This is not a review of Eco's book. There is a perfectly good one here: The Prague Cemetery Rather it is an acknowledgement that, at least for me, what we are experiencing in American Politics today is not all that new.
For those of you who do not know about Eco:
Umberto Eco, OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [umˈbɛrto ˈɛko]; born 5 January 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written further novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His most recent novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.
Having spent many years studying
semiotics as part of my own work in complexity theory, I read all of his novels with pleasure and was greatly helped by his work in semiotics:
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies and including (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. However, as different from linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and sign-using agents
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the life sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics (including zoosemiotics).
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols. More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences". Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
Read on below and I'll share some thoughts the book kindled for me.
Anyone familiar with my writing (including many of my 600 diaries here) knows about George Lakoff and his contributions of a host of ideas on the uses of framing in politics. Lakoff's ideas and Eco's compliment each other very nicely. They are further exploited in my book with Jim Coffman: Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World
With that background, what does a novel about the French revolution, the Masons, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and such things tell us about what we see every day? The link above tells us:
According to Eco, "the characters of this novel are not imaginary. Except the main character, they all lived in reality, including his grandfather, author of the mysterious message to abbot Barruelo which gave rise to all modern anti-Semitism". Eco goes on to say:
The nineteenth century was full of monstrous and mysterious events: the mysterious death of Ippolito Nievo, the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that inspired Hitler's extermination of the Jews, the Dreyfus affair and endless intrigue spun by the secret police of different countries, the Masons, Jesuit plots, and other events whose accuracy can't ever be authenticated, but that serve as fodder for feuilletons 150 years later.
Eco infuses the novel with other books as it explores the 19th-century novels that were plagiarized in the Protocols of Zion, and is structured like one. The spirit of the novel is Alexandre Dumas, in particular an intertextuality with his novel Joseph Balsamo (1846).
First of all, I have to confess my own inability to walk in the shoes of the present mix of people who are in today's republican party. Eco's novel makes it clear to me that such people have always existed and rose and fell during history. Clearly the hate of Jews then was as now a part of broad spectrum of groups subject to myths, blatant lies, and finally physical harm. I wake up each day with a feeling that the world is a very strange place having been steeped all my life in intellectual pursuits, the belief in human rationality, and other such myths and delusions. Clearly most people here are in the same boat to one extent or another. We share a belief that eventually the madness will be exposed and people will come to their senses.
Reading this novel gave me some frightening pictures which suggest that my world is as least as far from reality as those I insist are mad. It also made clear that their world is widely inhabited and often they win.
Yes it is just a novel. Yet I can't help but believe that Eco is using fiction to tell us that we are in much deeper trouble than we realize. We may be rational and correct but there is a powerful culture that sees us as silly and out of touch because they have a well entrenched alternate reality.The republican party's leadership base their crazy positions on a large group of people who share that alternative reality. They are real people and they do believe all that nonsense.
Recent tactical errors will not change their reality, just their tactics. As in the past, the lesson Eco teaches is applicable today. Tactical victories will only stimulate them to dig deeper and try harder. Look at the stuff they flaunt as believable! They cynical beyond my comprehension. The use of religion and so called morals is part of that cynicism. They are driven by greed and lust for power and will destroy anyone in their quest. They will use any means and the only objective is winning. There is no standard and no moral compass. Winning is the only goal. The rest is illusion.
I am very thankful to Eco for these reminders. I hope these thoughts are helpful in these very dangerous times. It will be hard to stop them if we play their game. It will also be hard to stop them with our own blind faith in human reason. It has clearly been demonstrated to be no more than an attractive (and sometimes disabling) myth.