Prof. Avv. Roberto De Vita ‘s essay published within Eurispes‘ 36th Italy Report, which was presented on 05/24/2024 at the Conference Room of the National Central Library in Rome.
The most serious difficulties begin when a man
Is free to do whatever he wants.
T.H. Huxley
Between individual and society
From uncertainty to perceived fragility, the dimension of individual disorientation becomes a systemic horizon in the century of conflict between “future threat” and retrotopic nostalgia.
The acceleration of social transformations brought about by the reversal of the relationship paradigm in the human-machine relationship triggers hardly predictable (but easily postulated) motions of anthropological change, the native manifestations of which are already visible.
And if this is the (dark) perimeter of the process of change, its (in)conscious systems of governance confront each other between severity and permissiveness as antipodes and scales of alchemical hope, between visions of order and discipline and visions of freedom and creativity. Dimensions sometimes in conflict, sometimes in continuity of maturation (embryonic in transformation), and sometimes in enlightened balance. From philosophical reflection to social inquiry, traversing individual introspection to the metasignificant of the normative rule, the apparent dichotomy becomes apparent in the primal and irrepressible chromosomal coexistence of individual and society.
Digital leviathan and “creative energy”
Philosophical research, after wondering with human thought about the form of God, plunges with analogical thought into the depths of Artificial Intelligence. The creativity resulting from the freedom of scientific research is, by some, read as a risk to humankind’s very existence, almost in a dystopian vision of a digital Leviathan (Terminator and his Skynet), while by others it is seen as the only saving projection in the face of an unsustainable ratio of scarce natural resources to world population. And if the relationship between philosophy and technology has always been explored, contemporary themes increasingly radicalize the confrontation: on the one hand, the need for severity and order in the governance of technological transformations (with traits of concealed Luddism) and, on the other hand, the exaltation of the magnificent fates and progressives to which it is thought (with traits of fideistic reliance) that the “creative energy” of these prodigious machines for humanity will be able to lead.
Since it is uncertainty that (should) represent the philosopher’s method of research – the only true explorer in the universe of the superstructure of thought – the dichotomy between severity and permissiveness takes on the kaleidoscopic color of Kantian observation and does not force the assumption of risk from predictive fallibility and error: method prevails over merit, inquiry over result, magma, rather than fluid, in a vaporous state.
And this is despite the fact that the comparison may take on the reassuring classical tension between Plato’s collective ethical rigorism and the relevance of balance among (and of) individuals in Aristotle’s thought, in which a strict regulation of citizens’ lives (severity for order and justice) is preferred to reliance on moderation and individual common sense.
A kind of endless agon that cannot have winner or loser: the latter are concepts of terminal negation that cannot find hospice in post-prehistoric human formations, where the relationship between society and the individual can be rewritten or, rather, described in the epistemology of the relationship between severity and permissiveness.
Efficient mixture
The analysis shifts, then, to the functional, finalistic, moral, utilitarian meaning of the two concepts and no longer on their inevitable coexistence, to the declinations of efficient mixture, political recipe and normative dosimetry, always with an eye on the alchemy of the resulting social and economic.
And while the Saint of Hippo relies on the severity of divine law as the criterion of order and grace as the confirming exception for mortal limitations, Thomas Aquinas, with impetus as a sociologist and psychoanalyst ante litteram, places individual understanding and merciful consideration for those limitations within the fabric of natural moral law (weave rather than warp).
In Christian thought, the pursuit of the aforementioned blend investigates the inscrutable divine plan, seeking to grasp signs of the way, signals of the course, and situating outcomes, even the nefarious ones, as a consequence of God’s inescapable will and atonement for human imperfection. Medieval political society is thus guided by the alchemists of protective and curative poisons: doses of one (severity) or the other (permissiveness) protect, cure, kill or extinguish, progressively, dosimetry in the result collected by historiographers.
With the Enlightenment, the unfathomable and the unpredictable (often considered – and rightly so – legitimations of despotic power) are abandoned (in part), and the individual and his freedom take on value autonomy, albeit to be governed according to social and moral rules: these are no longer unfathomable, but must be sought in man himself and his consociative vocation. Rousseau writes the method for government and rules, while Mill, through the measurement of social welfare, looks at the happiness of individuals in society through the dual dimensions of pandering-efficient and outcome-tending.
Only with Friedrich Nietzsche, however, and then even more so with Sigismund Schlomo Freud, do permissiveness and severity become internalized until they become exaltation of the individual, as well as overcoming the limits of individuality, on the one hand, and categories of being and ought-to-be, on the other. It no longer investigates only the relationship and balance between society and individuals starting from the imperative of order, but seeks the projection–starting from the individual and in the individual–of freedom, creativity and inner conflict.
