Neomedievalism E-Book

Jorge Majfud

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 375

Beschreibung

Jorge Majfud reflects once again on the economic, political, and cultural realities of recent years, with «an outsider's view from the center»: the culture of masks of the United States' cultural industries and national unconscious, the hyper-fragmentation of the contemporary individual, the construction of reality through social narratives, the narrative dictated by the major social powers of money and the social castes who have taken us steadily toward a new form of feudalism, one no longer based on ownership of the land but of finance capital. In all of the essays that comprise this book, one can see the urgency of responding to the historical moment, to the specific events that have occurred over the past two decades, but with an unflinching effort to contextualize events within their greater historical framework. Because, as the author asserts, forgetting is one of the principal weapons of moral, social, and, ultimately, military violence.

Leseprobe

NEOMEDIEVALISM

REFLECTIONSON THE POST-ENLIGHTENMENT ERA

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans

http://puv.uv.es/biblioteca-javier-coy-destudis-nord-americans.htmlhttp://bibliotecajaviercoy.com

Directora

Carme Manuel

NEOMEDIEVALISM

REFLECTIONSON THE POST-ENLIGHTENMENT ERA

Jorge Majfud

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Jorge Majfud

Neomedievalism: Reflections on the Post-EnlightenmentEra

Translated by Bruce Campbell

1ª edición de 2018

Reservados todos los derechosProhibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-317-2

Ilustración de la cubierta: Jorge OrricoDiseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de Valènciahttp://[email protected]

Index

INTRODUCTION

Tolerance is the wine of nations

RADICAL CULTURE

What Good Is Culture?

What good is literature, anyway?

Head-Shrinking Journalism

Humanism, the West’s Last Great Utopia

Ten Lashes Against Humanism

The Importance of Being Called an Idiot

The Rebellion of the Readers, Key to Our Century

What Is an Ideolexicon?

Virginia Tech: an ideolexical analysis of a tragedy

The Terrible Innocence of Art

Puppets, Puppet Masters, and Closet Liberations

Intellectual Capital

Men of the Cybernetic Caves

Power and the Intellectuals

Are We Really Indebted to Capitalism for Modernity?

PROPAGANDA AND POPULAR CULTURE

Where Does the Voice of the People Come From?

The Intra-national Colonization of Patriotisms

An Imperial Democracy

US Politics and Economics: the Patriotism of the Rich

Osama and the Dangers of Tunnel Vision

Ron Paul and Right-Wing Anarchism

Hurricane Katrina and the Hyperreality of the Image

If Latin America Had Been a British Enterprise

On How to Topple an Empire

Propaganda and the Myth of Reconquest

The Culture of Hate

Rock Democracies, Paper Freedoms, Scissors Securities

The Repressed History of the United States

Patriarchy with a Woman’s Face

The Pandemic of Consumerism

RELIGION AND OTHER EXCUSES

The Slow Suicide of the West

The Privatization of God

The Jesus the Emperors Kidnapped

Do You Believe in God? Yes or No

The Imperfect Sex. Why Is Sor Juana Not a Saint?

LATIN AMERICA

Why the name “Latin America”?

Violence of the Master, Violence of the Slave

One Bolivia, White and Wealthy

The Fragments of the Latin American Union

Respect Without Rights: The Privatization of Morality

Honduras Against History

The Illegitimate Constitution

The Devils of Haiti

Latin and Latino American Immigration

EDUARDO GALEANO

The Open Eyes of Latin America

“The Hoariest of Latin American Conspiracy Theorists”

Past, Present, and Future: Interview with Eduardo Galeano

The Open Veins of Eduardo Galeano

NOAM CHOMSKY

Rescuing Memory. Conversations with Noam Chomsky

IN THE MANNER OF FICTION

The Walled Society

The Age of Barbaria

Introduction

TOLERANCE IS THE WINE OF NATIONS

My father was the fourth or fifth child of twelve born in Uruguay to a Lebanese immigrant couple, she being Christian and he probably too. He lived his entire childhood in misery, digging up food from the field to eat, setting his bare feet in the cow manure to relieve the frosty early morning cold, fighting with other poor people for the bones discarded by the Tacuarembó slaughterhouse.

