When I arrived in Sicily last spring, my hostess told me, with some excitement, that Danilo Dolci, not long back from England himself, where he had been toured and televised, was holding an international conference at Palma de Montechiaro in the west of the island on the theme of the backward areas and depressed people of Sicily. Dolci is the young artist-architect, now thirty-six, turned saintly reformer, the exponent of the philosophy of non-violence, who has dedicated himself to the purpose of reclaiming Sicily and the Sicilians. I have been told by people who have worked with him closely that Dolci is the “perfectly ordinary man.” What they mean is that he is not an abstract missionary but that he is trying to deal with the everyday problems of an actual group of people.
Dolci’s personal link with Sicily seems to be slight. It is true that his father was station-master at Trappeto, in western Sicily, thirty miles from Palermo, the capital of the island, but Dolci himself was born at Trieste in 1924. He finished his studies in architecture and town planning at Rome and Milan but did not feel that the comparatively prosperous North had the best claim on his skill and time. Although now an agnostic, he had always been a man with a semi-religious vocation, and as late as 1951 he published a fair amount of religious poetry which was quite good in itself (it was probably written somewhat earlier). Dolci’s dedication to the ideas of non-violence showed early and in a way which in Fascist Italy must have demanded considerable courage: he went to prison for refusing to take a combatant’s part in the war. After the war, he worked as a “brother” with Don Zeno Saltini, a priest who ran a religious community called “Nomadelfia,” for the rescue of delinquent boys. But this, it became clear, was too limited in scope for Dolci. His twin beliefs—that you cannot root out bad lives unless you deal with the general soil and structure of poverty, and that personal creative work is regenerative both to the individual and the community he is part of—needed a larger laboratory. Perhaps he decided to work in Sicily for this reason, for it is a fact that any marked degree of historical and cultural isolation may well provide good conditions for experimentation and control. (Perhaps he merely felt the fascination of the islands.)
When he arrived in Trappeto in January 1952, Dolci had thirty lire in his pocket. As he told the local fishermen, who not unnaturally asked him what he had come for, he wanted to live among them as one of themselves, to help them and at the same time to learn to put up with their conditions. Dolci began his method of help by studying the nature and causes of the local misery, and it was after this—presumably as the most practical answer—that he borrowed the money to buy a piece of land and building materials and, with his own labor and the labor of those who volunteered to work for food (obtained by Dolci on credit), he built his first home for the homeless—destitute children and old people—and moved in his first couple.
This may look like piecemeal charity of a familiar kind, but Dolci’s principles of self-help and cooperative work provided something radically different. It was almost more important that the unemployed should get together to build a home than that the homeless should move into it.
He next turned his attention to roads and water. The huge sad huddle of Sicilian towns and villages (a “village” may be up to 25,000 inhabitants) is not the mere hideous outcrop of industry as European cities have often been. They are the squatting-places of an unorganized proletarianism—concentration camps of poverty, as they have been described. They are populated largely by those who go out to work a strip of land in an antiquated agricultural system, or stand about waiting for work. Or, as Dolci reveals in his book To Feed the Hungry (in Italian, Inchiesta a Palermo), which is based on the first-hand reports of a good cross section of the inhabitants of Palermo, they “stand about counting the cobble-stones,” or they are pickers-up of snails, of wild asparagus, of any wild fauna and flora that can fetch a few lire. Potential laborers pile up in these towns, instead of getting out to the fields, because of lack of communications and irrigation.
But communications and irrigation involve public resources, and at this point the civil authorities began to be sensitive to the subversive possibilities in Dolci’s movement. They refused at first to contribute toward his plans for building a dam in a small local river. Dolci dealt with this by fasting: after only seven days the authorities gave in and promised a grant. (Dolci may have got this idea from Gandhi, but he seems to have read only Gandhi’s autobiography, as nothing else is available in Italian, and Gandhi in any case did not invent the philosophy of non-violent resistance.) By the time that Dolci felt able to move on to the larger town of Partinico (also in western Sicily), the people of Trappeto had already provided themselves with sewers and roads, and, among other things, with two small hospitals.
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After he had come to Partinico, Dolci married a widow with a large family. The couple now have children of their own and have adopted still more. It was in Partinico that the profound social and cultural change which he was trying to initiate revealed its outlines. Two more of Dolci’s books, Fare presto e bene perche si cuore (“Act speedily and rightly because people are dying”) and Banditti a Partinico (“The Outlaws at Partinico”—to be published here in March by Orion Press), belong to this period (1954—55). His method is that of minute investigation, in interviews with “witnesses” as he calls them in the later book To Feed the Hungry. We might call them case histories, except that they reveal a degree of imaginative and descriptive insight, and a freedom from preconception or theory as well as from cold-blooded and statistical detachment, which seem well out of the range of the typical social welfare worker.
