History

An Imperial Democracy

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Una democracia imperial (Spanish)

An Imperial Democracy

Jorge Majfud

Translated by Bruce Campbell

Judging by the documents that remain to us, Thucydides (460-396 B.C.) was the first philosopher in history to discover power as a human phenomenon and not as a virtue conferred by the heavens or demons. He was also aware of the principal value of money in defeating the enemy in any war. We can add another: Thucydides never believed in the principle that those with no trust in arguments are so fond of repeating in revisionist criticism: “I know what I am talking about because I lived it.” We once noted that this idea was easily destroyed with two contradictory observations by those who experienced the same event. Thucydides demonstrated it thusly: “Investigation has been laborious because the witnesses have not given the same versions of the same deeds, but according to their sympathies for some and for others or they followed the memory of each one.” (Ed. Gredos, Madrid 1990, p. 164)

According to Thucydides, in order for Sparta, the other great city state, to go to war against the dominant Athens, the Corinthians directed themselves to their assembly with a portrait of the great enemy democracy: “they [the Athenians] are innovators, resolute in the conception and execution of their projects; you tend to leave things as they are, to say nothing and to not even carry out that which is necessary” (236). Then: “exactly as it happens in techniques, novelties always impose themselves.” (238)

Hearing of this speech, the Athenian ambassadors responded with the following words: “by the very exercise of command we saw ourselves obligated from the beginning to take the empire into the present situation, first out of fear, then out of honor, and finally out of interest; and once we were already hated by the majority […] it did not seem safe to run the risk of letting go.” (244) The law that the weaker be oppressed by the stronger has always prevailed; we believe, besides, that we are worthy of this empire, and that we appeared so to you until now, calculating your interests, you set about invoking reasons of justice, reasons that no one has ever set forth who might obtain something by force in order to stop increasing their possessions. […] in any case, we believe that if others occupied our place, they would make perfectly clear how moderate we are”; (246) “if you were to defeat us and take control of the empire, you would quickly lose the sympathy which you have attracted thanks to the fear that we inspire.” (249)

Its pride provoked, the conservative and xenophobic Sparta decides to confront Athenian expansionism. The Athenians, convinced by Pericles, refuse to negotiate and face by themselves a war that leads them to catastrophe. “We should not lament for the houses and for the land – advises Pericles, repeating a well-known topic of the period – but for the people: these goods do not obtain men, but rather it is men who obtain goods.” (370)

Nonetheless, the war extends death over Greece. In a funeral speech, Pericles (Book II) gives us testimony of the ideals and representations of the ancient Greeks, which today we would call “humanist precepts.” Refering to the Spartan custom of expelling any foreigner from their land, Pericles finds a moral contrast: “our city is open to the whole world, and in no case do we turn to expulsions of foreigners” (451) In another speech he completes this ideological portrait, repeating ideas already formulated by other philosophers of Athens and which today’s conservatives have forgotten: “a city that progresses collectively turns out to be more useful to individual interests than another that has prosperity in each one of its citizens, but is being ruined as a state. Because a man whose private affairs go well, if his fatherland is destroyed, he goes equally to ruin with it, while he who is unfortunate in a fortunate city is saved much more easily.” (484)

But humanist egalitarian that Pericles was, he did not escape from oppressive patriotism. As if Greek foresight had become myopia by extending the gaze beyond the limits of his own homeland. Radical democracy at home becomes imperialism abroad: “Realize that she [Athens] enjoys the greatest renown among all men for not succumbing to disgrace and for having expended in war more lives and effort than any other; know that she also possesses the greatest power achieved until our days, whose memory, even though we now may come to cede a little (since everything has been born in order to diminish), will endure forever in future generations; it will be remembered that it is we Greeks who have exercised our dominion over the greatest number of Greeks, who have sustained the greatest wars against both coalitions and separate cities, and who have inhabited the richest city in every kind of resources and the largest. […] To be hated and prove a nuisance for the moment is what has always happened to those who have attempted to dominate others; but whomever exposes himself to envy for the most noble motives takes the correct decision.” (491)

In his critical introduction to this same Gredos edition, Julio Calogne Ruiz recalls that Sparta’s objective was “to put an end to the progressive increase of the Athenians’ markedly imperialist power. Given that all of Athens’ power came from the tributes of its subjects, the pretext that Sparta gave to go to war was the liberation of all Greek cities.” (20) Then he speculates: “many ordinary Athenians must have realized that their well-being basically depended on the continuity of domination over the allies without thinking about whether this was just or unjust.” (26)

The question of power in the Fifth Century is – continues Calogne Ruiz – the question of the imperialism of Athens. For three quarters of a century Athens is an empire and nothing in Athenian life can be removed from that reality.” (80)

Nonetheless, this reality, which at times is explicitly named by Thucydides, is never expressed as a central theme in the major works of ancient thought and literature.

In The World, the Text, and the Critic Edward Said, referring to the literature of recent centuries, reflects on the false political neutrality of culture and the so-called “absolute freedom” of literary creation: “What such ideas mask, mystify, is precisely the network binding writers to the State and to a world-wide ‘metropolitan’ imperialism that, at the moment they were writing, furnished them in the novelistic techniques of narration. […] What we must ask is why so few ‘great’ novelists deal directly with the major social and economic outside facts of their existence – colonialism and imperialism – and why, too, critics of the novel have continued to honor this remarkable silence.” (p. 176)

Jorge Majfud

The University of Georgia

Mayo, 2007

Monthy Review (New York)

One Bolivia, White and Wealthy

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Una sola Bolivia, blanca y próspera (Spanish)

 

One Bolivia, White and Wealthy

 

The rapid Conquest of Amerindia would have been impossible without the Mesoamerican and Andean cosmology. Otherwise two mature empires, with millions of inhabitants and brave armies would never have succumbed to the madness of a handful of Spaniards. But it was also possible due to the new adventurer and warrior spirit of the medieval culture of a Spanish Crown victorious in the Reconquest of Spain, and the new capitalist spirit of the Rennaissance. From a strictly military point of view, neither Cortés nor Pizarro would be remembered today if it had not been for the bad faith of two empires such as the Aztec of Moctezuma and the Incan of Atahualpa. Both knew they were illegitimate and this weighed upon them in a manner that it weighs upon no modern governor.

The Spaniards first conquered these imperial heads or crushed them and cut them off in order to replace them with puppet chiefs, privileging the old native aristocracy, a story that may seem very familiar to any peripheral nation of the 21st century.

The principal strategic legacy of this history was progressive social and geographic division. While at first the cultural revolution of the United States, based on utopian theories, was admired and then later simply its muscular power, which resulted from unions and annexations, the America of the south proceeded with the inverse method of divisions. Thus were destroyed the dreams of those today called liberators, like Simón Bolívar, José Artigas or San Martín. Thus Central America and South America exploded into the fragments of tiny nations. This fragmentation was convenient for the nascent empires of the Industrial Revolution and of the celebrated Creole caudillismo, whereby a chief representative of the feudal agrarian culture would impose himself above the law and humanist progress in order to rescue the prosperity of his class, which he confused with the prosperity of the new country. Paradoxically, as in the imperial democracy of the Athens of Pericles, both the British and American empires were administered differently, as representative democracies. Paradoxically, while the discourse of the wealthy classes in Latin America was imposing the ideolexicon “patriotism,” their practice consisted in serving foreign interests, their own as minority interests, and submitting to exploitation, expropriation and contempt a social majority that were strategically considered minorities.

In Bolivia the indigenous people were always a minority. Minority in the daily newspapers, in the universities, in the majority of Catholic schools, in the public image, in politics, in television. The problem stemmed from the fact that that minority was easily more than half of the invisible population. Somewhat like how today black men and women are called a minority in the southern United States, where they total more than fifty percent. To disguise that the fact that the Bolivian ruling class was the ethnic minority of a democratic population, one pretended that an indigenous person, in order to be one, had to wear feathers on their head and speak the Aymara of the 16th century, before the contamination of the colonial period. Since this phenomenon is impossible in any nation and in any moment of history, they were then denied Amerindian citizenship for the sin of impurity. For that, the best resource now consists of systematic mockery in well-publicized books: they mock those who would claim their Amerindian lineage for speaking Spanish and for doing so over the Internet or on a cellular telephone. By contrast, it is never demanded of a good Frenchman or of a traditional Japanese that they urinate behind an orange tree like in Versailles or that their woman walk behind them with her head lowered. Which is to say, the Amerindian peoples are out of place except in the museum and in dances for tourists. They have no right to progress, that thing which is not an invention of any developed nation but of Humanity throughout its history.

Bolivia’s recent separatist referenda – let’s dispense with the euphemism – are part of a long tradition, which demonstrates that the ability to retain the past is not the exclusive property of those who refuse to progress but those who consider themselves the vanguard of civilizing progress.

If medieval (which is to say, pre-humanist) cultures and ideologies defended until recently with blood in the eyes and in their political and religious sermons differences of class, of race, and of gender as part of nature or of divine right and now they have change their discourse, it is not because they have progressed thanks to their own tradition but despite that tradition. They have had no other recourse than to recognize and even try to appropriate ideolexicons like “freedom,” “equality,” “diversity,” “minority rights,” etc. in order to legitimate and extend a contrary practice. If democracy was an “invention of the devil” until the mid-20th century, according to this feudal mentality, today not even the most fascist would be capable of declaring it in a public square. On the contrary, their method consists of repeating this word in association with contrary muscular practices until it is emptied of meaning.

It is easy to point out why one patriotism or nationalism can be fascist and the other humanist: one imposes the difference of its muscular power and the other claims the right to equality. But since we only have one word and within it are mixed all of the historical circumstances, we usually condemn or praise indiscriminately.

Now, the muscular power of the oppressor is not sufficient; the moral defect of the oppressed is also necessary. Not long ago a Miss Bolivia – with some traces of indigenous features for an outer glance – complained that her country was recognized for its cholas (indigenous women) when in reality there were other parts of the country where the women were prettier. This is the same mentality as an impure man named Domingo Sarmiento in the 19th century and the majority of the educators of the period.

Military colonialism has given way to political colonialism and the latter has passed the baton to cultural colonialism. This is why a government composed of ethnic groups historically repudiated at home and abroad not only must contend with the practical difficulties of a world dominated by and made to order for the capitalist system, whose only flag is the interest and benefit of financial classes, but also must struggle with centuries of prejudice, racism, sexism and classism that are encrusted beneath every pore of the skin of every inhabitant of this sleeply America.

As a reaction to this reality, those who oppose it take recourse to the same method of raising up the caudillos, individual men or women who must be defended vigorously. From the point of view of humanist analysis, this is a mistake. However, if we consider that the progress of history – when it is possible – is also moved by political changes, then one would have to recognize that the theory of the intellectual must make concessions to the practice of the politician. Nevertheless, again, even though we might suspend this warning, we must not forget that there is no humanist progress through struggling eternally with the instruments of an old, oppressive and anti-humanist tradition.

But first things first: Bolivia cannot be divided in two based on one rich and white Bolivia and another indian and poor Bolivia. What moral foundation can a country or an autonomous region have based on acute mental and historical retardation? Why were these separatist – or “decentalized union” – boundaries not arrived at when the government and society were dominated by the traditional Creole classes? Why was it then more patriotic to have a united Bolivia without autonomous indigenous regions?

 

Jorge Majfud, Phd. The University of Georgia.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

 

The Fragments of the Latin American Union

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Los fragmentos de la desunión latinoamericana (Spanish)

The Past Hurts But Does Not Condemn

The Fragments of the Latin American Union

Jorge Majfud

Lincoln University

1.

In Latin America, in the absence of a social revolution at the moment of national independence there were plenty of rebellions and political revolts. Less frequently these were popular rebellions and almost never were they ideological revolutions that shook the traditional structures, as was the case with the North American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution. Instead, internal struggles abounded, before and after the birth of the new Republics.

A half century later, in 1866, the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo would make a dramatic diagnosis: “freedom and fatherland in Latin America are the sheep’s clothing with which the wolf disguises himself.” When the republics were not at war they enjoyed the peace of the oppressors. Even though slavery had been abolished in the new republics, it existed de facto and was almost as brutal as in the giant to the north. Class violence was also racial violence: the indigenous continued to be marginalized and exploited. “This has been the peace of the jail cell,” conclued Montalvo. The indian, deformed by this physical and moral violence, would receive the most brutal physical punishments but “when they give him the whip, trembling on the ground, he gets up thanking his tormenter: May God reward you, sir.” Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican Eligenio M. Hostos in 1870 would already lament that “there is still no South American Confederation.” On the contrary, he only saw disunion and new empires oppressing and threatening: “An empire [Germany] can still move deliberately against Mexico! Another empire [Great Britain/Brazil] can still wreck Paraguay with impunity!”

But the monolithic admiration for central Europe, like that of Sarmiento, also begins to fall apart at the end of the 19th century: “Europe is no happier, and has nothing to throw in our face with regard to calamities and misfortunes” (Montalvo). “The most civilized nations—Montalvo continues—, those whose intelligence has reached the sky itself and whose practices walk in step with morality, do not renounce war: their breasts are always burning, their jealous hearts leap with the drive for extermination.” The Paraguay massacre results from muscular reasoning within the continent, and another American empire of the period is no exception to this way of seeing: “Brazil trades in human flesh, buying and selling slaves, in order to bow to its adversary and provide its share of the rationale.” The old accusation of imperial Spain is now launched against the other colonialist forces of the period. France and England – and by extension Germany and Russia – are seen as hypocrites in their discourse: “the one has armies for subjugating the world, and only in this way believes in peace; the other extends itself over the seas, takes control of the straits, dominates the most important fortresses on earth, and only in this way believes in peace.” In 1883, he also points out the ethical contradictions of the United States, “where the customs counteract the laws; where the latter call the blacks to the Senate, and the former drive them out of the restaurants.” (Montalvo himself avoids passing through the United States on his trip to Europe out of “fear of being treated like a Brazilian, and that resentment might instill hatred in my breast,” since “in the most democratic country in the world it is necessary to be thoroughly blonde in order to be a legitimate person.”)

