Umberto Eco’s Lessons on Ur-Fascism
“Ur-Fascism,” wrote the Italian thinker Umberto Eco,
derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois… the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
.. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies.
.. Mussolini himself “did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric.”
.. ordinary people and their values are mocked, especially among bien-pensant elites. And the idea that hard, honest work will yield a comfortable life—the core American idea, if we ever had one—doesn’t feel true anymore. The principle distinction within the middle class is now whether sending your children to college will leave them in severe, or merely moderate, debt peonage. And the intense competition at all levels of education reflects a growing fear that hard-earned success might not help your children enjoy the same. A world of social critique and thwarted ambition is a breeding ground for nihilism in the best and worse in the worst.
.. Eco also saw a “cult of action for action’s sake” in fascism. “Thinking is a form of emasculation…. culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes….the critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism,” the root of the cultural maladies fascism sought to eradicate. In a world of social chaos and murky values, the fascist’s bold measures appear otherworldly, supernatural, as marks of superiority. The fascist acts “before, or without, any previous reflection”—meaning his confidence and clarity are illusions: he knows the right path forward because walking resolutely makes the path right. Thinking before acting, on the other hand, reflects weakness of character, makes someone “low energy”; when they act—if they act at all—it will be in useless half-measures.
.. Truth, for the Ur-Fascist, was revealed “at the dawn of human history,” but was shattered, hidden in a thousand sources, “concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.” The little fragments of the “primeval truth” must be pieced together from a thousand sources, some contradictory. Thus, for example, the fascist world’s weird fascination with archaeology, with Zoroaster, with the Vedas.
.. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.
.. Yet Eco thought technology could revive the Common Will, that “there is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
.. Mass-scale social media enables us to find a thousand backers for even our oddest opinions; its algorithms, given time, push us to see only those with whom we agree. Ideological monocultures are the new default; finding opposing viewpoints requires constant effort. That is where Eco was wrong: writing before the Internet was social and algorithmically optimized, he could not see that the new Leader, the new interpreter of the Common Will, is the self. The crowd is back, and it is everywhere.