Summer 2014 Philosophy of Italian Culture Class Notes 1

Class Dates

Monday May 19, 2014

First Day notes

• Introductions

• Name, major, goals, motivation, relevant experiences.

• Course overview

• Course topics and research questions TH
• Movie distribution MA
• Wiki Instruction MA
• Assignments in this course TH

• Start Course

• Show clip from GIC
• Answer questions for Tuesday

Tuesday May 20, 2014

Davies, "6 Things Wrong with Italy"

• Economy:
• A stagnating economy, corruption, organized crime, political apathy, misogyny, youth unemployment
• "the economy having contracted for the last six consecutive quarters and languished in more than a decade of almost non-existent growth. Unemployment is at more than 11%; for under-25s, it is more than 36%. Italy has the second highest ratio of sovereign debt to GDP in the EU."
• lack of competitiveness --
• Treatment of women: "Italy's female employment rate is, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 46.5% – better only than Greece, Mexico and Turkey among advanced economies, and 12 percentage points below the EU average."
• Justice system: "Italy is one of the most litigious countries in Europe, with more than 2.8m cases brought in 2011 alone, and has by far the most lawyers of any EU country – around 240,000" also, overcrowded prisons.
• Organized Crime: "The 'Ndrangheta, for instance, has its roots in Calabria but dominates the European cocaine trade and the huge contracts being put out for tender at Milan's Expo 2015 are under particular scrutiny for signs of mafia involvement." (new "Tangentopoli"): update May 2014 executives questioned/jailed; anti corruption task force assigned by PM Renzi to former Antimafia magistrate Raffaele Cantone
• Politics: lack of stable governments (Wikipedia: over 50 since WWII)
• North/South division: "GDP per person is more than 40% lower in the south than in the centre and north "

• Act one la mala Italia:
• political corruption

• extra-state and state terrorism
• organized crime, political connivance, control of elections, money washing in legal enterprises

• Bomb attacks on antimafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellini, 1992,
• Ndrangheta, controllo territoriale; justice and education to fight organized crime
• origins of B's money

• Discrimination of women
• Liva in Taranto, jobs and lives depend on bad government and bad capitalism

• Act II Buona Italia

• The South Project - confiscated property becomes community for differently abled

• GOEL female workforce

• If not now when: women's resistance to B

• Familial/good capitalism
• Marchionne + Elkmann, FIAT

• Ferraro, nutella. Ethics of Sharing with community

• Eataly, slow food, local, fair

• Cultura, Torino museum of cinema occupation of theatres

• Act III Sloth
• Sloth the major and worst of sins; easily absolvable
• Berlusconicmo has put everyone in the purgatory; all are equally involved and all are as solved

• Mauizio Viroli - Machiavelli - church has made weakness "sancta religione: (holy religion) - Leaders of the Unification (1861) were morally strong and critical of the church's tendency to make deals with political power

• Umberto Eco: the lacking sense of the state, church's influence on politics

• Brain drain - new immigration patterns
• search for opportunity and meritocracy; repatriation as import of intellectual resources; attention to Italy reinforces democracy
• Eataly, slow food, local, fair

• truth: Saviano segment, also effect of church (viroli)

• honesty
• creativity
• community: women's movement, disabled community,
• law
• work

Wednesday May 21, 2014

Il risorgimento

• Wood and Farell

Introduction 

• Anomaly: e.g. One party government  of First Republic (1948-1992 tangentopoli)
• lacking monopoly of violence 
• Idiosyncratic attribution of legitimacy 
• Contesting voices and dissent against the state's monopoly of legitimacy from different groups 
• Risorgimento:,state speared,absent or adversary to many 
• Strong regional identities 
• Antonio Gramsci failed revolution: lack of popular culture to forge unity 
• Refusal of federalism during the Risorgimento,

Power sharing with the mafia 

• Christian democrats 
• Cooperation minstries and masoneries P2; politicians extreme left wing forces 
• Connivance with organised,crime syndicates,of different nature - increased legitimacy of the illegitimate part 
• Corruption and acceptance of violence undermine appeals to,justice and order 
• Bruschetta's testimony    A culture in the antropological,sense; structures of command   (pyramidal)
• The family is the state of the Sicilian Sciascia 
• Diivisiond North South; imposition of,Piemontese law founded on French Rev. :*European liberalism 
• Honour/omertà  the major currency in mafia culture 
• Exchange of votes - electoral backing exchange for free enterprise 