Nonetheless, even though practice always tends to contradict ethical principles—it is not by accident that the most basic moral laws are always prohibitions—the unstoppable wave of humanist utopia continued to be imposed step by step, like the principal of union in equality, or the “fusion of the races in one civilization.” The same Iberoamerican history is understood in this universal process “to unite all the races in labor, in liberty, in equality and in justice.” When the union is achieved, “then the continent will be called Colombia” (Hostos). For José Martí as well, history was directed inevitably toward union. In “La América” (1883) he foresaw a “new accommodation of the national forces of the world, always in movement, and now accelerated, the necessary and majestic grouping of all the members of the American national family.” From the utopia of the union of nations, project of European humanism, it comes to be a Latin American commonplace: the fusion of the races in a kind of perfect mestizaje. The empires of Europe and the United States rejected for such a project, the New World would be “the oven where all the races must be melted, where they are being melted” (Hostos). In 1891, an optimistic Martí writes in New York that in Cuba “there is no race hatred because there are no races” even though this more of an aspiration than a reality. During the period advertisements were still published in the daily newspapers selling slaves alongside horses and other domesticated animals.

In any case, this relationship between oppressors and oppressed can not be reduced to Europeans and Amerindians. The indigenous people of the Andes, for example, also had spent their days scratching at the earth in search of gold to pay tribute to those sent by the Inca and numerous Mesoamerican tribes had to suffer the oppression of an empire like the Aztec. During most of the life of the Iberoamerican republics, the abuse of class, race and sex was part of the organization of society. International logic is reproduced in the domestic dynamic. To put it in the words of the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas in 1909, “when a boss has two or more pongos [unsalaried worker], he keeps one and rents out the others, as if it were simply a matter of a horse or a dog, with the small difference that the dog and the horse are lodged in a wood hut or in a stable and both are fed; the pongo is left to sleep in the doorway and to feed on scraps.” Meanwhile the soldiers would take the indians by the hair and beating them with their sabres carry them off to clean the barracks or would steal their sheep in order to maintain an army troop as it passed through. In the face of these realities, utopian humanists seemed like frauds. Frantz Tamayo, in 1910 declares, “imagine for a moment the Roman empire or the British empire having national altruism as it foundation and as its ideal. […] Altuism! Truth! Justice! Who practices these with Bolivia? Speak of altruism in England, the country of wise conquest, and in the United States, the country of the voracious monopolies!” According to Angel Rama (1982), modernization was also exercised principally “through a rigid hierarchical system.” That is to say, it was a process similar to that of the Conquest and the Independence. In order to legitimate the system, “an aristocratic pattern was applied which has been the most vigorous shaper of Latin American cultures throughout their history.”

Was our history really any different from these calamities during the military dictatorships of the end of the 20th century? Now, does this mean that we are condemned by a past that repeats itself periodically as if it were the a novelty each time?

2.

Let us respond with a different problem. The popular psychoanalytic tradition of the 20th century made us believe that the individual is always, in some way and in some degree, hostage to a past. Less rooted in popular consciousness, the French existentialists reacted by proposing that in reality we are condemned to be free. That is, in each moment we have to choose, there is no other way. In my opinion, both dimensions are possible in a human being: on the one hand we are conditioned by a past but not determined by it. But if we pay paranoid tribute to that past believing that all of our present and our future is owed to those traumas, we are reproducing a cultural illness: “I am unhappy because my parents are to blame.” Or, “I can’t be happy because my husband oppressed me.” But where is the sense of freedom and of responsibility? Why is it not better to say that “I have not been happy or I have these problems because, above all, I myself have not taken responsibility for my problems”? Thus arises the idea of the passive victim and instead of fighting in a principled way against evils like machismo one turns to the crutch in order to justify why this woman or that other one has been unhappy. “Am I sick? The fault is with the machismo of this society.” Etc.

Perhaps it goes without saying that being human is neither only biology nor only psychology: we are constructed by a history, the history of humanity that creates us as subjects. The individual—the nation—can recognize the influence of context and of their history and at the same time their own freedom as potential which, no matter how minimal and conditioned it might be, is capable of radically changing the course of a life. Which is to say, an individual, a nation that would reject outright any representation of itself as a victim, as a potted plant or as a flag that waves in the wind.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

Men of the Cybernetic Caves

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Hombres de las cavernas cibernéticas (Spanish)

Men of the Cybernetic Caves

Jorge Majfud

Every time someone complains about ideas that fall outside an arbitrary and narrow circle called “common sense” (also known in English as “horse sense”), they do so by brandishing two classic arguments: 1) the philosophers live in another world, surrounded by books and eccentric ideas and 2) we know what reality is because we live in it. But when we ask what “reality” is they automatically recite to us a list of ideas that other philosophers placed in circulation in the 19th century or during the Renaissance, when those philosophers were branded by their neighbors, if not jailed or burned alive on the holy bonfire of good manners in the name of a common sense that represented the fantasies or realities of the Middle Ages.

The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, still in the name of what his detractors could frivolously call “populism” – as if a dominant culture were not simultaneously populist and classist by definition; what is more demagogic than the consumer market? – critiqued the idea that the poet must repeat what the people says when “misery attempts to pass itself off as sobriety” (Tengo, 1964). Then he recalled something that turns out to be obvious and, therefore, easy to forget: the “common man” is an abstraction if not a class formed and deformed by the communication media: film, radio, the press, etc.

Perhaps common sense is the inability of that common man to see the world from provinces other than his own. The first time that a common man like Colombus – common for his ideas, not for his actions – saw a Caribean, he saw the scarcity of weapons of war. In his diary he reported that the conquest of that innocent people would be easy. It is no accident that the violent enterprise of the Castilian Reconquest would be continued in the Conquest of the other side of the Atlantic in 1492, the same year the former was completed. The Cortéses, the Pizarros and other “advanced” men were unable to see in the New World anything other than their own myths through the insatiable thirst for domination of old Europe.

The old chronicles recall a certain occasion when a group of conquistadors arrived at a humble village and the indigenous people came out to meet them with a banquet they had prepared. While they were eating, one of the soldiers took out his heavy sword and split open the head of a savage who was trying to serve him fresh fruits. The comrades of the noble knight, fearing a reaction from the savages, proceeded to imitate him until they retreated from that village leaving behind several hundred indians cut to pieces. After a brief investigation, the same conquistadors reported that the event had been justified given that a welcome such as the one they had witnessed could only be a trick. In this way they inaugurated – at least for the chronicles or as slander – the first preemptive action on behalf of civilization. The popular idea that “when the charity is great even the saint is suspicious,” makes heaven complicit in that miserable human condition.

In the same way, both science fiction and the plundering of resources by colonizing new planets are nothing more than the expression of the same aggressive mentality that doesn’t end up solving the conflicts it provokes at each step because it is already undertaking the expansion of its own convictions in the name of its own mental frontiers. The conquistadors (of any race, of any culture) can neither comprehend nor accept that supposedly more primitive beings (native Americans) as well as more evolved beings (possible extraterrestrials) might be capable of something more than a close-minded military conduct, aggressively exploitative of the barbarians who don’t speak our language.

