Friday, July 21, 2023

The Collective Imbecile, by Olavo de Carvalho

Who is the collective imbecile? He is twofold: born from the unlikely union of the conceited intellectual and the enraged mob. He is a rabid fanatic with a touch of elegant relativistic skepticism. He is the body of Bakunin with the head of Anatole France. Between truth and falsehood, he possesses the impartiality of indifference. But, like a true Chinese sage who acts by not acting, he turns his omission into the engine of history, yielding to the initiative of the masses and allowing the miracle of praxis to transmute theoretical contradictions into physical violence, which, in the end, is the only decisive response in the eyes of the skeptic. Behold, The Collective Imbecile, a stumbling block of the Brazilian intelligentsia of yesterday, today, and forever.

Front matter

Dedication

To my children

HELOÍSA, LUIZ, TALES, DAVI, MARIA INÊS,

PERCIVAL, LEILAH MARIA, PEDRO

and to the memory of

PAULO FRANCIS

Epigraph

everybody happy?

WE-WE-WE

& to hell with the chappy who doesn’t agree

E. E. CUMMINGS

La colère des imbéciles
remplit le monde.

(The anger of imbeciles
fills the world.)

GEORGES BERNANOS

De quoi s’agitil, en effet, sinon

d’arracher la langue aux imbéciles,

aux redoutables et définitifs idiots

de ce siècle, comme saint Jêrome

réduisit au silence les Pélagiens ou

Lucifériens de son temps?

(What is it about, in fact, if not
to tear out the tongue of imbeciles,
the formidable and definitive idiots
of this century, as Saint Jerome
silenced the Pelagians or
Luciferians of his time?)

LÉON BLOY

Standard Form for Composing Reviews of The Collective Imbecile

FILL IN, HIGHLIGHT AND SEND TO THE EDITOR OF YOUR CULTURAL SUPPLEMENT1

In these days of rapid progress, no one has any more time for anything, and it is not fair to expect busy people like Brazilian intellectuals to read this voluminous book just to then write fifteen or twenty lines that everyone already knows what they are going to say. For this reason, I provide here this form, where these amiable creatures can choose, according to the state of their respective livers, the most appropriate sentences to describe what they feel about the work and the author — O. de C.

O. de C., author of this:

( ) rotating machine gun

( ) reactionary mishmash

( ) scandalous controversy,

intends to:

( ) implode Brazilian culture

( ) destroy unblemished reputations

( ) expel his excess bile.

He is a person full of:

( ) resentment and envy

( ) misunderstanding of the specific characters of Brazilian culture

( ) self-promotional Machiavellianism.

It becomes evident that this author’s mentality is

( ) neurotic

( ) authoritarian and overbearing

( ) nostalgic for the Middle Ages.

He is clearly:

( ) out of date with the most recent bibliography

( ) out of sync with History

( ) out of his mind.

Deep down, he seems to us to be driven by:

( ) repressed sexual desires

( ) sordid political ambitions

( ) interests of multinational companies.

Note to the Fourth Edition

IF IT IS TRUE that books have their destiny, this one seems to have the same as its character: to grow indefinitely until it bursts. It seems, but it is not: The Collective Imbecile here reaches its maximum size, and whatever its author has to say about the same or similar subject will go into other volumes.

Not that the reason for the fattening was illegitimate: having found that this book had the unique property of proving its content’s truth through its fate, the author merely wanted to document in each new edition the progressive accumulation of evidence. Indeed, it is proven: two or three or a thousand heads think much worse than one. To the thesis that the collective imbecile (the phenomenon, not the book) is a collection of intelligent people who come together to make themselves imbeciles, the local intelligentzia collectively offered much more imbecilic answers than its isolated members could produce on their own.

To reach this Q.E.D., the book paid its price: it repeated itself beyond what is convenient, in the final pages.

It is necessary to stop before the reaction of other readers comes to prove another of the theses defended in this volume: that there are insurmountable limits to the extensibility of human patience.

The Collective Imbecile, therefore, ends here the increasing series of comments about itself and, satisfied to have proven everything it wanted, promises that in future editions it will come in the same size or perhaps, having eliminated any possible errors, a little smaller.

The author thanks everyone who collaborated, voluntarily or involuntarily, for the success of this work, and declares that he is not, nor has he ever been, angry with anyone, despite the rabid dog traits with which they tried to paint him in a scandalously projective manner, in the Freudian sense of the thing. Nor do I care at all about the exercises in pejorative psychology that tried to speculate, behind this book, all sorts of sick, malicious, self-interested or sinister motivations that would have originated in the author the desire to produce it. Something of the real motivations that led me to write it, as well as those that determined certain reactions from my antagonists, will be shown with full evidence in my next book, How to Win a Debate without Having to Be Right. Comments on Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Eristic Dialectics”, in the course of publication by Topbooks, as well as in other works that I have written, am writing, or, Deo juvante, intend to write.

Rio de Janeiro, May 1997.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Preliminary Note to the Third Edition

1. Interpretation of Albrecht Dürer’s Enigmatic Illustration on the Cover of this Profoundly Enigmatic Work

Malicious minds like before are no longer around. If The Collective Imbecile were published in the 1950s, some clever person would quickly claim that the author, with vanity, had printed his own portrait on the book’s spine. But now, no one, no matter how irritated they might be with the work and the author, remembered to make that observation. So, I will make it myself, with a mix of buddhist serenity and Olympic indifference, embracing all its filthy consequences. Yes, readers, the little pig on the spine is neither Professor Leandro Konder, nor Professor Emir Sader, nor Dr. Muniz Sodré, nor any of the other literary-philosophical beings denounced in this book as creators, priests, and spokespersons of imbecilic doctrines. They might have imagined that I portrayed them there with a malicious intent to attribute some porcine quality to them. None of this ever crossed my mind. On the contrary, the little pig is myself, a helpless and astonished listener to the foolish doctor’s speeches, as seen in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, which illustrates the cover of the work and from which the profile that unmistakably gives the spine its porcine touch was cut. As for the other pig and the two geese, I have no alternative but to conclude that you, dear readers, are them, condemned with me to eat from the same trough and listen to the same discourse. However, do not think that by saying this, I am trying to lower our ontological status before the human orator who tricks and torments us with his philosophical shenanigans. It is true, as the Mamonas said, that “there is a lot of raunchiness in the animal world,” but it is limited to pure gastronomic lewdness in the case of pigs and genetical lewdness in the case of geese, without affecting the higher strata of intelligence, from which both pigs and geese, and we, are excluded due to lack of a university diploma. As Erik Satie pondered, “many animals have not received the benefits of human education,” a fact that the former Minister Magri and the philosopher Renato Janine Ribeiro considered to be extremely revolting, and sometimes I agree with them, considering the intellectual performance of those who did receive it. The sphere of intellectual filth being above our jurisdiction, it would be senseless to call its legitimate occupants pigs or geese, who are undoubtedly human because, as everyone knows, to err is human.

2. Clarifications and Thanks

I take this opportunity to inform you that this edition includes a few additional things compared to the second one, gathered in a “Supplement to the Supplement,” and to thank the readers who depleted the first edition in one month and the second one in two weeks. I also renew the thanks I gave in the previous two editions:

I thank my wife, Roxane, for her patience and intelligence in listening to and reading my opinions, and for helping to enrich them with a thousand and one interesting suggestions.

I thank José Carlos de Azevedo for his trust.

I thank Ronald Levinsohn, Paulo Mercadante, and José Mário Pereira for their courage.

I thank Cláudia Levinsohn, Sandra Teixeira, Beatriz Lima, Luís Soares, Cristina de Mattos Manier, Sílvia Szczupak, Sofia Bezerra Coelho, and all the staff at Faculdade da Cidade for their help in preparing and editing this book.

Above all, I thank Paulo Francis, Roberto Campos, and José Oswaldo de Meira Penna, who came to the aid of the sharpshooter in a war against an organized army.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Addendum

PAULO FRANCIS did not have time to read these acknowledgments.

He died of a heart attack on the morning of February 4, 1997. My friendship with him was brief, but deep and true. This man of overflowing joy did not die happy. His last days were tormented by persecutions and slanders of an incomparable baseness, which well measure the character of their authors and the cause they serve, for nothing better reveals the nature of the ends than the nature of the means. Some of them are discussed in the final pages of this book.

Note to the Second Edition

Certain reactions to this book, exceeding the average rate of imbecility anticipated, removed any doubt the author might still have had about the credibility of the thesis defended here, according to which something in the brains of our intellectuals is not right. First there was Paulo Roberto Pires who, not liking this book, invented another and wrote about it in O Globo, swearing it was this one. Then came André Luiz Barros, Gerd A. Bornheim, Muniz Sodré, Emir Sader and Leandro Konder, who, gathered on a page of JB on September 4, saying nothing about the book, issued these opinions about the author’s person:

He is not even a man. He is a fool. I won’t serve as a step for such a person. He is a coward. He relies on economic power. He is right-wing. He doesn’t even have a degree.

Faced with such spittle, the accused can only add to his thesis the fateful letters:

Q.E.D2

Details of the demonstration the reader can obtain in the supplement that gathers in the final pages of this volume the author’s responses to these and other restless creatures who, at the mere mention of the word “fool”, immediately started shouting: “It’s me!” And expressing the uncontrollable desire to slap the author’s hand. The supplement is intended to ask this portion of the public to calm down and wait in line, as there is no shortage of fool’s caps in the square, there is also no reason to hurry.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

The Ministry of Health warns:

The Collective Imbecile is harmful to individual imbeciles

User Manual

of The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Uncultured Current Affairs and the volumes that preceded it: The New Era and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci and The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar – Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion

TEXT READ AT THE LAUNCH OF THE COLLECTIVE IMBECILE THEATRE OF THE CITY, RIO DE JANEIRO AUGUST 22, 1996

The Collective Imbecile concludes the trilogy initiated with The New Era and the Cultural Revolution (1994) and continued with The Garden of Afflictions (1995). Each of the three books can be understood independently of the others. What is more challenging is to grasp the underlying thought that guides the entire trilogy through a single one of them.

The purpose of The Collective Imbecile in the collection is quite explicit and was stated in the Preface: to describe, through examples, the extent and seriousness of a state of affairs – current and Brazilian – which The New Era had already alerted to, and whose precise location in the context of the evolution of ideas in the world had been diagnosed in The Garden of Afflictions.

The series' meaning is, therefore, clearly to situate Brazilian culture today within the broader framework of the history of ideas in the West, from Epicurus to Chaim Perelman’s “New Rhetoric”. To my knowledge, no one has previously made an effort to think about Brazil on this scale. My only predecessors seem to have been Darcy Ribeiro, Mário Vieira de Mello, and Gilberto Freyre. The first with the tetralogy initiated with The Civilizing Process, the second with Development and Culture, and the third with his entire work. However, I differ from them in essential ways: Ribeiro employs a much larger scale, starting with Neanderthal Man, but at the same time seeks to cover this immense territory from the perspective of a particular empirical science, Anthropology, and based on a disappointingly narrow philosophical foundation, which is naked Marxism. Vieira de Mello, with much more philosophical scope, does not venture beyond the period of the French Revolution, with occasional incursions up to the Renaissance and the Reformation. As for Gilberto, the cycle that interests him is the one that begins with the great navigations. In general, scholars of Brazilian identity assumed that, having entered history in the so-called “modern” period, Brazil had no reason to try to see itself in a broader temporal mirror. Therefore, I stand alone in this endeavor, and I can claim the formidable merit of originality.

Formidable because originality is uniqueness, and the human mind is ill-equipped to perceive singularities as such: it either immediately expels them from the circle of attention to avoid the discomfort of adapting to an unfamiliar form or apprehends them only through partial and superficial analogies, mistakenly assimilating them to some known class of objects. Between silent rejection and loquacious error, my trilogy does not have many chances of being well understood3.

But the singularity, therein, is not only in the subject matter. It is also in the philosophical postulates that underlie it and in the literary form I chose to present it—or rather, a form that was imposed on me by the nature of the subject and the circumstances of the moment.

Regarding the form, the reader will notice that it differs across the three volumes. The first is composed of two medium-sized essays, placed between two introductions, several appendices, a handful of footnotes, and a conclusion. At first glance, the whole gives the impression of texts from diverse origins brought together by the fortuitous coincidence of subject matter. Upon closer examination, it reveals the unity of the underlying idea, embodied in the symbol I had printed on the cover: the biblical monsters Behemoth and Leviathan in William Blake’s engraving, the former heavily ruling over the world, the massive power of its belly firmly supported by its four legs, the latter agitating in the depths of the waters, defeated and fearsome in its impotent resentment. I did not use Blake’s engraving for its beauty, but to indicate that I attribute to these symbols precisely the meaning that Blake attributed to them. An important detail because this interpretation is not a poetic allegory, but, as Kathleen Raine noted in Blake and Tradition, the rigorous application of the principles of Christian symbolism. In the Bible, God shows Behemoth to Job, saying: “Behold Behemoth, which I made with you” (Job 40:15). Taking advantage of the ambiguity in the Hebrew original, Blake translates “with you” as “from thee,” indicating the unity of essence between man and monster: Behemoth is both a macrocosmic power and a latent force in the human soul. As for Leviathan, God asks, “Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook or snare his tongue with a line?” (Job 40:25), making it clear that the force of revolt lies in the tongue, whereas Behemoth’s power, as stated in 40:16, lies in the belly. There could be no greater clarity in contrasting a psychic power with a material power: Behemoth is the massive weight of natural necessity, Leviathan is the diabolical infranature, invisible under the waters—the psychic world—that agitates with its tongue.

The meaning that Blake records in these figures is not an “interpretation” in the negative sense that Susan Sontag gives to this word: it is, as should be any good reading of sacred text, the direct translation of universal symbolism. For Blake, although Behemoth represents the ensemble of forces obedient to God, and Leviathan represents the spirit of denial and rebellion, both are equally monsters, cosmical forces disproportionately superior to man, engaging in combat within the world’s arena and within the human soul. However, it is neither man nor Behemoth’s task to subdue Leviathan. Only God can do that. Christian iconography shows Jesus as the fisherman who pulls Leviathan out of the waters, attaching its tongue with a hook. But when man shirks from the inner battle, renouncing Christ’s help, the destructive struggle between nature and rebellious antinatural or infranatural forces is unleashed. The battle transfers from the spiritual and interior sphere to the external stage of History. This is how Blake’s engraving, inspired by the biblical narrative, powerfully suggests a metaphysical interpretation of the origins of wars, revolutions, and catastrophes: they reflect man’s resignation to the call of inner life. By avoiding the spiritual combat that frightens him but which he could overcome with the help of Jesus Christ, man exposes himself to material dangers on the bloody stage of History. In doing so, he moves from the sphere of Providence and Grace to the realm of fate and destiny, where the appeal to divine assistance no longer has an effect, as there, truth and error, right and wrong, are no longer at stake, only the blind forces of relentless necessity and impotent rebellion. In the context of more recent History, that is, the cycle that begins roughly with the Enlightenment, these two forces clearly assume the sense of rigid conservatism and revolutionary hubris. Or, more simply, right and left.

The entire drama described above can be iconographically summarized in the cross diagram that I later included in The Garden of Afflictions, but which was already implied in The New Era and the Cultural Revolution, as it constitutes the very structure of the analytical approach through which I seek to grasp the significance of the two currents of ideas mentioned in the title: Fritjof Capra’s neo-capitalist holism and the Gramscian enterprise of cultural devastation.

In this first volume, the initially adopted form could not be clearer and was imposed by the very nature of the subject: an introduction, one chapter for Capra, another for Gramsci, a comparative retrospective, and an inescapable conclusion: ideologies, whatever they may be, were always limited to the horizontal dimension of time and space, opposing the collective to the collective, the number to the number; lost was the vertical dimension that connected the individual soul to the universality of the divine spirit, the singular to the Singular. Along with it, the sense of scale, the sense of proportion and priority, vanished. Thus, ideologies tended to occupy the entire stage of spiritual life and, at the same time, deny the metaphysical totality and the unity of the human individual, interpreting and flattening everything into the mold of a one-dimensional worldview.

The footnotes and appendices, which apparently create some disorder in the form of the whole, serve two opposing and complementary purposes: on the one hand, they indicate the broader bases implicit in the argument, showing the reader that Capra and Gramsci’s analysis was just the visible tip of a much larger investigation that, at that time, only my students knew through the classes and handouts of the Philosophy Seminar, but which, under the conditions of an abnormally busy life, I was not sure I could ever fully write; on the other hand, they indicate that my analyses did not hover in the sky of mere theories but applied to the understanding of political events unfolding on the Brazilian scene at the very moment I was writing the book—hence the controversial edges that give certain passages of this essay the appearance of combative journalism. If some readers saw in the book nothing more than this surface—as others will see in The Collective Imbecile only an occasion to criticize certain figures of the day and in The Garden of Afflictions an attack on the USP (University of São Paulo) establishment—I cannot say they missed anything, as the rest and the best of what these books contain were not really meant for these readers, and it is best that they remain invisible to their eyes.

If in the first volume, I allowed the central idea to be only sketched in fragments, somewhat in a minimalist manner, so that the reader, rather sensing it than perceiving it, had to work to find it within themselves instead of simply picking it up from the surface of the page, in the second volume, The Garden of Afflictions, I followed the opposite strategy: to be as explicit as possible and give the exposition maximum unity, obliging the reader to follow a tight argumentation, without jumps or interruptions, over four hundred pages. But to avoid giving the illusion that this complete form encompassed the entirety of my thinking on the subject, I scattered throughout the text hundreds of footnotes indicating implicit theoretical assumptions, possibilities for further depth to be realized (or already realized orally in class), and a thousand and one seeds of possible and interesting developments, which I would accomplish if I had a never-ending life, but which intelligent readers can well undertake for themselves. The unity of argumentation in The Garden of Afflictions, which, in my intention, confirmed by some readers, gives this otherwise heavy and complex book the readability of a detective novel, thus shows itself to be not the closed unity of a system, but the unity of a holon, as Arthur Koestler would say: something that, seen from one side, is a whole in itself, and, from another side, is part of a larger whole. This homology of part and whole is, in turn, repeated in the internal structure of the book, where the apparently insignificant event that serves as its starting point already contains, in its microcosmic or microscopic scale, the broad outlines of the global interpretation of the history of the West presented in the remaining chapters. Those readers who complained that such a substantial book began with the polemical commentary on a minor event showed that they did not fully understand one of the main messages of the book, which is that, in light of a metaphysics of History, there are no properly insignificant events—the large and the small are merged into the organic unity of a Meaning that permeates everything. That which weighs nothing in the causal order can reveal much in the order of significance.

Indeed, if there were perfectly insignificant events, deserving only contempt and silence, the third volume of the series, The Collective Imbecile, could not have been written at all: for what I present there is a commented showcase of cultural banalities that mean a lot precisely because they are worthless. And if I decided to gather them in a volume, giving them the dignity of being remembered when their authors are nothing more than shadows in Hades, the graveyard of irrelevance, it was precisely because I understood that, starting from each of them and circling in ever-widening concentric circles, one could arrive at visions of universal scale similar to those in which, starting from a cultural squabble that occurred at the São Paulo Art Museum in 1990, I showed the readers of The Garden of Afflictions the battle of Leviathan and Behemoth on the entire horizon of Western history. And, not being able to undertake such a hermeneutic effort anew with every new cultural idiocy I read in the newspapers, I decided to gather some and offer them to readers as samples for exercise purposes. The Collective Imbecile is, therefore, the book of assignments that accompanies the base text brought in The Garden of Afflictions, with The New Era serving as an abbreviation for beginners. Those who read The Collective Imbecile in this way, seeking there the homework to reconstruct, from thirty examples, the outlines of the vision of History and the interpretative method expounded in the previous volumes, and always seeking the organic unity between part and whole, between the philosophical view of a millenary culture and the samples of the momentary inculture of a country forgotten on the margins of History, they will have acquired for themselves the best part of what I have given them. For that is how the books of philosophers are read, even when dealing with only a “self-appointed philosopher” like the one speaking to you.

I admit that if I had adopted a more academically acceptable expository form in any of the three books, I would not need to draw attention now to a unity of thought that would be evident at first glance. However, this visibility would come at the cost of losing all references to authentic life and confining my discourse within a linguistic bubble that does not align with my temperament or the rule I set for myself some years ago, never to speak impersonally or on behalf of any collective entity but always directly in my own name, with no backing more respectable than the simple honorability of a rational being, and never to address abstract collectives, but solely and exclusively to flesh-and-blood individuals, stripped of the provisional identities that positions, social status, and ideological affiliation superimpose upon the one with which they were born and with which they will one day appear before the Throne of the Almighty. I am deeply persuaded that only at this level of discourse can one truly philosophize.

Furthermore, there is some pedagogical merit in being a bit messy, in being able to arrange the data not in the customary order desired by the lazy spectator but in intelligently disarranging them to compel the reader to take an active part in the investigation. And there is immense pleasure in mixing literary genres when one is the author of a booklet that previously distinguished and cataloged them with touches of formal rigor4.

I am immensely pleased to have been able to conclude this trilogy and to be here today, in this celebration that, for me, is less about the launch of a book and more about the completion of a part, a stage of the task that falls to me in this life. The task, in essence, is to break the circle of limitations and constraints that ideological discourse has imposed on the intelligences of this country, to connect our culture to the millennial and loftiest currents of spiritual life in the world, and, in short, to enable Brazil, instead of looking solely into the narrow mirror of modernity, imagining that four centuries are the entire history of the world, to see itself on the scale of the human drama before the universe and eternity. The task, in its highest and most ambitious intent, is to remove the mental obstacles that currently prevent Brazilian culture from receiving a stronger inspiration from the divine spirit and to flourish as a magnificent gift to all of humanity.

The Collective Imbecile

Prologue of the Prologue

When I began to write these pages, I did not expect to grant them even the external and corporeal unity that two covers and a spine confer upon the object called, in this case most improperly, a “book,” which should rightly be called a “volume” or a “block.” They did not follow an overall plan, nor were they conceived with the intention of harmonizing with one another. In them, my impressions of cultural events of the day were randomly noted down as the events unfolded, without my vision even attaining the unity of any demiurgic intention, however secret and subtle it might be.

However, as they accumulated, I noticed that they reflected the unintended convergence of my usual points of focus on a precise point. Led by some hidden demon, my brain became increasingly attentive and sensitive to the annoying foolishness that, in ever-increasing doses, I found in the newspapers, spoken by men of letters in this obscure part of the world, and which the good angel, driven by concern for the alarming swelling of my scrotum, advised me in vain to keep the maximum distance from and devote to well-deserved oblivion. Due to either the increasing accumulation or my obsessive attention, lettered buffoonery began to take, in my eyes, almost the form of an independent literary genre, well differentiated and characteristically national. Yes, just as Germany had found its highest literary vocation in philosophical prose, England in lyrical poetry, Italy in epic verse, Spain in picaresque narrative, Russia in the novel, and France in journalistic ideas, Brazil had found the perfect expression of its intellectual personality in the journalism of the lack of ideas. Once my spirit became accustomed to consuming this literary genre, just as Don Quixote had accustomed himself to chivalric romances, nothing could stop me in the search for new and increasingly depressing cultural experiences.

Every morning, when I, amid masochistic pleasures, threw myself into those vicious letters, the poor angel, in vain, tried to dissuade me, direct my gaze to more hygienic things, ranging from the Bible to the Amiga magazine, through the classics of literature and the works of great philosophers, as well as stock market quotations, the adventures of the Knights of the Zodiac, and advertisements for installment plan refrigerators. And I, after a brief glance at this material, returned with redoubled zeal to the cultural obscenities in which I wallowed like a pig. Only one thing was missing: for him to offer me pornographic literature, which would have been an unworthy appeal of his high office. However, I believe that, if he did not do so, it was not so much for reasons of morality but because he foresaw in advance the ineffectiveness of this expedient, given the different direction taken, apparently irreversibly, by my furious animus legendi. Yes, I read everything, but everything that was cultural, in the special sense that this word has assumed among us since the advent of Antonio Gramsci and Michael Jackson: the Ideias supplement of JB, the literary pages of O Globo, the Caderno de Sábado of Jornal da Tarde, the Suplemento Cultura of O Estado de S. Paulo, the weekly magazines Veja and Isto É, the Suplemento of Recife, the literary pages of A Tarde da Bahia and Diário do Paraná—everything, in short. Everything and More!

The edifying pretext that moved me, as I imagined in my foolish self-deception, was of a patriotic nature. Yes, I replied to the angel, I read these things in search of a trace of intelligence, a sign of hope, a signal at least that I can present to defend my country before the throne of the Almighty, showing Him that giving us neurons was not in vain. The guardian of my soul lost patience:

Ma che brutta bestia! (language: I’m sorry. In my childhood, I was educated by Italian priests, and I got the impression that angels speak Italian. From now on, I translate.) You are there acting as an advocate for the indefensible, and you poison your own soul with venomous nourishment? Go work, you vagabond!

I can’t quite say when the inner shift occurred, when the patriotic intent converted or perverted into fully assumed masochism. It was then that I began to collect and organize these notes. Then the angel said to me:

If you really want to, then go, seal your fate: become a collector of follies. But, for God’s sake, let it not be in pure vain. Give a purpose and meaning to these self-inflicted pains. Make a book, not to show to God, who already knows in advance everything you see, but for those very people who do not see themselves and by not seeing themselves, display themselves when they should hide. Do the work of the spirit: show them to themselves, so that what once flattered them may humiliate them, and falling from the heights they climbed, they may know how human they are. Gather your papers, compose a bulky writing, if rudeness and crudeness do not matter, but do not lie. And so that you do not fall where those you speak of have fallen, be careful: do not boast of being anyone’s conscience, for any good you may happen to do will not be your work, but the effect of divine alchemy, which can transmute even the vice of reading what is worthless.

May 1996.

Prologue

I gather here some notes that I took on the sidelines of Brazilian cultural news between 1992 and 1996. They all refer to a single theme: the alienation of our intellectual elite, swept away by fads and passions that prevent them from seeing the most obvious things. These are scattered observations, not intended to provide an overall diagnosis, but they strongly suggest a suspicion: the suspicion that something is amiss in our national psyche5.

All these notes start from some local cultural event — a show, the release of a book, the words of some celebrity spoken in an interview — and they seek to unravel the general ideas they contain, judging them from the perspective of intrinsic coherence, confrontation with facts, and the requirements of a higher culture. However, despite the homogeneity of themes and the unity of the criteria interpreting and judging them, the focus is diverse, and the style varies. As a result, you will find here everything from brief philosophical essays (“Rorty and the Animals” and “Note on Charles S. Peirce”) and cultural criticism (“The Collective Imbecile” and “Christopher Lasch”) to humorous sketches (“Vegetable Ideas” and Appendices) and mere journalistic notes, so that the reader, shifting positions, does not feel uncomfortable about the subject.

This book completes the trilogy that began with The New Age and Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci and continued with The Garden of Afflictions. From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar: An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion. I devoted this trilogy to the study of Brazilian intellectual pathology in the new world panorama. Its role in the series is to demonstrate, through examples, the extent and gravity of a phenomenon of which the first book gave the alarm, and its location in the History of Ideas in the West was studied in the second6.

The selection of samples is random. I found them in the press. Right or wrong, I thought they could compose a meaningful sample of the state of mind of Brazilian intellectuals in the present phase of our history. “Intellectuals” in most cases is just a way of speaking: it refers to people who should be intellectuals due to their position, profession, fame, or pretension.

The reader may be surprised that some of the facts discussed here do not have Brazil as their setting but the United States7. However, I am not speaking of American culture as seen by the Americans from the North but as it appears here, in our literary press. The material is from there, but the selective approach is ours, revealing our interests and priorities. Secondly, as can be seen from this approach, the local confusion is, in some essential aspects, a reflection of the crisis of American intelligence. Chronically incapable of independent thought, Brazilian intellectuals compensate for their lack of creative strength with an excess of sensitivity to the fluctuations of the world’s market of ideas. No one, like our intellectuals, has such a keen sense of “current events” and such a shameless rush to renounce yesterday’s devotions at the slightest suspicion of them being “outdated.” Fickle and insecure, they strain to keep up with the chimes of the fashion clock, mistaking the echo of history for history itself.

The desire for security is a normal impulse of human beings. It drove the first philosophers to seek a truth beyond the fluctuations of opinion. However, among Brazilian intellectuals, this desire takes on a caricatural and perverse meaning. Instead of seeking security through direct and personal intuition, they imagine they can find it in collective and epidemic adherence to the most recent prestigious trends in what they call “the great centers of cultural production” — an expression that already reveals a materialistic and market-oriented conception of culture. Too afraid to attempt to figure out right from wrong on their own, they find relief and protection in feeling up-to-date with world opinion, or what appears to be so8. This spares them from distressing effort, reducing intellectual activity to a basic arithmetic operation, dedicated to seeking not the order of reasons but merely the sum of opinions. Thus, from a carbon copy of French fashion, we evolved into a fax reproduction of American mentality. When, in the last three decades, the crisis of communism undermined the prestige of the great intellectual figures of European Marxism, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Althusser, and Lukács, the Brazilian intellectual compass shifted from Paris to New York9, where two powerful currents of cultural trends emerged: the New Left and the New Age, New Left and New Age. Brazil became increasingly dependent on the USA in matters of ideas since the 1960s. Several unfortunate circumstances converged to produce the present state of our cultural poverty.

First: The transfer of our intellectual framework to New York occurred precisely at the moment when the USA was entering an alarming intellectual decline. This alone shows our radical disorientation, our difficulty in selecting influences according to sensible priorities, and our tendency to be guided by deceptive signs of momentary brilliance. In romanticism, we preferred Victor Hugo over Hölderlin. In 1922, when the world had Rilke and Yeats, we followed the shooting star of Marinetti. In the 1950s, we ignored Husserl to follow Jean-Paul Sartre, his pale reflection. Now we are dazzled by the phosphorescence of Richard Rorty, of Frederic Jameson, without realizing that it is a waste to import new make-up for dead philosophies when the local production of funeral cosmetics is self-sufficient10.

Second: The worldwide discredit of Marxism coincided, chronologically, with the rise of the left to the forefront of national politics, and precisely at the moment of its greatest glory, they find themselves more disoriented than ever, with no models to copy other than the remnants of American intellectual decomposition. And as the leftist intelligentsia has occupied all the strategic positions of the prestige industry — dominating universities, communications, and the book market — they have contaminated the entire Brazilian cultural life with their poverty11.

Third: Our intellectual decline has been accompanied by a remarkable progress in the material means of cultural diffusion: the expansion and modernization of the book industry, the opening of spaces for cultural news on TV and radio, a prodigious increase in the number of university slots, the multiplication of official funding for cultural production, etc. Thus, the lower the quality of ideas, the wider the channels through which the mental sewage of intellectuals is poured into the minds of the people. Worse still: by suddenly rewarding the young, unprepared, and lacking inner depth intellectual, success acts as the encouraging sign that an imbecile needs to become an arrogant imbecile.

However, it so happened — fourth circumstance — that the verbose arrogance of the intellectuals found, in the context of popular outrage against poverty and corruption, the most powerful stimulus that insincere souls need to rid themselves of the last trace of composure: a moralizing pretext. When levity, foolishness, and pretentious arrogance are invited to ascend the stage to speak in the name of “ethics,” there are no longer any limits to the progress of unconsciousness: morality is the last refuge of imbeciles12.

The picture is completed at the moment when some clever folks of the older generation, seeing these battalions of young people devoid of their own judgment and in need, therefore, of planting the stunted seedlings of their thoughts in the collective support soil, realized — fifth circumstance — that they could channel the potential of these boys for the benefit of a specific political strategy by just giving them a little make-up. It is precisely from masses of semi-literate young people that the “collective intellectual” of Gramscism is composed: the party apparatus of agitation and propaganda, where the distribution of clichés, prejudices, and mental habits serves as intellectual life. Hence the title of this book.

But this title is more than a satirical allusion. It illustrates, with minimal inaccuracy, one of the essential properties of what is conventionally called the intelligentsia. It is necessary to remember that this Russian word does not encompass all individuals engaged in scientific, philosophical, or artistic tasks, but only those who frequently engage in dialogue with each other and mutually persuade themselves that they are collaborating for something they swear is the social and political progress of humanity. Eminent thinkers like Kurt Gödel or Edmund Husserl, poets of the highest caliber like Blake and Saint-John Perse, and spiritually elevated individuals like Râmana Maharshi or René Guénon are not part of the intelligentsia, either because they care little about the social and political progress of humanity, or because, being predominantly occupied with timeless matters, they remain on the margins of what their contemporaries understand as “the great debates of our time” — the universal logomachy that, although it has not produced intellectually valuable results since the French Revolution, has at least raised about two hundred million human beings to a higher plane of existence, lifting them from this lower world to the ethereal realm, as that is more or less the number of victims of the ideological wars of the last two centuries. Having contributed nothing to this result, the six mentioned characters are not, therefore, intellectuals in the sense that Voltaire, Plekhanov, Sartre, and D. Marilena Chauí are.

Once the concept of the intelligentsia13 is understood, the expression that names this book acquires full clarity as a designation of one of the main activities of this category of beings. The collective imbecile is not, in fact, merely the sum of a certain number of individual imbeciles. It is, on the contrary, a collective of people with normal or even superior intelligence who come together driven by the common desire to imbecilize each other. Whether this desire is conscious or unconscious is not the issue; what matters is that the objective is generally achieved. How? The process has three phases. First, each member of the collective commits to perceive nothing that is not also simultaneously perceived by all the others. Second, they all swear to believe that the minimized intersection thus obtained is the only true world. Third, they all profess that the mental common denominator operating this intersection is infinitely more intelligent than any individual human being, either inside or outside the group, since, according to an authoritative spokesperson of this collective entity, “psychoanalysis, with the concept of the unconscious, and Marxism, with that of ideology, have established insurmountable limits for belief in the power of autonomous consciousness, emphasizing its limits” (sic)14. Thus, if one of the members of the collective is bitten by a dog, he must immediately call the others and ask them if he was indeed bitten by a dog. If they answer that it is merely a subjective impression (which will be the case in most instances, as it is highly unlikely that dogs will reach an agreement to bite people in the presence of a significant portion of the literate community), he must immediately renounce considering this episode an objective fact, but he can continue to talk about it in public, if he wishes, as a personal creative expression or religious belief. For the collective imbecile, everything that cannot be confirmed by the unanimous testimony of the intelligentsia simply does not exist. It is thus understandable why the world described by intellectuals is so different from the one in which other people live, especially those who, immersed in the illusion of the total power of autonomous consciousness, believe in what they see rather than in what they read in the books of the professors at USP.

Therefore, this book deals with what does not exist: that which is outside the world as conceived by the intelligentsia, but which is adjacent to its circumference and can be seen with perfect clarity by anyone who consents to cease being an intellectual for a few minutes and takes a peek outside, making use, even discreetly, of the extremely limited powers of his individual consciousness.

Many will see in this book an indictment, a furious and venomous diatribe against Brazilian intellectuals. Individuals in whom the hormones of emotion are more active than the lights of intelligence15 are incapable of understanding that sometimes we have to say dreadful things not because they arise from our stomachs but because they enter through our eyes; that we do not say what we want but what we see—and we do so without any pleasure, much less the hypocritical pleasure of a platform moralist who imagines himself to be good when he manages to prove that someone else is bad. Compulsive accusers, pertinacious attributors of their own intentions to others, are incapable of conceiving that the one who speaks bitter words may not be motivated by the intention to denounce or accuse but to describe and warn. And if the discourse comes in a tone of brutal frankness, it is because the state of affairs described has surpassed the limits of tolerability, and the warning is already too late.

I have no doubt that this book will, in a good portion of literary circles, receive the standard reception given to many Brazilian books, some even better, whose aim was to provoke thought: complete silence regarding the content, and a majestic flowering of gossip and slander regarding the author’s character16. It is characteristic of our intellectual meanness that the less someone understands the simple statement of an idea, the more he considers himself qualified to diagnose the deep and even unconscious psychological motives that supposedly led the author to produce it. This has the indisputable advantage of diverting the discussion from the arid terrains of philosophy, science, etc., to the fertile plains of armchair psychoanalysis, where every Brazilian feels like an expert in football tactics, political economy, and car mechanics. The diagnosed motives are invariably morbid or sinister—hatred of humanity, Oedipal complex, latent homosexuality, pig-chauvinistic chauvinism, demented egotism, repressed envy, neurotic resentment, furious desire for self-promotion, and so on and so forth—thus obscuring the author’s person with a sufficiently unlikable mask to dissuade any reader from making an effort to understand him. Truly great men—like Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Gilberto Freyre, Otto Maria Carpeaux, and Oliveira Vianna—have been abundantly subjected to this type of caricaturing makeup, so that, seeing them reduced to easily graspable stereotypes, every potential reader believes he already knows enough about them to dispense with examining closely what they wrote. Why would I escape a similar fate? Intrigue and slander—sometimes not spontaneous but precisely directed and systematic from interested centers—have been, in Brazil, the most common form of literary criticism17. It seems that no one realizes how much the entire country—including the slanderers—loses because of this. The network of groundless fears, suspicions, prejudices, and superstitious preconceptions that this habit casts over our cultural life imprisons Brazilian intelligence in a neurotic and incapacitating complex, frustrates the exchange of inspirations, halts the flow of ideas, suffocates creative forces, and condemns us to perpetual spiritual anemia18.

However, there will always be many good readers eager to understand even what initially displeases them. These readers will not take offense a priori, imagining that attributing intentions is the same as understanding. They will immediately notice a fact that contradicts, at its core, any diagnosis of literary hydrophobia that some bolder enemy may try to pass on to me with the scientific authority conferred by the tenth glass of cachaça: the fact that, in the country of corporatism, where each person only speaks pro domo sua, the one speaking to them is a rare and not insignificant example of a Brazilian capable of making serious criticisms of his own guild, punishing, as recommended by the millennial wisdom of the I Ching, his hometown before chastising others. For, having lived thirty and some years of my work as a journalist, writer, professor, and lecturer, what else am I but a member of the clan of the literate? The anti-corporate discourse is fashionable, it has good press, and a naive audience fails to realize that speaking against others' corporatism is often just an elegant way of strengthening one’s own. Inverting this malicious formula, I criticize my own. And, given the modest print run of this book, which will certainly not be read by the uncultivated masses, no one can justly claim that I have washed our dirty laundry in public. Of course, I make a distinction between the learned class in general and, as mentioned above, the intelligentsia in particular, attributing exclusively to the latter the jurisdiction of the collective imbecile. But the intelligentsia is to the learned class as the part is to the whole, as a branch of the family is to the family, and its very claim to speak on behalf of the entire family justifies my addressing it as people of the same blood—on equal terms, in the irritated tone of someone who does not speak from above, judging and condemning with neutral authority, but who feels contaminated and ashamed of their own guilt.

Regarding the subtitle, this work is squarely situated within the literary genre inaugurated by Osman Lins: studies of incultural problems. A genre to which the national environment, judging by the signs of the times, will not deny themes or motifs anytime soon19. It will only deny opportunities for publication. The appropriate place for works of this genre is undoubtedly the daily or weekly press since they follow journalistically the unfolding of events and distinguish themselves from pure news only by seeking, in the broader background of cultural history, the connection between the course of days and the passing of centuries, as seen through an autonomous conscience. However, I do not believe that the Brazilian press provides a conducive atmosphere for the discussion of the themes presented here, simply because journalism is the very temple of the intelligentsia, and editorial guidelines faithfully reflect the above-mentioned minimizing approach, if not serving as its mold. And if there is no room in the newspaper pages for these themes, there is even less room for the very personal and direct language, sometimes openly impertinent, in which I feel more comfortable talking about them—not because I am an explosive or grouchy person by nature, but because for decades, all I have heard in this country is the voice of the collective imbecile, whether or not confirmed by psychoanalysis and Marxism, there are insurmountable limits to human tolerance.

Until a few decades ago, Brazilian journalism had not yet realized its supreme power and consented to echo foreign thought, often in a personal and direct manner in content and tone. Later, the standardization of journalistic technique brought about the reign of mediocre thinking and tepid language, supported by a whole technology of caution, a whole engineering of ambiguity20. Bilinguis maledictus. At the same time, journalism—along with its conjoined twin, marketing—rose from its position as a servant of culture to become its model and master, reducing cultural production to a passive echo of the daily news.

Another obstacle to the publication of these texts in newspapers is their length. The “technical” modifications introduced in our journalism from the 1960s are intent on cutting everything according to the mold of a chronicle, suelto, or a “pirolito” (short piece), and nowadays, an article writer is someone who fires off a few catchy phrases to an inattentive reader and goes home feeling proud of their ability to summarize the Bible in a paragraph, even though God needed nothing less than ten. To make a statement is easy; to prove it is difficult. The statement of a theorem can fit into one line; the proof may require several pages. The prevailing journalistic norm implies nothing less than a prohibition of proving, a strict obligation to stick to the peremptory assertion, preferably delivered in that authoritative tone which, dissuading potential objectors, reasonably abbreviates the conversation. The laziness of reading comes to the aid of the norm, condemning as “verbose” anything that goes beyond the simple assertion. This ultimately turns journalism into what Conrad said: something written by idiots to be read by imbeciles.

That is why these articles, written in the style of a type of publication that no longer exists, have ended up becoming a book—a journalism without a newspaper. Of the works presented here, only a few were published in the press: one in the most modest—though no less valuable—Carioca newspaper, Tribuna da Imprensa; another in Jornal do Brasil; two more in a newly founded literary supplement of O Globo; and one in a magazine for journalists, a family setting where these professionals allow themselves the luxury of frankness, which they restrain in their public exercise of the profession with the austerity of saintly ascetics.

Good friends recommend that I do not speak like this, that I moderate my tone, that I carefully select my targets and attack them one by one so as not to draw everyone’s hostility at once. Useless precautions. Malediction does not reason in choosing its victims. I may fall into its claws due to an unfortunate phrase, just as I may escape them despite a generous distribution of bitter truths21.

Finally, I say that it would only make sense to avoid the susceptibilities of groups and factions if my book were addressed to groups and factions. Now, it addresses exclusively the individual reader, in the solitude of their conscience, in that “unbribable core” of which Ortega y Gasset spoke, which every man possesses and where he is capable of admitting, within four walls, truths that he renounces in public. I address the best in my reader’s inner self, not that fearful and servile exterior that says amen to group opinions out of fear of solitude. To do otherwise would be disrespectful. Therefore, irate reader, do not censor me publicly before making sure that you will not agree with me in private, when, in the heart of the night, the words that emerge from within you find no other interlocutor but the immense silence22.

May 1996.

From America to the World

In April 1962, the newspaper “Novos Rumos,” the organ of the Brazilian Communist Party, published the following lines:

"We must reconsider another attitude deeply rooted among us, which reveals a true mental lethargy. It is the habit of reasoning within fixed schemes. This ‘method’ of reasoning is limited to capturing the facts and fitting them into the predetermined scheme. An example of this is the ‘revolutionary vs. reactionary’ scheme. According to this scheme, all we have to do is classify people, actions, and facts as either ‘revolutionary’ or ‘reactionary.’ Once this is done, the ‘task’ is completed. How can we understand reality while maintaining this attitude?"23

Thirty-two years have passed since the time when an obscure communist ideologue from a peripheral country could publish such a warning in a small “agitprop” newspaper for workers. Now, an eminent American art critic, writing for the young intellectual elite of his country, finds himself compelled to explain the following:

"As a writer, I reject not only the post-structuralist argument that every text is indeterminate but also the renewed attempt to judge literature in terms of its supposed social virtue. Through this, we enter a never-marxist land, strange, nostalgic, where all the most retrograde ghosts of Literature as an Instrument of Social Utility are displayed. Thus, we read in the new Columbia History of the American Novel that Harriet Beecher Stowe is a better novelist than Melville because she is a woman and ‘socially constructive,’ as Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to rally Americans against slavery… while the captain of the Pequod was a laissez-faire symbol of capitalist individualism, with a condemnable attitude towards whales…"_

This is from Robert Hughes, “Culture of Complaint24.” Hughes continues:

“These outdated habits of judging writers based on their supposed ability to improve social consciousness are even more negative for students, leaving them with the impression that the correct response to a text is to measure it with a crude meter of political correctness… Politics should not permeate everything… Certain works of art may carry embedded political messages in their structure. But it is extremely naive to suppose that these messages exhaust the content of art as art or ultimately determine its value. So why is it fashionable to judge art in political terms? Probably because it is easy to teach. It clearly divides the extensive republic of letters into heroes and villains and relieves the student of the burden of imaginative empathy and the difficulties of aesthetic discrimination.”

And so on, pages and pages, with all the patience and delicacy, trying to explain to the educated youth of Columbia University what three decades earlier, in a culturally backward country, a communist could convey to communist workers in brief, rough, and straightforward words, without any fear of offending political or “ethical” sensibilities.

I do not hesitate to conclude that in the Brazilian Communist Party of 1962, there was a more cultured, more understanding, and more civilized atmosphere than in Columbia University today. Many there knew that Marx, an admirer of Homer and Aeschylus, acknowledged the enduring aesthetic value beyond the political opportunity of works; and confusing art with mere propaganda was seen as a petty-bourgeois radicalism, hostile to culture and tainted with fascism. The article by J. Miglioli — probably a pseudonym — attests that if there was any residue of this confusion among the militants, it was only as a spontaneous effect of pure mental lethargy and not as a formally assumed belief. However, what we see now in the American university is the explicit and programmatic reduction of art to political propaganda, something no communist theorist ever dared to defend, as there was never an essential incompatibility between Marxism and a sense of ridicule.

This reduction, in fact, falls below all criticism, and even a fifth-rate communist newspaper like Novos Rumos only touched on the subject in passing and reluctantly, as if discreetly abbreviating the confession of a weakness. In contrast, Hughes finds himself constrained to lengthy, didactic, and humiliating explanations to be understood by supposedly “highbrow” boys of Columbia.

The fact that the North American nation, after having engaged for over half a century in the bitter and necessary task of ridding us of communism, now distributes to the world, under the guise of academic culture, a trash that not even the dulled Soviet olfactory sense could endure, is a sign that something very serious is happening there. The victorious struggle against communism has left more than glorious scars on the winner: having killed the giant with bites, the hero now discovers that the deceased was AIDS-infected. Some of the most repugnant traits of the old communist mentality reappear magnified in the cultural production exported by the USA, but labeled as harmless and suitable for consumption by the stamp of the Food and Drug Administration.

The contamination of the hero is not an exceptional case in mythology. Edmund Wilson, another eminent American critic from a generation lucky enough to depart before the advent of the new Columbia History of the American Novel, observed exactly this in his memorable interpretation of Sophocles' Philoctetes25. Philoctetes, a mighty archer, saves his city by repelling invaders, but is wounded in the foot. The wound emits an unbearable stench, and the city’s inhabitants, preferring hygiene over gratitude, send the hero into exile. As for me, I have already exiled the North American Philoctetes, abstaining from consuming, except with the utmost antiseptic precautions, the productions of their current academic culture, marked by a blend of barbarism and pedantic pseudo-erudition (a mix that Brazilian consumers seem to appreciate above all delicacies, judging by the number of translations and reviews). Ingratitude? Not at all. Wounds in the foot symbolize, in universal symbolism, the expiation of guilt, which heroes are not exempt from. The condemnation is just, and the exile will not last forever. Either the wound will dry up — if not continually reopened by groups of resentful moral creditors of American society, unable to discern the difference between their guild aspirations and the interests of humanity — or, as in the play, the hero will be called back in the face of the imminent invasion.

The danger is that in the meantime, the infection threatens to contaminate the rest of the world: the leftist intelligentsia, deprived of its own light, is always in search of a prophetic beacon and, abandoned by the fall of Moscow, now turns to Columbia and Princeton with the servility of a prostitute who, in the war between pimps, abandons the defeated for the victor. The United States ascends to the intellectual leadership of the world at the very moment they are struck by a disconcerting attack of ineptitude.

Relativist Trap

The CYCLE OF DISCUSSIONS on Relativism as a Worldview, promoted by the National Bank of Ideas in São Paulo, offers the public three alternatives, presenting them as the only possible ones in the current stage of the evolution of thought: (a) relativism; (b) skepticism; (c) conventionalism, which is an arrangement between the two former.

In a boxing match, the real winner is not any of the fighters but the promoter who organizes the spectacle. Similarly, in a philosophical discussion, victory does not go to one of the contenders but to the one who, behind the scenes, defines the terms of the problem and shapes the possibilities of response in advance. Regardless of who appears to win the debates about Relativism as a Worldview, the listener will come out as a skeptic, relativist, or conventionalist, and any of these three results are equally useful for the main purpose of the contest: to consider all other alternatives as dead and buried without having to discuss them.

Obsessively concentrating the discussion on certain currents of ideas, to block the public’s access to others, has been the dominant norm in cultural and philosophical debates in this country for at least a decade. It is an elegant method of prior censorship that gives the most tyrannical mental direction the appearance of a democratic discussion.

A few years ago, an Ethics cycle promoted by the City of São Paulo was guided by an implicit and unspoken criterion, yet clearly visible to the attentive observer: to exclude all spiritual and religious perspectives from ethical debates, as if religions and religious thinkers had nothing to say on the subject. Instead, they gave the impression to the public that the basic themes of ethical discussion are found in Machiavelli, Rousseau, Karl Marx, and other political thinkers, who never wrote a single line about ethics and, in certain cases, showed a moral indifference bordering on pathology. The cycle had no purpose or outcome other than to politicize the word “ethics,” emptying it of all inner meaning and turning it into an instrument for immediate use on the platforms26.

Now, the discussion about relativism imposes an even more selective and distorting view of the alternatives at stake upon the uneducated or semi-educated public. It gives the impression that relativism is the almost inevitable conclusion of scientific development and that humanity has only two viable options against it: to adhere to the formal universals of scientific positivism or to “create universals” through the standardization of collective beliefs. In short, there are only three philosophies: skeptical relativism, scientific relativism, and “politically correct” relativism. The first destroys all knowledge by denying universals. The second seeks universals, informing, to the relief of the skeptical relativist (and not without intimate satisfaction), that it has not yet found any. The third argues that we must “create” universals through persuasion and political activity, which is the same as reducing them to socially useful lies. All other alternatives are gathered under the label of “dogmatism” and rejected to a distant past, out of the audience’s sight.

However, it is absolutely false that the current state of investigations has settled the matter regarding these alternatives.

The prodigious development of Comparative Religion, for example, presents humanity today with an evidence that cannot be concealed by any form of relativism, whether militant or amateurish: the perfect homogeneity of structures and contents in the mystical experience among the great spiritual figures of all religions, in the most distant and diverse epochs and civilizations27. The “universals” revealed there cannot be reduced to mere formalities or explained as effects of historical conditioning, given the diversity of cultures where the recurrence of the same inner phenomena is observed. It is unnecessary to assume that the universality of the mystical experience “proves” anything. It simply poses an insurmountable obstacle to the claims of universality made by relativism in any of its three versions. Moreover, even more significant is the result of a century of comparative study in the field of symbols and myths, whether in the visual arts, secular literature, or the exegesis of sacred texts. There, the universality of structures and themes becomes a direct argument against any form of nominalism, whether assumed or concealed.

To assume that it is not possible to be up to date in our times without taking a position among various forms of relativism and skepticism is to hide from the public’s eyes at least a whole century of scientific research and the millennia of spiritual history that it has brought to the knowledge of modern man.

Behind this selectivity, however, there is something more than mere lazy omission. There is the resentment of a certain intellectual class against anything beyond its narrow spiritual horizon: "Man has closed himself up so much within himself that he sees nothing but the tiny cracks of his cave."28

Rorty and the Animals

"Error speaks with a double voice, one of which proclaims the false and the other denies it; and it is a contender of yes and no, which is called contradiction… Error condemns itself, not by the judge’s mouth, but ex ore suo." - BENEDETTO CROCE

"PHILOSOPHY ORIGINATED in an attempt to escape to a world in which nothing would change. Plato, the founder of this area of culture we now call ‘philosophy,’ supposed that the difference between the past and the future would be minimal."

This is how the full-page article begins, published by Mr. Richard Rorty in Folha de S. Paulo on the last 3rd of March. When I started working in journalism thirty years ago, a paragraph of this kind would have been ruthlessly crossed out by the copy desk, which would also leave the author of the gem a rude little note, more or less as follows: “But how, clever one, could Plato so eagerly desire to escape to a world of stability without change, if in this very world, he did not see a significant difference between the past and the future?” Nowadays, blatant nonsense is published as a high manifestation of philosophical thought, and not a copy is there to say that it is not acceptable, not even as an attempt at journalism.

But besides starting his article with an ostensible contradiction, Mr. Rorty still intends to use it as the basis for conclusions that go against the most elementary historical truths. For he continues: “Only when they began to take history and time seriously did philosophers place their hopes for the future of this world in the place previously occupied by their desire to know another world. The attempt to take time seriously began with Hegel.”

To begin with, it is evident that Plato, like all Greeks, indeed saw much difference between the past and the future: if the fact of change did not seem worthy of attention to him, he would not make any effort to try to discover an immutable pattern behind the transience of things. Secondly, the concern for “the future of this world” was one of the main themes of the Platonic project, a work of social and political reformer rather than a mere theoretical contemplator.

Third, dating the beginning of concern with History and time from Hegel jumps over two millennia of Christianity, a religion that differentiated itself from the Greek worldview precisely due to its emphasis on the temporal and historical nature of human life – a fact already evident in St. Augustine.

Fourth, why assume a contradiction between concern for History and the desire for eternity when it is precisely the indissoluble union of these two themes that inspired Hegel himself?

Fifth, when Mr. Rorty interprets the desire for eternity as an “escape” or “flight,” he is merely playing with words, easily reversible, in fact: the impulse to revolutionize the world, to accelerate historical change, can with equal plausibility be interpreted as hubris, an alienating agitation, an escape valve against permanent and inescapable realities such as death, physical fragility, ignorance of our ultimate destiny, etc. These pejorative interpretations have only rhetorical value, if any. To give them as presupposed and unquestionable is not at all honest.

Based on all these assumptions, Mr. Rorty concludes the opening of his article by stating that the joint influence of Hegel and Darwin moved philosophy away from the question “What are we?” and led it to “What could we become?” This pompous historical generalization omits from the reader the information that, for Hegel, these two questions were rigorously the same (Wesen ist was gewesen ist), and that the philosopher from Jena, far from moving away from Greek thought, was merely giving logical development to Aristotle’s doctrine of entelechy, according to which the essence is not the static form of a being at a given moment in time, but the implied goal in its development. It also omits the fact that Darwin never uttered a word about “What are we?” or “What could we become?” but only concerned himself with “What we were”; thus, it confuses the theory of evolution with the evolutionist ideology, which is the work of Spencer and not Darwin.

In a single paragraph, there are so many absurd implications that perhaps it is the compressive force of the quickly injected falsehood that leaves the reader dizzy, unable to perceive that he is faced with a cheap charlatan disguised as a philosopher through mere marketing.

But I do not believe that Mr. Rorty writes in this way out of sheer ineptitude. He knows that he lies — and the secret of the fascination he exerts on hordes of pretentious young people lies precisely in the fact that, disbelieving in all truth, they envy the power of lying well. There are many who dream of becoming Richard Rorty when they grow up.

But do you really want to know who this man is? Do you want to have an idea of how ridiculous it is to honor him as a philosopher? Well then, going a little beyond what he said in Folha, follow this brief examination of his more general conceptions.

“Language is not an image of reality,” assures Mr. Rorty, a pragmatic and anti-Platonist philosopher. Should we interpret this sentence in the sense that Mr. Rorty calls “Platonic,” that is, as the denial of an attribute to a substance? That would be contradictory: a language that is not an image of reality cannot give us a real image of its relationship with reality. Therefore, the sentence must be interpreted in the pragmatist sense: it does not affirm anything about what language is, but it only indicates the intention to use it in a certain way. The central thesis of Mr. Rorty’s thought is a statement of intentions. “Language is not an image of reality” strictly means this and nothing else: “I, Richard Rorty, am firmly determined not to use language as an image of reality.” It is an “irrefutable” thesis: a statement of will cannot be logically impugned. There is, therefore, nothing to debate: within the limits of decency and the Penal Code, Mr. Rorty has the right to use language as he pleases.

The problem arises when he begins to try to induce us to use language exactly like him. He claims that language is not a representation of reality but rather a set of tools invented by man to fulfill his desires. But this is a false alternative. A person may well wish to use this tool to represent reality. It seems that Plato wished exactly that. But Mr. Rorty denies that people have other desires than seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. The fact that some declare to desire something more must be very painful for him because otherwise, there would be no pragmatically valid explanation for the effort he puts into changing the tone of the conversation. Faced with the impossibility of denying the existence of these people, the pragmatist may argue that those who seek to represent reality are driven by the desire to avoid pain just as much as those who prefer to invent fantasies. But this objection will have shown, precisely, that these are not mutually exclusive things. The Rortyan alternative is false on its own terms.

Confronted with this painful realization, Mr. Rorty claims that his philosophy consists of proposing a new vocabulary in which the distinctions between absolute and relative, appearance and reality, natural and artificial, true and false will be abolished. He acknowledges that he has no argument to offer in defense of his proposal, since it “cannot be expressed in Platonic terminology” and is therefore beyond, or beneath, the possibility of being proved or refuted. “For this reason,” he concludes on behalf of all pragmatists, “our efforts at persuasion take the form of gradually inculcating new ways of speaking.” Therefore, Mr. Rorty does not intend to convince us of the truth of his theses; he only intends to “gradually inculcate” his way of speaking, and once this is adopted, we will gradually stop asking whether what is said is true or false. But gradually inculcating in others a linguistic habit, while placing it beyond the reach of any rational arbitration, is pure psychological manipulation. Therefore, we are moving from the field of philosophical discussion — which Rortyanism refuses as “Platonic” — to that of subtle imposition of will through the repetition of slogans and vocabulary change. This is what George Orwell called Newspeak, the Newspeak of 1984.

Perhaps this is the deep and secret reason why, after declaring that men are nothing more than animals in search of pleasure and reducing language to an instrument for the stronger animals to dominate the weaker ones, Mr. Rorty can still proclaim that “we pragmatists do not behave like animals,” when his speech seemed to indicate precisely the opposite. The fact is that they are, in fact, animal trainers. A horse tamer does not argue with horses; he uses only psychological influence to “gradually inculcate” the desired habits in them.

Like all trainers, pragmatists are moved by pious intentions: “What matters to us is inventing means to reduce human suffering.” It is with this noble purpose that Mr. Rorty proposes the abolition of the oppositions between the true and the false, the real and the apparent, the absolute and the relative, etc., which have caused so much suffering to philosophy students, and suggests the universal adoption of Newspeak. Once this measure is approved, philosophical debates will no longer be, as they used to be, an uncomfortable clash of arguments and evidence but an effort to make the gradual inculcation of new habits in the minds of the audience more and more pleasurable and painless. New theories will no longer call upon the heavy weapons of logic but the delicate instruments of marketing, with giveaways to new followers and smiling Playboy bunnies on the covers of academic theses.

But Mr. Rorty’s decisive contribution to alleviating human suffering is his fight against the idea that life can have meaning. It is understandable that, in a universe that makes sense, Mr. Rorty should feel very bad — a fish out of water, just as a non-pragmatist would feel in a world devoid of meaning. However, Mr. Rorty sees no benefit in arguing with those who do not feel as he does. The controversy between the existence or non-existence of an immanent meaning in the cosmos, he says, “is too radical to be judged from any neutral point of view.” There is no way to argue: all a man can do is express his desire. Therefore, again, Mr. Rorty’s thesis is a statement of intentions: he, Richard Rorty, will do everything in his power to ensure that life has no meaning. He does this with extreme dedication and competence. Some believe that the lack of meaning is what makes human beings unhappy, but Mr. Rorty doesn’t care. He defends democratic pluralism, the free expression of all points of view. Only, since the confrontation of points of view cannot be arbitrated by any intellectually valid means, it becomes merely a competition between desires, the outcome of which will be determined by the pure manipulative ability of the winning party.

Those who know Mr. Rorty personally guarantee that he is a paragon of friendliness. I believe it. But I doubt that he wags his tail. After all, isn’t he the animal of the story?

Note about Charles S. Peirce

AND CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE begot William James, who begot John Dewey, who begot Richard Rorty, who, landing in Brazil, generated among the natives the greatest frisson and mental confusion. Let’s go back to the origins.

Peirce says that the only meaning of an idea lies in the practical consequences that can be inferred from it. This thesis is the core of his philosophy and what gives rise to its designation as pragmatism: pragma, in Greek, are the matters of practical life. Ironically, the thesis is inapplicable in practice, because there is a significant difference and often an abyssal separation between the practical consequences that can be inferred from an idea through logical conjecture and the practical consequences that it actually comes to trigger over time.

For example, from Marxism, one can logically infer the proletarian revolution and the classless state as intended consequences. But in practice, its actual consequences were a military coup and the establishment of a dictatorship of a new class. Which of these two orders of consequences represents the “true meaning” of Marxism? Peirce says that the meaning lies in the “sum” of the consequences, but in this case, this sum gives zero, since the two lines of consequences, the intended and the achieved, logically exclude each other. Thus, we would only have left to say that, from a pragmatic point of view, Marxism has no meaning at all, but this would contradict the fact that it had real practical consequences.

On the other hand, how to distinguish between the practical consequences that an idea triggers by itself and those that result from its accidental mixture with other different, heterogeneous, and contradictory ideas, or from the unpredictable mishaps that accompany its diffusion in human society? To make this distinction, we would have to recognize that the idea has some meaning independently and prior to any practical consequences it may trigger. But this would be to admit that it has meaning as a mere representative scheme, as an image of the real, which would be a denial of all pragmatism. The alternative would be to admit that accidental consequences are part of the meaning of ideas, which would lead us to the conclusion that any idea can mean anything, depending on what the accidents of the route do with it during the process of its diffusion. Reasoning along this line, we would conclude that Umbanda29 is part of the original meaning of the Christian idea, since the accidents of national history produced the fusion of this idea with African rituals, or that AIDS is an intrinsic part of the meaning of love, since love made some people contract AIDS. Similarly, nothing would prevent us from interpreting pragmatism as idealism, since Royce, a disciple of Peirce, happened to become an absolute idealist.

In stark contradiction with himself, Peirce states on the other hand that the scientific method should seek only the truth, regardless of its practical consequences. What is so special about the idea of the scientific method that it can be endowed with meaning independently of its practical consequences, if these, according to Peirce himself, are the only possible meaning of an idea?

Even more curious is Peirce’s denial of all intuitive evidence. According to Peirce, we have no intuitive faculty and all our knowledge consists of thoughts made with signs, based on the knowledge of external facts. But are these external facts known intuitively or are they also just signs? And how could something that was not perceived intuitively be a sign of anything at all? How to reconcile the denial of intuitive evidence with the concept of “sign”? A sign, says Peirce, “is something that, for someone, equates to something under some aspect”. How could there then be any sign without the intuitive evidence of this something, as well as of the identity or difference between the “something” and the “something”? If the blessed “something” is also only a sign and not an effective presence captured intuitively, then we will have signs of signs of signs and so on indefinitely, which would simply put an end to any possibility of the practical use of signs, even as conventional lies.

Even worse, I don’t see how to reconcile the denial of evidence with the trust that Peirce has in the power of logic. Logic is nothing without the principle of identity, which either is intuitive evidence or is a simple convention accepted by the scientific community. If it is a simple convention, its validity depends on a numerical consensus, which would reduce it to a mere “tenacious reaffirmation of authority” (sic), a method of validation that Peirce himself considers unscientific.

For Peirce, intuitive evidence has merely subjective validity, as it varies from one individual to another. He confuses here the evidence, in the logical-ideal sense, with the psychological act of intuition — naturally subjective and fallible —, and this, in turn, with the mere feeling of certainty, which not only accompanies intuitions but also beliefs, desires and hallucinations; in short, he confuses the logical with the psychological, and this is precisely the trademark of psychologism, of which pragmatism is but a version (and against which it is not necessary to argue but only to refer to the “Introduction” to Husserl’s Logical Investigations29).

Peirce asks: If intuition is a direct perception, how can we know that we have intuitions? Can we, by intuition, know that we have intuitions? He considers this a decisive argument against intuition, but the answer to the latter question is simply “yes.” If I don’t intuit that I intuit, I don’t intuit anything. Intuition is necessarily accompanied by self-awareness; otherwise, it would be confused with mere bodily sensation. If I see, but don’t intuit that I see, I can’t speak of “visual intuition” but only of “optic sensation, devoid of cognitive consciousness,” as is evident. A man who, like Peirce, denies intuiting that he intuits is either lying or in a schizophrenic state, denying self-awareness. However, he is a bit more pretentious than ordinary schizophrenics and demands that we also deny our own.

If intuitive evidence has no value, individuals alone can know nothing, and thus, says Peirce, “an entire community of investigators is needed to objectively test the truth of any idea.” But if each of these investigators is also incapable of intuitive evidence and universally valid personal certainty, who will combine their viewpoints to synthesize an “objective truth”? Peirce seems to believe that the academic community exists in and of itself, like an Aristotelian prima substantia, possessing a unitary self-awareness and certainty absent in each of its members. The academic community is a being endowed with consciousness, formed by the sum of various unconscious individuals. Peirce is a sociological transcendentalist.

From this point of view, if the only meaning of an idea lies in its practical consequences, what practical consequences can be inferred from the denial of individual intuition? It implies that each human individual, unable to trust their own self-awareness, will deny all intuitive evidence that comes their way and, unable to rely on themselves ever, will have to surrender to the authority of the omnipotent academic community. The practical result of this is the reduction of humanity to a herd of docile animals, incapable of personal understanding and always in need of the approval of “scientific” authority30.

Furthermore, Peirce claims that no truth constitutes evidence in itself but must be corroborated by independent proof. He forgets to mention that this independent proof is also worthless in itself and requires other independent proofs ad infinitum, which ends up neutralizing any possible meaning of the assertion that no truth is evident in itself.

According to him, truths evident in themselves mean nothing in science and must be corroborated by a scientific criterion, “objective and public.” Now, the validity of any proof ultimately rests on logical principles, which are either evident per se or arbitrary conventions. Peirce does not accept that there are truths evident per se or that arbitrary conventions have any value. Thus, there are simply no logical principles that can underpin any proof whatsoever. The only alternative left for Peirce is to appeal to the authority of the scientific “public,” that is, the authority of the majority, which he himself denies any scientific validity. It is all a dead end, and perhaps this is why this “philosophy” exercises such fascination in an era that takes exquisite pleasure in getting caught in all sorts of psychological labyrinths.

According to Peirce, the doctrine of intuition, by asserting that thoughts can directly embody their objects, is based on confusion between sign and signified thing. Nonsense. Intuition is not a thought or representation but a direct presence, like the presence of this leaf before the reader’s eyes, which imposes itself on their consciousness without signs or “thought.” If something is captured through signs, there is no intuition in it. It seems that Peirce confuses intuition in action with the mere recollection of a recently intuited object—which is certainly a sign. Anyone knows the difference between intuiting a presence and remembering an absence. Only Peirce doesn’t know or pretends not to know31 33.

Thus, despite its advocacy of practice, pragmatism is resistant to any practical application because it is inherently contradictory.

It is also disastrous to apply the pragmatist method of defining an idea by its practical consequences to pragmatism itself. The fundamental practical consequence of pragmatism is the absorption of nullified individual consciousnesses into an all-powerful “scientific community” endowed with transhuman powers and incapable, in turn, of obtaining proof of its beliefs except by the vote of the majority in academic sessions. This is its logical consequence, deduced from its mere concept, as well as its real consequence, historically verified. This can be seen in the fact that Richard Rorty, the latest offspring of the Peircean family, explicitly recognizes the law of the majority as the only valid criterion for knowledge, thus revealing to the world the true face of pragmatism, which its founder did not have the courage to face.

The Collective Imbecile

The Success of Richard Rorty in Brazil seems strange, considering that the local intellectual community is predominantly Marxist and should have every reason to reject pragmatism as a capitalist ideology32. However, the ground for Rorty’s reception was already prepared by three decades of Gramscian hegemony. Gramsci, the most influential Marxist theorist in Brazil, was not a pure-blooded Marxist but a mixture of pragmatism, following the lineage of his mentor Antonio Labriola. Labriola not only agrees with pragmatism in general but, by a significant coincidence, his “Philosophy of History” is identical to Richard Rorty’s, particularly in their flagrant disagreement with Karl Marx on the denial of History having a “meaning.” This denial is obviously incompatible with the ideology of “progress,” inherent in Marxism. The sudden interest of progressive intellectuals in philosophies that deny the meaning of History evidently stems from a depressive sentiment resulting from the failure of international communism. Failing to adhere to the optimistic vision of communism, they sought refuge in a similar ideology capable of accounting for the seemingly absurd course of historical change without requiring them to break with the atheistic and materialistic foundation of Marxism. Some endeavored to search for and rescue old materialisms, which Marxism believed to have absorbed and surpassed33. Others sought a reconnection with “bourgeois” materialist currents, such as the analytical philosophy of Russell and Wittgenstein (widely read in Brazil during the past decade), and, of course, pragmatism. First, there was the trend of Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher of mediocre standing, who was elevated to a totem in certain Brazilian academic circles. But the best came with Rorty, whose similarities with Gramsci irresistibly attract the local intellectual community.

One of these significant similarities is the denial of objective knowledge and the consequent reduction of intellectual activity to propaganda and manipulation of consciences. Both Gramsci and Rorty deny that human knowledge can describe reality and declare that the only purpose of our cultural and scientific efforts is to express collective desires. For both, there are no universal concepts or universally valid judgments, but universals can be “created” through propaganda, making all people share the same beliefs, or rather, the same illusions. The role of the intellectual is, therefore, to generate these illusions and, as Rorty puts it, “gradually inculcate” them into people’s minds. They differ only in the identity of the intellectual: for Rorty, it consists of the academic community; for Gramsci, it is the Party or the “collective intellectual.”

These two ghostly entities, tasked with directing the consciousness of beings devoid of consciousness, formed themselves of individuals who lack consciousness themselves. They share a great disdain for arguments and evidence and have a pronounced taste for psychological manipulation that shapes the feelings of the masses without allowing any room for discussion or justifications for “truth.” In both cases, the cunning of manipulating reality replaces the intelligence of knowing it. Manipulate reality? No. Manipulate its image in the minds of the public.

As much as Peirce and Rorty’s academic community, Gramsci’s “collective intellectual” lacks the real unity of an organism but rather possesses a functional and more or less conventional unity, akin to a club or an army. Because of this, it cannot be intelligent; it cannot have intuitive perceptions. What does it mean to “intellect”? It is to grasp, in a glance, the objective unity of a set of data, arranging them in a framework that is immediately available to all psychic faculties—will, feeling, imagination, etc. This simultaneity of information enables an individual to react as a whole to situations, without the mediation of a long and complex decision-making process. It is the “presence of mind,” the alert consciousness that allows for full and effective adaptation to changes without losing biographical continuity or the sense of life. How could a collective entity rise to this level of consciousness? In order to “intellect” and decide as quickly as an individual, it must place an individual at the top and follow their decisions without debate. However, to preserve internal democracy, it must subject decisions to the approval of all members and await the final outcome of discussions, during which thousands of deviant factors interfere, such as the intrusion of other topics, competition between vanities in assemblies, etc.—and finally, the ultimate decision will be a mechanical arrangement of pressures and compromises, rather than the immediate response of consciousness to a perception of reality. The “collective intellectual” must choose between the unity of tyranny and the multiplication of languages, between explicit or implicit submission to any individual consciousness and dissolution into a collective unconsciousness that will ultimately be discreetly manipulated by some clever individual. In short: between declared tyranny and disguised tyranny.