• Following the Congress of Vienna/Restoration of Pre-revolutionary Europe 1815, 1861,1870, 1919
• http://tuttojedi.blogspot.com/2011/05/cartina-geopolitica-dellitalia-nel-1815.html

D'Epiro Giuseppe Garibaldi

• The seven pre-unitary states - Austria dominates Lombardo Veneto directly; indirect rule over the duchies in central Italy.
• Regno Lombardo-Veneto (Milano, Venezia, Trentino, Hapsburg Empire.)
• Ducato di Parma e Vicenza
• Ducato di Modena e Reggio
• Granducato (archduchy) di Toscana

• Regno di Sardegna (Sardegna and Piedmont)
• Regno delle due Sicilie (Napoli, Palermo, led by Borboni of Spanish origins )
• Papal state

• Mazzini patriotic idealism; exiled revolutionary founded Giovine italia in 1831; visions of unity as republic
• Elected ruling Triumvit in 1849 Rome republic
• Stirs popular unrest following Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily

• King Vittorio Emanuele - monarch of French origins; claims Southern Italy from Garibaldi in fear the Mazzini will establish a republic
• King of Italy in 1861; Rome becomes capital in 1870

• Count Cavour real-politic, Turinese aristocrat and King Vittorio Emanuele's prime minister. Allows Garibaldi's return to Italy and takes advantage of Garibaldi's expedition

• Garibaldi bravery; progressive political ideas, born in Nice, Annexed to Piedmont.
• Member of GIovine Italian and part of Mazzini's anti-piedmont insurrection in Genova 1833, both condemned to death, and 1848 revolution in Milan
• Declared a Colonel in Republic of Rome 1849; forced to retreat in 1851; Austrian and Napoleon III's French army in defense of the Pope's return
• 1859 Fight for the King as head of volunteer brigade against Austrian rule of Lombardy
• 1860 leads the spedizione dei mille - volunteers of diverse regional and social origins
• http://taglidotme.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/la-spedizione-dei-mille.jpg
• Benefits from the Sicilian's opposition to Bourbon rulers and inspires popular unrest when Sicily is conquered
• 1866 Leads volunteers in battle against Austria
• 1867Defeated and arrested in attempt to conquer Rome

Thursday May 22, 2014

Mazzini's Argument in, "On the Duties of Man"

• Duties before Rights: Why?

• Competing voices (from revolutionary Europe): improve the material well being of oppressed workers. rights first.
• But, says Mazzini, you can have rights without the possibility of exercising them. privileged classes can use rights talk to oppress (82)
• material well being cannot be the end of social revolution.

• Mazzini's "cosmic compolitanism" (linking eschatology (God's plan for humans) to political life)

• Knowing God's plan -- through individual conscience -- fallible and variable
• Need to work by "association" through a concept of Humanity
• Duties aren't merely negative. But positive to promote social well-being
• Need to invoke the "Reason of Humanity" (a kind of collective social conscience which is progressive)
• Duties to state and family are still egoistic. Need to be informed by God's plan which is universal humanism.

• p. 90 - quasi-Hegelian history of our self-knowledge of God's plan

• Fetishism, polytheism, Christianity

• Liberty (96-99)

• List of liberties
• Liberty is a means, not an end

• Conclusion

• More than a summary, actually a list of legitimate state functions, interestingly, including confiscation of Church property!
• Role of government is formative: big role in education, support of Worker's Associations

Monday May 26, 2014

Gramsci: The Southern Question

• Division of north and south – south mostly peasants. Duty of the proletariat to ensure peasant rights.
• Turin communists had the duty of bringing the problems of the south to attention: political alliance of Northern workers and Southern peasants to overthrow bourgeoisie from power
• Southern Question – “hegemony of the proletariat” – proletariat must understand the demands and desires of the masses of the peasants
• Assumed the south are naturally barbarians – “the ball and chain preventing development in Italy” (socialist party idea in the North)
• Mass action of proletariat only possible by adopting turin communist approach, had to gain support to have control
• Fiat board encouraging the company become a co-operative (job security)
• 1900-1910, revolt to reformist policy (syndicalism – fight back of peasants)
• syndicalism similar to liberalism
• mass strikes of Po Valley workers (Fiat idea rejected, support of Turin communism and rights of all skills of workers accepted)
• Reggio Emilia workers were suppressed and supported corporate ideas – Turin communist spoke with them and they reject reformist, corporate position.
• Rights taken away from less skilled workers, built up the proletariat
• April 1921, 5000 workers laid off from Fiat and more at Reggio Emilia because they didn’t succumb – did not lose their jobs for nothing
• Southerners mostly peasants without a common goal so cannot band together to make change
• Southern intellectuals – rural bourgeoisie, afraid of the peasants
• Northern priests more in touch with the masses than southern priests – explains why southern peasants have no network of institutions or mass organizations
• Sardinia – war veteran’s movement, more solid social structure.
• Sicilian Socialism – much more rich than the rest of the south
• Southern peasant tied to landowner through the intellectuals
• Agrarian and intellectual block in the south – either peasants or big landowners/intellectuals, no middle ground
• Benedetto Croce – national function (connection of intellectuals with bourgeoisie)
• Intellectuals develop the most slowly in any social group
• Must create an alliance between proletariat and peasant masses

