HE Italian philosopher and professor Nuccio Ordine (Calabria, 1958), the classical art and literature expert of the period, spoke to this newspaper after learning that he had been awarded the 2023 Princess of Asturias Communication and Humanities Award. happy”, but showing humility, he considered it “too big” for himself and dedicated it to “teachers around the world who quietly teach and change the lives of students.”
as well as commenting on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, neoliberalism and populism, Ordine insists on emphasizing “his great admiration and great love for Emilio Lledó, a great Spanish master”. “When I was 20, I heard about some of Plato’s courses in Naples. The world needs great teachers like him, full of passion and culture.”
Ordine won the award ten years after the publication of ‘The utility of uselessness’ (Acantilado), a short manifesto in defense of the Humanities that sold in Spain and became an international ‘bestseller’. 80,000 copiesQuite a feat for an essay with philosophical depth.
You advocated a return to knowledge such as philosophy, art, music, and literature in the benefit of the useless. But we’re definitely seeing a brutal decline in the humanities. Are we still going in the opposite direction? What could cause this in society?
-It is a problem that exists all over the world because of neoliberalism, which says that man’s dignity is in his money in the bank. This is a lie. In society, only things that can earn you money matter. Not true. Reading a book, admiring a painting, listening to a concert means food for the soul, it helps us to be better, to develop values against the current. And today, education, the teacher must be a trout: go against the current. The values that make us believe that human dignity is money are wrong. Human dignity holds great values such as justice, solidarity and struggle, so that inequalities that are so great across the world today will decrease and disappear. I dedicate this award to teachers around the world who have taught quietly and changed the lives of students. As you remember the fantastic letter [Albert] When Camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957, he said to his Algerian teacher Louis Germain: ‘Thank you very much, my dear teacher, if it were not for you, my poor child, I could not have done what you are doing. Completed.’
-In the ‘ideal small library’, you said “literature is the key to understanding life”. However, we are experiencing a decline in reading comprehension among young people. How to understand the importance of literature?
-It’s a very difficult job. A student’s attention span today is a few minutes. After 32 years of teaching, I realized something very important: When you read a page from a classic, students get emotional and follow you. When it comes to dating, everyone thinks they have 1,500 friends because Facebook says so. This is the trivialization of friendship. You only need to read 1 page. [Michel de] Montaigne or ‘The Little Prince’ to understand that friendship is trivialized. The love and friendship between the Desert Fox and the Little Prince, and his dialogue on the art of ‘domestication’ always creates excitement among the students. The problem is that teachers today do not have time to prepare lessons, because the school and university do not ask teachers to make students think, but to devote themselves to the bureaucratic life of the centre. This is bad. It’s a cancer.
– In Barcelona introducing optional training so that doctors learn to treat patients more humanely. Which one shows? To what extent has society been dehumanized?
-Indicates the neoliberal mission to health and knowledge: Patients are customers, just as students are customers, which is terrible. It is not true that students and patients should be customers, this should be changed. The pandemic laboratory has taught us that the two pillars of human dignity are the right to health and the right to information. And in these decades, neoliberalism has destroyed the network of hospitals and public schools. You have to defend them.
-How do you think Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT will impact literature and humanities? Will it kill them?
– The inventors of artificial intelligence made statements a few days ago that what they did was very dangerous. Calling artificial intelligence intelligent is another thing. Can it create a machine? I do not think so. We cannot confuse the speed of computation and the ability to collect data with intelligence, which is creativity. Can a machine play a concert like Mozart or Beethoven or paint a painting like Velázquez? I see it difficult. However, it is also difficult to answer this question.
-Are the populisms seen in Italy in recent years embodied by Meloni’s far right the best profiles for managing and confronting the current, economic and climatic crises?
-NO. Because people who think that immigrants are enemies and that they don’t have the right to live like us do not deserve to rule. There are rulers who have built walls in Europe and the United States. In the book ‘The Wall and the Books’, [Jorge Luis] Borges spoke of a Chinese emperor who built a wall and also burned books, which meant burning the possibility of understanding. Because Borges said that when you build a wall, you don’t protect yourself from others, you build a prison for yourself. To do so is a very worthless outlook on life and politics. My latest book, ‘People are not islands’ (Cliff), is an affirmation from the classical world to the contemporary world, the classics, that makes us realize that our lives can only have meaning through what we do for others. because of our egoism.
Are we living more than ever between emotion, knowledge, and reason, to the detriment of the latter?
There is a great disdain for knowledge today. Human dignity only seems to overlap with money. There is also a duel between knowledge and knowledge: there is more knowledge and less knowledge. That’s the theme. There is ‘fake news’ on the internet. The Internet is a gold mine for those who know, and a danger for those who don’t. Because people who don’t know can believe the bullshit on the internet. A butcher has no right to talk about vaccines, he cannot. There are millions of flat earthers in the world. Students with a critical perception and knowledge can choose beautiful things on the Internet.