Facing news cases such as the most recent ones, we witness, once again (and too often) the usual overflow of political, sociological and philosophical polemics that now envelop any news event, from the most macroscopic (wars, economic crises, pandemics, etc.) to the most local and particular. The recent case of murder of passion involving an innocent 22-year-old girl as a victim at the hands of her ex-boyfriend was, unfortunately, no exception. Almost immediately the two real protagonists of the affair, the innocent victim and the heinous murderer, disappeared from the radar, while other actors, this time a collective one, stepped into the limelight or, rather, entered the courtroom. In the dock is no longer the murderer but the entire male sex and, more broadly, the entire society (including women), defined as "patriarchal." In the prosecutor's bench sits, in the role of accuser, progressivism, with its plethora of students [the social justice warriors Ed], influencers, politicians, academics. How is this translatio possible and especially why does it happen? It is worth dwelling on an analysis that, albeit in brief, seeks to try to unravel a skein that is apparently as illogical as it is insoluble.
From one to "many"
Since time immemorial, progressivism has had a problem with the concepts of the individual and responsibility. Being genealogically the direct product of the disappearance of the so-called "horizon of meaning" provided by religion before the scientific revolution, progressivism is led, almost forcibly, to deny the existence of free will. In the mechanistic view of the cosmos, and thus also of man, derived from the Enlightenment and later extended to Marxism and its offshoots, the individuality of human consciousness is merged into a more general network of "power relations" where its autonomy is not only recisely denied but even loses ontological status.
Egalitarian mechanics
In the progressive view, as we know, every division between humans is presented as artificial: every difference between humans (sexes, classes, nationalities, etc.) is thus presented as a mere social construct determined by precise pre-existing arrangements, but these social constructs do not constitute "reality"; instead, they would be a kind of distortion of it, a waste product to be corrected by intervening in the circumstances and contexts that generated them. This is the basis of egalitarianism. Of course, such a conception of existence implies profound social and philosophical consequences. The concept of free will is probably one of the first victims. A concept of eminent Christian derivation, free will cannot, for obvious reasons, marry with a mechanistic view of the universe and politics.
Guilty or not guilty? Both
In Marx, the superstructural order of society, that is, its entire cultural, religious, and family heritage, is the resulting product of the structural arrangement of the economy and the division of labor, the sum of the productive forces and the relations of production between them. In the Marxist view, which, while not exhausting progressive theories regarding individual responsibility summarizes its main dynamics, there is therefore no behavior, whether meritorious or deviant, to be the child of a deliberate act of will of the individual who puts it into practice. "Evil" therefore does not present itself as a free choice of the person who commits it, but as the simple "toxic" product of an abnormal society that relies on unjust social relations. The concept of free will, in the philosophy of Marx and later Marxists, is saved, but it is shifted from the individual sphere to the super-individual sphere of first the class, and then the whole of humanity. If this is so, then the reason for the special indulgence that most criminal phenomena seem to enjoy when confronted by the progressive is evident. Rarely is the individual, in and of himself, judged to be the one actually responsible for his actions. Instead, the responsibility for them is shifted to the social context, that is, to that network of supposed exploitation and alienation which, by deviating man from a supposed original goodness (Rousseau) would cause his criminal behavior. The criminal, in essence, is not really guilty. In this perspective guilty is no one and, at the same time, we are all.
The redefinition of structure
This is in good evidence a major philosophical problem, which instead of confining the weight of the deviant act on the individual responsible for it dilutes, and at the same time extends, its impact on the collectivity, in a kind of dichotomous and simultaneous rise of irresponsibility and guilt, both declined in collective form. In this climax, only apparently contradictory, we already smell, very strongly, the scent of contemporaneity. As we know, however, history has turned its back on Marxism, at least on "orthodox" Marxism, relegating its theories to the great archive of utopias as unrealizable as they are extremely costly in terms of spilled blood. While this may be true with regard to Marxism as a political and economic theory as Karl Marx thought of it in the mature phase of its existence, however, the same cannot be said with regard to Marxist praxis, which, as we have seen, contains within it, already summarized, all the characteristics of progressivism understood in a genealogically broader sense. In particular, the mechanistic perspective of an unjust superstructural arrangement, the offspring of an equally unjust structural base, has survived unscathed the weather that shattered the Berlin Wall.
The great mutation
Defeated on the battlefield of economics, the Marxist Weltanschauung only changed perspective posturing. As already subdued by the so-called "Western Marxism" of the Frankfurt School and their only apparent postmodern opponents, the most promising battlefield lay elsewhere. Indeed, the rise of psychoanalysis and the philosophy of language had shown progressive philosophers and sociologists a decidedly easier field in which to do battle with the so-called injustices of their time. If in 1989 economics seemed to prove liberals and conservatives right in all respects, the same could not be said of the smoky and abstract fields of psychology, linguistics and semiotics. Triumphant economicist liberalism, then, appeared (and appears) to have little interest in these fields of study, showing itself willing to concede to progressives a field, for it, of no interest.
From the factory to the bedroom
Having thus abandoned the field of economics, but not the general plan of superstructural revolution to be enacted by intervening on the structural basis of society it was then necessary to redefine what this structural basis was. Exiled to the plane of abstract intellectualism by triumphant liberalism, the "Western Marxists" replaced the idea of the old structural base, made up of relations of production, workers and factories, with that of a new structural base, made up of relations between the sexes (psychoanalysis) and language games (philosophy of language). To achieve a more just society, in a nutshell, it was no longer necessary to intervene on the dynamics of economic exploitation, but on the sexual and linguistic ones, a perspective that proved to be of absolute fertility and that at the same time did not indispose the neoliberal set-up but, on the contrary, tended, in many places, to reinforce its dynamics and ideological scope, which in itself was quite anemic. Class struggle therefore has not disappeared, but has only chameleonically mutated into the form of a struggle between sexes (or "genders") and a struggle for inclusive language. This does not mean, of course, that the forces operating today in the wake of so-called "wokeism" are made up of Machiavellian Marxists in disguise, but rather points to the existence of a praxis, a modus operandi, acting in the service of a kind of ur-progressivism, predating both Marxism and the Enlightenment itself, which would be of great interest to investigate and study.
From judges to engineers
It is only in this perspective that, with regard to news cases such as the one reported at the beginning, the collective blaming of entire social groups and, ultimately, of all humanity, makes sense. The concept of intersectionality, a sort of hierarchical redefinition of society hinged no longer on value/merit but on perceived pain, in turn seeks to give legitimacy and agibility to the political translation of this gigantic machine of the guilt complex and bad conscience: law diversifies, and from being a control tool aimed at countering the abuse of individuals' freedom, it turns into an engineering tool aimed at transforming society into something else.
In defense of complexity
Once again, the defense of natural coexistence among people passes through the defense of the realistic complexity of existence, a definition that sums up all the multiplicity of human (and other) living and acting irreducible to any abstract theoretical model that, like all utopian models cannot assert itself, but only spread around itself overwhelm and violence. For years, the conservative world was dazed by the impasse whereby the choice was exclusively between total responsibility of the individual (neoliberal stateless monadism) and total irresponsibility (collectivism and "identity" or "class" totalitarianism in its various forms). The rediscovery of a model, yes less intuitive but certainly more natural, of conception of freedom and the individual, who is yes integrated into a collective but not totally identified with it, still remains the way to a just compromise between identity, freedom and justice. On closer inspection it would also probably be the most Greco-Roman and European of answers.
Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.
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