The Tendency to Form Mafias (part 2)
Beretta model 1917 automatic pistol
In the first note in this series – (here) – we referred to Italy’s surprising capacity for generating mafias. The country has, more or less officially, four of them: the Sicilian Mafia properly speaking, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and, in Puglia, the Sacra Corona Unita. This proud record of organized crime is probably unmatched in any country in the world outside of China, itself rich in tongs, triads and such.
China though has more than twenty times the population of Italy. Why has this relatively small country been such a bountiful source of organized criminals?
For once, the Church hardly seems to come into it. Italy is the home of Catholicism, but there are other, more priest-ridden countries – Ireland and Poland will do for two – that have never really developed the phenomenon. Nor does it appear to be a Latin issue. Neither France nor Spain nor Portugal offer anything much like this form of organized aberrant behavior. Nor, for that matter, do the Mediterranean countries of the Islamic faith.
Historians – who follow a trade deeply touched by political thought – have many interesting ideas about the puzzle and, if questioned, will immediately say learned things about the “Sicilian Vespers” and the struggles of that island’s people to rid themselves of their Angevin (French) oppressors, proposing that the Mafia was originally organized to do just this. Mafias, they think, are more or less political movements that have gone wrong somewhere down the line. They are all about the “little people” trying to get their own back from their filthy rich overlords: misguided perhaps, but democratic as all hell.
The explanation might work for the specifically Sicilian Mafia, but even assuming that politics is necessarily cleaner than organized crime, the view leaves a few open questions – like, why has this particular reaction been so characteristic of Italy? The world is thick with oppressors and with people who want to take their place, but most societies appear to have found other workarounds.
“Upper Italy” thinks the answer is, in a way, much simpler. The italians like to form mafias. They work fairly well, give a kind of stability, an attractive sense of belonging and a certain prestige to their members, and they can be quite a decent source of income. Above all, they are based on shared ideals, common across most if not all of the country, that both make these organizations work and are, for the most part, socially positive.
In other words, we suspect that the reasons mafias function so well in Italy are the dark side of the same coin that makes the country such a pleasant place to live and to visit.
Foreign travellers – it doesn’t much matter of what flavor – to France, Germany, the UK and many other places who then reach Italy are often amazed by just how “nice” the Italians are. They may of course make off with your bags, but in the meantime are likely to offer you something to drink and to eat, a place to sit in the shade and are capable of spending hours attempting to learn the story of your life – and to advise you on how to live better and be happier – in a language they do not speak.
Some of this is simply Mediterranean. You can find traces of similar behavior in North Africa and the Middle East, at least where it has not been stamped out by the rigors of Islam. Much though is truly and characteristically Italian.
What then is going on? Victims of the most excessive forms of Italian hospitality – those of the South, where by no chance at all the mafias come from – recognize there is something almost maniacal about the process. “Honored guests”, that is, anyone from outside, may literally be subjected to a twenty-course meal, even in quite a modest household. No human being can consume all that food – but it will be offered with great insistence and with the barely veiled suggestion that to do less than try to eat everything would be profoundly offensive.
To a degree this is about ostentation and showing off. That’s why it reaches its peak in the paroxysmic weddings of the deep South. Much of it though is about systematically creating a kind of moral debt on the part of whoever is receiving the benefit, whatever it is. Whatever you think, when an Italian offers you a glass of water, he or she is counting – unconsciously for the most part, but an entry has been made in an invisible ledger. You are a glass of water down until that debt is paid back. Excessive hospitality is about creating reciprocal bonds, not so much of friendship, but more or less feudal in nature, based on mutual obligations and mutual benefits.
There is a generalized understanding, sharper in the South of Italy but still felt in the North, that these social debts must be paid – even before financial or any other kind of obligation. Further, society as a whole enforces the priority. Viewing someone failing to recognise his debt, failing to act on it, causes unease and puts the sinner somehow beyond the pale.
One part of Upper Italy a few years ago recommended an American woman for a job in an Italian company that needed a foreigner with particular language skills. Procuring a job – a way to make a living, in other words – for someone is, in Italian terms, about the greatest favor you can do and it creates an obligation that is widely considered to be permanent, that can in certain circumstances even reach beyond death in that the family and heirs of whoever has benefitted must – or should – bear gratitude as well.