Reins of government
However, to noble introspections sociologists and political scientists prefer system macroanalysis, partly because the more society becomes structured, the more urgent the study of superstructures becomes. And because severity and permissiveness are reins of government, Michel Foucault analyzes the use of punitive practices to regulate behavior and concessions of spaces of freedom, or tolerance of rebellions to maintain social control. As the contrasting twentieth-century models of individual liberty and social justice gradually emerge, variants of different-intensity blends of one and the other, an inescapable Nozick and an ennobling Rawls.
The dominant question in the diachronic thinking of classical sociology is whether severity is innervated in the system of social rules as such, whether the concept of permissiveness is located outside the rules or within them, whether society is, as such, a manifestation of the inevitable suppression of a share of individual freedom; an analysis, however, that is no longer metalogical, but methodological, interested more in the consequences than in the premises, in the probability of the relationship between rule action and social resultant and even its measurability.
“Mechanical societies” and “organic societies”
Durkheim’s “mechanical societies,” at the foundation of which there is a strong sharing of values and beliefs, have a consequent high level of conformity-severity to social rules. These are contrasted with “organic societies,” where diversity and balance among the diversity of individuals require a greater degree of permissiveness in social rules. Severity and permissiveness thus describe the very nature of consociation, that is, what its root is (identification versus coexistence), exalting the tension between communal cohesion and anomie: the latter concept, in its extreme, can be seen as the very negation of the communal dimension and thus a harbinger of social disintegration and negation of society as such. Again, as in the dimension of philosophical research, for sociologists the declination ultimately comes down to the virtuous dysfunctionality of the relationship between individual and society.
However, with Weber and Adorno, thought quickly turns to what enables (why and how) societies to determine adherence (compulsion) to social rules, seeking in the induced stratification of cultural patterns (even seemingly individualistic ones) the key to social control, an inescapable and necessary evil for some, a desirable viaticum of social justice through collective welfare, for others (Marx). Hence the apparent oxymoron of strict society in the permissive rule: here constraint and punishment are replaced by cultural homogenization and communal “religious” identification, sharing and belonging in Durkheim’s mechanical societies.
Organic society, that of balance and coexistence of diversity, thus appears to be only a passing phase, transeunte chrysalis or antiphrasis of permissiveness.
Declinations of coexistence
Society and individual, severity and permissiveness, social justice and individual freedom, security and liberty, punishment and forgiveness: (dichotomous?) declinations of coexistence. Philosophers, sociologists and economists investigate roots, cause and effect, method and measurement; jurists (dystopian rulers of the superstructure) offer tools. Be they those of inquisitorial torture, those of narcotic tolerance, those of laissez-faire, or those of Orwellian fascination. Ennobling intentions extremes act between the meta-legal (of the half-jurist and half-philosopher or sociologist) and the mechanistic formalism (of the magistrate to apply called), lacking their own foundations but “enlightened” by other reason, to the point of being (self-)servant, at once libertarian and paternalistic, capable of finding in calligraphy the justificatory root of racial laws and non-discrimination (Kiel School).
In contemporary society, jurists, convinced regulators of (co)existence, self-assert their axiom: those who write the norms, those who materially draft them, make themselves absolute exegetes of the first thought (the others, philosophers and sociologists, are beautiful souls); judges, called upon to enforce the form of the exegetical excerpt, are despots of harmony, between wrapping garments and shape-shifting bodies.
And when in the fortunate dimension of modern severities the concept of democracy is established as a merit and not a method, even wars have their basis in law (although reason would say otherwise). Since the philosopher investigates (at least seemingly) without boundaries or territories and the sociologist diffidently perscrutes every superstructure, legal thought is the one that is most apt to be enlisted first in the special wards of democracies, those in which the cultural regime governs coexistence and where cultural homogenization is preferred to severity, which deceives with phony permissiveness (typical Western), or those in which freedom to vote is transparent dress that shows the scars of dissent.
If then, as per the opener, the perimeter becomes murky, the portents project the dichotomy on structure and superstructure, where man and machine and their (inter)acting are the new individuals and society with its rules is yet to be investigated, even before it is vainly to be regulated.
And here, to make a contaminating leap into social pedagogy and with the aid of the parenting metaphor, think of the father’s bewilderment and paroxysm in the face of the digital native and his neurological as well as psychological change, where the plastic brain no longer has the structure of a book but that of a smartphone: what severity and what permissiveness (and what results will they produce), waiting for the terminal connection to the machine? Even more complex appears the educational balancing act in school, where one has by definition the responsibility not to abandon the last and at the same time to promote the whole, where rule education is the forerunner of social education, where the concept of free development of identity is associated, clandestinely, with normalized deviance.
A “frightened society?”
Precisely at the stages of greatest revolutionary, destructive and creative transformation, where the decay of individual anomie leads to social disintegration and, likewise, to the reassertion of an individualism immersing itself in values of fundamentalist extremism, where diversity marks the boundary of belonging and not of the richness of coexistence, where fear makes hostile and forastic, severity must regulate coexistence and not identification, while permissiveness must be incentive of creative force, license for the deserving, consequence of deserved trust.