While the principle of the “collective intellectual” was initially confined within the Communist Party, its cult of unconsciousness affected only those directly engaged in left-wing movements, preventing them from seeing the most obvious and glaring facts, such as the Moscow Trials, the economic failure of the USSR, the Gulag, etc.

However, with the fall of the communist hierarchy, the spirit of the “collective intellectual” leaked from the dying body of communism into the intellectual community at large. Nowadays, particularly in Brazil, the entire intellectual life, through the uniformity of themes and values, imitates the internal discussions in the old Communist Party, collectively processing ideas through the votes to determine the infallible “correct line”34. As a result, individual intelligences lose all capacity to operate independently; they no longer comprehend things by themselves and, confirming the widespread notion of the futility of autonomous consciousness, they only demonstrate their ability to act in an atmosphere of unanimous agreement and “participation” in the collective sentiment. As everyone is immersed in this collective, no one perceives it from the outside, just as fish cannot see the water they are in. Intellectual life is thus reduced to mutual confirmation of beliefs, prejudices, feelings, and habits among members of the literate group. It becomes tribalized.

One would be excessively optimistic to see this regression as a passing phenomenon that merely scratches the surface of History. It has an anthropological dimension; it affects the destiny of the human species in the cosmos: if a generation of “collective intellectuals” were to dominate the world, the individualization of consciousness, the reward of a millennial evolutionary effort, would be lost35.

The idea of the “collective intellectual” has a highly compromising origin. It emerged in clubs, assemblies, and literary salons where the French Revolution was conceived—in the “Republic of Letters.” It was there that modern intellectuality felt the strength of its unity and was crowned queen under the title of “public opinion.” Indeed, this term did not refer to the opinion of the masses but rather to the common sentiment of the educated elites36. The distinguishing feature of these clubs, which set them apart from scientific societies as we know them today and from the debating centers of the medieval university, was the complete absence of rational criteria for validating arguments. It was the reign of “opinion” in the Greek sense of doxa or pure belief. Theoretical issues of epistemology, metaphysics, economics, and even natural sciences were decided there through shouting, according to the preferences of the majority. The true doctrine was not the one that coincided with reality but the one that best expressed the collective’s aspirations, in the language most flattering to the passions of the moment. After the storm of the Revolution passed, the scientific and university institutions of the victorious bourgeoisie, of course, made no attempt to organize themselves according to the example of revolutionary societies but instead followed the established models of the medieval university and the scientific circles of the Renaissance. Everyone knew that the “Republic of Letters” had been used to agitate the masses but could not serve to produce knowledge. It is not surprising, therefore, that the model of revolutionary debate societies was later adopted by the excluded ones of the new order: the socialist intelligentsia.

Yet, it would not remain confined there forever. If throughout the 20th century, an atmosphere of Jacobin club took hold of the entire cultural life, this was largely due to the proletarianization of universities, which transformed them from nuclei that generated a scientific and governing elite into centers of professional training for the masses (transferring, of course, the burden of forming the elite to more discreet or even secret institutions37).

The democratization of education opened access to intellectual and scientific professions for millions of people. What was once an elite, a handful of geniuses who exchanged ideas through private correspondence and a few academic publications, has now become an innumerable crowd. The quantitative swelling, accompanied by reduced requirements, resulted in a formidable decline in quality: the intellectual proletariat, spread across thousands of institutions and engrossed in their daily professional tasks, no longer even attempts to keep up with the march of ideas in the world. Each professional has resigned to the fact that they cannot even keep track of the succession of discoveries in their own field; everyone follows their own tunnel, unaware of where the others are going. To compensate for the imbalance caused by specialization, a “general culture” prosthesis is then grafted onto the specialist, and universities are forced to produce a stream of “experts in general culture.” Comprised mainly of those who failed to specialize in anything else, this new profession either adorns the cake of professional knowledge with a cherry of culture as a form of leisure, perfectly disconnected from any reference to practical life, or attempts to sketch a synthesis between culture and practice in the form of ideological indoctrination.

As a result, the very nature of university professions has been perverted: the university professional no longer needs to be an intellectual capable of forming a reasonable personal opinion; they are workers, employees who follow the dictates of the collective, similar to middle-class bureaucrats and manual laborers of the past. Consequently, as scientific information accumulates, the capacity, necessity, and simple desire to absorb it diminish.

With the advent of tertiary capitalism, where the dominant industry is that of “cultural goods,” the intellectual proletariat has expanded to encompass the majority of the population in wealthy countries and nearly the entire middle class in poor countries. Consequently, superior cultural production has had to cater to a prodigious demand for cheap emotions, now ennobled with “intellectual” prestige. The gossip of old show business magazines, for example, has invaded historical research, assuming an air of respectable academic activity. Driven by the need to flatter the most vulgar passions, high culture ends up conforming to the criteria of pure marketing, and the collective imbecile confirms circularly that there is no truth above the taste of the majority.

In this atmosphere, rational discussion becomes impossible: consensus is formed through waves of feelings that agitate confusingly in the air and produce brief shivers on the skin. Beliefs are molded and dissolved in an impressionistic atmosphere, like moving inkblots on wet paper. This is the era of rhetoric, psychological persuasion, and veiled blackmail, which takes the place of reasoned argument. Eventually, the state of affairs demands elevation to the status of norm and law: figures like Böhm, Feyerabend, Kuhn, and Rorty advocate the legitimacy of rhetorical argument, emotional appeal, and even subliminal influence as means of scientific proof38. The notion of “truth,” which the first generation of intellectual proletarians had already reduced to a conventional formalism, devoid of its ontological substance, is now completely blurred and openly denied. Ideas gain followers through affective contagion and, once dominant, no longer need to pretend to be true. They possess a better argument: the power of numbers, which spreads the fear of isolation among recalcitrants, vaguely identified with misery and madness. Beneath the festive adherence to new intellectual fashions, the persuasive machine of psychological terror creaks ominously.

In summary, these are the dominant trends in scientific and philosophical debate in the world today. In older countries that preserve values inherited from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, these tendencies may be occasionally balanced by some critical and organizing reactions. But in newer countries, which entered history after the French Revolution and absorbed little from the legacy of previous centuries, there is no defense against the spirit of the “collective intellectual,” which tends to be unconsciously identified as the only possible incarnation of the idea of higher culture. Becoming an “intellectual” there does not mean acquiring certain knowledge and demonstrating skill in certain types of investigation or creation; it means being accepted in certain circles, speaking in a certain tone, acquiring certain mannerisms that identify the caste. Hence, a great philosopher who lives in isolation may be excluded from the cultural history of the country, as happened to Mário Ferreira dos Santos39. On the other hand, a socially adept individual, popular in certain groups, may become a celebrated intellectual even if they leave no worthwhile work to read or discover nothing of value.

Brazil is the promised land of the “collective intellectual.”

Christopher Lasch, the new elite and the old masses40

LAST WARNING left by Christopher Lasch: there is a new ruling elite in the world, distinct from the bourgeoisie; it does not rule through ownership of the means of production but through the domination of information; more ambitious than its predecessor, it is not content with power over people’s material wealth and workforce but aims to shape their minds, values, lives, and the meaning of their lives; it does not just want to possess the world but to reinvent it in its own image and likeness, regardless of the consequences (it calls this “social engineering” — and it does hurt!). Like the bourgeoisie, it is imbued with false consciousness, with a discourse that legitimizes its interests in the name of everyone’s interest. However, the bourgeoisie needed the help of intellectuals to create its discourse; and intellectuals, being typical intermediaries, often switched sides. The new class does not need intermediaries; it invents its own discourse and is not in danger of being betrayed by the vacillations of hired intellectuals: because it is composed of intellectuals. We are in the midst of the tyranny of the intelligentsia.

This warning is the main message of The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, the last book that the sociologist of The Culture of Narcissism prepared a few weeks before his death. The words of the dying carry a weight that others do not. Christopher Lasch’s words only risk being heard lightly because, like all the author’s writings, this essayist read mostly by academics addresses the same audience to whom he assigns a heavy share of responsibility for the state of affairs in the world.

The thesis they enunciate is not, at first sight, much different from James Burnham’s, who, in The Managerial Revolution (1938), announced the rise to power of a new class of executives and technocrats to whom the complexity of modern administration had granted greater power than the nominal owners of capital.

Only, in Burnham’s time, the class of managers was quite distinct from the university intelligentsia. They were the technicians, the men of action who made decisions for pragmatic reasons, ignoring with sovereign contempt the subtleties of intellectuals, whom they derisively called eggheads. The intellectuals, infected with Marxism at that time, saw in managers a disguised and doubly odious expression of the old capitalist class. They did everything to discredit Burnham’s thesis. Who would have thought, then, that they themselves would eventually become, in a twist of history, the protagonists of the managerial revolution? The new class referred to by Lasch occupies the same place in the system as Burnham’s managers, but their heads are made up of the yolk, white, and pure university material: the intellectuals have become managers.

The causes that determined this turnaround are well known. Administration became even more complicated, requiring experts in sociology, psychology, communications, and the like, and had to recruit them from the ranks of the intelligentsia. At the same time, business leaders became aware of their position as virtual creators of a new culture: managers became intellectuals. Added to this was the fact that intellectuals' disillusionment with Marxism made them give up on being an auxiliary force for a hypothetical revolutionary proletariat and decide to act on their own: the manager-eggheads became social engineers, inventors of new ethical and political criteria that the alliance of a modernizing state with the omnipresent market would impose on populations reduced to the role of awestruck and bewildered spectators. The revolution, forgotten by the masses, became the occupation of the elites.

Lasch’s book does not detail this history of how the new class came to power, but, in compensation, it extensively describes and discusses their ideas and value criteria. These criteria, transmitted to the masses through the educational system and the communications industry, quickly take on the role of unquestionable dogmas in their minds, inspired by the inconceivable mixture of cultural relativism and moral absolutism that today constitutes the formula of “political correctness.” The formula is extravagant: members of the new elite see no contradiction between demanding unrestricted sexual freedom and advocating severe legal punishments for a gaze of lust occasionally cast by a male at a pair of female legs; nor between unrestricted freedom of speech and repressive policing of vocabulary to remove all expressions capable of offending political, racial, sexual sensibilities, etc.. But the peculiarity of their forma mentis is explicable. For Karl Marx, bourgeois thinkers tended to think in hollow abstract categories because they lived far from direct engagement with material reality. Lasch extends this diagnosis to the new elite: “The thinking classes live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world, made up of computerized models of reality — hyper-reality, as it has been called — distinct from the palpable, immediate, and physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women.” Their main function is to create, interpret, and market symbols, which is why one of the scholars cited by Lasch, Robert Reich, collectively labeled them as “symbolic analysts.” Hence their tendency to imagine reality as a plastic and malleable material, obedient to any engineering: “Their belief in the social construction of reality, the central dogma of postmodernism, reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment, from which everything that resists human control has been excluded.” Symbolic analysts have such difficulty adjusting to the limits of physical reality that they spend much of their lives in athletic and dietary efforts to prolong their youth indefinitely but continue to die at the same age as ordinary people who accept the inevitability of aging and death.

But the new class lives apart not only from the physical world but also from the other classes, even more than the old bourgeoisie. Noticing an unprecedented elitization of American society, Lasch writes: “There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its neighbors.” Isolated, firstly, geographically: ensconced in glass towers and gated communities; secondly, culturally: the new class all comes from a few hundred elite colleges where education is infinitely better than in the public school system; thirdly, linguistically: they master codes and information incomprehensible to the majority of the population and increase the distance with the excessive use of specialized jargon.

Isolated from the present world, hypnotized by the incalculable power that leads them to believe they are at the pinnacle of civilization, symbolic analysts end up isolating themselves also from the past and their cultural heritage. At the height of their intellectual prestige, they have regressed to the kind of barbarism that, in José Ortega y Gasset’s classic analysis, characterized the revolt of the masses. The mass man, according to Ortega, was the presumptuous, resentful, and arrogant heir who squandered the hard-earned heritage of his ancestors; he was the spoiled child, the satisfied señorito, unable to recognize any moral or cultural superiority. In the name of inconsequential fashions and abstract utopias, this type of person threw away all values and knowledge that he could no longer comprehend and, wanting to improve the world, only managed to plunge it from one crisis to another. Hence the importance of the elites: “From Ortega’s point of view, the value of cultural elites lay in their willingness to assume responsibility for rigorous standards without which civilization is impossible.” But now the situation has changed. Instead of the masses, Lasch says, “it is the elites who have lost faith in the values of the West, or what remains of them. For many, the term Western civilization now evokes a system of organized domination designed to reinforce conformity with bourgeois values.” All the mental habits of the mass man “today better characterize the upper layers of society than the lower or middle classes.” Ortega, in short, heard the rooster crow, but he did not foresee where it would crow the next day.

What can we think of all this? The importance and value of these analyses are evident. Their timeliness remains to be assessed. Many will find them bold and intriguing in their novelty. They will seem so, especially to those still attached to a Marxist view of classes and ideologies (although one does not need to be a Marxist in all other respects, of course). But just as Lasch’s diagnosis seemed identical to Burnham’s, yet different, it also seems different from Ortega’s, yet identical. For, like almost all intellectuals outside Spain, except for a few scholars of Hispanic issues like Ernst-Robert Curtius, Lasch read Ortega very poorly. He understood him only through The Revolt of the Masses, a collection of articles lacking complete sense in itself, as the author himself repeatedly (and futilely) warned. He didn’t even leaf through the rest of the philosopher’s works, where the antecedents and continuation of his argument can be found. There, he could discover, for example, that Ortega’s distinction between elite and masses has no socio-economic sense, but only a psychological and ethical one, inspired, as it is, by the Hindu doctrine of castes and dharma, which Western sociology terms do not translate: there are “elite men” among the proletarians and “mass men” in the ruling class. He could discover, worse still, that by “masses,” Ortega specifically meant, as clearly stated in Invertebrate Spain (1923), “the most powerful masses: those of the middle and upper class,” mainly the masses of students who filled the universities, that is, the future manager-eggheads analyzed by Lasch. In Mission of the University, a text almost contemporary with The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega made it clear that the “new” barbarian he called mass man was “principally the wisest professional ever, but also the most ignorant: the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, the scientist.” Ortega’s analysis is from 1928. It remained unknown to the world, buried under the false connotation almost universally attributed to his term “masses,” to the point that there are now two images of Ortega: an Ortega of the center-left in Spain, where he was read, and an extreme right-wing Ortega in the rest of the world, where his interpreters read him. To the non-Hispanic world, Lasch’s analyses may seem novel.

But we, in Brazil, cannot resort to that shabby excuse that we are not Spanish. Here, the revolt of the elites was diagnosed five decades ago by the Austro-Brazilian historian and critic Otto Maria Carpeaux (who read Ortega very well). In a memorable and unjustly forgotten essay, published in the volume A Cinza do Purgatório (Rio, Casa do Estudante do Brasil, 1942) under the title “A ideia de Universidade e as ideias das classes médias” (“The Idea of the University and the Ideas of the Middle Classes”), he mainly attributed the phenomenon of revolutionary barbarism to the “intellectual proletariat” that universities poured annually into the market to form the rising new middle class: “It is a child, this new middle class; but a dangerous child, full of the resentments of the declassed, furious against books that it no longer knows how to read and whose lessons no longer guarantee social ascent.” This is a nearly literal description of the hordes of daddy’s boys demanding the removal of Shakespeare and Homer from American university curricula and their replacement with “non-colonialist,” “non-machista” literature, and so on.

But let us not disdain Christopher Lasch’s final warning, however belated it may be. The intellectual decay in America has gone much deeper than he imagined. It has even contaminated its most lucid critic. If not, he would not devote so many pages to the meticulous examination of second-rate ideologues of purely local importance while omitting to take a closer look at the philosopher himself who inspired his book as an overt postmodern counterpart to The Revolt of the Masses. Nor would he sacrifice the idols he exposes by methodically adding the cautionary qualifier “and women” to the word “men” when used with the meaning of “humanity.” Nor would he suggest, as a remedy for the malaise he diagnoses, a return to the tradition of Deweyan pragmatism — a tradition that, by depreciating the notion of “objective truth” in favor of mere useful consensus, has done much to weaken the American mind and generate the current state of affairs. Because of these weaknesses, and above all because of the irrepressible tendency to provincially attribute universal significance to everything that happens in the United States, Lasch’s work is itself, to some extent, a symptom of the situation he describes.

But this situation is so intellectually depressing that it is a remarkable feat that someone has finally hit upon the social reality that Ortega diagnosed in 1928 and our Carpeaux in 1942. And if there is an undeniable benefit of Christopher Lasch’s book, it is that, both for what the author reveals of others' weaknesses and for what he reveals of his own, it can help the reader shed any rural awe of intellectual life in the so-called First World.

27/07/95

Merits of Ignorance

A GRAVE SYMPTOM of the decline of consciousness in this country is the ease with which everyone accepts as an excuse for the lack of culture of Mr. Luís Inácio Lula da Silva his working-class origin41. It is absolutely false that the leader of a class should have only the average level of education of its members. Should the leader of a bourgeois party then be uneducated like the average bourgeoisie?

The leader of a class is, by definition, someone who rises above it inwardly through their talent and knowledge while not abandoning their external standard of living or their intimate adherence to the interests and values of their original milieu. For those who understand culture in its true sense as internalized knowledge in a better personality, and not merely as a display of diplomas42, the identification of cultural levels with differences in social class is a silly sociological prejudice. If every worker, upon acquiring culture, were to become a bourgeois, there would not have been a single working-class leader in this world. The same applies, analogically, to any social group of origin. By elevating themselves, through their knowledge, to the status of a shaman, an indigenous person does not become white. The Irish Catholic does not convert to the Protestantism of the dominant class by reading St. Thomas or Bede the Venerable in Latin. The acquisition of true culture is an internal change, which, especially in Brazil, almost never results in an improvement of external living conditions. Teachers provide the most blatant testimony to this. However, Mr. Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, to remain faithful to his proletarian condition, seems to have to persist at the cultural level of his birth class while adapting without major traumas to the external lifestyle of the upper classes, including fine clothing and cigars (but, thank God, without the damn jet-ski). It would be odious demagoguery to criticize him for living the life of a deputy with his deputy’s salary, but it is equally wrong to suggest that his cultural poverty is a right. It is not decent for an enriched worker in politics to prioritize imported cigars over hiring a speech therapist to correct his speech defect. Equally dishonest is capitalizing on a speech impediment as a populist emblem, implying that the rich speak perfectly correct Portuguese with a melodious accent. In doing so, the deputy and almost president sets a double bad example for the people, promoting snobbish consumerism and cultural neglect — in which he is, by the way, typical of a country where there are all facilities for the importation of luxury cars and all difficulties for the importation of essential books.

After discounting deceptive appearances, there is no connection between internal culture and social origin, and this should already be clear in a country where the most cultured men — Capistrano de Abreu, João Ribeiro, Florestan Fernandes, not to mention Machado de Assis or Gonçalves Dias — came from poor classes. The fact that some of them embraced the lifestyle of the rich, while others remained faithful to the values of their original milieu, shows that ideas do not spring from social conditions, as does the common phenomenon of wealthy bourgeois individuals adopting working-class discourse — of which a good part of the PT (Workers' Party) elite is composed.

The notion that culture is a bourgeois adornment, dispensable for a working-class leader, stems from a prejudice that devalues any acquisition of knowledge that does not result in financial or social benefit for its holder. The ignorant masses who appreciate the leader’s lack of education as a sign that he is “of the people” are the same ones who, upon seeing a young poor person reading poetry or philosophy, disdainfully ask, "What will you gain from this?". The prestige of an illiterate politician does not reflect the aspiration and right of the worker to become more cultured and intelligent than the bourgeois but the right to cultural poverty itself, taken as a value and attached, like a badge of glory, to the working-class condition43.

Incapable — or unwilling — to intellectually rise above his class in a disinterested manner to represent its best qualities, Lula is not, therefore, a true leader of the working class, but a random sample chosen precisely for his lack of impact, functioning as a blank canvas on which the public opinion can project the most disparate aspirations and desires under the false unity of an “working-class” frame. He does not embody the working class in its essential aspect, but in the accidental figure that it presents before the Brazilian imagination at the present conjuncture. An imagination in which resentment against the ruling classes and insolent disdain for intelligence and culture merge into a phantasmagoria of confusion, proving, contrary to what Marxist theorists have been proclaiming for half a century, that socialism and fascism have no deep incompatibility between them.

However, Lula is no imbecile — and has already shown that he possesses more than a vague awareness that the role assigned to him by his party is ill-fitting and superfluous in relation to his real personality. Hence, there is a certain humility, sincere and touching at times, which, by one of those singular ironies of human condition, only lends even more credibility to what is strictly a deception. The most ironic part of it all is that, reasoning always within the limits of the PT’s worldview, which constitutes the horizon of his intellect, Lula seems equally determined to suppress the inner call of humility, in order to continue playing his part in this deceit, no matter how much it hurts inside, as if it were a moral duty of the highest order for a man to pretend to be what his party needs him to be. It is not today that socialism demands from its militants a succession of little inner lies which, with time, accumulate and multiply to become the seeds of great tragedies.

Appendix: Letter to the Newspaper “O Globo”

In the Sunday edition of May 15th, a Mr. Paulo César Coutinho, lamenting that the PT (Worker’s Party) removed the legalization of abortion and the official recognition of gay unions from its program, states that “the Catholic Church has revived the medieval Inquisition, demanding that the PT abjure heretical issues under the threat of campaigning against the party.”

Mr. Paulo César Coutinho presents himself as an author and theater director. He is an intellectual, as well as the founder of a party that claims to lead a cultural revolution in this country. He is, therefore, doubly qualified to enlighten me on three details - one concerning history, another grammatical, and a third logical - that obscure the understanding of his article.

1. Does Mr. Coutinho intend to say that in the Middle Ages, the Inquisition punished heretics by campaigning against them during the electoral campaign? Or is he suggesting that campaigning against a party in elections nowadays is an act of inquisitorial oppression? In the first case, he distorts history. In the second case, he shows a complete lack of perspective.

2. Can Mr. Coutinho explain to me what “abjuring issues” means? Portuguese speakers may abjure beliefs, commitments, positions, or even answers but never “questões” (issues). Could he be using “abjurar” as a synonym for “disinterest”? If so, Agamenon Mendes Pedreira is correct when he says that the PT’s cultural revolution will begin by replacing the Portuguese language with a restricted language as the official language of Brazil.

3. Further on in his article, Mr. Coutinho protests against the PT’s concessions to the clergy, saying that “each organization must maintain its own identity, values, principles, under the threat of dilution.” That is true, but how can the Church support the legalization of abortion and gay unions without being unfaithful to the values and principles that have sustained its identity for two thousand years? Why should the PT remain faithful to itself while the Church must betray itself to remain faithful to the PT?

As it seems to me, Mr. Coutinho knows neither what the Inquisition is, nor what “abjurar” means, nor what principles are. Therefore, if tomorrow or the day after, his party abjures democratic principles to establish a new Inquisition presided over by illiterate fanatics, he won’t even notice that something wrong has happened (or, as they will say in the new language, “acontefeu”).

15/5/1994.

The Debt of the Pharaohs

SOME supposed friends of the black movement seem determined to turn the anti-racist fight into a crusade against intelligence. The new banners that, imported from the USA, are displayed in the blackness demonstrations seem purposely designed by white racists to ridicule the black people and demoralize a movement whose primary inspiration is, at heart, nothing more than a basic demand for justice.

The demand for reparations is the most visible example. Driven by the oratory of schizophrenic intellectuals, blacks now demand compensation from the great-grandchildren of their former masters, but at the same time, they boast of being descendants of the pharaohs, who enslaved dozens of peoples for fifteen centuries. I don’t see how they can avoid the question: - Why don’t you first pay what you owe to the Jews?

Secondly, slavery was not introduced to Africa by white Europeans, but much before their arrival, by Muslims, among whom, ironically, there were many blacks and mulattoes44; and, even before Muslim rule, enslaving the defeated tribes was already a widespread custom among various African peoples, who later came to sell the prisoners to Arabs and Portuguese. It is curious, therefore, that the demand for reparations is selectively thrown on white Europeans. Even more curious is that this demand comes predominantly from Islamized blacks, forgetting that not only did Muslims practice black slavery before the Europeans, but many Islamic countries continued to practice it until the 20th century.

But the reparations theory also suggests another, more uncomfortable question: how much black blood will be needed to be admitted to the cash queue? The mulatto - fifty percent black, fifty percent white - does he pay or receive? The son of a mulatto and a white woman, or of a white man and a mulatto woman - 25 percent black, 75 percent white - is he three-quarters debtor and one-quarter creditor? Or can each one switch from debtor to creditor by their own decision, simply by “assuming blackness” for this miracle to occur? Doing justice, in this case, is almost impossible, especially in a country that for fifty years of the Second Empire was ruled by a mulatto elite, whose descendants still hold top positions in public administration and the pantheon of notables. Once the reparations theory becomes law, even the President of the Republic and Dr. Roberto Marinho would join the queue of receivers, if what is said about their racial origins is accurate. And the white parents of mulatto children - including myself, for those who don’t know - would they have to pay all over again in the form of tax, after having supported, clothed, and pampered the little scoundrels to adulthood? I have never seen anything crazier.

Insofar as it servilely and uncritically adheres to certain fads, the black movement risks becoming, moreover, an instrument at the service of American cultural imperialism:

(a) If the importation of words is a normal process of language development, the importation of foreign connotations for local words is a sign of that psychological subjection that favors cultural enslavement. In English, nigger is pejorative, only used by whites, and blacks therefore demand the qualification black. Fair enough. Pretending to introduce the same semantic relationship between “preto” and “negro” is frankly artificial. In a country that named a church Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men, where “pretinha” and “pretinho” are forms of affectionate treatment between lovers, where on the other hand the plantation owners spit contempt at the “nigger crowd” and said that “a nigger who doesn’t shit at the entrance shits at the exit”, to pretend that negro is a more noble adjective than preto is to impose on our usual semantics a deforming prosthesis molded in the pattern of a foreign language, and without any etymological or functional equivalence. The only semantic difference that exists, in Brazilian Portuguese, between “preto” and “negro” is that the first of these words is more popular, and the second is more literary, or, depending on the context, a little more pedantic - a profoundly different relationship from the one that exists in English between nigger and black. Twisting Brazilian semantics to adapt it to the North American ear is pure mimicry, it is blatant cultural colonialism. If popular is the same as pejorative, homosexuals should demand the immediate exchange of the slang gay for the cultured term “uranist”, or perhaps, more elegantly, “pederast”.

(b) Brazilian usage has always distinguished the white, the black, the mulatto, the brown. We are a country of mixed-race people, where racial identity dissolves in a mist of ambiguities - evidenced by the profusion of synonyms for “mulatto” that exist in our language -, and we only say that a person is preto when they are of pure race. The North American racists, rejecting mestizaje with disgust, catalog as black or nigger anyone who has a drop of black blood, even under fair skin. Demanding that mixed-race people - mulattos and browns of all shades - “assume blackness” is wanting them to adopt the false identity of pure race that in a racist nation was thrust upon them by whites. Again, it’s cultural colonialism. In terms of race, it is as absurd for the mulatto to “assume himself as black” as it is to declare himself white. To make matters worse, most mestizos here have a few drops of Indian blood, and assuming blackness is in these cases a falsehood if, in the same act, they do not also assume Indianness. Blackness, as you can see, is not in the color of the skin, but in the ideological color; and, in the murky atmosphere of ideological rhetoric, all cats are brown. Brown? My apologies. They are black.

But it is on the topic of religion that the claims of the black movement reach the height of absurdity. Why should a white person take African cults as high expressions of black culture, when most of the blacks in the world have converted to Islam and now abhor these cults as polytheistic idolatry? A black sheikh, preaching in a mosque in Addis Ababa or New York, will tell them that the afro cult is the disgrace of the black race, a residue of tribalism that should be buried in oblivion just like the Arabs buried their pre-Islamic cults. Moreover, there is no need to go so far. I constantly see on TV black and mulatto evangelical pastors saying that umbanda and candomblé are religions of the devil and pointing to these cults as causes of the age-old misfortune of the black race. Some appeal to a fearsome Weberian argument: Is it conceivable a rich, prosperous, and cultured country governed by voodoo practitioners? The economy of Switzerland with the religion of Haiti?

Secondly, black people should have noticed that among the white intellectuals who are friends of Candomblé, the majority are significantly atheists, like Professor Darcy Ribeiro, who as such do not believe in demons as much as they do not believe in God, and can only view these religious manifestations through their aesthetic epidermis, for their museum value or for their political utility (already in the 1930s, the Comintern instructed communist militants to approach racial minority movements and infiltrate them with class struggle discourse — a program that among us was strictly complied with by Dr. Florestan Fernandes, this being the essence of his scientific contribution). In short, being a friend of “black culture” is not the same as being a friend of black people: it is being more a friend of an abstract idea than of flesh-and-blood black people to whom it does much harm. On the other hand, it is only fair that Brazil is finally recognized as a racially mixed or even black country (I myself contributed to this purpose). But, if this implies the acceptance of the primacy of Afro culture over European, Jewish, and Christian culture in national education — or even its leveling with them — then the only thing left for intelligent whites, blacks, and mulattoes is to get out before the new State forces them to follow, instead of the Pope, a Papa Doc. The elite intellectuals — whites, blacks, or mestizos — are guilty of cultivating in the black people, out of opportunism or perversity, almost demented illusions about the value of Afro culture. The basic contribution of Blacks to Brazil was given through slave labor, which built the wealth of the Colony and the Empire: it was a material, not a cultural, contribution. And the elements of African culture that have been introduced into our mentality, if they are an undeniable historical and anthropological fact, have a value, to say the least, doubtful. For if the African Blacks are indeed, as they proclaim, descendants of the ruling Egyptian class, then when they first came into contact with the Muslim or European dominator they were already a decadent, weakened people, reduced from ancient imperial glories to tribal dispersion and the impotence of a diminished life: what great cultural contribution could they make to Muslim or Christian dominators, who were then reaching the maximum splendor of their respective civilizations? The fact that we abhor the slave plunder that was the origin of national wealth should not lead us to try to offer it a deceptive compensation in the form of demagogic flattery — this only results in replacing economic abuse with psychological mockery. Someone has to tell Blacks the truth: the truth is that all Yoruba rites are not worth a page of JalaledDin Rûmi and the entire history of samba is not worth three measures of Bach. The truth is that the cultural contribution of African religions to the world is perfectly dispensable, so dispensable that more than half of the black people in the world live perfectly well without it and would never exchange the Arabic language for a Yoruba dialect or European science for Mr. Verger’s macumba recipes. The truth, my black friends, is that you lost the race of history — perhaps paying for the evils committed in the time of pharaonic splendor —, you scattered and weakened, and ended up being enslaved and sold to the Portuguese by the same Semites — for Arabs are Semites — on whose backs you ruthlessly whipped in the time of pyramid building. There is no good people: and if you were slaves for three centuries after being slave masters for more than a millennium, you should thank God for the clemency of your fate. Compared to the Jews, enslaved by Egyptians and Babylonians, exploited by Muslims, expelled from here and there by Christians and finally decimated by the Nazis, you are lucky. And look well: in each nation where they passed, the Jews left, in exchange for the sufferings obtained, a cultural legacy infinitely more precious than carnival, samba and other things…

In the third place, the very idea of “black religions” is an intrinsic contradiction. If anyone, whether white, indigenous, or Japanese, can convert to African religions through a simple initiation ritual, then inevitably the expansion of these religions — if it were to happen, which is unlikely — would cause them to lose any particular racial ties and become world religions like Christianity or Islam. In Brazil, which is indeed the only country in the world where African religions are expanding, the majority of their followers are no longer blacks but rather mixed-race individuals, and the most prominent religious figure representing them is a white Frenchman: Pierre Verger45.

To assume that the global expansion of African religion will represent a belated revenge of the African people against their old white dominators is as naive as it would have been two millennia ago to imagine that the expansion of Christianity would give victory to the Jews over the Romans. The expansion, if it were to happen, would necessarily involve a de-Africanization and sever the ties between the religion and its original culture, just as it happened with Christianity. Conversely, if these cults insist on preserving the racial purity of their followers, they would incur the crime of racial discrimination and be condemned everywhere46.

In fact, the appeal to African religion as a weapon of anticolonial combat was a mere rhetorical expedient, with a very modest effect when compared to the anticolonial force of Islamic discourse, which is transnational and transracial47. Because it is evident that an expansionist culture can only be confronted on equal terms by another expansionist culture: local, national, and racial cults are inevitably crushed under the wheels of History, except when they also become expansionist and bid farewell to their roots, just as Islam bid farewell to its Arab past to become, today, a religion of blacks and Polynesians48.

Intellectuals Are Never To Blame49

In his interview with the Ideias supplement of the Jornal do Brasil 50, Prof. Gilberto Velho describes a Brazil marked by raw violence in social life, shameless cynicism in interpersonal relationships, the absence of a sense of hierarchy in the realm of values, and his description is accurate. Correct is also his diagnosis regarding the origin date: the situation described indeed began during the period of military dictatorship. However, Prof. Velho confuses date and cause, assuming that what started during the dictatorship is, ipso facto, the work of the dictatorship. It is somewhat like attributing the authorship of Elizabethan theater to Queen Elizabeth.

The military regime, despite any abuses it may have committed, has little or nothing to do directly with such a vast social change as pointed out by Prof. Velho. No government has the power to penetrate so deeply into the collective soul, uprooting customs and values sedimented by centuries-old tradition. Even if this government were a monster of indecency and perversion, which the dictatorship was not; even if it launched a massive campaign to corrupt the mentality of the people, which the dictatorship did not do; even if it eradicated from the popular imagination all examples of good behavior, leaving only a gallery of thugs and prostitutes for people’s edification; and even if it forbade the practice of goodness and rectitude, punishing it with exemplary punishments as in Machado de Assis’s “Church of the Devil” – even then, this gigantic brainwashing would take at least a few generations to take effect, assuming it didn’t produce precisely the opposite effect as in the story, leading to an eruption of holiness everywhere. If eight decades of relentless propaganda and brutal repression in the USSR couldn’t eliminate religious sentiment in the people, how could our dictatorship achieve this diabolical miracle in just twenty years, when it couldn’t even efficiently control the publishing movement, the small press, the student movements, and in two decades of shootings, didn’t cause more than two hundred victims, ten per year, a rate Pinochet or Castro would surpass in a week?

No, the military government is only contemporary with the beginning of the decline, not its author. Prof. Velho’s diagnosis reflects, on the one hand, the universal ease of blaming a fallen government and, on the other hand, the Brazilian propensity – a remnant of the imperial officialism – to attribute demiurgic powers to the government: whoever expects all goods from the government can only blame it for all evils.

However, while the official violence barely scratched the skin of the people, who remained indifferent for decades to the suppression of political rights and even showed some appreciation for the most vampiric of general-presidents, it certainly shook, traumatized, violated, and scandalized the souls of a few who were either direct victims or belonged to the circle of those victims.

In which segment of the population were these people? If Prof. Velho, instead of generalizing his personal impressions, were to investigate the professions and social classes of the victims of the dictatorship, he would easily find that the overwhelming majority were intellectuals – literates, university students, people of the class to which both Prof. Velho and the author of these lines belong.

It was in the midst of the intelligentsia, writers, students, doctors, that the impact of the dictatorship was felt like an earthquake, shaking to the core this narrow circle of sensitive people, while the rest of the nation cared little and continued its daily existence as an impavid colossus. The best literature of the period – especially the novels by Antônio Callado, Quarup, by Carlos Heitor Cony, Pessach: a Travessia, and by José J. Veiga, A Hora dos Ruminantes – testifies to the isolation of intellectuals and their loss of meaning in an environment of repression.

What hurt the literati most was not the violence of repression – which, as we have seen, was very moderate compared to the universal standard of dictatorships – but the isolation. If in the previous decade intellectuals – for the first time in this country – had tasted the thrill of participation in History, the advent of the dictatorship and especially of AI-5 returned them to the insignificance of their personal lives. Feeling squeezed and suffocated there, some left for the guerrilla and death, others for drugs and unrestrained sex, others for despair and madness, others for exile, and still others for comfortable adaptation to the new order, which offered ample opportunities for talented young people with short memories. The epidemic of personality mutations observed in educated circles shows that, for those people, the extinction – or even the mere postponement – of their immediate political hopes sounded like a complete loss of the meaning of life, justifying all desperate measures, all craziness, all debasements.

Later, the collapse of the guerrilla seemed to close the last possibility of political action for hundreds of people for whom politics was the sole purpose of life. Deprived of means to act politically, everything else seemed absurd and empty to them. A verse by Brecht condemning poets who wrote poetry instead of destroying capitalism was repeated everywhere. The moral shock came less from external events than from an internal predisposition of the Brazilian intelligentsia: the difficulty of conceiving any meaning for their profession outside the immediate political ends they could serve. This characteristic, in turn, derived from the absolute hegemony that communist militants exercised over Brazilian intellectual life – especially over literary publications and the editorial movement – since the end of the Vargas period, as well as from the increasing importance of the waves of social scientists that the university started churning out from the 1950s onwards – including Prof. Velho –, and who, finding no place or function in the system, joined the ranks of revolutionary theorists.

The complete politicization of the meaning of life could only result in the intellectual life’s sterilization under an authoritarian regime. Unable to live without politics, the literati found in the dictatorship the pretext to legitimize their self-indulgence. The cultural sterility of the period was later entirely blamed on the debts of the dictatorship. The claim seemed plausible to an audience deprived of points of comparison. However, I have here, on the shelf next to the computer on which I write, the works of the Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri. It is a posthumous publication. Expelled from the university by the Francoist government, Zubiri spent thirty years isolated, without means to act politically or spread his ideas. He locked himself at home, living on private courses, without uttering a single complaint, and in solitude, he built this monument of knowledge and dignity, which the world only came to know after the author’s death (and the end of the Francoist regime) and which will endure when no one remembers the name of Francisco Franco. On another shelf, I have about twenty books by Edmund Husserl, probably the greatest philosopher of the century. A Jew, living under the Nazi terror from 1933 until his death in 1938, Husserl never used the oppression of the environment as an excuse to interrupt his philosophical work. Some of his deepest works date from that period. Examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. On another shelf, I have the thirty-two volumes of the História Universal that Cesare Cantu wrote in prison. And who has not read Amor de Perdição by Camilo Castelo Branco, written in the Cadeia da Relação de Lisboa? What perhaps almost nobody in this country has read is the classic De Consolatione Philosophiæ, where Philosophy, embodied in a woman, converses with the philosopher Boécio in his prison cell.

No, the dictatorship does not explain the total despair of the literati or the intellectual sterility of that period. Comparatively, the reaction of our literati to the impact of the dictatorship was disproportionate and pathological. What explains it, indeed, is the incapacity of Brazilian intellectuals to see value and meaning in intellectual work outside immediate political purposes. What explains it is the reduction of intellectual life to a tool of politics – a reduction that is one of the prominent tendencies of our intelligentsia, which could not, therefore, be deprived of means to act politically without losing the meaning of life and falling into the deepest melancholy. Among the intellectuals during the military regime of 1964-1987, Graciliano Ramos confessed with the sincerity that is lacking in most of his colleagues: “Certain writers excuse themselves for not having forged excellent things due to lack of freedom – perhaps a naive recourse to justify ineptitude or laziness… Let’s not slander our little Tupinambá fascism: if we do, we will lose any vestige of authority, and when we are truthful, no one will believe us. In fact, it did not prevent us from writing. It only suppressed our desire to engage in this exercise”51. In short, deprived of freedom to act externally and incapable of true inner life, intellectuals fell into depression. It is from the depression of the literati that the current Brazilian negativism is born, which they now diagnose as an evil that comes from outside, without realizing that they themselves produce it. Projection, as Dr. Freud said, is the best device to rid ourselves of guilt rejected by our consciousness.

If we examine the history of the dictatorial period, we will see in miniature and seed, in the microcosm of the literati class, the birth of all the morbid, destructive, and cynical tendencies that would later infect the entire society, resulting in the situation described by Prof. Velho. It was among intellectuals that the appeal to drugs emerged, first as an elegant theory, then as a trend among the literati, and later – by imitation – among the upper, middle, and lower classes.

From intellectuals, the spirit of negativism and skepticism spread to infect the whole nation, discrediting all values and promoting the cult of the macabre and the abyssal. A brief examination of the small press of that period shows how this spirit initially spread among the educated layers – in a country where the people still believed in family, religion, honesty, beauty, and truth – and then gradually infected the editorial movement, major newspapers, and TV soap operas, thanks to the continuous, persistent, and tireless action of a kind of abyssal militancy.

And how to explain, finally, the omission of the Rio de Janeiro government in the face of organized banditry, without taking into account decades of cult of “malandragem” (trickery) in our literature or the influence that Eric Hobsbawm’s ideas on banditry as a political and social protest exerted among our intellectuals? Even today, while the streets witness killings, rapes, and robberies, a TV soap opera52 romantically idealizes popular banditry to contrast it with elite criminality, “white collars,” imposing on the people the stereotype, perhaps “politically correct,” but morally and sociologically false, of the “good thieves” against the “bad thieves.”

Professor Velho, being a social scientist, should know that mere facts, even if repeated, are not enough to change the mentality of a people if they are not first transmuted into images and symbols, charged with an interpretation and a value. He also knows that the social layer responsible for producing these interpretations, condensing them into images and symbols, and thus directing collective mental life is precisely the intellectual class. He is aware that with the progress of communication, intellectuals have had, since the 1970s, the most powerful means at their disposal to shape public mentality in their image and likeness. For instance, observe the difference between the TV soap operas of the 1970s, sweet and naive trivialities (well in line with the family values whose disappearance Professor Velho laments), and those of today, where there isn’t a businessman who isn’t a thief, a family that isn’t corroded by adultery or incest, a child who isn’t laden with resentment and hatred towards their parents. Look at what happened, for example, with the soap opera Sonho Meu. It started as a naive fantasy, based on a novel from twenty years ago, A Pequena Órfã (The Little Orphan), and deeply moved the child audience. It was crushed by the intellectual class, which condemned its lack of “critical sense” through the newspapers. To please the literati, TV Globo changed the script, introducing a case of bigamy, massive doses of erotic Machiavellianism, and all kinds of baseness in the style of Nelson Rodrigues—all of this during the 7 pm time slot and for a children’s audience. Doesn’t this reflect a perverse impulse of our intellectual class, a hatred for all good feelings, a desire to scandalize and corrupt the childish soul to turn children into a promising market for the industry of rebellion? What future can a country have where intellectuals consider it more important to teach children to hate politicians in Brasília than to love their parents?

Offended by the dictatorship, Brazilian intellectuals had a disproportionate and morbid reaction. Unable to overthrow the government, they internalized their revolt and started to tear down the family, morality, grammar, human personality, feelings, respect for civilization—everything that adorns and ennobles life—to disseminate, in their place, a Nietzschean spirit of rebellion and Nelson Rodrigues-style cynicism. For two decades, they subjected the Brazilian public to a psychological rape, always in the name, of course, of fighting against the dictatorship. Even after its end, the dictatorship remains the legitimizing pretext for all kinds of baseness.

It is almost irresistible to ask, given these observations, why an equally destructive reaction did not follow the end of the Vargas dictatorship, considering that in both the military period and during Vargas, intellectuals were subjected to the same depressing isolation. The answer lies in the difference in ideological atmosphere between the contemporaries of Graciliano Ramos and those of General Médici. In both cases, the intellectual class was overwhelmingly leftist and wholly dependent on imported ideas. However, Vargas’s time coincided with the fight against Nazism and the formation of the Front Popular (Popular Front), which united intellectuals from all tendencies in a fruitful alliance, where the ideals of Marxism, merging with democratic-bourgeois humanism, Christian personalism, and all other currents opposing Nazi barbarism, could identify at least partially and temporarily with the highest values that humanity inherited from millennia of civilization. In short, the leftist intellectual class during Vargas’s time had positive ideals, values, norms, and ethics, of which Graciliano Ramos’s work is the highest testimony. On the other hand, the intellectuals of the Médici era had, inspired by foreign ideas, nothing but the suicidal appeal of Guevarism, Marcusian codification of despair, Foucault’s anti-humanism, and the depressing procession of negativisms stemming from what a critic in the USA aptly called the “nietzscheization of the left.”

This difference in ideologies gave rise to different reactions in one time and another. Emerging from the Vargas dictatorship, Brazilian writers and artists showcased a display of creativity that marked the period from 1945 to 1964 as one of the richest in our cultural history. In contrast, at the end of the military dictatorship, intellectuals emerged from similar isolation with a different spirit, having nothing to offer the country but bitterness, sterile resentment, hatred for all principles and values of civilization, a desire for revenge at any cost, self-pity, and cynical arrogance. Furthermore, this psychologically depraved left, from the New Republic onwards, gained access to means of action far superior to anything their predecessors from the Vargas era could dream of, seizing ministries, official and private TV channels, university chairs, the press, the publishing market, and more. It didn’t take long for the denial of all values to spread like an epidemic across all segments of the population. If, now, intellectuals still have the audacity to accuse everything and everyone for the present state of the Brazilian soul, without even remotely considering their heavy share of blame in producing this phenomenon, it is only further proof of their lack of a sense of responsibility.

The Science of Black Hens

Since their beginning, social sciences have had the motto and ambition of overthrowing metaphysics. All its founders—Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Spencer, Weber, Mauss—believed that positive knowledge of society could perform for the entire realm of knowledge the guiding and regulating function that metaphysics had played.

However, this goal could only be achieved through two contradictory means: on the one hand, it was necessary to exclude metaphysical questions from the sphere of scientific knowledge; on the other hand, it was necessary to provide non-metaphysical answers to these questions and demonstrate that they were more valid than metaphysical answers. To accomplish this, it was necessary to reintroduce metaphysical questions into the sphere of scientific knowledge, but reduced to a sociological, anthropological, linguistic, etc., scale, and deprived of their proper metaphysical dimension. The paradox is evident: when social sciences have something to say about metaphysical questions, what they say has no metaphysical significance, and the questions retain, above and beyond the social sphere, their challenging potential. When social sciences refrain from invading the metaphysical field and limit themselves to a restricted domain below that field, a new metaphysical interest develops beyond their jurisdiction, seeking to encompass and regulate the sphere of validity of social sciences. There is no escape: either social sciences lose their scientific authority by attempting to address what they themselves placed beyond their legitimate scope, or they lose the place they intended to take away from metaphysics, allowing a new metaphysics to grow beyond their domains and regulate them from outside. Either they become pseudosciences or they accept subordination to that very thing they sought to destroy.

Hence the ambiguous relationship, one of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, that social scientists have had with metaphysical themes for a century. No one is more fascinated by myths, rituals, symbols, angels, demons, magic, alchemy, masters, and initiations than social scientists. No one, more than them, would like to eliminate any spiritual and metaphysical significance from all these things. When they succeed, their object loses all specific reality, becoming a mere projection of sociological or anthropological concepts, and requiring, beyond these, a metaphysical explanation. When they fail, they bow with humiliation and thinly veiled resentment before what they call “the mystery,” “the irrational,” etc., seemingly wanting to recover their pride within the humiliation by insinuating that what lies beyond the horizon of their science must be beyond all human understanding. Hence their tendency to attribute a high “spiritual” significance even to banal phenomena of paranormality, which a metaphysician—or a shaman—dismisses as the mere periphery of the spiritual world. Islamic mystics would say that one who refuses to bow before the supreme mystery of Allah ends up prostrating before minor djinns (subtle forces of the earthly nature). Between a God who humiliates them and black chickens that flatter them, social scientists decidedly choose to worship the black chickens.

The recent book by Muniz Sodré, Extreme Games of the Spirit 53, exemplifies in a particularly clear way this constitutive contradiction of social sciences. Starting with the title. The habit of labeling everything beyond the material and the sensible as “spiritual,” even mere subtle material forces that do not entirely escape the realm of interest of physics, reflects the tendency to exalt black chickens. Phenomena like those caused by the paranormal Thomas Green Morton—the subject of the book—merely manifest what India calls “siddhis,” powers, and siddhis deserve no more attention from spiritual men than the production of golden buttons for uniforms deserves attention from the military. Our social scientist is to the spiritual world what a boy who, from military life, appreciates above all the golden buttons and attributes to their use the power to turn a man into a soldier. If a boy thinks this simply because golden buttons are more accessible to him than knowledge of the art of war, the social scientist also tends to exaggerate the importance of paranormal phenomena, especially the most striking ones, because they are more accessible to their science than true spiritual life itself54.

Muniz Sodré protests in his book against the reductive mechanism that causes social sciences to see in an object only what corresponds to the projection of their own concepts and methods, allowing what is genuinely objective in it to escape. But his own approach to the subject could not escape this criticism, nor can any book of social science as such, because the perspective of social sciences is not reductive by chance but by essence: social science, despite exceptions that confirm the rule, is a reduction of its object—the human life—to the social scale, for admitting that there is something, and something of importance, beyond that scale is to abandon the original project that constituted social sciences as successors of metaphysics in the regulation of knowledge.

The somewhat hypocritical ambiguity of social science regarding religious and metaphysical themes could not fail to affect the average professionals in this field, as it constitutes the unmistakable mark of the classics, the founders of modern social science, such as Durkheim, Weber, or Malinovski.

The most intelligent among them, Max Weber, was fully aware of this ambiguity but could never escape it except through lamentable verbal contortions. In the section of Economy and Society devoted to the Sociology of Religion, he begins by stating that this discipline does not deal with religion as such but with its relations with social life55. Hence, it is understood that the Sociology of Religion will not pronounce on the truth or falsity of religious beliefs in themselves. Thus, when Weber affirms that the basic motivation that drives men to religion is of an economic order, he is well protected against any accusation of attempting to marxistically reduce religious discourse to an illusion veil covering a conduct that remains essentially economic. He seeks to maintain a “scientific” posture and not pronounce on what lies beyond its sphere. However, to the extent that, on the other hand, his conception of knowledge and truth dismisses as illusory any claim to obtain a valid answer regarding the truth or falsity of religious beliefs56, the result is that the metaphysical content of these beliefs loses any cognitive interest. Now, if the truth or falsity of a religious belief is irrelevant, and if all that science can do seriously is to study this belief from the perspective of its relations with other areas of human conduct, any approach to religion that aims to grasp it in itself and from within is automatically excluded from the realm of truth, and the study of external relations is elevated to the status of the only true knowledge about religion. If the content of religion is expelled from the realm of truth, then there is no point in asking religion anything, not even about the religious impulse in man; we can only ask that to the Sociology of Religion, to the Psychology of Religion, to the Anthropology of Religion, etc. It is to the social scientist that I must ask about the true cause that impels me to God, and the religious response that it is God himself who attracts me becomes irrelevant from the point of view of truth; behold, in one stroke, the social scientist is elevated to the status of the supreme religious authority, surpassing rabbis, ayatollahs, popes, saints, and prophets, because only the one who knows my true religious motivation has the credentials to be my spiritual guide. Weber denies that social science can offer guidance to anyone, but to the extent that it has the authority to exclude religion from the realm of truth, and to the extent that Weber considers any conduct not based on truth irresponsible, he is suggesting that responsible conduct is based on social science and not on religion. If this is not moral guidance, what is it? Weber was a sensitive man, and he cannot have overlooked this debilitating contradiction. It is indeed one of the tension cores that gave Weber’s work its strength and originality while turning the life of Max Weber into a moral hell. By secularizing Protestant moralism in the form of scientific ethics, he retained much of the priestly and prophetic pathos that he condemned in others: when he harshly criticized what he called “academic prophecy,” I think he projected some repressed guilt into it.

If Weber, the most sincere and honest of all materialistic social scientists, ends up falling into this trap, what more can be expected from his successors and imitators?

Suspicious Unanimity57

BY THE FURY of investigation with which newspapers and TV channels open the latrines, uncover the drains, and search the sewers of the Republic, it seems that Brazil, among all countries, has the most daring, independent, and committed press in uncovering and revealing the truth. However, the most admirable thing about it is the unanimity of its adherence to this objective. In this country, there is not a single newspaper, radio station, or TV channel that shirks the obligation to inform, that even discreetly tries to suppress accusations, protect reputations, or cover up suspects. Every single media organization, without any visible exceptions, is aligned in a frontal attack against corruption, which they denounce in unison, with the harmony of a multitudinous choir conducted by a single will, a single spirit, a single criterion of values. In the army of public morality, there are no defections.

It is the uniformity of the news coverage that has allowed the public to fix in their minds the image of Brazil divided into the righteous and sinners, heroes and villains, without any ambiguities or middle tones. An image where the demarcation line of “ethics” overlaps even the divisions of parties, interests, and ideologies, ultimately neutralizing them and leaving only two factions visible – that of Cain, vociferating its indignation in the squares, and that of Abel, skulking through the corridors, plotting schemes, erasing tracks, in a dark, serpentine movement.

This unanimity wouldn’t have power over consciences if it did not include, among the dominant themes of its discourse, the celebration of itself: the condemnation of corrupt politicians is simultaneously, and often explicitly, the glorification of the free press that investigates and exposes them. No one hesitates to see in this phenomenon the beginning of a new era: led by the hand of the press, Brazil reaches the threshold of democratic maturity.

However, for those who learned journalism by hearing that the press is diversity and democracy is pluralism of opinions, this unanimity cannot help but seem somewhat suspicious.

Historically abnormal, it is. Never, in any place or time, has there been a case like this, where an entire nation abandons its internal disagreements to form a united front under such a vague and abstract banner as “ethics.” Not even in countries at war, driven by the need to unite in defense of tangible assets against more immediate and lethal dangers, have they managed to homogenize the discourse of their journalists to such an extent.

What is happening in Brazil is a unique phenomenon in the history of the world’s press. A phenomenon all the more strange because the word “ethics” was only recently introduced into the Brazilian popular vocabulary and quickly, with stunning success, promoted to the status of a unifying ideal for an entire people. Never has a watchword emanating from a narrow circle of activist intellectuals spread so rapidly across the breadth of a continent, without anyone objecting that the speed with which words propagate is sometimes inversely proportional to the depth of penetration of ideas.

But beyond that, it is a suspicious phenomenon. The reasons for suspicion are so evident that not even the unanimous chorus can conceal them, as this general agreement to speak about certain things implies, as a conditio sine qua non, the commitment to remain silent about others.

These reasons can be summarized in one question: If the corruption scheme at the highest levels of power is so powerful that it can control presidents, mold the Republic’s budget to its liking, manipulate the Congress, divert from the public coffers an amount equivalent to the country’s external debt, bribe high-ranking police officials, and exercise, as Senator Bisol said, the functions of a parallel government, how is it possible that it lacks the means to bribe and silence the press? How can it be that, among all the powers shaping the nation’s life, only the press has escaped the clutches of corrupting influence and now stands free to denounce it?

Frankly, it is not reasonable to assume that experts in bribery, with decades of experience in the market of consciences, have simply forgotten to include media companies in their bribery or illicit favor programs.

It is not even plausible to imagine that TV channels, dependent on the government for concessions, or journalistic companies, always indebted to official banks throughout their history, would have the audacity to confront such powerful people without fear of retaliation if these people were truly as powerful as they are made out to be.

The fact that the all-powerful mafia does not have a single defender in the entire national press casts doubt on its proclaimed omnipotence.

Hidden in this unnoticed detail might be the key to understanding everything that is happening in the Brazilian public scene today—a scene painted for us only from the point of view of one of the characters involved, who conceals his involvement under the neutral facade of a narrator.

This narrator presents the events of the day as a gigantic phenomenon of awakening consciousness, a milestone in the history of the Republic, the emergence of a new Brazil. This is when it is worth remembering Max Weber’s warning: “There are human acts that, considered in isolation, are imbued by our value sensitivity with the most dazzling colors but, due to the consequences they give rise to, end up merging into the gray infinity of historical indifference, or which, as generally happens, intertwining with other events of historical destiny, end up changing both in the dimension and in the nature of their ‘meaning,’ to the point of becoming unrecognizable.”

Pay attention, please, to the words: “as generally happens.” They indicate that, as a general rule, the interpretations made of events at the time they occur have little or nothing to do with the historical significance these events will have. This applies to all contemporary interpretations. Consequently, how much more dubious would the interpretations become if they were emitted by a character on the scene who seeks to hide his involvement under the guise of an investigator and neutral narrator?

Should we remind ourselves that, just as much as the infamous construction companies, media companies also provide services to the government, take substantial loans from official banks, and engage in lobbying with the Executive and Congress, a lobbying further reinforced by their direct control over public opinion? How can we “clean up the country” if the hand that wields the eraser is careful to erase, first and foremost, the incriminating sections of its own involvement in the plot?

It is true that journalists, especially the younger and more leftist ones, eager to destroy certain sectors of the oligarchy, may think it is good policy to ally themselves with another sector of it (perhaps the most powerful of all), following Lenin’s advice: if you have five enemies, ally with four against the fifth, then with three against the fourth, until you destroy them all. But isn’t there naivety in this game of miniature Machiavellis, allowing themselves to be used in the hope of turning the tables tomorrow? After all, the five enemies may have also read Lenin, and some of them are quite clever, not to mention wealthier than any journalist.

Whatever the case, the history of this period will not be the one that its characters, in a simian semblance of prophetic foresight, are already writing today in the pages of newspapers, choosing their roles according to each one’s vanity. When labels like “historic event,” “historic decision,” “historic date” start to be used indiscriminately to stamp in golden letters the events of the day, all true historical consciousness has disappeared, giving way to the fascination of the dazzling colors Weber spoke of. It’s not for nothing, but I think that today’s journalists, adding their voices to the chorus of unanimous enthusiasm instead of striving to analyze calmly what is happening, risk playing a rather shoddy role before future history.

But there is a more hidden aspect to this question that seems decisive to me.

In Italy, which the Brazilian press often cites as an example of an effective fight against corruption, a multimillion-dollar bribe is denounced, through which the multinational Montedison allegedly obtained the complicity of the press in certain illicit operations.

Let’s compare this with what happens in Brazil. A contractor known for his flashy controversies, Cecílio R. Almeida, gives an interview to the newspaper Zero Hora in Porto Alegre, stating that, of all the major companies in the sector, equally under suspicion, only one is truly corrupt: OAS. According to him, OAS is to blame for all the illicit activities in the public works sector. Moreover, Cecílio informs that Editora Abril, a powerful communications conglomerate (and owner of the magazine Veja, one of the fiercest publications in the fight against construction companies), has interests connected to OAS, to the point of falsifying balance sheets published in its economic magazine, Exame, to favor that company. How was this reported? “Businessman acquits construction companies and accuses Abril Group”? “Journalistic company accomplice of suspected construction company”? No. In both Zero Hora and all the newspapers that later reproduced the interview, the tone of the headlines was the same: “Contractor denounces construction companies,” “The corruption scheme seen from within,” etc. In short, they transformed Cecílio’s interview into an accusation against construction companies in general, which he had actually exonerated; worse still, the mention of Editora Abril, the only truly new aspect of the interview, was omitted in some newspapers and, in others, hidden in the middle of the text, disguised under titles that didn’t even mention Abril. In other words, in addition to reversing the meaning of the interview, presenting a defense as an attack, the newspapers also protected, under the cloak of discretion or even silence, the only company that the interviewee was really accusing. With such slippery press, the “Operação Mãos Limpas” (Clean Hands Operation) that we imported from Italy will never be more than soap propaganda.

The most frightening thing is that the silence surrounding Abril was unanimous, just as the clamor against construction companies is unanimous. Is this a coincidence, a spontaneous reflex defending journalists against any impulse to practice journalism? Or, on the contrary, is there an agreement among media companies that no accusation against one of them will be published without prior negotiations with the affected party? In the first case, it is a serious pathology of consciousness, a moral scotoma that makes professionals tasked with seeing and showing certain realities blind to them. In the second case, it must be concluded that the Brazilian public opinion is secretly directed by a conspiracy of media companies that, at their own pleasure, delineate the boundaries of the visible and the invisible, as if adjusting blinkers to a donkey’s head. In this hypothesis, we, the Brazilians, are all the donkeys, and the parallel government that rules this country is not composed of construction companies but of media companies. This hypothesis, in fact, would not exclude the first one; it would merely show that the scotoma is not natural but produced. And if this were the true hypothesis, there would be nothing exceptional about it, as all sociologists and political scientists in the world agree that, in contemporary society, media companies are closer to the centers of power than any others. The prestige of Dr. Roberto Marinho, for example, has the power to veto, throughout the entire national territory, the broadcast of a documentary by the British TV about him, implicitly exercising a right to censorship that the federal government itself is denied. Could Emílio Odebrecht, Sebastião Camargo, or Cecílio Almeida dream of ascending to such heights? If the construction companies had the power of a secret government, their skeletons would also remain secret; if there is a national movement of public opinion against them, it is because someone has the power to generate it, and they do not have the power to stop it.

Thinking about Brazil moments before talking about Aristotle58

HOW MANY among our most prestigious intellectuals know more about Aristotle than what can be found in cheap digests and popular science books? How many, without having studied him, have at least the potential aptitude to understand him through direct examination and personal meditation of his texts? A true answer to these questions will reveal the measure of our intellectual misery59.

Everyone knows or at least says that the civilization of the West—the cycle to which we still belong, and which needs to be understood all the more rapidly as it approaches its end—was born from the synthesis of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian theology. Greek philosophy here means Plato and Aristotle. If we realize that the other two sources are collective productions, sedimented by the inheritance of many generations, we will become aware of this astonishing truth: the contribution of these two philosophers to the formation of Western humanity rivals that of two whole civilizations. Historian Arthur O. Lovejoy could rightly say that the course of Western thought over twenty centuries has been nothing more than a collection of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. There has never been in this world a single philosophy, a single current of ideas, a single revolution of thought that did not originate, explicitly or implicitly, from an initial stance towards the questions posed by the two Greek philosophers. Christianity finds its first philosophical expression by aligning itself, with Augustine, within the Platonic heritage. With Albert and Thomas, it undergoes renewal under the influence of Aristotle. The scientific Renaissance, with Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, is inspired by Plato, in the search for a mathematical model superior to the sensible order, while in literature, classicism finds its mold in Aristotle’s “Poetics.” With the advent of historicism and evolutionism in the 19th century, there is a new appeal to Aristotle, soon followed by the implicit Platonism of 20th-century mathematical physics, which emerges almost simultaneously with the new biology, the granddaughter of the science founded by Aristotle. Platonism and Aristotelianism are everywhere, intertwined in our most personal beliefs, in the usage of our language, in our learned reactions from a long cultural sedimentation that repetition has made unconscious and seemingly spontaneous. They constitute the basic vocabulary of intellectual life in the West.

Hence, no writer, thinker, poet, or scientist is worthy of public attention without first becoming aware of this legacy and taking a position on it with a full sense of personal intellectual responsibility.

But here lies the obstacle, which the mental laziness of our facade intellectuals makes insurmountable for them. The term “personal” here means what the American philosopher Josiah Royce summed up perfectly in the following passage60:

"The wisest religions have always told us that we cannot be saved by the merits of our neighbors' piety, but that we have to work for our salvation with fear and trembling. Well, in the same way, the student has to learn that he cannot grasp the ultimate philosophical truth merely by reading the reports of other people’s thoughts, but that he has to think for himself, not indeed without proper instruction, but without relying entirely on manuals… It is not about originality of opinion but rather about a personal intimacy with the questions [of philosophy]."

Yes, the great questions of philosophy—on which directly depend the solutions we will give to questions of religion, personal and public ethics, politics, culture, the arts, and the course of scientific investigations—cannot be understood superficially, through hasty readings or second-hand knowledge. They require personal confrontation, direct examination, a deep and serious commitment of our intelligence and our moral being. There is not a single philosopher in the world who would disagree with this.

When we ask how many among Brazil’s most hyped intellectuals have met this requirement or have the psychological and moral condition to do so, the answer is terrifying. Brazil is much more poorly managed in the realm of intelligence than in that of finances.

The range of interests of most of our public intellectuals (those who usually speak or write for the general public, outside specialized circles) remains limited to the binomial of art and politics. A cultured man, among us, is someone who has read foreign poets, knows details of the sex lives of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, watches good films, and has a somewhat elaborate political opinion, usually the same as that of his peers. It is also important to consume good wines and frequent good European restaurants. They show no interest in science; in philosophy, they only read authors with the easiest literary digestion (preferring, of course, Nietzsche or Sartre and keeping a safe distance from Kant or Aristotle), and they hold firm religious beliefs without ever having read a single theology book, except perhaps those by Frei Betto and Leonardo Boff.

Writers by profession, journalists of ideas, who would consider themselves the most despicable mortals if they missed the latest literary novelties from Paris or New York, feel perfectly at peace in their ignorance of philosophy, science, and religion, which sometimes even appears to them as a merit, a disciplinary requirement of intellectual division of labor.

It’s true: Brazil is the only country in the world where philosophy is a specialization, dispensable for intellectuals from all other fields, and where — in a sort of complementary perversion — a bachelor’s degree in philosophy grants the title of “philosopher”. This produces a strange bureaucratic tic in learned environments: when I’m introduced as a philosopher, the interlocutor soon asks me in which department I’m located, who my boss is, whether I’m a permanent or contract worker, and other such questions, which imply that being a philosopher is a kind of public office. A look of deep consternation forms on the face of the questioner when I reply that I’m not anywhere, I don’t have a boss or subordinates, just as good old Socrates didn’t, I don’t understand career plans, and as for titles, I only had them under protest, thank God redeemed in time. I then explain, hastily, that I’m not a philosopher, just a writer of books that, by sheer coincidence, deal with philosophy, a teacher in private courses that, due to my lack of other knowledge, also deal with philosophy, and the owner of a brain that, due to an absolute lack of other interests, obsesses over philosophy full-time. Upon seeing me admit that all these things don’t suffice to make me a philosopher — a functional condition reserved for those who, without ever having written philosophy books, given philosophy courses or thought about philosophical problems for a single moment, yawned diligently for four years in a university prep course —, the interlocutor seems to feel relieved. But inside I wonder when a similar functional identification will start to be required of poets, saints, heroes, who together with the philosopher or aspiring sage, form the quartet of higher forms of existence, which we, hardened traditionalists, thought was irreducible to any professional identity stamp. But, if things continue as they are, the day will come when you’ll hear such conversations at gatherings of the literati:

— Ah!, you’re a saint? That’s great! Are you in the Ascetic Department at USP or the Ministry of Transcendental Affairs? Oh, you’re freelance? That’s a shame! But they’re holding contests,61 you know?

It’s not surprising that, under these conditions, our learned environments are fraught with a rancorous prejudice against the highbrow, a demagogic populism that does not distinguish between lyricists and poets, idea journalists and philosophers, reporters and historians, and takes Gilberto Braga for Honoré de Balzac.

Writing in the newspaper O Globo, a celebrated academic confessed, the other day, to never having understood a line of Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche, which his father — an old-fashioned intellectual, in his view — had him read in adolescence. He acknowledged this as if admitting a minor defect, one of those that, without blemishing a great personality at all, rather adorn it with something picturesque. What country is this, where laureate poets abdicate the duties of intelligence with a smile on their faces, to the applause of their readers? It’s certainly easier to be shocked by a João Alves or an Ibsen Pinheiro, but whoever investigates the nation’s deeper evils knows that the corruption of intelligence precedes and fosters political-administrative immorality. But who, if not an intellectual, can perceive and denounce the carelessness and dishonesty of their peers? And who has more esprit de corps in this country than the owners of culture? No one can break the sacred pact of mutual hype or at least of complicit silence that entitles one to awards, positions, funds, and honors. The late José Guilherme Merquior, defending his political ideas (with which I totally and in detail disagree) with arguments somewhat above the local average, was met with slanders and insolent questions about his erotic life. Our greatest poet, Bruno Tolentino, dismantling in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo with the rigor of a scientific demonstration the false machinery of an Augusto de Campos translation, received nothing but collective insult as a response.

In this context, a call to study Plato or Aristotle might sound like an evangelical preacher’s sermon in a transvestite nightclub. Nevertheless, it is my duty to deliver it, despite my suspicion that perhaps there are more believing transvestites in nightclubs than there are studious intellectuals in this country.

Aristotle, in particular, seems somewhat indecent in this context. Isn’t he the founder of the empire of reason that oppresses us? Isn’t he the fearsome dictator who imposed on our brains, thirsty for fantasy and pleasure, the austere regime of syllogisms? Isn’t he the accomplice of that disgusting Thomist fat man who codified the torments of hell with which the Church afflicts boys who masturbate? Wasn’t he the one who gave intellectual weapons to the Inquisition to send the unfortunate Giordano Bruno to the flames and humiliate poor Galileo? Wasn’t he the one whom Renaissance science unmasked and banished forever?

No, no, no, no, no. All this is almanac culture. But, I confess, I never spoke about Aristotle to a university audience without having to laboriously deny, one by one, these and many other prejudices and clichés. I also never undertook this tiring task without achieving the best of rewards: that of, once past the barrier of vulgar obstinacies, seeing my students' and listeners' eyes sparkle with the amazement of an intelligence marveling at the endless riches of the Stagirite’s legacy.

That’s why I eagerly await the opportunity to talk about him in Bahia, the land of my ancestors, where I have always found more attentive understanding, even for challenging and unsettling ideas, than anywhere else in the country.

The Tolentino-Campos Controversy62

The response from Mr. Augusto de Campos to Bruno Tolentino’s observations regarding his translation of Hart Crane is utterly unsatisfactory. The number and prestige of the signatures in the supporting manifesto only demonstrate that a voluminous entourage of illustrious bodyguards cannot fill an empty argument.

The response and manifesto focus on the — considered offensive — tone of Tolentino’s article, carefully avoiding its content, which, concerning the analysis of the translation, is scientifically accurate and seemingly irrefutable.

Tolentino may have violated the rules of etiquette, but a culture where the rules of etiquette are more relevant than the intrinsic truth of arguments is a dying culture. High-level literary criticism can thrive in a tough, aggressive, and caustic language, as proven by the celebrated examples of Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Oscar Wilde, Voltaire, Joseph de Maistre, Julien Benda, and countless others, including our own Mário and Oswald de Andrade. However, it cannot survive the cult of appearances and the dogma of politeness at any cost, which currently governs Brazilian cultural journalism, and which O Estado de S. Paulo dared to defy by publishing Tolentino’s article. In fact, it is part of the tradition of literary criticism to ignite the flames of the most vivid controversies from time to time, where measuring words is the last thing that matters. The distinguished founders of national criticism, Sílvio Romero and José Veríssimo, engaged in verbal clashes like cats and dogs, which, apparently, would offend Mr. Campos' delicate sensibility. In recent decades, as is public knowledge, literary criticism has been absent from our cultural scene, probably the reason why the personal and candid language that characterized some of the classic productions of this genre has become discordant in our journalistic environment, where the norms of impersonality and coldness that should prevail in news reporting have improperly spread to cultural and literary pages. In these latter pages, instead, a literary language should prevail, personal to the highest degree compatible with the requirement of communicability, and this does not exclude, nor can it exclude, irony, sarcasm, and even insults, when legitimized by relevant intellectual and moral reasons and directed against works, ideas, and doctrines of public domain, not against mere personal behaviors.

