“Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
The lifestance of Humanism—guided by reason, inspired by compassion, and informed by experience—encourages us to live life well and fully. It evolved through the ages and continues to develop through the efforts of thoughtful people who recognize that values and ideals, however carefully wrought, are subject to change as our knowledge and understandings advance.
This document is part of an ongoing effort to manifest in clear and positive terms the conceptual boundaries of Humanism, not what we must believe but a consensus of what we do believe.”
Here’s the La Russa clip translated into English. The translators opted for “They can die” and not “They can go to hell”. Either way, I think you get the point. If you don’t want a crucifix in every public room in this country, you can kiss La Russa’s big Catholic ass.
I just finished reading Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (read it!), which took me two weeks in the subway going back and forth from work. I first encountered Jacoby when I read her book Freethinkers (read this too!), and have come to enjoy her logic-driven brand of cultural skepticism.
In Italy there is a culture war underway. It is not a debate over evolution vs. creationism. Somehow, despite the numbers (quoted in Dawkins’ latest book) that 32% of Italians believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on this planet – in Turkey it’s 42%, in Sweden 9% (2005 stats) – there is no debate over evolution. There is a debate over crucifixes.
Now the Catholics are on the counter-offensive. Slogans like “take down our crucifixes and we’ll cut off your arms” abound, crosses affixed to the doors of UAAR and Radical Party offices, and even a mayor (a self-declared non-believer) who will fine 150 Euro to any teacher who doesn’t have a crucifix on the wall of his or her classroom. He’s even taken pains to put up crucifixes in public places where they had been absent. Another upped the fine to 500 Euro.
Last year P.Z. Meyers earned himself death-threats along with Christian “compassion” while blogging his way to fame over a communion wafer scandal. The scandal culminated in a photograph (you can see it here) of a desecrated communion wafer – or “cracker” as Meyers insists on calling it – along with coffee grounds, a banana peel, a copy of the Koran and – just to show he’s a fair-minded bloke – a copy of The God Delusion. When I jokingly asserted we should burn a crucifix or two in public (they burn flags here) along with a mezuzah and a statue of the Buddha I was greeted with frowns. Of course, burning or desecrating these objects is only meant to accentuate their existence as objects. Isn’t the prohibition against idolatry widely interpreted to mean, “Don’t bow down before objects?” And yet here we have a cultural civil war underway for the sake of a piece of wood and plastic nailed up above a blackboard.
As ever, it’s not about the wood or the plastic. It’s about tradition, an “ancient” tradition going back some eighty years to Mussonlini’s fascist government. Mussolini was greeted at the time by Pope Pius XI as “the man Providence has led us to.” The Lateran Treaty was signed, as well as a concordat with Hitler’s Germany. Hitler, for the record, has never been excommunicated by the Catholic church.
In 2003, the year I moved to Italy, I witnessed my first “crucifix debate” on television. Adel Smith, the controversial protagonist of that episode and the founder of the Italian Islamic Party, had caused a stink by demanding that all crucifixes be removed from public buildings in Italy. They apparently offended him, though he was raised as a Catholic. He even threw one out the window of his mother’s hospital room. Religious conversion is strong medicine.
Six years later, the debate is back. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France has ruled that crucifixes in Italian schools violate the religious and educational freedom of children. At the center of the debate this time is a non-religious Italian family who don’t want their children to be conditioned by religious symbolism in what is nominally a public classroom.
Some readers might be asking themselves, “But why are there crucifixes in public schools in the first place?!” To an American, this is unthinkable. But the Vatican is not in New York City. And it’s where the trouble began more than 80 years ago with what is known as the Lateran Treaty.
The Treaty was devised under the Fascist government of the 1920s, and it stated that Catholicism was the sole state religion. Part of the agreement stipulated the presence of the crucifix in all Italian schools and public buildings, where they remain to this day, and “religion hour” — the teaching of the Catholic religion in all public schools. The religion teachers are handpicked by the Vatican and paid for by the state. Roll over, Thomas Jefferson.
All of this flies in the face of the Risorgimento, of course. Italy, as an autonomous nation, was founded in direct opposition to the Church. The integralist Pope Pius IX famously referred to himself as a “prisoner of the Vatican,” and no pope after him — until the agreements with Mussolini’s government — would set foot on Italian soil. In a country proud to have moved past the Fascist era (there is even a national holiday to this effect), it is perhaps anachronistic that Article 7 of the Constitution proclaims: “relations [between the Catholic Church and the State] are regulated by the Lateran Treaty.” Why not overhaul that as well, one wonders?
What we have on our hands is essentially a human rights issue. Is there a place for religion in the public sphere of a secular democracy in the 21st century? Religious apologists have remarked that we might as well tear up the Union Jack and the Finnish flag (and the Danish one, I suppose, that bastion of secularism), all of which have crosses. They’ve also suggested that the flag of the European Union has an encrypted Madonna and child among its 12 stars. Or that Europe has non-negotiable “Christian roots.” In these claims one hears the pronounced voices of reactionary bishops more than those of civil servants in a modern democracy. Yet Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini and Italian Senator Rocco Buttiglione all made them, among others. Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa, topping them all, said recently that the EU court could “…go to hell. We’ll never take down the crucifixes.”
