When discrimination is beautiful

If we have learned anything in recent years it is that discrimination is ugly, dirty and bad. They taught us – to the sound of symbolic blows on the fingers and metaphorical slaps in the mouth – a little bit everyone: journalists, commentators, intellectuals and – above all and first of all – that fascinating bandwagon of enlightened people defined as "sinister progressive ": one must never discriminate, ever; fight against gender discrimination; who discriminates, incites hatred. And so on, from commonplace to commonplace, from sentence to sentence, from password to password. We have been so intoxicated by this real ideology that we risk losing, together with the light of reason, also the light of discrimination.

Because the theme is this: is it really true that discrimination (always) hurts and must (always) be fought? Or not? And, again: will it not be that by categorically refusing to "discriminate" anyone and anything, we will end up losing the very quintessence of our humanity, in its noblest and highest sense? Are there (only) good intentions or even (and especially) poorly concealed, and very bad, objectives behind the party of "no-discrimination"? To understand this we need to look at both its stated purpose and its side effects. The stated aim is, of course, equality. And, from this point of view, there would be nothing to complain: it is not right to discriminate (in the sense of approaching in a different way) situations and subjects deserving of equal treatment, opportunities and protections.

For example, it's not okay to discriminate against women over men, blacks over whites, old people over young people. And so far, we are all in agreement. But the "no-discrimination" party goes much further; and not only literally invents an infinite number of categories, non-existent in nature, to which to apply the right concept of non-discrimination, but above all it implies that "discrimination" in and of itself is an immoral, illicit and criminal action. But the opposite is true. Because the term "discriminate" is an ambiguous, double-faced lemma. It can indicate an unfair distinction between classes of things and people worthy of equal consideration. But it also means (indeed, first of all) “to distinguish, to differentiate, on the basis of objective data”.

It is thanks to this attitude – partly innate, partly acquired by virtue of a good training – that we are able to distinguish, by "discriminating" them, the good from the bad, the right from the unfair, the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false, the reasonable from the irrational. This ability to discriminate is not only useful, it is blessed; because it represents the most authentic figure of our best "humanity". Among the great masters of the past, in the religious, ethical and even aesthetic fields, we have phenomenal discriminators: from Jesus, with his evangelical parables, to Aristotle with his "Nicomachean Ethics", to the Greek sculptors, or to the Renaissance painters, with their (discriminating) cult of beauty.

Well, the final aim of those who today shout, at every step, against discrimination of all kinds is precisely this: to make us forget the bright side of discrimination in order to focus only on the dark side. And they are already well advanced in their demolition work. The present civilization is also the daughter of the death sentence of our faculty to discriminate. Precisely for this reason the worst can happen without the majority realizing it; terrified as she is by the fear of being accused of discrimination.

Francesco Carraro

www.francescocarraro.com

---

---

The article When discriminating is beautiful comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

---

This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/quando-discriminare-e-bello/ on Sat, 06 Nov 2021 08:51:49 +0000.