What is truly unusual, abnormal, and aberrant is to respond to a literary criticism, fierce and insulting as it may be, with a collective manifesto of redress63. Redress, as the name itself implies, is only applicable in cases of moral offense, that is, an attack on honor. One form of moral offense is defamation. However, our Penal Code excludes from this category any depreciative opinions regarding the intellectual qualities of the alleged victim:

“There is no defamation in the conduct of someone who merely expresses a personal opinion about the psycho-intellectual qualities of the supposed victim”64.

Thus, calling someone a bad philologist, a terrible translator, or an inept poet does not constitute defamation. Is it then slander? Impossible: There is no crime of slander in literary criticism, where, as Heleno Fragoso states,

“the exclusion of the crime arises from the animus criticandi_, which rules out the purpose of offending and, therefore, the typical conduct”_ 65.

If there was neither slander nor defamation in Tolentino’s article, then there was no moral offense of any kind, but rather the normal exercise of one of the functions of criticism, which is to distinguish between what is good and what is not. Whether Tolentino was right or wrong in his observations about the translation is what the literature experts, including Campos, Cabral, Costas Limas, and Wisnik, should have discussed, for the sake of clarifying to the public. Instead, they sidestepped this point in their response and chose to present a depressing display of moral sensitivities entirely out of context66.

Regarding Tolentino’s arguments, if they are not absolutely irrefutable, they at least remain unanswered, due to the fact that emotional reflex prevailed over serious intellectual reaction in his opponents. The signatories of the manifesto collectively demonstrated intellectual immaturity by believing that feigned dignified gestures can shield Mr. Campos from Tolentino’s critical objections, which, no matter what we think of the language used, are, in substance, serious and weighty. In the future, this unfortunate document will be regarded as a testament to the cultural poverty of our Brazilian time, where mere protests and complaints tend to substitute for thought, and where the most assiduously cultivated literary genre is the "intellectuals' manifesto."

In the critical and philological domain, which is the proper sphere of the discussion initiated by Tolentino, the only indication of a rebuttal from Mr. Campos was his remark regarding the use of the word “nortenho” in Tolentino’s competing translation, which Mr. Campos deems inappropriate for deviating from the accepted meaning in dictionaries. However, what is truly inappropriate is a renowned poetry theorist like Mr. Campos pretending that poetic language must adhere to the accepted meanings in dictionaries — which is precisely the opposite of poetry’s definition, which, according to a phrase that Mr. Campos used to quote a lot in the past, consists in "giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe," a sense that, by a rare exception, fully coincides with what is found in dictionaries.

Mr. Campos also criticizes, with an intention that must have seemed very philological to him, the use of the conjunction “posto que” in Tolentino’s text — a glaring grammar mistake in his view. Good poetry is not incompatible with glaring grammar mistakes, but it is certainly incompatible with a lack of sensitivity to verbal context, where a phrase may fit, at times, even with a meaning opposite to the usual one. “Posto que” is perfectly suited in its place, spontaneously suggesting the meaning given by Tolentino, and therefore is not a glaring mistake at all.

Both Mr. Campos and his bodyguards could have done better. They could have offered critical arguments in defense of their protege rather than reproaches. And Mr. Campos, who has made good translations before, could have preserved the reputation of the others by simply admitting that his translation of Hart Crane’s work is indeed lousy.

Bandits & Scholars

AMONG THE CAUSES of the criminality in Rio de Janeiro, there is one that everyone knows but is never mentioned, as it has become taboo: for sixty years, our writers and artists have been producing a culture that idealizes the rogue, vice, and crime. How could this not contribute, at least in the long run, to creating a favorable atmosphere for the spread of criminality?

From Capitães da Areia to the soap opera Guerra sem Fim, passing through the works of Amando Fontes, Marques Rebelo, João Antônio, Lêdo Ivo, Nelson Rodrigues, and Chico Buarque, to the films of Roberto Farias, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues, Rogério Sganzerla, and countless others, the order is the same, repeated in chorus from one generation to another: thieves and murderers are essentially good or, at least, neutral, while the police and the upper classes they serve are essentially bad67.

I do not know a single good Brazilian book in which the police are right, in which the virtues of the middle and orderly class are exalted, or in which thieves and murderers are presented as worse than others, from any point of view. Even a superior artist like Graciliano Ramos did not escape the commonplace: Luís da Silva, in Angústia, the most pathological and ugly criminal in our literature, ends up being more sympathetic than his victim, the fat, content, and wealthy Julião Tavares - guilty of the crime of being fat, content, and rich. From Graciliano’s perspective, the only mistake Luís da Silva made was his isolation, his impotent act of despair acting on his own: if he had hanged all the bourgeoisie instead of just one, he would be a hero. The homicide itself is just; the bad thing was to commit it on a small scale.

Humanizing the image of the delinquent, deforming, caricaturing the middle and upper-class citizen to the grotesque and animalistic limits, or even the religious and law-abiding poor man who appears in this case as a despicable conformist and virtual traitor to his class — this is the command that a significant portion of our artists has faithfully followed, and which an army of sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists discreetly support with a “scientific” façade in the background.

Based on the resulting “ethics,” there is no evil in the world other than “conservative morality.” What is a robbery, a rape, a murder, compared to the satanic evil hidden in the heart of a family man who, by educating his children to respect the law and order, helps maintain the status quo? In this culture, criminality is either the passive and innocent reflection of an unjust society or the active expression of a fundamentally just popular revolt. It doesn’t matter that homicide and robbery are intentional acts, that the maintenance of an unjust order is not at all in the calculations of the family man and only results as an unwanted sum of millions of automated actions and omissions of the anonymous mass. The universally accepted connection between intention and guilt is revoked among us by a Marxist atavism elevated to the level of law: according to the “ethical” criterion of our intelligentsia, a man is less culpable for his personal acts than for those of the class to which he belongs68. This distorts the entire scale of values in the judgment of crimes. When a resident of the favela commits a murder, they must be treated with clemency because they belong to the class of the innocent. When a company director evades taxes, they must be punished severely because they belong to the guilty class. Those who demand imprisonment for corrupt politicians campaign for the liberation of the chief of the Red Command. Those who have always vigorously opposed the death penalty for murderers cite as exemplary the Chinese law that orders the execution of corrupt officials, and they reprimand Deputy Amaral Netto, an advocate for the death penalty for murderers, for being against the same penalty for “white-collar crimes.” Congress, focused on punishing petty embezzlers, shows sovereign indifference to armed banditry. Thus, our public opinion undergoes a reeducation that will end up persuading it that diverting money from the State is more serious than attempting against human life — a principle that, enshrined in the Soviet Penal Code, punished murder with ten years in prison and death penalty for crimes against the administration: tell me who you imitate, and I will tell you who you are69.

If taken even further, this “cultural revolution” will eventually pervert the entire moral sense of the population, establishing the belief that the duty to be good and just primarily and essentially belongs to society and only secondarily to individuals. Many Brazilian intellectuals consider this monstrous precept as an infallible dogma, which results in abolishing all duties of individual moral conscience until the day the “just society” is finally established on Earth—an ideal that, if not utopian and fantastical in itself, would at least be rendered unfeasible by the practice of the same precept, making people increasingly unjust and wicked the more they invest in the future just and good society70. One of the greatest ethical thinkers of our century, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, showed that throughout history, the moral standard of societies—and especially of States—has always been much lower than that of concrete individuals. Any society, yes, any society can allow acts that would be considered immoral or criminal in an individual. Therefore, according to Niebuhr, the essence of moral effort is to try to be just in an unjust society71. Our intellectuals have reversed this formula, dissolving all sense of personal responsibility in the magical potion of “social responsibility”. Some even consider this to be very Christian, forgetting that if Christ thought like them, He would postpone the healing of lepers, the multiplication of loaves, and the sacrifice of Calvary until after the advent of the “just society.”

It is absolutely impossible that the dissemination of so many false ideas does not create an atmosphere conducive to encouraging and legitimizing the omission of O the ruler elected by a left-wing party, for example, cannot help but be paralyzed by a dual loyalty, on the one hand, to the public order he claimed to defend, and on the other, to the cause of the revolution to which his heart has been committed since youth, and for which disorder is an indispensable condition. The almost complicit omission of figures like Brizola or Nilo Batista—men who are not inclined to take an active part in cultural production but are educated enough not to escape the influence of the produced culture—is nothing but a reflection of a set of values, or rather anti-values, that our educated class has consecrated as laws, shaping the minds of Brazilians for many decades. If support for strong measures against crime always comes from the lower classes, it is not only because they are the first victims of criminals, but also because they are beyond the reach of the educated culture. From the middle class upwards, the acquisition of higher culture is identified with adherence to the established prejudices of the national intelligentsia, among which are hatred of the police and sympathy for banditry.

It would be plausible to assume that these prejudices arose in reaction to the military dictatorship. But in reality, they predate it. The image of crime in our culture ultimately consists of a set of habits and clichés whose first origin lies in the instruction transmitted by the Comintern on April 24, 1933, to the Central Committee of the Brazilian Communist Party, urging them to assume the leadership of criminal gangs, giving their conflict with the law a “class struggle” character72.

The instruction was promptly followed by the communist intelligentsia, which produced a multitude of books, articles, theses, and speeches for this purpose. The communist writers were not many, but they were the most active, taking over the representation of intellectuals and artists73. They raised their voices above all others and soon their ideas prevailed, occupying the entire mental space of the educated public. Today, we see how deeply the communist propaganda has left its mark on the conscience of our intellectuals: none of them speak about the problem of crime in Rio de Janeiro, except to repeat the old clichés about poverty, evil rich people, and to blame the “elite” for all the assaults, homicides, and rapes committed by the inhabitants of the slums.

No one dares to question the truthfulness of the premises on which such reasoning is based—which proves how much these ideas have influenced our intellectual class, how much they, without even knowing the origin of their ideas, continue to repeat and obey, out of sheer automatism, out of mental laziness, the slogans spread by the Comintern in the 1930s.

It is futile that universal experience teaches us that the connection between poverty and criminality is tenuous and uncertain; that there are thousands of causes for crime that even the prosperity of a welfare state cannot eliminate; that among these causes is anomie, the absence of explicit moral rules common to the entire society; that a culture of “subversion of all values” and the glamorization of banditry by the educated elite help to remove the last scruples that still hold thousands of young people on the brink of criminality. Contrary to the lessons of history, science, and common sense, our intellectuals continue to cling to the legend that makes the criminal the collector of a social debt. Some even believe in it, with a kind of pathetic masochism, a residue of sickly sentimentality inoculated by communist discourse into the fragile souls of “progressive bourgeoisie.” The writer Antônio Callado, seeing his house broken into and his valuable paintings stolen, repeated to himself, defenseless and stunned, Proudhon’s sentence: “Property is theft.” He should have recited Heine’s poem instead, in which a man who sleeps is tormented in dreams by a figure who, pointing a weapon at him, says: “I am the action of your thoughts”74.

Unfortunately, the thoughts of intellectuals do not only turn their material effects against their authors. Elevated to a common belief, the legend of the “Cobrador” — the title of a memorable short story by Rubem Fonseca — has devastating real consequences for the entire population. It transforms the delinquent from being the accused to being the accuser. Confident and bolstered in their self-esteem by the flattery of the intelligentsia, the murderer no longer points only the barrel of a gun at us but the finger of justice; a strange justice that casts blame on the victim for the errors of an abstract entity—the “system,” the “unjust society”—while largely exempting the criminal from responsibility for their personal actions. Pursued on one side by gangs of criminals and cornered on the other by the discourse of the literate, the population falls into the most abject moral defibrillation and no longer dares to express its revolt. Like a raped woman, she is ashamed of her suffering and absorbs the blame of her aggressor. She may still demand action from the authorities, but does so in a weak and unconvincing voice—surrounding her plea with so many precautions that the authorities, after hearing her, will fear to act more than to abstain. After all, it is politically less risky to displease a multitude of victims who groan in secret than to displease a handful of intellectuals who vociferate in public.

The intellectuals in this country are the first to denounce immorality, the first to take the podium to speak in the name of “ethics.” But ethics essentially consists of each individual being responsible for their own actions. And I have never seen a Brazilian intellectual, let alone a leftist one, examine their conscience and ask themselves, “Have we also not contributed to the tragedy in Rio?”

No, none of them feel the slightest pang of conscience when they see that sixty years of literary praise for crime have suddenly materialized in the streets, that images have come to life, that words have become actions, that characters have jumped from the stage to reality and are robbing, killing, and raping with the good conscience of being “popular heroes,” of “fighting against injustice” with the combat techniques they learned on Ilha Grande. The intellectuals literally do not feel that they have contributed anything to this outcome. They don’t feel it because decades of false consciousness fed by Marxist rhetoric have immunized them against any protests of moral conscience. They possess the dialectical art of stifling the inner voice with historical opportunity arguments. Moreover, they despise the feeling of guilt — which they suppose was invented by the Catholic Church to keep the masses under tight control. Therefore, not wanting to assume their own guilt, they exorcise it by projecting it onto others and become, by a well-known hysterical symptomatology, public accusers, spokespersons of a resentful and vengeful moralism. Convinced dogmatically that guilt always lies with others, they are pure of heart and ready to fulfill their duty. What duty? The only one they know, the one they consider the primary mission of the intellectual: to denounce. Denounce others, of course. And the one who denounces, being, by virtue of that, on the side of the “progressive forces,” automatically exempts themselves from being accountable to the “abstract morality” of the bourgeoisie, which, without understanding anything about historical dialectics, continues to proclaim that there are inherently evil acts, regardless of social and political conditions: “hypocritical morality,” to which the intellectual wrinkles their nose with the infinite superiority of someone who knows the teleology of history and has already surpassed — or rather, “aufhebt jetzt” — in the dialectics of becoming the false conflict between good and evil…

But the collaboration of these dialectical gentlemen in the growth of crime in Rio went much further than simply psychological preparation through literature, theater, and cinema: it was specimens of their kind who, in the prison on Ilha Grande, taught the future leaders of the Red Command the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare that turned it into a paramilitary organization capable of posing a threat to national security. It doesn’t matter that, in doing so, the imprisoned militants had in mind the future integration of criminals into the revolutionary strategy, or that, acting blindly, they simply desired a suicidal revenge against the dictatorship that defeated them. What matters is that, by teaching guerrilla warfare to the criminals, they acted consistently with the teachings of Marcuse and Hobsbawm — who were very influential in our left-wing circles at the time —, which, even contrary to the old Marx, exalted the revolutionary potential of the “Lumpenproletariat.”

None of these servants of History feel the slightest remorse, the slightest disturbance of conscience when they see that their lessons were learned, that their theories became practice, and that their science of revolution armed the force that now terrorizes the people of Rio with assaults and homicides. No, they did nothing but accelerate historical dialectics — and there is no evil except in opposing History. With the purest conscience in the world, they continue to blame others: capitalism, the government’s economic policies, the police, and they brand citizens, rich and poor alike, who want to see murderers and drug dealers in jail, as “reactionaries” and “fascists.”

But the intellectuals on the left did not limit themselves to creating a conducive cultural backdrop and raising the level of dangerousness of banditry through technical instruction; they went a step further and reaped the political fruits of their long-standing flirtation with delinquency: the support of the bicheiros — which is the same as saying: the drug traffickers — was the main popular support base that the traditional and populist wing of the Brazilian left, represented by Brizola, built in Rio.

Under the aegis of Brizola’s rule, the relationship between leftist intellectuals and banditry turned into a blatant love affair, with the Brazilian Press Association (ABI) endorsing the promotion of the book “One Against a Thousand,” in which the gang leader William Lima da Silva, known as “Professor,” the leader of the Red Command, apologizes for crime as a legitimate reaction against “unjust society.”

A little later, when organized crime had grown to the point of requiring federal government intervention, it was evident that the left had not only collaborated with the criminals but had also worked to weaken their pursuers. The United Workers' Central (CUT) and the Workers' Party (PT), infiltrating the Federal Police, had made this organization more threatening to the federal government than to drug traffickers and criminals75.

And finally, when the federal government, overcoming prodigious resistance, finally decides to act and assigns the Army to lead the repression against banditry in Rio, the left-wing intelligentsia, as it could not be otherwise, initiates a silent campaign to undermine the military command of the operations, whether with alarmist warnings about the possibility of “abuses” against favela residents, or with all sorts of jokes and speculations about the weaknesses of the adopted strategy, or with pseudoscientific arguments about the inconvenience of the remedy adopted, suggesting that the risks of a military intervention are infinitely greater than those of the bloody anarchy installed in Rio. All this prepares the ground for a larger offensive, in which self-appointed entities representing “civil society” — the same ones that promoted the elevation of Red Command leaders to the status of “popular leaders” — will join forces to demand the withdrawal of the Armed Forces and the return of the hills to their eternal rulers, there enthroned by the grace of the goddess History76.

In summary, in chronological order: the left, first, created an atmosphere of idealization of banditry; second, taught criminals the techniques and strategy of urban guerrilla warfare; third, openly defended the power of criminal gangs, proposing their legitimization as “popular leaders”; fourth, weakened the Federal Police as a repressive agency while simultaneously strengthening it as an agitation instrument; fifth, sought to psychologically sabotage the repressive operation mounted by the Armed Forces, trying to attract popular antipathy to it. Is it humanly conceivable that all this is just a series of fortuitous coincidences? If the perfectly logical continuity of the left’s initiatives in favor of banditry does not reflect the unity of a conscious strategy, it at least expresses the unanimity of a state of mind, the strong cohesion of a knot of prejudices against public order and in favor of delinquency. For our left, murderers, thieves, drug traffickers, and rapists are aligned with the “progressive forces” and destined to be redeemed by History for their collaboration with the cause of socialism. As for their pursuers, they are clearly identified with the “reactionary forces” and will be thrown straight into the dustbin of History. As for the victims, well, they may be lamented, but, as Uncle Vladimir used to say, what can be done? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs…

To complete the picture, it is well-known that artists and intellectuals are one of the wealthiest markets for drug consumption and do not wish to lose their suppliers: when they advocate the decriminalization of drugs, they advocate for themselves. But they are not only consumers: they are propagandists. Those with a little memory will remember that in this country, the drug trend in the 1960s did not start among the lower classes but in universities, theater groups, and psychology circles, surrounded by the prestige of an elegant and enlightening vice. Thanks to this artificial embellishment undertaken by the intelligentsia, drug consumption ceased to be a habit restricted to small circles of delinquents and spread like metastases of cancer throughout society: Si monumentum requires, circumspicii.

Is it surprising, under these conditions, that banditry grew as it did? Is it surprising that while the population massively clamors for authority intervention and now applauds the arrival of marines to the favelas, the intelligentsia seeks to devalue the Army’s actions and is concerned only with safeguarding the civil rights of potential suspects to be detained, as if eliminating armed banditry were not worth the risk of some sporadic abuses?

What would be surprising is if the allegedly scientific studies on the causes of banditry never highlighted the complicity of intellectuals, as if economic factors acted on their own and as if cultural production had no influence on social order or disorder, even when this complicity moves from words to actions and becomes overt political support for criminal activity. It would be surprising, I say, if we did not know who the authors of such studies are and which entities fund them.

For decades, our intelligentsia has lived on fictions that feed their hatred and resentment and prevent them from seeing reality. At the same time, they complain about their isolation and dream of the utopia of a wide popular audience. But it is the lack of culture in our people that protects them from contamination by intellectualized stupidity. “Lack of culture” is a manner of speaking: is it really a lack of culture to refrain from consuming false values and deceptive slogans? No, but when there is an intelligentsia in this country that lives up to its mission, it will be heard and understood. For now, if we want to see our Rio free from the scourge of banditry, the first thing to do is not to listen to those who actively contributed to the spread of this evil, who then showed a total inability to repent of their mistake, and who finally have the audacity to still pretend to be advisers and saviors — they have lost any vestige of authority and have exposed their lamentable moral ugliness.

The Democracy of NGOs and the Dictatorship of Marketing or: A New Apology for the Collective Imbecile

In this collection of articles77 published in the press of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília from 1989 to 1992, the author presents a showcase of his political ideas, which could prove to be quite useful in the resurgence of the Brazil project at the beginning of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government.

Although the presentation of these ideas is informal and even casual, conveyed through daily comments on events, they represent a systematic thought that connects his proposals for Brazil with his vision of our social and political history. This vision stems from a diagnosis of the current state of world civilization, which, in turn, is based on a political theory grounded in the principles of a philosophy of culture. To this coherence, we must add the author’s extensive knowledge and vivacity in his observations on the events he comments on. He reveals a dual capacity to relate everything to a few basic principles while remaining attentive to the variety of reality, which inevitably leads a sincere individual to grasp the reality of things. Whether he has truly grasped it or not remains to be seen.

The very organization of his thought makes both the strengths and weaknesses of this book equally visible. The strengths lie primarily in the vitality of the proposals, which dissolve certain thought categories that had frozen our political debate for decades, opening up new combinations of ideas and, therefore, new arrangements of political forces. By approaching issues from an unusual angle, reconciling seemingly opposing ideals and delineating new areas of dispute, the author may simply be outlining what the Brazilian political landscape will be in a few years. In constructing this scenario, he will have contributed not only through vision and prediction but also through persuasive effort. As a skillful advertiser and idealistic politician, he guides the course of events towards a future both “foreseen and desired”—which is, after all, the essence of the art of marketing.

Given the merits of this book, its flaws are highlighted with no less clarity. The main flaw lies in the fragility of the philosophical foundations on which the author seeks to base his diagnoses, which, ironically, do not need such foundations and would remain valid relying solely on pertinent direct observation of facts without any philosophical support. On the contrary, attempting to give these diagnoses a flimsy philosophical foundation could only diminish their credibility. These statements may seem to contradict what was said above about Jorge Maranhão’s coherent thinking. However, we are facing one of those peculiar cases in which a logical deduction based on false premises results in confirming an observed fact. The classic model of such cases is the syllogism: “Socrates is a stone; every stone is a human being; therefore, Socrates is a human being.” Deluded by the coincidence between the conclusion of his reasoning and the experience, the reasoner persuades himself that he has thought correctly. This is the case with Jorge Maranhão, an astute observer and a ponderous thinker.

I read on the back cover that the author already had an honorable career in communications and advertising when he pursued a Master’s degree in Philosophy at UFRJ in 1986. There, he must have acquired the elements of bad philosophy, which are now grafted onto his personal observations. Fortunately, these elements did not diminish his observations, but they remained as unnecessary and compromising adornments over a book that is mostly based on direct experience.

The coherence that the author seeks to maintain between his views on the present and his philosophical foundations is thus less of a merit and more of a demerit. A little less coherence would have resulted in a little more truthfulness.

It is worth studying this case more closely.

According to Jorge Maranhão, the traditional division of the Brazilian political arena between statists and privatizers does not reflect the reality of economic alternatives but rather the residual survival of old ideological rivalries. Updating the nomenclature to “social democrats” and “neoliberals” does not solve anything.

The establishment of the global telecommunications network has so radically changed the social and economic landscape that the ideals and goals sought by individuals, groups, and currents no longer correspond to any of the previous ideological frameworks. Certain ideals traditionally defended by socialists, for example, can now only prosper under the free enterprise system, which provides activists with the means to gather in NGOs and advocate for their proposals in the marketplace of competing ideas, each of which is supported by a small entrepreneurial scheme.

The worldwide phenomenon of NGOs dissolves the traditional capitalism versus socialism framework since they neither fully align with the policies of the large conglomerates representing capitalist interests nor can they survive in a fully socialist regime. As social ideals in our time are personified primarily by NGOs, it would be self-contradictory if, as the final outcome of these struggles, they ended up dissolving themselves and giving way to the bureaucratic organization of a socialist state. Therefore, NGOs are not only means or instruments of the struggle for a new state of affairs; they are already the very principle of the organization of the new state of affairs.

Jorge Maranhão goes beyond merely diagnosing this new political model as a forming reality; he firmly argues in favor of it. According to the author’s reasoning, the dominant tendencies also prove to be for the better: the course of events emerges as the embodiment and realization of a value.

The new model departs from socialism by being founded on the free market and differs from neoliberalism by also being a free market of opinions. Due to an intrinsic rule of the market, it admits the eventual victory of anti-liberal and even socializing proposals, at least in partial domains of social and economic life.

The doctrine of the free market of opinions goes far beyond the usual and current conceptions of freedom of expression. Instead of being mere instruments serving political objectives, the media and marketing become the defining framework of the political arena. In this sense, they are the origin and legitimizing authority of all power. “Being a citizen” in this context no longer just means enjoying certain civil and political rights but also having access to the media, participating in shaping public opinion, and thereby exercising power.

On the other hand, the worldwide network of telecommunications and the advent of microcomputers open up the possibility for all citizens and small groups to participate in this game on relatively equal terms — or almost equal — with large organizations. Curiously, it was these same organizations that created the technological conditions for this to happen.

All power is the power of opinion. Giving the technical means of participating in shaping public opinion to as many people and groups as possible is not only, according to Maranhão, the dominant tendency of our time but also the political ideal that should guide the efforts of those who value freedom over traditional ideological schemes.

These ideas are manifestly appealing, especially to someone like me who has never believed that anyone should expect anything from governments. To demand from the government, even what is theoretically just, always results in moral degradation in practice: a person who goes down that path ends up seeing no other way of acting but through complaints. Behind the angry outcry, there is nothing but the stunned passivity of a baby crying and unable to do anything for itself. A government that interferes in everything forces people to demand everything from it, degrading the people by fulfilling their demands, rewarding indiscipline and protest, and also by not fulfilling them, sowing despair and cynicism.

At least, that is how I see it, and to those who think likewise, the image of a society founded on the free association of those with ideas to propose is absolutely delightful78. The free competition of ideas, even if it imposes limitations on the free competition of capital, preserves the best of liberalism, which is freedom; and even if it does not guarantee the protection of an all-powerful paternalistic state for everyone, it preserves the best of socialism, which is the defense of the small against the powerful.

Jorge Maranhão thus unmasks the stereotype of the “social democracy versus neoliberalism” conflict, showing that the ideals of social democracy can only be fulfilled in liberal capitalism and that the only “neo” aspect of neoliberalism is the degree of socialism it can incorporate without betraying its nature.

I believe that no sensible person will deeply disagree with these ideas.

However, immediately afterward, the unrepentant advertiser seizes the opportunity to argue pro domo sua, attributing to members of his professional guild, in the new political framework, a privileged role almost akin to a new priestly caste. Not content with this, he calls upon philosophy to support his thesis, which, if taken to its extreme, would transform the dream of freedom in the realm of NGOs into a subtle but no less odious dictatorship of the “marketing” men.

In Maranhão’s line of reasoning, considering that the media is the modern substitute for the agora, advertising becomes more than just an instrument at the service of democracy: it becomes the very environment where democracy is born and thrives, the air it breathes, and the lifeblood of the democratic organism. The only problem, according to Maranhão, is that advertising is in the hands of a few who shape public opinion according to their whims. However, technological evolution is taking care of dismantling this monopoly by democratizing the means of access and dissemination of information. One day, each NGO could have its TV channel, and every citizen could inject their opinions into the veins of the global telecommunications system. The future of democracy, therefore, lies in a politics that only helps the current course of events achieve the goal it already tends towards. All that is needed is to democratize advertising, and the entire world will be democratic. Fortunately, advertising tends to democratize itself due to the very force of technological evolution:

"The technological revolution of communication, on the one hand, and the informatization of society, on the other hand, are rapidly shaping a new landscape in the social relations between citizens and collectives. Especially in their political relations with the established powers. The relations between knowledge-producing centers and the political decision-making centers of governments are increasingly mediated by the participation of the entire collective and the opinion of organized civil society. If the French Revolution made opinion the foundation of power itself, the technological revolution of this end of the century has made opinion the very condition of power."79

However, from the moment democratized advertising governs, a new problem arises: the criteria, values, modus ratiocinandi, and ideology of advertising become the dominant ideology. The marketing, by ruling the public discourse, automatically determines the criteria for truth and error, good and evil, right and wrong, lawful and unlawful.

What criteria are these to be? Firstly, the dominance of opinion. An idea that, skillfully shaped by marketing, emerges victorious in the free market of opinions will have as much right to be considered true and good as a product that wins the competition has the right to enjoy the largest share of the market, regardless of the deceptive benefit consumers derive from it.

Above the free market of ideas, there will be no law, religion, ideology, doctrine, or belief of any kind that can impose itself as true against the opinion of the majority, as measured by polls or market research.

According to Maranhão, this will herald the advent of the kingdom of freedom, delayed for millennia by the predominance of “truth” over “opinion”:

"If humanity, under the dominion of religion, was guided by the mystery of revealed truth, under the dominion of reason, scientific truth, the product of a closed conceptual system accessible only to the initiated, revealed itself as an instrument of discretionary power. Opinion, the product of human argumentation effort, while an instrument of ancient rhetoric and the foundation of politics itself, is reborn after twenty centuries of repression of the truth of the Aristotelian-Christian tradition and two centuries of repression of the rationalist-Cartesian tradition."80

It becomes clear here that Maranhão has fully absorbed and endorsed without the slightest critical reflection Chaim Perelman’s New Rhetoric, which he does not explicitly mention but which unmistakably permeates his entire book. During Maranhão’s time studying philosophy at UFRJ, Perelman’s ideas circulated there like mosquitoes in the air, spread as a panacea by José Américo Motta Pessanha and his admirers. The university public, restless and verbose, eagerly absorbs any doctrine that offers them relief from guilt, pointing to a new scapegoat into which they can pour the basest resentments of an age that is, by excellence, the age of complexes. Seeking in ideas less a description of reality than an image imbued with their own desires, the student class has a fateful vocation for the cult of errors. Believing themselves - in a phrase that became a slogan of the student movement in the 1960s - “the most enlightened segment of the population,” they have actually supported only streams of ideas that lead directly to catastrophe, such as Bolshevism and Fascism, which exert far less charm on those supposedly less enlightened. Hence the ease with which pseudo-philosophies propagated by masters of flattery are absorbed into the academic environment without undergoing the slightest critical examination and quickly establish themselves as saving formulas for all human ills. Maranhão, at UFRJ, undoubtedly received abundant doses of the potion that José Américo Motta Pessanha distributed throughout the national territory at the time. If he were not intoxicated by the fascination of the New Rhetoric, he would easily realize the insurmountable contradiction between democracy - particularly in the version he himself presents - and the elevation of marketing to the supreme criterion of knowledge.

Firstly, there is nothing democratic about the pure and direct rule of the majority. Democracy requires respect for minorities. This respect, however, is not democratic if it consists only of leaving them alone in their corner, untouched but marginalized. Democracy begins when the minority is granted the right to try to persuade the majority and thus become the majority itself. Now, this presupposes, as an indispensable condition, the existence of some criterion of truth and error that is superior to the law of the larger number. If the only valid argument in favor of an idea is that it expresses the desire of the majority, the arguments of the minority are invalidated a priori and forever, except in the case of a fortuitous change in the feelings of the majority. Democracy, far from identifying with the rule of the majority, has one of its essential foundations in the belief that the minority can be right against the majority. This belief is the only argument that exists, by the way, in favor of freedom of opinion. If the market-driven criterion of collective aspirations outweighs the logical criterion of objective truth, then the majority is always right; and if the majority is always right, freedom of expression is unnecessary and even harmful, since, in all cases and without any conceivable exception, there will always be one and only one correct opinion. Worse still, the “correct” will not be accountable to the “true,” and whatever seems good and correct to the majority (or their self-appointed spokespeople) will automatically be elevated to the category of norm and obligation, no matter how much its implementation contradicts the laws of nature, elementary logic, or real requirements of the state of affairs. The reign of “political correctness,” which imposes rules contrary to the most elementary common sense, which believes, for example, that it can reconcile total sexual freedom with the prudish susceptibilities of virtuous spinsters, is the result of a situation where the majority’s desires have an authority superior to reality itself. It is the reign of wishful thinking. Therefore, democracy cannot consist solely of the pure and simple rule of opinion, but of opinion founded on reason. It is not necessary to discuss the concept of “reason.” Whatever it may be, it represents, in democracy, the superior instance, the criterion of objective validity that hovers above the law of large numbers. The proper functioning of reason presupposes that there must be objectively valid arguments in favor of an idea that are far superior to the simple claim that it expresses the desires of the many. For example, in 1933, the majority of the German electorate desired Hitler. It is a typical example of what the law of numbers can do once it becomes absolute and independent of reason. On a smaller scale and closer to comedy than tragedy, the majority of Brazilians chose Collor in 1989.

Maranhão laments that the means of persuasion are in the hands of a few and advocates for their democratization. However, the effectiveness of persuasion depends not only on material means but also on the ability of the public to judge the arguments. If we were to give each citizen a megaphone but remove from all brains the ability to objectively judge issues, the only final criterion left for arbitration would be to measure the number of decibels in favor of each proposal. What good is a democracy that gives me tools to spread my opinions if it leaves me with no other means to form my opinion except to follow that of others?

All this demonstrates that, beyond mere rhetorical persuasion, there must be an objective criterion to decide the truth or falsehood of arguments independently of the desires of the majority and potentially against them. The ability to obtain this criterion can be called reason, intelligence, consciousness, or whatever one may prefer. What matters is that rhetoric and marketing operate at a lower level than reason, at the purely quantitative level where the supreme criterion consists of the summation of illusions.

It will not be me, of course, who will teach the old or new rhetoric to someone who learned it in an institution as venerable as UFRJ. What I can do is suggest the need to think about it, something that certainly was not done at UFRJ during Jorge Maranhão’s time there.

The essential feature of rhetorical argumentation - and what distinguishes it from dialectical argumentation - is that it rests entirely on verisimilitude, that is, the momentary appearance of truth that an argument can show to a particular audience in a given situation.

The intrinsic truth or falsehood of an argument is entirely foreign to rhetorical art, which deals exclusively with how to adapt this argument, true or false, to the expectations and preferences of a particular audience. Rhetoric is essentially a psychology of communication. It focuses on the human subjects involved in the persuasive process, studying their language, habits, values, their greater or lesser vulnerability to various types of arguments while remaining entirely at the margin of the object on which the persuasion revolves. For rhetoric, what matters is not what the object actually is but what the public imagines it to be. Rhetoric has no means of judging the truth of its own discourse, just as the quality of a product for its intended purposes has no reciprocal implication with the effectiveness of the marketing that conveys it. The number of thalidomide victims, for example, confirms the effectiveness of its marketing to the same extent that it attests to the poor quality of the product.

Logical-dialectical and rhetorical argumentation move in different planes: the former deals with the relationships between human subjects, while the latter deals with the relationships between subject and object, knower and known, intelligence and reality. Both are necessary and irreplaceable, but each for a specific purpose: just as logic is not suited to influence the feelings of voters, rhetoric is not suited to ascertain the consistency of our knowledge.

The confusion into which Jorge Maranhão falls stems from a lamentable mistake made by Perelman and his school. Perelman only recognizes two types of argumentation: logic and rhetoric. Thus, he absorbs dialectical argumentation into the latter, resulting in a false dualistic conflict between rigid, mathematical, Platonizing, dogmatic thought, and the softer and more flexible modus argumentandi necessary in the discussion of human affairs. Having done this, there is only left to decidedly take the side of the latter, attributing to the former the blame for the excesses of the Inquisition, absolute monarchy, totalitarian governments, and technobureaucracy, which places us squarely in the territory of the paranoid interpretation of History. Rhetoric then becomes the humanized, civilized, and polished world of exchanging opinions, while logic, with its pretension to prove “the truth,” becomes the very embodiment of totalitarian repression. Taken to its ultimate consequences, this attitude exalts “opinion” above “truth” and proposes, as a saving utopia, the universal empire of marketing.

However, all this is based on a foolish generalization, combined with a complete lack of knowledge of the differences between rhetoric and dialectic, and a stereotypical absolutization of the logic-rhetoric opposition. I will not extend further on this point here, as I believe I have already demonstrated enough in my booklet on Aristotle’s theory of discourse81, not only the existence of four - and not two - basic modalities of argumentation but also the complete interdependence between these modalities, whose distinction is more formal than real. Taking this distinction as absolutely real and basing on it something like a typology of political societies, Perelman’s school - more so than Perelman himself - confuses mere logical-abstractions with real entities of cultural history and even risks producing concretely malefic political effects.

Maranhão does not seem to realize how monstrous and inhuman the beautiful utopia that the empire of rhetoric offers us is: where the effectiveness of persuasion is a nobler value than the truth of knowledge, speaking is more important than knowing, and know thyself is surpassed by speak to the public; where a lie repeated by millions is more valuable than the truth known by one. The contempt that Maranhão feels for the “solitary truth” is poorly disguised82:

“If companies and governments decide their projects for society for techno-scientific reasons, they run the risk of ending up solitary with their truths, which, because they are truths, are not arguments to convince public opinion.”

In this caricatural inversion of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, the good leader is not the one who acts according to his conscience based on knowledge but the one who follows public opinion at all costs and, unable to persuade it of what is right, festively adheres to what is wrong to avoid the risk of ending up “solitary with his truth.” I wonder if the author of this book was in his right mind when writing these passages, which, with their Goebbelsian apology for externality, suggest nothing less than a collective renunciation of the dignity of human conscience in favor of an ant-hill democracy. One must be hypnotized by the fascination of marketing to an almost insane degree to see any attractiveness in the offer of throwing away everything that gives value and meaning to life in exchange for entry into the “free market of ideas.” The man who prefers the solitude of truth to the company of liars is certainly not very well-regarded; but he is the most beautiful moral human type, personified in Christ: Barrabas was more superior in marketing. Maranhão wants us to sanctify the vote of the mob, for which even a fool like Pontius Pilate was too sensible to take responsibility.

On the other hand, seeking in rhetoric an antidote to the “discretionary power” of science is an idea that can only occur to someone who is unaware that the power of science over society does not arise from the cognitive content of scientific knowledge, but rather from scientific ideology, which is pure rhetoric. It was not the physics of Einstein, the genetics of Mendel, or any scientific theory that elevated the class of technicians and scientists to the status of a priestly caste, but the Enlightenment rhetoric and later positivism. The men who created scientific power — Voltaire, Condorcet, Comte, Renan — were not scientists, not even in an approximate sense of the term, but communicators, marketers like Maranhão.

The very notion of “intellectual” in the modern sense is above all that of a rhetorician — an agitator of ideas, someone who discovers or creates nothing on their own but makes a tremendous noise and sets the machinery of History in motion. This type, everyone knows, was inaugurated by Voltaire. At the forefront of all currents of opinion that have agitated the world for two hundred years, one never finds a true man of science, a philosopher in the classical sense of the term, a genuine creative artist, an authentic religious figure, or even a pure man of action. Instead, one invariably finds an “intellectual” — an individual who has the gift of transforming ideas into active forces through words. In other words: a rhetorician, a publicist. The authors of the Encyclopedia, the pioneers of the socialist movement, the ideologues of liberalism, the propagators of spiritualism and theosophy, the apologists of positivism, the instigators of the Paris Commune, and the spokespeople of both sides in the Dreyfus Affair — all are publicists; Lenin and Trotsky, Hitler and Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt, Gandhi and Mao — all are rhetoricians; those who spread existentialism, Marxism, the New Left, and the New Age in the world are also rhetoricians. Nowadays, Alvin Toffler, Fritjof Capra, and all the circulating ideologues are rhetoricians.

Even before the advent of the modern world and the pure “intellectual” or rhetorician who constitutes its dominant figure, rhetoric was already the source of power. It was not the speculative theologians who turned the Church into a political force, but the preachers. Europe was already completely Christianized by the fervent words of apologists when, centuries later, the doctrinal body of Aristotelian theology was organized with Albert and Thomas, which, after facing many resistances, was accepted as the official doctrine of the Church in the 19th century (!), an event that Maranhão, with complete ignorance on the subject, attributes to “twenty centuries of suppression of truth.” It is the rhetoric of St. Bernard — and not the theology of Thomas or anyone else — that leads Europe to the adventure of the Crusades, from which it emerges less Christian than when it entered. It is rhetoric that ignites the fires of the Inquisition, and it is rhetoric that, when extinguishing them, takes the opportunity to drown scholastic philosophy in a bath of slander, as a scapegoat. It is the rhetoric of Hobbes and Bodin that, against papal power, lays the foundations of absolute monarchy, and it is rhetoric that turns the masses against absolute monarchy, blaming the Church, which was indeed its first victim, for its sins. Rhetoric has always moved the world, and if it is heading towards the abyss, it is being carried there by rhetoricians. Not by theologians, philosophers, men of science, contemplatives, or seekers of truth. Even the power of weapons remains dormant and harmless if not awakened by good rhetoric. One must be completely ignorant of history — or else a complete liar, which I do not believe Maranhão to be — to now offer us the empire of rhetoric as something new and as a path to salvation. This empire is almost as old as the world itself. It began on the day the first rhetorician bet on the persuasive effectiveness of the first simile: “You will be like gods…” One cannot help but recognize a distant echo of that proposal when the marketing man offers us the free market of ideas as protection against the “tyranny of truth.” For any idea that does not willingly submit to this “tyranny” is worth nothing: it is pure rhetoric.

The most ironic part is that, when viewed without their philosophical pretensions and reduced to their proper size, the political proposals in this book acquire a better sense and retain their validity perfectly. The error here was to greatly expand the diagnosis of a momentary situation, making it — with the help of a false theory of discourse — the principle and criterion of an entire philosophy of the history of civilization. This mistake led the author to generalize about matters that are somewhat beyond his understanding and draw conclusions of unparalleled absurdity, enveloping — in a compromising aura of paranoid delusion — political ideas that, in themselves, are not senseless. He would do well to limit his ambitions in a future edition, admitting that something more is needed to establish the judgment of an entire civilization than talent — undeniable in his case — for political commentary.

Against the Intellocrats83

§ 1– Brazil’s Cultural Stagnation

It is a commonly held belief, if not a unanimous conviction among Brazilian intellectuals, that cultural production in Brazil has declined in quality over the past three decades. However, this acknowledgment of the problem is not followed by any attempt to discuss and investigate its causes or ways to remedy it. The recognition of the current state of affairs, when limited to itself, becomes fatalistic resignation or complacent cynicism. This shows that in Brazilian cultural life, it is not only the production—the external manifestation—that has declined, but also the inner motivation, the level of commitment of intellectuals and artists to the values that nominally legitimize their activity.

During the twenty years of military dictatorship, we all heard the refrain attributing our cultural anemia to an oppressive government and promising a rebirth of national genius after the restoration of freedom. However, in the late 1980s, the critic Wilson Coutinho assessed our cultural production in the first decade of democracy as “the stupidest in our entire history.” No one disputed him. Now, halfway through another decade, not only has the expected rebirth not come, but we have also lost interest in asking why it hasn’t come. At least Godot prompted questions.

But indifference, conformism, and apathy in the face of the surprising, when they go beyond the point where they can still be explained as natural manifestations of human laziness, become a surprising phenomenon in themselves. Rather than just investigating the causes of Brazil’s cultural decline, it is urgent to investigate the reasons for the lack of interest in investigating them.

§ 2– Possible Causes of the Lack of Interest

A good way to begin an investigation is to consider, as scientists say, the set of plausible hypotheses. If this set includes all possible causes, leaving out only the foolish, irrelevant, and absurd, then the sought-after cause will necessarily lie among the conceived possibilities.

Now, there are four and only four reasons why a person might lose interest in a problem that objectively concerns them and of which they are aware:

1st: They are unaware of the problem’s importance.

2nd: They acknowledge the importance of the problem, but due to some deviation of attention, they feel it is not their concern.

3rd: They acknowledge the importance of the problem and feel responsible for seeking a solution, but they do not believe a solution exists.

4th: They decisively do not want the problem to be solved.

In the first hypothesis, the person is a simpleton. In the second, they are an omitter. In the third, they are a defeatist. In the fourth, well, to say the least, in the fourth hypothesis, they are an enemy of those affected by the problem; in fact, they are one of the elements of the problem. There is no fifth hypothesis. Let us examine the four:

First: The poor state of Brazilian culture is a well-known fact. It is the intellectuals themselves who proclaim it. They speak of it in articles, interviews, lectures, and conferences. People do not frequently discuss a problem they consider unimportant. The first hypothesis is therefore excluded.

Second: It is excluded for the same reasons as the first: no one constantly expresses opinions on a problem when they are convinced it does not concern them.

Third: The hypothesis of defeatism cannot be completely ruled out. On the contrary, many statements by intellectuals convey a dark and depressing view of Brazilian culture, which unequivocally reflects not only an objective diagnosis of the state of affairs but also a subjective state of disbelief and hopelessness.

Fourth: A rebirth of Brazilian culture would have to express itself not only in new creations but also in new channels of cultural activity, the dissemination of new ideas, and the emergence of new prestigious figures. Who could be against that? Those who, no longer able to create, have institutionalized themselves as managers of past achievements; those who have taken control of the channels of cultural activity and understand the value of a corporate monopoly; those who have frozen the struggle of ideas into a scheme of fixed alternatives where they feel comfortable fighting under standardized banners, and whom a change in the framework would risk leaving disoriented and mute; those, in short, who have the prestige and means and are all the more attached to the spoils, the harder the fight was to conquer them. If there are people like that, they are enemies of a cultural rebirth in Brazil.

§ 3– The Class Responsible for Success and Failure

But does such a class exist? Yes, it does, and it constitutes a well-defined category of people. Not everyone within it is consciously or unconsciously complicit with the guardians of decadence. But, dragged by the mere dynamics of their social mode of existence, they end up compromising with evil or, in the best-case scenario, swelling the ranks of defeatists.

The class we are referring to can be easily identified by a barbaric term created by the needs of sociological research. They are the intello-crats. The term is not new. It was coined two decades ago by two French researchers, Hervé Hamon, and Patrick Roitman, to designate those people who play the role of traffic cops for all cultural activities in a country, especially for the success or failure of intellectual, artistic, and scientific careers: they either let them pass or stop them.

Intelocrats are not necessarily the most prominent intellectuals. They are those who, due to prestige, personal connections, and above all, the exercise of power or lobbying, whether in public institutions, the publishing industry, or mass communications, have the power to open or close the doors to new ambitions and, therefore, new ideas84. It is a well-defined class, which in a country like Brazil, does not number more than a few thousand members, if that. The culture of a country is born from an agreement, a collaboration between creativity—expressed mainly in those individuals distinguished by talent and personal aspiration—and the administration of cultural means, that is, the class of intelocrats. As is known, creativity is and will always be unpredictable, thus rebelling against any planning. The best incentives, the abundance of resources, and state support will not bring forth excellent artists, profound philosophers, or brilliant scientists if the inclination does not lean in the desired direction. Conversely, devoid of the means to create, or at least of access to the means of disseminating what they create, even the most powerful creativity will end up in vain attempts, and the most prodigious popular talent will only be able to manifest a tiny part of the potentials it carries within.

If intelocrats have the power to open and close doors, the criterion by which they exercise it must be determined. This criterion, in turn, coincides with the dominant theme in the cultural debate of the day.

The cultural health of a country is primarily decided by the narrowness or breadth of the themes recognized by the intelocrats. The present situation of Brazilian culture can thus be clarified by simply acknowledging that the intelocratic class has been stuck with a narrow and rigidly immutable theme for several decades.

§ 4 - The Stagnation of Ideas

I– Brazilian cultural production over the past three decades has been driven by the energy generated by the following contradictions:

1– Loyalty to the “fortunate tradition” of seeking national self-definition versus the impulse for formal renewal through copying foreign fashion models.

2– Modernist imperative of a permanent formal revolution versus the desire to popularize cultural productions.

3– Residual obedience to the traditions of a culture of social and political combat versus at least nominal recognition of the decline of the Marxist paradigm.

4– Impulses for professionalization and social advancement of intellectuals and artists, and consequent aspiration to partake in the material wealth of the First World, versus at least nominal loyalty to the populist, leftist, and Latin American traditions of our culture85.

II– Our intellectuals and artists' attention remained fixated on these four focal points of contradictions, revolving around them for three decades without being able to overcome them and renew themselves.

III– This chronic stagnation of our intellectual life resulted in the exhaustion of creative forces and a vertiginous decline in the level of national cultural production in all sectors. Hence, an atmosphere of malaise and resentful dissatisfaction, in which the lettered class seeks false relief by recriminating a military dictatorship that ended more than a decade ago86.

IV– The lettered class must stop looking for culprits and assume its own responsibilities. First and foremost, it must engage in introspection, review the postulates of its activity, realistically diagnose its current state, and the causes that produced it.

V– Among these causes, the confinement of the national intellect to a narrow circle of themes and interests is of significant importance. The national culture tends more and more to be merely passive and reactive, descending to a commentary on the day’s news, instead of being creative and inspiring. Its motto has become “I am led, not leading.” The media, advertising agencies, show business, and political party disputes dictate norms to which it eagerly submits. Intelligence must have dignity and its own initiative.

VI– Regarding the four points mentioned above:

1– The conflict that has lasted for many decades between attachment to national roots and the desire for renewal through foreign influences has no solution at the level it stands and should simply be removed from our intellectual priorities. However, it can be overcome if, instead of copying (or rejecting) foreign models of the day, we focus on absorbing the permanent, universal values of more distant epochs. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, and Confucius, Dante and Tasso, Rûmi and Al-Ghazali, Villon and Cervantes, Shakespeare and Milton, Goethe and Schelling do not belong to Paris or New York87. Have we absorbed them enough to feel the urgency of following (or xenophobically rejecting) the current production of the “great centers”? To overcome a mediocre present, Goethe said, it is necessary to fixate on what has never been current.

2– The popularization of culture is a secondary problem. The essential thing is that there should be a culture worthy of being popularized. A realistic examination of our efforts to popularize culture would lead to the conclusion that our intellectuals are only concerned with whether the people will attend their banquet, but they do not care in the least about the quality of what they will serve.

3– The conflicts of conscience between social idealism and the rejection of Marxism are provincial: they will only be overcome if the national mentality is capable of facing this problem from a high philosophical universal reference frame88.

4– The obsessive concern of Brazilian intellectuals with their class interests arose from the influence of the Comintern, which regarded intellectuals as “workers” and sought to organize them in the service of class struggle. The Comintern died, but the intellectual still operates within the mental frameworks delimited by it. A serious reexamination of Brazilian intellectuals from a historical and sociological perspective is necessary, without Marxist clichés89.

VII– It is necessary to change the axis of our concerns, and change it upwards, towards the universal. A culture entirely focused on the “kingdom of this world” has nothing to offer to the people but miserable lamentations and histrionic protests90.

Philosophy from USP, or: Mlle. Rigueur’s trembles

IF FOR DECADES the Philosophy Department of USP did not produce any philosophy, it was not due to ineptitude or laziness, but to a commendable ascetic renunciation. At least that’s what the staff and directors of this noble department assure us. The dominant belief there, writes Paulo Arantes, was that a philosophy could only be born in Brazil “at the end of an endless learning of meticulously imported intellectual techniques”. More urgent than philosophizing, therefore, was to follow the debates taking place in the great “producer centers” of philosophical culture.

But “following”, in this context, did not only mean staying informed: it meant taking the European standard of the day as a benchmark for the value and importance of local thought. This standard, in turn, was multiple and changing, for the very reason of originating in countries with a rich and generous philosophical establishment, capable of sustaining legions of inventive brains, with inexhaustible loquacity. Under these conditions, any philosophical activity that aimed to be something more than a mere expression of personal idiosyncrasies had to submit to a succession of different and mutually contradictory mental sieves, whose number grew geometrically as new theories, coming from anywhere in the world, suggested new types and modalities of possible objections, no matter how disparate. And this requirement was not seen there as a means of improving existing philosophy, but as a preliminary requirement for a nascent philosophical idea to merit the attention of the Paulista university tribunal, thus self-placed at a height inaccessible to any human clamor. Naturally, the faculty of the institution had full freedom to select the sieves, superimpose them, exchange them or merge them, as they deemed necessary, at the moment, to prove that intelligent philosophical life could not exist outside the Department. The aspiring philosopher who happened to have the unfortunate idea of entrusting himself to the judgment of USP was thus subjected to a massacre between the iron fingers of a European superego which, under the solemn frown of “rigor” — la rigueur —, hid the unstable and capricious heart of a hysterical goddess in menopause. The name of this goddess is Fashion. La Rigueur de la Mode, my friends, would require that René Descartes had ready the Objections et Réponses before even drafting the Méditations; and that, in general, the second editions (corrected and expanded) were published before the first ones.

Imagining or pretending to preserve the Brazilian mind from the risks of premature independence, what the USP maîtres à penser did was merely to encourage the widespread practice of preventive philosophical abortion. It is not surprising that, for four decades, the “rigor” of USP, weighing on consciences like the formidable gaze of a malevolent gatekeeper, produced no other result than the rigor mortis of a philosophy that could have been and was not.

One has to write as badly as Paulo Arantes to capture in words the spirit of the thing: what hope could there be for the future hatching of a philosophy that, to be born, should preliminarily await “the end of the endless”?

That the very priests of the USPian cult gave up becoming philosophers to settle in the position of “historians of philosophy” or mere “philosophizers”, whether moved by modesty or cowardice, is something that only concerns them. However, making their choice the mandatory model of all intellectual honesty, repelling a priori everything else as reckless audacity, could only result in what it did: in the paralytic inhibition of a chronically postponed philosophy, which now lies before us like the corpse of an old virgin without virtue. And when, as an example, we compare the dry fruit of four decades of USPian rigor to the wealth of descendants left by a single university professor — José Ortega y Gasset — in the Spanish-speaking world, we cannot help but feel the pathetic difference in vital tone between the vigor of the stimulus given by Ortega to his students and successors in a dozen countries, and the somber burden of paralyzing demands that, combined with a heavy and pedantic style in writing, is the essence of the contribution left by that entire army of professors that the Paulista people stipended to teach them to philosophize. Nor can we fail to, moved by a certain evangelical indignation, apostrophize: “Woe to you, who neither enter nor allow to enter”. But, as evangelical quotes are not well seen in this environment, we end up staying with these two from Hegel: “Confidence in the power of the spirit is the first condition of philosophy” and “Fear of error is, most often, fear of the truth”.

Curiously, the sterility of the Department did not undermine its prestige, but rather strengthened it, by effect of that well-known psychological mechanism, according to which men admire less those who know how to do something than fear those who can prevent them from doing it. The power to give life is, indeed, less fearsome than the power to take it away.

But there are three peculiar traits of the USPian philosophical project that make it even more repugnant. First, it was nothing more than a shallow, mechanical and uncritical transposition of the rules of a certain economic policy to the sphere of intellectual activity: the dominant criterion to which Arantes refers was merely a copy of import substitution, the official formula for economic development from JK to the Goulart era — precisely the “heroic period” of USP. At the time, the analogy, as crass as it was, must have seemed plausible: if the thing worked for the manufacturing of battery radios and nylon nightgowns, it should also work in the realm of philosophical inspiration.

Secondly, the project was based, perhaps unconsciously, on the Hegelian and Marxist idea of the “qualitative leap,” the transformation of quantity into quality: the accumulation of erudite knowledge of the history of philosophy would give birth to an original philosophy, the accumulation of inhibitions would suddenly convert into a spark of liberation. Nobody remembered to object that the idea was misinterpreted there, that the qualitative leap, for example from water to steam under increasing temperature, only operates a change of state, not of nature: no accumulation of heat will transform water into Port wine, or erudite inhibition into creative thought.

Finally, the regulatory obligation to encompass the world with one’s legs, with which the pomp and pedantry of USP stifled and smothered philosophical inspirations with the fierce joy of a Saturn god devouring his children, always contrasted shamefully with the narrowness of the ideological frames of reference that demarcate the intellectual production of the USPian leaders themselves. After all, if they absorbed all the variety of ideas of the 20th century, strolling through psychoanalysis, phenomenology, existentialism, analytic philosophy, etc., they always did so with the prudent reserve of not letting themselves be contaminated too deeply, always keeping open a safety valve for an emergency return to the maternal womb of Marxism, which was and continues to be for these people the most valid criterion of last resort for the judgment of everything. To the pigeon lofts, the pigeons return, didn’t the verses of our childhood say so? No matter what they do, wherever they go, the USPian brains will always be revolving around value, alienation, capital, and all those magic words that, born for the description of a local and fleeting historical phenomenon, are subsequently inflated to constitute keys, principles, and criteria of unlimited ontological scope, from which one can legitimately expect the explanation of everything that exists under the Sun and above it, as well as inside and around. The other words, coming from other philosophies, can of course be used, but only to be annexed and absorbed by these. For example, one can talk about “sexual repression”, but only to associate it with capitalist oppression; one can talk about “language games”, but only to refer them to the market structure; one can talk about “transcendental ego”, but only to explain it by class ideology. And so on. A USPian philosopher therefore has total freedom to go wherever he wants, as long as he does not break the umbilical cord that connects him to the womb of Mrs. Jenny Marx, née Westphalen. Hugo de S. Victor said that one cannot teach philosophy to a student who does not cure himself of the nostalgia of the hut where he was born.

But it’s not just nostalgia. José Arthur Gianotti, seeing the flight of his colleagues from the university to the highest branches of federal administration, noted how weak their intellectual vocation was in them, and strong the call of political and bureaucratic ambition. He hit the nail on the head: if they believed they could teach philosophy by the methods of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, it is because they were, they have never been philosophers, but ministers, deputies, senators and department directors, temporarily obliged, by forced exclusion from the circles of power, to meditate instead of act. They entered philosophy as provisional employees, waiting for appointment to the permanent post, far away from all theoretical speculation. They resigned themselves to philosophy because they could not, on their own, dynamite the island of Manhattan.

That a philosophy, however small, could be born from this was at least an insane hope.

Nevertheless, the Folha de S. Paulo, through the voice of its columnist Fernando de Barros e Silva, informs us that the insane hope has materialized: that from the stone womb of the Department a living being was born, a true philosophy. No. More than that: the Brazilian philosophy was born, the first and so long-awaited Brazilian philosophy. This is what the Mais notebook proclaims, in a cover story and twelve (yes, twelve) pages, in its April 2nd issue, in a tone of national boasting that does not exclude — literally — the demand that Europe bow down to Brazil. Holy God! It’s irresistible to remember that the closing date was April 1st. Even stranger is the character to whom the newspaper credits the most implausible of births. It is none other than José Arthur Gianotti himself, the supreme and fanatical priest of la rigueur, accused even by his peers of subjecting students to a real “methodological tyranny”. Has Saturn begun to vomit his children?

Let’s take it easy. It’s not quite like that.

1st The author who signs the article bases his headline on a new book by Gianotti that he himself has not read and admits not having the intellectual cache to understand very well. Therefore, it’s the kind of investment that lottery patrols call a “surprise bet.” Despite this, the headline “Finally a Brazilian philosopher” comes as a peremptory statement, unaccompanied by that question mark that in such cases is a precaution at least as mandatory as the condom in other circumstances.

2nd Paulo Arantes, who also did not read the book but assures he has the cache to guess it by Gianotti’s past history (and, as is known, certain people never lack the cache to guess anything), says it only reflects a “paradigm shift” from Marxism to language philosophies - a turn that is not unique to Gianotti but a widespread phenomenon throughout the world’s intellectual community.

3rd A Brazilian thinker who escapes from the mental hegemony of Marxism to fall into that of language philosophy - especially without breaking with the original Marxist affiliation - is, strictly speaking, no novelty at all, but a routine event in the local philosophical panorama. For all materially-minded intellectuals, sullen with Marxism, the standardized alternatives have been language philosophies and pragmatism. In the last analysis, “paradigm shift” only means changing parties.

In short: no one read the book, and all we know about it is what Fernando de Barros e Silva (in favor), Arantes (against), and Gianotti himself tell us in Mais. And what they say shows precisely the opposite of what the headline announces: whether splendid or a piece of junk, the book does not inaugurate or intend to inaugurate anything, but merely reflects a change of sphere of ideological influence, which will not make Gianotti either the first philosopher of Brazil or Zambia, nor the tardy adherent that Arantes saw in him, annoyed at the master’s infidelity to the memory of the lamented D. Jenny.

It would, indeed, be a cruel irony and a disrespect to his students if the old Saturn of Maria Antônia street, having overloaded with pedantic obstacles others' efforts towards independent thought, suddenly began to think with the total ease of an original, sovereign philosopher, critical of the European and North American fashionable sources, flying and dancing like a dragonfly after having tied the whole audience to their seats. Gianotti is neither capable of such dishonesty nor of such originality. He did not found philosophy in Brazil, nor did he block others' path with malicious intent to cut in line. Whatever one may think of this man, his deep sincerity, his almost obsessive uprightness is manifest. I even say that if he obstructs others' thought it is because he himself thinks obstructively - obstructed by the demands of a superego heavier than his own intelligence can bear. To accept the hypothesis that makes him the first Brazilian philosopher, we would have to admit the peculiarly USPian way of rigueur as a valid criterion to distinguish the philosopher from the non-philosopher or the aspiring philosopher. But this criterion is not even philosophical: it is bureaucratic, political, and cosmetic. Non è una cosa seria.

In truth, the Department condemned itself to perpetual sterility from the very moment of its birth when, in the first competition for chair provision, it preferred, to a genuine philosopher, a “philosophant”, for ideological reasons hidden under bureaucratic pretexts of atrocious levity (the philosopher I refer to was Vicente Ferreira da Silva; his competitor, Prof. João Cruz Costa - as Bernard Shaw would say, a modest man, who lacked no reasons to be so). The episode, at the time, scandalized foreign observers - Enzo Paci, Luigi Bagolini and Julián Marías among others. This baptism in the waters of assumed mediocrity was followed by confirmation, when the sinister division stubbornly ignored for four decades, with the rancor of the envious, the gigantic work of Mário Ferreira dos Santos - the only Brazilian thinker who to this day deserved a full-page entry in a European philosophical encyclopedia, but who in the eyes of the mosquitoes of USP continues not to be even a philosopher, because immune to the histrionism of Mlle. Rigueur. Under the command of a Mário or a Vicente91, the Department would have given the country, in the poorest of hypotheses, two living samples of what philosophy is - great in the first case, small in the second, but authentic in both92. In the hands of Cruzes, Marilenas, Pessanhas, Arantes and tutti quanti, it produced ingenious “sociological” explanations of its own inability to philosophize. So now these people, incapable of distinguishing a philosopher from a can of tomato paste, but firmly decided to prove to us that it is impossible for any to be born in this country except per vaginam of the Department, only have two alternatives: to foist Gianotti on us as the national philosophical Adam or, following Arantes, to unmask him as a false messiah. To pompously and with rigueur defend either of the two alternatives, as we have seen, it is not even necessary to have read the new philosophy.

But Gianotti is neither one thing nor the other. He is just a Brazilian philosopher — one more, not the greatest among them. Unlike most of his colleagues in the Department, he is also a sincere and fair man, who seeks, whether belatedly or not, to free himself from the heavy burden of USPian mental debris and to think with his own head. What makes me admire him is precisely that he manages to be a philosopher — an authentic philosopher, whether great or small — despite still carrying on his shoulders a good part of the useless extra-philosophical and, in fact, anti-philosophical demands that he himself has helped, perhaps more than anyone else, to implant in USP as a veritable Decalogue of Procrastination.

For I, who lack the standing to judge what I have not read, and sometimes even what I have read, truly tell you from an experienced knowledge: Gianotti is not the first philosopher of Brazil, but he is the first one to survive unscathed in the sterilizing atmosphere of the Department of Philosophy at USP. All things considered, it is no small glory.

Money is culture, or: “Todo es igual”

The ADVENT of Fernando Henrique’s government was characterized as the takeover of power by the intellectual caste, the crowning achievement of a long effort to overcome competition, first from the military and later from the old class of professional politicians. Having achieved this goal, the intelligentzia is now devoted to obtaining the prize that, by immemorial tradition, belongs to the winners in this world’s realm: money. On the very day of Minister Weffort’s inauguration, a solemn debate began among intellectuals and artists about what appears to be the great, supreme, and only Brazilian cultural question: How much does each one get?

Expressing and giving credibility to the ideology of the class, writers, cultural producers, scientists, artists, and their colleagues repetitively diagnose, ad nauseam, that what Brazilian culture lacks is money, only money. The new minister is only asked to ensure a fair distribution of the spoils among the triumphant armies, of course, not forgetting mercy towards the defeated, whose voice he personally represents in the court.

Contrary to the popular belief that intellectuals are air-headed individuals detached from the harsh reality of life, their rise to power has finally given official character to Millôr Fernandes’s norm, a corollary to the above-mentioned Theorem: “When I hear about culture, I immediately reach for my checkbook.” This is exactly what is called cultural policy in Brazil today. The norm can only be partly applied because, in the present state of affairs, the checks have no funds. However, according to the widespread hope, whoever accomplished the miracle of the real can also achieve the miracle of the unreal. Thus, Fernando will make money think, reflect, imagine, intuit, create, write, paint, compose, play, dance, and sing, finally giving birth to all the majestic works that, latent in the abyssal depths of the national genius, only await the release of the paycheck to make Europe bow before Brazil again. And if inspiration, determination, talent, knowledge, or even subject matter are lacking, don’t worry, little brothers, about tomorrow: Mammon will provide.

Nevertheless, the birth of philosophy in Greece occurred during an economic decline, when, after the golden days of Pericles, Athens sank into inflation and fell under foreign rule. The blossoming of German genius, with its romantic idealism, took place in a backward country and was entirely led by poorly paid professors half a century before Germany’s industrial rise that made it a wealthy nation. Russian literature of the 19th century, a glory of the world spirit, is in its most beautiful part the work of hungry paupers—Pushkin, Andrei, Gogol, Dostoevsky—and a rich man who renounced his wealth: Tolstoy. And Ireland, perpetually reduced to poverty by the invader, did not wait for liberation or wealth to give its tormentor the best of what he would later boast as his own glory.

Despite all of this, an unquestionable dogma deeply ingrained in our intelligentsia states that the Spirit is a product of money. It no longer blows where it pleases but where the Budget determines it (Epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle to Congressman João Alves, 3:21—assuming no errors in filling out the voting slip).

One might argue that it is a prejudice of social scientists. Social science, after all, has dominated the Brazilian mental landscape for four decades, and its practitioners, marked by the atavism of a Marxist education that teaches them to see everything from economic bases, cannot envision any other causes of cultural atrophy other than pecuniary deficiency. But how can they believe such nonsense, I ask, when both founders of their science, Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, were either plagued with debts or earned insufficiently with Das Kapital even to recover the working capital spent on cigars while writing it? How can they think this way when all the millions of subsidized, incentivized, protected, and pampered successors funded by the State and private foundations have not been able to elevate this science beyond the level achieved by their two predecessors?

No, the hegemony of Marxist social science does not entirely explain the phenomenon. Aristotle might explain it when he said that economics is what remains when politics ends. Incapable of formulating a cultural policy, our intellectuals conceive an economic culture in its place, or rather, a cultural budget.

But what exactly is a cultural policy? It is the indication of purposes and goals for intellectual and creative activity. And if nobody feels the need to discuss these ends and goals, it’s because they consider them resolved. The massive concentration of national intellect on the pecuniary issue of the means reveals that, for our intellectuals and policymakers, the ends and goals of culture are not a matter of doubt. They are taken for granted. Jumping over the settled point, the intellectuals go straight to the dispute over means and instruments. Everyone already knows where to go and what to do. They only lack the money for the journey. The real problem is indeed a problem of real currency.

Yet, this presumed certainty about the ends contrasts pathetically with the equally frequent declarations in which Brazilian intellectuals confess their perplexity about the crisis of ideas in the world, their lack of direction, their uncertainty about almost everything, their spiritual orphanhood after the fall of Marxism, and the subsequent relocation of their helpless brains to the Neoliberal House of Aid to Literate Boys—a gloomy and smelly asylum that, to say the least, somewhat resembles the environment of Oliver Twist, with the IMF playing the role of Fagin, the exploiter of minors.

With this ideology of dazed cockroaches, how can our intellectuals be so self-assured about the ends and goals of culture, to the point of seeing nothing more urgent than the distribution of means? If they don’t know what to do, why such haste to have money to do it?

The qualification of the literate class to diagnose the causes and prescribe remedies for cultural depressions in this country is doubtful, to say the least. For twenty years, intellectuals and artists claimed that our culture was suffering due to repression. They assured that freedom would bring forth our genius squeezed into drawers. However, after the dictatorship was overthrown, the cultural production of the subsequent decade of freedom was ultimately evaluated by the critic Wilson Coutinho—as one example— as “the most stupid in all of our history.”

But the fact that they once grossly erred about themselves does not shake the certainty with which Brazilian intellectuals now proclaim a new diagnosis and praise the virtues of a new medicine: the cultural flourishing that civil liberty did not provide, money will.

What makes them presume they are right, despite their past experience, is the fact that two unquestionable authorities have already decided the ends and goals of culture for them in advance, leaving them free to deal with the means. These authorities are the Federal Constitution and the President of the Republic. The Constitution once and for all resolved the problem of the concept of culture by defining it as “the goods of material and immaterial nature that carry references to the identity, action, and memory of the different groups that form Brazilian society” (Article 216). The President, on the other hand, indicated the values and goals that cultural activities should be guided by: “to promote ethics and citizenship.” So, why waste time with theoretical debates? Give money to our literate ones, and they will readily implement the magnificent cultural policy outlined in these two maxims.

However, the maxims contradict each other. Combined, the cultural policy they suggest amounts to zero. This case is worth examining—and it should be the number one priority for a cultural policy debate if anyone in this country had an idea of culture that is somewhat superior to Deputy João Alves' idea of politics.

Culture, according to the Constitution, is anything that testifies to Brazilian life, just as a fragment of a jawbone testifies to prehistoric life, smoke testifies to fire, and periodic nausea in females testifies to pregnancy. In themselves, a fragment of a jawbone, smoke, and especially nausea have no value; they are only interesting as signs and evidence of something. Similarly, the cultural importance of works, according to our Constitution, does not lie in the works themselves but in their “reference” to national life: their value as evidence and testimony. Evidence and testimony of what? Of Brazilian genius? Of high moral virtues? Of a profound spiritual experience capable of enlightening all the peoples of the Earth? Of essential knowledge necessary for the salvation of humanity? None of these. Simply our habits and customs, our memories, all of which have no value or importance other than for the historian, ethnologist, folklorist, or collector of museum curiosities.

