La dottrina del fascismo- Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile (1919-1945)
I’m reading this book in Italian. I’ve read plenty of English translations of Fascist ideology, both by fascists and those that aren’t, but covered the movement. This time I wanted to read what they said in the original language since I can… with some extra help on the political and philosophical language.
This book is a compilation of some different documents from which one can piece together something of the fascist ideology- the worldview behind the political system, which, the fascists themselves, considered to be of the highest importance. They thought the political expression was the natural consequence of the worldview.
The primary writers in these particular documents are Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile.
The worldview is VERY briefly is summed up here.
Reality is produced by thought expressing itself through action. Reality was not out there to be observed, it is actively produced through thinking, and is therefore ever changing. Reality then is primarily spiritual and ethical- truth is not some abstract other that we discover, it is what we think and bring into action.
The State is that heritage of language, tradition, customs, memories and stories that unite a people together. It is spiritual, not material. Because the people of this tradition are bound up in their time and place, and are a part of a spiritual culture, meaning and purpose, and humanity, are found in that community. Individuals can only find humanity within the collective and it is their duty to work, sacrifice, and live for the State. Because man’s life is essentially his relationship with the spiritual whole, he exists only within the collective action.
At the same time, the will of the people is not equal to the majority; true democracy is the highest ideal of the people being realized within the State as the consciousness and will of all.
As much as possible, I like to be able to state what an ideology says to the satisfaction of its adherents. I can’t really do that with fascism. I mean I guess I can mouth the words, but I can’t square the circle.
The problems I see:
The state is the spiritual will of the people as it is actively thought… but it is rooted in traditions, customs, language, memories, etc. The problem is that the fascist directly state that this spiritual will isn’t the expression of the majority. I think it’s fair to grant that the majority can, at times, through short-term self-interest, voice an opinion contrary to its traditional stances. But the only way the traditional stances became the traditional stances were because the majority of the people thought such. And it is precisely this shared set of values that defined the culture which fascists claim is the ideological basis for the State.
The State is supposed to be the immanent act of thinking; it is real, knowable, and authoritative, yet isn’t based on the sum of the citizen’s belief.
Another maybe irreconcilable problem is that any collective system relies heavily on the buy-in of the people. In other words, it imagines a scenario in which all of society is self-sacrificing for the greater good. This in fact is one of the primary sales points: Won’t it be great when we all work towards the common good, rather than our own self-interests?
But in fascism, there is an explicit belief that men are 1) unequal, and 2) must struggle and conquer to be worthy of manhood. So they are actively fostering competition and struggle among their citizens, expecting that those who are most worthy will prevail, while at the same time expecting those same individuals to cooperate to the point of self-sacrifice. Those two things might be able to coexist, but ONLY in a struggle against other groups. Even then, it is unlikely that those most able to compete and win will restrict themselves to only intergroup competition.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower- Marcel Proust (1918)
This is the second book in the collection In Search of Lost Time. It follows the narrator through his life. The first volume was Swann’s Way. There isn’t a plot to these books. They are series of recollections; memories recalled. The aim, as I understand it, is to explore how consciousness experiences life. The real subject isn’t what happens next but perception: memory, desire, social observation, etc, and the way the mind reshapes experience after the fact. Memory isn’t just a recollection of facts. The narrator, apparently a version of Proust himself, and his inner life IS the action. The constant digressions in the book are supposed to convey how thought actually moves. We’ve all experienced this in our thought lives, and even how conversations will wander from one subject to another spurred by little cues that bring something only tangentially related to the forefront. And then there is the sense that time changes reality.
This is an interesting follow up to the fascist philosophy I had just read, because Gentile’s idealism is based on the principle that reality is what we think and act. Reality is produced by our thoughts and actions. Given that Proust was living and writing in that same era, there must have been something in the water in Europe.
The Travels of Ibn-Battuta (1356)
Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier Morocco in 1304. At 21, in 1325, he set out to make the Hajj, the prescribed Muslim journey to Mecca. He traveled across North Africa and across to Mecca in Arabia. In Egypt, he met an ascetic who encouraged him to visit the ascetic’s brothers, one in India, the other in China. After visiting Mecca, he turned north and went through Palestine, across to Iraq. He then made a second journey to Mecca, first visiting Turkey, then across to Africa again to see Mogadishu, and then south along the eastern coast of Africa to Tanzania. He returned to Mecca, then then travels take him through Turkey again, then a somewhat contradictory and confused map of central Asia before coming to India. From India, he travels south along the western coast of India to the Maldive islands, then up to Sri Lanka, Calcutta, then to Sumatra, down around to Vietnam, then through the south China sea up to China. From there he returned along the coastal route back home. He then journeyed into Spain, and finally down to northern Nigeria.
He stayed almost exclusively within Muslim lands, but narrates interactions with non-Muslims as well.