dae Massimo Fini
Levi-Strauss has made a hundred years. For this, and dare I say this only after decades of neglect, has returned to talk to him. Claude Levi Strauss, a singular figure of a philosopher, anthropologist, structuralist linguist, has the serious fault, it shares with another great contemporary thinker, which is also obscured, Karl Polanyi, particularly interested in the economic sphere, in a society that is, from this point of view, neither Marxist nor liberal, could not be scored either right or left. Not even his fault that could wash a hundred years if it is true that in all these months of celebrations has been said about him except to park in the most unorthodox and current of his thought: cultural relativism.
relativism without adjectives, philosophical, has a long tradition that runs from Montaigne to Voltaire to Nietzsche-criticism empiricism of Mach and Avenarius to get to the latest findings of physics modern. The first to transfer this concept in the social, political and ethical was Oswald Spengler's claim that all moral and religious principles, and all values \u200b\u200bhave meaning only in and for the duration of the civilization which developed and applied.
The original contribution of Lévi-Strauss is in having seen every culture as a system, with its internal compensation and its counterweights, a logically consistent set of factors closely related to each other (as in a language), so a any modification of one of them involves a modification of the others. It follows that you can not delete or extract from the "other" cultures aspects that we do not like - that is the arrogant claim that dominates in the West today - without fundamentally alter the entire system and almost always make the scaffolding collapse. And this is exactly why every Western intervention in the company of so-called Third World and in the even more archaic and primitive to have broken causes ruins unspeakable, inconsistent and created monstrous hybrids and eventually, in fact, destroyed those civilizations. As was the case for Islam if, under pressure from Western ideological and armed, the role of Muslim women was approved in what he has to us.
But Levi-Strauss also rejects that particular form of historicism is that evolution according to which the company starting from the simple (or apparent single) and going to the more complicated form is a single purpose and a single model in which the height is, of course, the western model of development which is today. It is absurd, says Levi-Strauss, to a company "a stage of development to another company. It is simply different companies, which start from different assumptions, each of which develops only some of the potential, and not others, present in human nature. The traditional ones tend to be static and give priority to the balance and harmony at the expense of economic efficiency and technology. Instead, the company "hot," as he calls Levi-Strauss, to which we belong, are dynamic and choose the efficiency and economic development to the detriment of the balance as "produce entropy, disorder, social conflict and political struggles, things against which the" primitive "is appropriate precautions and perhaps more conscious and systematic than they suppose. "
It is here that the discourse of Levi-Strauss is topical and it becomes particularly interesting for us. For two reasons, basically. Why, two and a half centuries the Industrial Revolution, we see what has caused acute discomfort in our lives, in terms of stress, anxiety, sealing nervosa, depression, anomie, the madman dynamism, the crazy speed of our development model, plus breaking the relations between men and the same constituent nuclei of a human being, depriving him of his instincts, his vitality, of its essence. And this is the main reason for our anti-modernism and of our struggle.
But there is a reason, so-called "external", which is almost as important. For Levi-Strauss, and for us, there are no "higher cultures". There are only different cultures, each with its own way. This is why we defend vigorously the principle of self-determination against the claim of the West of "reductio ad unum, ie to itself, the entire existing pretext of cultural superiority which is only a variant of the classic racism, Nazi memory, worse because more subtle, more hypocritical and more devastating because it is not content to conquer territories and peoples, he wants take their souls (one of the slogans with which the West tries to legitimize its military presence in Afghanistan is that we must "win the hearts and minds" of Afghans). But respect for other cultures did not, for us, only roots of principle. Approval of the world to a single model would be deadly in the literal sense of the word. For as popular wisdom says that we have lost "the salt of life is in diversity '
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