That is to say, mass consumer science fiction – that innocent artistic expression, made popular by the disinterested market – is the expression of the most primitive side of humanity. The basic scheme consists of dominating or being dominated, killing or being exterminated, like our ancestors, the Cromagnons, exterminated the big-headed Neanderthals – later turned into the mythological ogres of the European forests – thirty thousand years ago. This genre could be understood especially in the Cold War, but it is as old as our culture’s thirst for colonization. It is not surprising, therefore, that the extraterrestrials, supposedly more evolved than us, would be out there playing hide and seek. It is quite probable, besides, that they know the case of the Nazarene who took the precaution of using metaphors to preach brotherly and universal love and was crucified anyway.

Presently, while conflicts and wars ravage the whole world, while the environment is in its most critical state, scientists are charged with finding life and water on other planets. NASA plans to use greenhouse gases – like carbon dioxide or methane – to raise the temperature of Mars, melting the frozen water at its poles and forming rivers and oceans. With this method – already tested on our own planet – we will stop buying bottled water from Switzerland or from Singapore in order to import it from Mars, at a slightly higher price.

We are not able to communicate with one another, we are not able to adequately conserve the most beautiful planet in the galactic neighborhood, and we will manage to colonize dead planets, discover water and encounter other beings who probably do not want to be found by intergalactic beasts like us.

Nor is it by accident that the objective of video games is almost always the annihilation of the adversary. Playing at killing is the common theme of these electronic caves filled with Cro-Magnon men and women. If indeed we could imagine a positive aspect, like the possibility that the exercise of playing at killing might substitute for the real practice, there still remains the question of whether violence is an invariable human quota (psychoanalytic version) or can be increased or decreased through a precise culture, through a psychological and spiritual evolution on the part of humanity. I believe that both are surviving hypotheses, but the second one is the only active hope, which is to say, an ideology that promotes an evolution of the conscience and not resignation in the face of what is. If ethical evolution does not exist, at least it is a convenient lie which prevents our cynical involution. The Romans also used to express their passions by watching two gladiators kill each other in the arena; some Spaniards also discharge the same passion by watching the torture and murder of a beast (I am referring to the bull). Perhaps the first replaced the imperial monstrosity with soccer; the second are in the process of doing so. A few weeks ago, a group of Spaniards marched through the streets carrying slogans like “Torture is not culture.” Protest is a valiant resistance to barbarism disguised as tradition. We are better off not noting that history shows that, in reality, torture is a culture with a millenarian tradition. A culture refined to the limits of barbarism and sustained by the cowardly refinement of hypocrisy.

Bertrand Russell used to say that the madness of the stadiums had sublimated the madness of war. Sometimes it is the other way around, but this is almost always true. It is not less true, of course, that the culture of violence carries with it two hidden purposes: 1) with the supposedly violent libido sublimated in sports, films and video games, the greater violence of social injustices (injustice, from a humanist and Enlightenment point of view) remain unchallenged by the exhausted and self-satisfied masses; 2) it is a form of anaesthesia, of moral habit-forming, in the periodic return of the brute, prehistoric violence of the electronic wars where one neither kills nor murders but suppresses, eliminates. This cybernetic primitivism seduces by its appearance of progress, of future, of spectacle, of technological exploits. Human ignorance is camouflaged in intelligence. Poor intelligence. But it continues to be ignorance, although more criminal than the simple ignorance of the cave-dweller who split open his neighbor’s head in order to avenge a theft or an offense. Modern wars, like the genre of science fiction, are more direct expressions of a race of cave-dwellers that has multiplied dangerously its power to split open its neighbor’s head but has not committed itself to the courageous enterprise of universal conscience. Instead, it defends itself against this utopia by taking recourse to its only dialectical weapon: mockery and insult.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

The Age of Barbaria

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La Era de Barbaria (Spanish)

The Humanist (USA)

The Age of Barbaria

Jorge Majfud

In the year of Barbaria began the annual trips to the year 33.  That year was selected because, according to surveys, Christ’s crucifixion drew the attention of most Westerners, and this social sector was important for economic reasons, since trips to the past were not organized, much less financed, by the government of any country, as had once happened with the first trips into space, but by a private company.  The financial group that made possible the marvel of traveling through time was Axa, at the request of the High Chief of Technology, who suggested infinite profits through the offering of “tourism services,” as it was called in its moment.  From then on, various groups of 30 people traveled to the year 33 in order to witness the death of the Nazarene, much as the tourist commoners used to do long ago when at each equinox they would gather at the foot of the pyramid of Chitchen-Itzá, in order to witness the formation of the serpent from the shadows cast down by the pyramid upon itself.

The greatest inconvenience encountered by Axa was the limited number of tourists who were able to attent the event at a time, which did not generate profits in accordance with the millions expected by the investors, for which reason that original number was gradually raised to 45, at the risk of attracting the attention of the ancient residents of Jerusalem.  Then the figure was maintained, at the request of one of the company’s principal stock-holders who argued, reasonably, that the conservation of that historic deed in its original state was the basis for the trips, and that if each group produced alterations in the facts, that could result in an abandonment of general interest in carrying out this kind of travel.

With time it was proven that each historical alteration of the facts, no matter how small, was nearly impossible to repair.  Which occurred whenever one of the travelers did not respect the rules of the game and attempted to take away some memento of the place.  As was the most well-known case of Adam Parcker who, with incredible dexterity, was able to cut out a triangular piece of the Nazarene’s red tunic, probably at the moment the latter collapses from fatigue.  The theft did not signify any change in the Holy Scriptures, but it served to make Parcker rich and famous, since the tiny piece of canvas came to be worth a fortune and not a few of the travelers who took on the trouble and expense of going back thousands of years did so to see where the Nazarene was missing “Parcker’s Triangle.”

A few had posed objections to this kind of travel which, they insist, will end up destroying history without us being able to notice.  In effect, so it is: for each change that is introduced on a given day, infinite changes are derived from it, century after century, gradually diluting or multiplying its effects.  In order to notice a minimal change in the year 33 it would be useless to turn to the Holy Scriptures, because all of the editions, equally, would reflect the blow and completely forget the original fact.  There might be a possibility of tracing each change by projecting other trips to years prior to the year of Barbaria, but nobody would be interested in such a project and there would be no way of financing it.

The discussion about whether history should remain as it is or can be legitimately modified also no longer matters.  But the latter is, in any case, dangerous, since it is impossible to foresee the resulting changes that would be produced by any particular alteration.  We know that any change could potentially not be catastrophic for the human species, but would be catastrophic for individuals: we might not be the ones who are alive now, but someone else instead.

The most radical religious groups find themselves on opposing sides.  Barbaria’s information services have recently discovered that a group of evangelists, belonging to the True Church of God, of Sao Pablo, will make a trip to the year 33.  Thanks to the charity of its faithful, the group has managed to gather together the sum of several million that Axa charges per ticket.  What no one has yet been able to confirm are the group’s intentions.  It has been said that they intend to blow up Golgotha and set fire to Jerusalem at the moment of the Crucifixion, so that we thus arrive at  the greatly anticipated End Times.  All of history would disappear; the whole world, including the Jews, would recognize their error, they would turn to Christianity in the year 33 and the entire world would live in the Kingdom of God, just as descrived in the Gospels.  Which is disputed by other people.

