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ОглавлениеRadical Culture and Popular Culture
WHAT GOOD IS CULTURE?
In 2006, in Lewisburg, Tennessee, a neighborhood group protested because the public library was investing resources in the purchase of books in Spanish. Of the sixty thousand volumes, only one thousand were published in a language other than English. The annual budget, totaling thirteen thousand dollars, dedicated the sum of one hundred and thirty dollars to the purchase of books in Spanish. The buying spree, representing one percent of the budget, enraged some of the citizens of Tennessee, causing them to take the issue to the authorities, arguing that a public service, sustained through taxes charged to the U.S. populace, should not promote something that might benefit illegal workers.
Thus, the new conception of culture surpasses that distant precept of the ancient library of Alexandria. That now almost completely forgotten library achieved the height of its development in second century Egypt. Its backward administrators had the custom of periodically sending investigators throughout the world in order to acquire copies of texts from the most distant cultures. Among its volumes there were copies of Greek, Persian, Indian, Hebrew and African texts. Almost all of those decade-long efforts were abruptly brought to an end, thanks to a fire caused by the enlightened ships of the emperor Julius Caesar. Nearly a thousand years later, another deliberately-set fire destroyed the similarly celebrated library of Córdoba, Spain, founded by the caliph Al-Hakam (creator of the University and of free education for poor kids), where the passion for knowledge brought together Jews, Christians, and Muslims with texts from the most diverse cultures known in the period. Also in this period, the Spanish caliphs were in the habit of dispatching seekers throughout the world in order to expand the library’s collection of foreign books. This library was also destroyed by a fanatic, al-Mansur, in the name of Islam, according to his own interpretation of the common good and superior morality.
In the past, military rulers of Latin American dictatorships (I grew up in one of them), to exacerbate honor and patriotism, tried to clean up the Spanish language, college education and culture itself from any foreign influence, starting with ideas (people in power frequently fear other’s ideas, which is understandable; words are perceived as more dangerous than money and arms and, in fact, sometimes they are). For some reason they, as the Nazis and many other self-proclaimed democratic people did and do today, never realized that there is no idea, no tradition, no language, no religion, no race uncontaminated by foreigners. By definition, every human creation is historical, that is, is the result of a long evolution and, very frequently, of short and devastating involutions.
The Tennessee anecdote perhaps represents a minority in a vast and heterogeneous country (both “real Americans” and anti-Americans hate the most beautiful characteristic of this country: diversity). But it remains significant and representative of still millions of people, frequently exacerbated by some big media shows, a practice that was invented in Germany eighty years ago.
Significant and common is the idea, assumed in that anecdote, that the Spanish language is a foreign language, when any half-way educated person knows that almost one hundred years before English, it was Spanish that was spoken in what today is the United States; that Spanish has been there, in many states of the Union for five centuries; that Spanish and Latino culture are neither foreign nor an insignificant minority: more than fifty million Hispanics live in the United States and the number of Spanish-speakers in the country is roughly equivalent to the number of Spanish speakers living in Spain. For many, the “real American” (another stereotype, as most of the “real” men and women are), often depicted as a kind of cowboy, actually derives from the Mexican vaquero (originally from the Arabic tradition, like most of the traditional West and Southwest architectural style) who left a strong mark on both legal and illegal immigrants from the eastern US. The dollar symbol, $, is derived from the Spanish Peso (PS), the common currency until late 18th century—not to mention the Spanish Empire Flag, which is in the flag of some southern U.S. states. And so on, and so forth.
If those who become nervous because of the presence of that “new culture” had the slightest historical awareness, they would neither be nervous nor consider their neighbors to be dangerous foreigners. The only thing that historically has always been dangerous is ignorance, which is why the promotion of ignorance can hardly be considered synonymous with security and progress—even by association, as with the reigning method of propaganda, which consists of associating cars with women, tomatoes with civil rights, the victory of force and wealth with proof of the truth, or a million dollars with paradise.
According to French-American Thomas Jefferson, Spanish is a crucial language to an American. He read Don Quixote in its original language and recommended the study of both Spanish and French. However, as the revolutionary British Thomas Paine once said: “nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.”
I am not so naïve as to think that today we could have intellectual politicians like the Founding Fathers, but at least it could be convenient to consider that myths, traditions, and popular history are written based on a convenient combination of memory and forgetfulness. Sometimes it helps to mitigate the pride of ignorance—and the fire as well.
WHAT GOOD IS LITERATURE, ANYWAY?
I am sure that you have heard many times this loaded query: “Well, what good is literature, anyway?” almost always from a pragmatic businessman or, at worst, from a Goering of the day, one of those pseudo-demigods that are always hunched down in a corner of history, waiting for the worst moments of weakness in order to “save” the country and humankind by burning books and teaching men how to be “real” men. And, if one is a freethinking writer during such times, one gets a beating, because nothing is worse for a domineering man with an inferiority complex than being close to somebody who writes. Because if it is true that our financial times have turned most literature into a hateful contest with the leisure industry, the collective unconscious still retains the idea that a writer is an apprentice sorcerer going around touching sore spots, saying inconvenient truths, being a naughty child at naptime. And if his/her work has some value, in fact he/she is all that. Perhaps the deeper mission of literature during the last five centuries has been precisely those things. Not to mention the ancient Greeks, now unreachable for a contemporary human spirit that, like a running dog, has finally gotten exhausted and simply hangs by its neck behind its owner’s moving car.
However, literature is still there; being troublesome from the beginning, because to say its own truths it only needs a modest pen and a piece of paper. Its greatest value will continue to be the same: not to resign itself to the complacency of the people nor to the temptation of barbarism. Politics and television are for that.
Every so often a politician, a bureaucrat or a smart investor decides to strangulate the humanities with a cut in education, some culture ministry or simply downloading the full force of the market over the busy factories of prefabricated sensitivities.
Much more sincere are the gravediggers who look us in the eyes, and with bitterness or simple resentment, throw their convictions in our faces as if they were a single question: What good is literature?
Some wield this kind of philosophical question not as an analytical instrument but as a mechanical shovel, to slowly widen a tomb full of living corpses.
The gravediggers are old acquaintances. They live or pretend to live, but they are always clinging to the throne of time. Up or down, there they go repeating with voices of the dead their utilitarian superstitions about needs and progress.
How to respond about the uselessness of literature depends on what you comprehend to be useful and not on the literature itself. How useful is the epitaph, the tombstone carved, a reconciliation, sex with love, farewell, tears, laughter, coffee? How useful is football, television programs, photographs that are traded on social networks, racing horses, whiskey, diamonds, thirty pieces of Judas and the repentance?
There are very few who seriously wonder what good is football or the greed of Madoff. There are but a few people (or they have not had enough time) who question or wonder, “What good is literature?” Soccer and football are at best, naïve. They have frequently been accomplices of puppeteers and gravediggers.
Literature, if it has not been an accomplice of puppeteers, has just been literature. Its critics do not refer to the respectable business of bestsellers or of prefabricated emotions. No one has ever asked so insistently, “what good is good business?” Critics of literature, deep down, are not concerned with this type of literature. They are concerned with something else. They worry about literature.
The best Olympic athletes have shown us how much the human body may withstand. Formula One racers as well, although borrowing some tricks. The same with the astronauts who put their first steps on the moon, the shovel that builds also destroys.
The same way, the great writers throughout history have shown how far and deep human experience, (what really matters, what really exists) the vertigo of the highest and deepest ideas and emotions, can go.
For gravediggers only the shovel is useful. For the living dead too.
For others who have not forgotten their status as human beings who dare to go beyond the narrow confines of their own primitive individual experience, for the condemned who roam the mass graves but have regained the passion and dignity of human beings, for them it is literature.
Then, yes, we can say literature is good for many things. But, because we know that our inquisitors of the day are most interested in profits and benefits, we should remind them that a narrow spirit can hardly shelter a great intelligence. A great intelligence trapped within a narrow spirit sooner or later chokes. Or it becomes spiteful and vicious. But, of course, a great intelligence, spiteful and vicious, can hardly understand this. Much less, then, when it is not even a great intelligence.
HEAD-SHRINKING JOURNALISM
By the nineties, yet still in the twentieth century, I used to write for five or six hours at a time on a Czech typewriter I had bought for the price of scrap. I had found it at a Sunday fair called Tristan Narvaja, in Montevideo, something like the Madrid street fair Feria del Rastro or some marché aux Puces in Paris. In that lonely student room that faced an alley in the Old City, I wrote and rewrote the same chapter of a novel four or five times. The hardest part was always reducing the number of words. At least, it was that part of the literary craft that consumed me the most. Nevertheless, I did it with passion, pleasure, and without any urgency, since at that time I did not write for a publication.
When I published my first novel, Memorias de un desaparecido, it was partly the result of the chaotic struggle between obsessions, superstitions, and personal hallucinations with the almost impossible phenomenon of communication in a phantasmagoric world, which normally is very significant for oneself but not for the rest. I am sure that if I have managed to communicate with others using or usurping the sacred art of literature, it was thanks to successive mutilations: communication of the deepest emotions only occurs in a narrow space between one’s own follies and the particularities of others.
Thanks to this little novel, in a few months I met several young journalists whose friendship I retain to the present day. One day, one of them asked me to write an article on the subject of a conversation we had had, warning me that he only had space for just four thousand words. I never imagined that, for the misery of so many readers, that one would be the first article of many hundreds I have published to date. Occasionally I find that many of them have been republished in newspapers and magazines, sometimes erroneously signed by others. I usually just need to read two sentences to see if I or someone else wrote it, even when it is a fifteen-year-old article. I normally always excuse these errors but I strongly object, with some success, when I find my name on items that I never wrote. It is not good to kidnap merits or take the blame for the follies of others.
At the end of the century, you could still find short articles of four or five thousand words in nonacademic publications. Soon I could feel, beyond just understanding, the educational benefit of reducing long essays to this number, which at first seemed so greedy.
Within the first three or four years of this century, publishers had modified their typical word count from 4,000 to 2,000. I remember a major Mexican newspaper that once returned my usual weekly article because it surpassed the limit of 1,800 words. They kindly suggested that I reduce it to that number. So I did, sure that brevity is a form of kindness, and continued publishing there and in other newspapers of the continent, which apparently felt more comfortable with the new format.
A few years later, the sacred number had shrunk to 1,200, which coincided again with the standard of the entire continent, and one or two years later it reached the milestone of one thousand words.
Not long ago, one of the world’s most-read media outlets asked me on four separate occasions to reduce an article to 800 words. The first time, I sent an article of a thousand words. They said I should make an effort to trim it down to 850. I sent another 900-word piece, assuming some flexibility from them. Rejected. Normally, I would have given up on sending another version, but I was very interested in publishing the article in question because its subject matter was near and dear to me. Pained, I mutilated it again to make it 850 words. Naturally, it was published.
To date, the float level of op-eds walks the 800-word limit, and dis-counting.
Now, except for the brochures and pamphlets that fill our mailboxes every day and bestsellers sold by the kilogram, this dramatic, unlimited reduction of texts in the current media is not due to a space issue, as in the times since the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, for convent scribes, incunabula, heretics’ hermeneutics, the French encyclopédistes, and all paper periodicals from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. It is due to the new reader.
I do not intend to propose Being and Nothingness by Sartre as a reading model, but I do recommend it at least as an intellectual exercise. The problem is that every day we have more writing to pay attention to. Almost all are distractions; nearly all are failed stimuli. We do not have more options than before; that is patently false. We just have more distractions and, consequently, more need to interrupt everything right after we start it.
But the day of every man and woman still has twenty-four hours. The same twenty-four hours a reader of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Ernesto Sabato had. Therefore, we have the same time to deal with more things and get to the bottom of them.
I am afraid that this Jivaroan head-shrinking practice that affects literature is not due to the quality of the writings, but to the shortcomings of the new reader (apart from a blind pride and self-indulgency, almost always justified with the generational excuse that prevents them from expressing any self-criticism); not due to the art of synthesis but of mutilation.
I fear that this exercise of reduction will soon become an effort to stretch an idea down to 144 characters. Possibly just 10 or 20. Probably the New Thought movement could manage quite well with a couple of emoticons. :/
HUMANISM, THE WEST’S LAST GREAT UTOPIA
One of the characteristics of conservative thought throughout modern history has been to see the world as a collection of more or less independent, isolated, and incompatible compartments. In its discourse, this is simplified in a unique dividing line: God and the devil, us and them, the true men and the barbaric ones. In its practice, the old obsession with borders of every kind is repeated: political, geographic, social, class, gender, etc. These thick walls are raised with the successive accumulation of two parts fear and one part safety.
Translated into a postmodern language, this need for borders and shields is recycled and sold as micropolitics, which is to say, a fragmented thinking (propaganda) and a localist affirmation of social problems in opposition to a more global and structural vision of the Modern Era gone by.
These regions are mental, cultural, religious, economic and political, which is why they find themselves in conflict with humanistic principles that prescribe the recognition of diversity at the same time as an implicit equality on the deepest and most valuable level of the present chaos. On the basis of this implicit principle arose the aspiration to sovereignty of the states some centuries ago: even between two kings, there could be no submissive relationship; between two sovereigns there could only be agreements, not obedience. The wisdom of this principle was extended to the nations, taking written form in the first constitution of the United States. Recognizing common men and women as subjects of law (“We the people…”) was the response to personal and class-based absolutisms, summed up in the outburst of Luis XIV, “l’Etat c’est Moi.” Later, the humanist idealism of the first draft of that constitution was relativized, excluding the progressive utopia of abolishing slavery.
Conservative thought, on the other hand, traditionally has proceeded in an inverse form: if the regions are all different, then there are some that are better than others. This last observation would be acceptable for humanism if it did not contain explicitly one of the basic principles of conservative thought: our island, our bastion is always the best. Moreover: our region is the region chosen by God and, therefore, it should prevail at any price. We know it because our leaders receive in their dreams the divine word. Others, when they dream, are delirious.
Thus, the world is a permanent competition that translates into mutual threats and, finally, into war. The only option for the survival of the best, of the strongest, of the island chosen by God is to vanquish, annihilate the other. There is nothing strange in the fact that conservatives throughout the world define themselves as religious individuals and, at the same time, they are the principal defenders of weaponry, whether personal or governmental. It is, precisely, the only thing they tolerate about the State: the power to organize a great army in which to place all the honor of a nation. Health and education, in contrast, must be “personal responsibilities” and not a tax burden on the wealthiest. According to this logic, we owe our lives to the soldiers, not to the doctors, just like the workers owe their daily bread to the rich
At the same time that conservatives hate Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, they are radical partisans of the law of the survival of the fittest, not applied to all species but to men and women, to countries and societies of all kinds. What is more Darwinian than the roots of corporations and capitalism?
