A generation of locusts

    One of the nice things about blogging is that the genre allows one to write about anything and everything that seems important. Politics is important and, in the United States, we are in an election year. As usual, almost everything that is said for political consumption is either tasteless or tastes too good to be true. Speaking the truth is an ideal that almost no one adheres to. The lone partial exception is Ron Paul (by pointing this out, I am not thereby endorsing him). The best piece of political commentary I have read in the past year was penned by Nicola Rossi (b. 1951), one of the few Italian politicians worth hearing out. Every country, I would hope, has one or two politicians with a capacity for self-criticism, the rest being scoundrels, deludeds, or poppycocks.

    The title of Rossi’s op-ed: "The Failure of a Generation." Rossi is an economist with little interest in partisan politics. He is, politically speaking, "senza dimora fissa" - with no place to lay his head. On the occasion of his resignation from the Italian Senate, he chose to take stock of his own generation. I translate in full:

Resignation from the Senate, as I have chosen to do, can be understood – contrary to what many people believe – as a decisively political act. That’s because, if only for a moment, it forces the political class to take stock of itself and its own attitudes. One attitude more than others concerns me, the attitude toward the younger generations.

I will try to explain. The average Italian who had the adventure of being 20 years old in the early 1930s – my father, for example, one among many – experienced for a great part of his life (up until he was 50 or so) a diet 35% less rich in calories than the generation which preceded his. The fault of the war, certainly, but also of the illusion of self-sufficiency (autarchy) of the regime. In the United States and in the United Kingdom, during the period of industrialization, the average height of the population (an index of prosperity almost as important as that of nutrition) perceptibly diminished. In the case of the United States, the average reduction in height between 1830 and 1890 was 4 centimeters; in England the period of decline lasted for a century, beginning in the second half of the 1700s. In both cases, the decline in average height was due at least in part to the urbanization that accompanied the process of industrialization in the two countries. The cities of the epoch were characterized by high mortality rates, endemic sicknesses, overcrowding and therefore rapid contagion, few if any systems of sanitation (no municipal sewer system and no access to drinkable water), not to mention high prices (relative to the ones we know) for fresh and nutritious foods. More recent Italian history offers similar examples; an instructive example concerns the height of Lombards in the second half of the 1700s, which declined ca. 3 centimeters between 1735 and 1835.

My goal is simple: to furnish a few examples capable of giving the lie to one of the many fables that has been believed and professed on the Left in particular: the ingenuous and misleading idea that the evolution of humanity is to be considered a linear process whose interruptions are to be thought of as anomalies. I'm sorry, but that is not the way it is. It never has been. It has often been the case that a generation has experienced levels of economic prosperity inferior to those of precedent generations. Young people today are not the first and will not be the last to have this experience.  

The way ahead for them is the same one that many before them have had to take in order to climb the hill: that of rolling up their sleeves, of studying and working better and harder in order to reconquer the lost levels of economic prosperity, of accepting reality and confronting it with eyes wide open, altering it if necessary and where possible. Without wasting a single second listening to the many who – with a hypocritical show of pity – commiserate over the current conditions of the younger generations. Without however forgetting that, in their case, there is an anomaly. The true anomaly concerns the generation that preceded theirs. By and large a generation made up - I can think of no more effective image – of locusts. Politicians – on the Right and on the Left – have done whatever they could to make it impossible (and they succeeded!) to give to younger generations less uncertain prospects and now, given that those same young people are now voters, are the first to show lively concern for their fortunes. Union leaders who betrayed their mission by giving to those who already have by taking away from those who do not yet have. Armchair journalists who see the problem only when it is too late to address it. Adults, men and women, of the Right and of the Left who for two decades did not hesitate to consume whatever there was, and, especially, whatever there wasn't: the same generation that today looks at younger generations with damp eyes and considers them an unfortunate exception.

To the new season of uncertainty, the political class ought to have responded, not with metanarratives but with policies (politics in the proper sense): reforming, for example, the state’s role in society such that it insures against risks that are otherwise uninsurable and such that it is freed from the burden of activities that by now belong to the market sphere. To be sure, in place of the effort to understand the nature of the new risks and construct new forms of insurance it is always possible to take the shortcut of stopgap measures in favor of the precariously employed and continue to make use of the public sector as the employer of last resort. In this way however one merely ends up swapping out the risks and uncertainties of the market for the extreme and intolerable arbitrariness that is typical of politics.