Others do not understand how the travelers can witness the crucifixion without trying to prevent it.  The theological answer is obvious, which is why those least interested in preventing the martyrdom of the Messiah are his own followers.  But or the rest, who are the majority, Axa has decreed its own ethical rules: “In the same manner in which we do not prevent the death of the slave between the claws of a lion, when we travel to Africa, neither must we prevent the apparent injustices that are committed with the Nazarene.  Our moral duty is to conserve nature and history as they are.”  The crucifixion is the common heritage of Humanity, but, above all, its rights have been acquired totally by Axa.

In fact,the changes will be increasingly inevitable.  After six years of trips to the year 33, one can see, at the foot of the cross, bottle caps and magic marker graffiti on the main beam, some of which pray: “I have faith in my lord,” and others just limit themselves to the name of who was there, along with the date of departure, so that future generations of travelers will remember them.  Of course, the company also began to yield in the face of pressure from dissatisfied clients, leading to a radical improvement in services.  For example, Barbaria just sent a technical representative to the year 26 to request the production of five thousand cubic meters of asphalt and to negotiate with Pontius Pilate the construction of a more comfortable corridor for the Via Dolorosa, which will make less tiresome the travelers’ route and, besides, would be a gesture of compassion for the Nazarene, who more than once broke his feet on stones that he did not see in his path.  It has been calculated that the improvement will not mean changes in the Holy Scriptures, since there is no special concern demonstrated there for the urbanism of the city.

With these measures, Axa hopes to shelter itself from the storm of complaints it has received due to alleged inadequacies in service, having to confront recently very costly law suits brought by client who have spent a fortune and have not returned satisfied.  The cause of these complaints is not always the intense heat of Jerusalem, or the congestion in which the city is entrapped on the day of the crucifixion.  Above all the cause is the unsatisfied expectations of the travelers.  The company defends itself by saying that the Holy Scriptures were not written under its quality control, but instead are only historical documents and, therefore, are exaggerated.  There where the Nazarene really dies, instead of there being a deep and horrifying night the sky is barely darkened by an excessive concentration of clouds, and nothing more.  The Catholics have declared that this fact, like all those referenced in the Gospels, should be understood in its symbolic meaning and not merely descriptively.  But most people were satisfied neither by Axa’s response nor by that of Pope John XXV, who came out in defense of the multinational corporation, thanks to which people can now be closer to God.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

Bruce Campbell is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, where he is chair of the Latino/Latin American Studies program.  He is the author of Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis (University of Arizona, 2003); his scholarship centers on art, culture and politics in Latin America, and his work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and XCP: Cross-cultural Poetics.  He serves as translator/editor for the «Southern Voices» project at www.americas.org, through which Spanish- and Portuguese-language opinion essays by Latin American authors are made available in English for the first time.

 

Lektionen der Geschichte

Just in case / Por si acaso

Image by . SantiMB . via Flickr

Die erste Todsünde

Lektionen der Geschichte

Jorge Majfud

Lincoln University

Übersetzt von  Isolda Bohler, überprüft von Fausto Giudice

Am selben Tag, an dem Christoph Kolumbus aus dem Hafen von Palos losfuhr, am 3. August 1492, lief die Frist für die Juden in Spanien ab, ihr Land, Spanien, zu verlassen,. Im Kopf des Admirals waren zumindest zwei mächtige Objekte, zwei unwiderlegbare Wahrheiten: Der materielle Reichtum von Asien und die vollkommene Religion Europas.

Mit ersterem dachte er, die Zurückeroberung Jerusalems zu finanzieren, mit der zweiten sollte die Beute legitimiert werden. Das Wort „Gold“ quoll aus seiner Feder, wie das göttliche und blutige Metall die Schiffe der ihm folgenden Eroberer überluden.

Im selben Jahr war am 2. Januar 1492 die letzte arabische Bastion auf der Halbinsel, Granada, gefallen. 1492 war auch das Jahr der Veröffentlichung der ersten Grammatik in Castellano (die erste europäische in „vulgärer“ Sprache). Gemäß seines Autors, Antonio Nebrija, war die Sprache die „Genossin des Imperiums“. Die neue Großmacht setzte sofort die Wiedereroberung durch die Eroberung auf der anderen Seite des Atlantiks mit den gleichen Methoden und den selben Überzeugungen fort, um so die globale Berufung des ganzen Imperiums zu bestätigen. Im Machtzentrum sollte es eine Sprache, eine Religion und eine Rasse geben.

Der zukünftige spanische Nationalismus wurde so auf der Grundlage der Säuberung des Erinnerungsvermögens aufgebaut. Es ist wahr, dass acht Jahrhunderte zuvor Juden und arianische Westgoten die Mohammedaner gerufen hatten, die dann kamen und halfen, Roderich und die anderen westgotischen Könige, die für die gleiche Säuberung kämpften, zu ersetzen. Aber dies war nicht der Hauptgrund für die Verachtung, denn nicht das Erinnerungsvermögen war das Wichtige, sondern das Vergessen.

Die katholischen und nachfolgenden göttlichen Könige erledigten (oder wollten erledigen) das andere Spanien, das gemischtrassige, multikulturelle Spanien, in dem mehrere Sprachen gesprochen und mehrere Kulte ausgeübt wurden und mehrere Rassen sich vermischten. Das Spanien, das Zentrum der Kultur, der Künste und der Wissenschaften in einem von der Rückständigkeit, einem gewalttätigen Aberglauben und Provinzialismus des Mittelalters unterworfenen Europa war. Nach und nach schloss die Halbinsel den Anderen ihre Grenzen.

Mauren und Juden mussten das Land verlassen und nach Barbaria (Afrika) oder in den Rest Europas emigrieren, wo sie sich in die peripheren Nationen, die mit neuer sozialer, wirtschaftlicher und intellektueller Unruhe hervortraten, integrierten. Innerhalb der Grenzen blieben einige illegitime Kinder, afrikanische Sklaven, die in der offiziellen Geschichte fast nicht erwähnt wurden, aber die für die würdelosen häuslichen Arbeiten nötig waren.

Das neue und erfolgreiche Spanien schloss sich als eine konservative Bewegung ein (das Oxymoron sei mir erlaubt). Der Staat und die Religion verbanden sich strategisch zur besseren Kontrolle des Volkes in einem schizophrenen Prozess der Läuterung.

Einige Dissidenten wie Bartolomé de las Casas sahen sich in einem öffentlichen Prozess jenen gegenüber, die, wie Ginés de Sepúlveda, argumentierten, dass das Imperium das Recht auf Intervention und auf die Beherrschung des neuen Kontinents hatte, denn es stand in der Bibel geschrieben (Salomon 11:29), dass „der Dumme des Weisen von Herzen Knecht sein wird“. Die Anderen sind wegen ihres „stumpfsinnigen Verstandes und ihrer inhumanen und barbarischen Bräuche“ unterworfen.

