Good morning.
The theme that has been entrusted to me by TED,
for these 15 minutes that we will spend together,
it is utopia.
And thinking of this word,
two literary references came to my mind.
The first is a great Uruguayan writer, his name was Eduardo Galeano
– now it’s gone, just recently –
who wrote that “utopia is like the horizon:
the closer you get, the more you leave.
Take a step, and it seems even farther “.
But then, he concluded,
“Utopia serves precisely this: it serves to walk.”
The second quote that comes to mind
it’s that of a great writer, he was called George Bernard Shaw.
And it is a quote that was then taken many times
from a man who utopia has tried to apply it in political life,
that was Robert Kennedy.
George Bernard Shaw used to say:
“There are people who see things that exist, and wonder why.
I see things that do not exist, and I wonder why not. “
In this difference between why and why not
is the charm of utopia.
Of course, what is utopia?
Is it an abstraction?
Is it an illusion?
Is it a deception?
Sometimes, in common speaking it is said “but this is a utopia!”,
as if to say something unattainable, in fact.
Science fiction.
Or utopia is basically
the most powerful engine, the most powerful energy,
of which human beings, individually or collectively,
I’m available?
Think of the great utopias, of which I will speak in a moment;
but ultimately utopia is also its own individual life project.
The choice that is made at some point in one’s existence
when it starts to be right,
or when one begins to know the first passions.
There are people who are great
the job they discovered they love as children!
Because they have a talent that moved them,
and they had utopia
to be able to make that talent, and that passion, work.
And they succeeded.
And then there are the great utopias, the ones that have changed the world:
utopia is precisely to see beyond what exists,
look beyond the surface of things.
And please underline, for a moment,
this word, “surface”,
because it’s a key that we need also, then,
to interpret our present time.
Utopias have changed the world.
There are some utopias that then became reality,
that have changed the lives of each of us?
In reality yes, many.
And I say it because I’ve never appreciated,
I’ve never liked it, I’ve never shared it
that phrase, which has become commonplace,
for which nothing ever changes, they are all rumors –
those things that we repeat to do us harm.
But instead, fortunately,
the life of humanity has gone on chasing great utopias,
and transforming these utopias, with work and with the energy of each one
– and collectively of many,
in reality.
If you think, for some time in History
it seemed normal that there was slavery, right?
Then, at a certain point, this “normality” is skipped.
It is skipped because someone
– and we can go back to figures at the beginning of History, like Spartacus –
someone, at some point,
he no longer accepted that there was slavery
that human beings should be thrown into the Colosseum,
torn from the fairs with an emperor who with his thumb
– and that thumb, today, is back in fashion, technologically:
the “Like” are an inch up and a thumb down –
he could decide on the existence of a human being.
And slavery ended up like this:
because at some point, someone said: “Now enough!”
The rights of blacks!
If you take what for me
it is the best speech that has been done in history,
at least in political history,
which is the speech by Martin Luther King of August 1963
in front of the Washington Mall
that speech that is remembered
through the expression “I Have a Dream”, I have a dream –
and the dream utopia is neighbors.
If you listen to that speech – which is something more than a speech:
it’s also a gospel, it’s also a sermon –
in that speech there is anticipated what then happened.
So, at that time,
when Martin Luther King pronounced those words,
a black boy and a white boy could not get on the same bus,
they could not go to the same university.
Then, at some point, someone started to say:
“No, we have the same rights.”
And from that moment, like a wave that has spread,
and that has passed from the words of a man –
wonderful words, words built even musically,
words capable of infusing energy –
But it passed to those hundreds of thousands of people
who stood before him and listened to him,
without which the words of that great orator
they would have become nothing.
I thought of the Jews.
There was a time, in our most civilized country,
in which a Jewish person was prevented
to sit on the same bench as someone who was not Jewish.
It started like this, and it ended with Auschwitz.
However, while there was Auschwitz,
while the bombings were there, while we were killing each other,
someone cultivated the utopia of freedom,
that utopia of freedom that has existed in the countries of the East, in the communist countries,
by Jan Palach and many others.
That utopia that accompanied the desire for freedom
in many parts of the world,
where it seemed normal that one could not have his own opinions.
Or think of other utopias, the utopia of civil rights:
I’ve had, in my life,
the good fortune to meet a man like Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Pier Paolo Pasolini had lived,
even in his original political family,
he had lived a persecution because of his sexual choices.
Today, if we look at this aspect, it has gained enormous freedom.
Also here, because someone, at some point, said: enough.
Or who worked in the assembly line, in inhumane conditions –
at some point, someone said: enough.
Or that it was normal that women could not vote in elections:
look, it was normal in our civilized country until after the war!
Then, at some point, someone said: enough.
Utopias, utopias.
