ABSTRACT
On 15 March 1980 Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s best-known post-war novelists and the compiler of a classic collection of Italian folk tales and fables, published an article in the newspaper La Repubblica which he ironically entitled ‘Apology for honesty in the country of the corrupted’. 1 Though not exactly an historical document, it clarifies perhaps better than any number of statistics or case-histories the precise nature of the relationship between private and public morality which from 1960 onwards has dominated political and civic life in Italy.
Once there was a country which was built on what was unlawful. Not that it lacked laws, nor that the political system was not based on principles which most people said they agreed with. But this system, which was split up into a large number of centres of power, needed vast sums of money (needed them because once you get used to having lots of money you can’t imagine life without it) and the only way they could obtain this money was by breaking the law, i.e. by asking for money from those who had it in exchange for unlawful favours. Or rather, those who had money to give away for favours had usually made that money because they had received favours earlier on. Consequently it was a somewhat circular and not inharmonious economic system.
Though financing themselves unlawfully the centres of power were free of any sense of guilt because their own value system assured them that anything done for the sake of the group was permissible, indeed praiseworthy, inasmuch as the group saw its own power and the common weal as one and the same thing; breaking the letter of the law thus did not exclude a higher ‘real’ legality.
To tell the truth, in every illicit transaction in favour of collective bodies it is customary for a share to be kept by individuals as a fair recompense for their essential activities in seeking out and arranging the transaction: thus the law-breaking which their system of values assured them was permissible involved a margin of law-breaking which was not permissible in terms of those values.
But on closer inspection the individual who was in the position of pocketing his individual cut of the collective cut, was sure that he had only taken his individual cut in order to assist the group to take its collective one, which meant that he could quite sincerely persuade himself that his conduct was not only permissible but praiseworthy.
The country also had at the same time an extravagant official budget, fed by taxes upon every legal activity, and legally financed all those who legally or illegally managed to tap its funds. Since no one in that country was prepared to consider going bankrupt, nor even to be out of pocket (and it was far from obvious upon what grounds anyone could have been asked to do so), tax-payers’ money was used to cover legally, in the name of the interests of the public, the deficits on activities which, still in the name of the interests of the public, had excelled in illegality.
The collection of taxes which in other times and cultures could rely upon the sense of civic duty, in that country amounted to no more than an act of coercion (just as, in some parts of the country, to the State’s exactions were added those imposed by gangsters or the mafia) to which the tax-payer submitted simply to avoid even greater trouble, not with the feeling of relief at a duty well done but with the unpleasant sensation of having been a passive accomplice of the maladministration of public affairs and of having accepted that unlawful activities should enjoy the privilege of tax-exemption.
Now and again, when it was least expected, a court decided to apply the law, causing little earthquakes in a few of the centres of power and even the arrest of persons who until then had reason to think themselves beyond the law. In such cases the dominant feeling was not a sense of satisfaction that justice had been done, but the suspicion that one centre of power had simply got the better of another. So that it was hard to be sure whether the use of the law was now merely a tactical or strategic weapon in the feuds between illegal interests, or whether the courts, in order to justify the performance of their duties, now had to persuade people that they too were centres of power and illegal interests just like all the others.
A situation like this was, of course, also propitious for criminal organisations of the traditional kind, which through kidnappings and bank robberies jumped, when least expected, on to the ‘lots of money’ merry-go-round, sending some of it spinning down secret channels from which sooner or later it emerged in a thousand unexpected forms of legal or illegal finance.
Against this system terrorist organisations were gaining ground, using the methods of obtaining finance usually employed by outlaws, and following a well-thought out plan of regular murders among all classes of well-known and obscure citizens, and were putting themselves forward as the only all-embracing alternative to the system. But their effect upon the system was to strengthen it. Indeed, they became its indispensable prop, for they confirmed its own conviction that it was the best possible system and should not be changed in any way.
Thus all forms of law-breaking, from the slyest to the fiercest, were welded into a system which had its own stability, cohesion and consistency, and in which many people could pursue their own material advantage without losing the moral advantage of a clear conscience. The inhabitants of that country might well have considered themselves unanimously to be happy, had it not been for the existence of a still numerous class of citizens who did not appear to have any part to play in it: the honest.
The latter were not honest for any special reason (they did not claim to be inspired by high principles of patriotism, social concern or religious faith, for none of these were any longer current); they were honest by habit of mind, by upbringing, by reflex action. They just couldn’t do anything to stop themselves from being like that, from thinking the things they cared about could not be bought for money, from having thought-processes still based on outmoded linkages between earnings and work, between esteem and merit, and on doing as you would be done by.
In that country where everyone had a clear conscience, the honest were the only ones to be so scrupulous as to wonder all the time what was the right thing to do. They knew that moralising at other people, getting indignant about them, telling them what was right and wrong are things that all too easily win general applause, whether sincere or not. They didn’t think power was interesting enough to dream of having it themselves (not at least the power that the others were seeking); they did not delude themselves that the same evils did not exist elsewhere in the world, even if they were less evident; they didn’t hope for a better society because they knew that something worse was always more likely.
Should they have resigned themselves to dying out? No, they consoled themselves with the thought that just as on the margins of every society for thousands of years an alternative society of highwaymen, pickpockets, petty thieves and confidence tricksters had carried on existing which had never dreamed of replacing ‘society’ but only of surviving in the crevices of the dominant society and of maintaining its own style of life in the teeth of conventional morality, so the alternative society of the honest would manage to carry on for centuries, with no other desire than to live in its own different way, to feel different from everyone else, and so perhaps in the end to mean something important for everyone, to represent something which could no longer be expressed in words, for which the words are not yet ready and which we cannot yet define. 2