The town of Partinico is a bandit center, and a very high proportion of its families lack a head because he was either a victim or a member of the Mafia (the woman Dolci married was the widow of one of these victims).
The Mafia, the bandit organization, is a cult as well as an industry. Vile though it may seem to outsiders, it has strong romantic associations for Sicilians. In 20th-century terms it is a powerful pressure group, administratively and as a form of insurance often working better than the legal authorities. For instance, provided that your Mafia dues are paid up, the Mafia will recover your stolen property for you, and without delay, where the police will probably fail. (I am not talking only of the obvious cases where they have stolen it themselves.) For many centuries violence has been an integral part of Sicilian society, but whatever the historical origins of banditry, general poverty seems to be what keeps it alive today and in Partinico Dolci began trying by nonviolent methods to attack it at its core.
It is one of Dolci’s guiding rules to start with gli ultimi, the lowest. This is not a form of salvationism; he is simply being consistent. Bandits are therefore no different from any other kind of “ultimi”—and Dolci interrogates them and records their answers with his wonted sympathy and understanding of the poverty and sense of hopeless inferiority which has driven them to banditry.
Though the day-to-day and piecemeal approach to violence and poverty was and continues to be what is most characteristic of Dolci’s movement—it has been said that it works like yeast, to transform the situation from within—he can employ more spectacular means with deliberate effect.
The “strike-in-reverse” of January 1956 (this is the name given to the technique of finding some work which wants to be done, and doing it without pay) was initiated to call public attention to the evils of unemployment. The “strike” took place on the beach of Trappeto where the people of several towns gathered. It certainly called European public attention to Dolci, as probably nothing else would have done. Seven hundred people took part in it. They began by fasting all day. This was again a form of advertisement and is strictly consistent with Dolci’s non-violent principle of giving the enemy all possible warning of your intentions—diplomacy-in-reverse one might call it.
Groups then took turns in repairing a road which had been cut by a stream. Thus not only the fact of unemployment was advertised, but also the still totally inoperative Article 4 of the Italian Constitution, which recognized that the right to work should be made effectual.
Dolci was arrested and tried for causing a public mischief, for trespassing on public property, and also for using violence and resisting arrest. This last charge seems to have been false—Dolci in any case had taken the precaution of ordering the strikers to leave their knives, with which they usually cut their bread, at home. The police, on the other hand, used some violence against some of the strikers. Dolci was sentenced to fifty days’ imprisonment, but the sentence was suspended.
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From then on the movement spread. Not only eminent Italian lawyers but a number of distinguished European figures gave Dolci their support. These included Camus, Cocteau, Gunnar Myrdal, Mauriac, Sartre, and Silone; Aldous Huxley wrote a preface to To Feed the Hungry. Honors too have come Dolci’s way, but one, the Lenin Peace Prize, which might suggest a political alignment, was accepted by him—“apolitically.” And he has used the money thus gained to found five “Centers” in western Sicily, at Menfi, Cammarata, Corleone, and Roccamena as well as at Partinico. A different nationality is responsible for each center. The Center consists of a permanent cadre of specialists and voluntary workers—except for the Italian workers, they come from the “high welfare” countries. The territory is divided into corresponding zones and each Center concerns itself wholly with the problems—economic, cultural, and human—of its own zone, for which it is entirely responsible.
How far Dolci’s methods will continue to work in Sicily cannot yet be estimated. What has to be remembered when we look at any published figures, either of proposals or progress in the reclamation of Sicily, is that the western part of the island is a predominantly agricultural society which by ordinary European standards is abnormally retarded. The Sicilians are ignorant of methods of cultivation, and of the market, which are elsewhere commonplaces. The systems of land ownership and that of land exploitation are both completely out of date, indeed feudal. On the other hand, the Mafia is in one way more modernized: it has learned much from the cut-throat methods of big business and it largely controls the conditions of sale of whatever gets produced. Finally, in many areas, illiteracy is as high as 50 per cent.
