Aldo Schiavone - What Is Progress

This short book was finished, and was waiting only to be printed, when the health crisis linked to the spread of Covid-19 emerged in China, and then in Italy and the rest of the world.

I didnt think I needed to change what I had written or add to it. Rather, it seemed to me that events fully confirmed the interpretation I had outlined, and gave it an urgency that I would happily have done without.

I did think it would be useful, however, to include a brief afterword, in which the reader can find stated, more directly and explicitly, my arguments against certain opinions concerning our relationship with nature and with history that, today more than ever, are gaining credibility.

Rome, April 2020

Lets begin with a familiar passageat least among those who have some knowledge of art or philosophythat, as an authentic icon of twentieth-century thought, has been endlessly discussed by the interpreters:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin (the words are his, written in early 1940, when death was imminent) nurtured a real passion for the small painting hes talking about, which was made by Klee using a technique he invented, combining oil and watercolor. Benjamin had found it, and bought it, in Munich, where he had gone to visit his friend Gershom Scholem, in the spring of 1921, before the artist became famous; and from then on, during the many moves of his tumultuous, battered life, he always had it with him. Today its in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The painting also impressed Ernst Bloch, who had seen it in Benjamins house and wrote about it in the twenties. Paul Klee sketched a page, Angelus Novus; the angel has the horror in front of him, the wind of the future behind, he said, was reporting an intuition formulated first by his host.

In any case, the fact is that Benjamins (or maybe Blochs, earlier) description rather than explain Klees image overwhelms it, superimposing the features of a new scene and submerging Kleesmore enigmatic in its suspended dramain a conceptual and visual order that doesnt belong to it but constitutes, so to speak, a completely free reading, charged with metaphysics. The angel, as protagonistcaught in the act perhaps of an annunciation, or even just a desperate cryappears now as the impotent target on whom an immense, irresistible force is exerted, and revealed as the genuine focus of the new vision. He wants to oppose it, but cant. The fury of the tempest that rages all around gives him no respite; its a whirlwind that the gaze cant penetrate. The past, history, on which his unveiled eyes, not deluded by the false perspectives of men, are fixed, is an unsalvageable pile of ruins, reaching up to heaven. Progressthe idea that Benjamin saw disastrously refutedwas the uninterrupted rush of the catastrophe toward the inscrutable heart of the storm. It wasnt completely negated: the forward movement continued, unstoppable; but it was reduced to the storms pure, naked violence, waiting for a redemptionor at least a meaningthat didnt arrive.

For Benjamin what emerged fully in this picture was a kind of quintessence of the twentieth century: velocity and tragedy, power and the unknown, metaphysics and destiny. Progressthe word, inherited from nineteenth-century thought, was still familiar and full of promisehad become an endless, useless flight dragging us inexorably through an ocean of ruins: no one knew where, or even if a where existed and was humanly discernible.

Eighty years later, the state of mind to which Benjamin lent such an agitated and absorbing representation seems to have becomeif in a more tenuous and softened forman inevitable companion of our unsettled days, even though the conditions, at least in the West, are much less violent than those which affected Benjamins life (and death). In fact, it seems like the tonality of an era, not the faint reverberation of a distant past of anguish and devastation.

In the interval that separates us from that era, a clarifying light has returned only intermittently, while the mere thought of progress becomes steadily and desolately outmoded, to the point where the word itself is unutterable: a flag transformed into a sign of irrevocable disappointment, not to say deception and betrayal. Its as if our sense and view of the future, and the very meaning of history, had been definitively swallowed up by an indissoluble lump of pessimism, bewilderment, and uncertainty; and the presentunmoving and shut up in itself, in an opaque, fictitious eternitywere our only refuge.

What happened to plunge us into this swamp of unassuageable bad feeling?

The answer isnt simple, but it will carry us far.

Modernity, from the Renaissance onthe new age of Europes pathwas constructed around very different attitudes. It was based on the conviction that the ceaseless activity of human beingsthe productivity of their effort, their intelligence, their daily laborwas creating the foundation for a continual change for the better in our modes of life, at least in the part of the world that Europeans inhabited: a privileged region (it was thought), called on to build a civilization without equal that would elaborate standards and rules to be imposed in the four corners of the earth.

The changes evoked were not only material; the transformation would also include a refinement in the capacities for evaluation and discernment, and for moral judgment itselfthat is, minds, too, would become enlightened, stronger and more penetrating, on the way to an increasingly successful civilization.

This widespread faith went along with a new visionboth philosophical and theologicalof time and history, developed during the course of modernity: a turning point that analyses of the past century insisted on, not without some exaggeration and strain. The ancient concept of a circular and repetitive temporalitythe idea of history as a cycle, of an immutable and natural repetition of the chain of events: the myth of the Eternal Returnwas replaced by the properly Christian interpretation of linear time, with a beginning and an end, marked by the incarnation of the Son of God, and by the achievement of his eschatological project of redemption and salvation.

Its also true that in a remarkable comment, confined with unmatched (and perhaps unconscious) nonchalance to a very long footnote, Santo Mazzarino, one of the great classical scholars of the twentieth century, demonstrated conclusively that an opposition so unequivocal couldnt be sustained, and that the two imagesthe circle and the line, ancient and modernwere in reality much more closely entwined, overlapping and intersecting: and there is little to add to this reconstruction. Nevertheless, its undeniable that the emphasis on the direction of timeon the existence of a vector of history, so to speakbelonged specifically to the character of Western modernity, and, starting with the culture of the Renaissance, was paired with the development of a fundamentally optimistic idea of the relationship between past and future.