When inert observation is made of the deepening tolerance for conducts of intolerance to social rules, when unilateral claim for individual rights becomes denial of coexistence, the progressive habituation to irresponsibility is affirmed. Individual deviance becomes systemic, anomie rules in the logic of overwhelm.
Self-referentiality of rights, ideological opposition to duties, irresponsibility justified by individual discomfort or systemic faults.
The family as well as communities, schools as well as institutions, seduced by the prosperity of the post-ideological century, by the absence of organized conflict, gave way to the apparent freedom of primordial individuality, dismantling, because they were deemed archaic, the superstructures of coexistence, perceived as useless scaffolding and trusting (out of ignorant good faith) that regulatory spontaneism was (at all times) the very cement of society.
Consider the drift of parental authority, sharedly extended (in aesthetics and merit) to parental responsibility and dramatically sunk into the perils of youthful dissatisfaction among adults and suffering anarchy among minors. A childhood no longer denied by material need but by the emotional and educational neglect of bewildered and irresponsible parents forbidden to punish but not neglect.
Not different is the fate of the School, where bullying of students and their parents and resignation due to cultural and supportive poverty of teachers is true pedagogical and civic renunciation, where judging, punishing and rewarding have been forbidden because they are considered mortifying manifestations of the esprit de jeunesse.
Families and schools mature increasingly fragile and arrogant children, only to leave them prematurely to an even more agitated and gloomy social living (of which adults grasp very little). The dramatic numbers of new addictions of progressively younger minors, alcohol and narcotics, the numbers of the scars of battered sexuality, the explosion of serious psychological distress and the number of suicides among very young people, the increasing severity of juvenile crime are increasingly manifest symptoms of this.
A society where individuals feel more invisible and lonely and therefore are increasingly scribbled on their skin and accompanied by animated stuffed animals, unable to relate beyond the aesthetic exhibitionism of image posts and fear of relational emotional failure.
Conflict, which once-when it was between society (strictness) and individuals’ quest for freedom (permissiveness)-generated creative force, of civic and moral, economic and political innovation, has become internalized; it is no longer ideological class conflict, but has become individual suffering, lonely frustration. Individuals struggle to recognize each other, maintain mistrusts, belonging is only commercial and consumeristic or animated by hatred of the weak or different other (in fear of the mirror), and being becomes psychopathological because inner conflict breeds frustration and destruction.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that over the past five years the dramatic number of young people (aged 15 to 34) who are not studying, not working and not in training (although declining slightly in the past year) continues to hover between two and three million.
At the same time, those who are committed see a gradual depletion of achievements in studies and employment level.
The engine of society is resigned and frightened, and, free from material need and the need to gain freedom and rights, it remains unmotivated and unmotivated.
Certainly these are not the only causes (always complex, deep and historical in the alibis of all ruling classes) of the existential drift of generations, but it is hard to doubt that the renunciation of educational severity, value rule, community obligation, and achievement rewards have done children and students any good.
At first it appeared as an ideological, value choice, overcoming patriarchal oppressiveness in the postwar Italian family and school, where severity was axiomatic. It seemed to have freed the educational method (society as a whole) from despotism and grafted (by movement of revolutionary aspiration) vital yeast, creative ferments, destined to combine freedom, spontaneity, individual and collective improvement.
Perhaps it has happened elsewhere, but certainly not in Italy where, the demolition of a superstructure has not been followed by improvement, if anything, abandonment. Abandonment first and foremost affective, parenting is responsibility and educational severity is primarily affective commitment, of presence, of listening, of confrontation, all activities incompatible with the youthfulness of adults in search of their gratification and with little time to be parents; therefore, better to delegate or doubt, better to justify, better to understand, better to forgive, better to let it go wrong and “let’s hope it gets by.” And if School acts stern and reminds us of our commitments to family and society then it is paternalistic and therefore wrong, while if students’ merit results do not satisfy and trigger tensions and depressions then better to reward everyone and “hope they get away with it.”
Severity is commitment; today its “overcoming” is no longer ideological or value-based, but an alibi for inadequate adults engaged in something else.
And it is the same sickness that consumes institutions in the face of a degeneration, not only generational but communal, of abusive and violent conduct, such as that chronicled in the daily chronicle of overwhelm.
But it is certainly not a simplistic appeal to orderly solutions, to old-fashioned severities, to the use of means of correction, to redemptive punishment, that is the saving viaticum. Because after the digital revolution, the “neurological” distance between the generations of young and old has increased sidereally, and an analog retrotopic jolt can hardly regulate freedom and responsibility in the ecosystem of digital humanity.
As we wait for traces of the direction of a new Pestalozzi, in his pedagogical vision for children and adults, for individuals, families and society, where before precepting one must explore the state of nature, the social state and the moral state, we collectively surrender ourselves to a new society, which before the complete digital metamorphosis will be the “frightened society.”