He was a schoolboy when he was already working with his siblings mixing mortar to make bricks or planting vegetables that later he would sell in town. As one brother would come home from school, the other would meet him at the entrance of the town in order to get his shoes to wear.

Eventually, at some point in the 1950s, my father successfully made his way to the capital city to study carpentry and radiotelephony and upon returning to his town started Fabrica de Muebles (Furniture Factory), as he called it, in addition to starting various businesses and founding a Rotary Club and some banking cooperatives, with some success. During the day he worked in his pharmacy or looked for some lost cow in one of his fields, and at night, for 30 years, he taught classes at the technical school. His colleagues laughed at his ability to fall asleep sitting or even standing up.

“If I could go back in life, I would work less and enjoy things more,” was one of the last things he told me on the phone, not out of regret but to give me a new piece of advice, which ended up being his last. Our last conversation was lighthearted because one never knows the meaning of a moment.

One day after his funeral, as I walked through the old corners of the city of my past lives, as if taking my sadness out for a walk with the secret hope of losing it at some intersection, I crossed paths with many people, too many for the moment, most of whom I did not know or was not able to recognize after so many years. One of them told me: “I had the best time of my life when I worked for your father. The man knew how to set up projects in any city and we all went together.”

“I was a student of your father,” another gentleman, whom I did recognize from some years back, told me. “I was a lost boy when I met him. He gave me my first job and showed me how to be part of a team. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be who I am today nor would I have the family that I have.”

My perspective, like anybody’s, is not neutral. In my view he was an austere man, generous with his own family and others, even though many would think the opposite. “For some people I am a good guy,” he said, “and for others I am surely a wretch. You can't be okay with both God and the devil.” It was not difficult to find faults in him, not because he emphasized this in some particular human way but because it is never difficult to find faults in others. If they say there was once a perfect guy, who went around preaching democratic love even for his enemies and they crucified him anyway, what do you expect?

This was even more evident in the world of ideological passions. We always argued about politics. He always clung to his conservative principles and I always insisted on a rebuttal. Our arguments were intense but we always resolved them in a simple way: “Well, I can see now that we are not going to reach an agreement,” he said, “let’s go have some wine then.”

Of course, someone might say that tolerance is not the wine but the opium of the people. It is no less true that its absence is the death of nations and, even worse, the frustration of each one of the concrete lives that make up that mythological abstraction.

I loved him a lot, like any good son can love a good father. But a son never loves as much as a father does. It takes a whole lifetime to come to this realization; some, even, need two lifetimes to understand it and one more to begin to accept it. So, you can go about discovering other meanings in old memories, each one more profound than the last.

For example, in several political elections, the old man listed himself on the ballot for his party. I never voted for him. I remember my first time, at the end of the 1980s, I voted for an emerging ecological party. When I arrived home I told my father that I had not voted for him. As always, he took the news with a smile and told me that I had done well.

Now that he has died, I ask myself what in the hell was the point of all my idealistic honesty on that one election day. What was the purpose of all that petty cruelty? What good was that petty truth, that questionable honesty?

What was the point of any of it? I ask myself this while I stare at a pile of a hundred letters written in Arabic that his parents wrote and received almost a century ago. I don’t know what they say. I can only suspect that they are stories of love and heartbreak, of encounters and disagreements that my father never knew about because his family also hid from him their own frustrations, just as they hid from him all the secrets of a language that they only used in the depths of their two privates lives in a small earthen house, in the middle of a field that belonged to someone else and barely provided for survival.

What was the point of it all? I ask myself again. Then I look at my son looking out the window as I liked to do while my father worked at more useful things and I realize that I know the answer. The answer, not the truth. Because duty, what should be, is one thing, and what simply is is something else. There is no doubt about one and about the other, about the truth, probably no one even knows its name.

Radical 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