This article is a co-publication of Zócalo Public Square and State of Mind, a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University focused on covering mental health.

Mental illness haunts me in two different ways. The first surrounds me, living and working in Los Angeles, California, daily. When I see people half naked, lying on the hot sidewalk on the way to the trendy new coffee house. When I meet parents searching for their missing adult children and being turned away by agencies who can help—but will not—because it would be a “privacy violation.”  When I hear of people with untreated mental illness finding themselves locked in claustrophobic jail cells and chained to furniture for the few hours a day that they are allowed out to ensure they do not harm themselves or someone else.

The other haunting also takes place here in Los Angeles, but is a product of my travel to Trieste, Italy, “the city that cares.” In Trieste, none of these tragedies exist—and that fact haunts me, in a good way. Recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as demonstrating a global best practice in community-based mental health care, grounded in accoglienza (the Italian word for hospitality), Trieste is a north star for the world.

Ever since I first witnessed the human-centered system in Trieste in 2017—and I have visited five times now, first on a fellowship and later as an observer for an entire month—I am more convinced than ever that my own city, Los Angeles, is capable of moving toward a true community-based system of care. That is, if we have the political will.

The current American mental health care system dates back to the 1960s, when the vision to close the mental institutions in the U.S. and build out a community system of care was gaining traction. From L.A. County, we can see clearly the through-line of the abandonment of this vision. After President John F. Kennedy called for a community-based system of care in the U.S. in his last major policy address in 1963, a gradual devolution of authority from the federal government to the state and now to the 58 counties followed, culminating in the 2011 elimination of the California State Department of Mental Health. This moment served as a capstone to the withdrawal of direct responsibility, or accountability for, mental health care from the state.

California is not alone in this downward slide. Today, America’s mental health system is fragmented, built upon clinical interventions, and tied to a reimbursement system that pays for some useful things but ignores all the life needs of a person in crisis.

In Italy, I discovered, this same story played out differently. Like the U.S., Italy was involved in the mid-20th-century movement to bring an end to the horrible conditions in asylums and institutions. But unlike the U.S., Italy had a visionary psychiatrist who started a revolution in his country around mental healthcare that persists to this day.

As a young psychiatrist, Dr. Franco Basaglia railed against institutional life, influenced by his World War II imprisonment as a member of the anti-fascist resistance. When he was assigned to head an asylum in the town of Gorizia (in the same province as Trieste) in 1961, he was horrified by the conditions he witnessed. As documented in the excellent book The Man Who Closed the Asylums, Basaglia initiated radical changes that flew in the face of conventional “treatment.”

Here are just a few measures he put in place: outlawing restraints, unlocking the wards, instituting meetings between patients and staff, and requiring that the doctors shun their white coats.

By the time Basaglia moved to Trieste’s asylum in 1971, his “democratic psychiatry” movement was gathering momentum. Basaglia and his supporters promised recovery for mental patients and pushed for measures to reintegrate people back into the community, where they could connect with family and friends and find meaning through work.

But he didn’t stop there. In 1977, Basaglia moved to close the asylum in Trieste, and the following year the Italian Parliament passed Law 180, known as Basaglia Law, which formally led to the dismantling of the asylum system throughout the country.

Italy’s community system of care—and the local mental health centers that anchor it—continues to focus upon treatment, recovery, and prevention today. But what struck me most about what I observed in Trieste was a culture that allows people to be treated with human kindness. I was particularly taken by the city’s emphasis on supporting a person’s life aspirations. Trieste’s community mental health program does not define people by their mental illness; they understand that a diagnosis is just one piece of information. Housing is integrated into the program, ranging from independent living to supportive family-style arrangements with 24/7 staff support. In a crisis response situation, community mental health center staff steer people away from the trauma of hospitalization, or worse, incarceration, through short-term housing in a home-like setting managed entirely by peers. Peers play a significant role in the entire system, offering support and the wisdom that can only come from lived experience. The community mental health team also connects people to clubs, associations, and social cooperatives that help them find employment appropriate to their skills and capabilities.

The current situation in California couldn’t provide a starker contrast.

I have yet to meet a person or a family member who can describe a successful story of moving from the onset of mental illness symptoms to treatment to diagnosis to sustained support to recovery. Instead, they find themselves stuck in a system (or rather, a non-system) built upon clinical interventions, tied to a financial model that emphasizes symptom management but ignores the longer-term life needs of a person in crisis.

Other solutions are available to us. In a podcast interview I conducted with Guyton Colantuono, executive director of Project Return Peer Support Network, we discussed the peer respite center, a cost-effective, trauma-informed alternative to hospitalization or jail. He explained that it costs $840,000 per year to run a 12-bed facility—which averages out to $295 to $368 per client, per day. By contrast, it costs $2,200 to spend a night in the emergency room of a typical hospital. Yet there are only two peer respite centers in all of L.A. County.

The guiding principles that are so evident in Trieste don’t require a secret handshake to unlock here. It will take the unwavering focus on the needs of the whole person—not just clinical interventions. A commitment to hold systems accountable to people and outcomes—instead of protecting the institutions. A culture shift to practice radical hospitality—as opposed to adhering to positional authority and power dynamics. A belief in every person’s ability to recover and the right to pursue a purposeful life—as opposed to writing off the hopes and dreams of a person with a mental health diagnosis. And a community ethos to foster social inclusion, and eschew marginalization and isolation.

This movement for change will require involvement at all levels of government—local, state, and federal. Some might say that is impossible to enact Trieste’s ethos of care here. But I would counter that it is immoral not to try.

The post What the World Can Learn From Trieste’s Mental Health Model appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But soon Luigi started following the news a little too avidly. Then he started going to meetings on the sly. Suddenly the De Michelis’ good boy was more interested in the man the newspapers called “Comandante” than in the approval of family and teachers. Before his parents realized what was happening, Luigi ran away from home, without finishing high school, to join the movement that had won his heart and mind.

Late in 1920, Luigi sent a letter home to prepare his parents for the imminent reckoning, an armed clash between Italian nationalists (of which Luigi was one) and the Kingdom of Italy’s army, a battle which would come to be called “The Christmas of Blood.” Luigi warned: “Soon there will be battle, maybe soon I shall be no more. Console yourselves in thinking that I died for the purest of Causes …”

How does populist, political charisma change the world and how can we hold it in check? The story of how the De Michelis family lost hold of a child—the history surrounding “the Christmas of Blood”—offers enduring answers to those questions.

Charismatic, populist politicians can have the pull of a cult. The Comandante to whom Luigi was in thrall was not Mussolini, but his precursor, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was the most famous living Italian in 1920. By the end of World War I, D’Annunzio had created a craze around his own personality in ways only a much-loved celebrity can.

Before World War I, D’Annunzio had been Italy’s most revered decadent poet and womanizer. During the war, at 52 years of age, he enlisted as Italy’s oldest officer volunteer. He flew airplanes, manned ships, and screamed from the trenches, everywhere using his prominence to campaign for Italy’s military cause. After the war, he was the most vocal proponent of Italian territorial expansion.