Attempting to apply this concept to great productions of the human spirit would lead to bizarre results. In English culture, for example, the importance of Shakespeare’s work would lie solely in the fact that it “contains references” to English life in the 17th century. To accept this concept, the English would have to unlearn the lesson of Matthew Arnold, learned a hundred years ago, according to which excessive consideration of the historical value of a poetic work is one of the main obstacles to understanding its literary, moral, and pedagogical value: the more we focus on what a work meant in the historical development of literature, the less we grasp what it means to us now and to all living men. If this were not enough disaster, one can imagine the result of applying Article 216 to scientific works: the cultural interest of the theory of relativity would not lie in the truth of what it tells us about the constitution of the physical universe but in what it indicates about the mentality of the Berlin academic milieu at the beginning of the century. However, it is clear that as evidence and testimony of the mentality that produced it, a false theory is as significant as a true one: the celestial monsters that frequently appear on the astronomical maps of the 16th century are as significant of the mentality of that time as Kepler’s calculations. Taking this criterion further, the crematoriums of Auschwitz and Treblinka are expressions of German culture just as much as the writings of Thomas Mann, and perhaps even more so, since Thomas Mann has something non-German, cosmopolitan.

According to this conception, cultural works are reduced to their documentary value, as signs and evidence of the state of society. A Botocudo’s club is, in this sense, just as cultural as Chartres Cathedral or the Divine Comedy. All considerations of universality, moral elevation, intellectual significance are abolished in favor of a radical and depressing immanence.

The concept of culture embedded in our Constitution is directly anthropological in inspiration. Anthropology, which comparatively studies various cultures, abstracts from the differences in value between them, as well as between the various works produced in each culture, and, taking an impersonal and neutral stance, considers works, acts, and things as mere evidence “of the identity, action, and memory” of these cultures. In a descriptive and comparative science, value judgments would indeed be an impediment, and by banning them from their area, anthropologists have merely shown good sense. In the same way that anthropology refuses to judge cultures, it prudently abstains from dictating norms to cultures, from telling them what they should do to be better than they are. It observes facts, organizes them into structures, establishes comparisons, seeks constants, and that’s all: from an anthropological perspective, the habit of decapitating heads is as significant to a culture as the habit of giving alms is to another. Anthropologists are not there to judge, much less to exhort head-cutters to contribute to Betinho’s campaign.

All of this is well and good, but what intrigues me is the question: what is a non-evaluative, non-normative anthropological concept of culture doing in a Constitution, which is the quintessential normative text, by definition the guiding norm of national life? I will answer myself: it is creating a hell of a mess. It is there enshrining as constitutional law, binding on all Brazilians, an extremely specialized methodological rule that is only valid within the limited scope and for the specific purposes of anthropological research, and for nothing else. It is there to sanctify as a criterion of cultural importance a snobbism of a social scientist—and, even worse, an uncultured social scientist who, seeing the entire universe of culture through the narrow prism of their specialty, flattens and compresses this universe according to the ruler of a methodological precept that, even within their specific science, has only the conventional value of a provisional delimitation of the field of study: anthropology, after all, abstains from value considerations not because it dogmatically believes there are no differences in value between the various cultural objects, but simply because examining these differences would introduce an uncomfortable amount of variables that are difficult to control through strictly anthropological means. Any sensible anthropologist knows that anthropology, by not examining value differences, has no authority to say whether they exist or not. This is a philosophical, theological, pedagogical, moral question that infinitely transcends the scope of anthropology. However, the half-educated, provincial anthropologist treats the provisional as definitive, the relative as absolute, the methodological precept as an ontological judgment, and declares, with the supreme authority of Science, in capital letters: “All is equal, nothing is better, the same an ass as a great professor”—without realizing that, with this, they only pass judgment on themselves. Before this learned declaration, the rustic audience blushes with shame, hurriedly hiding their old (and indeed universal) conceptions about cultural value, in order to adopt the new non-evaluative attire and shine in the showcase of third-world buffoonery.

In 1985, if I remember correctly, a mass of pretentious ignorants held a protest in Brasília against the staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute under the auspices of the Cultural Secretariat of the Federal District. The protesters claimed that the funds should be used to support an exhibition of graffiti artists, which they considered to be a much more significant representation of national culture. From a strictly anthropological standpoint, they were right. The Magic Flute may be superior in aesthetic standards, moral and spiritual elevation, educational strength, etc. However, as a document of Brazilian life, its value is null: anthropologically, it is not significant of “our culture”. Three years later, the constituents, having incorporated the spirit of Margaret Mead in a macumba session, gave victory to the graffiti artists, attesting that Brazil does not want to educate itself, elevate itself morally and spiritually, or even refine itself aesthetically. It just wants to “document itself”, show itself as it is, and, discarding all higher ideals, beat its chest like Popeye, in a paroxysm of self-satisfaction with its present state: “I am what I am what I am what I am”. Or, translated into Bahian dialect: “I was born this way, I grew up this way, I’ll always be like this: Gabriééla!” Down with values, long live the facts! 93

Examined as an expression of Brazilian cultural history, Article 216 of the Federal Constitution itself testifies to a fact: the growing importance of the influence that batches of social scientists - anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists - dumped into the cultural market from the 1950s onwards, in the formation of our educated opinion. But it also testifies that, along with their political ideas, this professional corporation also imposed its mental limitations on the country, elevating them to the norm and standard of intellectual life. Reigning sovereign over a desert of intelligences, social science has become, among us, the substitute for philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and finally, ethics - consecrating, in recent times, an opportunist, superficial, and confusing conception, in which morality, amputated from any root in the interiority of man, is reduced to mere decency or exterior composure in the conduct of politicians, according to stereotyped and casuistic standards that the media subsequently consecrates as supreme models of saintly conduct 94.

On the other hand, the President of the Republic may not have even noticed that his appeal to a culture founded on expressed values - ethics and citizenship - contradicts, straight up, the letter of the Constitution and the non-evaluative conception of culture, which was imposed on us by the same corporation of social scientists from which the closest members of his circle come.

Of course, Fernando Henrique is right: culture must be founded on values, be they these or any others. By proclaiming it, the president calls upon the intellectual elite, perhaps inadvertently but opportunely, to the necessary debate about ends and goals, which the desire to conquer the means has temporarily forgotten.

If the “ethics” and “citizenship,” in the sense in which S. Excia. understands them, are clear and authentic enough values to support a cultural policy, that is what can be left for discussion afterwards (it seems to me that they are not). What is indisputable is the need to rethink and change Article 216, which, by enshrining indifference to values as a norm, ends up reducing culture to the worship of monetary values - a result that was certainly not in the intentions of the constituents but for which they have to answer as intellectuals and public figures committed to that “ethics of responsibility” which they so vehemently demand from other classes and people.

The onslaught of insolent demands that rained down on Minister Weffort like carcaras on an innocent calf is the result of a long deformation of the mentality of our intellectuals, in which the social scientists were not without responsibility. They fostered a petty and short-sighted conception of culture, the burden of which now falls on the minister, a typical representative of the profession and generation that instilled this mentality. You reap what you sow.

January 14, 1995.

The moral superiority of the left, or: The tail and the dog

I

AT THE TIME OF Collor’s IMPEACHMENT, the Reports of Graciliano Ramos’s administration in the Municipality of Palmeira dos Índios — included in the volume Viventes das Alagoas and now reissued in an independent volume95 — were often cited to remind the public, in contrast to the presidential indecency, of a classic example of administrative probity, adorned, moreover, with one of the most beautiful literary styles of the Portuguese language96. The edifying lesson, however, carried a biased political message in its subtext: Graciliano was not only there as an impeccable administrator and unblemished artist, but as an emblem of the moral superiority of the left. His figure helped confer on the fight against corruption the desired ideological undertone, without which the moralist campaign risked producing the most dreadful of results: bringing a handful of honest right-wingers to power. Graciliano’s image was raised to exorcise this ghost.

The example, however, impressed more by its rarity. The right, fertile in notorious corrupt individuals, also has in its gallery of emblematic ancestors a remarkable collection of upright rulers, such as Marshal Castelo Branco, incapable of using government money to buy even an aspirin envelope, or Pedro II, ruling for forty years from within the same worn-out suit. Further to the right, you will not find the slightest blemish on the administrative reputation of Salazar, Marcelo Caetano, or Francisco Franco. But the life of all great communist leaders, without exception, is a sordid story. Karl Marx had a son with the maid who, for the sake of bourgeois decency, was never admitted to the family table. Lenin began his career by selling Russia to Germany in exchange for an armored train. Stalin funded orgies with public money, and Mao TseTung, as it has recently been revealed, ate even the guards of the Palace — entering, literally, into the annals of the Revolution. Luis Carlos Prestes, Robin Hood in reverse, stole from the Third World to give to the Comintern; and, in the João Goulart government, when the communists proclaimed they were in power, the president’s friend was not the clumsy P. C. Farias, but a genius of influence peddling, Tião Maia, who after the fall of his protector bought one-twentieth of Australia’s territory, where he is today the fourth largest fortune in the country. When asked "How?", he responds: "The Banco do Brasil was a mother to me."97

With these precedents, it is no wonder that, when it comes to combing the globe in search of examples of honest leftist rulers, one could only find one in the Mayor’s office of a small town in the interior of Alagoas. And he was the most atypical of mayors, without similar in Brazil or the world. Despite all this, the example was persuasive, at least for that portion of the public that was already convinced of the moral superiority of the left. Beliefs of this type are usually implicit and unexpressed, not only because they spread more easily by subconscious contagion, but because if confessed aloud, they turn into episodes of involuntary humor. This is what happens for example in this paragraph by the late — and, regardless of his political beliefs, much beloved — publicist Carlito Maia:

"The right has no ideology whatsoever, except for cupidity, greed, the thirst for profit, the complete lack of ethics in dealing with others, whether in the business they do, or in the politics they think they do, or in life; in everything that involves right-wingers there is, invariably, the most absolute lack of scruples under the guise of honesty."98

Few leftist intellectuals would have the candor to display their deepest feelings in this way, which they generally reserve for informal conversations in an intimate circle, protected by affective complicity that excludes, by tacit agreement, the interference of all critical gaze. But in this paragraph, there is an entire underlying moral criteria, which we must know if we want to reach an understanding of how people of high culture and in their perfect judgment are capable of nurturing beliefs so obviously contrary to the facts.

For, facts, to a mind educated in the canons of Marxism, are merely the illusory foam that covers deep structures: the real world is not the everyday one, where we see flesh and blood characters stirring, but the one behind it where the plot is carried out by invisible actors, called Causes of History. It is in this ethereal backdrop—similar, in more than one aspect, to the Platonic world of Ideas—that the real struggle between Good and Evil takes place, of which human actions are nothing more than a misleading external appearance. Therefore, good deeds can be bad if they unintentionally favor the cause of Good, and vice versa. Hence, for the Marxist mentality, goodness and evil are no longer those ambiguous and fluctuating qualities we see appear and disappear in the most unexpected circumstances, but essential and permanent attributes, once and for all attached to certain human groups, regardless of the quality of the concrete acts of the individuals that make them up: the left-wing man is good, even if he cheats, lies, steals, and kills; the one on the right is bad, even when saving a drowning mosquito. The judgment criterion is no longer on the scale of individual acts and intentions, but on that of historical opportunity by which an act, whatever its subjective motivation, favors or disfavors the cause of the left: as immoral as this may seem to other human beings, the Marxist sees nothing wrong in judging an act more by its accidental consequences than by its nature and intention.

It is illusory to think that a human brain, having absorbed this criterion, can get rid of it overnight, by a simple public act of abjuration. Once learned, it becomes embedded in the deep structures of the mind, marking emotional undercurrents with its characteristic tone, and continues to determine reactions and judgments, like an automated and unconscious habit, long after its bearer has formally rejected Marxism. No one gets rid of a complex as easily as returning a club card. I therefore invite the repentant Marxists, abundant in this country, to follow these sketches of my ideological psychoanalysis:

For the Marxist tradition, the human individual is not the subject of History and therefore is not even, ultimately, the author of his actions. Through his actions and words, it is “the class”—aristocracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat—that acts. Believing to decide and act for himself, the individual is only the puppet moved by the ideology of the class. He does not need to approve of it, or even know it: the ideology is a kind of sociological Id that jumps over his conscious intentions and makes him defend his class privileges even when he imagines he is doing precisely the opposite. Karl Marx substantializes the abstract collective—“the class”—to the same extent that he desubstantializes the flesh and blood subject. “Concrete”, for him, is the class: the individual is abstract, despite the appearances of bodily unity with which biology deceives us. Marx does not deny the individual all autonomy: but the margin of decision that remains for the poor puppet is to break with bourgeois ideology and adhere to that of the proletariat. Only the bourgeois, of course, has this privilege: the proletariat has only to endorse the discourse of its own class or evade reality. Freedom, according to Engels' maxim, consists in recognizing necessity.

All of this, of course, is pure confusion. If the bourgeois can adhere to the ideology of the proletariat, it is because the class position does not effectively determine the ideology of the subject, but only suggests it, leaving him free to reject it. The individual is bound to the class ideology simply because he wants to, and leaves it when he wants to, as Marx and Engels did, rebellious sons of the bourgeoisie. The course of the Revolution thus depends less on ideological determinism than on the personal arbitrariness of a few apostate bourgeois, as can be seen from the fact that no subject of proletarian origin has ever led a proletarian revolution. That our Workers' Party is therefore composed less of workers than of a bourgeois elite—as a recent survey revealed—does not make it an exception at all, but rather one more proof of the fallacy of Marxist theory of ideology. Contradicted by its own internal contradiction and by the facts, this theory is still accepted as an unshakeable assumption by the mass of leftist social scientists, because attempts to theoretically justify a certain margin of action for the individual consciousness, demanded by the reality of the facts, encounter insurmountable logical difficulties in the conceptual framework of Marxism.

Ideology, in fact, does not act, nor does the class: it is the individual who acts, using the ideology—bourgeois or proletarian, according to his free choice—as a rhetorical instrument of self-justification, which will be persuasive to the public that has adhered beforehand (and with equal freedom) to the same ideology, but not to the followers of the opposite ideology. “Class” there no longer means an objective economic position, but virtual receptivity to a certain discourse, which, once adopted, will retroactively become an explanation and cause of itself. Hence the otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon of the non-coincidence between social classes and ideological blocs, of which the socio-economic composition of the global communist leadership is the most striking example. Now, to admit that the rhetorical pretext is the author of the acts, and that the human subject is a mere puppet in the hands of the pretext, is to endorse the most formidable attempt ever made by a thinker to prove that tails wag dogs. The theory of ideology is a disguise, a “dress of ideas”, Ideenkleid, to use Karl Marx’s term, to cover the terrible reality of human freedom99.

But, devoid of any scientific value, the theory of ideology still has a formidable rhetorical appeal, mainly for its effects in the realm of morality. This effect consists, summarily, in this: transforming the tail into the active subject of the dog’s actions, it confuses and inverts the sense of responsibility. Functioning less as a free agent than as an instrument of the class, the human individual is no longer primarily responsible for their voluntary personal acts, but for the class to which they belong: the subject is evil not for having done this or that, but for being a bourgeois. To complicate matters, “class” here has an ambiguous meaning: it can mean an economic position or an ideological affinity, between which, as seen above, there is no connection. Thus, in revolutionary justice, a man can be condemned not only for the collective and impersonal acts of the class to which he belongs (even without having the slightest knowledge of them), but for those of any other class, if his ideas coincide with the ideology that, nominally, the court attributes to it.

The resulting ethics is tortuous and perverse to the point of hallucination. First, it revokes the universally admitted connection between authorship and guilt: the individual is no longer judged as an autonomous agent and creator of their own acts, but as a “representative” of an impersonal force — the class. As a corollary, the link between guilt and intention is also abolished: the subjective intention of an act matters less than the accidental result; and, as class ideology is the true subject behind human acts, any act that, even by chance and against its agent’s will, favors a certain ideology, will be explained retroactively as a product of it. This is how Soviet justice condemned Boris Pasternak: his apolitical poems, by being apolitical, diverted readers' interest from the proletarian struggle; therefore, they favored the bourgeoisie, no matter how little Pasternak consciously intended this result; therefore, they were products of bourgeois ideology; therefore, Pasternak was an agent of this ideology and guilty of the crimes attributed to the bourgeoisie.

It is a tragic mistake to think that this moral monstrosity was buried along with the USSR: the attribution of guilt through ideological identification is still today the most frequently practiced form of moral reasoning by left-wing intellectuals, even by those who declare themselves free of all Marxist influence. The recent illusion that national left fell into, that it could use the fight against corruption as a means of dealing a mortal blow to the ruling class, can only be explained by our intellectuals' belief in the identity between the bourgeoisie and evil. If it never even crossed their minds that the moralistic campaign, even if loaded with left-wing ideological intentions, could strengthen the ruling class, as it indeed did, it is because they judged, a priori, that class rule is intrinsically dishonest and that therefore fighting dishonesty is fighting class rule. But it’s not. Capitalism is no more immoral than socialism, not only de facto, but even in theory: the idea that public service has an intrinsic moral virtue that makes it superior to entrepreneurs — or even that it is easier to supervise a gigantic state bureaucracy than private companies — is one of the most extravagant that has ever passed through the human brain; and, in Brazil, it is irresistibly comical.

II

Of course, the new apostles of morality did not follow the old and orthodox Marxist recipe, but introduced into it a nuance that is typical of the left-wing mentality after the end of the Cold War: the mix of the criterion of ideological culpability with the “bourgeois” rhetoric of responsibility and individual guilt. It is this mixture that gives the most recent left’s “ethical” discourse its characteristic pathos, so different from the cold moral neutrality of classical Marxism.

For the assumption of moral superiority has not always been a characteristic feature of leftist ideology. Karl Marx himself had the utmost contempt for the moralistic approach to political struggle, and the pages he dedicated to unmasking all “ethical” idealism in the socialist movement are eloquent.

Lenin shared this contempt, but, more concerned than his predecessor with the immediate practical side of the struggle for power, he recognized the tactical value of the moralistic discourse: he even recommended that militants encourage corruption so they could later condemn it as an inherent vice of capitalism. Buying consciences, fostering smuggling, spreading prostitution and drug consumption, and, last not least, selling support to a foreign nation at war with Russia, were some of the expedients Lenin used to show the world the intrinsic evil of the bourgeois regime.

From the moralistic discourse, however, Leninism only exploited the negative side: the condemnation of evil. A positive claim of superiority, the blatant identification of the communist movement with decency and goodness, only really came with Stalin. Based on the observation that the working masses are less sensitive to the denunciation of the horrors of capitalism than to the appeal of sentimentality, Stalinist propaganda emphasized values such as generosity, solidarity, and peace, relegating apocalyptic denunciations and truculent threats to a discreet background. At the same time, always speaking softly, Stalin had exterminated, in occupation wars and in prison camps, a population that he himself, in amiable conversation with Churchill, estimated at 60 million people.

Stalin was also, and for these same reasons, the first communist leader who knew how to systematically use the support of intellectuals. Lenin didn’t want to talk to intellectuals, unless they were registered in the party, loyal and disciplined. Stalin understood that, for propaganda purposes, a crowd of sympathizers was worth more than a handful of militants. It was in his time that the Comintern created a series of new categories that broadened the range of possible alliances to encompass, within the generous bosom of the communist movement, a whole varied fauna of informal guests and collaborators: the “fellow traveler”, the “peace lover”, the “progressive intellectual” and even the “progressive bourgeois”. To win the sympathies of the world intelligentsia, the Comintern spent fortunes on translations, literary magazines, writers' congresses with paid trips, cultural foundations, exhibitions, competitions, scholarships and residences, and all possible forms of flattery.

By broadening the range of sympathies, the Soviet government could not, of course, harbor the illusion of enlisting the entire global mass of intellectuals into the Party’s ranks and indoctrinating them to repeat orthodox doctrine. It knew it would have to content itself with a very general and diluted rhetoric, capable of reaching people from various classes, groups, and currents. Hence, by renouncing all orthodox rigidity, Soviet propaganda began to applaud even the most characteristically petty-bourgeois moralist discourse as a healthy anti-imperialist manifestation, which old orthodoxy condemned. This conjunction of circumstances gave rise to the bizarre mix of revolutionary Machiavellianism and sanctimonious moralism that constitutes the characteristic discourse of the global left since the end of World War II, and that among us is still echoed today by the entire leftist wing of anti-corruption campaigns. That this discourse could survive Stalin’s death, the revelation of all the horrors of the Soviet regime, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR, is a sign of how deep the penetration of Stalinist propaganda was in the global intellectual community. This is how the New Left, swearing to bury Stalin’s corpse, in fact exhumed it to enthrone him in the pantheon of immortal ideological divinities. Capable of surviving itself and of continuing to act through the mouths of those who believe they abhor it, the Stalinist discourse proved to be one of the main formative currents of twentieth-century culture: Stalin pas mort.

As ingenious as it was, the co-optation of intellectuals sometimes did not work, of course: André Gide returned from his Voyage en URSS saying that he had not found much there; and Arthur Koestler, although he was recruited as an agent, could not resist seeing and recounting all sorts of miseries produced by the new regime. But in general, it worked well: and the proof was the worldwide wave of insults that intellectuals hurled at Gide and Koestler. Another proof of the effectiveness of the Soviet program of seducing intellectuals we have here among us. And it comes from whom? From the incorruptible mayor of Palmeira dos Índios.

Accustomed to abuse, unyielding in the face of screams and threats, calm and without hatred in the face of the executioner, Graciliano could not resist flattery and pampering: upon returning from the USSR, where he had been a guest of honor of the communist government, he produced this masterpiece of circumspect sycophancy which is Viagem (1954, posthumous publication).

The work shows how the art of the novelist, who creates a human truth with invented facts, can also construct a fictitious impression with pieces of truth. But I do not think that Graciliano intended to deceive. When writing it, he was already eaten away by old age and disease, which incline even the toughest of men to cling to comforting illusions, especially after a lifetime spent contemplating misery and sordidness. In his last book, the tough backlander gives himself shamelessly to all the consolations of false consciousness.

The book was not completed, but its general plan is quite visible: to present a sober narrative, meticulous and precise in details, from which the splendor of socialism would naturally spring forth, without needing to be declared. Nothing less could be expected from the great narrator, who marked a character forever with two verbs and no adjective. Put to the service of Soviet propaganda, Graciliano’s famous “dry style” did what it could to lend credibility, for example, to the idea that young Stalin had been expelled from the seminary for having high spiritual interests, and that the statues and photographs of the dictator, with which the government had covered the entire USSR, were a spontaneous popular tribute to which the great man bowed reluctantly, out of sheer compassion. The author also illustrated a crucial difference between capitalism and socialism, informing us that in the USSR “the police, instead of arresting us, as is natural, try to assist us if we inadvertently commit an offense”; and further on, in a sudden drunkenness “of good feelings” infused in his soul by the vision of a plaque in homage to John Reed, an American communist writer, he generously admitted that it is “dangerous to give ourselves over to hasty generalizations. Not everyone in America wants to annihilate humanity”. Forced to this point, the sober style, which we so admired in Vidas Secas and in Memórias do Cárcere, transformed itself into an affectation of simplicity, unintentionally ironic. Perhaps it wasn’t an affectation; perhaps it was truly a hick’s dazzlement. But how to distinguish between lie and illusion in the murky fog of a falsified consciousness?

Throughout the book, there is not a single word about political prisons, press censorship, forced internments of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, physical and psychological torture, domestic spying, medical squads specialized in brainwashing and extortion of confessions — about everything that constituted the differentia specifica defining the Soviet regime. In contrast, there is a profusion of incidental details, with which the author creates a realistic atmosphere intended to cover up and replace the essential. Everywhere are flushed and smiling faces, sympathy, culture, beauty, which, removed from all ethnological context and assembled — with Eisenstein’s technique — in counterpoint with visions of robust industry and modern administration, no longer appear as virtues of a people, but of a regime. We then realize that the stated intention to “be objective, not pour myself out in praise… not show myself to be excessively partial” was just a stylistic recipe — incidentally the same as always, in Graciliano — and had no remote connection with the content of the message, laudatory to the point of dementia.

But, falling like a reagent into the broth of Brazilian verbalism, traditionally unable to grasp the abyss between word and idea, the book seems to have worked exactly in the direction intended by the hosts. Not finding there the ostentatious verbosity of the vulgar apologist (as if it were possible to find it in Graciliano!), and confusing sober style with objective vision, the criticism endorsed the words of the editor, according to whom the book described the land of socialism “conscientiously, honestly, without any sentimental or political blackmail”100.

Until today, there has not been a comprehensive study on the subject, but the depth of the mark left by Soviet propaganda on the mentality of the world’s intelligentsia is comparable to that of an unconscious complex, to that of a neurosis — which my late friend Juan Alfredo César Müller, a genius in psychology, defined as “a forgotten lie in which you still believe.” The fact that in the midst of the 90s, Graciliano’s figure can still represent, for advertising purposes, the supposedly essential and inseparable synthesis of leftism and honesty shows to what extent the forgotten lie continues to be active, and it works even more implicitly and discreetly. If all left-wing intellectuals were as frank as Carlito Maia, they would have already abandoned the stale legacy of Marxist ideology, just as in psychoanalysis, the complex, once expressed in words, is already one step away from dissolving in a fulminating insight.

February 1995.

Drugs of Arguments

[Translator’s note: The title has been translated literally, but it was also slang for “bad arguments”.]

In the June 1st edition101 of Jornal do Brasil, three apostles of marijuana legalization showed, to anyone with eyes to see, how far their cause is not ashamed to be defended by artificial arguments, which constitute — you decide — either an exploitation of others' ignorance or a display of their own. Those who are repulsed by this proposal should be grateful to Messrs. Leonardo Boff (Caderno B), Paulo Tota and Fernando Gabeira (page 4 of the first notebook) for the complete self-unmasking of the liberalizing thesis.

Mr. Gabeira wants to make us believe that the fact that the USA has legalized marijuana for therapeutic use is an argument in favor of its general and, let’s say, recreational use. Either this criterion applies only to marijuana — and in this case, the arguer is obliged to justify this privilege attributed to cannabis over other chemical substances of plant origin —, or it applies to all: anything that is of legal use in medicine and is not positively lethal could be freely purchased and consumed by anyone, without a medical prescription and for the purpose of getting a kick, thus radically and definitively eliminating all legal distinction between medical use and arbitrary consumption of medications. In either case, the thing is so absurd that our mind fails, perplexed and stunned, lacking defense against arguments that are beneath the dignity of higher primates.

But, with Mr. Gabeira’s apparent approval, the state deputy for Paraíba, Mr. Paulo Tota, surpassing the sphere of mere logical absurdity, quickly moves on to the — how shall I say? — Total misconception: against those who only see the harmful aspects of marijuana, he points out the benefits that, since the beginning of the century, homeopathic medicine has extracted from this plant for the treatment of certain pathological symptoms.

Faced with such an argument, Samuel Hahnemann, from his ethereal seat, communicates to the distinguished public that cannabis (indica or sativa, it doesn’t matter) is indeed used in homeopathy, but always in infinitesimal dilution and to specifically cure those same symptoms that it causes if ingested in a material dose. As the dilution usually goes well below Avogadro’s number, what is left of marijuana in the cannabis purchased in homeopathic pharmacies is, literally, less than smoke: it is an ex-marijuana, or anti-marijuana, with properties inverse to those of material marijuana, and for this very reason therapeutic.

If we follow Mr. Tota’s thesis to its final consequences, a lead bullet in the forehead could even be recommended for health, since plumbum metallicum — its homeopathic dilution — is beneficial for patients with locomotor ataxia and multiple sclerosis.

Finally, Mr. Boff. He goes far. First, he defends legalization, saying that it “would break the spine of illegal trafficking”. Second, he says it is not enough: we must go to the root causes and attend to the craving that leads people to consume marijuana by healthy substitute means, a craving that, being of a spiritual nature, can well be satisfied by… Liberation Theology. Fourth, he associates the banditry of Rio with the roots of our society, “based on historical, institutional, structural violence, because we are heirs of a colonization that usurped the national project and destroyed the populations that were here”. Fifth, he says that organized crime has roots in colonial slavery. And he ends with an apology for the new popular Church that, breaking free from traditional Vatican constraints, rushes in support of the poor and oppressed.

Let’s take it one step at a time:

1st Legalizing the marijuana trade would indeed liquidate illegal trafficking, but through the most gigantic money laundering operation ever carried out in all of History. No longer being a crime, trafficking could not be retroactively punished, and the large international gangs would enter a legal business with monopolistic privilege: already possessing the sources of raw material, specialized know-how, processing equipment, distribution networks, and accounting and administrative organization, they would instantly dominate the market, and it is inconceivable that newbie competitors would stand the slightest chance. Moreover, it would be impossible to legalize the drug trade without, in the same act, granting amnesty to all the crimes that were committed in association and because of illegal trafficking: thefts and arms smuggling, forgery of documents, illegal money shipments, kidnappings, and killings — everything, absolutely everything, would have to be forgotten in a universal reconciliation that would confer upon yesterday’s criminals the status of honorable merchants of the New Era. Since Sir Francis Drake, no one has received more eloquent proof that crime pays.

2nd A spirituality suitable to substitute for the type of craving for emotions that leads someone to consume marijuana is, indeed, a rather skimpy spirituality. Mr. Boff measures his spiritual stature by defining the inner life as a “search for peace of mind”. Christ, on the other hand, exhorted us not to seek peace, but truth; and it is not recorded that, in his life, he enjoyed a moment of peace. Mr. Boff, like so many other gurus of today, confuses spiritual life with psychotherapy, with relaxation, with neurolinguistic programming. It’s a show business spirituality and nothing more. His differs from Mr. Lair Ribeiro’s only by the different ideological adornment it flaunts.

3rd “The populations that were here” had no national project whatsoever, because they lived in a tribal organization and were happily ignorant of the modern concept of “nation” — a concept precisely in whose name they were decimated. If Dr. Boff said that colonization usurped from the natives the lands on which their tribal life was based, this would still make some sense, but “national project”, frankly, is a bubble that goes boff! and bursts in the air.

4th There is no link between slavery and organized crime. Slavery is a constant in human history, and the phenomenon of organized crime is recent and much later than the emancipation of slaves worldwide. There was no organized crime among the freed serfs in Tsarist Russia, nor among the Roman slaves freed by the extinction of the Empire, nor among the Jews freed from the yoke of the Pharaohs, who were of black race according to black cause theorists. Organized crime is a new phenomenon on a planetary scale, it has to do with the new conditions of the capitalist regime in the world and is miles away from any mythical “structural violence” inherited from Brazil Colony. “Structural violence” is a podium buzzword, already used and worn out for all purposes, and is now offered as an Ersatz explanation for a phenomenon that didn’t even exist when they invented this term.

5th An anti-Vatican church is nothing new, it is strictly a Brazilian tradition. During the Empire, the clergy was full of Masonic priests and bishops who helped the imperial establishment to veto any interference from the Vatican in the local church, even prohibiting visits from the superiors of the European religious orders to their monasteries and schools in Brazil and the founding of new Catholic schools. The only religious person who rebelled against this state of affairs and tried to reestablish the fidelity of the local church to the Vatican was D. Vital, who ended up imprisoned, to the applause of politicians and the clergy united in fierce anti-Vaticanism. It was the alliance of the Vaticanists with the disaffected of the imperial power that proclaimed the Republic and gave Brazil religious freedom, which benefits both friends and enemies of the Vatican until today.

Also anti-Vatican — just to give a second example — was the bionic Church created by the French Revolution, which helped the revolutionary government to distribute the real estate properties of the Church — the last refuge of the landless at the time — at a vile price to enrich the bourgeoisie and throw hordes of peasants into the blackest misery for almost a century.

Neither fidelity to the Vatican is a sign of reaction, nor is anti-Vatican rebellion proof of love for popular causes, but, most of the time, only of love for the powers of this world or, in some special cases, for one’s own navel.

Either Mr. Boff is completely ignorant of the issues he comments on, or he assumes that we are ignorant of them. And if, taking advantage of the discussion about marijuana, he makes it an occasion for the marketing of his spiritual proposal, I can only conclude that he proposes the substitution of one drug for another.

APPENDIX: Letter to JB

Rio, March 13, 1996

Dear Editor,

Since when did debates lack disagreements? Unanimous debates? Debates between “amen” and “yes, sir”? I thought this only occurred in the extinct USSR. But it just happened right here: the evening about drugs in the series called “Civil Debates” was a sham, a fixed card game, where a veneer of democratic controversy barely masked the guiding and manipulative intent that orchestrated the event. The technique involved attributing the role of contenders to people who, beneath minor disagreements, were in absolute agreement on the essentials: this led the audience to jovially take the underlying thesis as an obvious and unquestionable truth, mandatory for intelligent beings of all parties and beliefs. Through the article “Less heavy drugs” (JB, March 13), the false impression also spread to readers.

I know that the series is promoted by JB itself, whose integrity I have no reason to doubt; but those to whom the event’s coordination was handed over used the sponsor’s prestige to propagate their own ideas through malicious means and total intellectual dishonesty.

The maneuver became evident when the debaters, as JB informed, “were unanimous in defending the decriminalization of the user” — the first step, as deputy Gabeira confessed, towards the total decriminalization of drug trade. In fact, the deputy, out of cynicism or naivety, gave away the plot, observing that this topic wouldn’t even need to be debated anymore, as it was “prehistoric”. Precisely: the “Civil Debate” about drugs was not intended to debate the issue, but to create in the audience’s mind the embarrassment of debating it frankly and the compulsion to presuppose one of the theses, which, in an honest confrontation, would run the risk of being confronted and demoralized by its opposite. Proof of bad faith is in Gabeira’s next statement: “It’s the first table on this subject where there isn’t a cop, a pastor, and a drug addict’s father.” As intelligent as he is, Gabeira didn’t even realize that this sentence was self-incriminating: excluding differing opinions, all that remain are unanimous ones. But this isn’t debate: it’s unilateral proselytizing. In an environment of joyful unanimity, anyone who had objections to the prevailing belief would feel out of place and would likely keep quiet not to spoil the party. Possible counterarguments were thus excluded a priori, without discussion or even simple mention, by the tacit complicity of manipulators and manipulated. It’s simply astonishing that the creators of this happening, of this rally disguised as an exchange of ideas have the audacity to call themselves democrats: their method of psychological induction is fascist, to say the least.

It’s important to stress that, personally, I have no formed opinion on the drug issue, as I do not consider myself sufficiently informed yet. But it’s precisely my state of indecision that grants me, in this case, the right to demand honest and non-directional information. And the minimum of honesty consists in listening to both sides. Listening to only one, making it pass for two, the “Civil Debate” on drugs was as authentic as a telecatch. Jornal do Brasil, respected by the entire country, does not have the right to disappoint our trust, lending its honorable name to cover this kind of operation. And it is not only necessary to emphasize the moral ugliness of the episode, but also to ask consumer rights specialists — for I am certainly not one of them — if announcing a debate as the pure univocal preaching of a preselected thesis isn’t a typical case of deceptive advertising. The word is yours, JB’s management, the lawyers, the public opinion in general and especially that part of it that was purposefully excluded: the police authorities, the religious, the parents of addicts. What do they think of all this, if they are not, deafened and inhibited by the incessant clucking of so many lightweight intellectuals, already discouraged from thinking anything?

I ask these questions fearing, of course, that my letter will not be published, at least without cuts that, under pretexts of editorial technique that would be perfectly flippant in such a major case, suppress its logical sequence and make it a brittle showcase of loose opinions, easily shuffled by any semblance of response; for something tells me that the dominant opinion that the “debate” served to disseminate is also dominant in the journalistic class, to which I had, at another time, great pride in belonging. I appeal to JB’s management not to allow, in defense of an indefensible manipulative maneuver, a second sleight of hand to be done with my words. And I say to my fellow journalists: publish it in full or hide it once and for all — and, by hiding, reveal yourselves.

As for Gabeira’s performance, a man who continues to pose as a worthy sample of Brazilian intelligence, he gave us instead a strong indication in favor of the thesis that drugs dumb down. It is a national shame that a clearly disqualified, foolish, uncoordinated man is accepted as an intellectual because of old deeds of arms that an illiterate could perform with equal merits, and which, by the way, no matter how authentic they were, would barely qualify him for the honorary title of sergeant of Zambia’s liberation army. Gabeira’s prestige as a “thinker” is a typical example of our cultural provincialism, where popularity is synonymous with intellectual elevation.

Judaism and prejudice

An exaggerated susceptibility concerning the honor of a particular nation or race is an obvious sign of racism, even if unconscious. In this sense, the anti-racist ideology of our days fosters the hatred and prejudices that it claims to eradicate.

Once, I wrote an article about the causes of the rise of Nazism and received letters from outraged Jews because I did not mention the Holocaust. I had to remind those nervy individuals that the Holocaust was not a cause but a consequence…

I recognize that for a people so tormented by persecutors, it may be difficult to remain calm when discussing certain issues. However, intellectuals have a duty to the truth that must be placed above love for the homeland. Jewish intellectuals have never stopped to consider what would happen if every offended race and nation meticulously scrutinized every word spoken against them to denounce them as hateful manifestations of discrimination. The Italians would write entire encyclopedias of anti-Italian expressions; the same goes for the Chinese, the Irish, not to mention the Indians and Muslims. But they simply don’t have time to waste, and they know that the risk of such an endeavor (which could fuel a Mussolini-style revival or fan the flames of fundamentalism) outweighs the hypothetical benefit. This kind of neurotic and masochistic compulsion mainly affects Jewish intellectuals and is a disgrace to a great people.

For example, Mr. Jeffrey Lesser (interview in the “Ideias” supplement of the “Jornal do Brasil” on June 24, 1995) labels any criticism of Jewish actions in the world as anti-Semitism. In this, he imitates Senator Joe McCarthy, for whom any criticism of the United States was intolerable anti-Americanism.

It is also absurd to indiscriminately label any opinion against Jews as “prejudice.” Prejudice is a preconceived, thoughtless, and irrational opinion. A person may come to unfavorable conclusions about Jews through reflection, conceptual thinking, even if they fail and deviate from the truth. A wrong opinion does not necessarily mean it is prejudiced or irrational. The widespread use of the word “prejudice” by minority movements today is a dishonest manipulation of vocabulary aimed at creating prejudice, a reflexive and unthinking rejection of certain opinions and even the words that describe them.

Although I find anti-Semitism repugnant in general, I find equally repugnant the manipulation of consciences through the distortion of vocabulary—a technique at which the Nazis and Communists were accomplished masters.

Anti-Semitism, strictly speaking, is not any contrary opinion to this or that action of the Jewish community, much less a vague antipathy that does not translate into discriminatory actions. Instead, it is an ideology that formally and explicitly opposes the Jewish nation as such, seeking its weakening or even extinction. This ideology cannot be a prejudice but simply a system of incorrect concepts: it may exploit prejudices but not be constituted by them. For this reason, it should be fought in the field of clear discussion and not in the fogging of the meaning of words. The undue extension of the label “prejudice” to any and every opinion that may be expressed against Jews, even those that, like General De Gaulle’s opinion on Jewish pride, repeat word-for-word passages from the Bible, is based on the assumption that they are above rational criticism, that they are perfect and inviolable. Some Jewish intellectuals have even declared that anti-Semitism, even in its indirect and mild forms, is a serious psychopathological symptom—an abuse of the prestige that the Jewish community holds in psychiatric and psychoanalytic circles. As long as it is not expressed in harmful and degrading actions, even the profession of anti-Semitic opinions cannot be more or less pathological than, for example, anti-Islamism, which often assumes a racial connotation and violent forms of expression, yet no one thinks of eradicating it through psychiatric methods. I admit that Jews, due to recent traumas of suffering, have the right to a greater share of sensitivities than other peoples. However, unfounded pretensions only serve to feed unnecessary antipathies that can condense into a new anti-Semitism.

Incorrect concepts exist pro and con. A research like Mr. Lesser’s—which, admittedly, I only know from its summary in JB—runs the risk of getting lost in a multitude of facts, ordering them according to an overly elastic fictitious framework that expresses more of a vague impression—strictly speaking: a prejudice—than a serious reflection on the nature and specificity of the phenomenon under study. Mr. Lesser even includes Gilberto Freyre, the intellectual who did the most for racial democracy in this country, in this semantic package of prejudices. The reasons alleged by Mr. Lesser are so comical that only the rigid mind of a fanatic devoid of any sense of humor could fail to perceive: Freyre is an anti-Semite because he sometimes uses stereotyped expressions about Jews, such as those related to hooked-nosed usurers, profit-seeking, etc. Mr. Lesser seems to be unaware of what a stereotype is: a commonplace endlessly repeated and worn out to the point of losing all literal intent. Just as Freyre uses common language clichés, Jews call gentiles “goyim,” which originally means “cattle,” without any conscious intention of insinuating that non-Jews belong to the bovine species. Similarly, we call Germans “chucrutes,” without any purpose of affirming that they are vegetables. If the researcher could point out passages in Freyre’s work that advocated any type of action against Jews, such as suggesting the inconvenience of receiving them in our country, then the claim of anti-Semitism would make sense. But in Freyre’s pages, there are as many popularly pejorative expressions as there are pages that praise the Jewish genius and its contribution to Iberian and Ibero-American civilization. I can only conclude that, in Mr. Lesser’s methodology, anti-Semitism is any word or manner of speaking that may hurt a hypersensitive person intentionally or unintentionally. A bit of Jewish humor would do no harm to this irritable person. But probably Mr. Lesser believes that Jewish jokes about Jews—from Sholem Aleichem to Woody Allen, via Groucho Marx—are an unconscious form of internal anti-Semitism.

If Mr. Lesser, instead of highlighting isolated facts from the global context and emphasizing them rhetorically, compared the Brazilian situation of the 1930s with that of France, England, Russia, or even his North American homeland, he would see that among all the allied nations, Brazil was the place where Jewish refugees found the cleanest and most hospitable atmosphere. We Brazilians spoke less ill of Jews than Yahweh did in the Bible. We were so little antisemitic that even among our fascist politicians, there were notable defenders of Jews, starting with Plínio Salgado. If there is one thing that Mr. Lesser’s statements demonstrate, it is precisely that antisemitism here was episodic, restricted, and of no sociocultural significance, unlike what was happening in almost every country in the world. If we were not perfect friends, if we humanly failed here and there as everyone did, but much less than most; if there were a few antisemitic intellectuals here when there were thousands in Paris or London; if our government rejected 99 Jewish refugees while welcoming 50 thousand, all this is, on the scale of human realities, evidence that, profoundly and substantially, we were and are the least antisemitic people and culture that ever existed in this world. But this does not satisfy Mr. Lesser. For him, antisemitism is not persecuting Jews, discriminating against them, denying them jobs and opportunities, isolating them in ghettos: it is simply not doing everything they would wish we did for them; it is not giving them what we don’t have; it is not being more generous to them than we are to ourselves. Measuring ourselves against this unrealistic and utopian scale, which compares men to fictional ideals and not men to men, he intends to smear a past whose overall image remains valid and honorable with splashes of facts. He presents many facts, indeed. But science is not just about collecting facts: it is about comparing and hierarchizing them according to an ordering reason - and there is no reason where the sense of proportion is lacking. And where the sense of proportion is lacking, the sense of justice is equally lacking: Mr. Lesser, recognizing that Jewish organizations refused to help non-Jews persecuted by Nazism102, omits to label them with the same “racist” label he adorned us with, although deserved and just in their case, as it concerned discrimination based overtly and exclusively on race.

Furthermore, concerning the Jews, the risk they run in today’s world comes less from the prejudices others may hold against them than from their own disregard - not to say prejudice - towards the religion of Moses, which is visibly declining as Jews enthusiastically embrace materialistic ideologies. Faced with the general debacle of Judaism, a very awake Jewish reader, Mr. Yaakov Wagner from Downsview, Canada, recently asked in a letter to Time magazine, "Will the Jews themselves now succeed in exterminating their own religion, accomplishing what generations of their persecutors have failed to do?" The answer is: yes, as long as their intellectuals devote themselves more to morbidly reveling in the traumas of the past than facing the dangers of the present. When I see a Jewish intellectual denouncing antisemitism in the world while corroding the religious traditions on which their people’s millennial unity is founded, through malicious criticism or pathological indifference, I wonder if there is not hypocrisy in so much hatred of evil without the corresponding love of good. The investigative mania that seeks signs of antisemitism everywhere is, in essence, a sign of a guilty conscience, the kind of guilty conscience that, to conceal its sins, goes around accusing the world. And the guilt of the Jews is clear and unequivocal: they have abandoned the spirit of their religion, they have become internally divided and insecure, they have distanced themselves so much from everything that ennobled their culture and made it a guardian of the meaning of life that today they can hardly escape oscillating between two extremes: either they adhere to atheist modernism or, when they cling to religion, it is to lower it to a resentful, fanatical, and murderous fundamentalism103. Regarding this last alternative, it should be noted: no one in this world is immunized by divine guarantee against the contamination of a Nazi-fascist mentality, least of all those who were its victims yesterday. The persecuted, tormented, and traumatized man tends, by an almost irresistible unconscious compulsion, to incorporate the traits of his persecutor, disguising them under a contrary discourse. But this is a form of demonic possession that an alert conscience must resist with all its strength, in order not to lose, in the name of revolt, the sense of justice that gives meaning to the revolt itself: propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

And when an investigator armed with suspicion up to the teeth comes to pick at trivialities to brand an entire country, where the Jews received the best reception in the world, as antisemitic, I can only reply that he knows better the speck that is in our eye than the log that is in his. A true friend of the Jews should not flatter the neurotic susceptibilities of their exasperated patriotism but should help defend the eternal and universal values of Judaism, which were so vilified in the past by militant antisemitism and today by the blasé cynicism of materialistic intellectuals, Jewish or not, and by those who, on the other hand, prostitute their religion to nationalist fanaticism. And no accusation leveled at the past of other peoples can disguise the harm that today’s Jews are doing to themselves.

If the Jews are indeed invested with a prophetic mission, if they are indeed supposed to be, as Herder claimed, the educators of humanity, then, for the love of God, let them not teach the human race either that pseudo-scientific materialism that gave rise to and sustained the Soviet dictatorship or that resentment which yesterday produced Nazism and today seeks to perpetuate conflicts in the Middle East.

The final message is the one that, shortly before his death, was left to us by the psychiatrist Lipot Szondi, a wise nonagenarian Jew, a former inmate of a concentration camp: "Man must have the courage to be good when everything around him induces him to be bad."

June 1995.

Comparato’s Comparisons

USING WORDS as weapons, as firecrackers that are thrown at the enemy to confuse them, to cover them with infamy and shame, to arouse against them the anger of the listeners, can be very comforting for the ego, can be very useful politically. But it has a price: the words thus used wear out, they no longer serve to name things, to say what they are, to investigate the truth. By dint of striking against the heads of victims, they become dull, coarse, and can no longer penetrate the sometimes narrow and almost imperceptible gaps that distinguish beings, qualities, and actions from each other. They were means of distinction: they have become instruments of confusion, like a spotlight that, short-circuiting, no longer emits light, but only smoke.

In the June 25, 1995 edition of the Folha de S. Paulo, Prof. Fábio Konder Comparato, I don’t know if because he has short-circuited or if he always functions this way, threw out enough smoke to cover the most elementary distinctions within ten square kilometers upon which any discussion about ethics must be based. He managed to mix and flatten on the same plane, composing a true samba of the mad jurist, personal morals, politics, psychiatry, and neurology, to diagnose all neoliberals as congenital psychopaths incapable, due to some brain lesion, of exercising moral feelings. Among those affected by this strange syndrome, he highlights the person of the President of the Republic, a “personality insensitive to the miseries of the human condition”, despite the regular functioning of his intellectual and cognitive faculties.

If Prof. Comparato had said these things as a mere figure of speech, to emphasize his disgust for the President of the Republic, he would deserve no other criticism than literary order, for the evident bad taste of the images. But he seems to take it seriously, to literally express his most sincere clinical convictions about the state of His Excellency’s brain.

Prof. Comparato could also have said these things just for the heck of it, knowing they are false. But clearly not: he is an honest man, and everyone knows this. He truly believes what he said.

We can appeal to the hypothesis of ignorance, of unpreparedness: a person reads an article on neuropsychiatry in the Reader’s Digest and leaves all happy for having discovered some pseudoscientific arguments to shine in his next bar discussion. But it also can’t be this: nobody can doubt the culture and intelligence of the distinguished professor at the Faculty of Law at USP.

What remains, then, is the unfortunate hypothesis of a soft brain: the honest, sincere, and cultured professor would have been struck by arteriosclerosis at the relatively early age of 58.

Not that I, from the height of my already well-worn and weakened neurons, can attest to the falsity of his diagnosis about Fernando Henrique, whom I have never seen close up or from a distance, much less in the intimacy of his synapses, and in whom I voted — I confess — without demanding a psychiatric report on the sanity of the candidate.

What shows in Prof. Comparato’s article an alarming sign of cerebral artery congestion is that he, while denouncing totalitarian ideologies indifferent to the human person, at the same time, and without giving the least account of the contradiction, makes about Fernando Henrique the typical moral judgment by ideology, which so characteristically marks the totalitarian discourse.

Now, either Prof. Comparato respects the human person in its concrete singularity, therefore admitting that the moral value or disvalue of an individual does not depend on the political opinions he follows, or, on the contrary, believes, with Stalin and Hitler, that good and evil lie more in the professed ideology than in personal conduct.

This distinction is so elementary that it could not escape a brain in the full enjoyment of its neuroconductors. But the worst of all is that Prof. Comparato, not content with confusing morality with ideology, still supports the condemnation of his adversaries based on psychiatric arguments, falling into that also typically totalitarian habit of covering up ideological intentions with a pseudoscientific language.

For my part, I am as hostile to neoliberalism as Prof. Comparato. If I admit theoretically that the new ideology can optimize the economy, produce wealth, and even generate some type of material happiness for the masses, on the other hand I have expressed more than once my fear that the global victory of capitalism will have disastrous cultural and psychological consequences, which the material gains probably will not be able to compensate for. I was very clear about this in my book A Nova Era, and later wrote an entire volume about it (O Jardim das Aflições).

Notwithstanding, the last thing that would cross my cranial convolutions would be the hypothesis of attributing to the defenders of this ideology, or of any other no matter how wrong, some type of congenital psychopathy that would explain their adherence to it. Still fresh in the world’s memory are the internments of dissidents in the USSR, with which they sought to extirpate their political convictions — real or supposed — through injections of haloperidol and electroshocks: an inevitable therapeutic consequence once diagnoses such as that of Prof. Comparato about our President are accepted104.

Since, on the other hand, I am generally opposed to psychiatric internments except in the case of grave public danger — following in this the Italian school of antipsychiatry —, and as Prof. Comparato’s case seems to be a harmless early senility, without any of the dangerousness he attributes to Fernando Henrique’s sociopathy, I suggest only that the honored professor retire to bed, under the care and affection of his family, and stop making idiotic comparisons between ideology and psychopathy.

Vegetable Ideas

FRIENDS OFTEN ASK ME about the reasons for my complete disbelief in spiritual messages that currently congest the skies of Brazil, coming from all galaxies, as well as from the afterlife and countless regions of the Eternal Being.

Some believe I am a skeptic, a cynical materialist infected with the virus of incurable irreverence towards sacred things.

Others suppose that I have secretly founded my own church, which, due to an absolute lack of followers, remains a secret; and they suggest that, out of envy for the success of others, I engage in unfair competition with other gurus, challenging them to a battle of impious laughter, where they cannot defend themselves as it is not compatible with priestly decorum.

But the truth is not that. In reality, I am a peaceable and obedient individual who believes what is told to him and does what is commanded, mostly out of sheer laziness to raise objections.

Not that I consider myself a perfect fool for doing so. For if Descartes entered history as the clever man who avoided error by practicing de omnes dubitandi, Leibniz, on the other hand, declared: “I must admit that I agree with everything I read,” and it is not known that anyone made a fool of him.

If God gave cunning to the suspicious, he did not leave the credulous entirely defenseless. Credulity itself, when practiced seriously and entirely, is the best defense: all you need to do is to believe in what someone tells you and also believe in the consequences that he probably didn’t mention. If these consequences are absurd, their absurdity will become apparent to you without your having to search for it as Descartes would do. Similarly, when you receive an order, just follow it to the letter, so that any resulting harm cannot be explained as accidental results of unfaithful execution, but rather as inevitable consequences of an inherently absurd order. This way, you will be free from the deceptions that malicious individuals try to induce in you and from the bothersome effort of systematic doubt, which ended up turning Descartes into a bilious grumbler. You will retain the good humor of old Leibniz, who never held grudges against anyone or let anyone deceive him.

To apply this method to reading newspapers, all you have to do is believe thoroughly in everything they say, and you will soon discover that this leads to extravagant and unbelievable consequences.

Here’s an example, to illustrate this to young minds.

To dispel all doubts about the help that the consumption of certain plant drugs can bring to the enhancement of human intellectual faculties, there is nothing better than listening to the testimony of someone who has personally experienced this benefit. The testimony will be even more significant if it comes from a cultivated, intelligent man who has become even more lucid and keen through the effect of these substances. Fortunately for readers, such testimony exists. A Mr. Armando Daudt de Oliveira, a political scientist with a reasonable number of diplomas, including some from prestigious foreign universities, appeared some time ago on the editorial page of the Jornal do Brasil to inform us of an “important contribution to the humanity of the 21st century”: Santo Daime. This is an invention or discovery capable of leading the successors of the present generation “to the knowledge of the deepest causes of all things,” which, I must say, is no mean feat in terms of intelligence.

Santo Daime, as Mr. Daudt informs us, is a doctrine and at the same time a tea. As the author uses the same term indiscriminately to name both substances, one liquid and the other intellectual, it is not entirely clear whether the announced effects are supposed to arise from the assimilation of the doctrine, the ingestion of the tea, or both measures taken simultaneously. The tea, as Mr. Daudt assures us, is composed of vine, leaves, and water. As for the doctrine, he tells us nothing, but probably, like all others, it is composed of concepts and propositions. Since these are insoluble in water, we understand that the ingestion of the mentioned substances cannot be done through a single route but rather through two: the tea, orally; the doctrine, through auditory or visual means (lecture or reading, for example). It is therefore inevitable to ask: should the two substances act in harmony to achieve the desired effect, or do they function separately?

If the tea itself, due to its intrinsic pharmacological virtues, has the power to trigger beneficial effects on the human mind, then there is no need for the doctrine: anyone, ignorant of it, and ignorant of everything else, can access the knowledge of the deepest causes of all things simply by buying the vine and leaves at a pharmacy, without needing any kind of propositions or concepts. Conversely, if the tea does not produce results without the assistance of an orally heard or read doctrine, then it is because it does not possess the pharmacodynamic virtues necessary for the production of this effect. A third hypothesis is that the doctrine itself, when heard or read, confers some of its pharmacological powers to the tea. In this case, we must admit that concepts and propositions, being logical and immaterial entities, have physical-chemical properties like those carried by material beings, including leaves and vines.

Thus, by faithfully following Mr. Daudt, we are already gaining a glimpse of what the higher levels of intelligence might entail, where we will have access to the knowledge of the deepest causes of all knowable things and some others.

However, if I return to Mr. Daudt’s text for further clarification, I find that the indistinction between ideal and plant beings, which I reached in my effort to understand his article, was already there from the beginning: because Mr. Daudt states that the doctrine (note well: the doctrine, not just the tea) “is a natural wealth of the Amazon.” I then realize that the chemical properties of the doctrine, so similar to those of plants, are explained by the fact that it sprouts from trees, not from the mind, as in this case it would not be a natural wealth, but a cultural one.

There remains, of course, the hypothesis that Mr. Daudt is mistaken about the origin of the doctrine, but this should not be the case because he would not be hypocritical to proclaim the virtues of the tea and the doctrine without having personally ingested them and gained access to the knowledge of the deepest causes of all things, including, undoubtedly, the vegetal origin of ideas, a mystery that will only be revealed to humanity in the 21st century.

The followers of the doctrine and drinkers of the tea, or the followers of the tea and drinkers of the doctrine, by now I don’t know what is what, may judge that, if I arrive at such confusions, it is because I have been deceived by merely apparent differences, believing in the materiality of the tea and the ideality of ideas, without realizing that they are merely external manifestations, illusorily different from each other, of one and the same being, the teadea or ideatea, united in the realm of essences by a transcendental nexus invisible to narrow-minded materialists like me.

Credulous by habit and out of sheer laziness to doubt, I try to accept this hypothesis, but I soon realize that it is unviable. For, right in the first paragraph, Mr. Daudt says that the tea was used for millennia by the Incas and Toltecs, and at the end of the article, he assures that the doctrine is “Brazilian like the Brazilwood,” which forces me to conclude that the doctrine and the tea are two distinct things, discovered at different times by two different peoples.

If that was the case, then it is certain that the Incas and Toltecs, when they used the tea, did so without any concomitant help from the Brazilian doctrine. In this case, the question arises: did the tea without doctrine work for them or not? If it did, then it undoubtedly gave them the knowledge of the deepest causes of all things, knowledge that could not fail to include the concepts and propositions of the Santo Daime doctrine, among the deepest things that exist. But if the Incas and Toltecs acquired this knowledge simply by ingesting the tea, why would they need to import a Brazilian doctrine about the causes of anything? Once the tea was swallowed, they became ipso facto knowers of the doctrine — a phenomenon of infused wisdom in the most literal sense of the term. On the other hand, it is possible that among the Incas and Toltecs, the ingestion of the tea did not produce any enlightening effect precisely because they lacked the doctrine, the knowledge of which was then the monopoly of the Brazilians. In this case, they did not know the deep causes of anything and drank the tea out of sheer idiocy, remaining idiots after ingestion.

Another hypothesis that can be admitted is that the Incas and Toltecs were Brazilians, or that the Brazilians had taken the doctrine to them, at a time when these imbeciles knew only the tea in the material sense, without perceiving any spirituality in it. However, this contradicts what the author tells us, that the tea is a natural wealth of the Brazilian Amazon, not the Mexican or Peruvian one.

In short, there are two possibilities: either I arrive at such confusions because, having ingested neither tea nor doctrine, I do not reach the deepest causes of all things or even some of them; or Mr. Daudt was so thrilled with the spectacular increase in his intelligence after drinking the tea that he ended up confusing it with the doctrine to the point of putting concepts in the teapot and listening to the reasoning of the vines.

What I know is that, trying to believe in Mr. Daudt and follow his suggestions, I end up feeling like a complete idiot. Perhaps with this, I have accidentally grasped the deepest intention of his article. In any case, I really don’t like tea.

1993.

Stimulus and Response

"The most remarkable progress, achieved in the reflection on social phenomena, has come to light in times of crisis, or in connection with a crisis."

"Of course, it is not enough for a crisis to erupt automatically to stimulate progress. Moreover, it is necessary that it occurs in conscious times, where there exists an ‘intellectual milieu,’ or at least some groups of people accustomed, by taste or profession, to analyze facts and freely reflect on abstract matters. Note that the ‘intellectual milieu’ should not be confused with public opinion, which also reflects events or reacts to them. The condition of sociological reflection is the existence of a group that attempts to seek other data than the immediate and traditional ones, and that is not already tied to customary explanations and solutions."

These considerations by Gaston Bouthoul in his Traité de Sociologie apply not only to the sociological domain. In all fields, the progress of thought has always been spurred by crises because, as Aristotle said, knowledge is born of wonder, and crisis is the mother of wonders.

Written five decades ago (the book is from 1946), these words can serve as a touchstone for those who wish to evaluate the condition of intellectual life in Brazil today.

On one hand, the country undoubtedly goes through a crisis that has been proclaimed as the most serious in its entire history — a crisis that threatens to push it out of the significant historical world. On the other hand, the intellectual production of this crisis decade, as abundant as it may have been in quantity, could not compare, in terms of quality and importance, to the majestic blossoming of talent, consciousness, and creative power that Brazilian intelligence displayed in the 1930s or during the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s.

In the realm of superlative comparisons, the artistic production of the 1980s was even labeled by the critic Wilson Coutinho as “the most stupid in our entire history.” While not fully agreeing with this severe diagnosis, which would neatly parallel the unanimous assessment of the gravity of the crisis, we cannot avoid noticing the contrast between the force of the stimulus provided by political and social events and the feeble intellectual response it received.

However, according to Bouthoul, the crisis is only a necessary condition for fruitful reflection. To become sufficient, it requires the existence of an attentive and lucid intellectual milieu, capable of seeking new types of data and finding new ways to approach the situation. In Brazil of the 1980s, this latter condition was not fulfilled. Intellectuals failed. We neither found ways to overcome the crisis in the material and practical domain it manifested nor gained intellectual insights that would compensate for it and bequeath to future generations as a stock of schemes and safeguards to help them face future crises. We lost in the material realm and gained nothing in the spiritual realm: we transmitted, in its entirety, the legacy of our misery, confusion, and emptiness.

The loss that Brazilian intellectual life suffered in this decade was perhaps more severe and far-reaching than the crisis itself to which it failed to respond. Moreover, there has never been, in our entire history, another period in which cultural, artistic, and scientific life received so many and such substantial incentives — in terms of money, prestige, and means of dissemination. This fact has been systematically omitted, even by those who recognize and denounce our current cultural poverty. Perhaps the cause of this omission lies in what Goethe said: “Certain people do not abandon their errors because they owe their existence to them.”

But consider, for a moment, the number of intellectuals who, marginalized, silenced, oppressed, or exiled during the dictatorship period, were able to resume their work in this decade, in full freedom, surrounded by the applause given to heroes returning to their nations.

Consider the exuberant increase in job opportunities in newspaper and magazine editorial offices, television channels, schools, universities, and research institutes, which allowed the formation of the largest and most prosperous “lettered class” that has ever existed in this country.

Consider the unprecedented growth of the book market, reflected in book festivals and millionaire book fairs.

Consider the mass of writers, sociologists, and artists who, once relegated to obscurity and anonymity, locked away in the basement of forgetfulness and silence, could now ascend to prestigious and powerful positions in the government of the Nation and the States, in the new democracy.

Observe all this and honestly ask if nothing has changed in this country since the time when the anemic and provincial market could not sustain a single professional writer in full-time employment; ask if nothing has changed since the time when “making a living from literature” (or philosophy, or any other expression of intelligence) was a heroic risk only taken by the strong, capable of renouncing bourgeois comforts with lofty disdain. Ask if nothing has changed since the time when Glauber Rocha had to shoot Barravento with expired film stock or when João Antônio wrote the splendid stories of Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço on the tables of squalid boarding houses in the Brás neighborhood, among prostitutes and criminals.

Everything, absolutely everything, has changed. Never before has the intellectual been more celebrated, assisted, courted, and above all, well-paid, than in this decade. Everything — foundations, scholarships, fellowships, competitions, co-editions, the Sarney Law, book fairs — everything, in the 1980s, brought Brazilian intellectuals closer to the “beautiful people” who frequent trendy bookstores and restaurants today and farther away from the isolation that depresses and the misery that sterilizes.

If creative thought requires an obstacle, a challenge, one could not wish for anything better than a crisis. If, on the other hand, the positive stimulus of work opportunities and the promise of rewards need to be added to the negative stimulus of the challenge, that also did not lack. Challenged by the crisis, encouraged by the privileged status acquired in the New Republic, the Brazilian intellectual should have, according to logic and appearances, reacted in a more encouraging manner. And here comes the decisive question: why did what should have happened not happen?

But before attempting to answer it, we must remember one more thing. In addition to the challenge and the stimulus, whose presence we have just noted, there was yet another strong reason why, in good logic, one could expect something better from our cultural production in the 1980s. I am referring to the fact that everyone was certain that, with the end of the dictatorship, there would be a cultural flourishing of great proportions.

For nearly two decades, almost everyone in this country who could read and write believed that our inspiration had not dried up; that it was temporarily blocked by censorship, persecution of intellectuals, and, finally, by the massive stupidity of the dictatorship itself, which reduced Brazil to the condition of a rural backwater. With this harness removed, we would then see what Brazil was capable of…

So, there was the challenge; there were the means, generous and inviting; and there was also the yearning, the expectation, the intimate and pulsating impulse to flourish after a period of oppression and sterility. All of this existed, and yet…

Nevertheless, when the whirlwind of freedom tore down the gates of prisons and allowed the flower of national thought to emerge from the shadows, all that emerged from the dark belly of time was Fernando Gabeira, in swim trunks, proclaiming that, in the light of reason and science, that whole “macho” thing was over…

The name of a rock band that has been very successful lately summed up with precision the anticlimax of these ten years of Brazilian cultural life: Aquilo del Nisso.

If there was a challenge, a motive, means, and desire, the question arises again: why did what should have happened not happen? Why did our intellectuals not do what everything led us to expect they would do? Why couldn’t such favorable predisposing conditions be captured and synthesized into a great cultural resurgence?

You do not know, and I do not know either. However, as can be understood from Bouthoul’s text, the service of the intellectual, if it is to contribute to the progress of knowledge, consists of trying to see the facts from new angles — not haphazardly and constantly just for the sake of novelty, but out of objective necessity when the old angles no longer work. And some possible angles are as follows: Could there be something wrong in our usual convictions about what stimulates, sustains, and fosters intellectual life? More precisely, when, following a widespread belief, we maintain that intellectual life depends on historical and social conditions, are we not drawing from this indisputably true premise the erroneous conclusion that it is society and not the individual that should take the initiative to seek answers and advance knowledge? And does this implicit and semi-conscious belief not lead intellectuals to expect everything from institutionalized culture — especially from universities — and nothing from individuals? Are we expecting an abstraction — “society” — to do for us what only we ourselves, real and concrete individuals, can do? Is the habitual Brazilian view of culture as a social product generating this undesirable side effect of making us wait for the tail to wag the dog?

Another angle: has our eagerness to keep up with the “most advanced” opinions in European and North American philosophical and scientific circles not exerted an inhibitory censorship on Brazilian intelligence, preventing it from tackling major questions at their very root with “naïveté” and direct realism? Are we not giving in to the tendency to cater to contemporary consensus, always mutable and elusive, instead of granting more importance to the millennia-old legacy of world civilization? Are we not falling into the tragic error of making the judgment of an era we ourselves proclaim to be relative the supreme and ultimate authority? What is the use of giving speeches against the Eurocentrism of our culture when, on the other hand, we do not dare to utter a word without the “nihil obstat” of European and North American “cutting-edge thinking”? Wouldn’t it be more useful and liberating to use ancient, medieval, and classical culture, already more consolidated as a universal value independent of local contexts and momentary preferences, as a parameter for a while? Are we not risking suffocating our best inspirations in their infancy when we subject them to the court of contemporary consensus? When, four decades ago, Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed Marxism as the “inevitable philosophy of our time,” did we not start feeling ashamed of everything within us that was pre-Marxist? And what did this sacrifice on the altar of “topicality” avail us, when today everyone fears declaring themselves Marxists to avoid being labeled as old-fashioned? Thought has always advanced with the intention of reaching truth; only Brazil seems to believe that the objective of thought is to reach “topicality.” Is this obsession not enough to keep us in a subordinate and peripheral position from which no “progress” can ever rescue us?

Other possible questions: When we see that European thought, in its extreme senility, now denies the substantiality of individual consciousness (Gadamer) and reduces truth to a “democratic consensus” (Habermas), do we not realize that these doctrines of exhaustion are not exactly conducive to stimulating budding philosophical thought, but rather to suppressing it? When we strive to “level” our thought with that of Gadamer or Habermas, are we not rejecting what may still remain of creative force within us, in favor of embracing what Europe has to offer that is most tired and senile? Wouldn’t it be better to draw from old Europe the strength of Hegel, Plato, or Thomas Aquinas — philosophy that Europe made when it still had the strength to do philosophy? Why must we believe that the only possible evolution from these classics must be the one that led to contemporary European thought? Why deny, a priori, the possibility of a different evolution? Why submit to this conformist dogma that everything had to happen exactly as it did?

If we had asked ourselves these questions two decades ago, perhaps we would not have fallen into the depressing anticlimax of the 1980s…

Nationalism and Dementedness

IF THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL TRAIT that defines Brazilian culture and distinguishes it among all others, it can be summed up in one word: nationalism.

Nationalism here does not mean a chauvinistic preference for local creations: on the contrary, our inferiority complex towards imported goods is proverbial. It also does not mean patriotic unity in defense of national aspirations: our disunity, bordering on chaos, is the traditional ally of foreign interests105.

The nationalism that guides and inspires our culture is simply the propensity to judge the works and ideas of Brazilians less by their intrinsic value than by their typical Brazilianess. It’s the elevation of nationality, as such, to the supreme criterion of value.

So deep and rooted is this tendency that the history of national culture could, without any exaggeration or mutilation, be reduced to a coherent and unique line of development, which is the rise and final victory of this criterion over all others.

The “nativist feeling” springs up among the poets of BrazilColônia, initially as a vague mix of love for the landscape with anti-Portuguese ideas. It gains strength with Independence, staining with “local color”, in themes and language, the main productions of Romanticism, and becomes an explicit program with Gonçalves Dias. In 1872, taking stock of a hundred years, Machado de Assis already notes the “instinct of nationality” as the main hallmark of our literature. The instinct becomes militant and aggressive in the Modernism of 1922, and in the following decade gains the depth of scientific prestige in the work of Gilberto Freyre, which inspires a multitude of writers and researchers a movement for the “rediscovery of Brazil”. The 50s-60s, with debates at ISEB, make nationalism the doctrine, at least unofficially, of the State, while the leader of this entity, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, erects an entire philosophical, or pseudophilosophical Weltanschauung on the concepts of “nation” and “national development”. The supreme consecration comes in 1988, when the Constituent Assembly, born of the broadest popular movement in our History, establishes as culture everything that is “expression of the way of life” of the Brazilian people. Here the concept of “national” overtakes all other criteria of value in a culture: beauty, moral elevation, effectiveness in dominating nature, educational strength and even pure and simple truth: if it is Brazilian and expressive, if it is expressively Brazilian, it is culture. Paulo Coelho, for example, or Gugu Liberato106.

Nationalism is, in this sense, a habit or assumption, shared implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, by most people who deal with culture in this country: before a novel is asked to be beautiful, deep, or true, it is required to be “national” in language and themes. If it has this quality, the lack of any others will not seem serious. The reverse is not true: a beautiful, deep, true novel, but set in another country or written in Portuguese from Portugal, is automatically rejected to outer darkness: it is not part of “our” culture.

Thus, for example, our educators find it very natural to impose on young people the reading of Joaquim Manoel de Macedo, Bernardo Guimarães and a whole plethora of second or third rate authors, because they are typically national, or typical of national historical formation, while omitting from literary education any mention of writers of much higher value, like Da Costa e Silva, for being too Greek, José Geraldo Vieira, for being excessively Portuguese, or Hilda Hilst, for not having roots anywhere known in the solar system.

There was once someone who, preferring the simple nationality of themes to the consummate greatness of a classic, intended to dethrone Machado de Assis to put in his place Lima Barreto, a very good writer, no doubt, but whose achievements obviously fall short of the promises.