In part, too, figures are unimportant now. What Dolci’s movement is trying to give people is the basic tools of human existence. It is clear that many proposals are still, and will remain, in the stage of study. For instance, you only have to drive through Sicily to convince yourself that Dolci is correct in believing that the waste of water is Problem No. 1. On our way to the conference at Palma, we found rocky magnificent scenery. But life seemed to be drying up: the grass was faded and worn like a shabby carpet: the frequent torrenti, or mountain torrents, were nothing but a bed of pebbles. Yet in three of the five zones, projects for building dams still remain on paper—which is not surprising, since undertakings of this size obviously need cooperation and funds from the existing authorities. In the case of the dam at Trappeto, Dolci’s methods brought the authorities to yield. But this broaches the question of the totality of Dolci’s “open” revolution—“open” because it does not aim at dramatic and final achievement, but works by continuous contact and example.
Dolci’s revolution, thus, is also a cultural revolution. Dolci studies not only the economic conditions of his subjects, but also their customs and superstitions (particularly in Fare presto e bene), and certainly Sicily is rich and strange in these. The most obvious tool which Dolci can put into the hands of the Sicilians, so that they can make a beginning with helping themselves, is literacy. In Partinico, one of the most unpromising places, he has founded a library and a cultural center. What schooling there is in Sicily seems to be at a very low level—and the children are given four months’ holiday in the summer. Dolci is beginning to move in here with what may be called infant summer schools. In the structural aspect of the whole movement, what is most promising is the formation of local committees that are really beginning to organize discussion and collaboration among their own people. It will be seen by now that people make this movement, they do not just belong to it.
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I cannot say that I enjoyed Dolci’s conference at the time, but in retrospect I am glad I went to it. We got to Palma at about nine-thirty on a fine and beautiful morning: we had unfortunately smelled it a mile up the road. Like many other Sicilian towns, Palma has “sanitation” which consists of open drains down the middle of the streets, and it is a “village” of 20,000 inhabitants. Our meeting place was the Palma cinema—the congress turned out to be a great draw, particularly to the black-shawled women and the children. They climbed all over us and we had to fight our way through. Foreigners are rare in Palma, there is nowhere for them to stay. The only other place I know personally where you cannot stand still in the street because if you do you are flat on your back under a pile of beggars, is Calcutta. This gives, as it were, the real space-time of much of Sicily. Dolci chose Palma on the Dotheboys Hall principle of “Cleen winders.” In the conference you learn that 84 per cent of the population have no W.C.: you then go out and see—or smell—for yourself. (This is perfectly consistent with Dolci’s general approach. He wants to involve each individual with the real immediate problem. This approach meant additional difficulties for the organizers—who nevertheless actually achieved a simultaneous-translation equipment which was miraculous if not adequate; and they were not all satisfied that this was the best way to make a conference function.)
Dolci’s main theme at present is spreco (waste). The conference itself offered several examples of what Dolci means. At the opening session the president of the region, who was due to inaugurate the congress, did not make his appearance for about two hours. The “president” was spending this time in praying, it was said, with the local Bishop. (Could that have been for the success of the congress?) Sicilians, like all the rest of Italy, are not time-ridden: and in a depressed area where so many people have hardly known what it is to have a regular job, punctuality is not a virtue with strong incentive. On the other hand, superstition and violence have for so long been built into the structure of Sicilian society that the church, having abetted the one and compromised with the other, is not likely to favor Dolci, who is trying to undermine both. Notwithstanding, a local convent produced a clean, cheap, adequate lunch for the delegates—another miracle (the nuns also actively pushed their own handicraft products, a rare chance no doubt in this unhallowed and unvisited spot).
When the platform of speakers at last arrived, nobody could have doubted which was Dolci: an exceptionally tall, big-boned youngish man with a round, pale, mild countenance and dressed in what looked like a black soutane, with what might have been a black beret or skull-cap on his head. I say “looked like” because I did not really take in his clothing; it was like some rather abstract stage-direction to express a dedicated, even a consecrated personality.
The president made a good emphatic politician’s speech about nothing in particular and all things at once. The writer Carlo Levi spoke movingly of the state of Sicily. Dolci spoke too, a quiet factual speech as far as I remember. But whether he spoke or not hardly mattered. The discussion dealt with the general ideas of the movement and its development in the five zones.
After his speech, I asked Dolci whether in view of the enormous strength of reaction in Sicily, he did not expect at some point to meet with a revolutionary situation which could not be side-stepped and which also could not be met by non-violent methods. The information given at the conference, it seemed to me, argued only to the converted. (I felt Palma itself to be a direct incitement to violence: I was convinced it was terrible and I wanted to get away from it.) Dolci answered, I thought at the time, illogically, even evasively; indeed what he said to me—“Go and look at this place”—seemed no answer at all.