Mussolini would echo D’Annunzio’s calls, though the two did not get along, agreeing about little beside Italy’s greatness and the feebleness of its government. While Mussolini busily recruited thugs to build his fascist party, D’Annunzio used his far greater fame to stage huge rallies and flood the media with his audacious and emotionally manipulative snubbing of traditional state authority.

D’Annunzio created stirs by combining shock and empathy. He could quote Dante and then call Italy’s prime minister a “shithead.” An elegant dandy, he nevertheless presented himself as “one of the guys,” determined to vindicate those who felt cheated by the state and the world at large. Nice middle-class boys like Luigi hadn’t been cheated, of course, but they responded to the daring of saying what one shouldn’t and to a cause that promised to prevent corrupt bureaucracy from keeping Italy from its destined greatness.

How would Italy achieve that greatness? What was the cause that Luigi was prepared to die for? The last line of Luigi’s letter to his parents makes this clear: “Stay safe, your son salutes you, declaring himself above all ashamed of being Italian, that he no longer wants to be Italian, and from now on is Fiumian. Goodbye, Luigi.”

The reference to “Fiumian” is now obscure, but then was a rallying cry for Italian territorial expansion. Fiume, today known by its Croatian name Rijeka, was a multiethnic port town located in the northeastern Adriatic. Before 1918, it was a semi-independent city-state within the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy. Most Fiumians (unlike Luigi) did not identify as mother-tongue Italians and most were multi-lingual. Significant swathes of Fiumians declared their mother-tongue as something other than Italian—26 percent Croatian, 13 percent Hungarian, 5 percent Slovene, 5 percent German.

This diversity did not interest D’Annunzio and his followers. Instead, they saw Fiume as filled with Italians and as a target—a place they could usurp to make Italy great again.

Fiume seemed ripe for usurpation because of the political fallout at the end of World War I. Before the war, almost 300 million Europeans (including Fiumians) lived within a continental empire, whether German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman. When all these empires were dissolved in 1918, new countries were created out of their territories, with others expanding to absorb any lands they could get. Under the leadership of the victorious Entente powers, the 1919 Paris Peace talks became a squabbling ground over which states would get what.

Little Fiume turned into one of the biggest headaches that Paris diplomats tried to solve because the town’s Italian-nationalist leadership declared itself diplomatically and legally independent now that its empire was gone (citing their long-standing city-state semi-independence). This wasn’t the only problem. They also insisted that their new independence gave them the right to annex themselves to Italy.

Paris Peace diplomats, with the American president Woodrow Wilson in the forefront, repeatedly rebuffed attempts to annex Fiume to Italy; they made free-trade arguments against giving Italy a full monopoly over the Adriatic and pointed out that at least half the town didn’t consider itself Italian.

D’Annunzio soon became the most prominent critic of this stance, proclaiming that Wilson was trying to “mutilate” Italy’s WWI victory by denying its rightly earned dominance over the Adriatic. For months, D’Annunzio staged call-and-response rallies filled with lies to push for Italy’s control of the Adriatic and with xenophobic images against “Slavs.” In September 1919, D’Annunzio and his crew stopped just talking and decided to take Fiume.

D’Annunzio and his followers chose Fiume over other Adriatic hotspots because Fiume’s leadership invited them in. So, to the sound of church bells and without a shot fired, they entered Fiume and proclaimed it part of Italy, regardless of what the stuffed shirts in Paris, Rome, Belgrade, or Washington, D.C., said. This unsanctioned seizure of the town was titillating, and newspapers the world over covered it. Luigi was among those desperate to be part of this spectacular Fiume story.

D’Annunzio and his crew expected their de facto annexation of Fiume to Italy to be authorized within a few weeks’ time. They guessed wrong. Month after month, they marched around town proclaiming their endless motto of annexation to “Italy or death!” but no heads of state were willing to recognize their fait accompli.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Fiumians suffered the realities of what it meant to be a state gone rogue from the global order. Counterfeiting went into overdrive, with 60 percent of Fiume’s money supply falsified and no big state infrastructure available to crack down and stabilize. Law codes written in imperial times were patched over to make them look and sound Italian, but everyone was confused about what the real rules were.

Unsure where Fiume would eventually land on the geopolitical map, city policemen refused to follow orders to register their own nationality, even though they all spoke Italian. Croatian- and Hungarian-speaking schoolteachers were ordered to take Italian courses in their free time to make sure the proclamations of Fiume’s Italianness rang truer. Translators were hired to hide the fact that many bureaucrats and businesses still functioned more within a multilingual Central European mindset than a monolingual Italian one. And every day, everyone got poorer and hungrier as D’Annunzio’s Fiume grew more diplomatically isolated.

The Fiume fiasco lasted 15 months before the Kingdom of Italy and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (soon to be known as Yugoslavia) agreed that the only way to end this destabilizing interregnum was to make Fiume an independent city-state. That meant that neither nation-state would get it. D’Annunzio refused to recognize the treaty; he still demanded annexation to “Italy or death!” Italy threatened military action. D’Annunzio’s reply: Bring it.

Eventually, Italy decided to attack, but—to avoid attention—waited until Christmas 1920, when newspaper readership was at its lowest. (Italian politicians had learned the hard way that D’Annunzio was catnip to the media).

Before the first shots were fired, D’Annunzio proved again why the press could never get enough of him. He dubbed Italy’s attack a fratricidal “Christmas of Blood,” a name that has stuck. He might have won the media war, but there was no way the Italian army would lose the real one. The town was bombed; Italian soldiers invaded. D’Annunzio’s followers blew things up and shot at the arriving soldiers. Fortunately, hardly any soldiers died, though D’Annunzio often lied about this, inflating the numbers of casualties on both sides. Even fewer civilians perished, mostly because they hid in their homes waiting for the madness to end.

By New Year’s Eve, Fiumian statesmen had convinced D’Annunzio to surrender and recognize the treaty. Italy had won, but all sides felt they had lost. Italy was regularly demonized for perpetrating a fratricidal attack in a holy season. D’Annunzio was ridiculed for not surrendering in the first place.

Like most of his comrades, Luigi survived and returned home hungover (literally and figuratively) from the entire experience. He spent the next years working to catch up on the middle-class plans his parents had always had for him. With his “Fiumian” identity shed, he finished university, joined the Fascist party (like millions of others), and became a respected pharmacist in a seaside town north of Rome.

The future for real Fiumians was less easy to rehabilitate, however. They were left living in the material and political rubble of a “Christmas of Blood” most had hid from and few had supported.

None of this should have happened. That it did still produces important questions. Why would Italian nationalists go to war against their own Italian nation-state? Why would nice boys like Luigi drop everything to join them? And how and why did a town filled with so many non-Italians put up with all these D’Annunzio converts in their desperate mission to make Fiume part of “Italy or death”?

Historians of charismatic politics have written hundreds of books trying to answer the first two questions; most ignore the last one. Many of their answers are psychological at their core; they investigate how people got brainwashed into thinking that “justice” for Italy would come from taking over a town few Italians had ever heard of. These histories are frightening because they make it seem that the right combination of charisma, anger, and a tendentious media will convince people to do things they would never have thought acceptable before.