For the suspiciously celebrated professor of Harvard, Samuel Huntington, “imperialism is the logic and necessary consequence of universalism.” For us humanists, no: imperialism is just the arrogance of one region that imposes itself by force on the rest, it is the annihilation of that universality, it is the imposition of uniformity in the name of universality.
Humanist universality is something else: it is the progressive maturation of a consciousness of liberation from physical, moral and intellectual slavery, of both the oppressed and the oppressor in the final instant. And there can be no full consciousness if it is not global: one region is not liberated by oppressing the others, woman is not liberated by oppressing man, and so on. With a certain lucidity but without moral reaction, Huntington himself reminds us: “The West did not conquer the world through the superiority of its ideas, values or religion, but through its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners tend to forget this fact, non-Westerners never forget it.”
Conservative thought also differs from progressive thought because of its conception of history: if for the one history is inevitably degraded (as in the ancient religious conception or in the conception of the five metals of Hesiod) for the other it is a process of advancement or of evolution. If for one we live in the best of all possible worlds, although always threatened by changes, for the other the world is far from being the image of paradise and justice, for which reason individual happiness is not possible in the midst of others’ pain.
For progressive humanism there are no healthy individuals in a sick society, just as there is no healthy society that includes sick individuals. A healthy man is not possible with a grave problem of the liver or in the heart, just like a healthy heart is not possible in a depressed or schizophrenic man. Although a rich man is defined by his difference from the poor, nobody is truly rich when surrounded by poverty.
Humanism, as we conceive of it here, is the integrative evolution of human consciousness that transcends cultural differences. The clash of civilizations, the wars stimulated by sectarian, tribal and nationalist interests can only be viewed as the defects of that geo-psychology.
Now, we should recognize that the magnificent paradox of humanism is double: 1) it consisted of a movement that in great measure arose from the Catholic religious orders of the 14th century and later discovered a secular dimension of the human creature, and in addition 2) was a movement which in principle revalorized the dimension of man as an individual in order to achieve, in the 20th century, the discovery of society in its fullest sense.
I refer, on this point, to the conception of the individual as opposed to individuality, to the alienation of man and woman in society. If the mystics of the 14th century focused on their self as a form of liberation, the liberation movements of the 20th century, although apparently failed, discovered that that attitude of the monastery was not moral from the moment it became selfish: one cannot be fully happy in a world filled with pain. Unless it is the happiness of the indifferent. But it is not due to some type of indifference toward another’s pain that morality of any kind is defined in any part of the world. Even monasteries and the most closed communities, traditionally have been given the luxury of separation from the sinful world thanks to subsidies and quotas that originated from the sweat of the brow of sinners. The Amish in the United States, for example, who today use horses so as not to contaminate themselves with the automotive industry, are surrounded by materials that have come to them, in one form or another, through a long mechanical process and often from the exploitation of their fellow man. We ourselves, who are scandalized by the exploitation of children in the textile mills of India or on plantations in Africa and Latin America, consume, in one form or another, those products. Orthopraxy would not eliminate the injustices of the world—according to our humanist vision—but we cannot renounce or distort that conscience in order to wash away our regrets. If we no longer expect that a redemptive revolution will change reality so that the latter then changes consciences, we must still try, nonetheless, not to lose collective and global conscience in order to sustain a progressive change, authored by nations and not by a small number of enlightened people.
According to our vision, which we identify with the latest stage of humanism, the individual of conscience cannot avoid social commitment: to change society so that the latter may give birth, at each step, to a new, morally superior individual. The latest humanism evolves in this new utopian dimension and radicalizes some of the principles of the Modern Era gone by, such as the rebellion of the masses. Which is why we can formulate the dilemma: it is not a matter of left or right but of forward or backward. It is not a matter of choosing between religion or secularism. It is a matter of a tension between humanism and tribalism, between a diverse and unitary conception of humanity and another, opposed one: the fragmented and hierarchical vision whose purpose is to prevail, to impose the values of one tribe on the others and at the same time to deny any kind of evolution.
This is the root of the modern and postmodern conflict. Both The End of History and The Clash of Civilizations attempt to cover up what we understand to be the true problem: there is no dichotomy between East and West, between us and them, only between the radicalization of humanism (in its historical sense) and the conservative reaction that still holds world power, although in retreat—and thus its violence.
TEN LASHES AGAINST HUMANISM
A minor tradition in conservative thought is the definition of the dialectical adversary as mentally deficient and lacking in morality. As this never constitutes an argument, the outburst is covered up with some fragmented and repetitious reasoning, proper to the postmodern thought of political propaganda. It is no accident that in Latin America other writers repeat the US experience, with books like Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano (Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, 1996) or making up lists about Los diez estúpidos más estúpidos de América Latina (The Top Ten Stupid People in Latin America). A list that is usually headed up, with elegant indifference, by our friend, the phoenix Eduardo Galeano. They have killed him off so many times he has grown accustomed to being reborn.
