Similarly to those of medieval apocalyptic millenarianism - which arose during the scourges of the Black Death, wars and devastating catastrophes - the new moral evidences of the troubled Third Millennium state that humanity must repent of its sins if it wants to save the world from the punishment of God. Not the God of Christianity but the one, today hegemonic, of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza: that is, the “Deus sive Natura” (God, that is, Nature).
The new widespread narrative states that the Goddess-Nature is taking revenge for our sins and that we need to self-flagellate to save ourselves from the Apocalypse. In television sanctuaries, expiatory rites are staged during which there are those who abandon themselves to bouts of crying for the wounds inflicted by our sins on the Goddess Nature. And the mantra of the imminent extinction of the human race, multiplied disproportionately and recklessly by the mass media chain, is producing profound states of depressive anxiety in a growing number of individuals. Without underestimating the seriousness of the challenges brought about by current climate change and the emergence of new wars even at our borders, I don't think that rampant apocalyptic catastrophism helps to find responsible solutions. Irrational fear is always a bad advisor.
At the same time - as a counterpoint to this rhetoric of the inevitable end of the world - the sentence "beauty will save the world" has increasingly become established in common language. The saying must be explained exactly, to remove it from a vague intuitive approximation which also risks resulting in a pure emotional state and to open up hypotheses of hope and constructive assumption of personal responsibility in the face of today's challenges. The literary reference is Dostojevski's famous novel, The idiot, which tells of the good innocence of Prince Myshkin, against and despite a world of wolves. In the novel, the statement is anything but corny: the context is that of the sarcastic provocation that the tormented atheist Ipolit addresses to the "innocent" Myskin. «Is it true, Prince, that you once said that “beauty will save the world”? Gentlemen – he started shouting to everyone – the prince says that beauty will save the world! And I affirm that such joyful ideas are due to the fact that at this moment he is in love. Gentlemen, the prince is in love, as soon as he arrived, I was immediately convinced of it. Don't blush, Prince: you take pity on me. What beauty will save the world?».
The sarcasm of the nihilist Ipolit says a lot about how much modern man despises those who do not abandon themselves to cynicism and cultivate a hope of possible redemption. A sarcasm which nevertheless captures well the etymological and historical-cultural meaning of the notion of beauty evoked by Dostojevski. Which has nothing to do with an abstract and irresponsible aestheticism. The term of the original Russian, “prekrasnyj”, in fact, indicates the splendor of beauty and goodness together. In the book it is said that the prince personifies beauty and greatness of soul. The prototype of this notion of "beauty" is, moreover, the Jewish formula of approval pronounced by God in the book of Creation regarding his work: "And God said that it was tôb, tôb me' od”. The common translation of this passage from Genesis is “God saw that it was good/very good", but in reality the Hebrew term simultaneously means "God saw that it was a beautiful/very beautiful thing”. The beautiful and the good are one. Dostojevski himself explains it when illustrating the genesis of The Idiot: «An idea had been tormenting me for some time, but I was afraid to make a novel out of it, because it is too difficult an idea and I am not prepared for it, even if it is extremely seductive and I love it. This idea is to portray an absolutely good man. Nothing, in my opinion, can be more difficult than this, especially nowadays."
Difficult, because of the prevailing cynicism and nihilism that mock goodness, but also because this good and gentle man - although innocent - is fragile, weak, as weak as they will be Zeno Cosini of Svevo e the Man without qualities of Musil, on the eve of the barbarism of the twentieth century. “Beauty” is the term used by Dostojevski to indicate the manifestation of greatness of soul, of goodness, despite all difficulties. The same unexpected, intellectually illogical goodness that will be the protagonist, almost a century afterIdiotin Life and Destiny by Vassilji Grossmann, the great novel about the Second World War which denounced the Nazi extermination camps and the barbarism against the Jews and at the same time the Soviet gulags, the crimes perpetrated by the power system of communist Russia that Stalin perfected and embodied. The question about the beauty/goodness and salvation of the world dares to raise the question of a possible redemption of the world, of its liberation from evil.
But what can literature do against the evils of the world and the planet's drifts and to face the complex challenges of a society that evolves at a dizzying technological pace? The philosopher René Girard and the writer Milan Kundera affirm that the great Western novel literature – from Cervantes and Rabelais to Dostojevski, Stendhal and Proust… – captures the truth of things more than the romantic illusions and political and scientistic ideologies that dominate the modern age and postmodern. In an amnesiac era, in which literature is considered a leisure commodity like any other, if not outright negligible quantity, it appears very difficult to break the dominant cloak of nihilism and cynicism and allow hypotheses of beauty or goodness to emerge capable of positively impacting the destinies of a world faced with formidable challenges, such as new armed conflicts between superpowers, climate change, revolution digital and artificial intelligence.
But if the number one problem posed by these epochal challenges is personal and collective conscience and responsibility, then great literature appears to be a precious and essential tool for choosing between good and evil. At stake are the destinies of human beings and the entire world. An a fortiori fundamental question if we consider the risks of that mathematization of reality that the philosopher Edmund Husserl indicates as the main danger of the evolution of Western sciences. That is, the divorce of science from the "world of life": the reduction of the "world of life" - in which human beings and their essential needs and rights are central and in which beauty and goodness can manifest themselves and have a decisive impact - to a mere, anonymous, algebraic model.