It’s easy to see how this lesson relates to Mussolini’s rise, but it’s also frighteningly relevant right now, in the United States and around the world.

For me, the scariest part of the power of charismatic populism is different, though. I’m most afraid of the very last line of Luigi’s letter, where he identifies himself as “Fiumian.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his diary and letters, Luigi admitted often how foreign Fiume was. But he and the rest of D’Annunzio’s entourage successfully convinced themselves, much of the newspaper-reading world, and most historians that they—aggressive outsiders—were everything and everyone, that they were Fiume. As this entire “Christmas of Blood” narrative shows, charismatic populist politics don’t merely convince us to run away from home or leave behind our family and country. They have the power to erase everything outside those politics, including reality itself.

That’s why, in confronting populism and charismatic leaders, we must focus more on the world erased than the world they hoped to impose. We need more study of how wrong the brainwashed thinking was, instead of focusing on its appeal to people. Otherwise, we risk replicating precisely this nefarious vision: that the leader and his followers are all the world worth knowing about.

That’s also why history matters. It’s important to replace prepackaged “extraordinary” stories like the “Christmas of Blood” with the realities that produced a “Christmas of Rubble.” And it’s important to recognize that defeating charisma politics requires taking away its stage or balcony, so that people can see all the drama, troubles, hope, and failures of the big multiethnic world that the D’Annunzios, Mussolinis, and Trumps have worked so hard to overshadow.

The post How a Charismatic Populist Destroyed Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Francesco Capra was born in 1897 in Bisaquino, near Palermo, Sicily, the youngest of seven children. (“Capra” means goat in Italian; the town’s name is derived from the Arabic “rich in waters.”) In 1903—at the height of Italian emigration—the family booked passage for America. Millions of Italians from the Mezzogiorno (the south) emigrated just one generation after the unification of Italy in 1861. The mass migration was seen as an indictment against the way that unification was carried out as well as the increasingly desperate plight of the laboring poor in Italy.

Conditions in steerage on the steamship Germania were miserable, an experience Capra never forgot. As he explained to film historian Joseph McBride:

You’re all together—you have no privacy. You have a cot. Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off. There’s no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They’re all miserable. It’s the most degrading place you could ever be.

But as the ship passed through New York Harbor, Capra’s father admonished his son, age 6, in what could have been a scene from one of his later movies: “Ciccio, look! Look at that! That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem! That’s the light of freedom! Remember that!”

It seems Capra internalized that idealistic message during his life and advanced it in his films. Capra was never one to wax nostalgic about his Italian ethnicity. Indeed, he often insisted that he was American, without any hyphen and without deep ties to Italy. That ferocious desire to become American, and erase what may have been (for Capra) an embarrassing past, came to fruition in his film work. Even with relatively positive images of Italian-Americans, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra absorbed ambivalent stereotypes about Italian migrants from his adopted country, and conveyed them in his films.

As the film opens, we catch a glimpse of Martini’s, the restaurant and bar belonging to Giuseppe Martini, played by the actor William Edmunds, whose stage name was an erasure of Michele Pellegrino, born in Basilicata, Italy in 1886 and arrived in New York City in 1897. As film scholar Giuliana Muscio notes in her new magisterial study Napoli/New York/Hollywood: Film Between Italy and the United States, many Italian actors in Hollywood anglicized their names in order to secure work. Ironically, they rarely played Italians on screen and were often cast as other ethnics. Conversely, Italian characters were often portrayed by non-Italian actors.

Immigration scholars have long debated whether immigrant Italians were denied the privileges of whiteness or were considered “white on arrival.” Beyond dispute is the fact that Italians were not welcomed by earlier immigrants such as the Irish.

The pressure to assimilate was ferocious. Social workers made the rounds of Italian communities urging parents to send their children to school (where their names were often changed) and to eat oatmeal rather than Italian food for breakfast. During World War II, government posters admonished Italians in America not to “speak the enemy’s language!” even as Capra was making the film series Why We Fight for U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall. As late as the 1950s, Mario Cuomo was urged to change his name after graduating top of his class in law school, unable to land a position at a white-shoe law firm.

The saga of the Martini family in the film partially reflects this historical reality. Giuseppe Martini is the classical, striving immigrant, desperately yearning to advance the material prospects of his family. With a loan from the Bailey Savings & Loan Company, he secures a coveted home in Bailey Park, thus acquiring a part of the American Dream. As the family prepares for the move out of the Potter slum, Mr. Martini triumphantly announces to a neighbor that he will no longer rent but be the proud owner of his own home.

George and Mary Bailey are on hand to assist with the move. George packs the numerous Martini children into his car—with the requisite goat—and off they go, with Martini singing that universal marker of Italianess, “O Sole Mio.” Martini’s accent, gestures, and prodigious brood (human and animal), are all signifiers of Capra’s internalized image of how Italian-Americans were seen through the lens of American popular culture. On the steps of their new home, Mary Bailey presents Mrs. Martini with bread “that this house may never know hunger” and salt “that life may always have flavor.” Then George presents Mr. Martini with wine “that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini castle!” as Mr. Martini makes the sign of the cross.

Later in the film, George Bailey is drowning his sorrows at Martini’s bar as “Voglio cantare una canzone d’amore” plays on the jukebox. Martini asks, “Why you drinka so mucha my friend?” When Bailey is assaulted by a boorish patron, Mr. Martini is swift in throwing out the offending man for breaking the code of friendship, insisting “He no come ina my place no more!” (Martini, like many immigrants, is marked by—among other things, such as the goat—his broken English.)

All this was part of a larger history. An earlier migration of Italians from northern Italy, including Filippo Mazzei (friend of Thomas Jefferson) and Lorenzo Da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist and first professor of Italian at Columbia University), had convinced political and immigration authorities that the later-arriving southern Italians were of lesser status.

Northern Italians were descendants of Dante, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. But Neapolitans and Sicilians, who comprised a majority of migrants between 1880 and 1924, were considered barbarians, racially and intellectually inferior. Around 1900, as Italians were disembarking at Ellis Island and New Orleans by the millions, they were required to check off “Southern Italian” rather than “White” on entry forms and were portrayed in popular culture as rats carrying disease, licentiousness, and radical political ideas. Italian anarchists loomed in the imagination of Americans much as Islamic terrorists do today. If, during the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti (1920-27), one would postulate that there would eventually be not one but two Italian-Americans on the Supreme Court, it would be as if today someone suggested a Muslim for the same position.

That bigotry is present in the film. When George Bailey, in desperation after his business partner Uncle Billy loses an $8,000 deposit, begs Mr. Potter for a loan, the evil banker sneers at the idealist Bailey for being a “nursemaid to a bunch of garlic-eaters,” a not-so-subtle dig at Martini and all Italian-Americans. They had been called worse: dagoes, guineas, wops. Italian-Americans had been despised as gangsters and mobsters, and found hanging at the ends of ropes, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan for having the audacity to befriend African Americans, and posing a libidinal threat to the purity of virginal white American women, the dark side of the Latin lover stereotype.

