Five Moral Writings

International conflicts; the resurgence of totalitarian ideologies; the role of the press; the concept of morality; ethnic and religious tolerance. Five distinct themes, intertwined with the concept of ethics, are brilliantly addressed by one of the greatest living theorists of communication in Five Moral Writings. The book brings together texts and transcriptions of speeches by Umberto Eco, published in literary magazines in Europe and the United States. The texts collected in Five Moral Writings have two characteristics in common. First and foremost, they are occasional, the result of lectures or interventions by the author on current affairs. Furthermore, they are all ethical in nature, that is, they refer to what would be right to do, what should not be done, or what cannot be done under any circumstances. The first text, "Thinking about War," was published in La Rivista dei Libri on April 1, 1991, during the Gulf War. "Eternal Fascism" is the title of the transcript of a lecture given, in English, at a symposium organized by Columbia University on April 25, 1995, to celebrate the liberation of Europe. It later appeared as "Eternal Fascism" in The New York Review of Books on June 22, 1995, and translated for La Rivista dei Libri in July-August 1995 as "Fuzzy Totalitarianism and Ur-Fascism." What makes this text unique is the timing of its publication: the United States, where it was first published, was shaken by the recent Oklahoma City bombing and the discovery of the (not at all secret, by the way) existence of far-right military organizations in the country. Thus, the theme of anti-fascism took on particular connotations under those circumstances. The third text, "On the Press," is a presentation presented during a series of seminars organized by the Italian Senate among parliamentarians and the editors of the largest Italian newspapers. "When the Other Enters the Scene" reproduces a response by Umberto Eco to Cardinal Martini (Archbishop of Milan) regarding a question about Eco's propositions on the universality of ethics. The final text is, in fact, a collage. The first part of "Migrations, Tolerance, and Intolerability" reproduces the first part of a lecture given on January 23, 1997, at the opening of the convention organized by the mayor of Valencia on the perspectives of the Third Millennium. The second part translates and adapts the introduction to the International Forum on Intolerance, organized in Paris by the Académie Universelle des Cultures. The third segment was published under the title “Ask not for whom the bell tolls” in the newspaper Repubblica, on the occasion of the Rome military tribunal’s sentence on Priebke (a Nazi officer responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people at the end of the Nazi occupation of Rome).