Yesterday during the first class at one of the American university abroad programs I teach at, I was trying to get to know my students and was asking them why they had decided to come to Rome. They are all from the midwest. Among the various responses I got ("for the experience," "to not remain ignorant," "to get out of the US for a bit," etc.) one girl said, in complete seriousness, "because God told me to."
Naturally I didn't immediatly understand whether she was kidding or not. She was not. And then I had to think of what to say to that! In the end what was most striking was the realization that no 20 year-old university student from Italy or France or Belgium, because of simple rationalism and worldlyness, would ever say "because God told me to" about anything in their lives. An analogous response among the world of college age students would only be conceivable, I thought, in the most fundamentalist cultures of the remotest and impenatrable parts of Afghanistan or Africa and under the brutal force of being brain-washed by some fanatical imam, who, preying upon the total ignorance of his young students, is training them as future jihadists. To the people of civilization, because of civilization, who are aware that they are living in a secular society, and not a pre-enlightenment one, it becomes inconceivable to have a need to convince themselves that a higher power, The Almighty, has taken such a personal interest in their existence to dictate what decisions will be made at the various crossroads of life. Naturally this becomes an alibi and, ultimately, a cop-out.
Evidently, however, such is entirely possible in the Midwest, which demonstrates how removed from civilization and how unsettelingly backwards and religiously bigoted a certain segment of that population is. It is the product of a colossal idiocy, which in America is merely the flip side of the coin of the bigotry, fanatacism and ignorance of the likes of a Terry Jones from Gainesville Florida (another place where enlightenment hasn't exactly found a happy home). The only difference is that one is apparently inocuous (though I'm not entirely sure), the other potentially destabalizing (like Islamic terrorism) to the entire civilized and democratic world. It just goes to show you that people who can't think for themselves, need to have a higher power do their thinking for them. And for the simple minded or the egotistical, despite suffering from a terrible form of insecurity, such having "God guiding me" can thus convince them that they are actually really important, special, "chosen." Of course in the clinical world such folks have a propensity for narcissism and sociopathy, but are ironically protected from realizing their own weakness by their illusions. My student made me wonder how "civilized" and, above all, enlightened, this world of democracy has really become.
So as if right on que my boy Michele Serra had this to say about Terry Jones in la Repubblica today. If anything, just as with my female student from remote Iowa, the America of 2010 never ceases to amaze us! In any case I'm just hoping that if my student doesn't like the grade she gets in my class, she won't come back with "God told me I deserved a better grade."
The Hamoc
by Michele Serra
This reverend Terry Jones, that wants to burn the Koran to celebrate (I intentionally use this verb) September 11, has at least one merit. He reminds us how much the idiots count in history and, let's be frank, in life. For intelligence, in the end, is like democracy: an uninterupted fatigue along a fragile route; so fragile that even just one single idiot, particullarly gifted, is capable of sending straight into the gutter the collective fatigue and intelligence of all the others.
Governments, diplomats, intellectuals, religious hierarchies of the entire planet are, metaphorically, at the feet of one single idiot; the head of a small sect of vice-idiots who are convinced that Truth has established its temporary seat at Gainseville, Florida (imagine that). Cameramen, directors, journalists, satellites, attracted commitees, all the whole gargantuan mediatic universe are, in these days, suspended in the air by just one single idiot, who intends to make of his Ground Zero a sort of weapon of mass destruction and Final Solution. The fact that a providential meteorite crushed him a few seconds before Jones actuated his colossally moronic proposal, is a hope which we should hold in scarce consideration, at least if we are not to be just as idiotic. Such is the power of the idiot: he has the capacity to drag even the others into his terrain.
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