It is not only in literature that the criterion of historical and local opportunity wins over universal value. The music of Alberto Nepomuceno, a superior genius, is still today preferred, as European, in favor of the postcard Brazilianess of O Guarani (an opera whose undeniable merits, ironically, do not depend at all on its quota of Brazilianess). In cinema, Alberto Cavalcanti was rejected as an intrusive Englishman, and Mário Peixoto as a Frenchman grafted with Russian. The cardinal sin, which justifies the penalty of ostracism, is always the same: “It has nothing to do with national life”. As if outside the national there is no life107.

Sometimes the rejection of the “non-Brazilian” has defined political connotations: in the atmosphere of national-communism created by the opportunist marriage of the Communist Party with Getúlio, which lasted until the 1970s, being alien to Brazilian themes was the same as being “reactionary”. Glauber Rocha, intoxicated by this atmosphere, wrote incredible nonsense against Mário Peixoto108. Peixoto’s work survived. But Glauber, having in turn broken with left-wing nationalism and becoming increasingly interested in foreign themes, was labeled by the intelligentzia as definitively sclerotic and died in exile, embittered and alone.

But not infrequently the political connotation is reversed, without the nationalist criterion losing its primacy. Vicente Ferreira da Silva was a card-carrying reactionary; but, as his mythological-apocalyptic speculations have a vague flavor of carnival and macumba, they still attract more attention than the universally significant works of Maurílio Penido and Newton da Costa, because one wrote in French and the other only deals with logical-mathematical equations without a defined nationality. For similar reasons, Oswald de Andrade’s tupiniquim pseudophilosophy seems more worthy of national attention than the authentic philosophy of Mário Ferreira dos Santos, perhaps the only fully realized philosophical vocation that Brazil has ever produced.

Men of the same political tendency can also be placed in opposite fields by the simple difference in the dose of Brazilianness. Here is what Eduardo Portella writes about the greatest of our literary critics and historians, Otto Maria Carpeaux (Austrian by birth): “Brazilian literature in his hands is subjected to a monstrous sleight of hand process. Operating with mental schemas that are his but not ours, he reveals a total inability to understand that what is specific in us, individualizing, is our character.”

In this last case, at least, the slander to a master did not escape divine punishment: Portella ended up minister of Sarney. But his anti-Carpeaux nonsense is enlightening. It reveals the core of the phenomenon. For our nationalism consists substantially of this: in the obstinate refusal to let ourselves be understood and judged by any criteria that the rest of humanity admits as valid for itself; by the claim of an originality so profound that it escapes the known parameters of universal intelligence and requires other standards of judgment, “specific and individualizing”, unsuitable for any other human beings and valid only for us.

This claim is a Leitmotiv, a refrain endlessly repeated in our culture. At every moment there are protests against the application, to our case, of “alien criteria”. To us, historical materialism does not apply, nor Hegel’s dialectic, nor Weber’s sociology, nor Aristotle’s logic, elementary algebra, Einstein’s physics, or the Ten Commandments. To judge what is Brazilian, only a Brazilian criterion. And, in this criterion, the supreme value is Brazilianness itself.

If this irreducible singularity that we are so proud of were a fact, we would not have to be amputating from our cultural heritage such significant productions, to adjust its profile to a preconceived image. We are probably not really as unique as Portella and tutti quanti claim. But in one thing we certainly are: in this very mania of sacrificing, for the sake of a stereotypical “originality”, the most authentic values. For no other nation, however rich in culture, has ever indulged in the wasteful luxury of rejecting part of its heritage on the grounds that it is contaminated with foreignness. What historian of English literature would accept excluding Joseph Conrad from it, for being a Polish-born person who writes in French-accented English stories set in Latin America and Africa? Who, in the USA, thought of denying Henry James his prominent place in American literature, for having become a naturalized Englishman and almost always writing about European themes? Who, in France, protested against André Malraux’s habit of writing stories set outside French territory? Does Germany judge Leibniz less German for having written in French and Latin? Isn’t Hungarian and Czech literature, so powerful, written half in German? Don’t the greats of Irish literature all write in the language of the foreign dominator?

Nations, ever since they understand themselves as such, appropriate all their cultural values at the slightest pretext that justifies it, without concessions to any impoverishing purism. This is how the normal and healthy patriotic instinct works (which, in a memorable essay, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga definitively distinguished from all nationalism109). The only country known to have embarked on the nationalist purism canoe was Hitler’s Germany: and it ended as it ended.

The almost demented emphasis on the particularism of our case is perhaps an inheritance of the Lusitanian nominalism, swollen by cachaça. It may also be an unconscious mechanism of compensation for our feeling of inferiority: it exempts us from humiliating comparisons and transfers the competition to a closed field, where we are unbeatable: if the supreme value is to be Brazilian, who could be more so than us?110

It could be that the claim of singularity serves as an ideological trick, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a rhetorical wishful thinking that doesn’t aim to describe the existing reality, but to create a nonexistent one. If all Brazilians believe that they are a unique people, that they can’t be judged by the universal criteria of reason, common sense, and civilized values, then they will indeed become a unique people, who can’t be understood by others and who only understand themselves in terms of a solipsistic self-aggrandizing discourse. The price that this people will have to pay for this will be their withdrawal from world history, their isolation in a vain dream. It seems that the prophecy is already being fulfilled111.

Implicit and stealthy in most cases, the absolutization of nationalism as a criterion of cultural value sometimes becomes ostensive and shameless.

Particularly emphatic is the example I gather from the critic — excellent, under other aspects — Fábio Lucas. It is in the book The Invisible Face112:

"Only national literature, the one that reflects the peculiarities of the environment in which it takes place, is suitable for critical judgment. What is a false product, imitation, copy (...) is outside literature."

Identifying nationalism with authenticity, Lucas is not content to suggest this identification as a program for Brazilian writers in particular, but also demands the universal adoption of this criterion, its extension to the judgment of all literatures:

“Thomas Mann, Malraux, Graham Greene, and Hemingway have universal significance precisely because they never betrayed their respective nationalities. They are great because they are nationalists” (my emphasis).

The concept of “the environment in which literature takes place” is, to say the least, equivocal. Does it designate the author’s country of origin, the language in which they write, the nation where they live, or the place where the action of their novels takes place? Some examples will show that the application of this concept is problematic, if not unfeasible.

A writer can, to start with, have two nationalities: one by birth, another by adoption. Even if they fully integrate into the adopted homeland, they won’t completely sever their ties of origin, but they also won’t be able to prevent their work from expressing something of the atmosphere and values of the new homeland. If the judgment of value depends on a certain relation of the work with the nation, we cannot appreciate the aesthetic value of a work as long as there are doubts about the nationality of its author. But Henry James, an American naturalized English, who is typically English without ceasing to be a typical American, has been appreciated for a century as one of the world’s great novelists, without the recognition of his artistic value having to wait for an answer to the question of the predominant nationality.

In certain cases, the application of the concept simply becomes impossible. The author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre is certainly someone who writes in English about Mexican themes, but as his signature, B. Traven, is the pseudonym of an unknown person who insists on remaining hidden (some claim he is a German), should all aesthetic judgment of the work wait until his geographic origin is clarified?

On the other hand, should the writer, when writing about foreign themes and scenarios, take all their own national typicality to the country where the story unfolds, or, on the contrary, adapt with plasticity to the demands of the local scene? Does For Whom the Bell Tolls have value for expressing something of revolutionary Spain or something of the North American mentality? Are its characters alive because they spring directly from Spanish life, Spanish torment, Spanish ideals, or because they are seen by a foreigner incapable of detaching from their values and prejudices of origin?

Lucas opposes, schematically, the “national” to the “false”. “National” therefore stands for synonymous with “authentic”, and the “authentic” here, means being rooted in concrete life, as opposed to stereotype, abstract and cerebral scheme.

However, the examples mentioned above show that, in the production of the “authentic”, fidelity to a foreign setting, foreign feelings, and foreign values can be as decisive as rooting in a country of origin, or even more so.

Lucas takes the species for the genus. Nationalism is a species, one of many species of authenticity, of fidelity to life, of the victory of artistic imagination over abstraction and artificialism; a species among many others of authenticity, and not authenticity as such, and not even its primary form.

Moreover, the concept is self-contradictory, as Lucas refuses to consider as truly national works that, although typical, are bad: “Criticism has to make use of what is expressive. The simple, the naive, the childish are irrelevant, they do not make literature. Whenever we talk about a national novel, we are assuming authentic work. Therefore, there is no need to distinguish. Criticism that defends the practice of national literature… does so by considering good literature. It couldn’t be any other way” (p. 153).

Now, how can we judge the quality of works by their nationalism if, to admit them as nationalists, we must assume their good quality? Will we consider all wines that are French good, but deny the condition of being French to wines that are not good? Is Tostines fresh because it sells more or does it sell more because it’s fresh?

All power to the PhDs?

THE ARTICLE by Prof. Francisco Antônio Dória, “The tomb of the bachelors” 113, is an apology, corporatist and elitist — in the worst sense of the word —, for the monopoly of knowledge by universities. Any cultural manifestation that comes from outside them ends up being, for the author, nothing more than belles-lettres and, worse, “at the service of the ruling class”.

Prof. Dória is a professional in higher education, and his panegyric to university power could be dismissed as mere self-interested argumentation. But there is a more serious reason to reject it: it is based on falsehoods. When someone uses a media outlet to deliver a speech pro domo sua, and on top of that resorts to false arguments, what comes to mind is Goethe’s sentence: “Certain people do not give up their mistakes because they owe their livelihood to them.”

What Prof. Dória says is, in substance, the following (I summarize everything so as not to be accused of cherry-picking sentences). In Brazilian cultural history, we verify the existence of three types of intellectuals. First, the “belles-lettres”. Second, professional intellectuals gathered in groups outside the university. Third, the academics. The belles-lettres is a dilettante who lives off some official sinecure, copies the ideas of First World thinkers, is servile or politically harmless, is brilliant without originality, is not fertile, does not create a school, does not leave disciples. Those of the second group are hardworking, productive, and for this reason they all ended up integrating into the university. The academics, finally, are “First World thinkers”, original, creative, independent and critical.

Prof. Dória suggests that the three types succeed each other historically. The belles-lettres dominate since 1827 (foundation of Law faculties) until around 1940; throughout this period, “the university was never the space for original thought… it served only as an interface between the ruling class and the state apparatus”. From around 1940, professional intellectual groups emerge in isolation (for example, the Tempo Brasileiro group headed by Eduardo Portella, the Brazilian Center for Physical Research, etc.). Finally, the third period is marked by “a qualitative change in Brazilian universities”: academics become First World, acquire the gift of creative genius, break the alliance with the State by opposing it with critical resistance and, finally, absorb the intermediate group of independent professionals. Thus, only two teams remain in the field, between which one must choose: belles-lettres versus academics. The former are docile servants of power, lackeys in the service of the reaction “that keeps Brazil feudal”; the latter are the lever of progress and enlightenment. Prof. Dória’s choice is clear.

Is it worth contesting such nonsense? It is, because the simplistic schematism of the argument gives it an air of verisimilitude. It is, because everything that comes from within universities, whatever it may be, already comes haloed with the prestige of the “First World”, which is the current form of the magister dixit.

Firstly, the concept of “belles-lettres”, as a category responsible for covering all the “typical intellectuals” of Brazil from 1827 to 1840, is of a phantom ideality: it corresponds to nothing. Prof. Dória defines it by socio-economic, ideological and intellectual traits. But, as much as he tries, he cannot combine these three types of characteristics in any concrete character.

Would Machado de Assis be a belles-lettres, for example? Sociologically and economically yes, because, in the terms in which Prof. Dória would describe him, he “lives off an official sinecure, far from intellectual concerns”. Ideologically too, because “he is a member of the establishment, someone who does not disturb power”. These two traits are notorious. But, regarding his intellectual production, how can it be categorized as “brilliant without originality”?

Perhaps Oliveira Lima, then? Member of the ruling class, by social origin. Ideologically, a monarchist in the monarchy. Intellectually, his production is brilliant, but not original. He seems a perfect example. But — darn it! — Oliveira Lima was an academic, a professor at the Catholic University of Washington.

Let’s try another. Capistano de Abreu? He doesn’t fit: he was the son of a maid and died poor. His cultural production, moreover, was extremely original, in current academic opinion.

Another one: Joaquim Nabuco. Here, we almost got it right. Rich, he got a sinecure (embassy in the USA), and his intellectual occupation consisted of brilliantly repeating ideas from foreign thinkers. So far, so good. But how would we see the leader of the abolitionist campaign as a “docile servant” of the agrarian aristocracy? No, Joaquim Nabuco also does not fit.

João Ribeiro, perhaps? But he was poor, and his intellectual activity brings him closer to the type of European scholar than the dilettante.

Graça Aranha? Everything here seems to fit the definition: social position, political harmlessness, brilliant literary activity without originality. But here lacks another essential trait: the belles-lettres-type, in Prof. Dória’s definition, “does not create a school”. Graça Aranha, in fact, did nothing else.

In the end, I searched through the entire gallery of notable intellectuals, and saw that, one by one, they all jumped out of the mold: Euclides da Cunha, for being a military engineer; José Bonifácio, for being an academic and geologist; Lima Barreto, for being a poor devil, and a professional journalist; Rui, for having disciples to this day; and so on until exhaustion. The last name that occurred to me to check was Clóvis Beviláqua, whom Prof. Dória mentioned in passing without saying whether he was a belles-lettres or not. But not even he was: like Rui, he had a legion of disciples in Brazilian Law.

Professor Dória might want to keep trying. For my part, I give up: where I find socioeconomic traits, ideological ones are lacking; where I find these, the intellectual profile fails. In the end, I cannot see a single litterateur in Brazilian history, as Professor Dória defines it, at least among the “typical intellectuals” from 1827 to 1940. The “litterateur”, after all, begins to seem like a Weberian Idealtypus, but constructed, for the sake of a mere logical exercise, by juxtaposing incompatible traits; like a creature that is both mammal and scaled, but also lays eggs, in addition to flying, swimming backward, and studying algebra. But Weber’s Idealtypus, even when not affected by congenital impossibility, was only a logical construction, with no pretensions of actually existing; and Professor Dória might avoid some ridicule if he had conceived the “litterateur” in this spirit, as a simple hypothesis, with the purpose of demonstrating, precisely, that he does not exist. But on the contrary, he confers historical and even carnal reality on his creation, affirming that not only did this character exist, but he was an important person for over a century of our history.

To prove the physical and historical reality of his invention, Professor Dória even cites a total of one (hum, like on checks) example. This extremely rare specimen, precious for historiography as the platypus is for zoology, is Eduardo Prado, the author of The American Illusion, Deeds of the Military Dictatorship and other writings, almost all of anti-republican controversy. But, unfortunately for us, Eduardo Prado was not a “typical intellectual”, neither in Brazil nor anywhere else. He was as atypical as it gets: a rich man unrelated to literary activity, who, after maturing and for purely political reasons, decided to open fire in a press campaign. Is it difficult to see the difference between an amateur and an activist? Furthermore, Eduardo Prado never lived on sinecure: he was extremely rich and lived off the income from his personal businesses (supporting, incidentally, some “typical intellectuals” without a sinecure). After all, who said that Eduardo Prado “did not form a school”? Has Professor Dória never heard of Carlos de Laet? Jackson de Figueiredo? João Camilo de Oliveira Torres? João de Scantimburgo? If he hasn’t studied History, why does he teach it? I hope at least that Professor Dória is aware of the existence of a monarchist movement, of which Eduardo Prado’s name has become a symbol.

Of course, in a much broader and non-sociological sense of the word, taken as a mere literary derogatory, there must have been a multitude of litterateurs in ancient Brazil, as there are in modern times: individuals who try to impress by writing about what they ignore. In my opinion, Professor Dória is one of them. They must have existed then, I say, because there were plenty in Europe at the time of Eduardo Prado. The homme de lettres, who, without needing to explicitly understand anything, is authorized by society to give opinions on everything, is one of the most typical figures of the 19th-century Europe. From the Revolution to the Dreyfus Affair, he sets the tone of the era, speaking with oracular authority one nonsense after another without ever having to prove anything, but sometimes, I admit, having some brilliant insights. It is to a litterateur - Karl Marx - that we owe the most influential theory of History invented to this day.

Another one - Joseph de Maistre - anticipates all the discoveries that Comparative Religion would make in the 20th century. But, according to Professor Dória, none of this happened: in the 19th century, he assures us, “all great thought was developed within the universities” - a sentence that excludes from “great thought” not only Marx and de Maistre, but Pasteur, Darwin, Comte, Tocqueville and Freud. It even excludes Nietzsche, who, although he held a chair of philology (gifted, without competition and as a sinecure), never wrote a university paper and was only truly brilliant in the field of belles-lettres.

“Litterateur” is a term that only serves for something when used to designate practitioners of a literary genre - journalism, and even then taken in a broad sense. Wanting to identify it with a social class in the Marxist sense, or with a particular ideology, is to ignore that journalism, the modern version of rhetoric, is the common arena where all classes and ideologies confront each other. There were litterateurs and there are litterateurs, but defining them in a restricted sense as Professor Dória does, and then making the thus obtained product the dominant type throughout a century of our history, citing in support of this theory the total of one - hum - example, is to have too much audacity in the hypothesis and too much timidity in the proof.

In addition, it is absolutely false that law schools have been, throughout our history, merely nurseries for docile servants for the ruling class, with the sporadic exception, which Professor Dória grants, of a few rebels without a cause. The decisive role played by these schools in all democratic, revolutionary, and progressive movements that have ever happened in this country may be a commonplace in our historiography, but it is a commonplace that has never been seriously contradicted, unless mere assertion without proof, when issued by a university professor, becomes serious contestation for this reason.

But if the reduction of intellectuals from the period 1827-1940 to mere servile litterateurs is already false, the equation “university students = independence”, with which Professor Dória complements it, besides being false, is cynical. Were all the technocrats who governed us in partnership with the military for twenty years litterateurs or university graduates? Do the state administration and multinationals recruit for their top positions the PhDs from the South or the litterateurs from the North? Campos, Delfim, Simonsen, Zélia, Fernando Henrique, and Ricupero - the most powerful among the ministers of the last thirty years - what are they? Do the ruling classes of today send their children to study Letters to become litterateurs or do they dream of making them PhDs in Economics, Administration, Computer Science, Physics?

No, the university hasn’t changed. Today, as always, it is still an interface between the ruling class and the state apparatus; and if middle-class young people seek the university as a means of moving up the social ladder, just as they once attended law faculties with the same goal, what other aspiration moves them but to fill slots in the ruling class? The university hasn’t changed: it has only expanded its services, beginning to recruit and prepare not only the always indispensable lawyers, but also future managers, department heads, company directors, engineers, economic advisers, politicians and technicians, in short, the entire gallery of “servants of power” — among whom, of course, are future university professors.

If all these people, while young, kick and scream against established powers, what’s new about this? Students were already yelling at princes and popes in the 12th century: universities, after all, were born as student guilds. I see no difference between the most recent protests and those that occurred in law schools in 1889, in 922, in 1930, in 1932, in 1935, and during the military period. Kicking against the ruling class is inherent to young people from the ruling class. Or do universities now admit proletarians and kids from FEBEM114? No: the clientele is the same as ever, and always imbued with the same confusion between its guild interests and the interests of the Nation.

Professor Dória, in claiming power for the caste to which he belongs, only shows that he is involved in this confusion. Confusion that is based, moreover, on an understandable ambition: universities are crowded with grandsons and great-grandsons of barons and ministers, who are not content to end their days at the head of obscure university departments. Far from constituting a new class of popular extraction, they represent the declining sector of an oligarchy that periodically slips out of government and periodically demands a return to power, under the most varied and inventive ideological pretexts: fascism, socialism, Christian democracy, neoliberalism etc. The recycling of the oligarchy is still confused with the generational change: the young children of the ruling class are eager to reach power, and their parents insist on staying alive longer than the most patient of Oedipuses can bear.

The claim, therefore, is not new. Just, Prof. Dória goes a bit further: by enumerating three types of intellectuals, rejecting the first as reactionary and absorbing the second into the third, he ends up arrogating to the university class, along with political power, also the monopoly of culture. Once this criterion is adopted, every independent intellectual will find themselves squeezed against the wall of a dramatic choice: either they prove they are serious and integrate into the university, or they are thrown into the dustbin of the past as a belletrist.

I don’t know if Prof. Dória realized this unavoidable consequence of his arguments. But he certainly did not realize that if, in our country, intellectual activity has increasingly concentrated in universities, it was not because they improved, but because the widespread stupidity of the military regime managed to discourage it so well everywhere else that it had nowhere to run but into the campi, where there was enough money to support it and that indispensable quota of freedom that even the fiercest tyrants know to grant to the well-born children. Besides, acquiring more and more a tone of political protest, cultural production could only thrive where there was an audience of literate activists — which gathered precisely in universities.

But this abnormal situation created by the dictatorship created an even more abnormal one, in which we live today, in which although there is freedom of expression all intellectual initiative is concentrated in public bodies, the spontaneous creativity of groups and independent individuals disappearing. Prof. Dória intends to give legitimacy to this sick situation, celebrating it as a progress of universities instead of lamenting it as a sign of decadence of everything else. If Prof. Dória sees the activity of independent groups as typical of an underdeveloped and pre-university stage, it’s because he did not think to ask if in Europe any university could contribute to the promotion of culture in a way comparable to independent groups that published, in Italy, Benedetto Croce’s La Critica magazine, in France, Temps Modernes and Espirit, in Spain, José Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente. For the most eloquent sign of a country’s intellectual vitality is precisely the proliferation of independent initiatives, operating on the margins of all officialdom and all subsidy. The 1930s and 40s, when the groups noted by Prof. Dória emerged in Brazil, were therefore the ones with our richest cultural production, and the decade of university hegemony — 80 to 90 — was called, not coincidentally, “the most stupid of our entire history.”

Addendum in December 1994

With great satisfaction, I note that Prof. Dória seems to have recovered from his propensity to make baseless generalizations. He just published a densely documented book115, where he defends a more than plausible thesis. This is how he sums it up in a statement to the newspaper O Globo116:

“The families who hold power today in the country are the same ones that have been in control since Colonial Brazil. With the exception of General Geisel, whose ancestry is of German craftsmen, all the other presidents of the Republic, including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, are descendants of traditional and powerful families.”

This is not a new thesis. Many people have already said this, including myself. However, Prof. Dória’s book provides extensive proof, which moves the argument from the field of personal conjectures to give it a scientific basis. Refining common sense beliefs, either by disproving them with facts or providing them with a greater certainty or likelihood that they lack, is one of the most important social missions of science, and here Prof. Dória has shown that he is up to the task.

Of course, this does nothing to mitigate my categorical rejection of his views on the university caste. But in light of his current work, the 1991 article can perhaps be reinterpreted as a momentary attack of corporatist delirium in an otherwise perfectly serious and respectable man of science.

In fact, the book provides some significant elements to refute the article. If the families that dominate the country are still the same, and if on the other hand the preparation of the ruler is no longer based on belles-lettres but on a scientific and university education, then it becomes clear that the university, instead of creating a multitude of independent and critical intellectuals, continues to be the interface between the ruling class and the state apparatus, having only expanded and diversified its services to meet new types of demand, as stated at the end of my comment.

On the other hand, a similar study could be done about what my friend Bruno Tolentino calls the intellectual patriciate: the caste that governs universities, academies, the publishing movement, the cultural press, all channels through which all intellectual and artistic vocations and ambitions pass — or where they get stuck. Whoever conducts this study will probably arrive at results very similar to those of Prof. Dória’s book, showing that the famous conflict between intellectuals and power in this country is nothing but a domestic quarrel of the patriciate. Such a study is much wider and more complex than that of the caste of politicians, but with time and patience it can be conducted. As a trial balloon, one can start with a smaller survey, limited to the current situation, like the one carried out in France by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Roitman on the caste of “Intellocrats” — those who hold power over the channels of access to literary and academic fame117. Another way to conduct this study is to investigate, case by case, the social origin and environment in which the most representative intellectuals were formed. The IAL, Institute of Liberal Arts, which I direct in Rio and São Paulo, has already begun a study of this kind, covering only living intellectuals and artists who entered cultural production in the 1930s and 1940s. The collected testimonies — among others, from Jorge Amado, Herberto Sales, Evandro Lins e Silva, Dorival Caymmi, Antônio Callado —, although they only constitute a casual sample, suggest the intimacy, or near identity, of the intellectual class with the ruling caste. The IAL, a private entity, without any government or corporate assistance, will not be able to carry this study much further, extremely important though it is for clarifying certain aspects of national history — those very aspects that Prof. Dória addresses in his book — which until now have been neglected by university research. A team like Prof. Dória’s would be much more qualified to conduct it than the students of the IAL, who only participated in the project as a class exercise.

Still regarding Prof. Dória’s book, it is inevitable that its conclusions will be used to give a semblance of scientific support to an ideological discourse against the oligarchy, much appreciated by the university representatives of the same oligarchy temporarily placed outside of power. The book proves only that there is an oligarchy, not that it is bad or abnormal for an oligarchy to exist. To demonstrate that the phenomenon described there is a cause of delay or underdevelopment, it would first be necessary to prove that rich and developed countries are not also governed by traditional families. Now, this cannot be proven, for the simple reason that it is false118.

Blaming the existence of the oligarchy as such for Brazil’s delay is a slogan of the journalistic class, which social scientists often repeat without the slightest critical discernment, showing how passive and dependent our intellectuals are in relation to the media. If instead of simply echoing the voice of the collective imbecile our social scientists were to carry out the necessary comparative studies required by the issue, they would see that what is abnormal in the case of Brazil (as in other Third World countries) is not to have an oligarchy in power, but to have a singularly ill-prepared, semi-educated119 oligarchy, ill-equipped for their roles and divided above all by all sorts of group and regional disputes, which place immediate factional interests far above national interests. Militarism, coup-mongering, clientelism, statism, nepotism, bureaucratism, and many other vicious “isms” — among which obviously the egocentrism of the intellectual class — are nothing but forms and variants of the same corporatist and divisionist behavior that, by weakening the elite, prevents it from living up to the mission that the people themselves traditionally confer on it in each new election, with an almost superhuman trust and patience. Young people from traditional families who, at university, join the fight of intellectuals against rulers, are not helping the people to overthrow the oligarchy: they are merely supporting one oligarchic faction against the other, deepening the divisions, strengthening corporatism, and preventing Brazil from creating a cohesive, responsible governing elite that is sensitive to national interests and the needs of the people.

Intellectuals and Ethics

TODAY, EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT ETHICS, which doesn’t mean that anyone knows what it’s about. There are countless misconceptions circulating about it, some intentionally created and nurtured, others springing spontaneously from ignorance and presumption.

For example, there are individuals who, in the name of sociological or anthropological relativism, deny any absolute foundation for ethical norms, making them solely dependent on the dominant custom. However, at the same time, they condemn certain behaviors deeply rooted in Brazilian customs, such as tax evasion, nepotism, and influence peddling, as unethical. It’s a contradiction, but one that becomes invisible when it becomes habitual—a crack hidden deep within the conscience.

This crack is now the secret evil of Brazilian intellectuals, giving a tone of hysterical pretense to their loud fight for public morality. Those who today, with indignant expressions, advocate for political hygiene measures that they once dismissed as petty-bourgeois moralism and UDN (National Democratic Union) demagogy cannot appear as anything but pretentious and hypocritical. However, they are not just pretenders. They have split consciences: no matter how sincere their indignation may be, it sounds false because it is not as wholehearted and passionate as they would like it to be or appear. In the soul of each of these men, there is a part that does not fully commit to the moralizing pathos displayed in public; a part that observes all of this with coldness and irony, denying the emphatic conviction of their gestures and words from within. This part is their critical conscience, which, formed in a tradition of historical materialism and sociological relativism, cannot wholly take moral values seriously.

José Murilo de Carvalho’s attempt (in the Jornal do Brasil on August 10) to justify the 180-degree turn by arguing that the fight against corruption has changed its character, from elitist moralism yesterday to democratic progressivism today, is of no use. Even if true in itself, this observation does not touch the heart of the problem. The contradiction remains intact because what is under discussion here is not historical opportunity but rather the logical inconsistency (not to mention the intrinsic immorality) of switching from relativism to ethical absolutism based solely on historical opportunity.

Jose Murilo’s considerations, instead of providing a plausible justification for this change, only highlight its inconsistency. The ones who now rally against corruption do not do so - at least not in public - in the name of historical opportunism (“we must combat corruption because it hinders progress”) but in the name of Ethics, with a capital E, as an absolute value (“we must combat corruption because it is something bad”). If the consideration of historical opportunity were the main motivation driving these men to fight against corruption, their appeal to Ethics would be a mere rhetorical play or a marketing tactic designed to attract popular support for a cause that would remain purely political, devoid of any moral significance; it would be the most unethical maneuver, prostituting the very concept of ethics120.

Should we believe in this hypothesis? It is too bad. A glimmer of hope leads us to admit, instead, that these men are sincere; after proclaiming for decades that ethics serves politics, and politics serves the economy, they have come to believe in the opposite: the supremacy of morality. If that’s the case, they have changed a lot. But if they have changed, they must publicly renounce their old beliefs or find a way to reconcile them with the new ones. Since they do neither, and they don’t even seem to realize the transformation they underwent or, at least, don’t explicitly admit it, their entire discourse creates an effect of a cracked bell: it convinces the listener that the accused are thieves but not that the accusers are honest.

No one can, without falling into debilitating contradiction, fight for values in the domain of practical action that they deny in the realm of ideas and doctrines. If ethics can prevail over politics, then the traditions of historical materialism and sociological relativism, so dear to our intellectual circles, must be abandoned altogether121. But if relativism and materialism still hold, then the appeal to ethics is merely a rhetorical ploy in a game without any ethics at all. This is the unspoken or unconscious drama of the Brazilian intellectual who, leading or following the masses, engages in the fight against immorality122.

A divided moral conscience, affirming in practice what it denies in principles, is a moral legacy of Kantism. Immanuel Kant denied any metaphysical knowledge that could give an absolute foundation to ethics, but at the same time, he saw moral commands as a “categorical imperative” to which man should submit simply because, even if he couldn’t justify it rationally and theoretically. He planned to resolve this contradiction, as can be seen in the outlines of metaphysics in his opus postumum, but he didn’t have time to complete them and died, leaving posterity with the abyss between intelligence and will. Incomprehensible disciples, without considering that the master attacked problems in stages, and that the conclusions of each stage were merely pauses before resuming the subject at another level, made this abyss the formal and definitive content of the philosophy that entered history, perhaps despite Kant, with the name of Kantism.

Kantism had a great influence on positivism and, through it, on the birth of social sciences. The typical positivist social scientist (in the broad and not strictly Comtean sense of the word) sticks to “facts” and avoids “value judgments,” cultivating methodical relativism. He describes the structure and functioning of society as he finds it, without opining on what society should become or do. However, since the vocation of a social scientist is never separate from an interest in political action, the social scientist is almost always a two-headed and incoherent being, torn by the antagonism between the scientific commitment to refrain from value judgments and the desire to interfere in the current situation to do what he thinks is right. The purest and most remarkable type of positivist social scientist was Max Weber (1864-1920). He experienced this contradiction with such intensity that his health was affected: he suffered two nerve paralysis crises that left him bedridden for years.

But not all social scientists are as scrupulous as Weber, who personally paid the price for his contradictions. Most prefer fictitious accommodations that appease their undemanding conscience: they avoid the internal conflict, leaving the public to guide themselves, as they can, by contradictory ideas wrapped in a veneer of verbal coherence and crowned with “scientific” prestige. Without the slightest ceremony, they interfere in politics and moral life, issuing value judgments and using, in the eyes of the people, an intellectual authority that they admit not to have inside the academic realm, away from the crowds. Weber had the greatest contempt for the presumptuous levity with which some of his colleagues engaged in this exercise of scientific histrionics, which he pejoratively called “academic prophecy.” The fear of prostituting legitimate intellectual authority made him interfere in public debates only at the cost of wrenching internal conflicts that do not bother the show-off eager to opine.

A social scientist who conceals the contradiction between science and activism spreads the habit of double, inconsistent, and frivolous thinking throughout society. And if the explicit meaning of his intervention is, as it is now, the appeal to the moralization of social life, then its result - collateral and probably unwanted, but no less inevitable - will be to infect the soul of the people with the virus of hypocrisy and false consciousness: pretending to cleanse the government, he will have corrupted the nation.

That’s why no sensible person can approve the current campaign for “Ethics in Politics” without the most prudent reservations. Nothing is more dangerous and alarming than the explicit or implicit identification of a particular group with “good” and its adversary with “evil.” When I see that this identification is now promoted by those who advocate sociological relativism, hostile to any crystallization of values in fixed representatives, even to the idea of values except conventional ones, then I cannot help but be impressed by the option between hypocrisy and madness. The sudden fever of moralization that has afflicted our intellectuals can only be one of these two things: either the most sordid and Machiavellian plot ever staged in our political arena or the symptom of a schizophrenic split in the minds of those responsible for forming and directing public opinion. Both hypotheses are terrifying.

The reader may now wonder whether I am talking about intellectuals in general or just social scientists, as it seems that I am ascribing to all of them a type of thinking that is specifically characteristic of the latter.

The reason I do so is most serious. Sociological relativism in Brazil is not a trademark of social scientists alone; it is a dominant trend within the entire intellectual sphere.

The cause of this phenomenon lies in the disproportionate importance that the social sciences have acquired among us as regulators of thought, in the absence of a vigorous philosophical movement.

In the world, positivist sociologism emerged as a reaction against metaphysical thinking dominant for twenty centuries. In Brazil, metaphysical currents never managed to penetrate beyond the surface. Platonism, the classical rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, German idealism, the phenomenological ontology of Hartmann—to say nothing of traditional Hindu or Chinese metaphysics—all remained exotic references, far removed from the real concerns of the intellectual sphere, for which the social sciences seemed to provide a more practical and accessible answer. Thus, sociologism, first positivist and later Marxist, became the mold and crucible in which the dominant ideas and inclinations of our intellectual sphere were formed.

Adding to this, on the one hand, the obsessive urgency with which social issues have been demanding our attention for at least a century and, on the other hand, the Lusitanian heritage of a genuine vocation for historical studies, we can easily understand the roots of the phenomenon that can, without exaggeration, be termed “Brazilian cultural sociologism.” In one of its aspects, it represents a chronic tendency of intellectuals to confine themselves to the historical, social, economic, or political aspects of questions, avoiding a deeper examination of their epistemological, ontological, etc., foundations; in another aspect, it is the overwhelming predominance of social themes in our cultural output.

Hence, the internal contradictions of social science spill out from the ranks of sociologists, economists, etc., to contaminate the entire intellectual sphere and, indeed, the whole public opinion.

However, as certain habits proper to the social scientist—sociological relativism, abstaining from value judgments, the Marxist precept to always reason from the economic base, etc.—enter the realm of the literate class in general, they lose even the character of mere methodological precepts they might still have in the hands of professional social scientists, and become dogmatic beliefs about the nature of reality.

For this reason, the formula expressing the basic conflict of sociological—and anthropological—consciousness, that is, relativistic commitment versus the vocation for social and political action, serves in Brazil to describe the inner dualism, conscious or unconscious, of all intellectuals. This contradiction, which laziness, bad faith, and the force of habit prevent from being elaborated as a conscious conflict, shows its profile with greater clarity at the moment when the intellectual sphere, as a whole, directly interferes in the political arena in the name of a morality that it disregarded until yesterday. Wilhelm Reich was right: the more unconscious a conflict is, the more visible it becomes from the outside.

Gay Lies

The GAYS perhaps find less satisfaction in their peculiar type of sexual games than in the flattering myths they cultivate about their community. One of these myths is that they are marginalized and persecuted. Another is that of their intellectual superiority.

Against the first of these beliefs stands the fact that some of history’s most bloodthirsty tyrants were gay, among others Caligula and Mao TseTung. The former would castrate handsome young men to take them as brides; the latter would forcibly feed the guards of the Celestial Peace Palace, sending the recalcitrant to the celestial peace itself. But these famous cases are not exceptions: they stand out against the dark background of an almost general rule. In India, last century, thousands of boys were bought or stolen from their families and forcibly taken to serve in homosexual brothels in England. A similar thing happened in China. In Germany and France, clubs and closed circles of homosexuals have always been close to centers of power and prestige (see for example the group of Stefan George and later the SA, Hitler’s personal guard, led by the sinister Rohm, himself an open gay). Some Islamic countries, where the institution of the bride’s dowry made marriage difficult for poor men, became paradises for rich European homosexuals, who bought the favors of young Muslims cheaply there (read Gide’s memoirs, Si le Grain ne Meurt). The trade of boys, a fact of universal amplitude, shows the oppressive power of homosexuals throughout history. For every case of violence committed against homosexuals, another can be cited of violence committed by homosexuals. The crying of an oppressed minority is crocodile tears. Sometimes oppressed, sometimes oppressors, homosexuals, at this point, are no better than other men or women. It all depends on whether they are out of power or within it. Worse yet: you will not find a single saint, mystic, or spiritual man of high stature in the gay ranks. Equal to others in evil, gays have a sparse record of good deeds.

As for the idea of intellectual superiority, it is based on a brutal misunderstanding: the list of gay celebrities tasked with proving it is false. It is based on a criterion vitiated by incurable elasticity: heterosexual practice, even if proven and long-lasting, is not accepted as proof that a creature is hetero; the slightest hint, even conjectural, of homosexual experiences is enough to classify it as gay. Lord Byron, who had sex with two hundred women and half a dozen boys, is gay, as much as André Gide, who did the same with fifty boys and one woman. Episodic homosexuality is proof of homosexuality; heterosexuality only counts as proof when exclusive. The fallacy is evident. To make matters worse, the mere absence of evidence of love affairs with the opposite sex is considered very strong evidence of gay inclination, but the absence of evidence of a gay relationship is not proof of anything. In other words: everyone is gay until irrefutable proof to the contrary. But proving heterosexuality is impossible: the most that is admitted is the absence of evidence of homosexuality. Homosexual desire, in a practicing hetero, makes him a homosexual; heterosexual desire, in a homo, also makes him a homosexual, just with a bi inclination. The total illogic of these assumptions cannot go unnoticed by gays themselves. Their argument is, in short, totally dishonest.

But it is not only dishonest in these points. The debate about homosexuality is systematically diverted from decisive topics, to focus on lateral aspects, certainly more flashy and more conducive to the flowering of empty verbiage.

The intentional confusion begins in the very terms in which the discussion is posed: sexual options. Hetero and homosexuality are not equally options. Relationships between different sexes are not a free option, but a natural necessity for all animal species. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is not a necessity at all, but just a desire. The total suppression of homosexuality would produce much dissatisfaction in certain people; that of heterosexuality would bring about the extinction of the species. To put these two orientations on the same level, treating them as simple free options, is to falsify the discussion at its base. Homosexuality is an option; heterosexuality is a given.

For this very reason, it is absurd to attribute the same value to these two behaviors. A necessity and a taste do not have the same value. Homosexuals protest against the hegemony of heteros, but it is fair: heteros speak on behalf of the human species (which includes homos), and homosexuals speak on behalf of the desires of a group. Priority determines hierarchy. Wanting to level these two things is a childish delusion of omnipotence.

Perhaps knowing this deep down, gay argumentation prefers to situate itself more frequently on another plane and appeal to the “rights of the human person”. But no homosexual wants to be accepted simply as a person; he wants to be accepted and valued as a homosexual. When someone accepts him as a person, condemning at the same time his sexual option as sick or abnormal, he feels discriminated against. But no homosexual sees anything wrong with accepting a Protestant or Catholic simply as a person, while at the same time condemning his religion as false, repressive, etc. In short: the homosexual claims that his sexual option is more valued than someone else’s religious option. He claims that we accept his homosexuality as a value, while he does not accept our religion except as a fact.

The profound distortion of ethical consciousness that presides over homosexual ideology is revealed, for example, in the following: a demonstration of lesbians against the Church during the visit of John Paul II to the USA is considered a normal expression of a democratic right; a demonstration of Catholics against lesbianism would be condemned as hateful discrimination, and could even be prohibited by court order: the right to expression — even aggressive — of sexual preferences prevails over the right to expression of a moral and religious belief. The disparity in the scales of values is evident. Religion — any religion — serves purposes that infinitely transcend mere personal taste, it is a universal value and a sine qua non condition for the subsistence of cultures. To place it on the same level as homosexuality would already be absurd. To attribute to it, however, a lower value than personal sexual choice is monstrous. It is the most fearsome assault on the dignity of human intelligence that has been committed since the advent of racist theories.

The gay ideology also appeals to medical arguments, revolving the discussion around the question: Is homosexuality normal or abnormal? But this is ill-placed, because there are no or it’s impossible to determine standards of normality and abnormality on the mere plane of behavior. Normal and pathological do not exist — except conventionally — in conduct as such, but on the plane of powers or capacities that an individual possesses. A man is not deaf because he doesn’t hear, but because he cannot hear. An impotent man is not impotent because he doesn’t have an erection, but because he cannot have an erection. And so on. Thus, homosexual conduct in itself cannot be considered normal or abnormal. But certainly the absolute incapability for heterosexual conduct should be considered abnormal, whether this incapability is physical or psychological, congenital or acquired. If constant homosexual conduct results in an acquired inability — even if purely psychological and in the form of an invincible rejection or aversion — then it certainly is abnormal. It is abnormal because it deprives a necessary potential for the subsistence of the species123. The opposite is not true: the incapacity or disinclination for homosexual practice only deprives us of a certain type of entirely unnecessary pleasure. Neither normal nor abnormal, but harmless as mere conduct, homosexuality can become abnormal due to its consequences, just as abstinence, normal conduct, can become abnormal from the moment it results, by excess, in a definitive deprivation of sexual power, with all the predictable psychological consequences.

These findings are enough to topple the claim of gays for specific legislation in defense of their community, a claim based on the allegation of normality of their conduct. Because it’s one of two things: either homosexuality is a choice, revocable at any moment by an act of will, or it is, on the contrary, a deprivation of heterosexual capability. In the first case, it’s mere behavior, with no significant medical meaning, which renders the claim of normality harmless. In the second case, it’s a deficiency, and it’s absurd to defend a right to deficiency as such. Therefore, the rights that should be ensured to gays are simply the same that are guaranteed to all human beings: the right of expression, the right to come and go, the right to privacy, etc. It’s absurd to claim that there should be specific rights of the gay community, just as there are no specific rights for abstainers, sadomasochists, pedophiles, etc. A choice or preference cannot, in itself, generate rights, which would reduce rights to a matter of taste. At best, these rights would create an unsolvable problem: if a homosexual decides to become heterosexual, does he lose his homosexual rights or does he keep them? And, if he goes through a period of indecision, does he have and not have these rights at the same time? A deficiency, however, if not a right, can generate rights (as in the case of the blind and crippled, for example): but would homosexuals ever accept receiving special rights as bearers of a deficiency? Never. Therefore, on both sides, the claim for specific rights is absurd. A taste can generate obligations, never rights.

Other gay theorists claim the argument of fatality: We can only be what we are, therefore we have the right to be what we are. But, firstly, no one denies them the right to be as they are, but rather the claim that this way of being guarantees them other supplementary rights. What is implied in their argument is an assumption that homosexuality is normal because it’s congenital. But the identification between congenital and normal is a perfect nonsense (the mongoloids can tell you). Secondly, if we accept that congenital tendencies should sovereignly determine human behavior, we will have to say goodbye to free will, and with it the very idea of a freedom of sexual choice will go down the drain. Thirdly, the reign of the congenital would be an argument in favor of a traditional type society, where heredity determined destiny, and against modern society, under the shadow of whose principles the gay movement itself takes shelter. If, on the other hand, they argue that, given a congenital tendency, the individual should have the freedom to follow it or not, then it becomes irrelevant, for the decision of conduct, to know whether this tendency is congenital or not.

If they argue that overpopulation ultimately makes heterosexual relations unnecessary, the answer is: 1st this does not make homosexuality necessary; 2nd some heterosexual relation, even if in a smaller dose, will always be necessary and, in this sense, more valuable to humanity than the homosexual; 3rd to reason in absurdum, even if the State, to artificially level homo and heterosexuality, prohibited procreation by direct man-woman contact and made artificial insemination mandatory, insemination would continue to be nothing more than a heterosexual relationship by indirect means: the fundamental data of the equation would remain unchanged under legal makeup.

Another sign of intellectual dishonesty is the abuse of the label “prejudice”. Homosexuals stigmatize as prejudice any opinion that condemns their behavior as abnormal or immoral. Prejudice is an unreasonable opinion, dictated by mere personal preferences prior to a conceptualization of the problem. In most cases, the opinions of anti-homosexuals are not prejudices, but concepts, as elaborate, as logical, and as respectable as the opinions of homosexuals, to say the least. However, even supposing they were prejudices, why should they be less respectable than the homosexual choice itself, which is also not based on reasons but on a mere desire, as irrational and arbitrary as any other? If there is a right to the expression of desire, there should also be a right to the expression of revulsion, which is the opposite of desire. There are people who have an instinctive and irrational revulsion for homosexuality, as instinctive and irrational as the homosexual desire itself. Note well: logically and psychologically, the opposite of a desire is not mere indifference, but rejection, revulsion, disgust. The old Graciliano Ramos, in prison, preferred to go hungry than to eat lunch prepared by the gay cook; if he ate, he vomited. Should we consider this revulsion abnormal, sick, condemn it as immoral, suppress it, prohibit it in the name of gay rights? The right to preference is nonsensical if not accompanied by the concomitant right to revulsion; and the right to express one comes along with the right to express the other. Why should homosexuals have the right to freely express their desires, however arbitrary and irrational they may be, when they deny this right to those who feel the opposite way? If homosexuality is a right, so is anti-homosexual prejudice, as long as, of course, neither translates into criminal acts, such as, for example, for the homosexual, the seduction of minors, and, for the anti-homosexual, the rejection of a job candidate for reason of sexual preference — things which, by the way, are the exception and not the rule.

If someone — to reason per absurdum — claims that taste can be the origin of rights, but repugnance cannot, then the answer will be as follows: What defines homosexuality is not the attraction to the same sex, but indifference or rejection of the other, just as what defines heterosexuality is not the attraction to the opposite sex, but rejection or indifference to the same. Homosexuality as mere conduct is one thing, as a libidinal pattern is another. Homosexual behavior can be accidental or occasional. The homosexual proper has, or intends to have, a specific libidinal pattern, different from that of the heterosexual. The homosexual pattern is defined by the exclusion of relations with people endowed with different genital organs: rejection of the vagina, by male homosexuals; of the penis, by lesbians. To dispense with the different, to be satisfied with the similar — this is the core of the homosexual pattern.

The transvestite is a different phenomenon: it is an incorporation of the different, transforming oneself into the different (losing or not the prerogatives of the similar, as there are degrees of transvestism, from vaguely effeminate to transsexual). In both cases, however, there is a rejection of the difference as such, a refusal to attempt the loving agreement between the different in the synthesis of procreation. Homosexuality is based less on a determined taste than on a determined revulsion: if there is a right to homosexuality, there is also a right to feel and express revulsion for it.

It is not appropriate to ask the homosexual why he is attracted to people of the same sex — since occasionally heterosexuals can also have it — but why he does not have attraction to the other sex, and whether he does not consider this a form of discrimination. Then, either all homosexuals would have to declare themselves bisexuals who freely chose one of their two possible orientations, or they would have to acknowledge that they have a deficiency.

But homosexuals go further in their demands: they claim that their doctrines and preferences should be taught to children, so that they can “freely make their choice”. The fact is that an eight-year-old child is not fit for a relationship (including the prospect of pregnancy), but nothing prevents them from having homosexual experiences. For heterosexual relations, there is a threshold of minimum maturity to be crossed; for homosexual relations, there is not. Heterosexual games between children are substantially different from an adult sexual relationship, because it includes the risk or the desire for procreation; this difference does not exist between homosexual games in children and an adult homosexual relationship. In a heterosexual relationship, the difference between adult and child is a decisive factor: a rapist cannot impregnate a normal six or seven-year-old girl. In a homosexual relationship, however, there is no difference: a six-year-old girl is physiologically capable of performing cunnilingus on an adult woman, a boy fellatio on a man, and both passive anal intercourse. With no risk of pregnancy, the civil liability of the act would be greatly attenuated. What argument would we have left, then, to condemn sexual relations between adults and children, as long as they are consented to by both parties? The teaching of homosexuality to children will have two catastrophic consequences: 1st, it will favor the easier choice and will practically incite all children to the homosexual experience at a stage of life when they cannot yet fully enjoy heterosexuality: taught homosexuality and heterosexuality as equivalent preferences, the child’s choice will not be free, as it will almost necessarily favor homosexuality; 2nd, in the long run, it will deliver children to the mercy of adult homosexuals and will prompt the emergence of movements for the liberation of erotic relations between adults and children: the pedophile, retroactively, will become an innocent victim of the repressive society that prevents him access to his object of desire.

And what about gay rights? The only right they can legitimately claim is that their private sexual behavior does not result in discrimination in employment and social life in general. A society that gives them that has already given them everything they deserve. However:

  1. Mere expression of moral condemnation is not discrimination; it is an exercise of freedom of conscience.
  1. Prejudice itself, however irrational and fanatical it may be, is not discrimination, as long as it is not expressed in aggressive or harmful acts.
  1. Gays do not have, morally, any right to induce children to practice homosexuality, which would be to lure them down an easier path before they were in a position to personally and directly assess the meaning of both homo and hetero experiences; other human beings, on the other hand, have a duty to try to induce them to heterosexuality, unless they manifest by themselves a too strong contrary tendency. Only adults should be totally free to choose, because heterosexuality only properly exists for adults.
  1. Gays have no right to pretend that their sexual preferences are more worthy of respect than the moral or religious convictions of others. Any moral belief system—especially any system that has already served as the foundation for an entire civilization—is, in itself, more valuable and worthy of respect than the expression of a particular taste.
  1. No personal preference, however fair or legitimate it may be, should compete with what is necessary for the survival of the human species. Gays have, morally, no right to pretend that their behavior is as valuable or worthy of respect as that of heterosexuals. Homosexuality is and will always be a matter of taste, and heterosexuality a matter of life or death.

No sophistry will ever revoke these evidences, which are at the core of every human soul, even though they may be obscured by tons of pseudo-erudite controversies of suffocating artificiality. They are also in the souls of honest gays, uncontaminated by an ideology that, under the pretext of defending them, leads them to sacrifice their conscience on the altar of taste, which is the most arbitrary of deities.

10/02/95

Sleeping Carmencita

VERY OFTEN, the revolt against injustices arises from a sincere desire to not understand anything. With a bit of abstract thinking, one can perceive even the banal day-to-day inconveniences as heinous forms of social oppression. Everything becomes monstrous when taken out of the context that explains and perhaps justifies it. But the discourse of abstract revolt has become such a widespread trend that no one notices anything abnormal in someone trying to talk about society as a whole while obstinately refusing to look at society as a whole.

D. Carmen Rico-Godoy, for instance, a enragée feminist, managed to sell 58 editions of her book How to Be a Woman and Not Die Trying (Translated by Ernâni Ssó, Rio, LP & M, 1995), showing as universal male oppression certain domestic oversights of her husband(s), which for the vast majority of husbands would be easily explained by the division of labor:

“Does his male pride prevent him from screwing on the cap or what? Is closing the packaging after using it a homosexual thing?… I don’t know why he thinks it’s natural that I should be the one washing the dishes, making the bed, collecting the pages of the newspaper scattered all over the terrace, and closing the lids.”

The impression that assails me when reading these things is that simply the vision of history has disappeared from the minds of many activist intellectuals; their conception of humanity’s past is shaped by their immediate experiences and they can’t conceive that things might have once been different, nor that different conditions explain different behaviors. This Ms. Rico-Godoy, for instance, is a political journalist, a woman occupied with big matters, and has every right to be irritated when, upon arriving home, she is forced to deal with minor issues her husband could have spared her. But she seems to assume that all women of the past were political journalists, business managers, police lieutenants, and nuclear engineers — all too busy to pick up socks or pages of newspapers scattered around the house. But is it permissible for a literate person to ignore that for millennia the toughest tasks of life — war, farming and livestock, construction, transporting goods by sea or on the back of a donkey — could be assigned to men precisely because someone was willing to stay at home to make the bed and pick up the socks? It is obvious that if some of these burdens could be transferred to women today, creating a moral obligation for men to help with household chores, it was precisely because of the general easing of working conditions that technology ensured for at least the class of people to which D. Carmen and the author of these lines belong. Does she truly ignore that this transformation is not yet a universally established fact, but merely a local trend in the most developed areas, whose effects have not yet manifested on most of the planet’s surface? Is it an adult woman’s attitude to demand that all men in the world instantly adapt to the rules of the new morality before the benefits of modernity extend to a significant portion of the world’s population?

Beneficiary, herself, of social changes that allow her to perform an important task, D. Carmen fails to realize that these changes may require deep and difficult adaptations, among which is a new division of domestic labor. No: she assumes that this new division is natural and eternal, and that men do not immediately fit into their new tasks simply because they are proud and afraid of appearing homosexual. Or is it an inherent flaw in the fragility of women to projectively explain men’s actions by sentimental motivations that would be entirely plausible for their own actions? No, it is not possible that all are as foolish as D. Carmen. Besides, many men think like her.

Particularly depressing in this kind of opinions so common today is that in them the most radical historical relativism, the denial of any universal moral principles, coexists with moral demands uttered in an absolutist tone that most blatantly ignores the social foundations of morality. For D. Carmen, if a man has the duty to help with household chores, it is not because the woman also works outside, but it is simply because yes — a categorical imperative independent of objective conditions. But anyone of average IQ, a few decades ago, would have enough imagination to see that, transposed outside the frames of modern technological society, this demand would make no sense.

Wars, for example, for almost all of human history were not only exclusively male tasks, but also took place outside and away from boroughs, towns, and farms, to spare women, children, and the elderly. That, under these conditions, women were left with the task of making the bed and collecting socks, was less a matter of justice than a favor due to male generosity. If this charge is transforming today into an obligation of both spouses, it is because, among other traumatic changes, modern society has abolished the boundary between combat zones and civilian zones, causing the whole society — women and children included — to end up being involved in a bloody activity that previously involved exclusively the male part of humanity and, within the male part, only those who felt called to the military vocation. The change was quick enough for humanity, dazed, to accept it as natural and inevitable. First, the French Revolution created mandatory military recruitment — an idea that had not even occurred to Genghis Khan. Soon after, the American Civil War initiated the habit of destroying cities and farms in the occupied region — an idea that would have seemed monstrous to a medieval warrior. Later, the Soviet dictatorship instituted the recruitment of women, and during World War II, Great Britain, soon imitated by all the combatant countries, began the systematic bombing of civilian populations, aimed at breaking the backbone of the enemy economy and destroying the morale of their armies by spreading terror among the families of the fighters: the soldier on the front line could do nothing against the bombs that at that very moment were shredding his wife and children in a distant town. The Third Reich, perfecting all this, consolidated in its legislation the concept of war as a civil responsibility — a macabre idea that has now become common practice throughout the so-called civilized world.

This escalation of changes constituted one of the deepest psychological revolutions ever experienced by humanity. It ended up neutralizing differences of sex and age, making men and women, old and young, all equally exposed to the same risks. This would be enough to explain and justify a new domestic ethic: if the risks are the same for everyone, all tasks are equal; if the female privilege of staying at home safe from violence no longer prevails, neither does the male privilege of leaving the woman with the task of making the bed and picking up the socks. But, from a strictly moral point of view, should we blame men because they are not in a hurry to become homemakers, or should we condemn a society that does not shield women and children from the dangers and cruelty of war? D. Carmen, who does not care about the bigger picture of History and only sees the world in terms of her daily life, has no doubt about this point.

From an economic perspective, the old division of responsibilities also protected women and children. Just to give an example, all the old ethics - from the Old Testament to medieval Civil Law, through Greco-Roman laws and Koranic Law - considered it immoral to charge a widow or an abandoned woman with the debts of her dead or runaway husband. Modern society, especially after the Napoleonic Code Civil, established the equality of the sexes, consecrating as a legal right of creditors the oppression of widows and orphans - a right that, in the 20th century, they began to exercise even over the lovers of disappeared debtors. Here again, the macroscopic socio-economic change forces a revision of the microscopic ethic: the female privilege of not paying for the husband’s debts having been abolished, the male privilege of letting the woman pick up his cigar ends is no longer justified. And here again comes the question: should we condemn men because they do not hurry to abandon millennial customs, or condemn a society that suddenly institutes as a legal right the oppression of widows, orphans and abandoned women? D. Carmen, naturally, starting from the dogmatic principle that modernity is above good and evil, throws all her fury against the males who do not pick up cigar ends. This is how the rebellion of an intellectual against the male hides the most abject conformity to the course of History.

D. Carmen and others like her seem to think that the equality of powers between man and woman is a natural right. She cannot even imagine that there might have been a time when a family’s survival basically depended on the courage and physical strength of the male, and that it would be a mismatch to demand that individuals trained to defend the family at risk of their own lives should be educated at home: a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. Millennia of repeated experience - still repeated today when a house is invaded by robbers or when a raped woman screams for help - have fatally consolidated in men a predisposition to gain more power over other males rather than share their power with the one who is under their protection - a division that, from a strictly military point of view, is pure and simple suicide. The guardian role assigned to the man was only very recently absorbed by the state, and it is absurd to demand a sudden change in men’s value scale before the worldwide dismissal of their role as family guards is consummated. Now, this dismissal is an experience whose fruits are not necessarily good, as it constitutes one of the origins of the police state. If it apparently favors the equalization of the powers of man and woman, it is at the cost of diminishing the powers of all in the face of the omnipotent establishment. It is absolutely inevitable that part of the powers that man is losing will end up not in the hands of women, but in the hands of the state or capitalist bureaucracy. If D. Carmen did the calculations, she would see that the enemies of the female part of humanity are not the males, but these asexual and abstract creatures that are the state and the market. As I pointed out elsewhere (O Jardim das Aflições),

"The State uses the claims of individual autonomy as bait to trap them in the snare of the worst of tyrannies. ‘Liberating’ men from their ties with the family, the parish, the neighborhood, protecting them under the immense network of public services that frees them from the need to resort to the help of relatives and friends, offering them the bait of a legal guarantee against prejudices, antipathies, feelings and even looks of their fellow men - a legal guarantee against life, in short - the State actually divides, isolates and weakens them, cultivating neurotic susceptibilities that infantilize them, making it impossible for them, on the one hand, to create true connections with each other, and, on the other hand, to survive without state support and much professional help_".

It is only this set of conditions, created by the “administered society”, that allows the awakening of feminist ambitions, which in another power structure would be immediately rejected as impractical and senseless. D. Carmen, however, starting from the abstract principle according to which the equality of power between man and woman is a categorical imperative superior and alien to social conditions, does not even remember to consider that her snottiness is protected and encouraged by an inhuman bureaucracy that oppresses both her and her husband(s), and that, if it had a mouth, would laugh with satisfaction when it sees them fighting over a pair of socks or a cigar end.

That D. Carmen thinks as she does, is her business. The worst are the 58 editions, the comments in the press, the disproportionate applause, which reveal a soft-brained audience and an intelligentsia incapable of intelligent reaction. The reviewer from the Jornal do Brasil, Mirian Goldenberg, for example, even noticing that there was something odd about D. Carmen’s tone, did not feel warned by this to examine if the content was in order. She ends up taking D. Carmen perfectly seriously:

"At the same time that she seems like a cranky crazy woman who fights over any nonsense, [the author] denounces in loud voices subtle dominations that women suffer in daily life. Dominations perceived as natural and, therefore, not overcome."

D. Carmen’s demands, however, are absurd in themselves and would not become more sensible if uttered in a discrete tone. D. Carmen goes far. She complains, for example, that

“one should never expect anything from a man, other than bad news. They always do the opposite of what is expected of them. If you need affection, they tell you to go to h(...). If what you want is firmness, they melt in your hands.”

She doesn’t even realize that it can be somewhat difficult to live with a creature that requires changes in treatment on a scale that ranges from tenderness to firmness — a Pavlovian alternation that normally should only be necessary to deal with dogs. But she does not only demand alternation, but also the chronometric precision of its moments: the man’s behavior should not reflect his internal state, but the momentary expectations of his partner. He should not express tenderness when he feels tenderness, but when she wants tenderness, even if she does not warn him; nor should he scold her because he is angry, but because she wants someone to scold her. I have never seen such ridiculous demands. It is true that many women think this way, and that many men, flattering them beyond measure, nurture in them this type of infantilism. But it is also true that, in a framework where certain male privileges no longer fit, the female right to demand that the man servilely align himself with the sudden changes in the mood of his lady and mistress should also not prevail. After all, why should technological rationalization only demolish the proud self-image of the male, and not the vanity and whims of women? We are all in the same boat, ladies, and the distribution of the seats is first come first serve. I preferred the time when ladies first, and today, when I help ladies and girls down from a taxi, I appear as a charming yet ridiculous kind of old-fashioned gentleman. But how could I please D. Carmen, if it happened to offer her my hand at a time when she was not in the mood for pleasantries? How could a man guess the moment when offering a hand would seem antiquated gentility or an offense to the dignity of a self-sufficient being?

D. Carmen complains that her husband enters the room making a devilish noise and then asks in a mellifluous voice:

— Are you sleeping, Carmencita?

She finds this revolting. But if her husband entered silently like the night breeze not to wake his beloved, it’s not at all guaranteed that D. Carmen, moved by the conviction that men always do the opposite of what is expected of them, wouldn’t interpret this as a sign of cynical indifference. So it seems that the only way to please her would be to enter quietly and then suddenly wake her up with a yell:

— Are you sleeping, you whore?124

Intellecrashers

[Translator’s note: The term “intellecrasher” was originally “intelectrujão”, a portmanteau of “intelectual” and “intrujão”. I have rendered it “intellecrasher” as a portmanteau of “intellectual” and “gatecrasher”.]

I

INTELLECTUAL DECEPTION, shadow and caricature of intelligent activity, exists everywhere. The difference is that in Brazil, the caricature tends to usurp the place of the model, the shadow gaining its own life and starting to move the body that projects it. The number of charlatans and inept doctors in all fields of cultural activity is unusually large in this country — to the point of constituting a permanent feature of national culture, as much as corruption in the political sphere or impunity in the judiciary. And, just as in these two sectors the unpunished wicked are not only numerous, but often occupy the top places in the hierarchy theoretically tasked with preserving order and decency, so too in the cultural sphere it is difficult to unmask the pseudos125, for the simple reason that, most of the time, he has that prominent position that invests him, in the eyes of the public, with the mission and authority to separate the true from the false.

One of the signs that indicate this is the high number of Brazilian literary works, among the most representative, that take as theme or character the figure of the false intellectual. Already in Machado de Assis abound the show-offs of pseudoculture and sellers of pseudoscience: the inventor of Brás Cubas' Emplastro, the philosopher of Humanitismo, the father and son of the “Theory of the Medalhão” and the psychiatric Robespierre of Itaguaí are examples, picked at random from the crowd. With Raul Pompéia, the pseudos invades the field of official pedagogy, in the person of Aristarco, while Arthur de Azevedo, in the story “O plebiscito”, shows him in action in domestic pedagogy. What distinguishes these characters, distinguishing them from those that would seem to correspond to them in world literature, is that, with the exception of the philosopher Quincas Borba, none of them is an isolated oddball, a solitary madman, but all are representative people, typical figures of society. The caricature does not arise from the disproportionate enlargement of the uncommon and the deformed, but from the exact transcription of everyday reality. Neither are the silly polemicists of a tavern in O Amanuense Belmiro by Cyro dos Anjos, the talkative little literary men of O Encontro Marcado by Fernando Sabino, the numerous well-spoken cretins that populate the novels of Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos pure exceptions. They are characteristic types of Brazilian life. Perhaps the most characteristic among all. They mark a chronic disease of the national soul.

All these characters, however, inspire us only laughter or contempt. The same happens with “The Man Who Knew Javanese” by Lima Barreto. But in other works of this great and suffering writer, the portrait of the pseudos comes out of the frame of the risible to acquire an almost tragic depth. Two things distinguish the world of Lima Barreto from that of his predecessors and successors. First, that alongside the false appears the authentic, giving the caricature, by effect of contrast, the meaning of an eloquent moral condemnation, which in Machado or Arthur de Azevedo was dissolved by irony and in Pompéia by an excess of self-lamentation. In Lima Barreto, indeed, the medalhão is not only the pompous and empty figure, but the usurper, the oppressor who condemns to exile, solitude, and despair the legitimate talents of Isaías Caminha and M. J. Gonzaga de Sá. For the reign of the pseudos would only be the object of comedy if it did not correspond, as a necessary and chronic counterpart, to the liquidation of the best. The second difference appears in the novel Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, the peak of Lima Barreto’s literary invention: for Major Quaresma is at the same time, and inseparably, an authentic scholar and a pseudo-intellectual — a tragic hero and a caricature. His scientific endeavor is as genuine as the literary vocation of Isaías Caminha; and his worldview, vitiated by the narrowness of nationalist mania, is as false as the professional identity of the “man who knew Javanese”. It is precisely the sincerity of the false consciousness that singles out the Major and makes him the epitome of Brazilian intellectuality. For if on one hand it would be impossible for the false and the authentic to be divided into watertight quotas, each once and for all assigned to a certain group or faction, on the other hand it is the naive pretension to always represent the “authentic” faction that makes the Brazilian intellectual a caricature type. In truth, it is the very phenomenon of factions, of small groups, of circles of friendship and mutual aid, which generates the pseudo-intellectual and supports it through the false security derived from the easy applause of numerous companions — a protective cushion that preserves him from any critical eye but imprisons him, finally, in the most depressing self-deception.

The mutual solidarity that weakens the self-critical sense is however not shared only by groups, distributed in the simultaneity of social space, but by generations, each one entrenched in “its time” and judging from its superiority the past epochs, near or remote, whose obscurantism it believes to have surpassed. This feeling of being at the top of the times is generally associated with more or less sudden political mutations, which, accelerating the present becoming, create that estrangement in relation to the past that facilitates the vision of its mental limitations, but, in the same measure, makes the current ones invisible. For a true objectivity of historical sense can only be achieved by those who do not limit themselves to judging the past with the eyes of the present — the most fickle of judges —, but consent to try to judge the present in the light of the past; in the light of its hopes, above all, which are sometimes the most fearful testimony against the arrogance of the present.

But this objectivity is completely lacking in a country where belief in the inevitability of progress has become a motto in the national emblem. Thus, the intellectual pettiness portrayed in those literary works always seems to us a relic of obscure past eras, with no possible connection to the brightness of present intelligence. By the effect of the illusion of progress, we forget to make double-way comparisons, and, well protected from the gaze of dead witnesses, the present can continue to exhibit its rags, without anyone being able to point them out to public consternation before they become past and give way to a new generation of self-aggrandizing illusions.

II

To avoid being accused of speaking in general terms, I will point out here two examples of our current intellectual misery. In both cases, the misery lies not only in the fact that people vested with academic authority display a knowledge they lack about subjects they are ignorant of, but also in the reaction of the public, or rather, the lack of reaction. The impression left by these events is that once someone achieves the status of authority in any cultural field, a Brazilian will be exempt from all critical scrutiny and can say whatever they please without anyone remembering to point out their errors, except through polite detours that will give the appearance of a respectful “theoretical divergence” to what should be a severe reprimand for the violation of intellectual ethics.

It is also characteristic that in none of these cases – nor in dozens of others I have observed increasingly in recent years – is the person involved a complete and finished gatecrasher, a chronic impostor, or a man who knew Javanese. Both Gerd Bornheim and José Arthur Gianotti – as they are the ones in question – are respected, competent, and unsuspected men. That is precisely what catches my attention: that respected and unsuspected men can start saying things that are remarkably below the level expected of them, without anyone thinking of giving them a forceful reprimand – a reprimand upwards, let it be clear.

The first of the cases I refer to is the account by Mr. André Luiz Barros about Professor Gerd Bornheim’s lecture in the cycle “The Crisis of Reason” (Jornal do Brasil, September 28). I do not know if the nonsense contained therein is the responsibility of Professor Bornheim or the reporter. I do know that one of them invented it, or both. Here are some examples, followed by comments:

  1. According to Professor Bornheim (or according to Mr. Barros?), the predominance of reason in the victorious Western tradition can be illustrated by the “traditional pedagogy, in which the child necessarily followed in the professional footsteps of the father.”

    Comment: Any history student knows that the transmission of the father’s professional status to the child is a custom present in almost all traditional societies, from the Chinese Empire to Hindu caste society, passing through Athens and Rome, the ancient Jewish communities, etc., etc. How can this be seen as a characteristic sign of Western reason?

  2. According to Professor Bornheim, or as the reporter imagines he heard him say, “modernity began when Hegel (1770-1831) said: 'The son is the cause of the father.’”

    Comment: If the idea that the son is the cause of the father marks the beginning of modernity, then modernity began in the 4th century BCE when Aristotle expounded the concepts of efficient and final cause, in which it is clear that the son is the cause of the father just as much as the father is the cause of the son.

  3. Barros writes: “According to Bornheim, the idea of God also changed with the modern world: 'Modern philosophers started to see God as guilty for the original sin, which was the creation of man.’”

    Comment: The idea that the creation of man was a divine sin is not at all modern. It was widely disseminated in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. It was the official doctrine of Gnostic sects, which were hugely successful at the time. Its repercussions reached the East, as seen in the fact that the Quran, the sacred book of Muslims (7th century), mentions this doctrine, condemning it as the invention of fallen angels. These are elementary historical facts that a philosophical interpreter of History has no right to ignore.

  4. And the most remarkable example: “First, religious missions traveled to catechize the natives with an established Christian truth. Starting in the 15th century, with Montaigne, the journey changed direction: Europeans began to seek differences, the exotic, the unknown, and the wild.”

    Comment: Good heavens! Montaigne, to begin with, was born almost in the middle of the 16th century and could not influence anything in the 15th century unless there was some kind of “Terminator” mechanism involved. Secondly, the systematic missionary journeys on a global scale, aiming to unify the world under the banner of an established truth (“expand Faith and Empire”), only began in the Renaissance, precisely when, according to Professor Bornheim (or his scribe), they were ending. Here, the reporter and/or the reported have managed to invert the chronological order, placing in the Middle Ages the effort of forced Christianization that marked the beginning of the Modern Age, and in the Modern Age the journeys of mere curiosity and the search for the exotic, as exemplified by Marco Polo (13th century) perhaps. It should also be noted that from the Patristic era until the end of the Middle Ages, almost all preachers who Christianized Europe traveled alone, without the protection of armies which, from the Renaissance onwards, became the armed forces of a catechesis that, in the previous period, had offered preachers martyrdom instead of demanding it from the listeners.

Is Professor Bornheim ignorant or is Mr. Barros an overly imaginative reporter who attributes the nonsense of his own invention to an innocent lecturer? I don’t know, but I do know that neither any listener interrupted Professor Bornheim for the necessary corrections, nor did any reader write to JB to hold Mr. Barros accountable. I wonder if fifteen, twenty, or a hundred years ago, such things would have been overlooked, or if there would not have been, among the inhabitants of those barbaric times that progress has erased, any alert mind capable of pointing out the king’s nakedness.

