For more than a decade, Sicily has been trying to revive its villages by selling vacant houses. Writer Lisa Abend heads to the largest island in the Mediterranean to see how life has changed.

(Mussomeli is roughly 60 miles from Palermo.Photo by Julia Nimke)

Like any small town that isn’t yours, Sambuca di Sicilia, located about an hour’s drive south of the Sicilian capital, Palermo, feels a little intimidating at first. Stroll its perimeter on a late afternoon in winter, when the sun sets the buildings alight, and eyes follow you. Order the town’s signature minni di virgini—breast-shaped cakes filled with cream, chocolate chips, and squash jam—and a hush silences the chatter in the local bakery. It’s not unfriendly, this exaggerated alertness, but it does make you, the visitor, feel a bit self-conscious.

By the time I walk into a small restaurant that first evening seeking dinner, my self-consciousness has reached an uncomfortable peak. The restaurant’s only other guests, a middle-aged couple, fall quiet as I make my way to a table. After the waiter and I stumble through my order, impeded by his poor English and my worse Italian, I pull out a book to hide my awkwardness while I wait for the food. But when the first course arrives—a heap of ocher-tinted pasta topped with crimson shrimp and shards of pistachios—I am so clearly delighted by the dish that the waiter then decides we are friends. He introduces himself by name, Giovanni, and when two women with their children enter the restaurant, he seats them next to me and introduces them as well. “La famiglia,” he says—his own, and that of the chef, who, stepping out from the kitchen to kiss his wife, also comes over to greet me.

Two hours later, I walk out into the night air, aloft on a wave of bonhomie and sturdy Sicilian wine. Oh yes, I think to myself. I could live here.

I’m not the only person to arrive at that revelation. In fact, I had come to Sicily to investigate a program that has attracted thousands with the same notion. A program that allows people, although they may not have the financial wherewithal to go full-bore Tuscan-villa-with-frescoed-ceilings-and-private-vineyard, to nevertheless live a different version of the dream. A program that promises them a house for a single euro.

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Pragmatism and conscience are two different factors that often come into conflict when making decisions.

Pragmatism involves being practical and focusing on what is realistic and achievable in a given situation. It may prioritize efficiency, results, and the most effective means of achieving a goal, even if it means compromising on certain values or beliefs.

On the other hand, conscience refers to an individual’s inner sense of what is right or wrong. It involves moral principles, ethics, and values that guide one’s decisions and actions. Conscience is often associated with doing what is perceived as morally right, even if it may not be the most practical or beneficial option.

In some situations, pragmatism and conscience may align, leading to decisions that are both practical and in line with one’s moral beliefs. However, in other cases, individuals may face a dilemma where being pragmatic may conflict with their conscience, forcing them to make tough choices between what is practical and what is morally right.

If moral dilemma involves heinous or criminal acts against humanity, then the equation weighs heavy on conscience. Such horrific acts and atrocities are not only morally reprehensible but also a stark example of the dangers of unchecked power, systemic oppression, and the disregard for human life.

Pragmatism, if taken to an extreme without moral considerations, can potentially justify and rationalize heinous acts like the Genocide and total razing of Gaza in the name of self-defense. This highlights the importance of ethical principles, human rights, and moral values as essential checks on purely pragmatic decision-making.

Biden Administration abandoned any moral consideration when giving green light to Israel with no red-lines in the name of self-defense. Biden provided all the military resources, including mass civilian killing bombs, and diplomatic cover to Israel to unleash mayhem over Gaza leading to thousands of deaths of innocent Gazans and genocide charges against Israel at ICJ. Biden continue to send to Israel mass civilian killing bombs even after Genocide charges against Israel. Gaza Genocide is a glaring example of use of morally unchecked military power, both by Israel and our powerful country, over Gazans occupied and besieged from all sides by Israel-and innocent civilians nowhere to go.

In November 2024 voters will have the choice to use their conscience, moral authority, and pragmatism to weigh-in.

