It is still too early to know if Nuccio Ordine will survive for many years as an author who is used to prop up a text with a pondered reflection. But, to this day, his ascendancy in the critique of utilitarianism is unquestionable. Despite having left too soon, in his books published in Acantilado / Quaderns Crema he has left enough arguments to be considered a reference in the matter. Not only thanks to his own ideas, but also from an always elegant rereading of the classics.
In the era of falsehoods that is coming, when, fed up with sailing against the current in search of veracity, we will consider good apocryphal quotes concocted by the perverse algorithm, his Classics for Life should be a must-have and consult.
For example, regarding short-termism, a topic that is addressed in today’s edition of La Vanguardia , the Calabrian professor warned that short-sightedness not only harms the humanities, but is also a brake on science: “If we have today the GPS -he explained in the Colombian magazine Cambio- is because Albert Einstein created his theory of relativity, and if a journalist had asked him what his theory was for, surely he would have answered that to know the world, not to make the GPS â€.
In the report that Mayte Rius publishes today in Sociedad on the need to look at the long term, the opinion of the experts consulted is in tune with Ordine’s idea about the damage caused to science by this renewed tyranny of now. From the impossibility of combating the climate crisis in an economy dominated by the shareholder’s right to obtain an immediate return to the difficulty of designing a reasonable development of artificial intelligence. And it is not possible to place all the blame on some politicians handcuffed by the extreme polarization of society, she warns herself.
As Ordine said, there is no antidote to this disease that does not involve rethinking the educational system.
As an epilogue and regarding the need to combat utilitarianism from school, it is imperative not to lose the habit of quoting him. To him and his suitcase full of classics: “As Giordano Bruno recalled in a beautiful passage from Candelero, everything depends on the first button: fastening it in the wrong buttonhole means, inevitably, continuing to make mistake after mistakeâ€.