As the townspeople arrive at the Bailey home with baskets of cash to bail out the Savings and Loan, Mr. Martini enters shouting, “I even busted the juke-a-box!” That jukebox, as Mark Rotella notes, would have included songs by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como and—later—many other Italian-American singers such as Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. Mary Bailey calls out to Mr. Martini, “How about some wine?” again, another marker of Italianess.

Capra’s depiction of the Martini family was simplistic and already out of date by the time of the film’s release in 1946. An extraordinary shift in America’s image of Italian-Americans took place during the middle third of the twentieth century. Public figures such as New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees, and crooner Frank Sinatra (whose short film The House I Live In, espousing racial, religious and ethnic tolerance, won an Academy Award), were at the forefront in shaping new perceptions. In 1950, all three candidates for New York mayor were Italian-American. (Two were actually Italian-born). It also helped that Italian-Americans had been the largest ethnic minority serving in the armed forces during World War II.

Italian-Americans began leaving their ethnic conclaves across the country and moving to the suburbs. (See the ending of Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, published in 1965). By 1946, the move to the suburbs was accompanied by a move rightward on the political spectrum among Italian-Americans. Why the political evolution? Perhaps it was anger at the Roosevelt Administration’s decision after Italy declared war on the U.S. to label 600,000 Italians who had never become American citizens as “enemy aliens” and intern several thousand in camps (before they were released on Columbus Day 1942 in anticipation of the presidential election). Perhaps it was an awareness that to fully be admitted to American society and enjoy its privileges, Italian-Americans had to embrace some of the darker aspects of American prejudice.

Italian-Americans felt they had proved their loyalty to America by renouncing Fascism (which many had supported in the 1920s and 1930s), and raising their children as “good Americans” only speaking English. Capra was emblematic of this evolution in real life, but the change isn’t reflected in this film—or any of his other films.

It seems both Capra and American popular culture preferred their Italians caught in amber, genial and warm-hearted but not too cerebral, or complicated.

The post Frank Capra Oversimplified the Italian-American Story appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s true that Rome, which has never been an easy place to make a living, is struggling these days. The economy is stagnant, I’ve never seen so many homeless people and beggars on the streets, and many Romans look visibly frustrated. It’s no wonder that populist parties are riding high. 

So why be here? Leaving aside the city’s superficial delights, like its superb climate and wonderful food, my own answer is simple:

History.

I am aware of no other great city whose past has been so well-recorded for so long. We have some idea—and often a very good idea—of what Rome was like, and what happened there, during each of the last 25 centuries. Nor, in any other great city, has so much survived physically from its past, through buildings and objects. If you know where to look, you can find souvenirs of the events that shaped Rome, allowing firsthand connections with great moments hundreds or thousands of years past.

I can give a few examples. In a modern hall at the back of Capitoline Museum are what look like weathered stone walls. One has been excavated, and you can see it descending deep into the ground. These are the foundations of classical Rome’s most important temple, to Jupiter Best and Greatest, which dominated Rome’s skyline for a thousand years. Created 2,500 years ago by the last of Rome’s early kings, Tarquin the Proud, the temple was partly responsible for his being the last king. Romans became so aggravated by the building costs that they rebelled and took power. Look at these piles of stone and you are looking at the moment the Roman Republic was born. 

Another temple built five centuries later—the Ara Pacis, or Temple to Peace—is in a much better state, having been painstakingly reassembled in the 1930s from scores of fragments. By the time it was built, Rome ruled the Mediterranean world, and the republic was dead. On the side of the temple, you can see a relief depicting—in their best and most fashionable togas—Rome’s ruler Augustus, his sidekick Marcellus, and their families and helpers walking in procession. It is a portrait of a new elite: the people who dismantled the Republic. In its place rose an unstable military dictatorship, whose administrations would often be decided by civil war.

If you visit the Museum of Rome near Termini station, you can capture the panic and anger during one especially important such regime change. A decade ago, during excavations of the emperors’ Palatine Palace, a scepter and two imperial standards were found. They had been carefully wrapped in silk and placed in wooden boxes. Dating work showed they had belonged to Emperor Maxentius, who at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge just north of Rome, was defeated by Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine. Looking at these objects, one can imagine the desperate moment when pagan Maxentius’s courtiers, learning that their emperor was vanquished and dead, hid his regalia of power to spite his successor. 

Rome has preserved its own defeats. In the city’s ancient Aurelian wall you can see the Asinarian Gate with its tall round towers. There, on a December night in A.D. 546, soldiers defending the city shimmied down a rope to search out the commander of their enemies, the Ostrogoth Totila, to ask how much he would pay for them to open the doors (he paid enough). Across the city, you can see the raised walkway leading from the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo, where, in early May 1527, Pope Clement VII ran for his life as Spanish and Lutheran German soldiers below took pot shots at him, and their comrades turned Rome into a slaughterhouse. And you can see the Papal Walls on the Gianicolo Hill, where in June 1849 Garibaldi’s soldiers heroically defended Rome in a hopeless struggle against a much superior French army. Though Garibaldi lost the battle, he won the war right there, as his forces’ courage gained sympathy around the world. Within a few years his dream of a united Italy, free of foreign rulers, was reality.

Or you can see the Balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, where, on the 10th of June 1940, Mussolini announced that Italy was at war with Britain and France (the crowd below was so unenthusiastic that a patriotic newsreel of the event had to be dubbed with cheers from sports events). And you can see the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, which was used as a torture center by the SS during Rome’s Nazi occupation. Now preserved as a warning from the past, you can read desperate messages scratched into the walls by those held there. 

For all this history, today’s Romans still aren’t impressed. “What use are monuments?” is a comment I have heard more than once. “Monuments are what’s dead and gone.” I disagree. I don’t believe that history repeats itself, as every age is different—but I do believe it can offer useful clues about human behavior. 

Romans have lived under every kind of political system, from oligarchy to theocracy, and from dictatorship and monarchy to democracy. Frequently they have lived under more than one at the same time. One can see Rome’s past as a vast case study of humankind and politics.

What can be learned from spending time among these relics? For one thing, they tell of the frightening chanciness of events. We like to think that great changes happen for important reasons—that they’re all but inevitable—but it’s rarely so. Huge and enduring transformations can come from the equivalent of a throw of a coin.

If Maxentius had defeated Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and had hung on to his imperial scepter, Christianity might never have dominated Europe as it did, and instead might have remained one religion among many. If Mussolini had not been tempted into war in June 1940 his dictatorship might have endured, ever more sluggish and corrupt, for another decade or two. And if river fog had not risen from the Tiber early in the morning of the 6th of May 1527, hiding the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s starving soldiers from Rome’s guns, Charles’s army would never have broken into Rome, the city would not have had to endure a horrific 10-month occupation, and Italy might not have been dominated by Spain for the next two centuries.

