LA VERITÀ DEGLI ALTRI

These surprising, enlightening stories cover five continents and 2500 years to trace the idea of pluralism.

It is true that men have always been fighting each other. But it is also true that there have always been those trying to understand not only their own culture, but also the other. Pascal, in looking at the border between France and Spain, has pointed out that what is legal on one side of the Pyrenees is considered a crime on the other. Those who believe in divine or natural law find it hard to accept the truth of their neigbours and ideas other than one's own. But there have always been pluralists and in his new book Giancarlo Bosetti tells the story of ten such exceptional, courageous people: narrated in a masterly voice, Bosetti shows us that the narrative of a "clash of civilizations" is wrong. There has always been a dialogue between cultures, a way of accepting variety and otherness. The edicts of Ashoka, the emperor Mauryia in India in the 3rd century B.C., the subtle doctrine of apocatástasis advocated by Origen within the Church in the 3rd century A.D., the unsettling reaction of Nicholas Cusano to the taking of Constantinople by the Turkish "infidels" in 1453, the battle of Bartolomé de Las Casas in favour of the Indians of the New World, the subtle arguments of Michel de Montaigne on cannibalism, the fable in code of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in a famous work which contains the answer to his persecutor, the birth of citizenship "with a hyphen" in the United States of Horace Kallen, the daring battle within the Catholic hierarchies of the Belgian theologian Jacques Dupuis, the disruptive novelty in the ethnological field represented by Margaret Mead's studies and, to cover it all, the radically pluralist view of Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin. Giancarlo Bosetti directs Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, an international organisation dedicated to encouraging cultural pluralism. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L'Unita. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of "Reset", a journal that explores cultural issues. He writes for "la Repubblica" and has published several books. He is also a professor at University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre.