An important essay by Umberto Eco was recently carried in the opinion section of this paper. Hoping this was not just one-shot, I thought this gave me an opportunity to share with you some thoughts on Eco.

It was some years back that I first saw the small quote from the Los Angeles Times displayed along a few others as “Praise for Eco’s Five Moral Pieces”. Of the five short essays — all praiseworthy — to me the most memorable was the last one: “Migration, Tolerance and the Intolerable”. This I later had the opportunity of placing before a committee of the University of Delhi for making it a part of the compulsory readings that were being contemplated for all the undergraduate students of the university. I will briefly come back to this piece below. Incidentally, I hope some of the new universities that are expected to come up as also some of the more venerable ones would also pay attention to Delhi University’s bold initiative in selecting some important compulsory readings for all would-be-graduates irrespective of their specialized courses of study.

The quote I referred to said: “The spirit of enlightenment breathes through the writings of Umberto Eco… an urbane genial writer who brings calmness and clarity to every subject he treats.” I was a little taken aback by the part of the praise showered on Eco that lauded his “calmness”. Obviously, the poor Los Angeles critic had completely missed the main point about Eco — the zero tolerance of volcanic dimensions that his calm surface covers. But I would let it go for now, for there is no disputing the immense clarity of Eco’s logical mind and his ability to handle complex structures in terms of principles stated with the utmost simplicity of a Tolstoy or a Gandhi. If you disagree with his contention, or any of the derivations that he draws from it, you will find his openness and clarity let you see why almost at once.

For example, Eco reveals a distinct preference for external humanitarian interventions over mere internal moral protests when the civil society within a country comes under an unbearable stress. I would not go along with that. At least not in cases where the only available intervening power has a very large material interest in things such as the minerals or oil reserves in the affected area. Perhaps most people of my generation who have seen the cataclysms caused by the gutsy adventurers of the West into lands that once were revered as the seats of the three great religions of the world, and the meeting ground of the best of Eastern and Western civilizations, would not agree with it either.

Eco, in fact, is even in favour of supporting external intervention to cure internal social maladies to the extent of supporting an external power even in its inflicting the harshest punishments available or conceivable, including the death penalty for the planners and perpetrators of mass tragedies and their menial accomplices in government and police — though it is here that he falters a bit. Eco confesses to be a non-believer in actually taking a human life which is the capital punishment a civil society can inflict. In which case, Eco’s use of the term “hanging” with approval has to be understood, as Dickens would have said, “only in the Pickwickian sense”.

The strength of Umberto Eco’s spirit lies, I think, not in actual prescriptions for what to do but in his reassertion of simple truths as explanations of most of the mischief that surrounds us, we suffer from, and are baffled by. Along with this he has, as anyone who read The Name of the Rose would have noticed, the ability of crime fiction writers of several genres — a Conan Doyle, an Edgar Allan Poe or even a homely Agatha Christie — to see through the webs of complicated lies that people like to believe in or rather make other people believe in as alibis.

In short, Eco is a natural disbeliever in all conspiracy theories. I would like to be on his side. But I have a difficulty in accepting this as a determining principle because modern macro-conspiracies are known to exist in real life. But I do also think simple truth is an amulet of the kind Gandhi used, that works, though not always without fail.

Eco does not look at large, even catastrophic, influxes of humanity fleeing from repressive regimes into your country as a problem to be necessarily dealt with sternly. For example, in strict accordance with your existing immigration laws. With all my heart going out to refugees who are mostly victims of circumstances beyond their control, I however also feel strong sympathy for countries like India desperately trying to make economic progress at great cost and trying to guard its own economic frontiers peacefully.

Funnily, contrary to perhaps what one would have expected of him, Umberto Eco, unlike a Gandhi or a Tolstoy, moved in a more complex universe. As a result, he was drawn to the tantalizing and mysterious world of detective fiction like moths to light. But Eco’s has been an interesting inversion, since Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and their kind have made their name and fame through believing that the obvious could not be true. Eco, a disbeliever in mysterious global conspiracies, points out that the immediate answer to “Whodunit?” is generally also the true one, which fact most of the time is either played down or just discarded in the best of detective fiction because it provides a less spectacular solution to the mystery.

To get to the root of an intolerable social malady — the continuing cruelties of the dowry system, the communal riots and the unending acts of cross-border terrorism immediately come to mind in the Indian context — Umberto Eco finds the existing legal processes unacceptable for long if you are honestly interested in the immediate dispensation of justice. To look around for mitigating circumstances only denies justice of any kind, so forget it, Eco would say. We shall not get out of this circularity, he writes in one place, “until it is decided when exceptional events occur, humanity cannot afford to apply the laws currently in force”.

What is intolerable, Eco points out, is uncontrolled intolerance that intellectuals cannot really fight “because when faced with pure unthinking animality, thought finds itself defenceless”. It is already too late for the intellectuals when intolerance has been transformed into doctrine. I end here with the lines from the “moral piece” that stirred me purely as an educationist — I don’t pretend to be a certified intellectual:

“Yet it is here that the challenge lies. To inculcate tolerance in adults who shoot at one another for ethnic and religious reasons is a waste of time. Too late. Therefore uncontrolled intolerance has to be beaten at the roots, through constant education that starts from earliest infancy, before it is written down in a book, and before it becomes a behavioural skin that is too thick and too tough.”