Die Rede des berühmten und einflussreichen Theologen, besonnen wie jede offizielle Ansprache, proklamierte: „[die Eingeborenen] sind barbarische und unmenschliche Leute, dem Zivilleben und den friedlichen Sitten fremd und es wird immer richtig und mit dem natürlichen Recht konform sein, dass solche Personen sich dem Imperium der kultiviertesten und humansten Fürsten und Nationen unterwerfen, damit dank derer Tugenden und der Duldsamkeit ihrer Gesetze sie mit der Barbarei aufhören und sich auf ein menschliches Leben und der Pflege der Tugenden reduzieren“. Und in einem anderen Abschnitt: „[man muss] jene, die aus natürlichen Bedingungen Anderen gehorchen müssen, aber deren Imperium ablehnen, mit Waffen unterwerfen, wenn es auf andere Weise nicht möglich ist“.

Damals wurde nicht auf die Worte „Demokratie“ und „Freiheit“ zurückgegriffen, denn bis zum 19. Jahrhundert galten sie in Spanien als Attribute des humanistischen Chaos, der Anarchie und des Teufels. Aber jede imperiale Macht spielt in jedem Augenblick der Geschichte das gleiche Spiel mit unterschiedlichen Karten. Einige, wie man sieht, nicht so verschieden.

Trotz einer ersten, mitleidigen Reaktion des Königs Karl V und der Neuen Gesetze, welche die Sklaverei der Eingeborenen Amerikaner (die Afrikaner galten nicht als Rechtssubjekte) verboten, fuhr das Imperium durch die Inhaber von encomiendas fort zu versklaven und diese Völker, „fremd dem friedlichen Leben“, im Namen der Errettung und der Humanisierung auszulöschen.

Um die schrecklichen aztekischen Rituale zu beenden, die so oft ihren heidnischen Göttern unschuldige Opfer darbrachten, folterte, vergewaltigte und mordete das Imperium massenweise im Namen des Gesetzes und des einzig wahrhaftigen Gottes. Laut Fray de las Casas bestand eine der Überzeugungsmethoden darin, die Wilden auf einem Rost festzubinden und sie lebend zu braten.

Aber nicht nur die Folter – körperlich und moralisch – und die Zwangsarbeit verheerten die einmal von Tausenden Menschen bewohnte Landstriche; sie verwendeten auch Massenvernichtungswaffen, genauer ausgedrückt, biologische Waffen. Die Grippe und die Pocken dezimierten ganze Bevölkerungen, manchmal unfreiwillig und andere Male präzise kalkuliert. Wie die Engländer im Norden entdeckt hatten, war die Wirkung von Sendungen verseuchter Geschenke, wie die Kleidung der Kranken oder hingeworfene, verpestende Leichen, manchmal verheerender als die Artillerie.

Jetzt aber, wer besiegte eines der größten Imperien der Geschichte, wie es das spanische war? Spanien.

Während sich eine durch alle sozialen Klassen ziehende konservative Mentalität am Glauben ihres göttlichen Schicksals, als „bewaffneter Arm Gottes“ (laut Menéndez Pelayo) festhielt, ging das Imperium an seiner eigenen Vergangenheit zugrunde. Seine Gesellschaft brach auseinander und der Reiche und Arme trennende Bruch wurde zur gleichen Zeit größer, in der sich das Imperium die Mineralvorkommen, die ihm zu funktionieren erlaubten, sicherte. Die Armen wurden zahlreicher und der Reichtum der Reichen, den sie im Namen Gottes und des Vaterlandes anhäuften, wurde größer.

Das Imperium musste Kriege finanzieren, die es außerhalb seiner Grenzen führte und das Finanzdefizit wuchs zu einem schwer beherrschbaren Monstrum. Die Steuerkürzungen begünstigten hauptsächlich die oberen Klassen so sehr, dass sie oftmals nicht einmal verpflichtet waren, sie zu bezahlen oder sie wurden davon befreit, wegen ihrer Schulden und Unterschlagungen ins Gefängnis zu gehen.

Der Staat brach mehrere Male zusammen. Die unerschöpfliche Quelle der aus ihren Kolonien, Nutznießer der Illuminierung des Evangeliums, stammenden Mineralen, waren auch nicht genug: Die Regierung gab mehr aus, als sie von diesen intervenierten Ländern erhielt und musste deshalb auf die italienischen Banken zurückgreifen.

Als sich viele Länder Amerikas (das heute sog. Lateinamerika) unabhängig machten, blieb auf diese Weise nichts weiter vom Imperium übrig als ihr schrecklicher Ruf. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier schrieb 1820, dass der Grund, warum Mexiko sich noch nicht unabhängig erklärt hatte an der Ignoranz seiner Leute liege, die immer noch nicht begriffen hätten, dass das spanische Imperium kein Imperium mehr sei, sondern der ärmste Winkel Europas.

Ein neues Imperium konsolidierte sich, das britische. Wie die vorhergehenden und die nachkommenden wird die Verbreitung seiner Sprache und Vorherrschaft seiner Kultur dann zu einem gemeinsamen Faktor. Ein anderer wird die öffentliche Werbung: England stürzt sich sofort auf die Chroniken von Fray de las Casas, um das alte Imperium im Namen einer höheren Moral zu diffamieren. Einer Moral, die keine Verbrechen und Vergewaltigungen verhinderte. Aber natürlich, was zählt, sind ihre guten Absichten: Das Gute, der Frieden, die Freiheit, der Fortschritt – und Gott, der seine Allgegenwart in allen Reden zeigt.

Der Rassismus, die Diskriminierung, das Schließen der Grenzen, der religiöse Messianismus, die Kriege für den Frieden, die großen Steuerdefizite zu ihrer Finanzierung, der radikale Konservatismus verloren das Imperium. Aber all diese Sünden fassen sich in einer zusammen: dem Hochmut, denn er verhindert es einer Weltmacht, all die vorherigen Sünden zu erkennen. Oder er elaubt, sie zu sehen, aber so, als ob sie große Tugenden wären.

Fundaciones de la historia

Fundaciones de la historia

 

Oros y diamantes

Mirando una carta de póker nos detiene la pregunta. ¿Por qué el rombo es el símbolo del diamante? ¿Por qué cortar una piedra tan valiosa en una figura que deja tantos desperdicios? Esa forma conoidal multiplicaba los brillos en la corona de la piedra pulida. Para el ojo común, los brillos debían ser lo más importante de las piedras preciosas y ¿cuál más brillante y más dura que el diamante? Por siglos, el brillo, la alucinación del diamante no tuvo competencia. Solo el sol brillaba con más fuerza, pero esa piedra era demasiado popular y nadie podía poseerla ni guardarla en un cofre para la contemplación privada de los brahmanes, del emperador, del rey o del duque. Y algo que pertenece a todos, aunque la sociedad dependa de él, no tiene valor social porque no confiere poder a unos sobre otros.

Hoy en día casi todos pasan su mirada indiferente sobre los cuadros de Fray Angélico, pero en su tiempo esos primeros atisbos de perspectiva renacentista conmovían las sensibilidades desacostumbradas a cualquier sustituto de la naturaleza o de la arquitectura centenaria, que era como la naturaleza misma. Los visitantes se desmayaban ante tan conmovedor efecto que confundían con el arte o con una revelación divina. Algo parecido ocurrió con las primeras proyecciones de cine que hizo saltar a los espectadores de sus asientos.