That have grown in the feeling of people, public opinion,
that have become the object of participation, commitment,
of the lives of millions of people,
and then they became reality.
Our society today is the daughter of these utopias.
I quote what is probably the most incredible of utopias:
when, in Ventotene, Altiero Spinelli and others imagined a united Europe,
they imagined it from the confinement,
and they imagined it while in Europe it was bombed.
What more utopian,
something further from the reality in which at that time we lived,
if not imagine that the enemies could one day become friends?
And today we no longer have borders, we use the same currency,
our boys go to study in other European countries,
in conditions of equality with respect to their scholastic condition here.
We have probably not done the Europe to which Spinelli and the others thought,
but surely we stopped doing those wars
that have marked the life of generations before mine.
My grandfather’s generation did two world wars!
Twice armed, we killed ourselves, among Europeans.
Then, this utopia gradually took hold,
and created conditions
for which we live
the longest time of peace in the history of this part of the world.
And so we also come to the topic of today: is it possible a utopia, today?
It is possible in this world
cultivate the aspiration to create the conditions
for which human beings
are in the possibility of being able to express themselves
without having lost the game at the beginning,
and that is without that, at the moment of birth,
between two people is decided
who has a lucky destiny and who has unlucky him,
but everyone is put in a position to show their abilities,
his talent, his intelligence,
without having original obstructions?
It is possible to imagine this utopia
in this world, in the world in which we live?
Utopia does not necessarily need anger.
Often born, from anger:
I mentioned cases where anger was inevitable, right?
The black boy,
that he could not get on the same bus,
objectively he could only cultivate a feeling of anger.
But it often also comes from reason.
I first asked you
to put aside the word surface mentally.
Because it seems to me
that the time we are experiencing is marked by this paradox.
We, in reality, are a generation
– I mean those who attend the Earth right now –
we are a generation that would have every reason to be said lucky:
we live much more
of what our fathers and grandfathers lived.
We do not know many of the terrible human adventures
that they knew:
illiteracy;
the absence of the possibility of eating adequately;
the cold in the houses, where there was no radiator;
the wars; dictatorships;
civil wars between Italians, the risk that someone would denounce you
if you did not think like him in one way or another.
We do not have all this anymore,
and at the same time we have a society in which everything is simple,
everything seems simple to us.
You think,
I grew up with the duplex, with the phone extension,
that seemed already to me of clamorous revolutions.
Today the phone
it is our main tool of knowledge, of knowledge, of relationship.
Today, traveling is much easier than before.
Today, for a boy who is not rich in family,
accessing knowledge is much easier
than it was for previous generations,
where the size of the father’s library
it was already an element of social distinction at the origin.
And yet, we are right now
as imprisoned in a psychological condition
which makes anger, disaffection, annoyance,
of worry, fear, uncertainty,
the prevailing sentiment.
Because in reality the previous generations,
those who were under bombardment, in Italy and in so much of Europe,
they had inside themselves
the most incurable and happy of the psychological conditions possible:
the certainty that the tunnel would come out,
and that once the tunnel was finished, light would be seen.
And Italy has seen the light, finished the tunnel,
and they have been extraordinary decades of growth and expansion.
And so it was all over Europe.
We, on the other hand, are in an opposite psychological condition.
It seems to us that the light is behind us,
and that inside there is only the darkness of the tunnel.
Once someone said: let’s furnish the tunnel,
our stay in the tunnel is long.
But instead of furnishing it,
we look for the right way to get out of it as soon as possible.
And perhaps the right way is to cultivate utopia.
Utopia as a project, utopia as a collective commitment,
utopia as hope, as experience.
And utopia also as an interpretation of reality.
This is why the word “surface”.
My impression is that we live in a very fast time,
the fastest time in history;
and yet that this speed
it is also accompanying a certain superficiality.
We are fast and light.
We have forgotten the beauty of depth.
Let’s go to the water surface with great speed,
and yet we lost the beauty of the seabed,
the beauty of finding the reflections of the water light below,
to understand the depth of things.
So, probably,
today utopia is primarily a cultural and human utopia.
If I had to summarize it,
compared to the idea of a simply fast and simple world,
I would suggest the depth and be mild,
in the sense that Italo Calvino attributed to this word
in one of his most beautiful texts,
which is the essay on lightness in “American Lessons”.
Being profound and light: deep in understanding and sharing;
slight in avoiding simplifications, vulgarity
and from all that unfortunately accompanies this time.
Probably, this is a cultural utopia:
but we learned from history
that the first utopia becomes reality
it is what happens in the consciences of each of us.
So to myself, and to all of us,
what would seem right to me, on which it would seem right to reflect,
it is just this.
There is no need for general utopias, for radical transformations in society;
we only need to want things to change,
to look for them together, to analyze them together
and make them live together.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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