Megan Trudell: Gramsci

• War and Transformation

• WWI unpopular in Italy, “Unified” but not unified
• expansion of industry, size of working class grows
• enter into war further divided, social protests begin to rise, strikes encouraged or provoked by soldiers
• 1917 Russian Revolution encouraged Italians to fight for rights
• Gramsci importance of these changes
• Bourgeois state instrument of this violence

• The ‘biennio rosso’

• Social unrest sharpened right wring opposition
• Italian Socialist Party (PSI) increased membership tenfold, Opposed the war, Won 156 seats in the election, Weakened by the big membership
• Gramsci interested in soviet democracy
• Knew dual power missing from PSI, Compared revolution to Russia, Institutions to organize entire class, Promise essence of Marxism, Underemphasized revolutionary party
• Wanted people to accept the electoral challenge

• Only way to get unity

• Felt like PSI failed to understand real process

• Incapable of connection and directing the various struggles

• BIG MISTAKE- Convinced that the southern peasantry could be liberated from economic misery through alliance with the north

Gentile

• Fascism – totalitarian aim to effect an anthropological revolution; Mussolini desired to create a “new man” for the Italian image. Saw themselves as ‘builders of the future.’
• Risorgimento, movements of nationalism, World War I. Mussolini desired to reshape “traditional defects” of Italians.
• Mussolini believed you had to start from birth and shape the Italians throughout their lives to change “not only somatic features or height, but also character.” This could be accomplished with a strong leader and a revolution. Utopia-esk.
• The Fascist principle – the state creates the nation. Took over the lives of Italians from a young age. Everything is the state, everything human or spiritual desire does NOT exist – “citizen soldier”
• Opera Nazionale Balilla (1926) – laboratory experiment that raised children from birth in an environment to be trained as soldiers for life.
• Different classes of people established. Two classes: those chosen to be part of the new aristocracy and those raised as docile instruments to work for the totalitarian state.
• “New woman” was a successful wife and mother who bred many citizen soldiers, but could also be cittadina militante – female militant citizen.
• 2nd half of the 1930s – anti-bourgeois campaign and intensified racism – strengthened the idea of Fascists and anti-Fascists, not compatible with each other.
• “New Man” was collective and organized, education by totalitarian pedagogy to identify spontaneously with the community and the state. Freed from individualism and supported collectivism.
• Mussolini saw the Italian people as his antagonist, the church had softened him. Made their change his life goal until the fall of the regime. Military failure in WWII started to drive him crazy – you can’t turn a people that has been an anvil for 16 centuries into a hammer with one revolution. He felt failed by his people. Succeeded for 2 decades and attracted Italians.

Croce

• Fascist intellectuals tried to draft their party plans at a conference in Bologna that resembled that of the German manifesto that was earlier condemned.
• Trying to combine intellect of science and mathematics with the complications of politics is overstepping the boundaries of one’s talents.
• Assigns “religious strife” to the issues with other nations – highlights Italians as the nation of desirable citizens and all others to be “foreigners”
• Tries to introduce a new faith – very mish-mashed and unorganized. No new ideas. Italy should recognize this disorganization of the regime and become a liberal country not riddled with strife.