Even more telling are the attempts made by some Catholics to separate the crucifix from its religious context. As the Italian Bishop’s Conference put it, “The multiple significance of the crucifix, which is not just a religious symbol but a cultural sign, has been either ignored or overlooked.” Which raises the question: what culture are they referring to?
Italian culture is, like all other cultures in all other times, a grab-bag of goodies. Of the 3,000 or so years of recorded Italian history, Christianity has decidedly marked the last 2,000. But Judaism, it is often pointed out, has a longer history on the peninsula than the offshoot sect. Should Jews then insist mezuzahs be nailed to every doorpost of every public building from Bolzano to Syracuse? They have as good a case as anyone.
Of course, no one will take my little provocation seriously. After all, there are Jewish schools that cater to the needs of religious Jews. The same should be expected of Catholics.
Public spaces are for everyone. They are not Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan or Buddhist. Taking crucifixes off the walls (Buttiglione comically suggests that a plethora of symbols should go up instead — a solution even more risible than their elimination) does not condemn Catholics to atheism. This conveniently misses the point. Religious freedom includes freedom from religion as well as the freedom of religious affiliation. People in their homes may display any symbols they desire, or even a multitude of them. They may frequent any house of worship or none at all. They may read the Gospels or the speeches of Robert Ingersoll. On this, I think, we all agree.
The promotion of the crucifix from a strictly Catholic religious symbol (Protestants don’t use it) to a “universal” symbol of inclusion and suffering is dishonest sidestepping. The conflation is simply insulting. Nothing could be less universal than a religion, especially one with an unbroken tradition of obscurantism, religious warfare, persecution and anti-modern policies. Besides, nearly all Catholics in the developed world flout Catholic dogma when it contradicts their immediate personal interests — without so much as flinching before the eternal fires of hell.
What more proof do we need that the European Union is bound by the modern secular principles of human rights and not the by cross (much less the crucifix)? Why not cut the head off the bull, as they say here in Italy, and abrogate the Lateran Treaty once and for all?
I’ve never actually read anything substantial by Žižek, which is of course essential before dismissing him entirely. I admit it’s even possible that his critics have taken him out of context (O beloved zizekian word!) in order to make him appear a “reckless” intellectual. Adam Kirsch’s well-known attack on the controversial counterculture guru (in the New Republic) seems strangely to have disappeared from the internet. All links to the article – including my own – lead to a “page not found” page. Is the zizekian secret police out to erase Adam Kirsch from existence?
Thankfully, Dissent has a brand-new skewering of Žižek by Alan Johnson. And The Magnificent Slavoj has ardent defenders as well. But you’ll have to subscribe to read it, because Dissent is not the NY Times.
Madeleine Johnson has a must-read interview with Roger Abravanel, author of the book Meritocracy: Four Concerte Proposals for How to Take Talent Seriously and Make Our Country a Richer and More Just Place (available in Italian):
One statistic in struck me: 68 percent of Italians think their culture is superior to others, compared with 47 percent of Americans and 32 percent of French.
It’s amazing. It my next book I contrast this with the life skills survey. Ten years ago, scientists from ETS [Educational Testing Service] and OECD decided to redefine literacy to beyond just reading. Literacy is what you need to understand, to think and elaborate documents, and problem solve – all essential for training people for jobs and citizens for life. Without life skills, the public is uneducated; people can’t perform jobs and citizens aren’t informed.
They studied five democracies: Italy, the U.S., Norway, Switzerland, Bermuda and Nuevo León, which is the poorest state of Mexico. In Italy they examined both north and south and ran tests in four categories with five levels of difficulty.
I just saw the results because of working with [Education Minister] Gelmini. It’s appalling. Eighty percent of Italians are illiterate by these standards. A literate country should be around level 3. Norway has 75 percent above level 3. The U.S. and Switzerland has 50 percent above. Italy has 20 percent and Nuevo León is at 19.
Ignazio La Russa, who has no degree in science and is therefore unworthy of having views on religion, went off his nut on Italian tv the other evening. The debate over the EU court’s judgement that crucifixes in public classrooms are a bad idea is off and running. Berlusconi has said that Italy will defy the court and the EU, and that no crosses are coming off the walls of any classrooms.
His position was backed up by the homophobic, conservative Catholic politician Rocco Buttiglione. Buttiglione’s brilliant solution to the problem of religious symbols contaminating public spaces is apparently to multiply them. The more, the merrier, he said. Just don’t take down them crosses! Perhaps my mezuzah proposal wasn’t too radical, after all.
Even if you don’t understand a word of Italian, you can grasp the meaning of what La Russa is getting at here. He calls Piergiorgio Odifreddi, a well-known mathematician and one of Italy’s only public atheists, a man without a degree (!) who “puts up and takes down crucifixes as if they were bath towels.” He then castigates the show’s host for not standing up for the dignity of the cross, telling him he is beyond absolution for his sin of silence.
Of course, he’s no Christian integralist, an afterthought he throws in as a final consolation. In case you thought maybe he got off on the wrong foot. “They (the EU?) can go to hell! Well never take down our crosses!!”
Marc Di Martino 