Rome’s monuments also hold warnings. However infuriating democratic government can be, beware of chucking it away. Once you start down the path to dictatorship you never know who you might get. Rome has been ruled by a paranoid schizophrenic (Caligula), a talentless wannabe singer (Nero), and murderers far too numerous to list—including some popes. For all their claims to efficiency, dictators rarely govern well. Mussolini despised the elected rulers who preceded him and yet, for all their faults, their rule was far more effective and less corrupt than his. Under democracy, Italy thrived economically and was well prepared for war. Under Fascism the economy stagnated and the country’s military was in a hopeless state.

Another warning that seems especially relevant these days is that democracy’s worst enemy is inequality. At the heart of Rome’s first Republic was a patriotic alliance between rich and poorer Romans. When the greed of the rich transformed Rome into a slave economy and the poor lost their role in society, they also lost a sense of connection with the Republic, and it died. 

But Rome’s monuments have some good news for us, too. Somehow, out of all of these wars and tyrannies and destruction there has emerged an extraordinary, fascinating, and beautiful city. The most important thing about Rome is that it endures. There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be.

The post Why I’m Staying in Rome, Even While It Crumbles  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the worst, we are told, is yet to come, because both countries have extremely low birth rates. Harvard sociologist Mary Brinton calls this “a demographic time bomb.” Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin says simply, “We are a dying country.”

Could all the experts be wrong?

Yes, and the reason is robots.

Conventional wisdom has long held that countries need enough young people to fill all the jobs left behind by retirees, and to create macroeconomic growth to finance all those retirements. A shrinking nation will have a very difficult time achieving any of those aims.

What does it mean to be shrinking? To sustain a developed country’s population, the birth rate needs to be 2.1 children per woman. In Japan, the rate is 1.4. In Italy, it’s 1.39, the lowest in Europe. In the United States, the rate is 1.86, but that’s supplemented by significant immigration. So while much of the developing world is experiencing an unsustainable population explosion, the conventional wisdom is that many Western industrialized countries face a sustainability problem from too few births.

That’s certainly the perception in Japan. This summer, the Japanese government made headlines by reporting that its population fell a record amount in 2016, by a total of 308,084 people, to 125.6 million. But the truly eye-catching number was this: Annual births dropped below one million for the first time since the government began its survey in 1979. By 2045, Japan is projected to lose 900,000 people a year, which is more than the total population of Indianapolis. Compounding the labor shortage, Japan has very strict immigration controls.

The Italian picture also is bleak, but in different ways. In Italy, fewer Italian babies were born in 2014 than in any year since the country was unified in 1861. This has been offset, recently and partially, only by an inflow of migrants, mainly fleeing Africa and the Middle East. For the last three years, the number of arrivals has been 580,000, but that’s still less than one percent of Italy’s 60 million population. Then there’s the unanswered question of where the new arrivals will work. Italy’s stagnant economy has produced high rates of unemployment, particularly among the young.

And that’s before another future trend takes hold: a devastating loss of employment due to exponential technological advances. In a groundbreaking paper published in 2013, Oxford’s Michael Osborne and Carl Frey concluded that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs are at risk of being taken over by “computerization” in the next decade or two. The futurist Martin Ford framed the problem in more frightening terms, proclaiming, in a popular book, “The Rise of the Robots.”

But while these two trends—declining births and new robot “births”—might be regarded as individually ominous, the fact that they are happening at the same time offers reason for hope. Could robots replace the workers who aren’t being born in Italy, in Japan, and across the developed world?

Such a replacement is not a radical idea—or a new one. As early as 1933, legendary economist John Maynard Keynes predicted the replacement of workers by machines, with massive unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

The 2013 Oxford study was motivated by this prediction. It assessed the probability of job loss over the next decade or two in 702 detailed occupations in the United States. The least vulnerable jobs (less than 1 percent at risk) include athletic trainers, oral surgeons, and anthropologists. The most vulnerable jobs (at 99 percent risk) include telemarketers and data entry keyers.

The CEO of Daimler-Benz has been more explicit, predicting: “In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans” and “70-80 percent of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years.” There also will be some new jobs created by new technologies—but it’s unclear how long it will take them to materialize.

If this vision of the future proves true, there will be casualties, as no revolution is bloodless. The Industrial Revolution terrorized textile and agricultural workers, and the computer revolution hollowed out the middle class of most Western industrialized nations.

But the best kind of country to be during the rise of the robots is a country with a declining population. In Italy and Japan, rather than having massive numbers of human workers displaced, robots may do the work that otherwise would have gone undone.

Of course, it will be crucial for countries to strike a balance—to make sure the robots come on line at roughly the same rate that populations decline. This could mean imposing heavier taxes on families that have too many children, or excise taxes on firms that automate too quickly. The revenues would go to retrain workers for jobs that can’t easily be automated. In some cases, nations could mandate human labor for some jobs, or guarantee a universal basic income, as some countries are now debating.

The 2013 Oxford study says that workers also will have to acquire creative and social skills, areas in which computers lag behind. The bad news is that few countries are adjusting their schools and training centers in order to meet the needs of today’s technology, much less the technology of the future. Across the Western world, companies report having millions of jobs for which they cannot find qualified candidates.

If societies don’t educate people to take those new jobs, they will be filled by robots. Or by nothing at all.

The post How Robot Laborers Could Restock Italy and Japan’s Dwindling Workforce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet each of these movements in the U.S. and Europe claims to be the true expression of democratic legitimacy. The raison d’être of UKIP was a referendum on British membership in the European Union, and now its mission is to defend the “the will of the people.” As for Trump, his sensitivity to having been substantially beaten in the popular vote implies a conviction that democracy somehow matters.

So are they fascist or not? And what does that tell us about where we’re headed?

In principle, there is no problem with using the term fascism in debate—after all, we use terms like socialism or liberalism all the time. But we are able to use these terms because we realize that they can’t be defined once and for all. We know (or rather we implicitly accept) that there are many ways to be a socialist, for instance, and while some see it as a term of abuse, others are happy to apply it to themselves. The problem with fascism is that any use of the term functions as a political assault, and so leads to defense or attack through definition, and that distracts from real issues. Personally therefore, I use terms like “extreme right”—not because I think that people or groups “scientifically” belong to the category, but because we can use the term knowing that it can mean very many different things. In the end, politics (and life) proceeds through misunderstandings and unintended consequences—which historians try to explain retrospectively.

After decades of research, academics—myself included—have been unable to agree on the proper definition of a fascist. Some see it as a conservative ideology, protecting property and capitalism; others see it as reshaping society in the name of revolutionary nationalism. Neither can academics agree on whether national socialism (commonly called Nazism) was a form of fascism. Some emphasize the many similarities (dictatorship, anticommunism, antiparliamentarianism, and so on), while others argue that Hitler’s drive to create a racially pure state through extermination of minorities was significantly different from the expression of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy.

Even those who embraced the moniker did not agree on what fascism was. Fascism—like socialism or any other political movement—was diverse and meant different things to different people. Among those Italians who described themselves as fascists between 1919 and 1945, there was an enormous range of views on what fascism was. It’s not surprising that academics cannot say which of the many fascist factions or movements represented the “real” fascism (was it the Brownshirts or the SS for instance?). However, our specialist knowledge and training as academics makes it possible for us to say what is similar and different about modern groups. Scholars can also trace the different meanings and their consequences.

