There is the case – probably now tarnished in the collective memory, of the young poet Amanda Gorman who, after having received worldwide attention for her true recitations in the inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden at the White House – a rather modest poem, for the truth – she claimed, through her agent, to choose the French, Spanish and Danish translators on the basis of their ethnic identity as well as of course their gender: she who writes among other things: «we must put our differences aside».
«It is singular that precisely with the aim of identifying the best translator, or rather the best translator, of this composition, we began by contradicting the text», writes Maurizio Bettini in Who is afraid of the Greeks and Romans? Dialogue and cancel culture, just released by Einaudi. And it offers us a calmly critical summary of what is happening above all in America, in particular towards Greek and Roman culture; but also an invitation not to underestimate, as would still be instinctive at least in Europe – and as we tend to do especially from the right.
Many of the principles that animate cancel culture, in short, the underlying ideas, Bettini underlines, in themselves have a “positive and progressive character”. The problem, however, is «whether this is the right way to affirm (one might say “implement”) these same principles».
The answer is no. But rejecting or mocking the demonizations of the past based on contemporary morals or ideologies is too easy, and above all useless. However, they are worth discussing. Moreover, «if Giuseppe Garibaldi, in addition to accomplishing the feat of the Thousand, had had a hundred black slaves working on his plantations – and the descendants of these slaves lived today on the soil of our country – his statues would probably also be in danger”.
And not just the statues. There is the case of Berkeley, the California city which for decades was the symbol of youth revolt, which now some would like to change its name because the British philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley, to whom it is named, upon arriving in America also had some slaves.
Against the classics, however, the prophet of the great crusade was a professor of ancient history, Danel Padilla Peralta, with a very American success story behind him. The son of very poor illegal immigrants, he managed not only to study Greek and Latin but to become a high-profile teacher. Having reached the peak of his academic career, however, he rebels, and identifies in the Latins and Greeks the matrix of a slave, white supremacist, sexist, colonialist culture, in short, evil, so much so that he hopes that they will no longer even be studied: or maybe , as other cancel culture theorists are clamoring for, littered with “trigger warnings”, i.e. warning signals for dangerous content. It was done for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which may seem at least disconcerting especially if you consider that the show, the television series and the films are a riot of often gratuitous violence.
However, Bettini does not indulge in direct controversy (even if there is a slight, polite irony in his arguments). He simply says that the classics should neither be exalted uncritically nor exorcised as if they were witches of the past: they must be studied and understood not only from a philological and textual point of view, but also in their relationship with the culture and civilization in which they were composed.
Unfortunately this rarely happens, he adds, giving very interesting examples for example from Horace or Plutarch: and a tradition of this kind, he suggests, at a certain point opened the way to ignorant fanatics, cultured maximalists and, let’s add them, to cunning people.
All in all, cancel culture is like climate change: a problem on which it is absurd to divide between right and left, because it concerns our time – as well as a ferocious guerrilla war in universities and the media, to gain positions. For now it is mainly about those from overseas. But by insisting on a climate of contemptuous opposition (i.e. considering all this an American thing) we will end up seeing something very similar in Europe and Italy. There is no shortage of signs. Even if Garibaldi did not practice slavery.