world this will be a commercial convention, not a profound conviction. If China had a flourishing civilization before our year 0 (and we know that before that date there were other civilizations in the Mediterranean basin; all that has happened is that we have agreed to record the age of Plato and Aristotle as "before Christ"), what does it mean to celebrate the year 2000? It means the triumph of the model that I shall not call "Christian" (because atheists will celebrate 2000 as well), but of the European model that, after Columbus's "discovery" of America—even though American Indians say that they were the ones who discovered us—also became the American model.
When we celebrate the year 2000, what year will it be for Muslims, Australian aborigines, and the Chinese? Of course we could disregard this. The year 2000 is ours, it is a Eurocentric date, our business. But apart from the fact that the Eurocentric model seems to dominate American civilization too—although the American nation includes Africans, Orientals, and Native Americans who do not identify with this model—do we Europeans still have the right to identify ourselves with the Eurocentric model?
Some years ago, upon the constitution of the Académie Universelle des Cultures in Paris, an organization made up of artists and scientists from all over the world, a statute or charter was drawn up. And one of the introductory declarations of this charter, which was also intended, to define the scientific and moral duties of this academy, was that the coming millennium would witness a "great cross-breeding of cultures."
If the course of events is not suddenly inverted (and everything is possible), we must prepare ourselves for the fact that in the next millennium Europe will be like New York or some Latin American countries. In New York we see the negation of the "melting pot" concept: different cultures coexist, from Puerto Ricans to Chinese, from Koreans to Pakistanis. Some groups have merged with one another (like Italians and Irish, Jews and Poles), others have kept themselves separate (living in different districts, speaking different languages and following different traditions), and all come together on the basis of some common laws and a common lingua franca, English, which each group speaks insufficiently well. I ask you to bear in mind that in New York, where the so-called white population is on the way to becoming a minority, 42 percent of the whites are Jews and the other 58 percent are of the most disparate origins, and of their number the Wasps are the minority (there are Polish Catholics, Italians, Hispanic-Americans, Irish, etc.).
In Latin America, depending on the country, different phenomena have occurred: sometimes the Spanish colonizers interbred with the Indians, sometimes (as in Brazil) with the Africans too, and sometimes languages and populations known as "Creole" came into being. It is very difficult, even if we think in racial terms, to say whether a Mexican or a Peruvian is of European or Amerindian origin. And it's even harder to decide about, let's say, a Jamaican.
So, the future of Europe holds a phenomenon of this kind, and no racist or backward-looking reactionary will be able to prevent it.
I believe that a distinction must be drawn between the concept of "immigration" and that of "migration." Immigration occurs when some individuals (even many individuals, but in numbers that are statistically irrelevant with respect to the original stock) move from one country to another (like the Italians and the Irish in America, or the Turks today in Germany). The phenomenon of immigration may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, planned, or accepted.
This is not the case with migration. Violent or pacific as it may be, it is like a natural phenomenon: it happens, and no one can control it. Migration occurs when an entire people, little by little, moves from one territory to another (the number remaining in the original territory is of no importance: what counts is the extent to which the migrants change the culture of the territory to which they have migrated). There have been great migrations from East to West, in the course of which the peoples of the Caucasus changed the culture and biological heredity of the natives. Then there were the migrations of the "barbarian" peoples that invaded the Roman Empire and created new kingdoms and new cultures called "Romano-barbarian" or "Romano-Germanic." There was European migration toward the American continent, from the East Coast and gradually across to California, and also from the Caribbean islands and Mexico all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Even though this was in part politically planned, I use the term "migration" because the European whites did not adopt the customs and the culture of the natives, but rather founded a new civilization to which even the natives (those who survived) adapted.
There have been interrupted migrations, like those of the Arab peoples who got as far as the Iberian peninsula. There have been forms of migration that were planned and partial, but no less influential for this, like that of Europeans to the East and South (hence the birth of the so-called postcolonial nations), where the migrants nonetheless changed the culture of the autochthonous peoples. I don't think that anyone has so far described a phenomenology of the different types of migration, but migration is certainly different from immigration. We have only immigration when the immigrants (admitted according to political decisions) accept most of the customs of the country into which they have immigrated, while migration occurs when the migrants (whom no one can stop at the frontiers) radically transform the culture of the territory they have migrated to.