Something that greatly contributes to the silly conformism of the audiences is the habit, consecrated in the more talkative part of our university intelligentsia, of imposing on the public the prevailing opinions among the fashionable European thinkers not as an object of reflection and discussion, but as the mandatory starting point for all possible thought. In this context, the phrase “today it is believed that…” becomes irrefutable proof of the veracity of the believed thing. The absolute inability to react critically, the most abject submission to the gurus of the day, is pompously exhibited to a dazzled audience as proof of our highly updated European culture, as a display of our philosophical level of the First World.

However, relying blindly on the spokespeople of learned consensus, the public has no means to verify the information it receives. When they are fed, for example, a gross generalization like "contemporary philosophers believe that…", they don’t even think to ask if the sentence refers to all contemporary philosophers, to many of them, or to just a few; much less if they are among the best or mere flashy figures of journalistic relevance, destined to be forgotten when the daily newspapers become wrapping paper in butcher shops. In this way, an audience constantly treated as culturally deprived is led to swallow as universal consensus something that might well be the opinion of two or three individuals, from here or there. The serious thing is that this same public, in its innocence, is led to take as philosophy that kind of discourse that in Greece was called “eristic”; that is, the wordy pararetorical discourse that Aristotle defined as “the argumentation that takes as premises commonly admitted opinions that are not true”; a discourse that, far from being able to achieve that minimum of demonstrative truth necessary for philosophical discussions, did not even rise to the level of rhetoric, but was merely its counterfeiting for use in low disputes of interest.

Thus, for example, in Professor Bornheim’s lecture, we are informed that “contemporary philosophers” find the pursuit of essence and truth foolish and prefer to study “error, marginality, appearances, falsehoods, the other, and difference – everything that Aristotle despised.” The sentence is ambiguous: Professor Bornheim does not distinguish between studying error and committing it. If we interpret it in the first sense, the statement will be scandalously false: the study of mistaken thought is, contrary to what it says, one of the top interests of philosophy throughout history and not a modern novelty; Socrates was so interested in the subject that almost all of his dialogues consist of examining false thoughts, and only a small part expresses the opinion he considered correct. It was Aristotle, in “Sophistical Refutations,” who first made a systematic survey of forms of false thought, and it was he who established difference as the supreme criterion of definition. Hence, the interest in these subjects is not new.

However, if we take Professor Bornheim’s statement in the second sense – that contemporary philosophy does not study errors to correct them through truth but rather dedicates itself to purposefully cultivating them – then it is a matter of utmost seriousness. Perhaps the notion expressed is true with regard to some philosophers, and here is Professor Bornheim’s lecture as an example. But it is unnecessary to point out that against such a philosophy, the classic arguments against skepticism apply fully, mutatis mutandis; particularly the one that to be interested in errors as such, we need, first of all, to know that they are errors: and if we do not even know the distinction between truth and error, we have no means of distinguishing one from the other. Without delimiting errors as such, how can we be particularly interested in them? Professor Bornheim’s sentence, in short, is either a historical falsehood, taking as new what is old, or a logical contradiction. Worse still, it sets a bad example: swallowed as a pill of established knowledge, it will induce the naive listener to feel very relieved that the high consensus of contemporary wisdom exempts him from the laborious pursuit of truth and authorizes him to consider any wrong, marginal, apparent, or false opinion that springs to his mind as philosophy. Reinforced by university nihil obstat, the old cry of General Milán Astray will once again resound in academic halls: “Down with intelligence, long live death!” Only now, with a background of funk music.

III

If a schoolboy wrote that massification is the standardization of products and that the diversity of products in stores proves the non-existence of massification, he would receive a failing grade. However, Prof. José Arthur Gianotti writes exactly the same thing in the column “Mais!” in the “Folha de S. Paulo” newspaper on November 19th, and no one seems to have noticed that the sum of the emperor’s clothes is equal to zero. Yet, nowadays, even some schoolboys know that the diversification of offerings, far from being an antidote to massification, is actually one of the essential mechanisms of the massifying process. It appropriates all sorts of cultural goods and equalizes them, neutralizing the differences that separate them abysmally in the hierarchy of spiritual values and ontological constitution, reducing them to mere “taste preferences” corresponding to different market segments.

“In a large store in New York or Paris” - writes Prof. Gianotti - "anyone can buy a CD with ancient Greek songs or pieces by Orlando de Lasso." Yes, I say, you can also buy Gregorian chants, which are on the shelves next to Madonna’s latest recordings. The difference is that Madonna’s songs were made primarily for selling on discs; they would never have come into existence without the modern entertainment industry, which is its raison d’être and its ontological mold. On the other hand, Gregorian chants were created to be heard for free by friars and mystics, serving as an entryway to a spiritual world that is neither bought nor sold. While they can be copied and sold in the consumer society, they could never have been created by or for it. It is precisely this difference, this small and essential difference, that is lost when reduced to a mere arbitrary divergence of taste - a consumer’s right, more sacrosanct than any spiritual world - the moment both creations are displayed on a store shelf with items “for all tastes,” as the professor would say.

Likewise, paintings, books, symbols, myths, and even ideas and doctrines, severed from their intentional context that gave them meaning, value, and life, are packaged and commercialized to cater to the customer’s taste. They are at the mercy of idiotic or debasing use, flattering a public incessantly swayed by advertising, believing that their whims are the supreme criterion of truth and goodness. And the consumer, swollen with pride in his power to consume whatever he pleases, fails to realize that this power costs him the loss of the purpose of the consumed things: propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. Whether he buys Madonna or Gregorian chants - or both - he will always be a consumer of senseless trinkets, in a world where everything becomes consumed.

If Prof. Gianotti fails to realize that the transformation of all cultural goods into commodities is not only a quantitative and extrinsic phenomenon but also a profound and perhaps irreversible mutation in the meaning attributed to these goods, I ask him how he explains the use of Gregorian chants - or perhaps Orlando de Lasso - as background music for underwear commercials. And I wonder if a consumer who first encounters religious music through an underwear commercial can later, through a prodigious aesthetic effort, free himself from the market-driven contamination accompanying his musical experience, in order to elevate himself to the understanding of its spiritual or even merely aesthetic significance. I confess that I can no longer hear the opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony without thinking of razors.

On the other hand, not any schoolboy, but any philosophy student knows the distinction between uniform homogeneity and chaotic homogeneity - homogeneity due to lack of differences or due to an excess of them. They know that since at least the 1920s, none of the critics of massification has been concerned with the threat of uniformity - a too gross and naive hypothesis that could only materialize in a grand guignol totalitarianism, more imbecilic than the Soviet or the Nazi - but rather with the much more real and evident risks of chaotic homogeneity, where a profusion of apparent differences masks the absence of differential value standards and the dilution of everything into the entropic soup of consumption.

Thus, when Prof. Gianotti claims diversity of offerings as an argument against the denunciations of massification, he either ignores or pretends to ignore that, in general, and at least in its highest and most famous expressions (such as Ortega y Gasset, Horkheimer, René Guénon, J. Huizinga, for example), these denunciations have been directed precisely against the state of affairs he extols as post-massification, not against the mere phantom of a Chaplinesque Fordism.

Even more serious is the fact that this self-proclaimed guardian of USP’s philosophical rigor celebrates as a victory of individual freedom against massifying homogenization the fact that the poor imitate the dress style of the upper classes, refusing to wear products from the brand “JoãodasCouves” and demanding jackets and underwear with a “griffe.” He cites the case of one of his employees, a young man of humble origin, who turned up his nose at popular products and only wore “Reebok,” becoming - oh, glorious achievement! - just like a middle-class person.

Here again, Prof. Gianotti either ignores or pretends to ignore what everyone knows: that the imitation of the upper classes, including snobbish demands, is neither a recent phenomenon nor a sign of a post-massification mentality. Quite the contrary, it was already noted more than six decades ago (by the aforementioned Ortega and Huizinga, to give just two notable examples) as one of the most characteristic signs of widespread massification.

Also, everyone knows, except the professor, that the lower classes only began to demand products with a “griffe” as the “griffe” stopped being the personal mark of an artist, indicating the rarity of a copy or the uniqueness of a specimen, to become the ubiquitously repeated stamp that today displays its foolish and obsessive presence in everything consumed in this world, from napkins to toilet paper, from condoms to shrouds.

Lastly, as a final proof that he does not know what he is talking about and that he is impregnated to the bones with the massifying mentality he claims to overcome, Prof. Gianotti assigns poets the mission of “representing and enforcing popular desires,” confusing poetry with a legislative mandate, aesthetics with public opinion polling - and forgetting, moreover, that Dante or Goethe preferred to assign their art the mission of teaching the people certain things that could very well contradict their desires.

All of this, I know, is nothing new, and I mention it precisely because it is not new but a well-known and arch-known thing, which cannot be ignored by anyone who ventures to opine publicly on the issue of massification, least of all by someone who presents himself as the extremely intelligent author of a new and revolutionary theory on the matter.

Therefore, my intention here is not to express a theoretical disagreement with what Prof. Gianotti says, but to point out the misuse he makes of his academic prestige to impose foolish ideas on the public, which demonstrate a total lack of understanding of the subject and are beyond any possible theoretical discussion. Any theoretical discussion, after all, becomes possible only when based on accurate information, logical consistency, and intellectual ethics - an ethics that should not be confused with politeness, especially with that excess of politeness that, swallowing hard, applauds the emperor’s clothes. And it is precisely the increasing relaxation of the demands of intellectual ethics that has marked our intellectual life in recent decades, fostering a succession of cultural impostures that far exceed those of Aristarchus and Dr. Simão Bacamarte.

December 1995.

APPENDICES

With some cuts, the first part of this article was published in the section “Prosa & Verso” of O Globo on January 13, 1996, provoking a strong response from Prof. Bornheim, published on the 20th of the same month. In response, I deemed it appropriate to make the following comments, which were sent to the editor of the section, Luciano Trigo, on the same date:

Rectifying the Intellecrashers

It is evident to any sound mind that my article about the “intellecrashers” had no intention of challenging or offending Prof. Bornheim. I merely wanted to offer him the opportunity to deny authorship of the absurdities pointed out therein and to obtain a correction from the newspaper that published them. Demanding such a correction would have been his duty rather than mine if he took his own words seriously: “Every comment must be based on the respective publication.” What I did was to demand that he fulfill this duty, albeit belatedly.

Evading this fair demand, he prefers to pretend to be challenged so that he can feign contempt for the alleged challenger and thus give his escape the appearance of victory. The contempt is so feigned that it is not enough to conceal the hatred that the overdue debtor’s conscience reveals. The thinly disguised anger displayed in defending his reputation even resorts to attributing malicious and morbid motivations to my initiative of divulging them—a diagnosis that becomes even more groundless when the issuer admits complete ignorance about the person being diagnosed. The professor’s use of insult is as incisive as his ambiguity and slipperiness in matters of fact. While he presents the sordid details he claims to have telepathically discovered in the depths of my psyche as unquestionable truths, he simultaneously avoids providing a decisive answer to the main question: was it he or the reporter André Luiz Barros who authored all those absurdities? Was it scientific scrupulousness that prevented him from pronouncing on this thorny issue, he who opines so confidently on the soul of a stranger? Difficult to tell. Just as a medical certificate signed without proper physical examination reveals nothing about the real state of the patient but says a lot about the signer’s ethics,

so does the singular document published in O Globo on January 20th at least reveal one unequivocal trait of Prof. Bornheim’s mindset: a person who does not hesitate to use his academic authority to lend a semblance of credibility to such pejorative conjectures would have no reason to refrain from using it to foist the nonsense I pointed out in his lecture upon the public.

Prof. Bornheim is certainly not the first Brazilian figure to shirk his responsibilities to the public by resorting to the hackneyed tactic of pretending to be offended and leaving while grumbling under his breath, eruditely quoting Chapolin Colorado: “Rabble!”

Therefore, it is I who owe the readers a correction. In my article, I categorically stated that Prof. Bornheim was not an intellecrasher. Now I realize that he is one. A serious intellectual, when questioned, knows that the duty to be accountable to the readers far outweighs any vain susceptibilities. However, the branded intellecrasher will never understand why someone would prioritize the interests of popular education over the privileges of the intelligentzia, or why they would demand the same level of accountability from an academic as academics constantly demand from politicians, judges, businesspeople, and other inhabitants of the planet. Such audacity seems so absurd to him that he can only explain it by resorting to the salon psychology of a hairdresser, with which Prof. Bornheim examined me126.

Still on the Intellecrashers

I thank reader Olinto Pegoraro for his kind intervention, but I ask: does it make sense to wait for publication in a book or a restricted academic journal to correct the nonsense that, through a newspaper, has misinformed hundreds of thousands of readers? Mr. Pegoraro’s observations are based on the assumption that only the academic circle requires accurate information, while the common people can swallow foolishness and say amen. Bornheim’s errors were published in a newspaper, and they should be corrected in a newspaper. The appeal to academic norms is completely out of context.

Furthermore, why defend Prof. Bornheim if no one attacked him? A demand is not an attack. Or is it an attack to call a man “competent and unbiased”?

The speck and the beam127

O Globo published at the right time — in the Books section on October 29 — an interview with Pierre Bourdieu on the tyranny that second-tier intellectuals exercise over the media. The producers of fast thinking prevent the disclosure of everything that goes beyond their own sphere of concerns — restricted to the most immediate journalistic interests — and thus create a false impression of a decline in cultural production when what exists is a decline in cultural debate, increasingly leveled to TV debates about sex and politics.

But two notes must be added to the excellent interview.

First: The state of affairs described by Bourdieu is not new. It was denounced in the early 80s by Claude Lévy-Strauss: the words of the journalist, the editor, the TV presenter, said the great anthropologist, began to have more weight than those of the scientist, the philosopher, the creative artist, and as a result, culture was reduced to a commentary on the news of the day. A little later, two researchers, Hervé Hamon and Patrick Roitman, carried out a detailed survey of the class of intelocrats — the owners of the circulation of ideas —, showing that, after all, the general content of French cultural life was determined by a very small number of brains, and not the most brilliant ones.

Second: In Brazil, the class of media intellectuals, as Bourdieu calls them, is smaller, but more cohesive and more jealous than in France. Among us, journalistic interest has become the petrified clause that governs the world of culture, and the cultural productions most affected by immediacy and worldliness end up receiving preferential treatment: the cultural press no longer has its own rules, based on the specific character of manifestations of thought, but copies without any critical sense the recipe of journalism in general: a book, even of science or philosophy, that does not deal with headline-grabbing subjects — sex, politics, and rock‘n roll — is treated as a minor work or is completely ignored. But the standard imposed by journalism ends up being absorbed by universities, academies, and the individual brains of writers and artists, and in the end, culture as a whole ends up being nothing more than luxury journalism: books, films, plays are just the feed back from the press and TV.

Now, this very subject I am talking about — the tyranny of media intellectuals — does not seem to be of much journalistic interest, so it only comes to be addressed in the press when some big shot happens to comment on it — and even in this case, the interest of the story centers on the character and not on the theme. If there were interest in the theme as such, it would be highlighted even when addressed by a nobody. But how would media intellectuals be interested in what questions the most uncontested and discreet of powers?

Thus, Bourdieu’s denunciation is neutralized by a double distancing effect: first, it is no longer a generalized concern among major intellectuals, but an opinion of Mr. Pierre Bourdieu — exotic and without practical sense like all merely personal opinions. Secondly, it is something that happens far away, in France, and does not concern us except as an overseas curiosity. On the contrary, if some unknown Brazilian were to write to denounce similar and more serious phenomena observed right here under our noses, they would be solemnly ignored by the press. Allow me to remember that this Brazilian exists: it’s me. For three decades I have been trying to draw my journalist colleagues' attention to the profound and often harmful effects their work has on culture in general, and I have never found any other response than complete indifference. I started a long time ago: in a small work published in the 70s, under the title “Press and Culture”, I announced the day when the cultural pages of newspapers, instead of reflecting cultural activity, would end up shaping it, reducing it to a subproduct of journalism: the dispute between journalistic interest and cultural interest would end up reducing the latter to the former. The work provoked some superficial debate in journalism colleges, but soon the subject died. I tried to return to it in a series of articles commissioned by the magazine Isto É, which aroused so much interest in the newsroom that they never got published. Other articles on the same topic were only accepted by specialized publications — like the excellent magazine Imprensa, for example — and thus remained out of the general public’s sight.

Therefore, the highlight given to Mr. Pierre Bourdieu’s interview is strange: why should we first become aware of what is happening in France rather than what is happening among us, even if it is more serious? Have we reached that stage of alienation where the speck in the neighbor’s eye seems more disturbing than the beam in our own? Or, on the contrary, is it more comforting to imagine that the things Bourdieu talks about only happen far away and that “there is no sin south of the Equator”?

Ethics of indignation

CAETANO VELOSO recorded an uplifting commercial some months ago, which is a perfect summary of the moral climate of our times. He condemns conformist indifference and urges people towards ethical behavior: “fighting injustices.” “Fighting injustices” seems to be, in fact, the highest ethical conduct one can conceive in this part of the world. The normal state of an ethical person, from this perspective, is indignation; their weapon is denunciation. However, it makes no sense to fight against or denounce evil when one has the power to prevent it from happening. Unless there is a prophetic foresight of hidden malicious intentions, it is only possible to denounce injustices after they have been committed. Since a person, being the master of their actions, always has the power to refrain from committing injustices, the fatal conclusion follows: an ethics that emphasizes primarily combat and denunciation leads individuals to police others rather than master themselves. It is an anti-ethics that, if adopted on a national scale, would result in transforming the Brazilian people into a horde of irresponsible individuals filled with indignation. Indignation towards others and perfectly content with themselves, in the tranquility of false consciousness, believing that denouncing is the fulfillment of their utmost duty. An ethics of spies and gossips, malicious to the core, and entirely devoid of critical self-awareness. An ethics of bandits, for the pinnacle of moral indignation is that of the gang leader betrayed by their henchmen.

If it were necessary to prove such an obvious thing, one would only need to observe how often, in recent times, accusers become accused, in an endless succession of reciprocal denunciations that give newspapers and TV screens the unmistakable appearance of a National Fair of Glass Roofs. And those who contemplate the spectacle, seeing in it no sign of a near end, cannot help but realize that the state of universal indignation does not foster honesty and decency but institutionalizes hypocrisy and provides wrongdoers with a profusion of new moralizing strategies and excuses to practice evil. For, surrounded by denunciations from all sides, what is the corrupt, the scoundrel, to do? Entangle themselves in the vain attempt to claim innocence or resort to the best defense – attack? Produce false evidence in favor of themselves or true evidence against their accusers? Seek the fictitious protection of fragile subterfuges or entrench themselves behind a solid wall of dossiers against their adversaries?

It is a grotesque illusion to suppose that the accumulation of mutual accusations will, through successive purges, lead to the punishment of sinners and the reward of the righteous. On one hand, the Brazilian mental traffic jam caused by the multidirectional swarm of tapes, wiretaps, pink files, and surprise witnesses is not conducive to bringing forth clear truth but rather to burying it under layers and layers of deliberate and accidental confusion. On the other hand, it is clear that the confrontation thus arranged ceases to be a contest between good and evil and becomes merely a competition between different networks of private espionage – and the outcome will be decided not based on the justice or injustice of alleged causes, but rather on the greater or lesser ability of each competitor in the game of information and counter-information.

And even in the extremely remote possibility of a good number of scoundrels being punished, one must ask if this result is worth the perverse psychological effect that all of this produces in the minds of the people, undermining their practice of self-awareness and replacing it with this ersatz morality of denunciation.

True morality, when it is indeed moral and not just a system of pretexts, consists primarily, essentially, fundamentally of a set of norms for each individual to govern their own conduct, and only secondarily, accidentally, and exceptionally, of a set of criteria for judging the conduct of others. To act correctly, to refrain from evil, is by definition a duty for all, an absolute and unconditional duty. From this duty arises the obligation for each person to master themselves, to rigorously examine and judge their own intentions before dogmatically considering them good and, invested with the conviction of their own purity, to go out shouting against the injustices of others. To denounce those who act wrongly is fundamentally an ambiguous act, which only becomes good under certain special circumstances and, in most cases, should be avoided. The universal disdain of common sense towards snitches and informers may become an obstructive prejudice in those exceptional situations where silence is a crime. However, in general, it expresses a profound moral and psychological truth that cannot be uprooted from the popular soul without triggering fearsome consequences, including the aggravation of the state of moral confusion and anomie, which is one of the manifest causes of increasing criminality. While it may be permissible to resort to widespread informing in extreme cases like an epidemic of kidnappings, it is nonetheless an error and a perversion to place denunciation and accusation at the center and pinnacle of moral conduct. Inverting the proportions of a sound morality, turning the exception into the supreme rule and encouraging an enraged hypocrisy that fuels evil under the pretext of combating it, is a disastrous psychological opportunism for which the leaders of our moralizing campaign will have to answer before the tribunal of historical consequences, some of which are already well within our sight.

Nameless fanaticism

WE ARE REQUIRED TO REVIEW another attitude completely ingrained among us, which demonstrates a true mental lethargy. It is the habit of reasoning within fixed schemas. This ‘method’ of reasoning simply takes the facts and fits them into the pre-determined scheme. An example is the ‘revolutionary X reactionary’ scheme. According to this scheme, all we have to do is classify people, actions, and facts into ‘revolutionary’ or ‘reactionary’. Once this is done, the ‘task’ is completed. How can we understand reality, maintaining this attitude?

These lines were published thirty-three years ago in the Communist Party newspaper128, as a warning and clarification for militant intellectuals. Today, very few intellectuals are militant; the majority declare themselves independent not only of parties but even of mere ideological definitions. They all, or almost all, consider themselves, in their own understanding, free-thinkers. However, if in the above paragraph we replace the specific term “revolutionary” with the broader and undefined term “progressive”, we will see that the warning it formulated still retains all its relevance: the dualist schematism that divides the world into progressive good guys and conservative bad guys continues to be, for most Brazilian intellectuals, the basis of their worldview, the main explanatory key for all “actions, facts, and people”. The exercise of intelligence, in this context, has as its main or only purpose to discern, behind the phenomena, with greater or lesser skill and art depending on the case, the progressive or reactionary nature of the ideas that inspire them. Once this is done, there is nothing else left to understand.

Please do not think that I speak in general and without basis on concrete facts. I had the patience to collect for a year the cultural supplements of two of our largest newspapers — taking them, quite reasonably, as significant indicators of the state of mind of our educated classes — and I came up with the following result: at least seventy percent of the space in these publications was devoted to praising progressive ideas, condemning reactionary ones, making or reviewing judgments of reactionism and progressivism or, last not least, expressing perplexity at the fact that works considered reactionary could have, in the end and despite everything, some value. The remaining thirty percent was devoted to analyses that did not fit into the two golden categories of Brazilian thought. I have not yet finished tabulating the results of the research, but the partial conclusions already obtained allow us to predict that, when it is published as a book, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. It shows, for example, that a dogma like that of committed art, which was even rejected by the majority of communist theorists, has become, among Brazilian intellectuals who claim total independence from ideologies, an unquestioned assumption for the judgment of all cultural products. It only remains to ascertain, finally — and this my research does not answer — whether we have become more stupid than the old communists or more communist than the old fools.

It is true that there are some differences in the application of the dualist scheme between the old communists and today’s progressives. The main one is that, among the former, a warning against simplistic schematism could sprout, as we have seen, from the Central Committee of the Party itself; whereas today anyone who formulates a similar or equivalent one will inevitably be labeled reactionary and right-wing. That is to say: intellectuals without explicit ideological affiliation have become even more rigid and fanatic than their card-carrying predecessors.

A possible explanation for such a singular phenomenon may perhaps be found in the fact that affiliation to a Party gave the old communists a feeling of protection, under which they could move and think with some freedom; whereas, in today’s intellectuals, the freedom they enjoy generates insecurity, which they try to compensate by clinging to old ideological simplisms that the Party considered contemptible. It is notorious, in the annals of ideological combat, that large and confident organizations tend to relax control of opinion — as happened not only in the Communist Party but also in the Catholic Church, Freemasonry, and the Army, just to give a few examples —, while uprooted minorities find in the rigidity of discourse a counterbalance to the insecurity of isolation. A case, in short, of uterine regression motivated by a feeling of orphanhood.

Another difference between the two periods is in the fact that new contents have been added to the definition of progressivism, or at least have been emphasized differently. The demands of women and gays, for example, were not of great strategic importance in old communism; they were ignored, despised, or contented with lip service. Today they have become priority items in the judgment of the coefficient of progressivism and reactionism. Similarly, the revolt against domestic morality, which in old communism was attenuated by ambiguities and restrictions — there were, after all, bourgeois and proletarian morality, bourgeois and proletarian pater families —, has become radical and uncompromising. (All these changes are linked, in some way, to the transitional stage represented by the New Left, which freed intellectuals from subjection to the Soviet dogma and introduced new ideological items into the leftist menu. But the investigation of the causes of the phenomenon is not relevant at the moment when it is only a matter of noting and describing it.)

A third difference, perhaps the most important of all, is that party communism, being an organized movement, had at its top an elite of official theorists who gave their ideology some principle of unity and coherence; the judgement that acquitted as revolutionary or condemned as reactionary therefore had to adhere to clear and well-known criteria. Devoid of this control, today’s progressive intellectuals are free to add to their code of values as many new trends as they wish, even if they are contradictory to each other (like for instance, the unrestricted liberation of customs and repression of sexual harassment, the attack on traditional religions and the defense of pre-modern cultures, etc.). And the variety and instability of the motives, which should be a factor of freedom and democracy in itself, ends up establishing an environment of Kafkaesque compressive totalitarianism the moment it is incorporated into the code, ultimately serving as the basis for the judgement of progressivism and reactionarism. Once the schematic simplism of the final sentence and the hodgepodge of judicial criteria are merged, we are in the full empire of arbitrary fanaticism, which judges and condemns peremptorily without even needing rational pretexts. Bear in mind: the man formerly labeled reactionary by the communists knew perfectly well the hierarchical table of criteria by which he had been judged, and he had in it a basis for discussion to refute his accusers who, for better or worse, behaved as rational beings committed to an explicit and supra-personal rule. Today’s progressive intellectual, on the other hand, can patrol, accuse, label, judge and condemn in the name of the most subjective and absurd motives, confident that at least the part of the public that shares his feelings will agree with him and that the defendant will be able to defend himself only in the name of principles that precisely have no credibility for this part of the public. We are thus at the mercy of irreducible emotional choices that do not have the slightest satisfaction to give to reason and coherence. Our destiny comes to depend entirely on fortuitous emotional consensuses that applaud or condemn us according to the direction of the wind and the greater or lesser rhetorical skill of our accusers.

This whole gruesome situation is due to the fact that progressive intellectuals, having superficially freed themselves from their old ideological and partisan commitments, continued, deep down in their souls, attached to the old scheme of feelings and emotions associated with ideological struggle: they moved from ideological communism to emotional, irrational, unconscious communism, all the more virulent the less loyal to an explicit doctrine. For the doctrine, if it gave the militants a ready mental prescription, also imposed on them, with it, an awareness of the limits and a certain respect for reality - limits and respect that are completely absent in today’s progressive intellectual.

To make matters even worse, in the Brazilian case, progressive intellectuals, once persecuted and thrown to the margin of a clandestine party, have moved up in life, occupied high positions in the establishment and today govern states, preside over courts, head ministries and universities, command newspapers and TV chains. In all these positions, they are implementing, at least by unconscious automatism, the unwritten law of schematic dualism, of fanatical and irrational “progressivism,” which thus gradually comes to shape as an unquestioned dogma the culture, customs, values of an entire population that has no idea it is being subjected to a gigantic mental surgery. The most ironic thing about the situation is that these intellectuals do so with full good conscience - false consciousness, in truth - of not acting by any ideological schematism, of being people free of prejudices and entirely “open to dialogue”. But what dialogue can there be, when the very assumptions of the discussion are so well buried and hidden that it becomes almost impossible to question them or even appeal to them in defense of an accused? What dialogue can there be, if the very absence of a commitment to an explicit ideology gives these people a psychological safe-conduct to judge everything with a fanaticism that dare not speak its name?

Press and culture, or: Pressing the culture

THAT THE PRESS not only reflects events but also produces a part of them is an inherent fatality in the constitution of human society: since the world exists, the dissemination of facts causes new facts. The study of information diffusion as a productive force of historical events is indeed one of the main areas of research for historians.

But the accomplished fact only appeases the conscience of those who have none. An honest journalist cannot help but ask whether there is a certain point where mere conformism turns into a wicked artifice: for there is always someone who likes to give an air of inevitable fate to perfectly avoidable effects they wish to produce.

This question arises when observing what happens in cultural journalism. Does cultural journalism consist of reflecting and disseminating cultural creations or shaping them beforehand by a criterion of journalistic interest? Which writer or playwright of today, desiring success as is normal, would dare to deviate from the current themes consecrated by the news of newspapers and TV? Who will dare to explore certain obscure depths that precisely because they are so, escape the grid of journalistic agenda interests? On the other hand, and complementarily, which cultural supplement editor, faced with a profound book and an appealing one, would prefer to publish a review of the former?

As the public only gets an overview of cultural production through what is published in the supplements, the result is that the face of culture ends up being determined, for all purposes, by the journalistic agenda, with its typical hierarchy of interests based more on the spectacularity of effects than on the depth of causes. The circle is complete when a new generation of artists and intellectuals, raised and educated in this atmosphere, voluntarily shapes their production according to the standards of journalistic culture, which they identify with “the” culture, with the only possible culture. And when culture, to be news, has to be reduced to a commentary on the news, then human intelligence is under the most serious threat it has faced since the dispersal of the Roman cities isolated men in distant and mutually hostile fiefs at the beginning of our era. Perhaps more fearsome than isolation in space is imprisonment in the cocoon of time: the hypnotic absorption of all attention in an obsessive immediacy, depriving humans of the possibility of that historical and critical distance that is the principle of ascending to a universal view of things. The primacy of the press in the creation of culture is the consecration of a more overwhelming and brutal temporal provincialism than any regional provincialism, as it camouflages itself in the deceptive splendor of a false quantitative universality, created by global telecommunication networks and computerization. For the profusion of data available to the consumer does not elevate their criteria or expand their perspectives of interpretation, since the values and assumptions that frame the image of the whole are always, in the final analysis, those of a closed immediacy, which autocratically takes itself as the absolute standard for judging times and peoples.

In this complex of interconnected phenomena lies the root of the global crisis in education, as well as the prodigious lowering of the intellectual level of the literate and university-educated masses, which is observed today in all Western countries and is even more alarming in young nations, deprived of a millennia-old background of culture and traditions that could partially compensate for the effects of this lethal process. It is also the profound cause of the discrediting of human intelligence, increasingly accused of cognitive impotence by thinkers incapable of perceiving that the defect lies not in intelligence itself, but in the historical-social conditions in which it is exercised, in an era that has abdicated the right to know the truth in order to know only the present.

The cultural journalist who reflects on these questions for a few minutes will be overwhelmed by the almost crushing feeling of the responsibilities that fall upon him. Squeezed between the functional obligation to make journalism in a journalistic manner and the ethical obligation not to distort the reality of cultural goods to fit them into journalistic interests, the most likely way out that he will find is that of legitimizing conformism, which will turn against the demands for autonomy of cultural production to condemn them as reactionary pastism and to advocate for a “new culture,” deterministically shaped by mass media. It won’t cost him much to give this convenient rationalization of interests the appearance of a profound theoretical speculation, which will also give him the right to those small academic glories that not even a global massification apostle can do without.

But all this is pure anesthesia of conscience. No embellishing theorizations can hide the press’s responsibility for the fact, consummated or not, of the world’s dumbing down. And that the individual journalist can do little or nothing to stop the widespread necrosis of intelligence does not mean that he should adorn the dying with ribbons and frills of a newborn, to give it the appearance of a new dawn of the spirit.

Being no Lenin to tell others “what to do,” I allow myself to recount only two personal experiences here that revealed to me to what extent cultural journalism arrogates to itself the right to shape and determine cultural production.

The first case was an article I sent some months ago to the Ideias supplement of Jornal do Brasil. In it, I commented on the book by the American sociologist Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, naturally emphasizing its merits but pointing out that the work, intended to be a postmodern inversion of José Ortega y Gasset’s classic, The Revolt of the Masses, seemed to ignore Ortega’s thought since it presented as new, his own ideas that were, in every way, identical to Ortega’s. Particularly, Lasch claimed that the spirit of arrogant and disdainful provincialism that Ortega attributed to the “masses” was now a characteristic trait of the “elites,” especially university-educated ones. I stated that Lasch had been deceived by the apparent meaning of the term “masses,” failing to realize that the nuevo bárbaro that Ortega called the “mass man” was not the proletarian, the common man, but “mainly the most knowledgeable professional ever, but also the most ignorant: the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, the scientist.” In short, Ortega had said the same thing as Lasch, sixty years earlier. But I continued, the misreading Lasch made of him was not an individual and isolated error: in general, Ortega had been widely misunderstood outside Spain, especially in the United States, where his interpreters, more attentive to titles than to texts, turned The Revolt of the Masses into an apology for fascist reactionism, unaware that at the same time, in the country where the book was read in its original language, its author was being elected as a deputy in a left-wing coalition with the enthusiastic support of Federico García Lorca; and they persisted firmly in their cretinous interpretation, even after learning that the philosopher was among the first on the list of those banned by the Franco regime. That Lasch still followed the old collective misunderstanding was symptomatic, I said, of the debilitation of American intellectuality, a decline that even affected the most powerful and courageous of its critics. But my article went further, stating that if Lasch had a national excuse for his ignorance, we Brazilians could not make a similar claim since similar analyses to his and Ortega’s had already been published in Brazil in the 1950s by the historian and critic Otto Maria Carpeaux, in a long and memorable essay reproduced in Origens e Fins.

What did the editor of the Ideias section do with my text? He cut everything that referred to Ortega and Carpeaux and left only the praises for Christopher Lasch: an essay on the history of ideas that, without failing to pay some tribute to the recently deceased Lasch, deeply criticized American university culture, turned into an apologetic article that attributed to The Revolt of the Elites a novelty it did not really have.

Why did the editor do this? It could not have been for reasons of space, as the remaining part of the page was filled with an unnecessary illustration in eight columns. Personal animosity towards me? Impossible. He is an extremely courteous person, with a clean soul. Stupidity? Of course not: no one denies the sharpness of Cláudio Figueiredo’s intellect. The only explanation is that of the mechanics of editorial work, which selects and cuts automatically to prefer the new and simple, even if false, to the old and complex, even if true. And this is precisely what gives the episode its greatest significance: it transcends the sphere of exceptions and personal grievances, which my literary code of honor forbids me to print, and rises to the category of a symptomatic example of a general state of affairs. For, having followed a uniform criterion, the deletions made in my text were similar to many others, imposed on countless writings that were no longer molded and pre-cut according to the pattern imposed by the “product profile.” Repeatedly cutting, page after page, article after article, there is culture reduced to ancilla notitiarum, to a paper contour made in the image and likeness of the journalistic agenda.

But let us turn to the second example—and if there was a second example, it cannot have been because Providence decided to bless me personally with one of those successions of persecutory coincidences that instill in one’s brain a germ of paranoia. It is, again, a sample of the general, because if I cite only two, there have been many cases, involving me and other authors, who, reduced to the simplest expression by the infernal algebra of journalistic technique, found themselves saying what they had not said and thinking the opposite of what they thought, in favor of novelty and to the detriment of truth.

Some readers may have followed a controversy in O Globo between the author of these lines and the philosopher Gerd A. Bornheim from Rio Grande do Sul. Accused of uttering solemn nonsense in a conference reproduced by the Rio de Janeiro press, the professor replied that he had no explanations to give to a fool like me, and in turn, I retorted that anyone who avoids giving explanations for what he said is unworthy of being heard. This petty episode, however, could have been a serious and culturally relevant controversy if the editor of the Prosa e Verso section, Luciano Trigo, as amiable and intelligent as the editor of Ideias, had not imitated the mental tailoring of the competing product.

The article investigated the phenomenon of the pseudo-intellectual, the inept and glib doctor—a type so numerous and influential in our society that it became a character in the works of Machado de Assis, Raul Pompéia, Arthur de Azevedo, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, Fernando Sabino, Marques Rebelo, and countless others. The text went on to say that a person does not achieve such literary prominence if they do not also play a relevant role in the real world that fiction draws from.

Therefore, it was concluded that the intellecrasher, a name I gave to the character, was as real and active among us as the dishonest merchant in French literature (and in society), the rich seducer of maids in English literature, the intrepid social climber in American literature, the cruel landowner and drunken peasant in Russian literature. The continuation affirmed that the decline in the critical level of literary debates in recent decades created an environment conducive to the maximum proliferation of intellecrashers, and as a sign of this, pointed out that even competent and honest intellectuals had allowed themselves to say things in public that were far below the level that would be expected of them, confident that no one would make the slightest demand on them. Finally, my analysis was illustrated with two recent cases in which serious thinkers, corrupted by the general negligence of critical thinking, said gross nonsense in public, and no one noticed anything wrong. The first example was a lecture by Gerd A. Bornheim; the second, an article by José Arthur Gianotti; what both said showed a total ignorance of the subject at hand, which two decades earlier would have elicited immediate disapproval, but now passed as normal and acceptable. In both cases, my article pointed out and meticulously corrected every error, leaving no room for doubt. To top it off, the section regarding Bornheim emphasized that the responsibility perhaps did not lie with him but with the JB reporter who covered his lecture, and made several demands on the reporter to explain himself.

What did the editor do with my text? The most dense parts of the historical and logical demonstration were removed, the paragraphs referring to Gianotti were cut entirely, the demands on the JB reporter disappeared, turning it into a feeble protest against an isolated individual. And, naturally, Gerd Bornheim saw no reason to give a serious response to such feeble accusations. The whole thing was reduced to a vulgar journalistic exchange of blows between two guys, an event of no greater intellectual importance than the rivalry between Marlene and Emilinha Borba, and to this day, no one knows who died: I guarantee it was him, he guarantees it was me.

Again, nothing personal, just business: no suspicion against the person of the editor—only an absolute certainty against the automatic and unintelligent application of the rules of general journalistic technique to this specialized and peculiar sector that is cultural journalism. For, if the journalist cannot make a utopian effort to change the destinies of the world, he can, in fact, be no more realistic than the king, not rushing to consider as an accomplished fact something that is only a process in progress and, therefore, to a certain extent, reversible—the resistible rise of collective imbecility. The tyranny of the press over culture has generated the phenomenon that Pierre Bourdieu called fast thinking: the empire of the petty intellectual who, with the omnipresent voice of his journalistically molded opinions, stifles the contributions of heavyweight thinkers and gives an appearance of cultural decline to the production when it is only a decadence of the cultural debate, of that part of culture that is displayed in public. What is better, what is serious, goes into the trash, as it does not fit into the “product profile.”

But is it permissible for the profile of a product intended to reflect a sector of social life to overshadow the profile of that sector itself, to the point of completely absorbing it? Is it permissible, for example, for economic journalism to disregard the concepts and propositions of economics to replace them with journalistic precepts? Is it permissible for medical journalism to ignore the principles of medical science and replace them with the style book? Is it permissible for the dictatorship of verbal and graphic form to so shamelessly impose itself on the substance of facts and ideas?

Cultural journalism, like any other sectoral journalism, has a duty of objectivity towards the specific sector it covers: culture—literature, art, philosophy, science—has its own criteria of value that cannot be rashly and crudely replaced by journalistic value criteria without serious damage to culture itself. Damages for which the blame does not lie solely with the macroscopic and impersonal forces that determine historical events, but with every human individual who, out of comfort, laziness, or cowardice, hides behind them their personal responsibility.

1996-02-07

The imitation of literature

The article by Wilson Martins about the “amateur novelists” (O Globo, section Prosa & Verso, February 10) brings back a forgotten distinction: the imitation of literature is not literature. The difference is evident: literature absorbs, extends, and seeks to surpass the universal tradition of the art of writing; the imitation of literature, ignoring this tradition, merely copies its most popular products. It is a difference of historical perspective: in every authentic literary work, the entire evolution of literature is implicitly present. In its imitation, only the fabric of contemporary conventions and tastes is embedded, devoid of its historical background, taken abstractly and in the air as the supreme and final model of human imagination. The literature of imitation imprisons us in the confines of a compressive present, separating us from the humanity that came before us.

However, this distinction is evident only to those who are familiar with literary tradition, to those who have, through self-education, elevated themselves to a historically grounded conception of the universally human. To those trapped within the iron circle of the present, it remains invisible and inconceivable.

Yet, the present calls us increasingly with the powerful appeal of news, marketing, and rapidly changing fashions, threatening to cast out of everyday communication — and imprison in a vaguely identified isolation associated with marginality and madness — anyone who refuses to keep up with them. However, updating oneself is not merely staying informed; it involves absorbing new assumptions that, embedded in the fabric of language, condition the very possibility of communication. The meanings of words are changing at an increasing speed, and with them, we acquire new feelings and reactions, adapting, willingly or unwillingly, to the customs of the day. Our communicability is directly proportional to our plasticity, to our complete lack of principles. Updating oneself requires less intellectual capacity than massive doses of opportunism, a quantity that can only be provided at the expense of other abilities, including the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad, and… literature from pseudoliterature. And as updating demands more and more dedicated attention, it eventually becomes a special form of education, with its professors, pedagogues, norms, top students, and failures. It is journalistic education, opposing the old humanistic education. The latter sought to give people a vision of the universal; the former seeks to immerse them in the current, even if it means depriving them of that critical distance from the present, which is a prerequisite for ascending to a universal understanding of things.

Now, from the perspective of journalistic education, the distinction between literature and pseudoliterature, or even sub-literature, tends to become increasingly irrelevant: a terribly bad book, by the standards of literary art, may be much more significant regarding the desires of the day — the “aspirations of our time” — than a great work of art. And since the Brazilian Constitution itself (art. 216) defined as cultural heritage anything that testifies to what happens in this country — disregarding any considerations of quality, aesthetics, morals, or cognition — the conclusion is that, thanks to an alliance between public authorities, the communication market, and the professionals of updating, the vastness of momentary interest tends to replace, gradually and inexorably, any criterion of universal value, including the literary one. The past does not speak, and past humanity is not included in the market surveys.

Furthermore, the quantitative growth of the class of “cultural producers” contributes to this effect — a noisy mass that is increasingly molded in the form of journalistic culture, devoid of any more universal conception and imbued with the edifying belief that their main mission is to echo — and if possible, vociferate — the sacred “aspirations of our time.” But “our time,” by definition, means nothing more than the period in which an aspiration continues to be a topic of debate: it is the duration of news. And when culture, to be news, has to reduce itself to an echo of the news, then human intelligence is under the most serious threat it has faced since the dispersion of the Roman cities isolated people in distant and mutually hostile fiefdoms. More formidable than isolation in space is the prison in the cocoon of time: the primacy of journalistic immediacy in the creation of culture is the consecration of a temporal provincialism more crushing and brutish than any regional provincialism, for it camouflages itself in the deceptive splendors of a false quantitative universality, created by global telecommunication and computer networks. Since the abundance of data available to consumers neither elevates their intelligence nor expands their universe, as long as the values and assumptions framing the overall image are always, in the final analysis, those of the present closed in on itself, which imperiously takes itself as the absolute standard for judging times and peoples.

There is no shortage of theorists legitimizing this state of affairs intellectually. Two neocretons who philosophized about the May '68 revolt, Philippe Rivière and Laurent Danchin, advocated a new basic education in which philosophy and literature would be replaced by informatics, Marxism, and pop music. Ideas like these have penetrated deeper and are more alive in Brazil than anywhere else in the world: according to Professor José Arthur Gianotti, the mission of art is “to uphold popular desires.” And according to the President himself, culture is the same as show business — a highly moral business, no doubt, as it conditions its profits on the services it provides to “popular causes.” The measure — self-attributed, naturally — of the merits acquired in the service of the cause can be assessed by the recent dispute among samba musicians over the millionaire remuneration for participants in the year-end show organized by the Rio de Janeiro City Hall: at the moment a samba musician attains the status of national glory, augmented with the moral authority of a public defender of the good, for whom any remuneration is too little and humiliating when it comes from a source other than the cause, who has the strength to expel them from literature? In the face of the “aspirations of our time,” literature is unnecessary; Chico Buarque is necessary. Because if the intellectual riffraff of show business has almost officially assumed the moral pedagogy functions once entrusted to religious, philosophers, and men of letters, it is because the very idea of culture has undergone a mutation from which it may never recover: reduced to an opportunistic synthesis of show business and agitprop, it merges the pleasures of capitalism with the flattering moral pretexts of socialism, fully satisfying the “aspirations of our time,” among which is not included that aspiration for the universality of spiritual values, which is implied in all great literature.

Thus, the distinction that Wilson Martins seeks to restore is valid and evident for those who know what he is talking about. However, the mental formation of the current “cultural producers” is precisely directed at making them increasingly uninterested in knowing what people like Wilson Martins and the author of these lines are talking about. To speak their language: They don’t care about us129.

Devotees and negligent

The interview with Bruno Tolentino (O Globo, March 7, 1996) builds upon the same underlying distinction as implied by Wilson Martins: the imitation of literature is not literature. As a link in a millennial chain, authentic works open up the grand theater of the world, where different eras and peoples engage in dialogue. Imitation, however, traps us within the confines of a compressive present, separating us from the humanity that came before us. Based on this distinction, which should be obvious to every educated person, Tolentino poses a crucial question to intellectuals: should we offer our children the opportunity to ascend to a universal understanding of things or subject them to the market demands of the moment?

From this question, some seem to have only grasped the part that touched their hearts the most: the threat to the reputation of their beloved Caetano. As if this were not enough to reveal the pettiness of their horizon, some among them even lost all composure in the face of the profanity. For not even the most fervent evangelical orator would have the naivety to declare their object of devotion “untouchable,” as Professor Bella Josef did, considering that Christ allowed himself to be touched and tested by the skeptical finger of Thomas. Thus, the cult of the Bahian idol has already exceeded the boundaries of mystification and turned into pure and simple insanity.

However, this is not an isolated case. Even Antonio Callado and Ferreira Gullar, who are not faithful tithe-givers, have avoided addressing the forbidden subject: their fear of offending devoted sensibilities outweighs their sense of intellectual responsibility. Ironically, it falls upon all true men of letters to raise the question: why do Caetano’s little writings occupy a place in the curricula that should belong to Quarup and Poema Sujo? Allowing the insignificances of pop music to usurp the dignity of serious literature is not modesty, it is cowardice.

No speech could describe with such eloquence as this silence the inhibition of the national intelligence in the face of the thunderous advance of pseudoculture wrapped in the sacred pomp of the electric trio. Not even the blatant stupidity of the prostrate academic before her untouchable PãodeAçúcar illustrates our intellectual poverty as well as the omission that leaves the destiny of national education in the care of the answering machine: “The intellectual consciousness of the country cannot answer at the moment: it went out for a walk with Isabelita dos Patins. On the third beep, please leave your message with the doorman of Canecão.”

Among the causes of this phenomenon lies repressed guilt. In the 1960s, many intellectuals rejected Caetano as escapist and anti-national; then, seeing him mistreated by the dictatorship, they hastened to flatter him to capitalize on his popularity, covering the rebel who had no cause with an opportune simulacrum of one: they went from intolerance to hypocrisy. The reverential fear they now dedicate to him has the typical histrionic exaggeration of a compulsive purging of poorly acknowledged remorse. The grotesque hyperbole of their praise is a “defense” in a psychoanalytic sense, intended to repel from the subconscious the compromising origin of the cult: neurosis, as a wise man said, is a forgotten lie in which you still believe. Caetano, like all idols, is a ghost haunting the false consciousness that worships him. Free yourselves from his lie, and you will see him reduced to his true size.

But do this quickly, before History condemns you for having sacrificed the education of millions of young people on the altar of a petty show business reputation.

Date: March 11, 1996

Letter to Oxfordgrad

Rio, February 10, 1996

Most Illustrious Mr. AUGUSTO MASSI - Caderno Mais! - Folha de S. Paulo

Dear sir,

I am writing to you without the slightest illusion of seeing my words published, at least without strategic cuts that strip them of their argumentative substance, reducing them to mere pretexts for giving a triumphant air to any idiotic response that is plastered alongside them.

In truth, I am not writing this letter to appear in Folha, but to make it another chapter in my forthcoming book, The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Incultural Current Affairs, to be released later this year. As you can see from the title, the book is entirely dedicated to the study of the cerebral manifestations of people like yourself. That is the reason why I am sending you these lines. I thought it would not be appropriate to publish this chapter without prior notification to the character involved: it would be turning someone into a fool who is already a fool in himself—an intolerable redundancy, aesthetically speaking. And in case you sniff a somewhat disrespectful intention in my words, know that your olfactory cells are not entirely deceiving you. But don’t tell me you are offended. The subject I intend to talk to you about is your article “The Mask of the Unembodied Sublime,” and I cannot believe that when you wrote it, you thought you were doing something worthy of respect. Innocence has its limits.

For instance, I cannot believe that you, in reducing Bruno Tolentino’s literary reputation to a mere effect of provincial wonder before the poet’s international friendships, genuinely ignored the distinction between being friends with famous writers and receiving critical praise from famous writers. You depict Tolentino as “a typical figure of our literary circle—the friend of notables,” and cite two similar cases: Gerald Thomas, the friend of Samuel Beckett, and Diogo Mainardi, intimate with Gore Vidal. However, it is not known that Beckett or Vidal ever attested to the artistic quality of these friends' works. It is also not plausible that our audience, however rustic it may be, would be more impressed by Tolentino’s VIP friendships than by the praise for his work, given by Jean Starobinsky, Saint-John Perse, and Yves Bonnefoy, among others. It is an elementary distinction that could not have escaped you, even if you tried your hardest to keep it hidden from the public eye.

I also cannot believe that, not being even a tiny bit vain, you seriously believe that it is more provincial to give credit to the critical judgment of Bonnefoy or Starobinsky than to that of Augusto Massi130.

Furthermore, I cannot seriously admit that you, seeing so much provincialism in the local audience’s enchantment with the poet’s famous friendships, did not see any in the skeptical disbelief that calls them into question131.

However, the most inadmissible of all, excluding the hypothesis of pathological innocence, is that you genuinely believe that it is typical of national provincialism to give credence to critical recommendations that were previously accepted in Bristol, Essex, and Oxford. Because that would mean that those places, preceding us in foolish wonder before a work that only has value through self-promotion, are even more typically Brazilian and rustic than Rio and São Paulo. It is also implausible to assume that, in your opinion, Starobinski and others wrote praises for Tolentino in order to make the Brazilian public believe them, instead of the Europeans to whom they were addressed, and to whom, at that time, all of the poet’s written production was aimed. For that’s the crazy hypothesis implied when you say that we are the gullible ones, not the Europeans who applauded Tolentino before us; or that, or even crazier, not only the three mentioned figures but also W. H. Auden and Giuseppe Ungaretti would have praised Tolentino’s poetry out of pure friendship, abandoning all critical probity, and setting up a monumental hoax that only Augusto Massi’s providential acumen could free us from. Lastly, it cannot be that you, in full use of your neurons, imagine that the national literary circles were so subserviently rustic as to wait for European consecration to recognize a Brazilian poet, when in the 1960s, before European exile, he was already fully recognized here by the applause of Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Lêdo Ivo, Ênio Silveira, and many others.

No: no one can believe that you write these things seriously.

But you go even further. You tell us that you see, in the verses of As Horas de Katharina, a poetry that is both “of customs” and “written by a late symbolist.” Should we then believe that a literature professor at USP is unaware of the definitions of historical styles? That he does not know that literature of customs does not exist in symbolism?

But, not content with that, you still tell us that this literature of customs describes “the spiritual adventure of a Christian conscience,” as if it were possible for an intellectual authority of your stature to ignore that all literature of customs is, by definition, alien to these mystical altitudes. Or do you really not know? After all, the writer who could invent something like symbolist-spiritualist literature of customs would indeed have performed a tour de force worthy of the praise of many Starobinskis.

Here the terms of the problem are better defined: either you are being tricky, or you are an ignorant pretending to be smart.

This last hypothesis is reinforced by some indications, such as the fact that you, in the tone of someone stating the most obvious and well-known thing, qualify Alberto Torres as a “conservative,” ignoring the entire line of research that, started more than thirty years ago by Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, has already shown the fallacy of that label.

Another indication is that you qualify the political engagement of Os Deuses de Hoje as outdated, showing that you did not even read the dates of composition of the poems, which attest to their contemporaneity with the events that inspire them. It also indicates that you did not read Os Deuses de Hoje because you accuse the author of “ignoring the relations between individual exile and collective political process,” when these relations are precisely the book’s only theme. Perhaps you want to say that they are not as described in the book, but in that case, you should give us some idea, however vague and allusive, of how they really are. But you carefully refrain from touching on this point, which leads me to suspect that you are completely ignorant of them.

There are strong arguments in favor of the trickery hypothesis as well. For a trick, a real trick (if it is not a verbal quid pro quo of someone who simply cannot write?), is to say that Tolentino, by attributing the authorship of his classically styled poems to a 19th-century nun, “hid behind a modern mask.” You, I say, haven’t seen anything yet: Marguerite Yourcenar made herself even more modern when she disguised herself as a Roman emperor.

But it is not only Tolentino and Yourcenar who attribute their words to others. You know how to do that too, as evidenced by the fact that, in explaining Tolentino’s literary fame exclusively through friendships and vain self-promotion, you also write that “from time to time, someone threatens to expose the supposed charlatan,” trying to give the impression that it is someone else and not you who both threatens and supposes at the same time.

Now, someone who is so clever cannot be so foolish at the same time, unless he possesses these two qualities on different levels. For it seems to me that this is precisely the solution to the problem exposed above: you are as ignorant and foolish in literature as you are skilled and sharp in malevolence.

But, like innocence, cleverness has its limits. No matter how skillfully you jump from one pretext to its opposite, in the end, you show us only this: that you do not like the poet very much, but you do not know very well why you do not like him. And if, to express this feeling, you have to weave such a web of misunderstandings and contradictions, it is because it is typical of the human being, when he takes a dislike to someone for irrational reasons, to invent all sorts of contradictory arguments against him, condemning him by hook or by crook.

For the only proper critical objection that you make to Tolentino’s poetic work, hidden behind all your verbiage, is that besides being archaic in form, it is not very progressive in content. However, the value of this objection is evident in the following lines, published in an editorial of the Communist Party’s newspaper thirty-three years ago, which condemned the simplistic criticism of bipolar classifications: "According to this scheme, all we have to do is classify people, actions, and facts as ‘revolutionary’ or ‘reactionary.’ Once this is done, the ‘task’ is complete. How can we understand reality while maintaining this attitude?"132

By merely changing the words “reactionary” and “revolutionary” to their fashionable equivalents, “conservative” and “progressive,” we have a perfect portrait of your critical method, so crude and simplistic in its schematism that three decades ago it was dismissed even by card-carrying communists. Try being as archaic at Oxford as you are.

To conclude these considerations, I wish to lighten your task by providing you with some of the sordid motivations with which you may explain, in a scathing reply, my decision to write this letter:

1st: I want to make the public believe that I am a member of Tolentino’s VIP circle.

2nd: I want, mutatis mutandis, to self-promote at the expense of an Augusto, just as Tolentino did with the other.

3rd: I cannot stand any longer to be featured in Mais!

4th: I have a secret agreement with the poet Bruno Tolentino for mutual social climbing and defense of our reputations.

5th: Bruno Tolentino and I are secretly a gay couple.

6th: Bruno Tolentino paid me to write these things, or worse yet, promised to pay me and didn’t.

7th: I write them for free because I am a compulsive sycophant.

8th: I do not exist and I am a pseudonym of Bruno Tolentino.

9th: Bruno Tolentino does not exist and is a pseudonym of the person who now bids farewell to you,

Sincerely,
Olavo de Carvalho

Historical reasons for a misunderstanding133

MR. LEANDRO KONDER, a man who feeds on and has lived off mistakes for decades, did not step out of his element when he wrote about Bruno Tolentino’s controversy against the empire of show business in the country of letters (O Globo, March 17, 1996). He claims that the border between the serious and the pop, prevailing in the rest of the world, was abolished in Brazil due to serious “historical reasons” that Tolentino is unaware of because he had been absent from the country for thirty years. Well, I have not been absent, and I know them perfectly well. It happened like this:

1st In the 1960s, the left, cornered by the dictatorship, took refuge in the cultural and university ghetto, imposing there a hegemony similar to what the right exercised in the surrounding territory.

2nd Shortly afterward, humiliated by the defeat of the guerrilla, they found salvation in Eurocommunism, in whose works, the prophet Antonio Gramsci provided a new and opportunistic definition of “intellectual”: according to Gramsci, an intellectual was anyone who had the means to spread revolutionary ideology. Quoting myself:

"The Gramscian concept of an intellectual is quite elastic: it includes accountants, bailiffs, postal workers, sports announcers, and show business people. As formulating and disseminating class ideology is the only intellectual task that exists, a showgirl who shakes her rolls in a protest performance can be much more intellectual than a philosopher."134.

3rd Once the meaning of “intellectual” was expanded, it easily accommodated Caetano and tutti quanti, abolishing the ad hoc distinction between the cultured and the uncultured.

4th After overthrowing the dictatorship, the left did not relinquish its control over cultural means; on the contrary, it expanded its domains by taking over ministries, official cultural protection organizations, newspaper and TV directorships, etc., and started hegemonically determining values, the selection of prestigious figures, and even the meaning of words. Hence, the Gramscian conception of an intellectual became commonplace, and forgotten were the reasons of passing opportunism that had led to its adoption, acquiring the status of an obvious, unquestionable, and enduring assumption. The confusion of terms resulted in a jumble of values — and Caetano, an “intellectual” in the Gramscian sense, is still mistaken for an intellectual strictu sensu.

It is precisely because I understand these historical reasons, realizing that they no longer hold validity outside the framework of the fight against dictatorship (if they ever did), that I believe Tolentino is right to demand a return to the normal sense of a hierarchy of values temporarily abandoned for political opportunism. By appealing to “historical reasons” without stating what they are, Mr. Konder cloaks them in an aura of pure mystification that dissipates as soon as we know them. Stripped of this aura, they become reasons in favor of Tolentino’s arguments.

But while the poet has been away for thirty years, Mr. Konder has taken the opposite journey, immersing himself in Brazilian provincialism and failing to observe what was happening in the world. The proof of this is that he regards the proposal to abolish the distinctions between serious and pop culture as exclusively Brazilian, ignoring that it was also advocated in other countries for different reasons, as done, for example, by Frank Kermode in England, Laurent Danchin, and Philippe Rivière in France, etc. However, in those places, the proposal, lacking an immediate pretext of political utility on which to rely, was quickly discredited, whereas the Brazilian left, unable to overcome the trauma of the dictatorship, still mechanically and faithlessly repeats the linguistic rituals that once served as their neurotic defense against the malevolence of the environment. When we free ourselves from the ghosts of the past, we will also be free from the Gramscian mistake that equates Caetano with Drummond. But Mr. Leandro Konder, who has made this mistake the reason for his existence, cannot naturally free himself from it with great ease.

The VIPs and the differences

FEARFUL THING is to argue with an authorized spokesperson of the “true intellectuals”. At the slightest slip, he kicks us out of the club. Bruno Tolentino, a poet laureated in three languages, fell into the sin of reactionism and was booted into the outer darkness, reverting to his original nobody status. The sentence was signed (in the Jornal do Brasil of March 30, 1996) by the very esteemed Roberto M. Moura, invested with his authority as a master’s student at UFRJ.

The circle is actually named VIP: True Progressive Intellectuals. In common usage, the name is abbreviated because it is understood that intellectual and progressive are the same thing. Progressivism, in turn, consists of abolishing differences:

"It cost us a lot — Mr. Moura135 recounts — to overcome certain prejudices. Tear down intellectualoid borders, area demarcations. Make the elite accept Chiquinha Gonzaga. Drink from Pixinguinha’s fountain with Radamés' endorsement. Read Caymmi as the personification of Northeastern identity, at the same level as Guimarães Rosa synthesizes Minas Gerais."

Some will find strange, in this paragraph, the first person plural, because when Caymmi was recognized, around the 1930s, Mr. Moura did not exist. But this does not matter. The true intellectual is collective, as Gramsci said, one for all and all for one, and Mr. Moura, by attributing others' actions to himself, proves to be an authentic VIP.

In vain, someone will argue with Mr. Moura that area differences are not the same as level differences. Seen horizontally, as documents on the lives of their respective regions, Guimarães and Caymmi are worth the same: one is no more Minas Gerais than the other is Bahian. They are equivalent in their respective regional expressiveness. Vertically, however, Guimarães reaches altitudes and depths that are outside of Caymmi’s world, and therefore becomes universal: any man, of any nationality, can read Guimarães to know himself and not only to know Brazil; whereas in Caymmi the local reference is also the extreme limit of his intellectual significance. It boils down to the difference between historical importance (or anthropological) and intellectual value (or pedagogical)136.

But this difference, like all others, is odious to a progressive. Like all VIPs, Mr. Moura did not come to differentiate: he came to confuse. Hence, he condemns as “spongy reactionism” Tolentino’s effort to restore a difference between the greater and the lesser, the better and the worse, the vertical and the horizontal. The reader will find strange the term “spongy”, as a sponge is what absorbs, while Tolentino’s distinctions expel and separate, which is exactly the opposite. But the distinction between suitable and unsuitable figures of speech is also deeply reactionary. Hence, Mr. Moura used “spongy” as he could have used “blue” or “stratospheric”: in democratic-progressive writing, all adjectives are equivalent, just like Chiquinha Gonzaga and Beethoven.

But Mr. Moura hates not only differences: he also hates everything that is static. A man of history and time, he moves forward, he flows, and naturally does not look back to read what he wrote, an act of hideous reactionism that would require crystallizing, in the ahistorical simultaneity of logical nexuses, words written at various moments of the temporal flow.

Hence, having leveled Bach and Pixinguinha, he is outraged when someone levels Caetano to Mamonas Assassinas or “to TV stars enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame”, without noticing that this second and more radical leveling is the inevitable day after of the first. For, once the criterion of intellectual level that differentiated Caymmi and Guimarães is abolished, there remains no other standard of aesthetic evaluation but the anthropo-sociological typicality, horizontal and quantitative; and in light of this standard, there is no denying that the Mamonas and other stars are much more representative of current society than Caetano or Chico, as can be seen by their respective record sales. Answering for the consequences of one’s actions is, however, a reactionary habit, which implies a return to the past: therefore, the VIP class owes no explanations to logical coherence or historical consciousness.

A “Genoine” Leftist Man

CONGRESSMAN JOSÉ GENOÍNO today has the reputation of being a man respected equally by the left and the right. His intelligence, politeness, charm, and unassuming demeanor significantly contribute to this. So too does the elegance and integrity with which he fulfills the duties of parliamentary ethics, whether in front of his party colleagues or opponents. All this makes him a man worthy of the distinction that surrounds him today. But the main reason for his prestige is that he embodies, according to general opinion, the very personification of a “new left” – enlightened and democratic, devoid of any totalitarian pretensions and averse to the use of violence as a means of access to power.

Genoíno himself lends credibility to this interpretation, insofar as, without completely denying his role as a guerrilla, he links it to a specific moment in the past, as something suitable for that time and unsuitable for ours. Today’s Genoíno, unlike yesterday’s, believes more in the vote, dialogue, and the rule of law than in the brutal rhetoric of machine guns.

He endorses, on behalf of the left, the favorite maxim of the right: Times have changed. And as both right and left share the pious belief in the myth of progress as a common dogma of their respective gospels, the congressman thus becomes a priest of the goddess before whom both churches' faithful prostrate themselves: Modernity.

However, more important than this is the moral side of the transformation. The revised and improved edition of Congressman Genoíno makes him, in the consensus of the opinion enshrined by newspapers and all good people, a different leftist: someone, in short, who, even in the decisive moments of radicalizations and the hardest confrontations, will always be more obedient to morality than to ideology, more faithful to the democratic commitment than to a strategy for the seizure of power, more attentive to the public word than to the secret loyalties of a conspirator and revolutionary.

If these qualities did not already outline, by themselves, the profile of someone fundamentally unfit for a political career, leaving unexplained the parliamentary success of such a man devoid of that minimum of Machiavellianism and hypocrisy, which common sense considers indispensable to such a profession, they would still impose, on the attentive observer and connoisseur of the history of the left, some rather disturbing observations.

Firstly, the congressman’s rejection of armed violence is not moral: it is strategic. In a certain political-social context, the use of weapons is sensible; in another, it becomes senseless. Therefore, it is not a question of rejecting terrorism, bombs, and carnage, the violent contestation of the established order, but merely of using them according to a diagnosis of the objective and subjective conditions that, at a certain stage of the historical process, advise or discourage them according to the conveniences of the revolutionary strategy. Only people totally ignorant of the history of the left – that is, the totality of our public opinion, including young university students – can imagine that the current attitude of Congressman Genoíno is, in this respect, something new and different. It is the literal and faithful repetition of a position already adopted, in various circumstances, by Marx and Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Guevara and Fidel Castro. Only anarchists and fascists, following Bakunin and Georges Sorel respectively, have the use of violence as an unconditional principle and a rule of permanent action. For communists, violence is and has always been instrumental and dependent on the strategic conveniences or inconveniences signaled by the realistic analysis of the historical picture. And this is precisely what it is for Congressman Genoíno, who, if sincere, will acknowledge that I accurately expressed his deepest thought on this point.

Secondly, it is a most notorious historical fact that the global left, in moments when convenience led it to predominantly adopt the peaceful and democratic path, always took undue moral advantage of this, giving the air of ethical virtue to what was merely a temporary strategic maneuver, ready to give way, at the first opportunity when necessary, to the massive use of bloody means. There have never been a shortage of devout audiences who, in phases of strategic pacifism, believed – out of ignorance or pure wishful thinking – they were witnessing the birth of a new, humanized, and redeemed left. This spectacle – with its cyclical counterpart of disillusionments and tearful self-critiques – has repeated itself dozens of times in the course of the leftist movement’s history.

Therefore, Congressman Genoíno is nothing new also under this aspect: by taking advantage of the mistake that takes for moral purity what is strategic cunning, he strictly continues within the traditional conduct pattern of the left. Whether he does this consciously or simply indulges himself in a state of moral intoxication where the applause of the deceived ends up deceiving the deceiver himself, I do not know: I do not know the depths of his psyche to know whether conscious Machiavellianism or false consciousness prevails in him; what I do know is that, in either case, he continues to be a typical character of the leftist circus, where there is only room for two characters, the ideological equivalents of Pierrot and Harlequin: illusion and cynicism.

Thirdly, there has never existed for the left the hypothesis of making a categorical choice between the armed and peaceful path, for the simple reason that any revolutionary strategy requires the use, either successively or simultaneously, of the two instruments. Between the weapons of rhetoric and the rhetoric of weapons, the left has always opted for both. No leftist revolution, anywhere in the world, has ever been made exclusively, or even predominantly, by one of these paths. The only distinction that applies is the following: as it is physically impossible for the same individual to participate in both at the same time, taking a seat in parliament on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and fighting guerrilla warfare in the jungles on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, a distribution of functions inevitably assigns some members of the leftist movement the gentler and more civilized role, others the more violent and wild one. Thus, Trotsky, in hiding, prepared the armed insurrection, while in the city the intelligentsia and leftist deputies in the Duma (Russian parliament) preached, in language perfectly compatible with order and laws, the defense of workers' and peasants' human rights. Only Lenin, from afar, was the head behind the two arms, which acted with total mutual independence and often antagonized each other.

In the same period when the young Genoíno was training for guerrilla warfare in Araguaia, the congressmen and senators from the left, in Congress, assisted by the urban intelligentsia and opposition press, were trying to prevent through legal and peaceful means the actions of the military government.

The left, at that time, did not choose the armed path: it added it, merely, to the parliamentary and legal combat, operating on two levels, like someone who keeps the adversary distracted with an abundant flow of arguments while gathering strength to kick them in the lower abdomen.

It is absolutely necessary, for the success of any revolutionary strategy, that the two hands of the revolution operate independently and without any sign of a unified command behind them. The convergence of the results of both - the shaking and destruction of the adversary - must seem, until the last moment, a pure coincidence. It is not uncommon for the strategic command to become invisible, refraining from interfering and letting the two wings act in a truly uncoordinated manner, only to force the unification of the movement at the moment of the outcome. This is precisely what Lenin did in his European exile. The command of a revolution is an evanescent and ambiguous being, who, while the waters flow in the desired direction, remains in the position of a discreet observer to whom nobody, at first glance, would attribute any significant power.

Now, there being no choice between legality and illegality, parliamentary action and war action, combat of words and military combat, but always convergence and articulation even behind the apparently incoherent duplicity of the two currents of action, congressman Genoíno knows that, in assuming his apparent option for the peaceful route, he is simply playing one of the roles of the revolutionary plot, sure that someone will be taking on the complementary role and doing the dirty part of the job, without compromising at all the good guy image that the circumstances and conveniences of the leftist strategy attributed at the moment to the person of the congressman.

José Genoíno knows that, excluded from his personal field of action, the violent part of the revolutionary action has by no means been excluded from the global strategy of the left. Rather, the role that today belongs to José Genoíno is the one that, in his guerrilla days, fell to Francisco Pinto in Congress, to Mário Martins in the Senate, to Ênio Silveira and I don’t know how many more in the cultural struggle, while the role that then was José Genoíno’s is played today by José Rainha and his legions of armed squatters.

And, if he knows all this, Genoíno also knows that his alleged option for the peaceful path is pure pantomime to disguise what is nothing more than a redistribution of functions according to the ages and talents of each combatant, within the framework of a leftist strategy that, today as yesterday, in Brazil as in Russia, argues above and hits below, with its two usual hands. If it wasn’t pure pretense of a faithful militant, if it was genuine and not just Genoínica, the refusal of violence would impose on the congressman the duty not only to vehemently condemn the war operations undertaken by José Rainha, but, with all logical consistency, the obligation to demand that they be punished with the rigor of the law, despite the ethical-social discourse that serves as their pretext. If, instead, Genoíno tacitly approves them and justifies them in the name of I don’t know how many moralizing rationalizations, spending on their behalf his own prestige of harmless pacifist, it is because he is precisely there for that purpose, to give violence the rhetorical coverage and political legitimization without which it would lose all aura of respectability and be condemned as pure and simple banditry. Having passed the age of shooting, which is a nasty thing, the congressman was transferred, in the periodic rotation of the leftist frames, to the beautification section.

All of this is glaringly obvious, and the fact that even literate people refuse to see it, or, seeing it, insist on hiding it from the eyes of others, can only be explained by the same mixture and alternation of naivety and cynicism, which I mentioned above, and which constitutes the typical mental recipe of the leftist audience, just as the Harlequin of false consciousness and the Pierrot of perfidious consciousness are the only characters on the stage of its fantasy.