As a general rule, the lists of the ten stupidest people in the United States tend to be headed up by intellectuals. The reason for this particularity was offered some time ago by a military officer of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) who complained to the television cameras about the protesters marching through the streets of Buenos Aires: “I am not so suspicious of the workers, because they are always busy with work; I am suspicious of the students because with too much free time they spend it thinking. And you know, Mr. Journalist, that too much thinking is dangerous.” Which was consistent with the previous project of General Onganía (1966-1970) of expelling all the intellectuals in order to fix Argentina’s problems.
Not long ago, Doug Hagin, in the image of the famous television program Dave’s Top Ten, concocted his own list of The Top Ten List of Stupid Leftist Ideals. If we attempt to de-simplify the problem by removing the political label, we will see that each accusation against the so-called US leftists is, in reality, an assault on various humanist principles.
10: Environmentalism. According to the author, leftists do not stop at a reasonable point of conservation.
Obviously the definition of what is reasonable or not, depends on the economic interests of the moment. Like any conservative, he holds fast to the idea that the theory of Global Warming is only a theory, like the theory of evolution: there are no proofs that God did not create the skeletons of dinosaurs and other species and strew them about, simply in order to confuse the scientists and thereby test their faith. The conservative mentality, heroically inalterable, could never imagine that the oceans might behave progressively, beyond a reasonable level.
9: It takes a village to raise a child. The author denies it: the problem is that leftists have always thought collectively. Since they don’t believe in individualism they trust that children’s education must be carried out in society.
In contrast, reactionary thought trusts more in islands, in social autism, than in suspect humanity. According to this reasoning of a medieval aristocrat, a rich man can be rich surrounded by misery, a child can become a moral man and ascend to heaven without contaminating himself with the sin of his society. Society, the masses, only serves to allow the moral man to demonstrate his compassion by donating to the needy what he has left over—and discounting it from his taxes.
8: Children are incapable of handling stress. For which reason they cannot be corrected by their teachers with red ink or cannot confront the cruel parts of history.
The author is correct in observing that seeing what is disagreeable as an infant prepares children for a world that is not pleasant. Nonetheless, some compassionate conservatives exaggerate a little by dressing their children in military uniforms and giving them toys that, even though they only shoot laser lights, look very much like weapons with laser lights that fire something else at similar targets (and at black people).
7: Competition is bad. For the author, no: the fact that some win means that others lose, but this dynamic leads us to greatness.
He does not explain whether there exists here the “reasonable limit” of which he spoke before or whether he is referring to the hated theory of evolution which establishes the survival of the strongest in the savage world. Nor does he clarify to which greatness he refers, whether it is that of the slave on the prosperous cotton plantation or the size of the plantation. He does not take into account, of course, any kind of society based on solidarity and liberated from the neurosis of competition.
6: Health is a civil right. Not for the author: health is part of personal responsibility.
This argument is repeated by those who deny the need for a universal health care system and, at the same time, do not propose privatizing the police, and much less the army. Nobody pays the police after calling 911, which is reasonable. If an attacker shoots us in the head, we will not pay anything for his capture, but if we are poor we will end up in bankruptcy so that a team of doctors can save our life. One deduces that, according to this logic, a thief who robs a house represents a social illness, but an epidemic is nothing more than a bunch of irresponsible individuals who do not affect the rest of society. What is never taken into account is that collective solidarity is one of the highest forms of individual responsibility.
5: Wealth is bad. According to the author, leftists want to penalize the success of the wealthy with taxes in order to give their wealth to the federal government so that it can be spent irresponsibly helping out those who are not so successful.
That is to say, workers owe their daily bread to the rich. Earning a living with the sweat of one’s brow is a punishment handed down by those successful people who have no need to work. There is a reason why physical beauty has been historically associated with the changing but always leisurely habits of the aristocracy. There is a reason why in the happy world of Walt Disney there are no workers; happiness is buried in some treasure chest filled with gold coins. For the same reason, it is necessary to not squander tax monies on education and on health. The millions spent on armies around the world are not a concern, because they are part of the investment that States responsibly make in order to maintain the success of the wealthy and the dream of glory for the poor.
4: There is an unbridled racism that will only be resolved with tolerance. No: leftists see race relations through the prism of pessimism. But race is not important for most of us, just for them.
That is to say, like in the fiction of global warming, if a conservative does not think about something or someone, that something or someone does not exist. De las Casas, Lincoln and Martin Luther King fought against racism ignorantly. If the humanists would stop thinking about the world, we would be happier because others’ suffering would not exist, and there would be no heartless thieves who steal from the compassionate rich.
3: Abortion. In order to avoid personal responsibility, leftists support the idea of murdering the unborn.