Today, after a nineteenth century full of immigrants, we find ourselves faced with unclear phenomena. In a climate marked by pronounced mobility, it is very difficult to say whether a certain movement of people is immigration or migration. There is certainly an unstoppable flow from the south to the north (as Africans and Middle Easterners head for Europe), the Indians have invaded Africa and the Pacific islands, the Chinese are everywhere, and the Japanese are present with their industrial and economic organizations even though they have not moved physically in any significant numbers.
Is it possible to distinguish immigration from migration when the entire planet is becoming the territory of intersecting movements of people? I think it is possible: as I have said, immigration can be controlled politically, but like natural phenomena, migration cannot be. As long as there is immigration, peoples can hope to keep the immigrants in a ghetto, so that they do not mix with the natives. When migration occurs, there are no more ghettos, and intermarriage is uncontrollable.
What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration. The Third World is knocking at our doors, and it will come in even if we are not in agreement. The problem is no longer to decide (as politicians pretend) whether students at a Paris university can wear the chador or how many mosques should be built in Rome. The problem is that in the next millennium (and since I am not a prophet, I cannot say exactly when) Europe will become a multiracial continent—or a "colored" one, if you prefer. That's how it will be, whether you like it or not.
This meeting (or clash) of cultures could lead to bloodshed, and I believe that to a certain extent it will. Such a result cannot be avoided and will last a long time. However, racists ought to be (in theory) a race on the way to extinction. "Was there a patrician class in ancient Rome that could not tolerate the idea of Gauls, or Sarmatians, or Jews like Saint Paul becoming Roman citizens, or of an African ascending the imperial throne, as indeed happened in the end? The patricians have been forgotten, defeated by history. Roman civilization was a hybrid culture. Racists will say that this is why it fell, but its fall took five hundred years—which strikes me as time enough for us too to make plans for the future.
Fundamentalism and integralism are usually considered to be closely linked concepts and as the two most obvious forms of intolerance. If I consult two excellent references like the Petit Robert and the Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, I find in the definition of "fundamentalism" an immediate reference to integralism. Which prompts me to think that all forms of fundamentalism are forms of integralism and vice versa.
But even if this were so, it would not mean that all intolerant people are fundamentalists or integralists. Even though at present we are faced with different forms of fundamentalism while examples of integralism are visible everywhere, the problem of intolerance is deeper and more dangerous.
In historical terms fundamentalism is a hermeneutic principle, linked to the interpretation of a holy book. Modern Western fundamentalism was born in Protestant circles in the nineteenth-century United States, and its characteristic feature is the decision to interpret the Scriptures literally, especially with regard to those notions of cosmology whose truth the science of the day seemed to doubt. Hence the frequently intolerant rejection of all allegorical interpretations, and especially of all forms of education that attempted to undermine faith in the biblical text, as occurred with the triumph of Darwinism.
This form of fundamentalist literalism is ancient, and even in the days of the Fathers of the Church there were debates between partisans of the letter and supporters of a suppler hermeneutics, like that of Saint Augustine. But in the modern world strict fundamentalism could only be Protestant, given that in order to be a fundamentalist you have to assume that the truth is given by a certain interpretation of the Bible. In the Catholic world it is the authority of the Church that guarantees the validity of interpretation, and so the Catholic equivalent of Protestant fundamentalism takes if anything the form of traditionalism. I shall omit any consideration of the nature of Muslim and Jewish fundamentalism, which I leave to the experts.
Is fundamentalism necessarily intolerant? On a hermeneutic level it is, but not necessarily on a political one. It is possible to imagine a fundamentalist sect that assumes its own elect to be the privileged possessors of the correct interpretation of the Scriptures, without however indulging in any form of proselytism and consequently without wishing to oblige others to share those beliefs, or to fight for a society based on them. "Integralism," on the other hand, refers to a religious and political position whereby religious principles must become at once the model of political life and the source of the laws of the state. While fundamentalism and integralism are in principle conservative, there are forms of integralism that claim to be progressive and revolutionary. There are Catholic integralist movements that are not fundamentalist, fighting for a society totally inspired by religious principles but without imposing a literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and maybe prepared to accept a theology like that of Teilhard de Chardin.
The nuances can be even subtler. Think of the phenomenon of political correctness in America. This sprang from the desire to encourage tolerance and the recognition of all differences, religious, racial, and sexual, and yet it is becoming a new form of fundamentalism that is affecting everyday language in a practically ritual fashion, and that works on the letter at the expense of the spirit—and so you can discriminate against blind persons provided that you have the delicacy to call them the "sightless," and above all you can discriminate against those who do not follow the rules of political correctness.
