Big is beautiful (a European story)
In this blog that has revived the debate on the merits and demerits of European integration we have often gone up the flow of history, or history, looking for lessons and categories that could be useful in interpreting the present and living season, and the sound of her. We did it with particular attention to the dialectic internal to the imperial project in which we have been involved for millennia, willy-nilly. In recent days I happened to read a book that instead focuses on the external dialectic, that is, on how Europe has affirmed its supremacy over the rest of the world. The book, highly recommended to the few who have not yet read it, isVele e cannoni , by an author very dear to me and recommended to me by a particularly brilliant person, Lorenzo Parola, of whom I suggest you listen or re-listen to the interventions in this webinar by a / symmetries:
The book is full of data and stimuli, but as always, as in every area of human action, I am interested in the method, in particular the method of analysis, rather than the merit of the various issues addressed. Yes, it is important to understand how we have subjugated the rest of the created world, but the underlying reflection on the relationship between political hegemony and technology, between technology and availability of raw materials, between availability of raw materials and political hegemony is more important (and the circle is closes).
In short: on what is happening now, under our very eyes, and that many of us (I take it myself, every now and then …) have difficulty reading, perhaps precisely because it has always happened, but, for some strange reason, we fail to realize it, because in history tout court we are subjected to the same illusion to which we are subject in the financial one: the illusion that this time it is different (while it is tragically and often fantozzianamente the same…). We would have to reflect on the psychoanalytical roots of this compulsion to repeat. Perhaps they are to be traced back to the piddina attitude, that is to say proper to those who “know they know”, consisting in denying, in order to protect the image of themselves, that mistakes have been made that could have been avoided.
If "this time" were really different, the mistake would be excusable, because it was induced by unforeseeable circumstances, and honor saved!
It follows that in order to save honor we must deny that the past has something to tell us, that is, we must condemn ourselves not so much to make mistakes, but to repeat exactly the same mistakes, as we have argued here talking about Azincourt (a European history) , a post that explains well the dialectic between the anglosphere and the European empire.
To the list of typically European perspective errors that we made in that post (the rejection of history, the political culture of total optimism, the delusion of total competitiveness, the illusion of number, the deception of rigidity) the reading of Vele and cannoni leads me to add one, the one that according to Woody Allen is typically masculine: penis envy, aka "big is beautiful". Because reading Cipolla I realized that he too, like me and I think many others, had wondered why the French, despite the lessons of Crécy and Poitiers, continued to insist with the heavy cavalry, and I discovered that the same error it had also belonged to other legal systems (typically, the Mamluk knights), and depended on the need to affirm the prestige of the feudal class over the subordinate classes: in short, from the need of some to propose themselves as indispensable, when instead the technological evolution had made them useless . And I also discovered that this attitude, in addition to determining a tactical inferiority towards the anglosphere, also determined it towards the East, so much so that when "we", the Westerners, had taken control of the Indian Ocean from a century and whistles, "they", the Orientals, arrived at the gates of Vienna, because their armies were articulated on the most effective light cavalry. And finally, without too much surprise, I was able to see that the success of the British derived, among other things, from having understood that "small is beautiful": as with the well-known paintbrush, a large cannon was not needed to win a battle. but many (small) large guns. Europe regained a tactical upper hand on the mainland when it succeeded in melting small, transportable guns, when it evolved from siege artillery (offensive and defensive) to field artillery. But of course underlying this evolution was a parallel evolution of social classes, the upper hand of the bourgeoisie over the landed aristocracy, etc.
The "big is beautiful" nonsense that has recently echoed in the comments on this blog is a piece of our collective not learning from our mistakes, and the considerations of Chinese mandarins reported by Cipolla remind me so much of what my ears hear in the corridors of Brussels. What was the fusion of iron guns today is probably Starlink and we should reflect with serenity on our position in this scenario. In passing the baton it would be advisable not to harm uselessly, due to ideological blindness, and to preserve dignity.
But this time it's no different …
Happy reading and see you soon!
(… we will also talk about this at # goofy11 …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2022/08/grande-e-bello-una-storia-europea.html on Sun, 14 Aug 2022 11:26:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.