Political Philosophy has Found its’ Chauncey Gardner

In effect Dante with this contrast of good/bad, ugly/beautiful, true/false, puny/precious, is saying that this unique earth which is Man's only home within time and space is meant to be beautiful as a garden at the outset, but the sad ugly present reality is that in this garden brother kills brother; it is one of general viciousness and incessant warfare. Dante is pointing out that this garden is a garden of exile and humankind's journey is a journey back to the future, a journey of a return toward that utopist garden it originally left behind. Later in his imaginary journey Dante will enter the earthly garden of Eden on top of the mountain of Purgatory, but his journey transcends even that beautiful earthly garden

There is a kind of lunacy to people who believe that all history has ended because they stopped trying to face the world for what it is.

Dante is therefore one of the grandfathers of this vision of a United Europe. As the consummate poet he is, he reminds all Europeans that, in the words of the Dante scholar, the British-American poet T.S. Eliot, "...The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started from and know the place for the first time." At that place we shall rediscover "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle" [The love that moves the sun and the other stars]—Paradiso XXXIII, 145.

As if Dante was talking about what was then a concept far less tangible – “A Europe” did not really exist to their minds because it was quite plainly an extension of the little patches of dirt that their were fighting over. “A far away land” was where the dialect changed, right over yonder hill.

And if this guy doesn’t realize that Dante wasn’t talking of a specific society or culture at all, but about man’s relationship (universal man in his view), with right and wrong, not little tiny earthly law as Paparella’s feeble misuse of a basic, widely read text would indicate. In a sick attempt to define the EU, “Europe” as the writer puts it, with a respite on the way to heaven, or akin to heaven itself, especially for someone who seems to be rather willing to also mock the former Utopianism of the faithful.

It’s a Government construct, you fool. Vesting Utopian notions in it has brought us nothing but the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and “Cultural Revolutions” where millions end up dying anonymously at the hands of a rather covetous earthly cult of power OVER others.