Umberto Eco essay on Ur Fascism

Over on his Chief Blogging Officer blog, Chris Locke has posted an interesting note on Umberto Eco's essay on Ur Fascism. The essay is in Eco's book "Five Moral Pieces".

This is how Eco begins his enumeration. You'll see why I was so excited to find this when you hit the last graf. In what follows, btw, the grafiks, links and emphasis are mine.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice"; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

Find Eco's 1995 list of the 14 characteristics of "Eternal Fascism" here.

Posted by Jock Gill at March 23, 2005 9:58 AM | TrackBack