THE WORLD OF "LA MISERIA"
221
clency
toward self-pity or playing upon the pity of the visitor.
We have mentioned a certain similarity between the pre-Socratic
conception of life and the
Weltanschauung
of the present-day Lucanian
or Calabrian peasant. In both cases we note a cosmic sanction of the
various phases of life, including the social realm. In both cases we detect
in
the acceptance of the cosmic order the source of their dignity. With
the Greeks, however, the cosmic sanction found its expression in social
and political action: in the presence of the cosmic example they built
their
cities and ordered their social life. With the peasants of Calabria
and Lucania the possibility of constructing and directing their own social,
political and economic life does not exist. The cosmic order is not per–
ceived as a stimulus to do but as an admonition to accept. The contrast
between the awareness of the cosmic order, potentially the cosmic ex–
ample, and of the inability to follow this example as a guiding light in
social action creates, next to the real sense of dignity, and often over–
shadowing it, a pseudo-dignity, which is the result of pitiful attempts
to
hold the individual, the family and the society together. It may
express itself in a disproportionate emphasis upon dress, in the raising
of
virginity to an absolute value, in the phenomenon of
" omerta"
(the
conspiratorial silence of a whole community when a crime is com–
mitted).
It is evident in the desire "not to be taken for dumb" (the
worst thing that could happen to a member of a society in which educa–
tion and intelligence are the only possible achievements); in fact, this
desire,
nourished by an almost pathological distrust of the "other world"
(of government officials and landed nobility), may assume at times
Itrange forms such as the gratuitous pretense of belonging to the Mafia.
The inordinately strong possessive attitude pervading every phase
of
the peasants' lives is a sure expression of the precariousness of their
existence, of the need and the desire to create artificial supports for
the human personality. This possessive attitude cannot be satisfactorily
explained
in
terms of economic need alone even in the field of material
goods.
Its full morbidity becomes evident in man's attitude toward woman.
Though we may find deep in the heart of the peasant a feeling of re–
spect toward woman, it is a feeling which seems to refer to the maternal
function in general rather than to one's own wife in particular. As a
rule, the wife is treated as a useful possession since she represents work–
ing
power as well as the capacity to satisfy man's most elementary desire
01
possession.
It
is
difficult to exaggerate the importance of sex in a society as