And racism? Nazi racism was certainly totalitarian; it had pretensions to being scientific, but there was nothing fundamentalist about the doctrine of race. An unscientific racism like that of Italy's Northern League does not have the same cultural roots of pseudoscientific racism (in reality it has no cultural roots), yet it is racism.
And intolerance? Can it be reduced to these differences and the kinship between fundamentalism, integralism, and racism? There have been nonracist forms of intolerance (like the persecution of the heretics or the intolerance of dissidents in dictatorships). Intolerance is something far deeper, lying at the roots of all the phenomena I am considering here.
Fundamentalism, integralism, and pseudoscientific racism are theoretical positions that presuppose a doctrine. Intolerance comes before any doctrine. In this sense intolerance has biological roots, it manifests itself among animals as territoriality, it is based on emotional reactions that are often superficial—we cannot bear those who are different from us, because their skin is a different color; because they speak a language we do not understand; because they eat frogs, dogs, monkeys, pigs, or garlic; because they tattoo themselves...
Intolerance for what is different or unknown is as natural in children as their instinct to possess all they desire. Children are educated gradually to tolerance, just as they are taught to respect the property of others and, even before that, to control their sphincters. Unfortunately, while everyone learns to control his own body, tolerance is a permanent educational problem with adults, because in everyday life we are forever exposed to the trauma of difference. Academics often deal with the doctrines of difference, but devote insufficient attention to uncontrolled intolerance, because it eludes all definition and critical consideration.
Yet the doctrines of difference do not produce uncontrolled intolerance: on the contrary, they exploit a preexisting and diffuse reservoir of intolerance. Take the witch hunts. This phenomenon was a product not of the Dark Ages but of the modern age. The Malleus Maleficarum was written shortly after the discovery of America, it was a contemporary of Florentine humanism; Jean Bodin's Démonomanie des sorciers came from the pen of a Renaissance man who wrote after Copernicus. My intention here is not to explain why the modern world produces theoretical justifications for witch hunts; all I want to do is point out that this doctrine became successful because popular fear of witches was already a reality. That fear can be found in classical antiquity (Horace), in the edict of King Rotari, and in the Summa theologica of Saint Thomas. It was considered a part of everyday life, just as the penal code provides for muggers. Without this popular belief a doctrine of witchcraft and the systematic persecution of witches could never have gained currency.
Pseudoscientific anti-Semitism arose in the course of the nineteenth century and became totalitarian anthropology and industrialized genocide only in the twentieth. But it could never have arisen had an anti-Jewish polemic not been under way for centuries, since the days of the Fathers of the Church, or if common people had not translated anti-Semitism into practice, a situation that endured for hundreds of years wherever there was a ghetto. The anti-Jacobin theories of Jewish conspiracy circulating at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not create popular anti-Semitism, but rather exploited a hatred for difference that already existed.
The most dangerous form of intolerance is precisely the kind that arises in the absence of any doctrine, fueled by elemental drives. This is why it cannot be criticized or curbed by rational argument. The theoretical foundations of Mein Kampf can be confuted by a battery of fairly simple arguments, but if the ideas proposed in it have survived and continue to survive all objections, it is because they are founded on uncontrolled intolerance, which is immune to all criticism. I find the intolerance of the Italian Northern League more dangerous than that of Le Pen's Front National. The historical background of Le Pen's movement is characterized by the perfidy of a certain class of right-wing intellectuals, while Northern League leader Bossi has nothing but uncontrolled drives.
Look at what is happening these days in Italy, where twelve thousand Albanians have entered the country in little over a week. The public and official model was one of welcome. Most of those who want to stop this exodus, which could become more than the country can handle, use economic and demographic arguments. But all theories are rendered superfluous by a creeping intolerance that gains new ground with every day that passes.
Uncontrolled intolerance is based on a categorical short circuit that is then leased out to every future racist doctrine: if some of the Albanians who have come to Italy over the past few years have become thieves or prostitutes (and this is true), then all Albanians are thieves and prostitutes.
This is a frightening short circuit, because it constitutes a constant temptation for all of us: all it takes is for someone to steal our baggage at an airport anywhere in the world, and we go back home saying that the people of that country cannot be trusted.