Mussolini’s supporters represented a minority in parliament and needed conservative support to form a government. They got it not just because conservatives sympathized with fascism (their views were mixed), but because fascist paramilitaries had waged a campaign of systematic violence in town and country, and were already the de facto government in some areas. The Blackshirts began a “March on Rome,” which persuaded conservatives to do a deal with Mussolini, making him head of a coalition government. The use of violence stretches the definition of legal.

Hitler and others were terribly impressed by this precedent, but reinterpreted it. In the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, he failed to carry out his own “March on Rome,” that is, an attempt to carry out a coup. Reflecting on this reversal, he concluded that electoral methods were also necessary. Hitler’s Brownshirts were not as murderous before they came to power as the Italian Blackshirts were, but in Germany, too, both paramilitary pressure and parliamentary deals brought the Nazis to power.

The combination of pressure from a violent mass movement and political deals that brought fascism and Nazism to power had significant consequences for legitimacy. The streetfighters of the SA (Brownshirts) claimed to be the emanation of the people—not through having won an election, but through some kind of communion with the German racial soul, proved by their bravery in the streets. Other Nazi supporters placed more faith in order, hierarchy, and stability, and saw Nazism as a way to reinforce the power of the administration, churches, and army. To simplify greatly, there was an ongoing conflict within the Nazi regime between these different groups—and a similar one in Italy. It was complicated further by the personality cults of the two dictators, based on the conviction that they as individuals were mystical emanations of the people—over and above both the state and the party. Each group claimed that it represented what Nazism or fascism “really were”—in other words, they struggled to “define it.”

These debates had real consequences for people. For example, after the Nazi seizure of power, the SA demanded a second revolution, which meant, for instance, making the SA the core of the army. Some officers were alarmed, while others welcomed this infusion of nationalism. On July 2, 1934, Hitler ordered the execution of several SA leaders—but the action was carried out by the SS, marking the arrival of a new actor in the struggle to shape Nazism. Historians do their most valuable work when they trace these conflicts and their consequences—they don’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) try to decide which of these groups had the correct definition.

Nevertheless, many academics do still claim to have correctly defined fascism. In my view they have misunderstood the role of categories in the human sciences, but it’s not necessary to go into that here. More relevantly, the reason they do so is that there is a “market” for such definitions. The reason is quite simple: Fascism is the ultimate term of political abuse; nobody wants to be a fascist, and it’s a tempting label to stick on others. Consequently, everyone defines fascism in a way that excludes themselves and includes their enemies. For instance, opponents of Donald Trump have said that the implicit appeal to violence makes him fascist. Defenders of Trump say that fascism is actually defined by state control, and so Obamacare is the real fascism.

So what are the similarities and differences between fascism, Nazism, and the modern far right? Confining our attention to the question of legitimacy, the modern far right, like the fascists and Nazis, claims to represent “the people” against the “liberal elite,” especially the press. Trump boasts that he takes his message directly to the people. Indeed, Trump’s words sometimes seem like a direct borrowing of Nazi terms. The President’s expression “lying press” echoes the slogan of Pegida and the AfD in Germany, which in turn echo Nazi denunciations of the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). Another similarity is the support for the modern far right of often wealthy and powerful conservative elements—in neither the U.S. nor Europe is the far right simply a movement of the disaffected working class. There are well-documented struggles within far-right movements to define its direction.

Notwithstanding the populism common among the far rights of then and now, a major difference is that these days there is no equivalent of the mass paramilitary movement, able to subvert constitutional politics by the threat or reality of violence. Of course, there are violent tendencies within modern movements, encouraged by Trump among others. The racist language of the far right encourages attacks on minorities, and there are violent groups attached to movements such as the English Defence League. But the far right these days has not engaged in the systematic destruction of trade unions or socialist local governments and other potential threats to their power that happened in Italy. In Germany, Nazi violence prior to winning power was much less extensive, but in power it went much further than the Italian regime.

The contemporary decline of paramilitarism is due partly to context—in the interwar years, millions of men in Europe and the United States had fought in World War I, and many of them believed that the values of the front should re-shape the social and political system.

Another reason for the decline of paramilitarism is that in the 1970s and 1980s, the then-marginal far right deliberately re-defined their movements, by attempting to distance themselves from violence, and by adopting the languages of liberal democracy instead. They now demanded the “rights” of all ethnic groups to preserve their identity—thus white nations supposedly required protection from immigration. In other words, they co-opted the language of rights and democracy. In effect, the modern far right exploits the discriminatory potential of democracy, interpreting it as a sort of dictatorship of the majority, in which judges serve not the law, but the democratic majority. They separate democracy from pluralism, respect for minorities, and the rule of law.

And finally there is the fact that politicians are aware of history, and it shapes their actions in the present. Protests against Trump and others are motivated partly by the fear of a return to the 1930s. Conservatives, too, have the past in mind. In Germany, above all, many conservative politicians outspokenly oppose the far right, not wishing to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.

Interestingly, in the depths of the crisis in Greece in 2013, which looked worryingly like interwar crises, the conservative government chose to arrest the leaders of Golden Dawn rather than ally with them. In France, on the other hand, many conservatives have proven willing to compromise ideologically and practically with the far right, claiming that it represents not fascism, but the values of frustrated ordinary people. Where these conflicting tendencies will lead is uncertain. Knowing the past does not allow prediction of the future.

The policies of the modern far right are not to be judged on the category to which they belong, but on whether they are morally right, and that is a question not just for academics, but for society as a whole. In that respect, it is worth bearing in mind that the crimes of fascists, Nazis, and indeed others, depended on the willingness to assist, or just look the other way, of people who did not consider themselves to be political at all.

The post No One Wants to Wear the “Fascist” Label, Even If It Fits appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I work as an archaeologist, but two years ago the refugee crisis in my country moved me to make a dramatic change in my life and focus on helping those in need. Baobab was a brand new effort then, and I saw in it the possibility to transform the way we think about and treat migrants—a more human and humane approach.

I came together with other volunteers to provide migrants not only with a bed, a meal, and clean clothes, but with empathy, kindness, and curiosity about their lives, and with guidance and legal information about their status in Europe. Thus far our experience has been filled with challenges, but we are not giving up, and we hope our story will inspire others to adopt a similar model.

The Baobab Experience was born in the spring of 2015, near Rome’s Tiburtina train station, three miles east of the postcard locales where tourists flock. It was May 12, one day after the police had forcibly cleared migrants from the area nearby Ponte Mammolo metro station, where refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, many of them survivors of arduous and terrifying journeys across the Mediterranean, had been congregating for months.

Chased out of their temporary shelter, hundreds of migrants poured into a cultural center in Via Cupa, a few blocks southeast of the train station. The reaction of Rome’s citizenry was immediate: In just a few hours, thousands of donations were brought to the center, and dozens of volunteers showed up, ready to help in any way they could. Some would pop by to donate some basic necessities and end up spending the whole day in Via Cupa, helping out. Donors and volunteers of different ages, origins and experiences would work side by side for hours.