The mass murder of the already born is also part of individual responsibility, according to televised right-wing thought, even though sometimes it is called heroism and patriotism. Only when it benefits our island. If we make a mistake when suppressing a people we avoid responsibility by talking about abortion. A double moral transaction based on a double standard morality.
2: Guns are bad. Leftists hate guns and hate those who want to defend themselves. Leftists, in contrast, think that this defense should be done by the State. Once again they do not want to take responsibility for themselves.
That is to say, attackers, underage gang members, students who shoot up high schools, drug traffickers and other members of the syndicate exercise their right to defend their own interests as individuals and as corporations. Nobody distrusts the State and trusts in their own responsibility more than they do. It goes without saying that armies, according to this kind of reasoning, are the main part of that responsible defense carried out by the irresponsible State.
1: Placating evil ensures Peace. Leftists throughout history have wanted to appease the Nazis, dictators and terrorists.
The wisdom of the author does not extend to considering that many leftists have been consciously in favor of violence, and as an example it would be sufficient to remember Ernesto Che Guevara. Even though it might represent the violence of the slave, not the violence of the master. It is true, conservatives have not appeased dictators: at least in Latin America, they have nurtured them. In the end, the latter also have always been members of the Gun Club, and in fact were subject to very good deals in the name of security. Nazis, dictators and terrorists of every kind, with that tendency toward ideological simplification, would also agree with the final bit of reasoning on the list: “leftists do not understand that sometimes violence is the only solution. Evil exists and should be eradicated.” And, finally: “We will kill it [the Evil], or it will kill us, it is that simple. We will kill Evil, or Evil will kill us; the only thing simpler than this is left-wing thought.”
Word of Power.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING CALLED AN IDIOT
In the fall of 2006, a gentleman recommended that I read a new book about idiocy. I believe it was called The Return of the Idiot, The Idiot Returns, or something like that. I told him that I had read a similar book ten years ago, titled Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.
“What did you think?” the man asked me narrowing his eyes, kind of scrutinizing my reaction, kind of measuring the time it took me to respond. I always take a few seconds to respond. I also like to observe the things around me, take a healthy distance, control the temptation to exercise my freedom and, kindly, go after the guy.
“What did I think? Entertaining. A famous writer who uses his fists against his colleagues as his principal dialectical weapon when he has them within reach, said that it was a book with a lot of humor, edifying… I would not say so much. Entertaining is sufficient. Clearly there are better books.”
“Yes, that was the father of one of the authors, the Nobel Vargas Llosa.”
“Mario, he is still called Mario.”
“Fine, but what did you think about the book?” he insisted anxiously.
Perhaps he was not so interested in my opinion as he was in his own.
“Someone asked me the same question ten years ago”, I recalled. “I thought it deserved to be a best seller.”
“That’s what I said. And it was, it was; in effect, it was a best seller. You realized that pretty quick, like me.
“It wasn’t so difficult. In the first place, it was written by experts on the topic.”
“Undoubtedly”, he interrupted, with contagious enthusiasm.
“Who better to write about idiocy, am I right? Second, the authors are staunch defenders of the market, above all else. I sell, I consume, therefore I am. What other merit could they have but to turn a book into a sales success? If it were an excellent book with limited sales it would be a contradiction. I suppose that for the publisher it’s also not a contradiction that they have sold so many books on the Idiot Continent, right? In the intelligent and successful countries it did not have the same reception.”
For some reason the man in the red tie sensed some doubts on my part about the virtues of his favorite books. That meant, for him, a declaration of war or something of the kind. I made a friendly gesture to bid farewell, but he did not allow me to place my hand on his shoulder.
“You must be one of those who defend those idiotic ideas of which those books speak. It is incredible that a cultured and educated man like yourself could uphold those stupidities.”
“Could it be that too much studying and researching cause damage?” I asked.
“No, studying doesn’t do damage, of course not. The problem is that you are separated from reality, you don’t know what it is to live like a construction worker or business manager, like us.”
“Nonetheless, there are construction workers and business managers who think radically differently from you. Might there not be another factor? That is, for example, could it be that those who have ideas like yours are more intelligent?”
“Ah, yes, that must be…”
His euphoria had reached climax. I was going to leave him with that little vanity, but I couldn’t contain myself. I thought out loud:
“It’s quite strange. The most intelligent people don’t need idiots like me to realize such obvious things, no?”
“Negative, sir. Negative.”
After all, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize of Literature and left his wife for the famous Filipino model Isabel Preysler.
THE REBELLION OF THE READERS, KEY TO OUR CENTURY
Among the most frequented sites for tourists in Europe are the Gothic cathedrals. Gothic spaces, so different from the Romanesque of centuries before, tend to impress us through the subtlety of their aesthetic, something they share with the ancient architecture of the old Arab empire. Perhaps what is most overlooked is the reason for the reliefs on the facades. Although the Bible condemns the custom of representing human figures, these abound on the stones, on the walls and on the stained glass. The reason is, more than aesthetic, symbolic and narrative.