The most frightening form of intolerance is that of the poor, who are the first victims of difference. There is no racism among the rich. The rich have produced, if anything, the doctrines of racism. The poor, on the other hand, have produced its practice, which is far more dangerous.
Intellectuals cannot fight uncontrolled intolerance, because when faced with pure unthinking animality, thought finds itself defenseless. But it is too late when war is waged on doctrinal intolerance, for when intolerance is transformed into doctrine the war is already lost, and those who ought to fight it become the first victims.
Yet it is here that the challenge lies. To inculcate tolerance in adults who shoot at one another for ethnic and religious reasons is a waste of time. Too late. Therefore uncontrolled intolerance has to be beaten at the roots, through constant education that starts from earliest infancy, before it is written down in a book, and before it becomes a behavioral "skin" that is too thick and too tough.
There are irritating questions, as when someone asks you what has happened just after you bit your tongue. "What do you think about that?" people ask you at a time in which everyone (with a very few exceptions) thinks the same thing about the Priebke case. And they are almost disappointed when you reply that, obviously, you are indignant and bewildered, because essentially everyone asks this question of everyone else in the hope of hearing a word, an explanation, that might reduce the indignation or bewilderment. 1
One is almost embarrassed to talk about this, to obtain thus a general consensus so cheaply, honorable men among other honorable men in an arc that spans the gap between the extreme left and the extreme right. As if the Rome Military Tribunal had finally led almost all Italians to agree. We are all on the side of the just.
And what if the Priebke case had implications over and above the individual episode—all things considered, a fairly squalid one (an unrepentant criminal, a fainthearted tribunal)—and involved us on a deeper level? Would it not suggest that not even we are innocent?
We still assess what happened in terms of the laws in force. Under current law perhaps Priebke could have been given a life sentence, but in terms of jurisprudence it cannot even be said that the tribunal's decision was an unthinkable one. There was a criminal who had confessed to a horrible crime, and, as every court must, the tribunal had to see whether there weren't any mitigating circumstances. Well, those were hard times, Priebke was not a hero but a wretched coward, and even if he had weighed the enormity of the crime, he would have been afraid to pay the consequences of a refusal. He killed an extra five people, but when men are drunk with blood, as we know, they become beasts. He's guilty, all right, but instead of life let's give him a long stretch; justice is saved, the statute of limitations comes into play, and we can close a painful chapter. Would we not have done the same for Raskolnikov, who murdered an old lady, and without any military excuse at that?
We are the ones who have conferred upon the judges a mandate to behave in accordance with the laws in force, and now we present them with an objection, a moral requirement, a passion; and they reply that they are judges, not killers.
Most of the objections turn on the interpretation of preexisting laws. Priebke had to obey orders, because such is the law of a country at war; but no, even the Nazis had laws that allowed them to avoid obeying an unjust order, and then again Priebke should not have been tried under military law, because the SS were a volunteer police corps. But international conventions justify the right to make reprisals; indeed, one may reply, but only in cases of declared war, and there is no evidence that Germany declared war on the Kingdom of Italy, and therefore the Germans, the illegal occupiers of a country with which they were not officially at war, could not complain if someone disguised as a street sweeper blew up one of their convoys.
We shall not get out of this circle until it is decided that when exceptional events occur, humanity cannot afford to apply the laws currently in force, but must shoulder the responsibility of sanctioning new ones.
We still have not drawn all our conclusions regarding the epoch-making event that was the Nuremberg trials. In terms of strict legality or international custom it was an arbitrary act. We had been accustomed to the notion that war was a game with rules, and that at the end of the day the king would embrace his cousin the winner, and then what do they do, take the vanquished and hang them? Sure, reply those who decided upon Nuremberg: we think that in this war some things happened that exceeded the limits of tolerability, and that's why we're changing the rules. But this level of tolerability reflects your values as winners; we had other values, don't you have any respect for them? No, since we won, and since among your values there is the glorification of power, we shall use power: we're going to hang you. But what will happen in future wars? Those who foment them will know that if they lose they will be hanged; let them think about that before they start. But your side committed atrocities too! Yes, but that is what you losers are saying; we are the winners, so we are going to hang you. And will you take responsibility for this? Yes, we will.
I am against the death penalty, and even if I had captured Hitler, I would have sent him to Alcatraz. So from now on I shall use "hanging" in a symbolic sense, to suggest a hard and solemn punishment. But apart from hanging, the reasoning behind Nuremberg is flawless. Faced with intolerable conduct, we must have the courage to change the rules, laws included. Can a tribunal in Holland judge the conduct of someone in Serbia or Bosnia? According to the old rules, it can't; according to the new ones, it can.