At any rate, sometime later, the Upper Italy contributor had occasion to make a proposal to the same company for some outside work. The woman whose name he had suggested was asked what she thought about the bid and replied that it seemed “a little high” to her. The woman’s boss, who had barely met the person who suggested her for the position, was so scandalized by the evident lack of gratitude that she called our contributor to make sure he knew his faith had been betrayed.
The American woman, who, after the way of her nation, thought a tip about a job and a phone call were roughly worth “lunch someday,” did herself enormous damage. She demonstrated that she was unreliable and could not be trusted to be part of society. She will never know why she is still making photocopies and will probably never get to do much of anything else.
Readers must understand that the Italians don’t necessarily realize what they are doing in this respect, anymore than they must stop and work out the grammar before they speak their own language. The “counting” and the understanding of the system of mutual obligations is wholly internalized. They know, they feel, what is right – and not paying these reciprocal debts is unacceptable. Better to forget about a car payment.
Beyond that, charming behavior becomes a habit, the “right” way to act, and is employed nearly automatically even when there is no reasonable quid pro quo in sight, as in giving aid to a fumbling tourist who will most likely never be seen again.
What is also important to recognize – and this may be hardest of all for honest Anglo-Saxons – is the aspect of reciprocity. Had the American woman we mentioned above held up her part of the implicit bargain, our contributor would have been to a degree responsible for keeping her employed in one way or the other for the rest of her life. You don’t “give somebody a hand,” you adopt them. Some little part of them is yours, body and soul, once you have done a bigger favor for them than they have done for you. And this is ingrained, it is just part of the way people feel, the way Italian society feels.
In case that last just slipped by without fully sinking in, it also means you must be quite careful about whom you do favors for and what the nature of the favor is, since, through your act of offering significant aid or protection, they also acquire a social “hold” over you.
Italy, in other words, cannot conceive of a “one-way” social transaction. To take an extremely familiar example, the death of Christ on the Cross is viewed in different ways in different cultures. The Italians implicitly recognize it as a remarkably effective form of social jiujitsu: it created an obligation to be a Christian whether you want to be or not. The Resurrection is just icing on the cake, proof of a valid “pin.”
If this all sounds like that old story about accidentally becoming responsible for someone whose life you chance to save, well, it is. This is at least one of the places where that old chestnut comes from. It’s the way Italian society functions, and if you fail to understand this, how it works and what it implies, you cannot be integrated. The Italians may find you an amusing and even pleasant guest, but you will never be part of what is around you.
As for the implications: you must for instance know someone, socially if not necessarily well, to do business with them. The “cold” sales call does not and cannot work. It doesn’t matter that you’re calling from Fort Knox offering gold at fifty dollars an ounce – or from IBM with free computers. In a related way, you cannot directly bribe anyone you are not on good terms with. That is something that’s done between pals.
You have to be careful who you meet and who you accept favors from because these things create iron-clad obligations that must be respected. If you do not, just for instance, take a phone call from someone who has shaken your hand, then you are a certified asshole and he or she is right in thinking you are. That’s why the secretary will hold out longer as a professional role in Italy than in other countries. If they’re good, they know how to take some of the sting out of saying “he’s in a meeting” for the third time.
And – here is where we’ve been heading all along – mafias are in extreme synthesis the institutionalization of all this. They are an essentially feudal concept, based on an idea of fully reciprocal, mostly social, debts and obligations, carried to the logical extreme. They guarantee respect for the principles we have tried to outline above through the use of a sawed-off shotgun called a lupara. As an example, that’s why “protection money” is not simple extortion. It also gets you protection.
None of this is easy to explain. We’ll take – for now – a last stab at it by using a medical analogy; the mafia, the mafias, are parasites that do not kill their host. They coexist with it and are part of it, part of the good as well as the bad. They cannot die as long as Italians are Italians.
In the third and final installment of this series, we will attempt to discuss what all this means in practical terms, in the day to day conduct of life in this more oriental than levantine part of the soft underbelly of Europe.
(end of part 2, you may wish to see also part 1)