Today, we are at Canto 16 of the Inferno in our "Hundred Days of Dante" (about which, see my previous post on September 14). In this canto, three once famous citizens of Dante's home city Florence ask him about the state of their temporal homeland. "Valor and courtesy, say if they dwell within our city, as they used to do, or if they wholly have gone out of it" (cortesia e valor dì se dimora ne la nostra città sì come suole, o se del tutto se n'è gita fora).
What would a modern-day Dante - an American Dante - respond to such a question were it asked about the U.S. today?
In the Inferno, the three Florentines actually already know the answer because a recent arrival is tormenting them (assai ne cruccia co le sue parole) with the news of contemporary Florence's "pride and extravagance."
"The age is out of joint, Men run to and fro to find the truth." So wrote Isaac Hecker in 1855 (Questions of the Soul, Preface). Looking at American today, it seems we're still running "to and fro." But, in our "pride and extravagance," not only is truth today even more elusive but for more and more of us it is less and less an object of our search. And, as a society, we are certainly seeing and paying the consequences.
As Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century) has warned: To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true then all is spectacle.
On so many levels - cultural, moral, and political - we are, in Snyder's words, "demeaning the world as it is" and so creating "a fictional counterworld."
Each side in our polarized society can point to the other side's "demeaning the world as it is" to replace truth with ideological fictions. Each side would be correct.
Where will that lead us? Where will that leave us?
Photo: The oldest known image of Dante, painted prior to his exile, probably by Giotto, in the Bargello palace chapel, Florence.
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