I now see that Dolci could not have answered me in any other way. To have given an answer one way or the other about the future, as it might be determined by his opponents, would be doing a kind of violence to that present which he is trying to initiate. Though to outsiders Dolci can appear somewhat mysterious, I believe myself that this is only because he is so obvious, so naively honest, and so consistent.
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While the objective-minded realist—and this category can take in people of great integrity, sensibility, and intellect—may often admire the kind of character represented by Dolci, they can usually explain its success—admitting that within its worldly limits it is sometimes successful—only as a compromise with the violent and fraudulent methods of power and competition. Bertrand Russell (with many others) explains Gandhi as “an astute politician.” Most people are unwilling to admit that anyone ever really means exactly what he says. To open your eyes and mouth and speak the simple truth which appears to be under your nose, lands you in the most complicated situations. In very artificial social circles it can appear as wit. In the intersecting circles of our various pressure groups, prejudices, and ideologies, it can appear as phony—and Dolci has even been accused of this. (It must be emphasized that most of the people who work beside him seem to be able to give and take honest criticism in a good-natured and constructive way.)
There have always been at all times a few people who cannot stand the split between moral theory and moral practice. Many of them go off their heads as Tolstoy nearly did. Obviously Dolci is more practical, less intellectualized and rationalizing than Tolstoy. He does not theorize as far beyond the work of his hands as Tolstoy did, and so he is always involved in a necessarily small, but definite, moral achievement. This, I think, is implied in a favorite word of his, “exactitude”—which means in effect, “Do the next thing, whatsoever your hand finds to do, as fully and precisely as possible.”
Louis Fischer says in his Life of Mahatma Gandhi—“The gulf between word and belief is untruth. The dissonance between creed and deed is the root of innumerable wrongs in our civilization, it is the weakness of all churches, states and persons. It gives institutions and men split personalities. In attempting to establish a harmony between words, beliefs and acts, Gandhi was attacking man’s central problem. He was seeking the formula for mental health.”
The simple and fundamental fact which has to be grasped about Dolci and his philosophy—or “way of life”—is that he, like Gandhi, fits into the category of the mental healer: his goal, whether formulated or not, is to help to heal the split in the mind and personality which our social conditions largely originate and continually aggravate. (It must be noted that Dolci’s practical problem of non-violence is very different from Gandhi’s, for Gandhi’s movement had to fight a foreign ruler and so was inherently revolutionary.)
In every moment of religious purification, one can see some signs of a swing back to the concrete suffering person, an attempt to shake off the bonds of abstraction and organization—of the “theology” and of the “church.” (I use quotation marks because the analogy applies in the reform of secular movements as well as religious.) Dolci’s is a religious movement in this sense, a reversion to the concrete, the immediate, the subjective, and the practical, as opposed to the abstract and theoretical. Hence the importance of “participation” and individual sacrifice. All the personal acts, like fasting, are symbolic as well as being a way of bringing pressure on the opposition.
This emphasis on “participation” with gli ultimi, criminals, bandits, and the pickpockets of Palermo (one of the most flourishing of occupations) in part accounts for the absence of theorization in Dolci’s books. But in the particular and personal form which his investigations take, the method of non-violence is logically implied. If you come to a man with the honest and professed intention of looking at him as a real person in a real situation and thus—in a quite scientific and statistical spirit as well as a charitable one—of learning from him, you cannot come in a punitive or morally critical spirit at the same time. In broader terms, if you hold that means are logically and morally prior to ends, there can be no ends which you feel justified in obtaining by force (even if the circumstances of life may force you to do so). Our general aims, however admirable in theory, can in practice only be realized through actual people and actual situations as they arise, and to force the aim is always to some extent to disrupt delicate human relations.
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It will be seen that Dolci’s philosophy and practice is opposed not only to the extreme forms of political violence which we have experienced in our day, the dictatorship and the genocide, but also to much that we in the West, from one side or the other, regard as our best social and moral achievements. On Dolci’s definition of non-violence, our kinds of social amelioration—whether they come from the applications of science and technology or from organized religion, which can hardly help imposing either their material changes or their ideology, or from socialism in any of its forms (which shifts the national income to suit its own purposes)—are clearly in part forcible. Such institutions certainly cannot afford a Jainist attitude toward the poor suffering beetle: in one way or another, he may simply have to be got out of the way so that the best—according to our partial definitions—may survive and prosper.