Basta con imaginar una ínfima parte de esa antigua sensibilidad, construida en el tiempo lento de las sombras y las estrellas, de los espacios naturales y previsibles para comprender algo del asombro o la admiración que podía provocar la contemplación de las joyas, del brillo del diamante. Si bien el vidrio es tan antiguo como el código de Hammurabi, rara vez las técnicas disponibles lograban la claridad del agua. Cuando los cristales, como los de Bohemia o de Murano, lograron hacerlo se hicieron famosos. Y caros. Aunque de mayor utilidad que el diamante, la relativa facilidad de su producción lo hacía dudosamente escaso. Pero eran tiempos cuando los brillos artificiales no abundaban.

Hoy en día aburren a los jóvenes y a los viejos acostumbrados al vértigo y al brillo excesivo de las pantallas de plasma, de los aviones, de los ascensores panorámicos, de los automóviles bailando en los tréboles de autopistas y sumergiéndose a setenta millas por hora en los túneles de colores.

¿Cuánto valdría hoy un diamante si la humanidad lo hubiese descubierto a finales del siglo XX? Seguro no hubiese impresionado a muchos. Quizás no valdría gran cosa y sin duda valdría mucho menos de lo que vale hoy.

 

Hitos y mitos fundadores

Podemos pensar que la valoración de un objeto como el de una conducta, el valor material y el valor moral pueden ser variables y pueden depender de un tiempo histórico, pero lo más interesante es observar también opuesto: hay valores materiales y valores morales que han sido definidos y cristalizados, para bien o para mal, en un tiempo dado según las condiciones y el momento de desarrollo de la humanidad.

Por ejemplo, los textos sagrados como el Bhagavad Gita, la Biblia o el Corán. Desde una perspectiva laica, podríamos preguntarnos por qué algunos textos como algunos hechos históricos se levantan como hitos inmóviles y persisten, aún cuando las condiciones económicas, sociales, culturales y simbólicas han cambiado de forma radical y con frecuencia contradicen esa realidad, hasta el punto de adaptar la realidad a esos textos mediante la violencia física o ideológica o adaptar los textos a la realidad mediante el uso y abuso de la interpretación. Donde dice blanco quería decir negro, pero lo que dice sigue siendo sagrado.

Una vez impuesta o reconocida, la autoridad del texto como el valor del diamante persiste, de una forma o de otra, cruzando generaciones, avatares históricos, políticos y culturales; traspasando a veces civilizaciones y mentalidades. Aun asumiendo toda su variabilidad y relatividad de interpretaciones y contradicciones, la Biblia y el Corán establecieron un valor ético y sobre todo teológico que pesaría, modificaría y controlaría los movimientos de cientos de generaciones posteriores.

De no ser por estos hitos fundadores, deberíamos aplicar a rajatabla el precepto marxista según el cual las necesidades básicas, los métodos de producción, de sobrevivencia, en fin, todo aquello que conforma la base material de la vida humana son los únicos o los principales responsables de los valores morales y culturales. Aunque en esto ni Marx era tan marxista, lo que no invalida ni contradice sus descubrimientos sobre la evolución de la historia sino, quizás, lo complementa. Tendríamos así una suerte de psicoanálisis historicista según el cual hay momentos propicios y singulares de la historia donde —dadas las condiciones materiales, el número reducido de la población y la ausencia de una memoria histórica que relativice una experiencia “traumática”, significativa o conmovedora— un hecho o un texto se convierte en un capitulo fundador de toda una civilización.

Como el peso de la tradición simbólica en el valor del oro y del diamante, fijados como un trauma en una etapa X de la humanidad que aun pesa en los tiempos contemporáneos, así pesan ciertos textos, ciertos hechos, ciertos mitos o ciertas verdades en el inconmensurable universo de otras posibles verdades, de otras posibles manías, obsesiones y fijaciones que pudieron moldear a la humanidad de otra forma, ahora inimaginable.

 

 

Jorge Majfud

Lincoln University, mayo 2009.

 

 

 

La historia baja al pueblo

 

Con voz suave pero robótica, Heather dice: “dobla a la derecha y mantente sobre la izquierda”. Entonces doblo a la izquierda. Heather se sorprende: “recalculando posición”, dice, para inmediatamente insistir: “Conduce dos millas. Luego mantente sobre la derecha y toma la rampa a la derecha”. Heather tiene un objetivo fijo y no dejará de recalcular mi posición para volver a insistir. “When possible, make a U-turn”. Nadie hace mejor ese trabajo que ella. Con su visión satelital calcula y en fracciones de segundo determina el mejor camino hasta X. “Make a U-turn now!” Ella lo ve todo y, al mismo tiempo, no entiende lo que ve. “Make a U-turn now!” A veces juzga mal porque tiene una fuerte tendencia a elegir los caminos más rápidos y no entiende mis preferencias por las zonas pobladas en lugar de las autopistas y los túneles.

La imposición de Heather por llegar a X es relativa. “Recalculating…” Antes de salir de casa yo mismo le di la orden. En realidad X era mi objetivo inicial. ¿Pero qué pasaría si X fuese un objetivo erróneo o un objetivo decidido por la costumbre o por una falsa obligación? O peor: ¿qué ocurriría si desconozco cuál es mi destino final, que fue definido previamente por alguien más y, ante mi propia ignorancia o ceguera o simple incertidumbre decido obedecer a Heather, por miedo a perderme, por la casi siempre inútil y hasta perversa ansiedad de no perder tiempo, por miedo a romper un orden, por miedo al caos?

Nuestro presente está mucho más definido por nuestro futuro —por nuestra imprecisa visión del futuro— que por nuestro pasado. Pero no sabemos con certeza cuál es nuestro destino X al cual creemos dirigirnos. Nos movemos en varios niveles de conciencia por lo cual nunca podemos decir que estamos completamente despiertos. Para mantener la ilusión de que somos consientes de nuestra dirección hacia X, nos mantenemos dentro del marco de los mitos fundadores: como la voz robótica de Heather, el navegador, el mito fundador nos indica, con insistencia y precisión el camino a X.

La mañana siguiente al triunfo electoral de Barack Obama, vi por los pasillos de las oficinas un pequeño grupo de gente que se abrazaba y decía “estoy soñando”; “esto es realmente un sueño”. Los diarios del mundo relacionaron el famoso “Yo tengo un sueño” de Martin Luther King cuarenta años atrás con el “sueño realizado” de Obama. Como nunca antes en la historia de las elecciones de Estados Unidos, una apreciable proporción del mundo se alegró del resultado. Todos esperamos cambios del nuevo presidente; aunque no muchos ni radicales, cambios que no acentúen la pesadilla, cambios que no agraven nuestras decepciones por venir.

En otros ensayos anotamos que el reciente cambio político en Estados Unidos, así como el cambio geopolítico del mundo en los últimos años, aparentemente apuntaban a la misma dirección y sentido trazado por la revolución del pensamiento humanista del Renacimiento. Las reacciones contrarias de las últimas décadas, en gran medida representadas por las ideologías conservadoras del imperialismo postcolonial del último tercio del siglo XX habrían sido un “desvío” en esa hoja de ruta, una violenta ralentización de la historia, una confirmación de que la verdad es una permanente reconstrucción del poder ideológico-militar del momento, de que la fuerza de la razón no tiene ninguna posibilidad ante la razón de la fuerza, que el único poder procede del músculo, no de la sabiduría ni mucho menos de la justicia, tal como puede entenderla un humanista. ¿Pero cómo saber si un desvío que dura décadas y un objetivo X que aparece como inalcanzable, pueden ser ralamente considerados desvío uno y objetivo el otro?

