The Usefulness of the Useless

"One of the reasons that I am very fond of that book is that in one of the essays in my book, The Nobility of Spirit , I try to explain that culture, by definition, has to be useless. It will therefore always be defenceless. It will always be disinterested because culture—and the classics—are timeless. They are important for all time, for everybody. That’s what makes them timeless. This is why we can still read Shakespeare or Jane Austen , or listen to Bach etc. This means that these works—whether it’s a cathedral or a poem or a sonata or a great novel—tell us something. We are not in charge. It’s not us who can control the work of art. The work of art is there to tell us, to inform us. Nuccio’s wonderful, small book is a compilation of the many things from antiquity to nowadays, making this call, not to make a mistake. Already in the 18th century Schiller—in his Letters on an Aesthetic Education —informs us that utility has become the idol of our time. So this is not about arguing something new or original. As a great archivist, Nuccio has put it together in an extremely readable and accessible way. “European humanism is rooted in that phrase. It’s rooted in this tradition that, at the end of the day, it is the cultivation of your soul, it is nobility of spirit, it is the life of the mind that makes life worth living.” In the world of education or when you are in the world of culture and you are involved in fundraising, you constantly get this nonsense of how to make it concrete and ‘What’s in it for us?’ That business approach is the poison of our society. It has no clue about the meaning of life. Zip. Zero. Once I was talking to some right-wing youngsters. They were asking things like, ‘Why should we support the arts? Why should the government support art?’ Or, ‘Why should we have bookshops? They are not useful at all.’ I replied, ‘Okay, well, so you think that the most important things in life are useful? That all things have to be useful?’ Then I asked one guy, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘Yes, yes, I have a girlfriend,’ he said. I asked him, ‘Do you have a girlfriend because she’s useful to you? And you would like to have children. Is that because they are useful to you?’ But people stop thinking and they do not realise that all the things that make their own life meaningful are by definition useless. They have to be useless, otherwise they cannot be what they are. That’s what Nuccio’s beautiful book is: a great reminder and giving you all the texts you need to “weapon” yourself against all the ongoing nonsense. It’s in no way academic, but he quotes Aristotle, Leopardi, John Locke, and Emil Cioran. It has wonderful, short chapters on the consequences of the disappearance of historic bookstores and why the classics are important, etc. etc. It’s a very small book that puts you in a very good mood. And it keeps you organised if at any moment you are confronted with the stupidity that something has to be ‘useful.’"