Among the many merits of Roberto Calasso, who died Thursday and celebrated with the necessary superlatives, is that he published with Adelphi a series of volumes with fifty years of essays and lectures by Isaiah Berlin, I mean a great liberal of the twentieth century, with the complexities of the case, not a liberal according to the simplifications of the times. One of the first volumes is called The crooked wood of humanity – an explicit reference to the famous sentence of Immanuel Kant – in which, among other things, justice is done to the wonderful Giambattista Vico, defined as the founder of modern culture: if we knew him more we would save ourselves so many nonsense of cancel culture. Above all Berlin insists on the eternal utopia, at least from Plato onwards, to find the algorithm of reason that will lead man to truth and salvation.
Whenever rationalism goes a little too far – he writes – an emotional resistance is manifested, a wave of return that arises from what is irrational in man. It looks like today’s story, with hysterical and conspiratorial responses to science’s verdicts on vaccines. But is not so. Within a few days, two important and esteemed scholars such as Giorgio Sestili and Roberto Battiston offered opposite analyzes: without vaccination, in October we will have hundreds of deaths, says the first, while for the second the green pass will be enough to give us a peaceful autumn. Of course, science is not certainty but hypotheses to be verified, however such divergent hypotheses suggest that, if irrationalism is fine, it is rationalism that is not going through the best (Good morning goes on pause. It will be back on Tuesday 24 August).