In a culture of illiterates, orality was the mainstay of communication, of history and of social control. Although Christianity was based on the Scriptures, writing was least abundant. Just as in our current culture, social power was constructed on the basis of written culture, while the working classes had to resign themselves to listening. Books were not only rare, almost original pieces, but were jealously guarded by those who administered political power and the politics of God. Writing and reading were nearly exclusively the patrimony of the nobility; listening and obeying was the function of the masses. That is to say, the nobility was always noble because the vulgate was very vulgar. For the same reason, the masses, illiterate, went every Sunday to listen to the priest read and interpret sacred texts at his whim—the official whim—and confirm the truth of these interpretations in another kind of visual interpretation: the icons and relief sculptures that illustrated the sacred history on the walls of stone.
The oral culture of the Middle Ages begins to change in that moment we call Humanism and that is more commonly taught as the Renaissance. The demand for written texts is accelerated long before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450. In fact, Gutenberg did not invent the printing press, but a technique for movable type that accelerated even more this process of reproduction of texts and massification of readers. The invention was a technical response to a historical need. This is the century of the emigration of Turkish and Greek scholars to Italy, of the travel by Europeans to the Middle East without the blindness of a new crusade. Perhaps, it is also the moment in which Western and Christian culture turns toward the humanism that survives today, while Islamic culture, which had been characterized by this same humanism and by plurality of non-religious knowledge, makes an inverse, reactionary turn.
The following century, the 16th, would be the century of the Protestant Reform. Although centuries later it would become a conservative force, it birth—like the birth of all religion—arises from a rebellion against authority. In this case, against the authority of the Vatican. Luther, however, is not the first to exercise this rebellion; the humanist Catholics themselves were disillusioned and in disagreement with the arbitrariness of the Church’s political power. This disagreement was justified by the corruption of the Vatican, but it is likely that the difference was rooted in a new way of perceiving an old theocratic order.
Protestantism, as the word itself says, is—was—a disobedient response to an established power. One of its particularities was the radicalization of written culture over oral culture, the independence of the reader instead of the obedient listener. Not only was the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the sacred texts, questioned; the authority of the sermon moved to the direct, or almost direct, reading of the sacred text that had been translated into vulgar languages, the languages of the people. The use of a dead language like Latin confirmed the hermetic elitism of religion (philosophy and science would abandon this usage long before). From this moment on, the oral tradition of Catholicism will continually lose strength and authority. It will have, nevertheless, several rebirths, especially in Franco’s Spain. Professor of ethics José Luis Aranguren, for example, who made a number of progressive historical observations, was not free from the strong tradition that surrounded him. In Catolicismo y protestantismo como formas de existencia (Catholicism and Protestantism as Forms of Existence) he was explicit: “Christianity should not be a ‘reader’ but a ‘listener’ of the Word, and ‘hearing it’ is as much as ‘living it.’” (1952)
We can understand that the culture of orality and obedience had a revival with the invention of the radio and of television. Let’s remember that the radio was the principal instrument of the Nazis in Germany of the pre-war period. Film and other techniques of spectacle were also important, although in lesser measure. Almost nobody had read that mediocre little book called Mein Campf (its original title was Against Lying, Stupidity and Cowardice) but everyone participated in the media explosion that was produced with the expansion of radio. During the entire 20th century, first film and later television were the omnipresent channels of US culture. Because of them, not only was an aesthetic modeled but, through this aesthetic, an ethics and an ideology, the capitalist ideology.
In great measure, we can consider the 20th century to be a regression to the culture of the cathedrals: orality and the use of the image as means for narrating history, the present and the future. News media, more than informative, have been and continue to be formative of opinion, true pulpits—in form and in content—that describe and interpret a reality that is difficult to question. The idea of the objective camera is almost uncontestable, much like in the Middle Ages when no one or very few opposed the true existence of demons and fantastical stories represented on the stones of the cathedrals.
In a society where the governments depend on popular support, the creation and manipulation of public opinion is more important and must be more sophisticated than in a crude dictatorship. It is for this reason that television news media have become a battlefield where only one side is armed. If the main weapons in this war are the radio and television channels, their munitions are the ideolexicons. For example, the ideolexicon radical, which is encountered with a negative value, must always be applied, by association and repetition, to the opponent. What is paradoxical is that radical thought is condemned—all serious thought is radical—at the same time that a radical action is promoted against that supposed radicalism. That is to say, one stigmatizes the critics that go beyond politically correct thinking when these critics point out the violence of a radical action, such as a war, a coup d’etat, the militarization of a society, etc. In the old dictatorships of our America, for example, the custom was to persecute and assassinate every journalist, priest, activist or unionist identified as radical. To protest or throw stones was the behavior of radicals; torturing and killing in a systematic manner was the main resource of the moderates. Today, throughout the world, official discourse speaks of radicals when referring to anyone who disagrees with official ideology.