In just a few weeks, Via Cupa became a unique place, with a vital energy springing from the mix of cultures animating it. It also was a place where people who had spent months fleeing for their lives finally could stop and repose in relative calm and safety—a place where they knew that, when they talked, someone would be listening. That deep, reciprocal act of listening forged the bonds that gradually arose between the migrants and us.

While we were listening, Rome’s political institutions stayed silent, not wanting to get tangled up in such a complex situation. During that summer of 2015, Baobab welcomed a total of 30,000 migrants. Doing our best to accommodate 800 people at a time in a space that had been built to host 250, we were constantly battling unsanitary conditions. We began to speak out publicly about the struggles we faced, and to meet with local government officials to begin searching for solutions.

The Baobab Experience continued to grow, as our volunteers began to forge solutions to our many logistical challenges, and to organize assistance and activities for our migrant residents. They called weekly meetings, organized indoor gathering spaces, and set times for clothing distribution and meals—our volunteer cooks were preparing more than a thousand meals a day. They assembled “arrival and leaving kits” with basic necessities, such as soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, snacks, fruit juice and water. A basketball hoop and other sports equipment were brought to the center, and migrants were given tours of the city to help orient themselves in their new home.

Meanwhile, other civic and charitable groups provided their skills and expertise, as well as space to collect, sort, and store donations. A sanitary squad and a legal team were created. Cultural mediators helped us to communicate across language barriers. Using a world map at the center’s entrance, we encouraged migrants to share their personal stories by pinpointing the routes of their journeys to Europe—and to plan the next passage to their final destinations.

But as autumn turned to winter, our situation changed. With cold weather discouraging migrants from making the perilous sea crossing, the number of new arrivals began to drop dramatically.

In December of 2015 the city shut down the center, with the promise that a new site with adequate living conditions would soon be found. But this promise never came to fruition—so Baobab had to begin welcoming and providing practical and legal information to the continuing trickle of migrants in the street, in front of the closed gate of what had been our center. This was when our group of volunteers evolved from being just a group of citizens brought together by their own solidarity, to formally establishing themselves as an association in order to be able to engage in formal talks with the city government. The Baobab Experience, up until then an informal collection of like-minded people, was formally born.

When spring came in 2016, and heavier migrant traffic resumed, we still had only the outdoor space of Via Cupa to welcome and shelter our new wave of guests. We began pitching tents in the street, and in a handful of days an informal camp was operating. Its conditions were even worse than those in the center. There was no running water, no electricity, and no kitchen to prepare meals.

And yet the Baobab spirit remained steadfast. If anything, it was more determined than ever not to give up our fight for human dignity. Although we had no building to offer the 20,000 people who arrived between April and September 2016, our feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood deepened during those days and nights together on the street. During uneasy nights, we turned to singing and dancing to lighten our mood and pass the dark hours. Once again, the strong support of the citizenry of Rome helped sustain us, and we also gained the backing of Italian and international cultural associations, which launched a petition supporting us.

Officials continued their threats of clearing the camp, and periodic, forced round-ups of migrants by police seeking identification documents never stopped. Migrants spent many anxious nights in police headquarters, often with no legal or cultural mediation to assist them. Despite our ongoing negotiations with Rome’s new city government—which, yet again, had promised a rapid solution to the problem—no alternative to our outdoor, informal camp has emerged.

On the last day of September 2016 the camp was cleared for good. Tents, gazebos, all the donations we’d received, and all the migrants’ personal effects were dumped by the police in the abandoned, locked building of Via Cupa, with no possibility for either volunteers or migrants to retrieve them.

From that moment on, we have been in our “itinerant phase,” constantly on the move, from parking lot to parking lot, trying as hard as we can to guarantee the essential needs of those migrants who have stayed and who are constantly being chased out and stopped by police demanding identification. It feels like a manhunt aimed at scaring and scattering us, trying to push us to exhaustion so that we will give up. For our part, we’ve given up on trying to negotiate with the local government, as every promise they’ve made to us has been broken.

But Baobab will not end. We have vowed to each other that Baobab will keep transforming itself in whatever ways are needed so that we can keep doing our essential work. Since the end of October 2016 we have been welcoming migrants in an unused public square behind Tiburtina train station. We continue giving a Baobab welcome to migrants whose long journeys have brought them here to Rome, trying to give them what we value most: the recognition of their precious individuality, and the desire to hear and keep alive their stories and their spirits.

The post In Rome, a New Kind of Sanctuary Is Growing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet Chiaromonte’s 3,400 residents were anything but content. They were crushingly poor and simmered with resentment. Why? In great part, as the Americans learned during their stay, because they were too family-focused.

Political scientist Edward C. Banfield went to Italy in 1954 to better understand poverty. Researchers then tended to assume people were poor due to lack of education or because they were victimized by the government or capitalism. Banfield himself had been a reporter and had traveled across the United States during the Great Depression, so he knew the reality was more complex. In order to understand why people are as they are and do what they do, Banfield believed one needed to learn how they viewed the world and their place within it.

This may sound self-evident, but it cut against the academic grain of the day. The University of Chicago, where Banfield earned his doctorate and had a teaching appointment, was known for its shoe-leather sociological research. Its Prof. William Foote Whyte, for example, wrote Street Corner Society in 1943 after four years studying a slum in Boston’s North End.

In 1956, Banfield and his wife Laura (who spoke Italian) spent nine months in Chiaromonte and interviewed dozens of residents. They pored over census data and official records, enlisted some residents to keep diaries, and conducted psychological surveys on others. Two years later, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society described what they had found and concluded that Chiaromonte’s poverty and grim melancholia (la miseria) were rooted in its people’s “amoral familism.”

The adults’ core attitude was that one must “maximize the short-run advantage of the nuclear family,” and “assume that all others will do likewise.” This might not seem like a bad thing—doing good for one’s own family is universally lauded as moral behavior. But taken to an extreme, a focus on the family can be destructive. Socioeconomic progress demands that individuals cooperate with one another, and work for the common good.

There was very little of that in Chiaromonte. Banfield found no organized voluntary charities, just an order of nuns—brought in from outside the town—struggling “to maintain an orphanage for little girls in the remains of an ancient monastery.” The townsfolk, he found, “contribute nothing to the support of it, although the children come from local families. The monastery is crumbling, but none of the many half-employed stonemasons has ever given a day’s work to its repair. There is not enough food for the children, but no peasant or landed proprietor has ever given a young pig to the orphanage.”

The priests in the town’s two churches feuded, and Sunday worshippers seldom contributed to the collection plate. The town’s doctor didn’t modernize his medical equipment because he saw no personal advantage in it. Patients could take it or leave it. Italian law required all towns to provide schooling to at least age 14. Chiaromonte’s school stopped at fifth grade, and the teachers’ attendance was erratic, their attitude toward their pupils defined by indifference.

