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In an era dominated by fast-paced digital consumerism and the moralistic rewriting of the past, taking back great books is not a nostalgic refuge. It is the most radical of the acts of freedom.
There is a strange and fascinating irony in the fact that the most hyper-connected, technologically advanced and informed era in human history is also the one suffering from the most severe chronic attention deficit. Today we consume ideas, news and cultural trends with the same speed with which we slide the screen of a smartphone: Everything is programmed to entertain a few seconds and then evaporate into thin air. We live in an eternal present, a large supermarket of disposable thinking where the value of a work or opinion seems to be measured exclusively by its immediate expiry date. Yet, beneath the surface of this digital conformism, a silent and extremely interesting riot is brewing. Against all odds of Silicon Valley technocrats and gurus, a substantial portion of the younger generation is rediscovering the classics of literature and philosophy. Not for school obligation or academic imposition, but for a form of healthy insubordination against the flatness and trivialization of contemporaneity.
For decades the sociology of consumption has explained to us that progress would inexorably push the human being towards ever more immediate, accessible and frictionless forms of expression. And indeed, the cultural industry has readily adapted to this economic dogma, turning into a sort of giant soul fast food. Contemporary artistic content, in order to be successful with the public and the market, must be fluid, immediately digestible and, above all, capable of not causing any cognitive or moral discomfort in the viewer. Thus was born the culture of absolute hyper-simplification, where even the great novels of the twentieth century or historical fairy tales are periodically “cleaned” by committees of editorial experts to prevent the reader from encountering uncomfortable words, complex concepts or worldviews not perfectly aligned with the ideological sensitivity of the moment.
But this obsession with laboratory inclusivity and the elimination of all intellectual effort ended up producing, by reaction, the opposite effect: a deep sense of boredom, emptiness and dissatisfaction. Removing complexity from a narrative does not mean elevating the audience, but childishizing it, reducing reading to a mere narcissistic mirror in which to seek only confirmation of what is already thought. The classics of our civilization have resisted for centuries not because they have been protected by some benevolent algorithm or a protective bubble, but because they have passed the most ruthless, impartial and democratic test of all: that of time. When a boy decides to unplug from the incessant notifications of social networks and opens the Odyssey, a platonic dialogue or a Shakespearean drama, he performs an act of total rupture with the fast fashion of today’s culture. Look for something that lasts, a solid anchor, a sartorial dress of the spirit capable of resisting the passing fashions of the next season.
The real reason why the hyper-progressive culture or the awakened ideological drifts often look with suspicion, if not with open hostility, to the classics lies in the fact that they are, by their nature, uncomfortable mirrors. A great book of the past has no intention of pleasing you, nor does it care to confirm your personal sociopolitical certainties or the moral dogmas of the 21st century. The classics show the human being in all his tragic, magnificent, sublime and contradictory reality, without therapeutic filters. Homer does not soften the ferocity, vengeance and pride of his heroes under the walls of Troy; Dante does not discount the political and moral miseries of his time, throwing popes and powerful to hell; Dostoevsky descends into the darkest and most disturbing meanders of the human psyche without offering easy consolations or sugary happy endings.
In cultural productions written today at the table by marketing offices or streaming algorithms, the characters are often reduced to rigid stereotypes functional to a certain ideological thesis, manifoldly divided into good and bad according to the ethical canons of the current year. Think, to give a recent and highly emblematic example, of the discussions born around the latest film transpositions of the Odyssey, where the complex, ambiguous and sometimes ferocious archaic psychology of the protagonists is regularly blunted, or worse rewritten, in an attempt to bend the Homeric myth to current ideological sensitivities or reassuring modern therapeutic canons. In the classics, on the contrary, guilt, honor, betrayal, destiny, the sacred and redemption are faced with a crudeness and a truth that displace and deeply question the contemporary reader. The classic forces you to confront the most radical otherness, obliges you to dialogue with minds that have lived in distant ages and that saw the world, justice and divinity in a radically different way from yours. And it is precisely this healthy “inconvenience” that serves us as the air to get out of the eco-chamber of today’s public debate, an asphyxiated place where everyone repeats the same identical slogans for the terror of being isolated from the group or censored by the court of the web.
Moreover, the loss of contact with the classics coincides with a dramatic impoverishment of language. The reduction in vocabulary, visible in digital communication dominated by tweets and instant messages, inevitably results in a reduction in the ability to think. Those who do not have the words to define the nuances of reality cannot exercise articulate critical thinking. The great texts of the past are gold reserves of words, metaphors and logical structures that restore depth to our minds. Reading them means reclaiming the tools necessary to decode the propaganda and simplifying rhetoric of technocratic power.
Conservative European thought, in its highest, noblest and philosophical sense, has always identified the transmission and continuity of culture as the fundamental pillar of the stability and freedom of a civilization. Philosophers and intellectuals like Roger Scruton have reminded us that true conservatism does not consist in the blind, nostalgic and immobile defense of the ashes of the past, but in the wise custody of its living fire: It is that deep feeling of gratitude, respect and trusteeship for the spiritual and intellectual legacy that has been left to us as a dowry by those who preceded us. Reading the classics means exactly this: Sit down at an ideal table with our ancestors and discover, with a thrill of authentic astonishment, that their most intimate doubts, their fears in the face of death, their outbursts of love, their existential crises and their tireless search for truth are exactly the same as ours.
Contemporary culture unfortunately suffers from a chronic pathology that we could call “chronocentrism”: the naive, arrogant and presumptuous illusion that those living in the present are inherently more intelligent, moral, tolerant and evolved just because they are ahead in the timeline. It is the myth of technological progress wrongly applied to consciousness and human nature. The assiduous attendance of the classics breaks this contemporary pride. It humbly reminds us that we are not the first to suffer, to question the meaning of the State, the limits of power, the value of the family or the unfathomable mystery of the sacred. It connects us to a millennial community of thought, offering us deep roots that prevent us from being swept away by the first ideological wind, by the propaganda of the moment or by the passing fashion of the moment. Those who have their backs protected by the giants of Western history hardly allow themselves to be manipulated by the transitory slogans of the present.
In conclusion, this rediscovery should not be understood as a pastist invitation to abandon modernity, to burn our digital devices or to take refuge in a nostalgic and sterile monastic isolation. Technology and speed are extraordinary tools for the management of daily life and material development, but they become catastrophic if we pretend to apply their frenetic and commercial rhythms to the deep growth of our soul and our intelligence. We must assert with strength and pride the right to slowness, study and verticality, promoting a real slow culture against the dictatorship of the instantaneous.
The rediscovery of the classics is therefore not a dusty pastime for bored academics or timeless aesthetes. It is the key to remain genuinely free men and citizens in an era that would reduce us to passive consumers of pre-packaged answers standardised by an algorithm. Protecting the past and continuing to read it with passion does not mean turning your back on tomorrow, but doing the exact opposite: It means arming the minds of future generations with the only critical tools capable of guaranteeing them real, autonomous and sovereign freedom of judgment. The real vanguard, today, begins by turning back.