Nicola Rossi, Senator, Democratic Party

    The original in Italian is all over the net, for example, at Pietro Ichino’s place here.

 

Comments

[Steve Pable]

Sadly, that powerfully apt image of "locusts" will be lost on far too many of Rossi's audience, at home and abroad.

I fear that no one wants to deliver the bad news to a younger generation that they will almost certainly have it harder than their parents. Fewer still are courageous enough to admit their own guilt in bringing it about.

[John Hobbins]

Hi Steve,

Wouldn't it be interesting if we had someone in our Senate who was as honest as Rossi? I can't think of anyone who is.

[Mitchell Powell]

Thank you, John! That is a refreshing speech, and the sort of voice that is sorely absent in American politics today. (Whether the younger generation will or will not be worse off than the older one is not what I am thinking of; it is whether there are any politicians who would admit it if they believed it to be true.)

It is a declamation comparable to, though more eloquently stated than, the fury that crept into the voice of Ron Paul in the recent Republican debates while he was discussed the war drums for Iran and the effects of our current drug wars. The difference, unless I am misreading it, is that while Paul confines himself to giving mostly well-deserved critiques of the political class, Rossi was willing to do the prophetic job of pointing the finger also at the greedy people who elected them.

[Steve Pable]

I think you're right, Mitchell-- it is, in the words of one commentator I follow (Mark Shea), the incestuous relationship between Caesar and Mammon that continues to erode our democratic principles, freedom, ethics, etc. And it is our own complacency in standing by and letting it happen that is in large part to blame.

[Carley]

An honest speech -- beautifully painful. Thanks for translating it into English. Thanks for sharing.

[Mitchell Powell]

Steve -- Not to argue, but just to make sure that what I have said and what you have said remain distinct, let it be known that I fear democracy at least as much as I love it, and I am not currently in a state of mourning a lack of it. I'm also more inclined to think of the collective "us" as actively evil than merely complacent -- I'm not in the least upset about low voter tournout.

[Steve Pable]

What I mourn is the complete lack of engagement until and unless it interferes with my perceived self-interest. I think there's something to be said for the quaint notion of the common good.

You are right-- democracy is a dangerous thing, but it is an attempt to make government more accountable to the citizens it is supposed to serve. But it seems we are only too happy to let our rights be taken away as long as we can keep up with the latest on the Kardashian family.

That form of complacency is, or is easily turned toward, active evil. To whom much is given much will be required.

[Mitchell Powell]

Then we are in agreement, Steve.

[Deane]

What? They've invented a highlighter that doesn't bleed through Bible-thin paper, and you're more interested in translating right-wing reactionaries? What Would Berlusconi Say?

[John Hobbins]

Hi Deane,

Rossi, to be sure, is precisely the kind of politician that left-wing terrorists belonging to the Red Brigades feared the most, since Rossi has proposals for reforming and reworking the social contract that would stand a chance of building more equity into a social democratic system which the Red Brigades, and perhaps you as well, despise and would rather see bite the dust.

A premise of this sort is the best I can do without further information as to why you would call Rossi a right-wing reactionary. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Berlusconi had no use for Rossi's proposals or for his analysis; if you fall into the same category, you are of course free to offer proposals and analysis of your own.

[Deane]

Hi John,

You missed the main focus of my comment: there are now highlighter pens so advanced that they do not bleed through the thin paper in Bibles!

The "right-wing reactionary" comment was just a throwaway line.

Highlighter pens that don't bleed through Bible paper, John! Imagine it!!

Hope you are well.

Regards, etc

[John Hobbins]

Hi Deane,

You're right, I should have caught your tongue-in-cheekness.

Best wishes,

John

[Deane]

I forgive you, John, and fully take back the Klingon insult which I had earlier muttered under my breath at you: Hab SoSlI' Quch!*

yIghoSDo',**
Deane

* "Your mother has a smooth forehead!"
** "Go onward with fortune"

[Rod]

Is this prof Menahem Mansoor reading?

http://depts.washington.edu/hbanes/mansoor.html

[JohnFH]

Hi Rod,

No, it's not Mansoor, but I grew up with that voice. It is a good one to learn Hebrew with.

[Rod]

It's OK, I guess. But he doesn't sound like a native speaker...
And I was looking for for someone able to differentiate between ħet and chaf and alef and 'ayin. Does anyone know where can I find what I'm looking for?