Amoral familism bedeviled local politics. Residents assumed anyone engaged in civic life was secretly out for personal gain. Few residents participated in politics or public affairs, and most dismissed government as hopelessly corrupt. When a citizen attempted to organize a political party, the townspeople balked at paying even paltry membership dues. The town’s council was riven by factions, and seldom able to work with the mayor (who was unpaid) to get anything done. Those who participated in politics frequently switched their party identification based on opportunism, not ideology. The secretary of the monarchist party became a communist, then declared himself a monarchist again. Seeing why was not difficult: voters believed politicians were cheating them and thus voted against whomever was in power.

Amoral familism also impoverished families. By tradition, a son was entitled to inherit a portion of land from his father upon marriage. The obvious result was smaller and smaller parcels of land, which were increasingly impossible to farm for profit. The son of an artisan was expected to be an artisan—never mind whether the town economy demanded a cobbler or blacksmith. From the cradle, the family socialized children—not infrequently through beatings—to follow the old ways, stay close to home, and distrust others.

Chiaromonte in 1954-1955.

Collectively, Chiaromonte’s residents all wanted more money, and each was jealous of any other who had more lire or nicer stuff. But they rarely sought to earn more by producing more or better. Banfield’s research revealed astonishingly low levels of individual agency. Unlike the family-focused southern Italian mafia (Ndrangheta), Chiaromontians were too cynical to form criminal enterprises. Crime was rare and usually petty in the town. Material success was attributed to personal corruption or luck, which might be reversed by bad luck. With everyone out for his own and on the take, the system by definition was rigged. Why try?

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society was a watershed in poverty studies, one still read in college classes today. It showed the importance of culture to socioeconomic flourishing. “People live and think in very different ways,” Banfield wrote, “And some of these ways are radically inconsistent with the requirements of formal organization.”

This was not “blaming the victim.” In the case of Chiaromonte, Banfield hypothesized amoral familism was exacerbated by factors outside the average citizen’s control. The town’s physical isolation, to cite just one factor, meant that citizens could little imagine their living other than as they did.

Some scholars criticized Banfield for overstating the power of values on behavior. They pointed to root causes. Material scarcity tends make individuals more anxious and distrustful of others’ intentions. And the larger provincial government had significant authority over Chiaromonte’s affairs, which exacerbated the political haplessness.

Banfield died in 1999, but the book continues to attract readers because its portrait of poverty is heart-aching and—to this day—recognizable. Like J.D. Vance’s recent bestselling memoir of Appalachian life, Hillbilly Elegy, Banfield’s Moral Basis shows that families can be a wellspring for poverty and misery, and that the root causes are a complicated blend that can be difficult to overcome.

The post How an Idyllic Italian Village Was Crippled by Family-Centrism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I write this, I’m still full. I just returned from my neighbors’ house and a long, extravagant Sunday lunch. We feasted to celebrate my successful olive harvest. First we fired up their 300-year-old wood oven and cooked some quick flatbreads. Then, as the oven cooled, we piled in traditional dishes like lasagna, roasted farm chickens and rabbits, and potatoes soaked in salt water and coated with olive oil and aromatic herbs from the garden. We sat at a table laid for 15 people and covered with bottles of wine, baskets of bread, and trays of crostini and house-cured salumi. We struggled mightily not to overeat, knowing all the delicious courses that were to follow.

My neighbors and I have not enjoyed a meal this gluttonous together for many years. Harvest traditions have fallen by the wayside as even this remote hamlet moves into the 21st century. These are the traditions I discovered when I first met my neighbors, the Antolinis, in the early 1970s. It was early June, I was 8 years old, and it seemed like we had extravagant meals every day at a long table under a grape arbor. My family had arrived for the summer just as the wheat harvest was getting underway, and we were quickly invited over to participate in the trebbiatura, or threshing of the wheat—no doubt because it was just assumed that every able-bodied adult in the community would join in the day’s labor during the time of the harvest.

But at the end of the summer, I learned that the feasting was an exception, a necessary reward for the hard work of threshing wheat on a June day under a relentless hot sun.

Back then, my neighbors seemed to straddle the 19th and the 20th centuries. The old sharecropping system called mezzadria was finally dying off (the Italian government ended it in 1964). My neighbors owned their property; the patriarch Agostino bought it with his World War I mustering-out pay. But many people in the village were still tenant farmers who did all the work on the farm and paid half their agricultural production to the landowner. This system had been in use since the Middle Ages in Italy and across Europe.

When my family arrived, we didn’t understand what profound changes, good and bad, the demise of mezzadria would have on the lifestyles of our neighbors. They went from living without electricity or indoor plumbing—as basically slaves to the land, whether they owned the property or not—to owning cars, watching TV, and growing cash crops like tobacco to pay for it all.

The Antolinis had three children—the youngest of whom, Arnaldo, was 17 when we first met them. He was the first child to complete high school and remembered a childhood of abject poverty and struggle. Gluttonous feasting was rare, privation the norm—even in the ’70s. Though the Antolinis owned their property and thus didn’t have to split their crops with anyone, they still survived off their land and what they raised on it. Perhaps because they lived so frugally most of the time, feast days were celebrated without restraint. We ate more food on a harvest day in a single meal then we ever consumed otherwise. There was wine and, eventually, music and dance. All of this was shared freely and with joy, as though entering fully into the experience cancelled out all the sober times.

In retrospect, these meals and the many other feasts I have shared over 40 years with my neighbors and “adopted” Italian family—from Christmas parties to the marriage of their son, Arnaldo—were quite gluttonous. I usually end one of these meals with a half hour spent walking it off, just to begin to feel normal and not stuffed to bursting.

Gluttony is about excess, taking more than what one needs or can comfortably consume. Yet excess of any sort can be intoxicatingly pleasurable. As a sensualist who absolutely believes in pleasure for its own sake, I don’t consider it wrong to enjoy gorging on a fine Sunday afternoon after the harvest has been reaped and stored. I don’t think it’s immoral to be seated amongst friends and family, enjoying the warm embrace of affection and contentment and sharing well-loved foods and wine, guzzling after-dinner digestifs as an accordion player accompanies a friend’s spontaneous song.

Gluttony has its place in a balanced life. Indeed gluttony can be part of the joy and pleasure of life. After all, it’s really just enjoying to excess—and why is that wrong? Is it wrong to enjoy the sweet perfume of a summer’s day on a fresh-cut lawn or field? Must we deny ourselves an apex of joy, since we have no ability to control the nadir of misery? Isn’t the occasional indulgence in anything—including food—to be respected and enjoyed as part of living?

To me, the idea of self-induced sober deprivation is a sour vestige of puritanical thinking, a remnant of a time when people were expected to suffer the miseries of human existence by consoling themselves with the promise of a hereafter filled with glorious pleasure. We shouldn’t deny ourselves the pleasures of the table in this life. We also probably shouldn’t have gluttonous meals like the one I just enjoyed every day. But we can relish them on occasion and enjoy a feast like that for what it is—a sensual pleasure followed through to the extreme.

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