Falsehood takes flight and truth limps after it (Jonathan Swift). The book is a mirror of the soul (Marcel Proust)
Michael the Great's Notepad
“Falsehood takes flight and truth limps after it,” says an aphorism by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Three centuries ago this statement was hyperbole, but today it describes social media well. All platforms that amplify provocative content risk acting as a sounding board for fake news. And, as is known, a fake story is much more likely to go viral than a real one. This applies in all fields – economics, terrorism and war, science and technology, entertainment and politics.
There are almost two billion websites on the Internet and more than half of the world's population surfs the Internet: every second over two and a half million e-mail messages are sent worldwide and 70 thousand searches are carried out on Google. Fake news is an integral part of the Internet, it invades Internet pages, spreads like viruses on the web, stands up to major newspapers and manages to create a media impact on a global level. Fake news has the prerogative of distorting the reality of the facts and hiding the truth, deceiving the reader. Thanks to the freedom that characterizes the nature of the web, disinformation finds fertile ground on the Internet, where it manages to spread like wildfire and enter the common sense of the user reader. The web represents a veritable ocean of content in which the boundaries between true, distorted or completely invented news become blurred, sometimes almost non-existent.
So, is the lying Internet party right? Vexed question. Of course, the political struggle and, now, the struggle against science conducted through lies on the national and international stage are advantaged by three factors: the possibility of anonymity; the possibility of quickly reaching a vast number of people: the phenomenon of information "cascades" (the hoax that goes viral). We are therefore far from the " cyberdemocracy " imagined by Nicholas Negroponte and Gianroberto Casaleggio. How, then, can we defeat the easy lie of click professionals? Those who are in favor of restrictive measures on freedom of communication, with the noble aim of stemming the false, should know that in this way they also risk silencing the truth. It is the mechanism that Cass Sunstein defined as the “chilling effect”.
According to the philosopher Franca D'Agostini (Menzogna, Bollati Boringhieri, 2012), we can instead adopt the old principle of "letting the weeds grow" so that the wheat can grow with it. In fact, the truth need not fear the spread of lies, given that the latter still needs it to live and prosper. Tradition explains this very well, describing the liar as a prisoner of his deceptions. In fact, if there are many ways of lying, while the truth is only one, each of those ways contains within itself the truth that can destroy it from within. And this is what a critical spirit well trained by a good education should normally do, provided that he has the desire and time to silence those who are ultimately his monkeys, or his jesters: the liars.
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On 6 December 1864 John Ruskin, an esthete fascinated by the English Pre-Raphaelites and disgusted by the miseries of industrial society, held a conference at Rusholme Town Hall, near Manchester. Faced with parents who ask him what education is most useful to give to their children, he claims the autonomous value of education. Because only education creates a utopian space of equality, where social hierarchies can be reversed. Hence the call for a policy that replaces weapons with books arises. A week later, still in Manchester, Ruskin holds a second conference. At the center is precisely the role of women and the idea that, thanks to reading, they can gain "royal power".
The British art critic will find an exceptional admirer and translator in Marcel Proust. In 1900, upon Ruskin's death, he dedicated two obituaries to him; between 1904 and 1906 he translated the two Manchester speeches. In the introduction to the first (Sesame. The king's treasures), he rejects the utilitarian and pedagogical conception – theorized there – of reading as a dialogue with book-friends. In fact, for him this conception is in conflict with "that wonderful miracle of reading which is communication in the heart of solitude".
Nonetheless, after having criticized the comparison between the book and the friend, Proust takes it up again and develops it in his own way: “Probably friendship, friendship towards individuals, is a frivolous thing; and reading is a form of friendship. But at least it is a sincere friendship, and the fact that it is addressed to a dead person, to an absent person, gives it something disinterested, almost touching […]. In reading, friendship is immediately brought back to its primitive purity. Towards books, no courtesy. With this kind of friends, if we spend the evening together, it's because we really want to. Seriously, most of the time, we only leave them reluctantly […]. All the anxieties of friendship disappear on the threshold of that pure and serene friendship that is reading".
The crucial theme of silence is therefore proposed again in an original version of the relationship with the book-friend, which must guarantee maximum transparency and freedom: “The atmosphere of this pure friendship is silence, purer than words. In fact, we speak for others, but we remain silent about ourselves. Furthermore, in silence there is no trace, as in words, of our defects, of our coaxing […]. The language of the book itself is pure (if the book deserves this name), made transparent by the thoughts of the author who amended it from everything that did not coincide with it, to the point of making it his faithful image". According to Proust, therefore, the book is a kind of "mirror of the soul"; and reading is a completely intimate and personal experience, a journey in which, by meeting others, one recognizes – and changes – one's own self. A journey to the limits of time and space, where infinite virtual worlds emerge and reality opens up to the horizon of the possible.
After all, since ancient times there has been an effective drug against anxiety or, rather, against the tumult of passions that assails us and risks overwhelming us in the darkest hours of our existence. It is certainly not the only one and does not guarantee prodigious recoveries, but, unlike antidepressants, it does not cause collateral damage: it is, in fact, reading a good book.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-falsita-spicca-il-volo-e-la-verita-la-segue-zoppicando-jonathan-swift-il-libro-e-uno-specchio-dellanima-marcel-proust/ on Sat, 16 Sep 2023 05:30:30 +0000.