Tuesday May 27, 2014

Wilson

• Gene culture coevolution is the impact of genes on culture and cultural impacts on genes
• Has equal importance in natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities
• The relation between genes and culture is not based on a single trait or gene but the frequency of traits and patterns
• The principle of varying plasticity or the belief that the development of gene traits is plastic in nature, has a lot of variation
• All societies follow rules of genetic fitness, the rule that have shaped generations in gene-culture corevolution
• When a part of the environment is unpredictable, the person is wise to use a mixed strategy achieved by plasticity
• Changes are brought not by mutations in protein-coding genes, but rather through the changes in regulatory genes
• Cultural variation in humans is determined by two properties of social behavior: 1) the degree of bias in the epigenetic rule and 2) the likelihood that individual group members imitate others in the same society who have adapted the trait
• Intricacies of gene-culture corevolution are fundamental in the understanding of the human condition
• Human beings and their social orders are intrinsically imperfectible, in a constantly changing world we need the flexibility that only imperfection provides
• Dilemma of good and evil was created by multilevel selection, in which individual selection and group selection act together on the same individual largely in opposition to each other
• Individual selection is the result of competition for survival and reproduction among members in the same group. It is the differential longevity and fertility of individuals in competition with other members of a group
• Group selection shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another it is differential longevity and lifetime fertility of those genes that prescribe traits of interaction among members of the group
• Individual selection is responsible for much of the sin in the world
• Group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue
• The iron rule exists in genetic social evolution which is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals
• We still desire the tiny united band-networks that prevailed during the hundreds of millennia proceeding the dawn of human history
• Emotions of fear come from the amygdala but more complex fearful thoughts about a particular person or object causing emotion come from the information processing centers of the cerebral cortex
• Humans are unique among animals in the degree that we attend to the sick and injured, help the poor, and comfort the bereaved
• Beyond just the ordinary instincts of altruism, humans have a sense of honor, a feeling born of innate empathy and cooperativeness
• With humans sexual intercourse is not simply limited to the purpose of conceiving children
• Human females have hidden external genetalia and do not advertise estrus, thus differing from females of other primate species
• Both men and women when together invite frequent intercourse beyond the simple practice of conceiving children, which ensure the woman and man's commitment to one another
• This constant commitment without any conception is vital in many circumstances

Gramsci: Popular Culture

• Gramsci believe revolutionary change is a process in which popular mentalities and behaviors are transformed
• Opera most prominent
• No real popular culture besides that
• Detachment of italian intellectuals and people of the simpler classes
• Problems with popular culture:
  • Illiterate lower class
  • prominence of work from other countries (Russian)
  • Writers do not have the same conception of the world as the readers. They cannot relate with the lower class or the culture.
  • Different interests (women choose the novels, they are not interested in politics)
  • Novels they read are old
• People are detached and without foundation
• Not much popular literature has arisen from Italy
• Church is not successful either with providing popular culture, and this leaves the people with a lack of lively spiritual life.
• Popular novels:
  • Victor Hugo...political in character
  • Sentimental type...not strictly political
  • Pure intrigue...conservative-reactionary ideological content
  • Historical...political ideological character
  • Detective
  • Gothic..Ghosts, mystery, etc.
  • Geographical, scientific adventure
• There are very few novelists from Italy, however, many novelists choose to have their stories based in Italy
• Oratory is popular. It is not only poetry but in a large part theater. It covers not only the popular past but also the urban and rural instances.

Wednesday May 28, 2014

Name, blood and miracles-

Honor

• Origins of Honor stem from oral pacts/verbal agreements
• Individual and collective honor was the only guarentee of the execution of pacts (fear of loss of honor)
• People were born into honor or dishonor based on lineage
• Types of most common original honor: chastity of women, courage in the battlefield, ability to protect possessions (including women), generosity (specifically to those who are most vulnerable), sound intellect and judgement
• Because honor connects past and future generations, honor is the first visible expression of society's awareness of itself in time and its action going forward into the future
• The source of acts of honor: Blood and Name
• Blood is the responsibility of the woman to uphold
• Name is the responsibility of the man to uphold (he also must ensure the purity of his wife)
• Woman's honor is based on positive symbols such as menstrual blood, which was believed to have magical powers
• Men's honor is based on actions performed once adolescence is reached
• Actions include: courage, defending honor, worthy of family's name, sound judgment
• Requires frequent action because men are constantly challenging each others' honor
• As time goes on, actions of men calls for a progressive rising of the stakes
• Honor offers (limited) mobility)
• American Dream (from rags to riches)with honor as currency "I want me children to be born with more honor than I was born with"
• Familial groups build their economic and political strenght on the basis of honor
• Honor is necessary to make dealings with neighbors and other members of a community
• Honor helps social advancement

Monday June 2, 2014

Holiday

Tuesday June 24, 2014

Holiday