Beyond the Present

REMEMBERING THE PAST TO BUILD THE FUTURE

The French historian François Hartog, in a recent interview with Il Manifesto, described a silent malaise of our time: “presentism”. It is the condition of those who live in a present that has devoured both the past and the future — an age in which the future no longer attracts us as a promise, and the past no longer teaches us anything, being neither model nor guide. All that remains is today, repeated endlessly, urgent and rootless, judged in an instant and immediately forgotten to make way for the next instant.

Hartog explains that this all-pervading present is not the same for everyone. There are those who endure it — people in precarious work, those who cannot plan their lives, those who live from day to day because tomorrow is closed to them — and those who choose it, riding speed as if it were a value in itself: in order to be connected, flexible, always available, never still long enough to look back. In both cases the result is the same: a life without historical depth, unable to measure its own actions over the long term, unable even to imagine those who will come after us. And unable, I would add, to understand those who came before.

It is a diagnosis that concerns us Alpini too. Not as a category apart, but precisely because our very existence as an Association springs from a gesture that is the opposite of presentism: the choice not to let memory fall away. When we gather, when we bring our hats to the war memorials, when we tell the young what our fathers and grandfathers lived through on the battlefronts or on peace missions, we are doing exactly what Hartog says has become rare: looking to the past not out of nostalgia, but as a heritage that guides the present and prepares the future.

It is worth pausing for a moment on what, at heart, Alpinità (the Alpini spirit) really is — because it is a term that has lately been pulled in every direction, often by those who know little about it. Alpinità is not military rhetoric, it is not the hat worn as a trophy, it is not barrack-room machismo. Alpinità was born as shared hardship — naja (military service) at altitude, the cold, the rations split in two when there was not enough for one — and in peacetime it has become the most concrete form of solidarity that Italy knows: the Civil Protection volunteers digging through the rubble of an earthquake, the bridges rebuilt, the flood victims assisted, the nursery schools refurbished free of charge in towns struck by disaster. It is humility, discipline, a sense of duty towards a community that reaches beyond one’s own backyard. Those who have lived true Alpinità know that its heart is not the parade itself, but “being there”, working in silence when there is need, without seeking applause, without making proclamations.

For this very reason, the controversy that accompanied our recent National Adunata (the annual national gathering) in Genoa deserves to be faced honestly, not swept under the carpet nor dismissed simply as an unjust attack. During the days of the Adunata, some feminist associations and anti-violence centres had circulated a handbook against harassment, going as far as defacing the city’s walls with offensive graffiti. Some politicians, too, had used contemptuous words — then hastily withdrawn, with the nonchalance of someone who apologises after the damage is done — about how the Alpini were said to have behaved in the city. In their wake came the usual train of commentators, indignant on cue, who, not wanting to miss the opportunity, piled it on with ready-made outrage and the equally summary, off-the-peg accusation of “toxic machismo”.

We must have the honesty to say two things together, without going easy on either. The first: if even a single episode of harassment happened under our hat, that episode is a betrayal of Alpinità, not an expression of it. Whoever wolf-whistles at a woman in the street is not carrying on any tradition: he is simply behaving badly, and covering for him with the excuse that “boys will be boys” would be a disgrace to those who truly earned their hat. The second: reducing hundreds of thousands of people — pensioners, Civil Protection volunteers, families with children, old comrades from national service who meet up again once a year — to the misconduct of a minority is an unjust generalisation, and it wounds those in our Association who have given a lifetime of unpaid service.

This is, in the end, another face of the “presentism” Hartog speaks of: the instant, viral judgement that has neither the time nor the inclination to make distinctions, that turns a real event into a factional war on social media within the space of an afternoon. Those who shout “toxic masculinity” at an entire adunata and those who shout “an attack on the Fatherland” at anyone raising the issue of women’s safety are, in reality, doing the same thing: replacing long-term reflection with the reflex of the present, the slogan in place of listening.

True memory teaches the opposite. It teaches us to distinguish. Anyone who knows a hundred years of Alpini history — from the glaciers of the Great War to today’s humanitarian missions — knows that this history is defended not by denying problems, but by confronting them: taking every report seriously, strengthening supervision during the adunate, teaching the young that respect for women is as much a part of discipline as respect for our flag. And they also know that this same history deserves not to be thrown away because of the mistakes of a few, nor used as a club against those who carry the Tricolore in procession. The Tricolore does not need to be “defended” against those who ask awkward questions: it needs to be honoured through deeds, every day, not merely waved.

There is, moreover, a broader lesson, and one more urgent today than yesterday. The Alpini have always known that the memory of one’s own home — one’s own valley, one’s own village, one’s own fallen — has never been an enclosure. Those who did their naja, those who experienced the solidarity of the Civil Protection in an earthquake or a flood, know that this same loyalty to one’s own history makes us able to recognise ourselves in those who suffer elsewhere: in the refugee, the migrant, the excluded — precisely the figures Hartog identifies as the most exposed to enforced presentism, those to whom the future is forbidden. A true memory, one that neither shuts itself up within the parish bell tower nor stiffens in defence of itself, forms citizens of the world even before citizens of a single place: because it teaches that every community has been through hardship, loss and reconstruction, and that this binds everyone together, beyond borders and allegiances.

That is why safeguarding memory — marching at our adunate, carrying our pennants with honour, continuing to pass on our stories to the young — is not an exercise in preserving the past, still less an enclosure to be defended by shouldering aside anyone who voices a criticism. It is an act directed towards the future, one that is nourished also by the ability to listen and to correct ourselves. In an age that threatens to swallow everything up in the instant and in the outrage of the day, our task remains what it has always been: to be a bridge between those who came before and those who will come after, men and citizens able to see beyond the end of their own noses — and beyond their own time.

Your Col Maòr