I publicly challenge congressman Genoíno to prove with facts and reasons - and not by means of depreciative rhetorical artifices or sentimental appeals - that my diagnosis is false or deficient in some point. If he proves it, I am willing to abjure my opinion immediately.

03/05/96

Appendices

Ethics of the Brazilian intellectual or: How to become a Wonderful Person

EAGERLY WISHING to be admitted to intellectual circles, I set out to study the themes and language of cultural publications and the interviews that acknowledgedly literate people gave on TV. My intention was to understand the tastes and habits of these people, without whose company and applause life is, as everyone knows, tedious, boring, hellish. After a few months of investigation, I was able to outline a set of conduct norms, which I make available here to all those who, like me, combine a magical attraction to sophisticated circles with an uncoercible vocation for social climbing. Here you will find the formula that opens the doors to admission into the grand world of beautiful and significant people, far from the grey opacity of anonymity.

But don’t think this is a rigid model, a set of ready-made formulas that anyone can copy without the slightest creativity. What matters here is less explicit adherence to a known set of commandments, like the “politically correct” of the Americans, than a tone, a way, a subtle style by which the intelligentsia recognizes its typical members and distinguishes them from the undesirable, gate-crashers, freeloaders, and squares of all sorts. As you read the following precepts, try to go beyond the letter and capture, as they say, the spirit of the thing.

1– The right tone is generally complaining, against society and reality, but it must not fall into complete negativity and must remain soft enough to be able to join in with campaigns for ethics and citizenship, which require a certain optimism — that optimism capable of leading the various classes to congregate to promote class struggle in a fraternal way. You must not speak ill of anyone, except for those that the press has specifically reserved for this purpose: Collor, Maluf, Quércia, Ricardo Fiúza, the contractors137. The other famous people must always be mentioned as bearers of exalted qualities, preferably using the expressions “wonderful person”, “a very special human being”, etc. By name and individually, such expressions apply to figures from show business, business or cultural life, especially those you have never met but everyone says these things about. Impersonally and collectively, and at a hygienic distance in case of bad smell, they apply to the poor and victims, a category that includes street children, landless people, indigenous people, boys and girls in prostitution, leaders of the Red Command, women in general and especially those who are desperate to have an abortion, black singers who sell five million records, gays and lesbians, Betinho, presidential candidate Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and some bookmakers whose popular origin counts more than their bank balances; however, it excludes those pests who want to take care of our car and, generally, beggars (the literate have always been against giving alms in the street; before, because it delayed the revolution; now, because they find it an affront that these little guys appeal to the individual and apolitical charity of passers-by, boycotting Betinho’s campaign138). If by chance you are in front of a TV camera, there are no limits to the use of the expression “wonderful person”: but if it occurs to you to use it in relation to someone who has never been called that, do it quickly, before the next interviewee does it.

2– If you enter a verbal dispute, express your beliefs with strong conviction, but do not fall into the trap of trying to prove that they are true. If you can’t do it, you will be considered tedious and verbose. If you do, you will be hated as an intolerant and know-it-all. Above all, do not use logical arguments of any kind, which are considered authoritarian and repressive. Try something more liberal and progressive, like raising your voice, making faces, and jumping around like José Celso Martinez Correia, or emotional blackmail, which are considered legitimate and democratic means of persuasion. If they fail, resort to neurolinguistic programming, hypnosis, or some other form of subliminal manipulation, all of which are well accepted by the educated community as appropriate instruments to foster authenticity in human relationships. Whatever the case, repeat several times, during the performance, the motto: “There are no absolute truths”, and you will see that this idea makes people very happy and relieved, mainly because they would feel devastated if they came across any truth that refused to change according to their wishes. If you have physical charms, use them abundantly in defense of your theories: they are one of the strongest arguments among cultured people. If you cannot persuade anyone, at least you will acquire a reputation as a seducer, a word which, although it designates a crime foreseen in the Penal Code (Art. 217), has perhaps for this very reason become one of the highest compliments that can be paid to someone in intellectual circles.

3– Any ideas that are conservative or have the reputation of being so should always be treated as prejudices, no matter how conceptually elaborate they may be. Hence, the word prejudice should no longer generically denote any judgement given out of unreflective habit but rather label specific ideas, that is, those which are not highly appreciated in this select circle. If you learn to use the word prejudice properly, people will automatically agree with everything you say, as they are horrified by prejudices.

4– Identify the discriminated minority to which you belong immediately - as everyone belongs to one - and display it like an entry card: it entitles you to a warm welcome in this circle. Don’t claim that you don’t have one. If you’re not black, gay, Jewish, short, fat, or indigenous, you must at least have a small penis. You don’t have to go around telling everyone this; just say that you belong to the category of the physically disadvantaged, a term that has just landed and commands the utmost respect.

5– Regardless of the speaker’s social position and the source of their wealth, they must give the impression that they would have everything to gain and nothing to lose from a communist revolution. The socialite, as there are heaps among intellectuals, should always suggest that they sympathize more with the landless than with their board of directors at the bank.

6– When it comes to cultural manifestations, they should mainly express these collective feelings, and say nothing to the audience that they are not already willing to agree with beforehand. However, it’s important to give this homogeneous paste of concurrent opinions a status of heresy, of deviation, of original and nonconformist marginalism, so that listeners and spectators can all feel like heretics too, as the thing that makes a person feel the loneliest and most abandoned these days is to find themselves outside the category of the excluded.

7– On the topic of sex, you should say the same thing as everyone else, but always give the impression of being the first to do so, breaking established rules and defying the wrath of the repressive conventionalism with incalculable audacity. If you have to admit you’re heterosexual, do it discreetly. If you mention AIDS, do it in a tone of vague revolt against the establishment. If you feel bold, say a few words against the Pope, who didn’t let our mothers abort us, the scoundrel.

8– If someone asks you about your religion, choose one of these:

  • Elves.
  • None.
  • Afro.
  • New Age (imported or domestic).
  • Lair Ribeiro.
  • Light Satanism.

Never make the mistake of saying you’re Catholic, unless you’re known as a communist, in which case this extravagant choice will be warmly welcomed by all as a healthy manifestation of hypocrisy. Much of Lula’s prestige comes from people believing that he’s only Catholic for convenience.

9– When the conversation veers towards literature and a work you are unfamiliar with is mentioned, resolutely state that it breaks the conventions of the genre. You’ll please everyone and there’s no chance of being wrong, as for the last half-century, no work has been published in Brazil that doesn’t once again break some literary convention from the time of Walter Scott.

10– Visually, you should convey an impression of health, well-being, and wealth worthy of a real wonderful person, while verbally suggesting you’re a victim of a cruel, senseless world, where a malevolent God has abandoned us without any other help than condoms and Betinho’s campaign.

11– If you are asked about economy and politics, say one of these three things, or better yet, all of them:

  • “I’m against privatization - but this doesn’t mean I’m in favor of nationalization.”
  • "Socialism has failed and the solution for Brazil is PT (Workers' Party)."
  • “The important thing is that the movement of the mass doesn’t end up as a pizza.”

Collective Imbecile Award 1995

BEING THE AUTHOR OF A BOOK titled The Collective Imbecile. Brazilian Uncultural Current Affairs, which through ample exemplification demonstrates that something strange has been happening in the minds of Brazilian intellectuals for some years now, I decided to establish the Collective Imbecile Award 1995, to encourage and extol those men of letters who played prominent roles in the common effort of the intelligentzia to confuse rather than explain.

The title of the book and the Award is an allusion to Antonio Gramsci’s “collective intellectual” and, more generically, to all forms of collective discourse that dispense with the painstaking exercise of individual intelligence. For greater clarity, I define, as is in the book: "The collective imbecile is not just the sum of a certain number of individual imbeciles. It is, on the contrary, a collective of people of normal or even superior intelligence, who gather for the primary purpose of dumbing each other down and achieve reasonable success in this.”

Having established the Award, I cannot, no, I cannot refrain from attributing it to the one who has become, by words and deeds, in the Gramscian unity of theory and practice, the self-proclaimed spokesperson and, more than a spokesperson, the individualized incarnation of the collective imbecile.

It is not me, in fact, it is not me who confers this title on prof. Leandro Konder: it is he himself. This honor does not come from outside as a pasted contrivance, but from within, ab imo pectore as Horace would say, by a free self-affirmation of will that proclaims: I am, but who is not?

Even if we disregard the merits accumulated over some decades of Gramscian militancy, prof. Konder would already be deserving of the Collective Imbecile Award 1995 just for his article “The Stupidity of the Left”, published in O Globo on July 22.

With that power of synthesis that says it all in three pages, prof. Konder, in the aforementioned work, says everything — everything the Award Judging Commission needed to know about him to place him far above any potential competitors.

Firstly, in response to the President of the Republic, who labeled the left as “stupid”, he says that there are no reliable criteria for measuring stupidity and intelligence, whose assessment “is always conditioned by our particular culture”, not occurring to him that every judgment of stupidity refers precisely to the difficulty that certain people have in assimilating the data of their particular culture, and not of any other — which makes the claim of cultural relativism perfectly harmless. For example, a stupid Indian is one who cannot learn indigenous culture, a stupid German is one who cannot learn German, a stupid Brazilian intellectual is… well, let’s leave it at that.

After having relativized both intelligence and stupidity equally, he attributes to the latter a certain metaphysical primacy, stating that it “has something mysterious, immeasurable”, for which reason we should approach it “with a certain humility” — attributes that, lacking in intelligence, exempt us from approaching it with similar reverence and sacred fear. After all, everyone projects onto the divine mystery the qualities inherent to their own soul. Aristotle saw in intelligence and intelligibility the essential marks of the divine. Others prefer to be devotees of the asinine god, to fall on their knees — or on all fours — before the altar of darkness of Saint Ineptitude.

Thirdly, prof. Konder says that collective movements are above all human judgment of intelligence and stupidity, truth and error, reason and irrationality. What matters is "to recognize their force". Voilà! The kick of the asinine god is, in fact, more potent than the arguments of our vain intelligence; and, as the eminent mathematician, prof. J. Goebbels demonstrated, the truth of the proof is a function of the number of voices repeating the same nonsense. (Truly, I tell you: reverential fear before stupidity, transmutation of force into argument are essential traits of Gramscianism, a seasoning of pragmatism and Sorelianism with which prof. Konder’s guru gave a spicier flavor to the old Marxist soup.)

Fourthly, he attributes to Antonio Gramsci the lesson that we should not only contest the weak points of the adversary’s argument but also absorb its strong points — a teaching that was already found in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (1st century AD) and, before him, in Cicero’s Rhetoric. It’s just that the Gramscian “cultural revolution” banished these old books from Prof. Konder’s library. Following the Konderian example, 21st-century schools will teach children the truth: Antonio Gramsci invented Pythagoras' theorem and Aristotle’s logic; recent excavations suggest that he was also the architect of the Egyptian pyramids and the father of the first Neanderthal Man.

Finally, prof. Konder declares that, in the absence of an objective difference between intelligence and stupidity, these two words only serve for the purpose of insult. Here there is an obscure point in Gramscian thought: if in collective movements force is a kind of intelligence, would insults, provided they are repeated a certain number of times, not become perfectly valid arguments?

Prof. Konder has said nothing to us on this subject, but we can guess that he is currently working on his new work, which will be a pendant to Michel Foucault’s book, The Order of Things. It will be called Words and Kicks. In it, he will demonstrate, with an abundance of kicks, the absolute innocuity of all arguments, and will prove that, when uttered collectively and forcefully, an insult is worth many syllogisms, except when directed against the insulting collective itself.

A sample of intelligent application (in the Konderian sense) of this theory is given in the same article, where neoliberals in general are cataloged in the extreme right, which in a purely rational-theoretical mapping of ideological directions would leave us without a region to place, for example, prof. Plínio Correia de Oliveira — but, for the purpose of insult, it works perfectly well and is worth a thousand apodictic evidences, as it has been collectively repeated by the left.

Will it go to the throne or not?139

Post Scriptum

THE COLLECTIVE IMBECILE does not end here: it is immortal and limitless. Only this annotated version of a few of its thoughts ends, a poor and summary image of a being exceeding all human conception.

I regret not being able to include in these pages the argument of philosopher Renato Janine Ribeiro in defense of the human rights of dogs and cats, a unique application of Magri’s doctrine by a thinker who certainly does not count himself among the former minister’s admirers; nor anything about the Artepensamento and Libertinos/Libertários cycles, each of which would fill a volume; nor the vibrant — oh, how vibrant! — thought of Dr. Lair Ribeiro; nor the slightest mention to the teaching of philosophy in high schools, which opens unlimited perspectives for collective imbecility’s expansion; nor anything more than a brief mention of the symposium called to discuss the crisis of reason of Mr. Adauto Novaes. So many, but so many beautiful episodes were left out, that my bouquet of selected imbecilities pales and withers at the sight of its own insignificance.

The task was beyond my strength, and the spirit of Stanislau, summoned in a macumba session to help me, declined the invitation on the grounds of preferring the beatific enjoyment of oblivion, denied to us others, living in this lower world.

Self-interested merchants suggested to me Collective Imbeciles II, III, IV… n, followed by a record, t-shirts, buttons, sticker album, chewing gums, and finally a spectacular multimedia show, narrated by Vicentinho, with Carlo Bronco Dinosaur in the role of Antonio Gramsci and Dr. Enéas in that of Marilena Chauí.

I even thought about it. I tried to form a commission to plan the venture. However, my lawyer, Dr. Jayme Mesquita, coordinator of the same, when inviting to join it a known technical advisor of the Ministry of Culture, says to have received in response two wide eyes and the anxious question:

— Commission? How much? How much?140

So, really, there are no conditions. My anthology of The Collective Imbecile therefore stops here, with wishes of a prompt recovery and a happy convalescence to all dear readers.

Supplement

The sniper141: On Frederic Jameson

Until when will the Brazilian press continue to take Frederic Jameson seriously? He is illiterate, saying with the utmost candor that Taiwan is the Third World and that Ridley Scott is American. He is inarticulate and cannot complete a syllogism: he claims that Hollywood’s major companies stifle creativity, that governmental incentives sow the seeds of new talents, and in the next line, he complains that creative directors have disappeared in recent decades — precisely when official subsidies came, and Hollywood lost strength. Moreover, he has the sociological acuity of a hippopotamus: he celebrates music videos as manifestations of independent creativity without realizing that they escape the Hollywood standard only to the extent that they copy the aesthetics of advertising agencies — these, indeed, are always creative, but out of market necessity and not driven by high aesthetic-political ambitions funded by the government.

Why do we have to listen to Jameson’s nonsense as if they were lofty expressions of intelligence, instead of sending this individual back — along with Camille Paglia, Richard Rorty, and tutti quanti — to find an audience of fools in their own land?

I have written dozens of articles for O Globo and other newspapers denouncing imported pseudo-intellectualism. None have been published. The Brazilian press, united, will never be defeated: the protective barriers it erected around its idols are more solid than the Berlin Wall, something Gramsci, by the way, explains. But is intellectual servility of the colonized only an ugly thing when in service of the right?

It is true that, in Jameson’s case, he is a Marxist and a friend of the president — two qualities that are enough to elevate any fool to the status of a celebrated intellectual. But even a commodified product like the “Marxist intellectual” is no longer made as it once was: a Lukács would never be deceived, like Jameson, by Quentin Tarantino’s aesthetics, nor a Peckinpah with extra tomato sauce.

Earflap critics and hearsay criticisms142

In everything they write about Bruno Tolentino’s work, Brazilian critics seem to have solemnly committed to avoiding the subject. They beat around the bush, talk about the poet’s VIP friendships, suspicions surrounding his alleged curriculum, various oddities in his behavior, the relevance or irrelevance of his political attitudes, and finally, they confess in passing, as if not wanting to admit it, that his poetry is excellent. They never explain why it is excellent. On the contrary, they imply that its excellence is an accidental and secondary detail in a framework primarily composed of biographical accounts, sometimes picturesque and awe-inspiring, other times critical and grumpy.

However, showing more interest in an author’s personal conduct than in the content of their writings is a clear sign of intellectual inferiority in a literary journalist. Higher faculties of the mind do not survive prolonged encounters with trivialities. “Masters talk about things, servants about people,” wrote Henry James, certainly not foreseeing that these words would one day serve as a warning to a whole community of professional intellectuals, the Brazilian literary critics. Among the members of this group, only one, a single individual, honored the duties of their profession by subjecting Tolentino’s poems to an elucidating analysis instead of engaging in gossip worthy of a tabloid. I refer to Ângelo Monteiro, a critic for Diário de Pernambuco, whose article “A nova Comédia de Bruno Tolentino” will one day be read in anthologies when everything written by his colleagues from the “Wonderful South” on the same subject has rotted away in the trash bin of ancestral gossip143.

Not even the article published in O Globo on June 16, signed by a man of Wilson Martins' stature, will escape this fate. Having heard so much sly gossip from Paulo Graças, Roberto Mouras, and Augusto Massi, the old aristocrat from Curitiba has been contaminated by the spirit of household chatter and has temporarily, I hope, abdicated his role as the supreme book critic to become, like the others, an earflap critic.

Indeed, it is in the earflaps that almost everything concerning the book The Gods of Today provided material for Martins' critical speculations: the praises from European and Brazilian critics about Tolentino’s work. To not say that Martins only spoke about that, I admit he also made some remarks about the publication date, which is not found in the earflaps but on the title page. Nevertheless, Martins could have written his article without the slightest examination of the book’s content, and it seems that he did exactly that.

I had always noticed in this great spirit some brief cyclical fits of inexplicable intellectual pettiness. Undoubtedly, it was a relapse that led him, in his examination of The Gods of Today, to pay more attention to hearsay than to the text.

It has never interested me to investigate whether the critical praises displayed by Tolentino, as well as his alleged familiarity with figures of literature and arts in Europe, were authentic or feigned; such information would only perhaps provide some insight into the poet’s moral character but would not help me in any way to understand his written work. On the contrary, it would threaten to prejudice my understanding by introducing a distorting biographical bias.

Avoiding this bias should be the first precaution of an honest critique. Even if the hypothesis of Tolentino’s alleged European fame being nothing more than a farce staged by a demented person afflicted with self-promotional obsession were proven, it should not affect the objective evaluation of his poems. Firstly, because the vain histrionics and even the most blatant lack of character, far from being disqualifying vices preventing the correct exercise of poetic art, seem to be the distinctive mark of some of the greatest talents in modern poetry. According to the feigned moralistic criteria of Graças, Massi, and Martins, readers should avert their eyes from the most profound and significant aspects of Shelley, Byron, Verlaine, and Rimbaud’s verses, just to meticulously delve into the black box of their less commendable behaviors.

Secondly, I, who have closely interacted with Tolentino and experienced some embarrassing situations caused by certain extravagances in his conduct, strictly choose not to take these details into account when reading his poems. To me, his contributions to Brazilian culture far outweigh any discomfort he might have caused me personally. So why can’t these esteemed critics do the same, who are paid to speak to the public on behalf of culture rather than their own personal grievances? Why can’t they simply direct their gaze higher, especially since they have only had that antiseptic and neutral relationship of reader and author with the poet? Why should they lack that minimum level of generosity, which is not even a virtue but the least obligation of a man of letters in performing their public duty?

I do not know. I suppose that so much pettiness and vileness are merely reflections of the Brazilian intellectual devastation, which I have already described in the 360 pages of my book The Collective Imbecile and which, for that very reason, I would prefer never to speak of again.

What I do know is that, searching for trash in Tolentino, even a generally sensible man like Wilson Martins ends up indulging in the most absurd and delirious conjectures, without even realizing that he is moving from the sphere of literary criticism into that of accusing criminal conduct. If the recommendations for Tolentino’s work are false, as Martins insinuates, then the poet and his publishers will have committed the offense of “false advertising,” as stipulated and punished by the Consumer Protection Law, and Martins, in denouncing them, will have contributed less to raising the level of our literature than to purifying our publishing industry. Conversely, if the accusation cannot be proven, Martins will be the defendant in a case of defamation and slander against Bruno Tolentino and publishers Luiz Schwarcz and Alfredo Machado.

If the Paranaense critic, attending to his professional duty, had only made disparaging, even crushing and cruel observations about the poet’s intellectual production, nothing could be objected to him outside the realm of literary debate. However, given that there is no objection to Tolentino in the strict field of literary matters (except for the harmless clichés concerning his classical metrics, which I will address later), the grumpy Martins had no choice but to join the gossip circle.

The imprudent elderly man goes so far as to, in an effort to cast suspicion on Tolentino’s reputation, demand bibliographic sources for mere laudatory quotations printed on the earflap of a book. These sources, if reproduced there, would be an exceptionally peculiar editorial oddity, which the editors of Martins himself have sensibly abstained from committing.

Furthermore, the critic rushes to contradict his own words, admitting that the praises may have been written by the authors who signed them, but only “at the author’s request.” He says this with the air of someone revealing a sordid trick, but the only sordid trick here is trying to give the appearance of deception to something that is not deceitful at all. There is no dishonor in a critic’s praise being written at the author’s or the publisher’s request; obviously, a critic’s reputation as a critic relies on their ability to discern which requests are worth honoring and which are not. Or does Martins mean to insinuate that Starobinsky and Saint-John Perse suffer from a laudatory diarrhea, lacking enough constriction in their respective literary sphincters to deny expressions of appreciation to anyone who asks for it? Moreover, Martins has no idea whether these praises were actually requested, so his evaluation is merely a conjecture based on another conjecture. And when such conjecture is not aimed at elucidating the meaning of a work but at demoralizing a person, then the critic loses all credibility, whether to praise or to criticize.

Regarding the praises from European writers published in the English edition of About the Hunt, they were there; I saw them myself. They were never refuted by the authors who signed them; that much is certain. As for the national praises, I can attest to two of them: I read Arnaldo Jabor’s in the Rio de Janeiro press and later heard them directly from the columnist’s own mouth. I read Antonio Houaiss’s praises in a letter sent via fax to the poet, in that inimitably chess-like style that one would recognize even from the distance between Rio and Curitiba.

However, what a poor reader I would be if I needed the endorsement of Houaiss, Jabor, Starobinsky, or whoever else to perceive the greatness in Tolentino’s poetry, which is immediately evident to anyone with eyes to see! Martins himself recognizes it, despite his blatant animosity, by letting slip, in a tiny paragraph hidden among his web of insults, that the author of The Gods of Today is even superior to Drummond and Cecília Meirelles… O tempora! O mores! Shouldn’t the first obligation of the critic be to proclaim loudly the evident and proven greatness instead of trying to conceal it under a layer of uncertain and conjectural moral suspicions? Have these people lost all sense of proportion?

However, Wilson Martins does not stop at insinuations of illicit conduct. He also tries to alienate Tolentino from the left, suggesting that, sheltered for thirty years in a silent and comfortable European exile while Brazilians suffered the effects of the military dictatorship, the poet, now safe from any retaliation, published The Gods of Today to play the belated hero whipping a dead horse. But Martins has no authority to lecture anyone on behalf of the commitments of the left. Firstly, because he is a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger. Secondly, because during the dictatorship, he not only remained safe in a New York exile at least as comfortable as the poet’s in London but also enjoyed the protection of solid complicity with the prevailing state of affairs. Meanwhile, even an alienated activist like me, who is also no leftist, risked my life hiding fugitives as a form of moral protest, given the circumstances, even without any political conviction whatsoever. Thirdly, as a columnist for O Estado de S. Paulo, Martins had a platform there, while Tolentino, isolated from Brazil and entangled in a thousand personal troubles, had no means of making his words reach us. If anyone missed the opportunity to protest, it was Martins, who did not do what he could have done, whereas Tolentino neither did nor could.

However, the falsehood of the accusation goes even deeper. Martins assumes that The Gods of Today is a book of political protest against the military dictatorship. But this assumption is inconsistent. The Gods of Today is not “participatory poetry” in the sense of taking part in the struggles of the day. On the contrary, it is a reflection, a recapitulation of thirty years of personal and collective history, in the most legitimate—and obvious, to those who can read—sense of "emotion recollected in tranquillity"; and while it includes poems from two or three decades ago, it eventually places them within the framework of a global vision that reflects and condenses the passage of time. Martins allowed himself to be deceived—or pretends that the reader will be deceived—by the subject, by the material object of the poems, without noticing the formal treatment of the collection, marked by a constant nostalgia that distances them from pure political actuality and transforms them into a meditation on the past, something that, by definition, can only be done after the past has passed.

As a literary objection, the only thing that Martins' article presents is a somewhat ambiguous endorsement of the criticism that the so-called avant-garde directs at Tolentino’s rigorous classical metrics. This criticism is utterly foolish and gains credibility only on the assumption that readers, incapable of reading in foreign languages, shape their literary preferences solely based on local prejudices, where, unlike the rest of the world, disdain for metrics or the inability to practice them has become the defining mark of “modernity” and an inviolable clause of prevailing aesthetics. Looking at the world beyond our borders, we see that the strictest metrics are preserved in almost all giants of poetry in this century, starting with Yeats, Antonio Machado, García Lorca, not to mention Eliot, who only violates the rules of English versification to discreetly adapt his language to the much stricter requirements of Neolatin metrics. No critic in the civilized world has ever found this phenomenon to be an unusual manifestation of traditionalism, unlike the local bumpkins who only find Tolentino’s metrics strange because they cannot grasp the most prominent and, therefore, accidental and dispensable material signs of modernity.

Upon careful examination, nothing of Wilson Martins' article remains worthy of preservation. And if I recommend to the Paranaense critic to repent of his imprudent and vain words, to return to the honest exercise of his profession as a public educator, and to abandon the circles of gossipers, it is because I place him infinitely above those whose bad example inspired him. This country has declined a lot for us to witness such a sad spectacle, where a great mind stoops so low as to repeat earflap hearsay as if it were the gospel truth.

Moral regret and political regret144

Celina Cortes' report on the executions of prisoners carried out by terrorist organizations is excellent. It shows that the dictatorship did not have a monopoly on evil. I must request only a small correction. The book I will be launching on the next 22nd, at Teatro da Cidade, is not titled Bandidos & Letrados, although it includes as a chapter the text I published in Jornal do Brasil in December 1994. The book is titled O Imbecil Coletivo. Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras. It was not published by Topbooks, which only distributes it; it was published by the Editora da Faculdade da Cidade in partnership with the Academia Brasileira de Filosofia.

I take this opportunity to point out, in passing, the cynicism with which Deputy José Dirceu tries to sweep under the rug the murder of Márcio Toledo, claiming that it is an “already clarified” episode and trying to detect obscure political interests behind a report whose journalistic interest is obvious in itself and does not require further elaborate explanations. Why is it that when it comes to crimes of the dictatorship, the left is not satisfied with “clarifying” them, but demands long-term legal consequences, while regarding crimes of the left, “clarification” is deemed sufficient to appease a not very demanding conscience? What is not clarified is what a spy from a foreign country is doing in the National Congress when he should be in the trash can of “already clarified” betrayals. José Dirceu is someone capable of trying to deceive the public with the silly lie that he never worked for Cuba, that he stayed in Brazil, innocently walking the streets with a hooked nose made by a plastic surgeon who then returned his original upturned little nose. Like any liar, he has a soul burdened with suspicions and sees malicious intentions everywhere, projecting fiercely, while being incapable of feeling shame or remorse for any atrocity that is politically useful to his ideological faction.

It must never be forgotten that, for the mentality forged in Marxism, there is no moral evil, crime, or sin. There are only “political mistakes,” for which they repent - when they do so - not because they admit they are intrinsically evil acts, but because they did not yield the advantageous results they expected.

The image of romantic idealism retroactively imposed on the guerrillas also does not correspond to the facts. The aversion to all romantic enthusiasm, the cultivation of Machiavellian cerebralism, is a commandment, a point of honor, and a consecrated habit of Marxist organizations. I belonged to the Marighella wing of the PCB, witnessed the preparation of what would become the guerrilla movement up close, and never saw the slightest sign of romanticism or idealism inside it, except in the despised mob considered “cannon fodder.” What I witnessed was only a fanatical indignation that training eventually transformed into cold hatred and an absolute inability to see anything human in the face of the adversary, always reduced to a monstrous caricature. Many militants ended up permanently assimilating these traits into their personalities. This is precisely the case with José Dirceu, whose oratory still retains that typical “dog-like eloquence” of the compulsive accuser.

Racism and mental censorship

In the September 14th edition of Estadinho, the children’s supplement of O Estado de S. Paulo, Eduardo Martins, the author of Manual de Redação e Estilo of that newspaper, takes the initiative to indoctrinate children against the use of expressions like “the situation is black,” “black misfortune,” “black fate,” etc., which he considers racist.

Using children as “agents of social transformation” is a dishonest tactic of the modernizing state and activist intellectuals to inject new beliefs they desire into society, carried by small innocent individuals who can disseminate them into the common sense (in the Gramscian sense) without undergoing the filter of conscious discussion. This tactic, originally invented by totalitarian states, was later imitated by democracies and has now become commonplace, no longer shocking a public exhausted by repeated violations.

However, in this case, the ruse becomes even more perverse because it is employed to spread a habit that is harmful to intelligence: to repress, under political pretexts of the moment, the use of natural metaphors that date back to the origins of the human species and have become, over millennia, essential foundations of our perception of the world. The symbolism of light and darkness comes from the time of caves, from the primal sensations of terror and wonder. The “black” in “black fate” is not the brown of our brothers' skin, but the darkness of the night. It is pure and simple absence of light. The natural sense of this experience is perceived in an identical way by people of black and white races, as seen in the Yoruba color symbolism: our improvised teacher of color morality can verify it, for example, in the study Yoruba Traditional Religion by Nigerian philologist Dr. Wande Abimbola (Tehran, Imperial Academy of Philosophy, 1977). Only the obtuse mindset of modern activist intellectuals seeks to associate this noble archaic symbolism with racist motivations and ban it from human vocabulary as “politically incorrect.” Suppressing the use of expressions that reflect a primordial and universal experience is to prevent human beings from thinking, introducing a paralyzing blockage between perception and speech, perverting the entire sense of communication between sensation and thought, and neuroticizing and destabilizing the minds of children. And all for what? To meet the demands of a morbid and unnatural sensitivity that these same activist intellectuals, on the other hand, seek to cultivate in people of black race, in order to keep them perpetually immature and always manipulable by demagogic slogans.

If children are prohibited from associating the color black with danger and the suffering of light absence, they will be forced by the politically correct superego to deny the reality of their most direct sensory experience and replace it with a system of unnecessary and senseless verbal detours. Thus, they will learn to doubt what they feel and believe, instead, what they hear others say, becoming increasingly incapable of independent judgment and more in need of being guided by helpful intellectuals like Mr. Eduardo Martins. To hasten this result, Mr. Martins not only uses the Pavlovian method of creating irrational reflexes of repulsion towards certain words in children’s education but also reinforces his procedure through frank blasphemy with a false theological rhetoric, stating that using these words, in addition to being a crime, “is a sin.” I say that the sin is to disregard Christ’s warning: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

As Christopher Lasch astutely observed, the new ruling class of bureaucrats and activist intellectuals, rapidly replacing the bourgeoisie in the world’s empire, does not govern through the legal possession of the means of production but through the game of information. More ambitious than its predecessor, it is not satisfied with having power over people’s workforce but wants to shape their minds, values, lives, and the meaning of their lives. It doesn’t just want to possess the world; it wants to reinvent it in its own image and likeness.

Infinitely confident in its power to shape reality, the new class has no accountability to logic, history, or biology: if remaking the map of the human brain, tearing apart the complex network of symbols and feelings that constitute the cognitive legacy of millennia of evolution, and causing a widespread short-circuit in the intelligence of millions of children are necessary to achieve its goals, it will do so without the slightest compunction. It is a class devoid of any moral self-awareness and firmly convinced that ethics consist of cultivating in people a neurotically expanded sense of their own needs and frustrations to keep them perpetually indignant with one another. In reality, it is the old divide et impera (divide and conquer) tactic practiced under false moralizing pretexts that fool no one. Except, of course, the children.

Response to Emir Sader (Collective Imbecile Award 1996)145

Perhaps encouraged by the revolutionary bravado that has been growing since the Chiapas encounter, Prof. Emir Sader decided to engage in more direct and base leftist propaganda, using the pages of a press which he surprisingly claims to be serving the right. The solid mass of lies, foolishness, and rudeness that he had published in yesterday’s edition of JB cannot go unanswered if Brazilian readers are still entitled to accurate information.

1– Sader accuses anyone who criticizes the left without committing politically to the right of hypocrisy. The implicit assumption is that one can only criticize an ideological bloc in the name of another ideological bloc, never in the name of morality, logic, science, or simple common sense. All categories of human knowledge are subject to the absolute criteria of ideological warfare. Before deciding whether two plus two equals four or five, Prof. Sader has to ask if the one who said it was the left-wing hero or the right-wing villain. There is no reality outside the Manichean stage that constitutes the mental horizon of a perfect Latin American idiot.

2– He assures, with the most ridiculous face in the world, that “the left has harbored the best of human intelligence throughout the century,” and for this reason, “the right has an inferiority complex in the realm of intelligence.” This clearly shows the level of reading of this pretentious semi-literate. The intellectual left is vast but never highbrow. It does not have an Eliot, a Yeats, a Claudel, a Valéry, a Pound, a Rilke, a Husserl, a Scheler, a Hartmann, a Jaspers, a Heidegger, a Popper, a Whitehead, a Lavelle, a Berdiaeff, a Bergson, a Cassirer, a Croce, a Mircea Eliade, a Jung, a Thomas Mann, a Weber, a Keynes, a Toynbee, a Jaeger, a Spengler, a Guénon, a Schuon, a Voegelin, a Weil, but it has a multitude of little Jean-Paul Sartres who talk endlessly, trying to pass quantity off as quality. This small fry, delighted with their own rhetoric, dominates the universities, the press, and the publishing industry. They entered these domains since the 1930s, aided by the cultural funds of the KGB (a story that Sader probably ignores), and still reign today by systematically boycotting opponents who are intellectually superior, cultured, and honest. The left has nothing intellectually, except for two or three mediocre thinkers like Lukács and Horkheimer (always under the surveillance of their fellow leftists), and of course, whatever it steals. Our shameless professor even includes Freud, a conservative moralist (see Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of a Moralist), and Bertrand Russell, who only joined the left in his old age and at the peak of his intellectual splendor, proposed nothing less than a preventive atomic war against the USSR. If there is a serious reason for someone without political prejudice to lose all confidence in the left, it is precisely the manifest intellectual inferiority of the leftist horde, which monopolizes cultural institutions and establishes the socialism of IQ, leveling everything down and declaring anything beyond their own frog-in-a-well horizon non-existent. The left monopolizes cultural charlatanism, deluding the masses of intelligence-deprived people. By believing in the myth of its superiority, it shows that it is merely a victim of its own gatecrashing.

3– Sader claims that “almost no one identifies as a neoliberal” — a silly lie that cannot even withstand comparison with the list of members of the Liberal Institute, which Prof. Sader carefully avoided consulting to preserve his belief that intelligent men are left-wing.

4– He says that the right bears the burden of having had Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, Videla, and Médici, but prudently omits to add that the victims of all of them combined (including the dead, the imprisoned, the tortured, and the simply bothered) do not even reach half the number of people killed on the orders of a single leftist ruler in the USSR in just two decades. The total number of victims of leftist tyranny in China, Russia, Poland, Cuba, etc., amounts to 150 million people — nearly four times the total of deaths in World War II. One must truly be a perfect idiot to assume that all this slaughter was just an accumulation of accidental deviations with no connection to socialist ideology, which supposedly remained pure and immaculate in the realm of Platonic essences, protected from any contamination by History and now has enough backing to present itself to the world as the expression of the highest humanism, fought against by evil rightists.

5– Sader lies by saying that the right monopolizes spaces in the media. The truth is precisely the opposite: it is very difficult nowadays to break through the barrier with which dominant leftism in newsrooms protects its idols against any serious criticism. Even highly prestigious individuals on the right find it extremely challenging to have their words published. And on TV, when a debate or a simulation of one is organized, the left always gets at least two-thirds of the voices, except on evangelical channels. In the cultural press, the Berlin Wall is still standing. Has Sader ever seen a review of a book published by the Army Library, the Liberal Institute, or an evangelical publisher in any supplement? And how can one explain the complete silence that the press surrounds the notable philosophy congresses directed in São Paulo by Miguel Reale and in Rio by Tarcísio Padilha, compared to the noisy festivity with which it celebrates the pseudocultural happenings in which Mr. Adauto Novaes, Marilena Chauí, and company squander public money on trivialities? Is all this opinion policing the work of the right?

6– Even more false is to say that the right has million-dollar publishers to disseminate neoliberal thinking. Just read the catalogs of the main publishers — especially the richest ones — to see that leftism is the almost absolute master of the publishing market, defending its monopoly with bites. Neoliberal works, in general, are only accepted for publication when financed by the authors themselves. And genuinely conservative works — in the correct sense of the word — simply do not exist in the Brazilian publishing market, allowing the left to exploit the public’s confusion between neoliberalism and conservatism. Has Mr. Sader seen any translations of Roger Scruton, Rama K. Coomaraswamy, or Martin Lings, if he has even heard of them? As for the State’s publishing apparatus, the only divergent voice in the unanimous chorus of leftism that dominates it was the University of Brasília Press during the time of rector José Carlos de Azevedo. Despite being celebrated by Karl Deutsch as one of the best collections of political works ever produced in this world, the collection was discontinued shortly after Azevedo’s departure, who until today suffers the effects of the barely concealed leftist resentment.

In summary, Prof. Sader combines a complete lack of information with a total lack of desire to acquire it. He imagines that with his vulgar readings, he can judge the culture of an entire century, but it’s too much for his little truck. He is like Antonio Machado’s “España miserable,” which “wrapped in its rags, despises everything it ignores.” Pretentious, arrogant, semi-educated, as the members of the Brazilian leftist intelligentsia usually are, he only deceives those who wish to be deceived. Clearly, he did not come to explain but to confuse. And in attempting to challenge the Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot, all he achieves is to show aspiring idiots the path to perfection.

August 6, 1996

The Imbecile of Pires and mine – Paulo Roberto Pires Does Not Critique: He Invents146

It’s clear that the critic Paulo Roberto Pires (Prosa & Verso, August 31) did not like my book The Collective Imbecile. He disliked it so much that he invented another one and wrote about it, swearing it was mine. Surpassing all measures of mere “I didn’t read it and I didn’t like it,” thus begins a new and more economical form of literary criticism, which dispenses with the author, the publisher, and the book, with all these functions merged in the person of the critic. To give the reader an idea of how this new genre is practiced, I highlight here some substantial differences between the book I wrote and the one the critic commented on:

1– According to Pires, I call people “big shots.” The word “big shot” appears only twice in my book: in the quotation of the title “The Big Shot Theory” by Machado de Assis, and in the explanation of its use by Lima Barreto. I did not qualify a single person with this adjective.

2– “In his eyes — says Pires —, the presence of foreign authors in university papers, essays, and cultural supplements is a sign of intellectual subservience.” I neither stated nor would ever state such nonsense, which Pires himself invented with the barely concealed purpose of making me appear as a fool.

3– According to Pires, my book systematically accuses anyone who quotes an author I don’t like of “aping.” Where did he see this? Throughout all the pages, I don’t accuse anyone of aping any author, whether I like them or not.

4– Also according to Pires, I insinuate that I am persecuted by the ignorant masses. I never insinuated or stated this, much less in the book. The only ignorant person who persecutes me is Pires.

5– The same Pires informs that I accuse intellectuals of being “conservatives.” I find nothing of this sort in my book, mainly because, in my understanding, neither “conservative” is a slur, nor “progressive” is a compliment, although they might be for Pires, an excessively progressive person.

6– According to Pires, my book has 289 pages. Even in this, the poor man does not tell the truth: it has 383147.

Why can’t Pires, like normal critics, faithfully stick to the text he intends to critique? Why does he need to invent a fictitious text to pose in place of a book whose page number he doesn’t even know, and which he probably only knows from third-party references or from a very quick glance at the index and the prologue? The answer is simple: it’s because he does not intend to critique, not even ruthlessly, a text. He wants to defame a man, destroy his credibility and self-esteem, psychologically wound him and create around him an atmosphere of malicious and suspicious hostility — a purpose that is not fulfilled due to the weakness of the attacker and the good health of the victim. Further proof of this intention, if needed, is that Pires is not content with falsifying the content of the work, but dares to paste a derogatory and false label directly onto the author: according to him, I am a philosopher only by self-proclamation. But I do not self-proclaim anything, nor will Pires be able to point out a single page of The Collective Imbecile where I have done so. I am thus designated by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy — where I have just been publicly honored in this capacity —, by the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy, by the City College, by the Catholic University of Salvador, by many top intellectuals, and by the very newspaper where Pires writes terribly. Unable to ignore this notorious fact, Pires lied deliberately, with the intent of defamation, in this as in everything else that he falsified. And after having intentionally sought to hurt the dignity of a person he never saw and who never harmed him, Pires still accuses him of being “rude”. Right, right. It’s Pires who is refined. As refined and delicate as an Empire-era urinal.

In his dedicated effort to distort everything, Pires even swaps the subject of my sentences. According to him, I assert that my work “is more than a satirical allusion”. I say this about the title, not the book. But as Pires has read little more than the book’s title, the mix-up is understandable.

And such is his eagerness to destroy, that he does not shy away from the most daring uses of an extravagant logic. He says my book is full of contradictions. But, with inexplicable restraint, he cites only one: that the author “does not dispense with the same media he condemns”. One concludes that, for Pires, any critique of the media, to be consistent, must refrain from being publicized. Pires, besides not knowing how to read, definitively does not reason. Moreover, I did not condemn any media, just the use that the Pireses make of it.

In short, Pires neither liked nor read: he invented. His critique is pure fraud, that will not deceive anyone. Not even himself, who already reveals, deep down, the dirtiness of his conscience. Want to see? According to him, the “standard form”, in which I vaccinate my book against the clichés of slander, “nullifies any possibility of dialogue”. It inevitably follows that Pires conceives no other form of possible dialogue other than the standardized labels that the “form” satirizes. And he feels very constrained because, not knowing how to do anything else, he can no longer exercise this type of “dialogue” without self-denouncing in the act. I have never seen such haste in putting on a cap.

Pires is so malevolent that, in a paroxysm of insane rage, he condemns in my book even the fact that it only features favorable reviews on the back cover. To my knowledge, all books are like this. Would Pires want my publisher, unlike all others, to advertise against his own product? Besides, there was, until the advent of Pires, no unfavorable critique of The Collective Imbecile or any of my other books. But, not to further irritate a person already so enraged by my sin of making him laugh at himself — a supreme humiliation for someone who takes himself infinitely seriously —, I agree to publish Pires’s opinion on the back cover of the next edition. As much as he dislikes me, or I him, I cannot deny this young man the only opportunity he will have in his life to appear alongside Paulo Francis, Herberto Sales, Josué Montello, and Bruno Tolentino.

For a slightly better left148

Jornal do Brasil on the 4th devoted an entire page for those who were bothered by the book The Collective Imbecile in an attempt to consign its author to the trash can of irrelevance through the following phrases:

  • “Your discourse is right-wing” (Leandro Konder).
  • “It is right-wing” (Emir Sader).
  • “Self-proclaimed philosopher” (André Luiz Barros).
  • “Not even a man” (Muniz Sodré).

In the fifties or sixties, someone who believed they could destroy a book through the mere ideological cataloging of its author - even without accompanying divinatory judgments about their sexuality or derogatory sentences about their professional condition, things that were inconceivable at the time - would immediately be downgraded from the status of an intellectual to that of a cheap demagogue. And the left itself would do that, as can be seen from this warning contained in an editorial of the Communist Party newspaper Novos Rumos in April 1962, which I quote at the beginning of my book:

“We need to reevaluate another attitude completely ingrained among us, which reveals a true mental lethargy. It concerns the habit of reasoning within fixed schemes. This ‘method’ of reasoning is limited to taking the facts and fitting them into the predetermined scheme. An example is the ‘revolutionary x reactionary’ scheme. According to this scheme, all we have to do is classify people, actions, and facts as ‘revolutionary’ or ‘reactionary.’ Having done this, the ‘task’ is completed. How can we understand reality while maintaining this attitude?”

Today, university professors, journalists, and writers shamelessly practice this kind of summary labeling, adding to it foaming insults of hatred, envy, and resentment. And after doing this, they believe, as the editorial says, that the “task” is completed. A task that they suppose gives them the right to pose as “left-wing intellectuals.”

By allowing these fools to speak on their behalf without demanding from them the minimum intellectual composure required of the lettered profession, the left-wing movements only sink further into the quagmire of demoralization.

When the pseudo-intellectuals, whose primary errors I denounce in my book, try to divert the discussion to the realm of ideological Manichaeism, what they do is use left-wing parties to hide behind them their glaring personal inadequacies. In doing so, they show no respect for the dignity of thousands of activists who, by entrusting them with an intellectual task, expected to see it fulfilled, at least at the level demanded by Novos Rumos.

It is very comfortable for these gatecrashers to pretend, before the public, that I criticized them from an ideological perspective, as a right-wing enemy. But I have never criticized anyone for being left-wing but for not knowing how to be left-wing with some dignity. I speak against the imposture of those who, deep down, are only on the left because they can protect themselves from any criticism under the mantle of ideological solidarity. Discussing ideology with these people would be granting them an honor they don’t deserve. I didn’t argue with them in my book, and I won’t do it now, because (intellectual or otherwise) trickery is not something you discuss: you denounce it, and that’s it.

Just look, readers, if it is possible to discuss ideology on the level of these individuals: Emir Sader believes that the best way to defend his ideology is to claim in its favor silly little lies that a brief examination exposes as false. Leandro Konder believes he is faithful to the leftist spirit when he proclaims that the truthfulness of an idea is worth less than the number of its followers, which is not Marxism or leftism, it’s pure and simple Goebbels. Muniz Sodré believes that insulting jokes about the sexuality of someone he has never seen are Marxist literary criticism, when they are only manifestations of the insane and prejudiced vanity of a bloated and simian macho. André Luiz Barros believes that left-wing cultural journalism consists of declaring as “self-attributed” the title of philosopher that the very newspaper where he writes has attributed to me three years ago. And the editor of Caderno B thinks that journalism is simply to devote a whole color page, with a cover headline, to say that the subject of the report is a completely unimportant person…

It is this type of gatecrashing that I have been fighting against, not the ideological choice of anyone, which is a constitutional right of the most obvious kind, although it scandalizes certain individuals when they see it exercised by others. By pretending that I fight them because they are left-wing intellectuals, Muniz, Sader, and all the others not only massage their respective egos with false flattery, but they prostitute their ideological choice, putting it at the service of a vile personal interest, which is to be able to continue enjoying an intellectual prestige for which they are utterly unqualified.

I am from the time when there were left-wing intellectuals, and I can recognize one when I see it, which is precisely why I know that this no longer exists today. Left-wing intellectuals were José Honório Rodrigues, Ênio Silveira, Caio Prado Jr., Otto Maria Carpeaux. The only remaining representatives of this endangered species are Alfredo Bosi and Franklin de Oliveira. There are no others like them. To try to pass off Emir Sader and Muniz Sodré as left-wing intellectuals is simply a case for Consumer Protection. I wonder if Ênio or José Honório, criticized justly or unjustly, would pretend to be offended damsels and respond with idiotic clichés instead of analyzing with meticulous honesty the critic’s statements to refute them through logically and culturally relevant arguments, exactly as I did with the opinions of Paulo Roberto Pires and Sader. I wonder if Caio or Otto, instead of defending themselves as the brave men they were, would run like frightened chicks to seek shelter under the wings of corporate solidarity, as these poor creatures do today. No, I don’t blame Sader, Muniz Sodré, or anyone else for being left-wing intellectuals, but for being merely sad caricatures of a cultural family that once had among its members some of the highest expressions of our national intelligence. To top it off, someone told me that the aforementioned editorial, signed under the pseudonym J. Miglioli, was written by Leandro Konder himself. I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, what can be concluded is that Konder, like everything else on the left, has declined a lot since 1962.

In everything these individuals said, there was not the slightest reference to any of my arguments, let alone any attempt to refute them - an undertaking that would really be beyond the capabilities of the interviewees. It was only crude labeling adorned with insults in the language of bouncers. Only the roars of gorillas who beat their chests and pretend to be heroes when, gathered in an armed gang with sticks and stones, they surround a lone enemy and call him a coward. But if they think that these things can intimidate me in the slightest, it’s because they measure me by their own stature. If they think that by lowering my book to the level of their heads, they can dissuade readers from trying to investigate the content of my arguments themselves, it’s because they look at the Brazilian people in the mirror of their own self-deception. And if they believe they can bury the reputation of others under tons of mud, it’s because they bury their own ostrich heads under the same mud, so as not to become aware that their time has come. But all this subterfuge is useless: since the publication of The Collective Imbecile, these people are ALREADY ON TRIAL - and the trial will continue relentlessly, before the eyes of the people, until the final conviction of the usurpers and corporatists who, for their own benefit, block the cultural progress of this country.

Response to the frightened braggarts149

In the face of the courage and heroism of those who summon an entire army to attack a “sharpshooter” and even call him a coward, I must observe that gorillas also beat their chests when armed with sticks and stones, gather their tribe to surround a solitary leopard.

I was already expecting this simian reaction, knowing perfectly well whom I am dealing with. In the prologue of The Collective Imbecile, I already answered them in advance: “I have no doubt that this book will receive, in a good portion of intellectual circles, the standard reception given to many other Brazilian books: complete silence regarding its content, a majestic flowering of gossip and slanders about the author’s character.”

The irrational fury and thinly veiled panic with which these people, incapable of any serious argument, seek refuge in the old arsenal of clichés and ready-made phrases, is a show of baseness that would not deserve a response if it were not for the respect owed to the readers of JB. It is exclusively to them that I address the following lines, not to my antagonists. Time will answer them: one day, they will wish to hide under the ground rather than acknowledge the authorship of the frivolous and senseless words they published under the sudden inspiration of fear and hatred. But it will be too late: these words will be indelibly stuck to their reputations as evidence of what was perhaps the most infamous and obscure moment in the entire history of Brazilian “intelligentsia.” Indeed, their statements constitute a moral strip-tease: they reveal to the scandalized eyes of readers the low level, gross fanaticism, complete incompetence, and massive dishonesty of those who are paid by the state to supposedly perform teaching tasks and who try to deceive the public by selling as high works of intelligence the thinly disguised expressions of their low instincts.

Since these people can always count on unlimited space in the press, which barely allows the right of reply five lines of defense for each hundred granted to the attack, whoever is the object of their collective wrath must buy space to defend themselves; and when they do not have the means to do so and resort to the help of generous friends, they are perfidiously accused of “relying on economic power” - to use the expression of the most cynical among my detractors - as if the power to buy an ad could be compared to the power to enjoy entire newspapers.

To try to remedy with some clarification the concerted effort of obscurantism with which these militants of nothingness sullied yesterday’s edition of JB, I will analyze, with the brevity required by the nature of the case, the words of each one.

The first to be unmasked is the page editor, who, remaining comfortably anonymous, is nevertheless primarily responsible for the overall approach of the material. It is from him, and not from any of the interviewees, that the label “self-proclaimed philosopher” comes. A label that is triple falsehood. First, because until 1994, I presented myself only as a “writer and journalist,” out of mere professional habit, and the first institution to publicly attribute the status of philosopher to me was JB itself, in the credits of an article of mine published on December 20 of that year. Later, in an article signed by Antônio Fernando Borges in the “Ideias” section on January 6, 1996, about my book The Garden of Afflictions, JB again presented me as a philosopher, highlighting my superiority compared to those he called “philosophers on duty” (obvious and derogatory reference to the very same class of people that the newspaper now treats as untouchable divinities) and emphasizing my qualities of “generous erudition and constant pursuit of clarity and intellectual honesty.” Thus, if now JB pretends that the professional status and merits it attributed to me are self-assumed, it only demonstrates its lack of memory and the volatility of its opinions, hastening the dizzying decline of its credibility among readers.

Second, the label is false because in the pages of the same JB from the day before yesterday, responding to journalist Paulo Roberto Pires, who attributed to my book phrases that were not in it, I had already explained: “I do not call myself anything, nor can Pires point out a single page of The Collective Imbecile where I have done so. I am called that by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy - where I have just been publicly honored as such - by the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy, by the City College, by the Catholic University of Salvador.” JB had the right, of course, to verify the veracity of my statement by consulting these institutions, but it had no right to arbitrarily declare it false and repeat the slanderous label as if it had never been denied.

Third, the label is false because the status of philosopher is not acquired either by self-attribution or by the appointment of others, much less by the decree of the State, but by the very nature of the activity performed, which, in my case, can be proven by a simple examination of my published books, especially An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture (soon to be reissued by Topbooks) and The Garden of Afflictions (Rio, Diadorim, 1996). Therefore, my status as a philosopher is simply a fact, not a value to be affirmed or denied with emotional nuances of ridiculous pathos. Whether I am a good or bad philosopher, great or small, time will tell. But it is not necessary to wait for the passage of time to realize that the designation of philosopher is unjust and absurd when applied to authors of mere popularization books, such as Leandro Konder. For a philosopher, by definition, is one who philosophizes, who elaborates, well or poorly, a personal response to philosophical questions, or at least an original interpretation of ancient philosophies (as I did in my book on Aristotle), and not one who simply writes about this or that philosophy, repeating or paraphrasing what his favorite philosophers said, which at best would entitle him to the status of historian, essayist, teacher, or cultural journalist. Just to make a didactic comparison, the status of a Konder or an Adauto Novaes is not the same, in this sense, as that of a José Arthur Gianotti, who may not be a good philosopher but is undeniably a philosopher, as from his first book he shows an effort of personal, original elaboration that unequivocally characterizes philosophical activity. This distinction is elementary, obvious, and universally recognized, and for this reason, it is a mixture of pity and shame to have to repeat it, with the patience of a primary school teacher, to people who are paid by the state precisely to teach this kind of thing, as well as to a journalist who, in the position of an editor, would have an obligation to know how to write and to use words in their proper sense.

The defamatory label, reproduced on the front page, reveals a very dishonest intention on the part of those responsible for the material. And so perverse was the spirit that produced it that even my status as an independent journalist, which is the simple legal definition of my professional status before the INPS and before the Almighty throne, had to be relativized and put into doubt by ironic quotation marks. Nothing, absolutely nothing in journalistic ethics justifies this kind of abuse, which offends me less than disrespects the reader.

To make matters worse, the newspaper lies in the most scandalous way by saying that I published a paid advertisement with my response to Paulo Roberto Pires. I am a poor man, I wouldn’t have money for an ad for a used car, let alone for a massive advertisement. The one who published the ad was the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, renewing its public recognition of my status as a philosopher and adding the tribute of taking the initiative of my defense, which honors me greatly and makes the newspaper’s use of the term “self-proclaimed” even more unwarranted. JB could have checked the origin of the ad by simply consulting its own accounting archives. But, in the face of certain journalists who do not even know the ABCs of the profession, it would be asking too much to expect them to have this elementary precaution of honesty. And to an editor who is too lazy even to consult the editorial files to see the articles from 1994, it would be too much effort to go down one more floor to go to accounting, right?

But the editor is not the only one responsible for this mess. The reporters are also involved. I have nothing to complain about Polyanna Torres, who interviewed me by phone and faithfully reproduced my statements orally, only to see them brutally cut by an editor and reduced to disjointed phrases with no logical connection. This is the fate of all reporters. I’ll just give one example of a maliciously edited sentence. When Polyanna asked me, based on the agenda she received, on what basis I criticized the bigwigs of the local intellectual establishment, I replied, “Based on a basic constitutional right. It is not up to me to explain why I criticize them, but they have to explain where they got the idea that they have the right never to be criticized.” Polyanna read this sentence aloud and I confirmed it. In the hands of the editor, it became: “I don’t have to explain why I criticize so many people, they have to explain why they can’t be criticized.” This is substantially different: it seeks to give the impression that I dispense with justifying my criticisms when I only said that the right to criticize is obvious and that questioning it is to arrogate a divine status (something indeed in the style of intellectual manipulations that Lima Barreto, in his time, satirized). This is not editing: it is, manifestly, distorting.

As for Cristiane Costa, I won’t say anything because I don’t know what she did or did not do in this case.

But Mr. André Luiz Barros, who also signs the article, was extremely dishonest in posing as a mere reporter of the dispute, without informing the public that he was also a character and a party interested in the dispute, having taken advantage of the occasion to give me a slap with someone else’s hand, cowardly hiding behind the names of the interviewees. For he is the subject of a serious accusation made in The Collective Imbecile: reporting on a conference he claims to have attended by Prof. Gerd Bornheim, he wrote, in the JB edition of September 28, 1995, that Michel de Montaigne greatly influenced the thinking of the 15th century (Montaigne was born in the following century) and that the colonialist exploration voyages ended (instead of beginning) in the 16th century. In an article published in O Globo, later reproduced in the book, I demanded that Bornheim and the reporter explain to the public which of the two was responsible for such nonsense, unacceptable in a high school student, let alone in a professor and a (should I say self-proclaimed? I think not) cultural journalist. Barros, hiding in his corner, did not say a word, and Bornheim pretended indignation in order not to come down from the pedestal where he believed he had risen due to I don’t know what glories, and to give an account to the public that supports him. But I see that Barros has kept his resentment, waiting for the opportunity, which now smiled at him, to use Bornheim’s name again, accompanied by a few others, to obtain a late revenge that only reveals the pettiness of his spirit. I don’t know if Bornheim, having preferred once to accuse the collector in order not to pay a debt or to unmask the gatecrasher who incurred it in his name, will allow the farce to be repeated.

As if the editor’s malevolence were not enough, the team of interviewees, all of them consisting, with a single exception, of people criticized in my book, entered the field in unison to repeat faithfully, letter by letter, those standard labels that, on the front page of my book, are satirized in the “Standard Form for Writing Criticisms of The Collective Imbecile.” It should not be expected that such mechanized brains would produce more inventive responses. The book was written precisely to show that these people think like this, if that can be called thinking, and they hurried to give The Collective Imbecile's thesis even more patent proof than it could desire. The most voted topics in the multiple-choice squares were that I am a reactionary, that I seek attention, and that I am serving business interests.

But let’s take it step by step. In the article, it is stated that I attacked Prof. Emir Sader, in the edition of the day before yesterday, “for his leftist positions.” This is false: I do not attack anyone for their adherence to this or that ideology, but for their dishonest way of defending it. Emir Sader had said that the left was the author of the best that human intelligence produced in the 20th century, and a simple list of the famous names in the arts, sciences, and philosophy in that period is enough to demonstrate the complete absurdity of this claim.

It is a twisted and sick way of seeing things to claim that I criticize people for being left-wing intellectuals. I come from a time when there were left-wing intellectuals, and I can recognize one when I see it, and that’s precisely why I know that nowadays they no longer exist. Left-wing intellectuals were José Honório Rodrigues, Ênio Silveira, Caio Prado Jr., and Otto Maria Carpeaux. Today, the only survivor of this endangered species is Alfredo Bosi (Antônio Cândido seems to be inactive). Trying to impose Emir Sader and Muniz Sodré on us as left-wing intellectuals is simply a case for the Consumer Protection Agency. I wonder if Ênio or José Honório, whether criticized justly or unjustly, would act as offended damsels and respond with idiotic clichés instead of analyzing the critic’s statements with meticulous honesty, to challenge them if necessary, in the field of logic and culturally relevant argumentation, just as I did with the opinions of Pires and Sader. I wonder if Caio or Otto, instead of defending themselves like the brave men they were, would run like scared chicks to seek shelter under the wings of corporate solidarity, like these poor souls do today. No, I don’t condemn Sader or Muniz Sodré for being left-wing intellectuals, but precisely because they are not; they are merely sad caricatures of a cultural family that once counted among its members some of the highest expressions of our national intelligence.

But Prof. Sader, appealing to the right not to respond, responds. It is another expression of the singular logic that characterizes him. “The right uses the discourse of order, of the new world order,” he says. Well, I ask: What does that have to do with me? Dragging the discussion into that field and assuming, with the intellectual automatism of a mongoloid, that whoever criticizes him must be an apologist for the new world order (as if he himself were the living embodiment of the opposite tendency), Sader ends up far from the target he was aiming at. What I had to say against the new world order, which is much more interesting than anything a soft-headed left could repeat, is stated in the final chapters of O Jardim das Aflições, a book a sensible left would read attentively because it would do them good. But Prof. Sader ignores this, as he ignores almost everything else he talks about. Anyone who seems unpleasant to him is immediately sent to the right, and that settles the matter. “He’s right-wing” is the ultimate argument in any debate, and it is indeed the only one Prof. Sader knows to resolve all issues, be they sociological, arithmetical, or sentimental.

Leandro Konder, who faithfully rebroadcasts the same station, only needed to press the recorder button to keep repeating: “He’s right-wing, he’s right-wing, he’s right-wing.” That seems to answer everything indeed.

But Leandro, too, was not criticized in my book for being left-wing, but for having written, in plain words, that the truth of an idea is worth less than the number of its followers, an opinion that is not inherently left-wing (since it is Goebbels' translation), but is stupid beyond belief. Speaking against the right in general, so as not to have to respond to rigorously accurate criticisms about specific points, is pure diversionary tactics. But then again, I never expected anything else from Leandro.

Regarding Muniz Sodré, he was the slipperiest of all, who, after his colleagues shifted the discussion from the field of intellectual ethics to that of ideological generalities, made an even more spectacular turn and diverted the debate from the realm of ideology to that of sexology, questioning the masculinity of his critic with the memorable phrase: “He must not be a man.” I confess I don’t quite grasp the reciprocal implication that this enraged chauvinist sees between paunchy virility and correct opinions, leaving poor gays and lesbians (among whom I include myself, alas) with the monopoly of error. But, in any case, the test of masculinity that his sentence demands from me is something I cannot provide publicly, because it wouldn’t look good for either of us, no matter how much he desires it. In conclusion, let’s change the subject, for the sake of morality, while the doubt lingers about what this individual meant when, after publicly displaying this patently hydrophobic reaction, he declares, with the greatest feigned innocence, that I am the angry one.

But if the question of the relative masculinity of the contenders is of more interest to the Criminal Justice than to journalism, what Prof. Sodré says about José Guilherme Merquior must indeed be unmasked right here: it is a disgrace that the united class of alleged left-wing intellectuals, which did everything in Merquior’s lifetime to tarnish the reputation of the great essayist, now seeks to use it as a rhetorical weapon against me, now that he is dead and can no longer denounce, as he undoubtedly would, this shameless misappropriation of his prestige.

It was also a dirty trick by the newspaper to publish that I attacked Muniz in a chapter “about a certain science of black chickens,” implying that I am the inventor of this science, when it is public knowledge that between the two of us, it is Muniz, not me, who is the patron saint and, therefore, the specialist in black chickens, although he may also deal with white or brown ones, depending on the particular exu involved, as I suppose in my ignorance of such matters. So let it be Muniz who handles the ritual dealings with the poultry, while I limit myself to a much more economical method, which is to merely seek the protection of the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

I must also make a footnote to Muniz’s claim that I am a coward because I rely on economic power. I am a coward who faces alone a united, disciplined class strongly supported by the media, as can be seen from the content of the report under discussion here. And to see economic power behind me is the paranoia of a left-wing adolescent hypnotized by stories of spectacular investigations like The Mattei Affair. If the proof of the mysterious economic power referred to by Muniz consists of the above-mentioned advertisement, I’ve already said that I would never have had the money to pay for it, and I am very grateful to the Academy, which made the struggle between a “sniper” and the entire army of a class solidly supported by the entire press a little less unequal. If Muniz refers to the advertisements for my courses, published by the Faculdade da Cidade, he should know, and perhaps he does, although he pretends not to, that the Faculdade advertises all the courses held there and would do the same if the course were by Muniz Sodré or anyone else. Motivated by envy and resentment, Muniz supposes that the neighbor’s chicken is always fatter (chickens again, always chickens!), and his imagination inflates the poor bird until it becomes a conspiracy of international capitalism. If it would be unseemly to make a public display of masculinity, I can at least demonstrate my poverty, simply by showing my income tax returns, where, I guarantee, Muniz will have nothing to envy.

As for Prof. Dória, he admitted not having read O Imbecil Coletivo, and the interviewer failed to inform him that the book contained both criticism and praise for his work, in equal measure. Deceived by a dirty trick, he assumed he was being attacked and defended himself in an even elegant manner, for which I congratulate him, as I already did for his study on powerful families. No, Prof. Dória, you are not a “nobody,” as you say. Unlike many of your academic colleagues, you are somebody, and you will become even greater if you continue on that path of humility, as a man who surpasses himself through scientific effort, as I have stated in my book. As for what you would do with the money from the advertisement, that is between you and the Academia Brasileira de Filosofia, because, I repeat, I did not pay for the ad. But how about buying a package of copies of O Imbecil Coletivo and distributing them to the people who have already expressed their opinions about it?

Finally, Bruno Tolentino tried to say something in my favor, without foreseeing, of course, that the newspaper could give his words a very different meaning from what he intended. What Bruno says, what he has been repeating to anyone who will listen, is that until 1994, I continued my work discreetly, withdrawn from media agitation and without seeking the slightest public recognition, as a man indifferent to such things and wholly engaged in my occupations as a writer, professor, and (forgive the word) philosopher; he also says that it was he who convinced me to come out of hiding and publish O Jardim das Aflições, which until then circulated only internally in my courses as a workbook, and especially the notes that eventually formed O Imbecil Coletivo. He has been saying these things for some time, and they are absolutely true. I explicitly acknowledged this in the prologue of O Jardim das Aflições. But Tolentino’s statements reveal the obvious: that I am so indifferent to the publicity of my name that I continued writing only for my students for two decades and only came out of hiding at the instigation of a friend. Now, JB managed to twist his words to the point of giving them a perverse meaning as if they were exposing my supposed “strategy” of creating noise around my name, when what Tolentino is actually saying, quite rightly, is that he started the noise. This is how, in the hands of certain media professionals, every fact becomes its opposite.

I see no reason to correct other minor inaccuracies and perversions that JB’s article is full of. Examining them all would be long, tedious, and unnecessary, as a report with so little credibility in its entirety is unlikely to be any more credible in its details.

It leaves only one question, deeply enigmatic to me: why would an entire cover of the second section, with a headline on the front page of the newspaper, be dedicated solely to say that a guy is an unimportant fool?

The chickens at the university150

“In Brazil, success is a personal insult.” Tom Jobim

When they peered through the window of Major Quaresma’s library, the old gossiping women from Lima Barreto’s novel were already clucking:

"Why so many books if you’re not even a graduate?"

Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma was written in 1915. Waking up with the chickens on a morning in 1996 and capturing the content of their university conversations, we can only conclude, like the Englishman in the joke: "Peter, you haven’t changed at all."

If we rely on the little professors who, perched on their bureaucratic perches, arrogate the authority to appoint and unappoint philosophers as the dictatorship unseated senators and created bionic beings, we will continue to be, for centuries to come, the country of graduates and the country of bruzundangas.

In the bruzundangan republic, the bachelor’s degree has the magical power to turn its holder into a “philosopher,” and its absence makes the exercise of thought prohibitive, except under the infamous condition of being a “self-appointed philosopher.” To this day, no one in the world has understood what is meant in Brazil by the extravagant expression “philosopher’s diploma.” In any civilized country, a self-taught person who can produce work that meets academic standards - not to mention those who exceed them - is honored far above mere university students: “The self-taught person capable of academic work,” as Bergson said, “is at least a genius.” In Brazil, being better through one’s own efforts is an intolerable offense to the dignity of the worst. Because the latter are not self-appointed: they appoint each other and mutually persuade themselves that they are philosophers. Since there is always uncertainty, they have to confirm it daily. Hence the noise in the henhouse.

But the longevity of the bachelor’s cult in the realms of philosophy is not just a circus act that has exposed us to universal laughter more than once. It is a crime, a continuous crime against Brazil’s cultural heritage.

The facts speak for themselves. Of all the intellectuals who have dedicated themselves to the practice of philosophy in the strictest sense in this country, only four have achieved international recognition: Miguel Reale, Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Newton da Costa, and Mário Ferreira dos Santos. None of these four had a university degree in philosophy, and none made a career in a philosophy faculty. In fifty years of activity, or inertia, the Brazilian university has not produced a single philosopher who achieved the same success as them. Our so-called university philosophy remains a local and provincial phenomenon, while the prestige of the four great sharpshooters continues to honor and propagate our country’s good name abroad.

If philosophy faculties cannot fulfill their mission by their own strength, they could at least save their honor by absorbing and disseminating the legacy that comes from abroad, for the benefit of the students. Instead, they have done everything to hide these four great names while promoting, with the help of their press servants, the cult of local mediocrities solemnly ignored by the rest of the world. The philosophical establishment neither fulfills its intended purpose nor allows others to help fulfill it. It does not do and does not let others do. It disguises its failure by trying to hide the success of others, either under the weight of silence or under tons of insults - and everything else that comes from the top of the perches.

Bolinha’s Henhouse

Many Brazilian university philosophers have an obsession: “Not to serve as a stepping stone”151. Viewing the world through hen-like categories, they do not understand that someone can philosophize without aspiring to a higher perch. Therefore, they fiercely defend themselves not only against current competitors but also against virtual, possible, future, and imaginary competitors. Out of an abundance of caution, the henhouse closes, becoming Bolinha’s Henhouse.

There is no mention of the foreign bibliography on Miguel Reale; nor of the protests by European philosophers over the rejection of Vicente Ferreira da Silva in the competition for a chair at USP, to the benefit of a degreed mediocrity; nor of the full-page entry in the Italian philosophical encyclopedia that recognizes Mário Ferreira dos Santos as a thinker of universal stature. There is no mention even of the intellectual production of several generations published in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia, the most important of its kind in this country.

Other thinkers of great value, such as Mário Vieira de Mello, Almir de Andrade, and Maurílio Penido, despite having no university ambitions, have also been cast into the darkness of oblivion for diverging from the prevailing ideological harmony. And when an effective competitor arrives, bringing laurels from abroad, they are subject to discriminatory and prophylactic vexations right from the start. This is what has just happened to Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a leftist man who, as such, should not stand out, but who has opinions that are too independent: when editing the book of the English essayist Perry Anderson, Zona de Compromisso, the Unesp Publishing House decided to cut the chapters “of less interest to Brazilian reality.” And, of course, they cut the chapter dedicated to the thought of the Brazilian Roberto Mangabeira Unger…

When I wonder why those responsible for this state of affairs still enjoy an undeserved reputation in the press, the hypothesis of ideological solidarity between academics and journalists, which was formed in the 1970s to combat the dictatorship and now persists, with an inverted sign, to dismantle democracy, does not completely satisfy me. To this fact must be added another: most journalists simply do not have the philosophical culture to discern, on their own, who is a philosopher and who is not. I have seen the Abominable Snowman shining shoes on Avenida Rio Branco more frequently than a reporter reading Kant or Aristotle. So, if in doubt, the reporter has to resort to the authority of the moment’s establishment, and naively seeks it in official institutions, believing that there and only there exist philosophers. Thus, even the journalist with no ill intention ends up inadvertently playing the role of an auxiliary force to a corporation of inept and defamatory people who, in the middle of the turn of the century, still try to preserve the fictitious power of their self-assumed monopoly. And the harm that results from this for the nation is more serious than that of economic and political corporatism, which has already been so abundantly denounced. For it is intelligence that moves the world, and we will not free our country from any form of corporatism if we do not first free our minds from the provincial yoke that strangles it. In this country, there will be no opening of the economy if there is no opening of the mind first.