Hay una diferencia radical. El navegador GPS es sólo un instrumento de nuestros propósitos. Para los mitos sociales, en cambio, somos nosotros los instrumentos de sus propósitos. Los mitos sociales pueden funcionar como un obsesivo navegador que, sin importar el inesperado rumbo de nuestro camino, permanentemente están buscando un nuevo camino para llegar al mismo punto y tienen la fuerza de imponerlo. Justificar una masacre en nombre de la libertad y poner todo el tradicional aparataje mediático para hacerlo creíble, sino incuestionable al menos posible, es sólo un mínimo ejemplo. Llamar terrorista a un asesino que mata niños y a otro que hace el mismo trabajo honrarlo como héroe, aquél porque calcula sus barbaridades y éste  porque calcula sus errores inevitables, es sólo parte de la narratura social que consolida el mismo mito. Esta idea enquistada en el inconsciente colectivo, a veces estimulada por el miedo o la autocomplacencia, fue observada ya por el español Ángel Gavinet hace 101 años:

“Un ejército que lucha con armas de mucho alcance, con ametralladoras de tiro rápido y con cañones de grueso calibre, aunque deja el campo sembrado de cadáveres, es un ejército glorioso; y si los cadáveres son de raza negra, entonces se dice que no hay tales cadáveres. Un soldado que lucha cuerpo a cuerpo y que mata a su enemigo de un bayonetazo, empieza a parecernos brutal; un hombre vestido de paisano, que lucha y mata, nos parece un asesino. No nos fijamos en el hecho. Nos fijamos en la apariencia” (Idearium, 1897).

Pero esta percepción no es producto de una mera “naturaleza psicológica” sino del laborioso trabajo del poder social a lo largo de los siglos.

Los mitos fundadores preexisten a cualquier cambio político, a cualquier decisión individual e incluso colectiva. De ahí las eternas frustraciones ante los cambios políticos. Sin embargo, si echamos una mirada general a la historia, podemos sospechar que hay algo más fuerte que cualquier mito social: los grandes movimientos de la historia —los más imperceptibles—, las ideas sobre la justicia y el poder, sobre la libertad y la esclavitud, sobre la rebelión de los pueblos y la fuerza arrogante de los césares, persisten o se radicalizan.

Hay un cambio sensible en nuestra época que es congruente con ese movimiento general de la historia de los últimos siglos, que significa la continuación de los valores humanistas que, si bien no han sido los valores dominantes, sí han sido los más persistentes y aquellos que más se han legitimado desde la caída intelectual de las teocracias europeas de la Edad Media. En nuestro tiempo ese signo es la progresiva separación de las creencias populares de los poderes imperiales. Si a mediados del siglo XX “imperio” seguía siendo una palabra que llenaba de orgullo a quien lo representaba —por ejemplo, el imperio británico, brutal como cualquier otro— desde los sesenta ya se ha confirmado como signo de agresión y opresión injustificable. Si a mediados del mismo siglo la narratura social todavía estaba en manos de una minoría propietaria de los medios de comunicación y entretenimiento —dos ideoléxicos paradójicos— hoy en día la voz mayoritaria de quienes no tienen nada de ese poder han descubierto un nuevo poder.

Esa voz ha probado ser todavía inmadura e irresponsable. Esa nueva conciencia todavía no es consciente de su poder o lo usa para distraerse e, incluso, para la autodestrucción. Podemos conjeturar, no sin un alto riesgo de equivocarnos, que gran parte de la antigua masa —esa que despreciaba Ortega y Gasset— aún no ha dejado de ser rebaño y todavía se guía por los antiguos mitos sociales que la oprimen. Pero esa gente, esa humanidad, está creando poco a poco una nueva cultura, una nueva conciencia y una silenciosa pero imparable rebeldía ante la histórica agresión de los césares, de los negreros, de los antiguos dueños del mundo. O quizás confundimos deseo con realidad.

“Recalculating… Take ramp ahead”.

 

Jorge Majfud

Lincoln University, enero 2009.

 

 

 

 

Conversations with History: Richard C. Lewontin

¿Para qué sirve la literatura?

Jorge Majfud’s books at Amazon>>

À quoi sert la littérature ? (French)

What good is literature, anyway? (English)

¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (II)

¿Para qué sirve la literatura?

Estoy seguro que muchas veces habrán escuchado esa demoledora inquisición “¿Bueno, y para qué sirve la literatura?”, casi siempre en boca de algún pragmático hombre de negocios; o, peor, de algún Goering de turno, de esos semidioses que siempre esperan agazapados en los rincones de la historia, para en los momentos de mayor debilidad salvar a la patria y a la humanidad quemando libros y enseñando a ser hombres a los hombres. Y si uno es escritor, palo, ya que nada peor para una persona con complejos de inferioridad que la presencia cercana de alguien que escribe. Porque si bien es cierto que nuestro financial time ha hecho de la mayor parte de la literatura una competencia odiosa con la industria del divertimento, todavía queda en el inconsciente colectivo la idea de que un escritor es un subversivo, un aprendiz de brujo que anda por aquí y por allá metiendo el dedo en la llaga, diciendo inconveniencias, molestando como un niño travieso a la hora de la siesta. Y si algún valor tiene, de hecho lo es. ¿No ha sido ésa, acaso, la misión más profunda de toda la literatura de los últimos quinientos años? Por no remontarme a los antiguos griegos, ya a esta altura inalcanzables por un espíritu humano que, como un perro, finalmente se ha cansado de correr detrás del auto de su amo y ahora se deja arrastrar por la soga que lo une por el pescuezo.

Sin embargo, la literatura aún está ahí; molestando desde el arranque, ya que para decir sus verdades le basta con un lápiz y un papel. Su mayor valor seguirá siendo el mismo: el de no resignarse a la complacencia del pueblo ni a la tentación de la barbarie. Para todo eso están la política y la televisión. Por lo tanto, sí, podríamos decir que la literatura sirve para muchas cosas. Pero como sabemos que a nuestros inquisidores de turno los preocupa especialmente las utilidades y los beneficios, deberíamos recordarles que difícilmente un espíritu estrecho albergue una gran inteligencia. Una gran inteligencia en un espíritu estrecho tarde o temprano termina ahogándose. O se vuelve rencorosa y perversa. Pero, claro, una gran inteligencia, perversa y rencorosa, difícilmente pueda comprender esto. Mucho menos, entonces, cuando ni siquiera se trata de una gran inteligencia.

© Jorge Majfud

Montevideo, Diciembre de 2000.

Litterae (Chile)

https://www.eldia.es/cultura/2015-09-26/17-libro-ya-es-acto-resistencia-vulgarizacion-cultura.htm

 

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, as 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.

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.

© Jorge Majfud