Mario Lentano: «We cannot afford to "erase" the classics»

The Romans were great conquerors. They have subjugated peoples, uprooted cultures and waged often ruthless wars. Yet, at no time in their history were ethnicity and skin color a reason for discrimination or exclusion from the privileges of citizenship, which were indeed extended over time to all the inhabitants of the empire. Today, however, the so-called cancel culture points the finger at them and more and more often at all the ancients, accusing them of complicity in the crimes perpetrated by the West: from colonialism to female marginalization up to the supremacy of the "whites".

The result is that there is no shortage of voices calling for the removal of Greek and Latin texts from school and university programs, from the catalogs of publishing houses, from the very imagination of our societies. A dangerous and disturbing drift as evidenced by "Classics in the pillory" (Salerno editor, 2023, euro 18, pp.136. Also Ebook), the latest book by Mario Lentano, professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Siena. A volume that highlights how we are running the risk of eliminating one of the fundamental interlocutors of our cultural tradition and promoting a new conformism, based on the censorship of any dissenting opinion. However, we ask Mario Lentano if there is room for considering the Greeks or the Romans racist, inspiring in some way European colonialism? «The imperialism of the ancients was certainly a reference for modern European colonialisms. Another issue is that of racism, at least in the meaning that this term has assumed since the second half of the nineteenth century. Greeks and Romans cultivated ethnocentric prejudices and elaborated negative stereotypes towards the peoples with whom they came into contact - suffice it to recall the tendency to define "barbarian" anyone who did not speak the language of the Greeks -, but they never managed to elaborate the idea that members of a certain ethnic group should be discriminated against, persecuted or even eliminated for the sole reason of belonging to that group".

Why can't we do without history and classical culture?

«Because the Greeks and Romans have never ceased to be part of our culture: their books have been read by all the generations that preceded us in this part of the world and have deeply shaped their thinking and imagination well beyond the end of the world that produced them. Virgil's Aeneid became a scholastic book right after the poet's death and has never ceased to be so since then: a robust common thread therefore unites the students who at the time of Augustus attended the grammarian's school, where to read the poets, and their contemporaries today. A red thread that would be insane to break».

What risks do we run by giving way to the so-called cancel culture?

«Cancel culture arises from two assumptions. In the first place, that the present has the right to have the last word and that it is legitimate to reject what from the past that does not conform to today's values and models, or at the most that it can be allowed to circulate after having been suitably purged of how disturbing it can be to the modern reader. Secondly, the idea that humanity is largely made up of emotionally fragile and culturally unarmed individuals, unable to think for themselves and inclined to let themselves be manipulated by the books they read, the images they see, the monuments that stand out in the their city and so on. The task of protecting all the others therefore falls on the healthy and capable elite to prevent them from coming into contact with cultural contents from which they would not be able to defend themselves and which therefore it is better to remove before they exert their distorting or disturbing effects. The very concrete risk we run is therefore of giving rise to a new, capillary form of censorship, of elaborating a new canon of the submerged and the saved no less arbitrary than those that have in force in other eras of cultural obscurantism».

Where does the wind of censorship and conformity that characterizes these last few years come from?

«Communication scholars speak of echo-chambers to indicate the tendency, typical of social networks, to create closed and ideologically homogeneous groups, in which only one's own opinion is heard, while divergent positions tend to be marginalized or excluded. In the case of cancel culture, it is as if the echo-chamber effect had extended to an entire culture, which seems incapable of establishing a dialogue with that particular foreign land which is the past, as other and different from the present. A refusal of otherness and difference that appears paradoxical, by a line-up that claims to be the bearer of egalitarian and inclusive demands».

How do we oppose the cancel culture?

“First of all, denouncing its conditions and effects. Secondly, by promoting, starting from school, a more mature and aware contact with the past, which must certainly be considered critically and of which any instrumental use must be strongly rejected for purposes of legitimizing the present in its most questionable aspects, but which above all must known and preserved for generations to come.