“Now, you might welcome his arrival:/He has been digging the depths of society to find moral freedom, that’s so precious/Like knows someone who voluntarily sacrificed his own life for it” (My translation into English of Dante’s Purgatory, Canto I, verses 70-72)
In Christian doctrines, suicide is a mortal sin. Despite, Dante Alighieri designed Cato the Younger as the guardian of purgatory, the ideal place where sinners try to deserve to go to paradise, by cleansing their sins. Well, the concept of freedom has many faces, so that even dictators and totalitarian ideologies can invoke it. In the second book of his Comedy, Dante was talking neither about civil rights, nor about independence of workers from needs and the exploitation of capitalism. Differently, the poet decided to treat a very difficult topic, the moral freedom, intended as liberation from the slavery of sin. The hardness of his reflections led Dante to an immediate, evident contradiction. In effect, the author of a mortal sin, the Stoic philosopher Cato, was indicated as a possible guide on the path to moral freedom. Apart from the recognized, literary greatness of Dante, that I don’t want to discuss, what about his ethical vision? I think that, in the year 1314, he has become the true inventor of the principle “the end justifies the means”, wrongly attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli, and developed by Machiavelli himself with the work “The Prince”, published in 1532. I don’t want to annoy my readers, and I’m not qualified to write treaties. For that, I summarize Dante’s moral conclusion as follows: you can commit mortal sins, when you’re a noble intellectual, whose purpose is to conquer the freedom from sins. That’s where Machiavellianism has originated.
As you can read, according to Dante Alighieri, men are not created equal, and there are great men, who have been authorized to transcend common human condition. That’s the fulcrum of elitism. What about that? The more I attempt to increase my personal culture, the more I become convinced that no man can transcend human condition. Humans are intelligent, but even rational thought is finite, and has precise limitations. Everyone is searching for freedom, while a universal definition of freedom can’t exist. In reality, we all are slaves of the passing time, so that we exclusively think in the past, live in a present that runs away and never waits for us, and don’t know anything about the future. There’s no superior enlightenment, and our brains can’t create any salvation recipe. So, wisdom is consciousness of inevitable ignorance, and comprehension that there’s only one road that we can fruitfully travel, named “compassion and respect”.
As a web DJ, I have decided to occasionally adapt my activity to the ethics of Cato the Younger. Of course, I immediately have excluded any suicidal choice. However, like a Stoic philosopher, I have examined recent releases of dance music, belonging to the large field of house music, in order to seek for tracks able to renew the emotions given by traditional funk, of the 70’s and the 80’s. With other words, I’ve been digging new groove for a notable time, in order to liberate my listeners from the slavery of boredom, thanks to the intercession of the God of funk. Humbly, the quest for moral freedom has become a quest for echoes of traditional funk.
File name is “digging nu groove to seek old funk, by Max Look DJ (Apr 2024)”, about 1 hour and 23’of old funk present into new dance songs.
Renewed funky, the playlist:
Mr. Scream – my neighbor is (2013)
People’s Choice – a mellow mood (LTJ rework 2009)
LTJ Xperience – feeling better (2022)
Liquid Liquid – dig we must (1984)
Vulfpeck – dean town (2016)
Duff Disco – alive (James Johnston Junk Funk mix, 2010)
Nigel Kenney – expansions (2006)
Llorca – wonderwhy (Hot Toddy remix, 2019)
Sam Jam – dance n chant (Tangoterje re-edit, 2006)
Sauco – twisted funk (2023)
Andromeda Orchestra – Mozambique (2023)
Only Child feat Veba – addicted (Llorca Spanish Banks remix, 2003)
Station 10 – clouds (Jerome Sydenham, 2018)
Lukas & Blade from Jestofunk – DJ control (2022)
Belladonna – dub funk (2009)
Super M – disco cool (2015)