It must be noted that this contradiction applies even to the milder democratic forms of socialism—and again because of a particular opposition of “means” and “ends.” Socialism feels able to define what ends are good, and so how the means must inevitably be adjusted. In the case, for instance, of social democratic Sweden, affluence, a rising standard of life for everybody, is implicitly defined as the Good Life. Dolci’s radically different approach to the problem of poverty can be put in a number of ways, but they all amount to the belief that we cannot deal by violent methods even with those evils which we most repudiate. The overriding of minority opinion which majority rule implies—even the social democratic countries like Sweden—would strike Dolci as examples of violence. Poverty is a disease but one which has to be cured by homeopathy rather than surgery. It has, like the symptoms of physical disease, its own natural significance and—provided that it is elected and not imposed—even its advantages. This point of view—rejection of affluence rather than choice of poverty—is open to misunderstanding, and to maintain it and act upon it in the circumstances of Sicily asks for great mental and moral courage. What Dolci implies is that work, not wealth in itself, is the cure—we want to restore poverty to a muscular leanness, not stuff it to unhealthy and unhandy obesity.
But if we think of non-violence first of all as a technique which has to prove itself, there is much to be said against it both practically and morally. Gandhi undoubtedly implied that a non-violent technique—since it entails tactics and manipulation—is something like a contradiction in terms. And non-violence is often interpreted as meaning all means short of physical violence. Gandhi once said that if non-violence is not of the heart it may be better not to try and practice it, for otherwise we practice fraud upon ourselves and others and so land ourselves in a moral paradox. (This whether or not the techniques of non-violent resistance are likely to influence actual and immediate situations.) Perhaps it is better to realize that all techniques are of this world. And perhaps, too, those more experienced people who organize marches and sit-down strikes against nuclear weapons should constantly impress on their younger and more idealistic supporters this crucial difference between technique and attitude.
Dolci lives in a world where he has had the unfortunate chance to know more of large-scale and well-organized horrors than Gandhi did, a world moreover which has been altered by such events, and so Dolci may have a more instructed and realistic view of violence. Gandhi exhorted the Jews of Germany to non-violence and said that those in the Warsaw Ghetto should have died without fighting, although it was pointed out to him that any passively resistant Jew would, still passive, arrive at the guillotine immediately instead of later. It is true that at the time, Gandhi, like the rest of us, could not know about the six million.
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In any case, Gandhi did not accept the technological structure of the West which Dolci wants to use. Dolci is not a Luddite but regards machines and techniques as “means”—and servants. In fact he seems to be moving out of what can be called in a rather literal sense the “amateur” approach, and is thinking in terms of competence. He is now collecting experts of all kinds. And he has something to offer to professional sociologists—after more dynamic centers of field work, for example Africa, Sicily offers an interesting change because it is so inert.
Dolci’s work and organization have in fact arrived at a fascinating point of consolidation—and no doubt a tricky one. Religious movements often (one might say usually) begin in this kind of hand-to-mouth, or hand-to-mind, fashion, the founder first healing himself and then laying his hands on others. But if the movement spreads and prospers, it tends toward a codification of its original doctrine and toward the formation of a body of disciples who make it their duty to keep the doctrine pure—or orthodox. This usually turns out to mean inflexible and incapable of growth: leading in the end to taking “sides,” and the use of force. (Is it an inescapable paradox of human existence that we always have to fight for our “peace?”)
Dolci’s movement is intended to be, and still is, the antithesis of both “theology” and “church.” That he should continue to draw the kind of people who understand and are imbued with this anti-orthodoxy, may be the test of his movement’s viability. What sort of people does he in practice attract? There are a lot of students and young people, presumably full of idealism and energy, but there are also plenty in middle life. There are plenty of amateurs, and there are plenty of non-expert jobs for them to do. (I am told that there is the usual easily-spotted body of masochists working off their social guilt, but that you can often find jobs for them, too, not too close to people.) But it is the experts, the people who come to do a professional job, who will provide a real and important test. Will they become consecrated brethren in Dolci’s order, at some spiritual remove from the world in which they live and work; or, on the other hand, will the existing material and conventional structure of their problems take over, will it be seen that solutions in economic, agricultural, and social life have to be at a certain standard of competitive efficiency? I should like to know the answer. At present, I am sure that Dolci has not moved away from his essentially limited aim of “valorization”—of making his depressed people more aware of themselves and of their potential human value—and thus more able to help themselves and their neighbors.
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