Nothing in history happens by chance, even though causes are located more in the future than in the past. It is not by accident that today we are entering into a new era of written culture that is, in great measure, the main instrument of intellectual disobedience of the nations. Two centuries ago reading meant a lecture or sermon from the pulpit; today it is the opposite: to read means an effort at interpretation, and a text is no longer only a piece of writing but any symbolic organization of reality that transmits and conceals values and meanings.
One of the principal physical platforms for that new attitude is the Internet, and its procedure consists of beginning to rewrite history at the margins of the traditional media of visual imposition. Its chaos is only apparent. Although the Intenet also includes images and sounds, these are no longer products that are received but symbols that are searched for and produced in an exercise of reading.
In the measure that the economic powers that be, corporations of all kinds, lose their monopoly on the production of works of art—like film—or the production of that other genre of school desk fiction, the daily sermon where the meaning of reality is managed—the so-called news media—individuals and nations begin to develop a more critical awareness, which naturally is a disobedient state of mind. Perhaps in the future, we might even be speaking of the end of national empires and the inefficacy of military force. This new culture leads to a progressive inversion of social control: top-down control is converted to the more democratic control from the bottom up. The so-called democratic governments and the old style dictatorships do not tolerate this because they are democratic or benevolent but because direct censorship of a process that is unstoppable is not convenient to them. They can only limit themselves to reacting and delaying as long as possible, by recourse to the old tool of physical violence, the downfall of their sectarian empires.
WHAT IS AN IDEOLEXICON?
I have been asked several times to define what I mean by ideolexicon. I have never given the same response, but that is not due to the idea being ambiguous or undefined but quite the contrary.
Although this term is a neologism, I do not believe that at root the idea is original: everything that occurs to us others have already intuited before. It is sufficient to read those ancient Greeks in order to discover there the first indications of Darwin’s theory of evolution (Empedocles), Dalton or Bohr’s atoms (Leucippius or Democritus), Einstein’s mass-energy equivalency (Heraclitus), modern epistemology (idem), Freud’s bicephalic psyche (Plato), Derrida or Lyotard’s poststructuralism (the Sophists), etc.
I suspect that the Italian Antonio Gramsci could have broadened the ideolexicon concept in the 1930s (perhaps he had already done so in his Quaderni del carcere, although I have not been able to find that precise moment among the more than two thousand pages of this disarticulated work). One of Gramsci’s observations with regard to Marxism was the warning of a certain autonomy of the superstructure. That is, if previously it was understood that the infrastructure (the productive, economic order) determined super-structural reality (culture in general), later it was seen that the process could not only be the inverse (Max Weber) but simultaneous or dialectical (Althusser). For me, examples of the first are slavery, modern education, feminism, etc. Humanist ideals that condemned slavery existed centuries before they would be transformed into a social precept. A Marxist explanation is immediate: only when the industry of the developed countries (England and the northern United States) found an economic problem with the slavery system was the new morality (and practice) imposed. The same with universal education: the uniformity of the children’s tunics, the rigorous compliance with schedules do nothing more than to adapt the future worker to the discipline of industry (or the army), the culture of standardization. For which reason today the universities and education in general have begun a reverse process of de-uniformization. Feminist demands are also ancient (and part of humanism), but they do not become a moral exigency until capitalist society and the industrialized communist societies needed new workers and, above all, new female wage workers.
Anyway, we can understand that, although these advances have not been obtained by an ethical conscience but by initial interests of the oppressors (like the universal vote for a people easily manipulable by the caudillo and propaganda), at any rate the road travelled “forward” is not walked backward so easily, even if those interests that made it possible were to change. Power is never absolute; it always must make concessions in order to maintain itself.
In our time, even though the use of brute force like in the times of Attila is not entirely looked down upon, it is no longer possible to lay waste to peoples and oppress other men and women without a legitimation. Much less in a global society that, though still submersed in the traditional networks of information, progressively tends to snatch from sectarian powers the narration of its own history. These legitimations of power may be farcical (they still trust in the fragile memory of obedient nations, or nations terrified by physical and moral violence), but their strength is the power of semantic manipulation to produce a determined reality: when a bomb is dropped from a plane and tens of innocents die, terms are used like “defense,” “liberation,” “collateral effects,” etc. If the same bomb is placed by an individual in a market and it kills the same quantity of innocents, that act is defined as “terrorist,” “barbaric,” “murderous,” etc. From the other side, the ideolexicons will be different: some are imperialists, other rebels or patriots.
In the 19th century, the Argentine D. F. Sarmiento defined José Artigas as “terrorist” (for others he was liberator, rebel), while the general Julio Argentino Roca became a military hero, in multiple bronze statues, because of the ethnic cleansing that his army carried out against the original owners of Patagonia (“There was no battle, it was a parade beneath the Patagonian sun and we achieved 1600 dead and another 10,000 of the rabble. It was the fate of a savage race that was already defeated,” informed the venerated general Roca).