F. Sheikh, May 10, 2024

(Partly generated by ChatGPT)

In his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria proffers his own 21st-century spin on storied historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal work The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. Like the famed 20^th-century historian, Zakaria recounts how the French and Industrial Revolutions profoundly shaped the structures, norms, and guiding principles that made our society what it is. The ubiquitous commentator also identifies a few more “revolutions” that aren’t generally considered revolutions, both pre-industrial era and contemporary.

( Fareed Zakaria : Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

While Zakaria may not be in Hobsbawm’s league, the Mumbai-born son of a political family who was a wunderkind editor of Newsweek International and remains a Washington Post columnist is still going strong at 60. Those who just see the erudite scholar on TV, where he presides over an eponymous CNN program, may not be aware that he earned a Harvard political science PhD under Harvard mainstays like Samuel Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame and Joseph Nye.

Much of what Zakaria writes is familiar, but that doesn’t make it unappealing. Anyone assigned to read the classic tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by the famed German sociologist Max Weber won’t be shocked to find that Zakaria locates the seeds of Western democracy in late 16th-century Holland, where northern Protestant provinces broke away from the Catholic Hapsburg empire. The Netherlands bestowed great agency to local authorities—much like America’s founders did two centuries later. In another precursor to Constitutional principles, early Holland enshrined the freedom of religion.

With the foundation for democracy laid, enter stage right: capitalism. In the 1500s, the Netherlands was a thriving maritime nation rather than an agricultural one. Fewer than a quarter of its workers were in agriculture—unusual for this period—with more than half in trade and manufacturing. Merchants, not aristocrats, held cachetand influence in this milieu. The world’s first stock exchange can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company’s issue of shares to the public to raise funds. At the same time, the Bank of Amsterdam served as a quasi-central bank, another historical first that Adam Smith described in detail in The Wealth of Nations. “It was telling that the Netherlands gained fame not for its castles or cannons but for its banks and merchants,” Zakaria writes.

This Dutch revolution took root in England during the Glorious Revolution, a not-quite-revolutionary sequence of events in the late 1600s. Following the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell seized power, presiding over the short-lived republic of Britain—which it became for the first and only time in its history, a mere decade before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Upon his death, his brother James ascended to the throne. However, his heavy-handed Catholicism did not go over well with Parliament, which invited his Protestant daughter, Mary Stuart, and her husband, William of Orange, to invade. William, of course, was the quasi-leader of the Dutch republic. Why quasi? As we learned earlier from Zakaria, the prescient early Holland didn’t have a monarchy.

The bloodless ascension of Mary and William as joint monarchs to the British throne in 1688 constituted the Glorious Revolution. But why does Zakaria include this un-revolutionary moment among his pantheon of revolutions? “For the first time in British history, the new royals were endowed with power by an Act of Parliament, making them limited, constitutional monarchs,” he writes. “This marked the turning point of England’s political modernization.” Stability flowed from the new arrangement, making the country ripe for Dutch ideas, such as religious tolerance and freedom of thought as embodied by Isaac Newton and John Locke (who was allowed to return from exile in the Netherlands), and, of course, capitalism. Now that the Dutch had passed the liberal baton to England, Zakaria chronicles how England led the charge toward modernity. These two accounts of lesser-known European history, early Holland and the Glorious Revolution, are illuminating and convincing.

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(IN FLORENCE, ON HER FIRST TRIP TO ITALY, 1994. COURTESY OF JHUMPA LAHIRI.)

In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized.

Lahiri was born in London in 1 967 to Bengali parents from Kolkata, and raised in a small town in Rhode Island. In 2012, she moved to Rome with her husband, the journalist and editor Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and their children, Octavio and Noor. She has spent the better part of the past decade shuttling between Italy and the U.S., where she’s held teaching posts at Princeton, from 2015 until 2022, and, since this past fall, at Barnard College, her alma mater, where she also directs the creative writing program. When we met again in October, it was at her brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a four-story building bookended by a large kitchen and living space on the parlor floor and Lahiri’s top-floor study. She and Vourvoulias-Bush hadn’t lived in the house for a year or two, and while we spoke on the sofas, he was getting the place back in shape. Some of their furniture was still in storage, and several art pieces, abstract photo collages and large stretched canvases, lay against a white marble mantelpiece, waiting to be rehung. The walls were painted deep purple.

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