At the end of 1982 there was a conference in Paris on intervention, which was attended by jurists, military personnel, pacifist volunteers, philosophers, and politicians. By what right and according to what criteria of prudence can we intervene in the affairs of another state when it is held that something is happening there that is intolerable in the view of the international community? Except for the clear-cut case of a country still ruled by a legitimate government that requests help to repel an invasion, all other cases are subject to subtle distinctions. Who is asking me to intervene? A part of the citizenry? How representative of the country is this group, to what extent does intervention cloak, albeit with the noblest intentions, interference (Saguntium being a case in point)? Is intervention required when what happens in that country goes against our ethical principles? But are our principles the same as theirs? Is intervention necessary because for thousands of years a certain country has practiced ritual cannibalism, which is a horror for us but a religious practice there? Isn't this the way the white man shouldered his virtuous burden and subjected the peoples of civilizations that were ancient, although different from the white man's?
The only answer that strikes me as acceptable is that intervention is like a revolution. There is no previous law that says it is a good thing to do; on the contrary, revolutions are made despite laws and customs. The difference is that the decision to launch an international intervention springs not from a restricted elite or from an uncontrolled civil disturbance, but from talks among different peoples and governments. It is decided that although other people's opinions, customs, practices, and beliefs must be respected, something seems intolerable to us. Accepting the intolerable means casting doubt on our own identity. It is necessary to assume the responsibility of deciding what is intolerable and then taking action, ready to pay the price of error.
When an example of something wholly intolerable occurs, the threshold of intolerability is no longer the one fixed by the old laws. It is necessary to legislate anew. Of course, we have to be sure that the consensus regarding the new threshold of intolerability is as vast as possible, that it goes beyond national frontiers, and that it is in some way warranted by the "community"—a slippery concept, but one that underpins even the fact that we believe that the world turns. But then we need to choose.
What happened with Nazism and the Holocaust set a new threshold of intolerability. Over the centuries, there have been many cases of genocide, and in one way or another we have tolerated them all. We were weak, we were barbarians, we did not know what was happening more than ten miles away from our village. But this genocide was sanctioned (and carried into practice) in "scientific" terms, with an explicit request for consensus, even philosophical consensus, and propagandized as a planetary model. It did more than just violate our moral conscience: it threatened our philosophy and our science, our culture, our beliefs in good and evil. It attempted to wipe them out. We could not fail to respond to this threat. And the only possible response was to conclude that this would not be tolerable, not only immediately, but also fifty years after, and in the centuries to come.
It is in the contact of this level of intolerability that we find purulent the sordid bookkeeping of Holocaust deniers, who spend their time calculating whether the dead were really six million, as if five, four, two, or one million could provide grounds for some kind of a deal. And what if they were not gassed, but had died only because they had been left there without adequate care? Or if they died merely because of an allergic reaction to the tattoo?
But recognizing the intolerable means that all the accused at Nuremberg should have been condemned to hang even if only one person had died, and for simple failure to offer assistance at that. The new intolerable is not only genocide but its theorization. And this involves and places responsibility upon even the peons of slaughter. Faced with the intolerable, distinctions regarding intentions, good faith, and error all collapse: there is only objective responsibility. But (says one) I pushed the people into the gas chambers because they ordered me to do that, in reality I thought they were going to be deloused. That doesn't matter, Fm sorry, here we are dealing with the epiphany of the intolerable. The old laws with their mitigating circumstances don't count here: we shall sentence you to hang as well.
In order to assume this rule of conduct (a rule that also holds for the intolerable future, which obliges us to decide day by day where the intolerable lies), a society must be prepared to make many decisions, tough ones too, and to be united in shouldering all responsibilities. What disturbs us as an obscure element in the Priebke case is that it makes us aware that we are still a long way from taking this decision. That goes for young people and old alike, and not just Italians. Everyone has washed his hands of the problem: we have laws, let's leave this wretch to the courts.
Naturally today we might say that, after the Rome verdict, this joint capacity to define the intolerable is even farther off. But it was too far away even before the trial. And this is what continues to torment us—the (unconfessed) realization that we are jointly responsible.
So let's not ask ourselves for whom the bell tolls.