Roman Summer

What European literary culture has offered in the creation of European morality was the subject of a 2 day conference at La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university.
Most of Europe’s ancient seats of learning contributed (an inquiry into what made the European spirit can only be investigated seriously in Rome in June). The Bible (and scriptures of some other major faiths) was taken as the frame in which the study was set; so was Homer.

As Ulysses went to the borders of the known universe, not just those of Europe, to encapsulate Ulysses’ human predicament we Europeans were advised to pursue “virtude e cognoscenza” “fatti non fummo per viver come bruti”. Il Contrapasso - that wonderful assertion that punishment should fit the crime - is such a satisfying contribution to our European culture (or it should be); certainly it was acclaimed as such when Benigni packed the piazza S.Croce for nights on end as he preached Dante to the Florentines, native and adopted, and held thousands in absorbed, breath- held silence as, at the end of each glorious evening, he read the best bits.

The brains powered on in Rome: Shakespeare, who gave us Doubt, took up more time than most, though any pause given to authoritarian socialist righteousness, the plague of the last 100 years and with us still in England, is welcome.

Bigotry met its end in the Dictionnaire philosophique, and Candide; here Europe arrived, laical and at the end of ipse dixit, enlightenment and reason re-take their place. On we galloped, Cervantes and idealism, Goethe, Kafka... but we had parted ways.

A group beckoned to me that others did not heed:

Cesare Beccaria whose Dei Delitti e delle Pene brought the rule of law, no torture, and no death penalty - all the most basic of civil rights and their guarantees we watch destroyed today, disgraced by their abolition.

Maynard Keynes - discoverer of the determinants of income and employment in capitalist societies, (of course Richard Kahn was feeding him potted Marx which is why, chewed and digested (though indigestible to most) it is used in keynesian understanding.

Beveridge - whose ideas and policies ended absolute poverty in Europe.

Gramsci, whose rational version of communism inspired or antagonised us all, whatever degraded version has reached us.

The prize for wrongest of all yet so influential goes to Freud. No women here? Ask him.