Response to Leandro Konder152

Although a devoted reader of Karl Marx - a writer who, when engaging in polemics, called his opponent a “monstrous dwarf,” “lackey,” “henchman,” and the like - Mr. Leandro Konder wishes to persuade us that his delicate sensitivity cannot bear to hear someone being called an “imbecile” in a debate of ideas. Judging by the article he published in O Globo on Sunday, his noble soul is deeply wounded by such vehement language.

To dry his crocodile tears, I must convey two analgesic pieces of information to Mr. Konder. First, neither the Brazilian Penal Justice nor common sense admits that there is an offense to honor in critical remarks that, without touching on the moral conduct of the alleged victim, are limited to stating, even in heated terms, their low intellectual level. Thus, even if I had called any writer an “imbecile,” I would still be infinitely more polite than Mr. Konder’s allies, who, instead of merely belittling the quality of my neurons, preferred to declare to the press that I am a coward, that I am an opportunist, and in a paroxysm of insane hatred, that I am not even a man.

Therefore, if Mr. Konder wants to give lessons on good verbal behavior, he should first cleanse the mouths of his cohorts, in whose company I, not being even a man, can at least claim that I am a girl.

Secondly, the “collective imbecile” referred to in my book is defined as follows: "It is a community of people of normal or even superior intelligence who come together driven by the common desire to make fools of themselves." As the name suggests and as the book explains in detail, it is a collective phenomenon of artificial imbecilization caused by the obsessive repetition of clichés and ideological clichés, which, without essentially compromising the IQ of its victims, temporarily hampers their use of intelligence, at least regarding certain matters. This is precisely the same as saying that the people mentioned are not imbeciles, but are only temporarily imbecilized by an external social factor. This definition is clearly stated on page 24 of my book and is even reproduced on the back cover, in large letters, font size 20. Therefore, if Mr. Konder, in a tone of absolute certainty, asserts that my book calls people imbeciles, I must conclude that not only has he not read it, but he has not even seen it.

For this reason, if Mr. Konder wants to give me advice on how a polemicist should know the opponent’s reasons before refuting them, I ask him first to explain how this can be done through telepathy and without even having any physical contact with the book where these mentioned reasons can be found.

If Mr. Konder and his friends falsely accuse me of directing personal insults at them, it is precisely because I did not insult individuals but something that, for them, is infinitely more valuable than any human being: I insulted the Gramscian ideology that imbecilizes intelligent men. If they prefer to personally embrace the stupidity that I did not target at them as individuals, it is only to preserve intact the image of their sacred guru - a thinker so honest and consistent that his ideas have to hide behind the feigned dishonor of his followers to avoid even the analysis of a poor “self-appointed philosopher.” It was necessary, absolutely necessary, to conceal from potential readers the scandalous fact that even an undiplomaed Brazilian can unmask the Gramscian fallacy on which so many have staked their lives and reputations. I understand the drama of these people; I understand why they prefer to stage a personal humiliation rather than recognize such intellectual humiliation.

But if I must, in good conscience, reject Mr. Konder’s lessons in literary etiquette, I strongly recommend that he accept the following lesson in law, which I offer him with a good heart and in his own interest: if, even by calling people imbeciles, I would not have committed any crime, attributing to an individual a compromising act he did not commit is, according to the Penal Code, the crime of defamation. By putting to my account an insult I did not utter, Mr. Konder has thus - according to Brazilian law and logic - become a characteristic and unmistakable defamer. The only difference between him and his accomplices is that he defames in his typical sententious and moralizing language, which makes him, not exactly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but a street kid dressed as Conselheiro Acácio.

A philosopher’s letter to Santa Claus

What do I wish to achieve, dear Santa Claus, with my criticisms of the university establishment? Hoping to be heard this Christmas or in the future, I make a list:

I wish that Konders, Chauís, and tutti quanti frankly admit that they are not and have never been philosophers, but only teachers and disseminators of philosophy. Let this distinction, accepted worldwide, finally become known to the Brazilian public. Let them honorably practice their honorable activity as teachers and disseminators and stop meddling as censors of those who, not being shoemakers, are not obliged to stay below the sandals.

I wish that the works of the great Brazilian philosophers, especially the three greatest - Miguel Reale, Vicente Ferreira da Silva, and Mário Ferreira dos Santos - become part of the curriculum in all philosophy faculties, for we will never create a philosophical tradition if we do not build on the foundations that have already been laid and if instead, we have to start over constantly on the basis of the latest French or American fashion.

I wish that no more directors of Philosophy Faculties take their own ignorance as a measure of History and go out saying, like João Cruz Costa, that there is no philosophy in Brazil and Portugal.

I wish that the rich Portuguese philosophical tradition, especially Latin scholasticism, which Leibniz considered a valuable universal heritage, also becomes a Brazilian national heritage. I wish that those who deny the existence of this tradition because they have acquired their knowledge of Portuguese philosophy from joke almanacs will be kicked out without ceremony.

I wish that Spanish and Latin American philosophy be incorporated into the curriculum and that there be more and more exchange between Portuguese and Spanish-speaking philosophers.

I wish that philosophy professors study modern Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and Islamic philosophy with all seriousness, instead of disguising their ignorance by telling students that philosophy in these places ended a long time ago.

I wish that the developments of Christian scholasticism in the 20th century be shown to students instead of being hidden behind grotesque and dishonest simplifications.

I wish that phenomenology be taught directly from Husserl’s texts instead of through the bias of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, or any other.

I wish that political prejudices interfere less in the selection of authors to study, and that, on the contrary, the university follows the example of pluralism and tolerance set by Miguel Reale and Vicente Ferreira in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia.

I wish that the works of Plato and Aristotle have complete editions in Portuguese with direct translation, subsidized by the state, which are distributed for free to all schools and sold at low prices in all bookstores.

I wish that our philosophy teachers follow Heidegger’s advice (whom they like more than I do): before studying Nietzsche, fourteen years of Aristotle.

Finally, I wish that they stop calling the Marquis de Sade a philosopher because there is a time and place for jokes.

After these requests are fulfilled, dear Santa Claus, I will remember to wish something for myself: I wish that my books are read without prejudice and that they are answered with arguments instead of insults.

Poor victim153

Prof. Emir Sader demonstrates his lack of culture once again by beautifying Oscar Wilde as a victim of capitalist repression—a stereotype that would serve well for the political propaganda purposes of the USP sociologist if it were not historically false. Wilde used and abused underage boys in Algeria, enjoying the sexual pleasures of imperialism, and today, he would not be condemned by reactionary puritanism, but by progressive movements defending children’s rights. His sentence would not be two years, but eight or ten, and he would be crushed by the left-wing media, along with anyone who dared to defend him. Wilde was a cynic, who shamelessly delighted in the bodies of Arab boys, while his fellow adventurer, André Gide, who was fundamentally a good man, only engaged in the game at the expense of agonizing dramas of conscience.

Until when will the most basic intellectual ethics, the most ordinary duties of accurate information and logical consistency be sacrificed on the altar of crude political opportunism, without anyone realizing that not even the left can gain anything solid and lasting from this?

Letters to M. F. do Nascimento Brito

First

Dear sir,

In the edition of the Jornal do Brasil on the 5th, I was the subject of a blatant and false defamation because I displeased some idols of the left with the success of my book The Collective Imbecile.

The JB, misused as a tool of retaliation by people who can only respond to arguments with insults, not only published entirely false information about me but also distorted the statements of the poet Bruno Tolentino, who, upon reading the article, was extremely shocked by the transformation his words underwent, turning from a defense into an attack.

I had a refutation published, paid for by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, but this does not exempt the newspaper from its duty to respect my right of reply.

I cannot believe that JB is so subservient to left-wing movements to the extent of granting their spokespeople the unlimited right to lie without being held accountable to the most basic norms of good journalism. If these individuals, simply because they have jobs in newspapers, already arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate public opinion, who will be able to contain their arrogance if they seize state power tomorrow or the day after?

Just to give an example of how far they allow themselves to go, there is absolutely no justification to call someone a “self-proclaimed philosopher,” as they did, when JB itself, in previous editions, declared him to be a highly accomplished philosopher, and who is, by the way, recognized as such by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy, the Catholic University of Salvador, and by all Brazilian scholars of philosophy not committed to leftist ideology.

It is also not right to say that the aforementioned advertisement was paid for by me when it was the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy that paid for it, as can be verified in JB’s accounting records. But in this case, it was necessary to lie because the recognition of this simple fact would automatically refute the defamatory label of “self-proclaimed philosopher” and dismantle the entire scheme conceived to defame me.

I would prefer not to have to go to court to restore the truth; that’s why I turn to you, requesting that you demand from your subordinates a conduct befitting the journalistic ethics that JB has always known to respect throughout its existence, but which some of them now believe should be subordinated to considerations of ideological opportunism.

Second

Dear sir,

The whole of Brazil has always known you to be a serious journalist. The detailed explanations you now provide in response to my letter of September 10th show that you are also a kind and attentive man.

I only wish to insist on one point. Besides being treated as a “self-proclaimed philosopher” and having even my thirty years of professional journalism put into question, I had to endure the vilest of insults: “HE IS NOT A MAN.”

I have never stooped nor would I ever stoop to such a level, and thus it is not fair for you to say that the polemical harshness was equal “on both sides.” It was manifestly unequal.

I point out to you that, under Brazilian criminal law, mere mentions of a person’s intellectual quality do not constitute an offense to honor. But could there be a more overt offense to a man’s honor than denying his condition as a man? And even more unequal is the fact that the newspaper treats the author of this baseless claim as an intellectual of high standing while labeling me as an aspiring pretentious individual.

You acknowledge that I had the right to a response. So I sent one, and it was completely ignored. It was only because of this that I was forced to accept the offer from the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy to publish another, shorter, and inevitably incomplete response154, through a paid advertisement. And no matter how harsh the response was in either of its versions, it never descended to the level of false imputations and coarse language used by my detractors.

I ask: did the complete and detailed response that I sent to JB reach your hands, or, on the contrary, did the editorial staff let you make your decision based solely on the reading of the news article and the paid piece, and thus on an incomplete knowledge of the involved data?

By abruptly ending the controversy, JB left the situation unbalanced. One side had to pay to counter insults that the other side got published for free — and with the overt support of the newspaper. That is not justice in any way.

Third (by Bruno Tolentino)

Returning from a trip, I was hugely surprised and disappointed to read in the September 4th edition, completely altered, the statements I had made to the reporter Cristiane Costa.

I remember saying that Olavo de Carvalho, a discreet man preoccupied only with his studies and pedagogical activity, had written for twenty years for a narrow circle of friends and students, and that I, recognizing the great importance of his work, encouraged him to publish it as a book so that his precious teachings could benefit the whole country and not just the happy few. Arguing vigorously against his morbid indifference to the publishing world and all publicity, I especially insisted that he should disseminate three texts that until then circulated in booklets and loose notes: Uma Filosofia Aristotélica da Cultura and O Jardim das Aflições, for their extraordinary philosophical value, and O Imbecil Coletivo (at the time still incomplete), because it was a work destined, as I said, to “make noise,” that is, to achieve the success that it did, with an edition sold out in two weeks. Having done that, I proudly boasted of having brought out of hiding a bear whose growls now frighten many chickens.

The editor of the article (for I don’t believe Cristiane herself did it) managed to completely reverse what I said: Olavo de Carvalho was depicted in JB, through a curious transmutation of my words, as a Machiavellian careerist hungry for publicity — a man I have never met and, even if I had, I wouldn’t bother to talk about.

I can’t explain this phenomenon other than as an intention to defame an innocent person and to blame me for the defamation. If the editor of the article dared to falsify my statements to such an extent, one may wonder: what credibility remains for the rest of his text?

Bruno Tolentino155

Response to slanderers, among whom a trendy individual156

The title O Imbecil Coletivo is a figure of speech used to designate the general decline in the level of consciousness among Brazilian intellectuals. The examples cited in the book aim to illustrate the existence of the historical-social phenomenon and not to publicly denigrate individuals whom the author has never encountered and against whom he holds no reason for prejudice or resentment.

The book does not accuse any individual or specific group as responsible for this state of affairs, but rather certain doctrines and beliefs widely disseminated in Brazil. These ideologies, explicitly or implicitly, subject all intellectual activity to the ends of ideological struggle, leading to the inevitable result (though perhaps not foreseen or desired by their respective founders) of the depression of human intelligence.

The intellectuals mentioned in the book as spokespersons of these imbecilic doctrines are not necessarily personally imbecilic, nor does the book claim they are. “The collective imbecile, as defined on page 24, is a group of individuals of normal or even superior intelligence who come together driven by the common desire to render each other imbecilic.”

The book does not accuse or defame individuals but describes and combats a complex of doctrines, ideologies, and states of mind. It presents a diagnosis of a national situation, not an indictment against people or institutions.

All of this is quite obvious to those who can read. However, if some intellectuals, mentioned in the book only as adherents and propagandists of imbecilic doctrines, prefer to feel personally targeted as “imbeciles,” it is due to a morbid diversion of their focus of attention. Swayed by vanity, whenever they hear their names mentioned in passing, they immediately assume they are the center of the discussion and become alert to defend their self-esteem, without realizing that the mention may have been merely incidental (and entirely dispensable) examples used to debate things infinitely more important than their cherished reputations.

When each of these egocentrics quickly concluded, at the mere mention of the word “imbecile,” that it was directed at them, a general rush for identifying with the term ensued. They compete fiercely to embrace the insult as if it were a glory, fulfilling Bernanos' prophecy cited in the epigraph of the book: La colère des imbéciles remplit le monde (“The anger of imbeciles fills the world”).

Feeling personally offended, they defend themselves with such vigor that an uninformed listener may end up believing these people are the subject of the work. From this, one might erroneously conclude that the book must substantially consist of personal insults. Thus, this self-flattering comedy achieves its goal of boosting the vanity of some at the expense of tarnishing the reputation of others.

Individuals capable of promoting such disqualification disqualify themselves ipso facto for any intellectual profession, as they reveal themselves to be prisoners of their respective subjective dramas and incapable of rising to the objectivity of the issues at stake in a scenario that transcends them. The ideologies, doctrines, and historical currents they act as spokespersons for, and whose suprapersonal prestige ends up attaching itself to the individualities that represent them publicly, are mere psychological crutches they use to support their fragile personalities involved in a perpetual struggle to defend a precarious self-image.

“Ripeness is all,” as Shakespeare said. For the exercise of intellectual life, maturity is a primary condition.

Lacking this condition, so far, none of those supposedly disturbed by the book has shown the slightest intention of contesting any of my arguments. They limit themselves to attaching all sorts of derogatory labels to the person of the author, sometimes even claiming not to want to descend “into the discussion of details,” as if it were more beautiful and dignified to insult as a whole rather than to refute in detail.

Fundamentally, what they fear is that the reader will decide to personally investigate the book and encounter there the truth that critic Antônio Fernando Borges of the Jornal do Brasil discovered when he read one of my previous works: “Olavo de Carvalho is everything that his detractors would not want him to be: his analysis is generous, his text is humorous, his arguments aspire to clarity and democratic discussion.”

In their effort to avoid serious discussion through antics, my detractors have now invented two more tricks: dropping hints to tarnish my name without mentioning it (to circumvent the right to reply) and trying to involve me in indecent schemes of which they themselves are the sole authors.

If I were not in the midst of these whirlwind events, I would find it hard to believe, if I heard them retold, that the intellectual class could stoop to using such low tactics to prevent the democratic discussion of the content of a book. So that it is not said that I exaggerate, I reproduce here the letter I sent to the Jornal do Brasil on September 24, 1996, which reveals the latest defamatory trick conceived by my detractors:

João Ricardo Moderno, president of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, wrote to JB yesterday to say that the Academy neither published my book O Imbecil Coletivo in partnership with the Editora da Faculdade da Cidade nor commissioned the advertisements in which I defended myself against other slanderers of his ilk.

To expose his falsehood, there is no need for anything else but to contrast his words with the documents. The reproduced invoice, number 509447, issued by JB against the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy on September 4, 1996, for payment of the advertisements, and the attached testimony from the employees of Editora da Faculdade da Cidade, who received Moderno’s approval for the book cover, show who speaks the truth and who lies.

It is evident that feeling frightened by the dimensions taken by a cause to which he initially lent his opportunistic and frivolous support, Moderno decided it was time to backtrack and pulled out of the closet his old uniform as a soldier of Mao Tse-tung, hastily staging a show of subservience to the corporation at the expense of the defamation of an innocent.

And to further confirm with certainty that, in the process of editing and disseminating the book O Imbecil Coletivo, the slanderer Moderno oversaw and approved everything, the attached photo shows him witnessing and applauding the book launch ceremony, where huge posters announced the sponsorship of the Academy he presides. This individual would have to be morbidly distracted not to have realized that the Academy was publishing a book and to only become aware of it, astonished and outraged, a month later, when the first edition had already sold out.

On the occasion of the ceremony, he had even more personal reason for satisfaction: to know that, in the Academy’s partnership with the Editora, the next title scheduled for publication was a work authored by himself, whose preface, attached herewith, was already ready…

Sokal, a parodist of himself157

In Folha de S. Paulo on October 6, physicist Alan Sokal protests against the interpretation that Roberto Campos gave to his “experiment” of sending an article of pure nonsense in academic jargon to the editors of a sociology journal to see if they would publish it. Campos' reading, which saw in the case a demonstration of the intellectual ineptitude of the left, would be the result of “blind prejudice.”

“Except for those most directly affected — those caught with their pants down — the vast majority of the American intellectual left supported my intervention,” Sokal says. According to him, this proves that “the left is beginning to recognize its errors and renew itself intellectually.”

But what this proves is only that the left does not show solidarity with those among its members who are caught with their pants down. Lack of intelligence does not mean a lack of malice. By seeing in the episode a sign of a newfound intellectual renewal of the left, Sokal shows ignorance of the history of the movement to which he belongs: for the most traditional malice of the left is precisely to proclaim its sins to avoid bearing political consequences. The left has thrived on denouncing its own mistakes since the days of the French Revolution when it recognized the political convenience of guillotining the first guillotiner — an act that elevated the movement’s prestige to the skies and gave it the leverage to continue guillotining anyone it pleased. Since then, each new leftist current is born from the proud proclamation of the discrediting of the previous one. Marxism itself emerges from a devastating critique of the left’s errors, as does Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Gramscism, and so on. From Robespierre to Alan Sokal, the history of the left is a succession of decapitated idols on the altar of the rebirth of the cause; it is a succession of rings sacrificed for the multiplication of fingers.

For verbal acknowledgment of errors — formerly known as “self-criticism” — always aims to explain not only ineptitudes and absurdities but also crimes and atrocities as accidental deviations that do not compromise the pure essence of the socialist ideology, so that the more blood is shed in its name, the more dignified it becomes. The cycle is self-renewing because the repentant sinner receives not punishment but always a reward for their sins. With each new series of horrors and failures, the left emerges invigorated and imbued with a new faith in its unquestionable honesty of purposes. From generation to generation, leftists become less and less responsible for the actions of their predecessors and more and more confident in deserving new opportunities to try and err indefinitely. Leftism is a lie that dialectically feeds on its own negation. Up to now, this game of trial and error has cost 150 million lives (equivalent to the work of two dozen Hitlers). But for the leftist moral conscience, this is not something that keeps them awake at night. Just a few words condemning those who were caught with their pants down, and everything is clean: the left is ready to reappear in public, head held high, and demand humanity’s renewed trust.

Sokal is right in saying that the right does not have a monopoly on honesty. It is the left that has the hegemony of gatecrashing or at least of false consciousness.

If you want an example, just read Sokal’s response to Campos, where he reveals the characteristic tendency of the leftist intellectual to take a view of oneself as absolute truth, founded solely on subjective intentions and sovereign disinterest (or incapacity?) to assess the real scope of their actions.

Thus, he claims that the parody accepted for publication by Social Text “was not intended to ridicule the left but to strengthen it through the critique of its excesses.” But whether to destroy or to regenerate, every parody, by definition, exposes its victim to ridicule, and that is precisely what Sokal did with the highly esteemed journal, unintentionally taking down all its numerous counterparts published by the American left. Whether the object of parody will emerge weakened or strengthened by exposure to ridicule does not depend on the subjective intentions of the author; it solely depends on the reaction of the victim, who can take the case as a stimulus to regenerate or as an occasion to expose themselves to even greater ridicule, just as the director of Social Text did. Sokal’s claims only show the total inconsequence of his act: because the parody is the last literary genre to be chosen by an author who wishes only to admonish and edify the sinner without exposing them to ridicule. After all, parody is the epitome of ridicule.

More ridiculous than parody, however, is involuntary humor: the air of innocence with which the author of a parody declares not to have intended to ridicule would make him a true pince-sans-rire, if we didn’t know that he genuinely believes what he says, and that, in this case, believing what he says means admitting that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

But that’s not all Sokal doesn’t know. He also doesn’t know what the left is, as he defines it as “a political current that condemns the injustices and inequalities of capitalism and seeks to eliminate them or at least minimize them” — a definition so elastic that it applies to a range of characters from Mussolini to Lord Keynes, from Salazar to Franklin Roosevelt, including all popes since Leo XIII, and in Brazil, besides encompassing the two Plinios (Salgado and Correia de Oliveira), it wouldn’t exclude President Castello Branco and his minister Roberto Campos, creators of a Land Statute that was precisely meant to remedy some of the mentioned injustices. Moreover, I don’t know where Sokal intends to have seen someone who completely denies the injustices of capitalism or the need to eliminate or mitigate them158. Personally, I have never seen that. If the left is what he says, it suffers from a pathetic lack of adversaries.

To make matters worse, Sokal seeks to minimize159 the scope of his own critique of academic leftism, claiming that nothing serious is happening there, and the only harm this community suffers is that an insignificant fraction of intellectuals has begun to write nonsense in academese, while the overwhelming majority continues to say interesting things in excellent English. But how can one explain that the critique of a minority fraction has caused such a fuss, except for the fact that this fraction is the most representative of academic leftism? Sokal himself provides the most blatant proof of this when he says that his article, instead of mentioning only second-rate authors, quoted a list of nonsense spoken by “prominent American and French intellectuals.” Prominent, I ask, in whose opinion? By definition, no one is prominent solely by receiving the applause of a minority. Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, Deleuze, Aronowitz, are not the objects of worship of a tiny university church: they are idols of the global leftist intelligentsia. Exposing them to ridicule necessarily compromises the false image of intellectual respectability of the left as a whole. To conclude this from Sokal’s article is not “blind prejudice,” it is just a matter of logic. Sokal’s display of such unawareness of the inevitable effects of his writing only shows that he is quite incapable of directing the critical gaze he applies to both his peers and his adversaries towards himself.

And the fact that even someone as cunning as him is cleverer than the American academic community, to the point of being able to expose it to ridicule in a parodic writing, demonstrates above all, more than the parody itself might have shown, the poor intellectual state of this community. Worse than the parody is the parody of the parody.

07/10/96

Donating a copy of this book

Rio de Janeiro, October 11, 1996

Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

Attention: Library Director

Dear Sir,

I have come to know that a professor from this institution, after publishing some grouchy opinions about my book The Collective Imbecile in a newspaper, was asked by a student if he had read the mentioned work or not. In front of the class, he responded that he hadn’t because he wouldn’t waste money on the work of a scoundrel.

Recognizing that the modest salary of a university professor nowadays does not allow for such expenditures, I have decided to send a copy of the book to this library, where the austere professor can personally examine the content of the alleged scoundrelry without any expense incompatible with the decorum that should prevail in the teaching profession.

Sincerely, Olavo de Carvalho.

What is, after all, the intelligentsia?

After the strategy of insults has clearly failed, the new trend among activist intellectuals is to attack my book The Collective Imbecile without even mentioning it. First, it was Leandro Konder in O Globo. Now, Emir Sader in JB. They do this to try to bypass the right to reply and avoid publicly admitting that my critiques of the leftist intelligentsia have struck a nerve and are a cause for serious concern. They do it so as not to acknowledge that the one they mockingly labeled a “self-proclaimed philosopher” has presented them with a barrier of arguments that none of them, individually, can handle, following the advice of Descartes: they divided the problem into pieces. Then, completing Descartes with Gramsci, they assigned each piece to a department of the “collective intellectual,” hoping that together they could handle the matter. As for me, I follow Erasmo Carlos’s methodological precept: they can come in hot, I am boiling.

Sader, while apologizing for the class whose absurdities I denounced, offers a rhetorical definition of intelligentsia that he intends to substitute for the logical definition I provided in my book. A rhetorical definition, for those who do not know, is one that, instead of differentiating its object by genus and species, as the logical definition does, isolates and unilaterally emphasizes one of its distinctive traits - positively or negatively, depending on the intended argument.

It is a legitimate rhetorical instrument, as long as the emphasis on the part does not distort the nature of the whole, and as long as the definition does not presuppose what the continuation of the argument seeks to prove based on it. In the latter case, we have, instead of a definition, the typical sophistical figure called begging the question. In the former, we simply have a false definition. The perversion of rhetoric that falsifies logic and facts to win over the opponent in an unfair fight is called eristic. If rhetoric merely simplifies and beautifies arguments to make them attractive, eristic goes beyond that: it beautifies the lack of arguments with false attractions.

My definition of intelligentsia was: “This Russian word does not encompass all the people engaged in scientific, philosophical, or artistic tasks, but only those who frequently speak with each other and mutually persuade themselves that they are collaborating for something they swear is the social and political progress of humanity.”

Now, Sader’s definition: “The Russian word intelligentsia designates something different from the simple expression ‘intellectuals.’ In its original sense, it characterized a group of people united by critical ideas about the system, opposed to academic specialization, and marked by a strong ethical connotation.”

The comparison highlights the differences. The first definition, despite its somewhat ironic tone and the use of a figure of speech (“speak with each other” does not have a literal sense, obviously), does not presuppose anything regarding the value or lack thereof of the intelligentsia, or the accuracy or error of their claim to serve the progress of humanity. It merely distinguishes its object by the proximate genus (intellectuals) and the specific differences (sense of solidarity and shared belief in serving a particular notion of “progress,” notably the one characterizing the so-called “left”).

On the other hand, Sader’s definition seeks to individualize the intelligentsia with three characteristics: criticism of the system, opposition to academism, and the ethical inspiration of their efforts.

Of these traits, the first two are false, and the third is not specific. This is a typical rhetorical definition that, instead of logically delimiting its object, only envelops it in a beautifying mist. But, since the alleged beautiful qualities are false, it is not even a rhetorical definition but simple eristic.

Let’s see. The intelligentsia is not against the system in general, but only against certain systems. For more than thirty years, the intelligentsia did nothing but servilely flatter the Soviet system, throwing mud and stones at anyone who dared to contest it (like Gide and Koestler, for example). The intelligentsia can sometimes be a group of brave people fighting against the establishment. However, it can, in the very next moment, without losing any of its members and without changing a single word of its progressive discourse, take power and form a pack of watchdogs protecting the system against its critics.

Secondly, the intelligentsia only opposes academic authority when it is someone else’s authority. As soon as it takes over the universities, it becomes an advocate for academic prerogatives and fiercely defends its territory against outsiders. Its spokespersons sometimes reach the absurdity of implicitly claiming the academic monopoly of thought, disqualifying as a “self-proclaimed” and “autonomous” individual anyone who engages in the debate of ideas without possessing the academic certificate they themselves sign, which, by definition, couldn’t be worth more than its signatories. The intelligentsia self-proclaims to be composed of thinkers free from academic prejudices, which is their prerogative and their cherished self-image. But to do this less than a month after they have used and abused academic authority as holy water to exorcise an intruder is just a downright hypocrisy.

Finally, ethics. This cannot be a distinctive trait of the intelligentsia for the simple reason that many intellectuals oppose the intelligentsia for reasons at least as ethical as theirs. It would be patently absurd to deny that thinkers as openly conservative as Bossuet, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, René Guénon, Edmund Burke, G. K. Chesterton, or T. S. Eliot were driven by the highest ethical intentions (regardless of whether we agree with their opinions). The most glaring proof that the ethical sentiment is neither left nor right comes from the case of Georges Bernanos, perhaps the most eloquent polemicist of the century, who, always moved by the same ethical impulse and based on the same Catholic moral principles, either attacked or joined the intelligentsia, depending on whether he thought they acted badly or well in specific situations. If Sader’s definition is true, then Bernanos never existed.

For the purpose of propaganda, it is convenient to give the illusion to the public that ethics and leftism are one and the same thing, that outside of the left, there is nothing but wicked interests, and that Santa Claus does not bring presents to the bad boys on the right. But this is the most foolish eristic.

To make matters worse, if ethics is not exclusive to the intelligentsia, there is also a significant portion of the intelligentsia that openly advocates amorality and cynicism without being expelled from the club for it. It would be comical to search for lofty ethical intentions in Derrida or Foucault, not to mention Jean Genet, Richard Mapplethorpe, or the Marquis de Sade, idols of a considerable fraction of the leftist intelligentsia. Not to mention in detail the complicity between the Brazilian intelligentsia and the criminal gangs in Rio de Janeiro that I spoke about in this same newspaper a few years ago.

Now, a trait that is not exclusive to an object and is sometimes absent from the object without ceasing to be itself cannot possibly be part of its definition. Ethics is not an intrinsic beauty of the intelligentsia nature; it is an artificial adornment that they put on or take off depending on the demands of the strategic moment. And it should never be forgotten that the word “ethics” in Antonio Gramsci has nothing to do with elevated moral feelings but only designates a pragmatic and amoral balance between economy and ideology.

From a false definition, one can only deduce false consequences. Professor Sader pretends to lament that the pressures of the market “diminish the importance of differentiated opinions.” However, the intelligentsia and the market are not always enemies. It can, at certain moments (and we are currently experiencing one), monopolize the market and sideline the differentiated opinions of those who displease them. The Gramscian strategy of achieving hegemony consists precisely in this and sometimes succeeds. Richard Grenier, in the splendid book Capturing the Culture (Washington, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), abundantly documents the left’s hegemony in American literature and cinema, concluding with a quote from Hilton Kramer, the editor of New Criterion: “Truly I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a serious conservative writer to win a major literary prize in this country.” If it happened in New York and Hollywood, why couldn’t it happen here? Sader, for example, occupies vast spaces in the media, says whatever he wants, and anyone who tries to challenge him faces a tough struggle to get a few lines published. And what about the idols of the show business, who, from their beautiful gated communities, transmit to the world their deeply ethical outrage against the market they dominate? Complaining about the market, the beneficiaries of the system shed crocodile tears.

Even more false is the affected nostalgia in the following words with which Sader concludes his article: “Good times when established truths were unmasked, when great challenges of radical criticism were dared to be opposed to common sense.” I say those were good times. In those times, my book would be seriously and openly debated, without gross insults or veiled insinuations, and especially without some sociologist demanding, from the radical critic, the display of their academic nihil obstat.

Supplement of the supplement

Racial law is racism

If someone believes that the main difference between a workhorse and a thoroughbred is their color, everyone can see that they either have poor eyesight or a troubled mind. However, Senator Benedita da Silva says the same thing about the difference between her and Marilyn Monroe, and no one has the courage to inform her that she would hardly fare better in comparison to Whitney Houston or Isabel Filardis. Implicitly called “trash” by the new president of Sebrae (Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service), the senator explained the impoliteness as a crime of racism—a comforting subterfuge denied to white uglies. If Maria da Conceição Tavares were a victim of a similar rudeness and wanted to make a legal fuss about it, she would have no choice but to sue Marilyn Monroe for unfair competition.

Driven by the hysterical discourse of black racists, this country is taking hypocrisy beyond the safety limit, where it turns into self-deception, and self-deception into madness.

Citing the historical sufferings of their ancestors, blacks have won the right to praise their own race without being accused of racism and, in return, accuse anyone who criticizes a black person for any reason of racism.

However, all racisms begin as compensations for historical suffering. The Germans invented this whole Nazi thing only after being discriminated against by cultured and wealthy Europe for three hundred years, being regarded as a crude and backward people speaking a barnyard language. Making fun of Germans was fashionable, even among themselves—an example of self-discrimination: Nietzsche was ashamed of not being French. It was centuries of inferiority complex. And when the Germans finally rose, their neurotic desire for compensations led to what it led.

The desire for compensations is psychologically explainable but results in making race, as such, a holder of rights, and this is, no more, no less, pure and simple racial right. At the same time, the law that enshrines the rights of race imposes no obligations on it arising from the exercise of these rights, which makes it a legally privileged being that can demand but cannot be demanded. Absolute and unconditional, racial right supersedes, therefore, the constitutional rights of the individual citizen, which entail obligations. To make things worse, racial right blatantly violates a constitutional principle: if no one can be discriminated against based on race, it is absurd that, for the same reason, they enjoy special rights.

Anyone who introduces contradiction and absurdity into the body of laws is, in essence, an enemy of the legal order, no matter how edifying their alleged reasons may be.

The halves of the moon world160

In Brazil, the sphere of philosophical studies has, like the Moon, two diversely lit halves. One of them is the Faculty of Philosophy of USP, with Rio branches at Funarte and in some university departments. The other encompasses everyone else who studies, teaches, and practices philosophy in this country.

The second hemisphere holds huge philosophy conferences, where hundreds of papers are presented each year and which have already brought figures of the stature of a Georges Gusdorf, a Julián Marías, an Enzo Paci, a Luigi Bagolini. It publishes at least three notable journals: the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia, from São Paulo (over two hundred issues), the Presença Filosófica, from Rio, and the Síntese, from Belo Horizonte.

This hemisphere has inhabitants of world renown. Miguel Reale, an author translated into several languages, has so much prestige abroad that just now, in October, an international philosophy conference will be held in Vianna do Castelo, Portugal, with the purpose of studying his work. It is the first time that a Brazilian philosopher has received such high recognition.

But, following the logic of the world of the moon, this is not the visible half of the sphere. The part that shines is the other. It encompasses only producers of little dissemination books (sometimes not even that, but mere entrepreneurs of philosophy-as-spectacle). Among its most notorious militants, there is at least one who confesses to never having read a philosophical work in the original. But this half of the sphere shines for four reasons. First, it has a notable unity of beliefs and tastes, which is not at all philosophical but gives it the undeniable market advantage of an easily recognizable profile and the strategic priority of organized action. Second, it has a vast network of retransmitters installed in strategic positions in the press and in the so-called educational TV channels. Third, it has show business figures to beautify the image of its product. Fourth, it has good friends in major publishers. In short, it has everything that a person needs in Brazil to be considered a philosopher.

Because of this, the second hemisphere is only visible from outside, while the first, non-existent for the world, occupies the entire local scenario and poses here as if it were the very incarnation of philosophy. A sneeze, a mumble, any nonsense, if issued by the self-appointed namers of philosophers, reverberate throughout the Tupiniquim territory, while the international homage to Miguel Reale will be massively ignored by the press, as has happened with everything that honors and elevates philosophy in this country. A strange country, where the directors of a small collection of second-hand philosophical translations, horribly planned and worse executed, acquire greater intellectual authority than a Carlos Alberto Nunes, author of the only vernacular translation of the complete works of Plato - a job that, in Europe or the US, would bring him the glories awarded to Sir David Ross, Joseph Tricot, Jonathan Barnes, or Léon Robin.

Until when will the organized militancy of the mediocre overshadow the authentic shine of the true Brazilian thinkers? Until when will the best remain passive due to lack of common belief, while the worst, with passionate intensity, will eat everything up?

Media and reality

The media creates the profile of its own object. It’s like a programmed camera that captures only certain colors or shapes, ignoring the rest. Selection and simplification exist in all knowledge, but in the case of media, the selective grid is not designed to highlight the essential characteristics of the object but to consolidate the “profile of the vehicle” or “profile of the product,” the “personality,” so to speak, of the newspaper, magazine, or TV channel, which, as a result, ends up focusing only on its own image and likeness. Each media outlet functions like a neurotically egocentric individual, continuously needing to reaffirm its identity: in others, it notices only the traits and gestures that serve to confirm, by similarity or contrast, its self-image.

Furthermore, facts pass, but the vehicle remains. The object—the event, the interviewee, the world—reduced to an occasional pretext for the continuous reaffirmation of the personality of the one exhibiting it, loses all substance. It is what is being talked about, but, surreptitiously, the public’s focus of attention is diverted toward who is speaking. Initially, a TV news broadcast attracts the audience by talking about important things; later, things become important because they appear in the TV news. Marshal McLuhan exaggerated when he said that the medium is the message: the medium only progressively usurps the place of the message. Every media vehicle, as a product seeking to impose its own image on the market, aims to take this usurpation to the extreme: the conquest of total credibility coincides with the total absorption of the object into the “profile of the vehicle,” the complete subjugation of the world to the mold of its mirror. When the medium becomes the message, we enter the realm of universal redundancy.

In each media outlet, the selective grid is incorporated into the daily work norms of professionals, and they end up adapting to it as if it were a second nature. Over time, they lose all capacity for critical awareness of what they are doing. They often believe they are just simplifying the facts journalistically to make them accessible to the “average consumer,” when, in fact, they are distorting and caricaturing the reality of the world brutally. This happens because the “average consumer,” the “average reader,” the “average viewer” are delineated as mere ideal types projected according to the “profile of the vehicle” and not according to their real characteristics as concrete human beings. And when the product becomes successful, consumed exactly by the type of person—or “market segment”—for which it was ideally intended, then opinion polls confirm that real consumers think exactly as the ideal consumer was expected to think. Then, the media persuades itself that it is reflecting reality when it is only looking at aspects of reality that confirm its self-image and ignoring everything else, no matter how historically, socially, morally, etc., important it may be.

This distorting selectivity has a potential for stupidity, which, when projected onto higher culture, dragging writers, playwrights, intellectuals, in general, in its habits, can produce a disastrous result, making an entire people unable to perceive the most obvious things. Because the media provides the symbols with which the consumer conceives and elaborates reality, and whatever is not in the media gradually becomes intransmissible, then unthinkable, then unimaginable, and finally inexistent. Thus, the freedom of expression, which is the sine qua non of media development, ends up becoming, in the long run, a barrier to the communication of many important facts and ideas. Social analysts sometimes perceive that this is happening, but imbued with moral and political concepts somewhat outdated in relation to the state of affairs, they naively take it as the effect of premeditated ideological manipulations, without realizing that it is essentially an automatism—a process that, once installed, becomes independent of any human designs and tends to multiply indefinitely like a computer virus. Hence, the very denunciations of the harmful effects of the media are selective and impotent to provide an effective explanation of what happens. When these denunciations become part of the common language of journalism and TV professionals, they provide them with a legitimizing pretext to examine with even more critical sense the distortions committed by others—especially large companies—while paying less attention to those they themselves practice daily. Thus, critical thinking perverts into false consciousness, and the sense of justice, often cited as a legitimizing motive for the denunciations, is prostituted in that indigestible mixture of self-complacency and accusatory spirit that has taken hold of the Brazilian press in recent years, almost universally.

Curiously, the media, as a capitalist enterprise, carries within it the remedy for its own ailment. In wealthier countries, the variety of media and the richness of perspectives in public debate, consolidated by a strong higher education system—which the media itself helps strengthen—largely neutralize the destructive potential of distorting selectivity. Where hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and TV channels with different profiles and antagonistic orientations confront each other in fierce competition, it is very difficult for aspects of reality systematically ignored by one outlet not to be immediately exploited by another—one that, in the long run at least, forces the first one to acknowledge that those facts it was induced to ignore according to its product’s profile did exist.

The growth of the media professionals' class also creates, in the long run, the variety, difference, and antagonisms that, as a whole, are the true and only guarantee of everyone’s freedom.

But in a country like Brazil, where the market is monopolized by a relatively small number of large companies, and especially where the press professionals' class is small enough for there to be a sense of unity, a certain identity of moral and political ideals, and even a community of language, tastes, and habits, the selective grid by which the media cuts out reality tends to be uniform. This is tremendously dangerous. Firstly and most obviously, it is politically dangerous: it is very easy in Brazil to turn the entire press against certain targets without the accused finding a defense remotely proportional to the accusation. Journalists today recognize, at least in words, the most striking and aberrant cases of character assassination, but this recognition is not accompanied by the necessary interest in probing the deep causes that make these episodes dangerously easy to unleash and almost impossible to control. In a chapter of “The Collective Imbecile,” previously published in the magazine “Imprensa,” I highlighted the astonishing phenomenon of the unanimity of the Brazilian press during the CPI (Congressional Committee of Budget) period: all newspapers, magazines, and TV channels were united in denouncing a gigantic conspiracy of interests that had taken over the state, and no one remembered to ask how it was possible that such powerful interests, capable of buying half of Congress, did not have a single defender in the media. When it later became clear that the involved interests were not as vast or powerful as claimed, that the guilty were actually ordinary swindlers incapable of formulating an efficient defense, not a single newspaper confessed to making a storm in a teacup. The “parallel state” thesis fizzled out by itself but was never expressly repudiated.

Secondly, the danger is much greater, though less obvious, in the cultural and psychological domains: to the extent that the media’s unanimity influences writers and intellectuals, even creating a kind of community of habits and tastes shared by media professionals, academics, and artists, then the very class tasked with critically reasoning about the phenomenon becomes incapacitated from doing so. Under these conditions, anyone who dares to show the public certain facts or ideas generally ignored by the media will not only face the media itself but also the dominant consensus among intellectuals and artists. The blockage, under these conditions, becomes truly totalitarian, without any of those involved in creating this state of affairs consciously harboring any totalitarian intentions. It is an implicit dictatorship, strengthened by the false consciousness of being sincerely democratic.

To make matters worse, the resistance of unanimity to accepting divergent proposals will not take the form of explicit contestation or genuine debate but rather of selective—distorted and caricaturing—dissemination of the proposal itself, so that it does not reach the public without being pre-vaccinated against its own potential effectiveness. Again, no professional involved in biased dissemination needs to be consciously aware of being biased, and the very uniformity of the treatment given to the subject by other professionals and outlets gives each one the good conscience of dealing with the matter according to accepted standards of professional integrity.

Gradually, this becomes a stone barrier to all true novelty since the very definition of novelty has been previously narrowed to include only standardized classes of admitted novelties. The contradiction is inherent in the notion of a media vehicle, on the one hand, as a supposed portrait of reality, and, on the other hand, as a standardized, delineated product imprisoned once and for all in its own grid of interests and priorities, from which it cannot deviate without risking losing the already conquered audience, without the guarantee of being able to conquer new audiences. Hence, when, for the millionth time, a theater show presents naked actors or psychologically assaults the audience, it is reported as a spectacular novelty, and when, for the first time in Brazilian history, perhaps the first time in world history, an abnormal increase in the number of used properties for sale starts to indicate an almost generalized exodus of inhabitants from old middle-class neighborhoods in a major city, as has been happening in São Paulo, the press takes ten years to realize that it is facing an unprecedented and very strange phenomenon.

This phenomenon is at the root of the low credibility of the Brazilian media, repeatedly noted by surveys. The consumer, the reader, the viewer can never be so manipulated as to not perceive the most obvious differences between the world shown to them and the world they see. It is also what allows proposals, ideas, and people rejected by the media, or solemnly ignored by it, to continue reaching the public through direct action, as happens in the world of arts and shows with figures like Juca Chaves and Eliana Pittman—successes that the media ignored for a long time and which, in turn, could ignore the media. After all, the media refuses to talk about these people, but it does not reject their paid advertisements, which sometimes reach the public with even greater credibility than the news.

But, returning to the distorting selectivity, the writer, journalist, entrepreneur, or politician who dares to fight for a proposal that is very divergent from the tastes of media professionals will have to face, first and foremost, the subtle but not less serious distortion that his image will suffer when passing through the filter of journalistic adaptation. This will select from the character and his proposal, not the aspects that are essential and most valuable in the character’s own intention and meaning, but those that seem “journalistically interesting,” i.e., those that serve to underline the “profile of the product” of the media outlet in question. That is, regardless of the intrinsic nature of the subject being discussed, the newspaper, magazine, or TV channel will always find a way to talk only about itself. And, in the absence of any place in the product’s profile or in any previously established classification key for the singular and the unprecedented, the focused character will adapt to fit into one of the prefabricated roles admitted by the product’s formula, and he will be very fortunate if that role bears any partial resemblance to what he is for himself and in the reality of the external world.

Often, the greatest resemblance is quite remote. All of us who have ever been interviewed by a newspaper, a magazine, or a TV program have felt cut out according to the standards of a tailor seeking in us not our own measurement but our resemblance to someone or something known and standardized—a resemblance that, in many cases, only reached the realm of mere coincidences. The more rigid the product’s profile and, worse still, the more unanimous the spirit of the media professionals' class, the more remote this resemblance will possibly become, and the less the interviewee, the character, or the fact will resemble themselves.

I have talked to many people who have had this experience, and I myself have been a character in it several times. The most recent was the wave of interviews and comments sparked by my book “The Collective Imbecile.”

For twenty years, I wrote, taught, and gave lectures to well-defined groups—essentially a university audience—without seeking to give greater diffusion to my work and ideas. I did this on purpose because I was convinced that philosophy is not a field where one can achieve a reasonable mastery of one’s ideas before reaching maturity, as is demonstrated, moreover, by the fact that, unlike poetry and the arts in general, philosophers rarely show precocity, and masterpieces are almost always written in maturity and old age. Knowing this, I thought I could wait at least as long as Aristotle did: the master founded the Lyceum and began his public teaching at the age of forty-nine.

Now, after so much time of experience, a man has the right to believe that he reasonably knows the profile of his work and the meaning of his life project. Moreover, if he has left enough milestones along the way—records of his actions and words—the direction of his trajectory has left the realm of intentions and become an objective fact. This man has the right to expect that any overall image of him appearing in the media will at least roughly coincide with what he knows about himself and with the records he has left behind.

In many cases, however, this expectation is not fulfilled: our stereotyped character portrayed in the media differs completely from the one we know and whose record of our actions proves.

When, at the age of fifty, I selected a few hundred pages out of a mass of thousands of written pages dedicated to criticizing the Brazilian cultural present and published them under the title The Collective Imbecile, I suddenly found myself portrayed in the press as “having a vocation for controversy,” whose main occupation in life was to pick fights with intellectuals.

Now, a vocation, as far as I know, is the ultimate sense of a task to which the individual feels called and to which they dedicate their efforts; it is not that particular trait which, isolated from the context of a life, happens to draw the attention of the press at a certain moment.

The distortions and minor falsehoods that innumerable appeared in the news about me all stem from this initial deviation of focus; a deviation that slips from the center of its object to the periphery, simply because this periphery coincides, in this case, with the center of the sphere of interests of the local media.

Of course, in this episode, a large part of the distortion was fueled by ideological prejudices; but these ideological prejudices wouldn’t have such ease in imposing their mold on the news if the very usual modus operandi of the media — which in itself is ideologically neutral — didn’t predispose it to such.

Date: 04/09/96

From Commission to Fuckery

[Original title: Da comissão à começão]

The great intellectual debate of the month, which featured Profs. José Arthur Gianotti and Octávio Ianni as protagonists, focused on a topic of unfathomable depth: how to distribute university funds. It is a subject that has monopolized the attention of our best minds for decades, when they are not occupied with other questions of equal philosophical complexity, such as the one that stirs the theater community in Rio de Janeiro: should a critic be allowed to attend a play when there is proven risk that they will speak ill of the performance?

Both factions agree that university autonomy must be preserved at all costs, meaning the right of the academic class to do whatever they please with taxpayers' money. The disagreement concerns only the age at which the funding applicant should start enjoying their share, with Prof. Ianni preferring that they do so whenever they feel like it and Prof. Gianotti as soon as possible.

Regarding the destiny each beneficiary should give to their respective share, there is no hesitation between these two luminaries of science: research, of course! Research involves raising a question that has already been resolved and creating apparent difficulties that make it extremely painful – a result that is usually achieved at least stylistically. Once accomplished, the researcher shows their gratitude by praising public education, a benevolent institution that charges nothing to teach nothing.

But sometimes, research itself can become the object of research. When this happens, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. As early as 1988, a comparative survey of topics, funds, and results led Prof. Edmundo Campos Coelho, in the book “A Sinecura Acadêmica,” to a conclusion summarized by Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos: “Government spending on higher education constitutes vast wastefulness, the Brazilian university is to a large extent a hoax, and there is an enormous variety of parasites that inhabit it.”

In the same year, Prof. Leandro Konder published “A Derrota da Dialética,” a 200-page report about those who had read Marx in Brazil until 1935 (there weren’t many, one can guess). Narrative and journalistic, with no more theoretical elaboration than fifteen pages of conventional communist self-criticism at the beginning and another twelve at the end, and based solely on books, without investigating original documents, the research, with the assistance of about twenty people, had taken six years – approximately the time it took Otto Maria Carpeaux to fill alone the 3,500 pages of the “History of Western Literature.” Of those six years, two were funded by CNPq, which later even shared the expenses of a trip to Argentina with the researcher’s mother. The achievement earned the author the title of “dotô” (doctor), with a perfect grade, demonstrating the indispensability of a similar document for the superior exercise of intelligence. Endorsed by Prof. Gerd Bornheim, among others, the title was not subject to protest.

But Prof. Campos Coelho’s denunciation is now outdated. After 1988, the academic class, through in-depth research, discovered that the best defense is offense: having played a significant role in the campaign for ethics and having helped to punish the corrupt members of the Budget Commission, it can now devote itself to discussing the best strategy to continue, through admittedly legal means, the Commission’s Começão of the Budget.

Imaginary letter to the director of “Raça” magazine

I was perplexed when I saw the magazine “Raça” on newsstands and read that its purpose is to instill in the reader the pride of being black, even though it has several white editors who couldn’t share this reason for pride or make an equivalent apologia for the white race without causing a major uproar in the publication’s editorial line.

As a white person who married a black woman and has a mixed-race son, I am facing a dilemma for which I seek the assistance of you. Should I teach my son to take pride in being black or being white? Should he identify with his mother’s race or his father’s? Or should he discard any racial pride and stop reading a magazine that fills his mind with doubts?

Being old-fashioned individuals, educated in the Holy Mother Church with its multicolored pantheon of martyrs and scholars, we had never thought that race should be a source of pride or shame. To boast or humiliate oneself over any physical characteristic, be it skin color, weight, or the size of one’s nose (not to mention any more intimate organ), always seemed foolish to us and not something any mature person should cultivate, as it would reduce us to the level of exhibition animals. We believed that anatomical features, including racial ones, were secondary and negligible in the face of the spiritual unity of the human species and should never be elevated to values to be defended in any somewhat serious public debate. However, as we became modern people and started to believe everything we read, your magazine has put us in great confusion, and the most embarrassing questions have started to arise in our minds.

If being black is a reason for pride, should being white be a reason for shame or pride as well? Are some races praiseworthy while others are shameful, or are they all equally praiseworthy? In the first case, please inform us which ones are shameful so that we can avoid any contact with these inferior beings. In the second case, explain to us how a racial characteristic can be a source of pride without assuming that the lack of it constitutes a reason for shame. How can one be proud of something if they do not see any superiority in it, and how can one imagine that their own race is superior without presupposing that others are inferior?

Even worse: that which is a source of pride is, by definition, a valuable asset that should be preserved. If the black race is a source of pride, should black individuals preserve their racial purity, avoiding all miscegenation, or should they discard this reason for pride and let it dissolve in the Brazilian melting pot where all races intermarry? How can there be racial pride without defending racial purity?

We would also like to know if you would accept an advertisement with a photo of German weightlifters and the title: “We are proud of the white race.”

We also have some Jewish friends and do not show them your magazine to avoid confusing them, not knowing if they should be proud of being white like Germans or Semitic like Arabs. We imagine they might take pride in being Jewish in a religious sense, without any racial references, but this would not be fair because if blacks have the right to racial pride, why wouldn’t Jews have it too?

Even worse, we have a black friend who married a woman of Japanese descent, overcoming strong resistance from her community, which wanted to preserve the race that was their source of pride. The couple’s child does not look Japanese or black, but rather like an indigenous person with a sunburn. Should he take pride in the racial characteristics he does not have or in being a sui generis individual? But wouldn’t it be odious discrimination to obligate him to admit that he is an ethnological UFO deprived of any right to racial pride?

In short, we do not understand how the cult of racial pride is possible without that of racial purity, let alone racial purity without racism, and we are in great confusion because we cannot admit that your magazine is racist, as it is applauded in the “Letters” section by celebrities of all colors.

One hypothesis that has somewhat relieved us is that perhaps the magazine is precisely intended to make money from other people’s confusion. But if that is the case, why not mix everything up and call the publication “Tiririca” (meaning clown) and say that its purpose is to defend the racial purity of mixed-race individuals or that it combats the Jewish Nazism of Muslim followers of Bishop Macedo?

Memories of a Weirdo, or: The State of Affairs161

"Many animals did not receive the benefits of human education."

Erik Satie

Education doesn’t only serve to find a job, make someone famous, or increase one’s bank balance. Sometimes, it also improves the human personality, albeit accidentally, without anyone being blamed for such inconvenience.

As for me, I confess that I deliberately sought this and only this purpose in education when I became a journalist, a profession that allowed me free time. I realized that my inability to climb the career ladder could be adequately compensated by some form of inner gain achieved through self-education, whether it be the kingdom of heaven or a modest relief from the feeling of complete ignorance that had oppressed me ever since a dedicated geometry teacher mathematically demonstrated the impossibility of making me understand Thales' theorem.

So, I studied and studied a lot, solely with the aim of understanding something about this world, and occasionally about the other, without any intention of using my knowledge to become what is conventionally called "someone." Like a bear in its den, I spent thirty years among books and a few friends, teaching in private courses, not missing the colorful chattering that passes for "cultural life."

But everything has a price. Deprived of the infallible guidance that can only be obtained in Brazilian universities, my brain took strange paths, which clearly illustrate the dangers of intellectual autarky—the activity of the solitary scholar, pursued on the margins of the dominant cultural discourse. Solitude, which the ancients considered a requirement for the pursuit of wisdom, is now seen as an obstacle, a disease, a disqualifying vice. What can human intelligence achieve when severed from the thriving trunk of the “collective intellectual,” where the sap flows that gives life to cultural pineapples, bananas, jackfruits, and zucchinis? While students at the University of São Paulo (USP) accumulated their wealth of letters delving into the study of J. Posadas’s Intergalactic Socialism and exercising their intellectual muscles by tackling the weight of fifty pages of Régis Débray’s Revolution in the Revolution, I wasted the best of my energies reading Aristotle and Plato. Cynical, frivolous, and light-hearted like every sniper, I compared various translations and, when in doubt about the meaning of a sentence, had the audacity to verify it in the original Greek with the help of M. A. Bailly’s dictionary. Truly the behavior of an ignorant.

Later, when the academic circles gave up their frustrated guerrilla passion to focus on subjects that seemed very spiritual at the time, such as the consumption of marijuana, group sex, and intensive reading of the sermons of the ineffable gurus Rajneesh and Maharaji, I, too, coincidentally turned towards the East. This might have made me more acceptable in those environments if, as I discovered, they didn’t insist on believing that the East was in California, while I preferred to seek it in the Vedic and Quranic texts—a disagreement that proved to be absolutely irreconcilable, as where they saw the highest manifestations of wisdom, I saw nothing more than simian imitation, and where I saw a sign of wisdom, they saw nothing at all.

Over time, I became more and more of a cultural oddity, a stranger to the customs and habits of our learned circles, especially in their university, publishing, and journalistic branches. The only thing we had in common was the reciprocal contempt with which we meticulously ignored each other. Between the bear in the silence of its den and the monkey in its noisy circus ring, there was, to say the least, what in circus jargon is called an "epistemological cut."

Since 1991, however, we started to communicate again. The first news I received from them came through the Jornal do Brasil. It was an article on the editorial page, where a professor, burdened with as many PhDs as a general has medals on September 7th, informed the world of a formidable discovery: the Holy Daime, a tea that granted those lucky enough to ingest it “the knowledge of the deep causes of all things” (sic). A few lines later, the author stated that the doctrine (notice well: the doctrine, not the tea) of the Holy Daime was “a natural richness of the Amazon.” He went on to say that the pre-Columbian Incas regularly produced and consumed this tea, which did not prevent it from being “genuinely Brazilian.” Thus, among the deepest causes of all things, the vegetal origin of doctrines and the Brazilian nature of the Incas were included.

As no letter expressing astonishment appeared in the newspaper in the following days, I made a mental note of the case to discuss it with my students.

However, in the weeks and months that followed, similar episodes continued to catch my attention without apparently arousing the interest of anyone else. A philosophy professor from Rio Grande do Sul claimed that Michel de Montaigne had a significant influence in the 15th century, anticipating The Terminator. Another professor from São Paulo assured that there was no massification in modern society because stores were filled with different products. A writer argued that the Church should support the legalization of abortion and same-sex unions to remain consistent with its millennia-old doctrine. A philosopher declared that the training of horses and dogs was an insult to their moral freedom. A theologian swore that the cause of drug trafficking was colonial slavery. All this was said with an air of seriousness and listened to in respectful silence.

Being morbidly prone to epistemological doubts about my perception of the external world, I concluded that I was seeing things. However, the obsessive repetition eventually persuaded me that the world was indeed like that. I had to admit that something very peculiar was happening in the minds of our intellectuals. Similar events unfolded in other countries as well, with the difference that there, people noticed the abnormality of the situation, as seen, for example, in the books by Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), Robert Hughes (The Culture of Complaint), Richard Grenier (Capturing the Culture), Etienne Souriau (L’Avenir de la Philosophie), Julián Marías (Razón de la Filosofía), and many others. In short, the world was falling apart, but here it was falling apart much more rapidly, effectively, and discreetly.

The last bit of doubt about the direction of events was removed by an incident involving me personally.

In late 1993, a summary of some lectures on “Aristotle’s Thought and Present” that I had been delivering at the Laura Alvim Cultural Center was submitted to SBPC (Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science) for evaluation and possible publication in the magazine Ciência Hoje (Science Today) by Dr. Ivan da Costa Marques, a member of that scientific society, who honored me with his presence at the course.

Almost a year passed without any response, so I felt free to publish the text as a book. In early October 1994, I received the first copies from the printer, impeccably printed. On the same day—mere coincidence or Jungian synchronism, who knows—I found an envelope from SBPC at the entrance of my building. It contained the return of the original manuscript, a notice that the article had been rejected by the Editorial Committee, and a suggestion that, since it was a work on education in Dentistry (yes, that’s right: Dentistry), it would find a more suitable place in a specialized magazine.

I wrote to the magazine, informing them that neither I nor Aristotle had the slightest idea of the dental interest of our speculations, that the return was belated and unnecessary since the work was already published as a book, and that, considering the strangeness of the reason given for the rejection, it seemed that the work had not even been examined.

After a few days, I received an angry letter from the magazine’s editor, blaming a typist for the dental mishap and assuring me that the article had been examined very carefully by an esteemed specialist—and as proof, she attached an erudite “Report” in two and a half pages of small letters.

Upon examining the esteemed arguments, I noticed that the learned editor wrote “verossímel” (with an e), confused St. Gregory the Great with St. Albert the Great, “apofântico” with "apodíctico," potential with act, dialectic with rhetoric, and so on, reaching an impressive average of ten errors per page.

It was then that the bear started coming out of the den, more or less by accident. I wrote some comments on the “Report” and included them in a few copies of the book. One of them ended up in the hands of Elizabeth Orsini from the newspaper O Globo, who then made a full-page report, with a cover headline, about SBPC’s embarrassment. Meanwhile, the poet Bruno Tolentino, in a small box in the corner of the page, demanded the revelation of the identity of the reviewer in very delicate terms: “Who is this fool?” It was a scandal. The organization had no other reaction than to feign offended dignity, denigrate the book’s author for his political views unrelated to the case, and, last but not least, try to suppress the protests and hide, by all means, the name of the erudite person, who remains anonymous and is doing well, albeit at the cost of implicitly placing the responsibility for his deed on the shoulders of Minister Francisco Weffort, nominally the magazine’s philosophical consultant.

As I noted in the preface to the second edition of the book, still in preparation:

In the polemic surrounding Uma Filosofia Aristotélica da Cultura (An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture), the most curious thing was that my opponents, prodigious in opinions about an author whom they had never seen fatter, nor seen again after the diet, were not capable of saying a single word about the content of the thesis defended there, which certainly eluded not only their understanding but also their circle of interests, being, as it is, completely alien to frivolous conversations of old cronies. When publicly challenged to discuss it, they preferred to take refuge in the realm of personal insults, where their trembling and resentful souls felt safer, as it was perhaps their natural habitat.

It is not useless to recall that my book proposed a global reinterpretation of Aristotle’s work, making it a kind of general theory of interdisciplinarity, based on the idea, suggested by Avicenna and St. Thomas, but disregarded by later exegesis, that a profound unity linked the Organon (set of logical writings) to the Rhetoric and the Poetics.

Significantly, a study by the erudite Canadian Deborah L. Black, which called for investigations in this direction, had been chosen shortly before to be included in a UNESCO anthology when several serious scholars had recognized the enormous importance of the subject. Now, the investigations suggested by Prof. Black had been completed and carried out in this obscure part of the world since at least 1987, with some of them reproduced in the small volume that SBPC received with an affected disdain and the giggles of caipira incredulity. Thus, while the Canadian was rewarded for doing the beginning of the job, the Brazilian was punished for having prematurely completed the entire task.

But the punishment was not entirely unfair. I really deserved some spanking for not believing what my eyes had been showing me since 1991: that I was surrounded by robed savages and that, to discuss philosophical matters with these people, it was necessary to take all the precautions of a preacher “in partibus infidelium” to avoid being burned alive.

I continued taking notes—selectively, of course, as the cultural production of oddities far surpassed my capacity for recording—and ended up composing a book, The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Incultural Current Affairs, published jointly by Faculdade da Cidade Editora and the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy.

At the same time, I sought to probe the origins of the state of affairs. The investigation, which traced back to Greece and the Roman Empire to unearth the earliest intellectual roots of certain ideas that only appeared new to those who were unaware of them, was published in The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar—An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion (Rio, Diadorim, 1995), a book that, despite the praises of Antônio Fernando Borges in JB and Vamireh Chacon in Jornal de Brasília, did not attract the slightest attention from the intelligentsia, for the simple reason that the last person interested in diagnosing their own dementia is the demented.

But The Collective Imbecile had a different fate. Since it did not investigate causes but merely described isolated episodes, it could be read in pieces and easily become the subject of gossip. In a speech I delivered in response to the homage paid to me by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy on the day of the book’s release, I took the precaution of warning:

The Collective Imbecile concludes the trilogy that began with The New Era and the Cultural Revolution (1994) and continued with The Garden of Afflictions (1995). Each of the three books can be understood without the others. What cannot be done is to grasp the essence of the thought that guides the entire trilogy based on just one of them.

The function of The Collective Imbecile in the collection is quite explicit and was declared in the Preface: to describe, through examples, the extent and seriousness of a state of affairs—current and Brazilian—which had been alerted by The New Era and whose precise location in the evolution of ideas in the world had been diagnosed in The Garden of Afflictions.

The purpose of the series is to situate Brazilian culture today within the broader framework of the history of ideas in the West, in a period ranging from Epicurus to Chaim Perelman’s “New Rhetoric.”

Referring to the fate of The New Era and the Cultural Revolution, I continued:

If some readers saw nothing more in the book than its political surface—as others will see in The Collective Imbecile only an occasion to criticize certain celebrities of the day, and in The Garden of Afflictions an attack on the USP establishment—I cannot say that they have missed anything, for the rest and the best of what these books contain were not really meant for these readers and it is good that it remains invisible to their eyes.

As I said, so it happened. Read in pieces and without any reference to the previous works, The Collective Imbecile, despite the praises of Paulo Francis (O Globo), Roberto Campos (Folha de S. Paulo), and J. O. de Meira Penna (Jornal da Tarde)—or perhaps partially because of them—aroused irrational and rabid reactions from the literary circle, where wounded vanity, bloated presumption, and the most immature political prejudices allied with a firm decision to understand nothing, in order to focus all the attacks on the person of the author and attempt to demolish his honor and dignity.

What was most remarkable was the uniformity from the start. Paulo Roberto Pires, in O Globo, Celina Cortes, in Isto É, and André Luiz Barros, in Jornal do Brasil, as if obeying the baton of the same extremely discreet conductor, vibrated in unison the note that would set the tone for the reactive discourse: the author of the book, lacking a diploma, was merely a “self-appointed philosopher.”

This curious objection revealed, at the very least, a lack of culture. The condition of being self-taught could have nothing pejorative or, much less, unheard-of in a country where its three greatest philosophers, internationally recognized (Miguel Reale, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, and Vicente Ferreira da Silva), were all self-taught in philosophy, and where university philosophical production is deemed irrelevant by its own spokespeople, like João Cruz Costa and Paulo Arantes.

Furthermore, my previous experience with alleged university philosophers was not enough to encourage me to seek their teachings or take their opinions into account. To me, it mattered little whether they considered me a philosopher or a surfer, as a diploma is worth only as much as the person who signs it, and a title signed by those people is worth the same as a protest.

But the attacks continued. Gathered on a page of JB on September 4th, like baboons fleeing and crowding a tree, André Luiz Barros, Gerd A. Bornheim, Muniz Sodré, Emir Sader, and Leandro Konder, saying nothing about the book, grunted their opinions about the author:

He is not even a man.

He’s a brute.

I won’t serve as a stepping stone for someone like that.

He’s a coward. He relies on economic power.

He doesn’t even have a diploma.

As the Bible says, they tore their clothes, shamelessly displaying the extent of their dementia.

But do not think that everything in these creatures is pure animal rage. The following week, Leandro Konder showed the gentle humanism of his prudish soul, writing in O Globo an edifying piece to recommend moderation in intellectual debates and condemn as an intolerable brutality the use of the term “imbecile.”

In a letter whose publication the editor of the page, Luís Garcia, postponed for more than a week with various excuses and which ended up being published only partially, I pointed out to Prof. Konder that, compared to his allies, I, since I was not even a man, could consider myself, in the realm of vocabulary, a girl.

It is worth clarifying that it was not in vain but rather in response to criticisms I had made about his opinions on a certain problem of comparative religion that Prof. Muniz Sodré reacted by questioning my masculinity, which, in my profound ignorance of scientific methodology (see how university education is missed!), I had not yet realized had any relevance to the solution of said problem.

An uncultured self-taught, incapable of grasping the nuances of academic jargon, I was astonished by this assertion, not understanding its meaning. At first, I thought it was a disguised proposal for gay flirtation—a very common type of seduction, as is known, among people who imagine themselves to be seductive. However, I had to abandon this hypothesis when I learned, from reliable sources, that Prof. Muniz was recognized by the faculty of the School of Communications at UFRJ as one of its members; a virile member, whose head, always held high above the human average, spouted seminal ideas that would fertilize that worthy educational institution. In short, the man was more manly than this weakened father of eight children.

In a response published as a paid article by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy in JB, which obstinately refused to grant me space in the letters section, I thus attributed the professor’s outburst to the mere bluster of a boastful macho, one of those who constantly and indiscriminately try to impress others with their masculinity, until the day they find themselves face to face with a fatal accident or confrontation with a bear. Having received a visit from the bailiff with the notification of the lawsuit I filed against him, at this point, the tough guy is already preparing to speak in a falsetto before the judge.

In the following days, the fraternity, tired of putting on a useless show that only resulted in their own demoralization, fell silent. The first edition of The Collective Imbecile sold out in three weeks, the second was going to press, and my final shot in the battle was fired:

In everything these creatures said, there was not the slightest reference to any of my arguments, much less any attempt to refute them, an endeavor that would truly be beyond their capacity. Only crude labeling adorned with insults in the language of bouncers. Only gorillas' roars as they beat their chests, pretending to be heroes when, gathered in an armed band with sticks and stones, they surround a solitary enemy and call him a coward. But if they think that these things can intimidate me even the slightest bit, it is because they measure me by their own stature. If they imagine that by lowering my book to the level of their minds, they can dissuade the reader from attempting to assess the content of my arguments for themselves, it is because they see the Brazilian people in the mirror of their own self-deception. And if they believe they can bury others' reputations under tons of mud, it is because they bury their own ostrich heads under the same mud, so as not to become aware that their time has come. But all this subterfuge is futile: since the publication of The Collective Imbecile, these people are already on trial—and the trial will continue relentlessly, before the eyes of the people, until the final condemnation of the usurpers and corporatists who, for their own benefit, block the cultural progress of this country.

It was then that, abandoning the failed strategy of insults, the community responsible for representing the highest standards of national intelligence resorted to an attempt to stab in the back: to appease the anger of their colleagues, the president of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, João Ricardo Moderno, had a letter published in JB in which he swore that the Academy had neither edited my book nor paid homage to me in public, much less paid for the advertisements in which I defended myself against my detractors. Thus, I and Faculdade da Cidade Editora were the authors of a fraud, a scam, in which the name of the Academy had been improperly used to denigrate the never-to-be-praised-enough university community.

I had no choice but to publish, in response, the invoices that proved the payment of the advertisements by the Academy, the testimony of the employees to whom João Ricardo Moderno personally authorized the publication of the book, and, last but not least, the photograph showing the modern calumniator, in flesh, bone, suit, and tie, applauding at the ceremony where Prof. Paulo Mercadante, on behalf of the Academy, extolled the value of my philosophical work. Material evidence, testimonial evidence, documentary evidence: faced with this, João Ricardo Moderno withdrew into the silence of meditation, from which he will emerge, who knows when, transfigured into a pumpkin.

With the second battle over, hostilities ceased, for the moment. I am very pleased with the silence of my adversaries, for, as Léon Bloy said: “What is it about, after all, but tearing the tongues out of the imbeciles, the formidable and definitive idiots of this century, as Saint Jerome silenced the Pelagians or Luciferians of his time?”

Despite my apparent advantage in the moment, I do not consider myself a winner, nor could I do so, when facing a protean being with limitless resources, whose name is Legion. The collective imbecile (the character, not the book) continues to speak in a thousand tongues, and neither I nor an army of scribes would have the breath to record even a fraction of their daily production, printed in newspapers with an air of respectability bordering on bliss. Just to give an example, they have just incorporated, in the person of a highly awarded gay writer, the defense of pedophilia as fair and healthy, as young children, at three years old, already have tremendous sex appeal and seduction games that rival those of Sharon Stone. No one pounced on the declarant, expelled him with kicks, or even thought of suing him for advocating a crime. They are all educated, cultured people, with delicate souls and aesthetic feelings incompatible with violent instincts. Only I seem to have had the idea that it would be difficult to resist the impulse to shoot down, like a mad dog, anyone who approached my children with such doctrine.

Overall, and especially in its final chapters, the rocambolesque story of my relations with the intelligentsia leads to a conclusion that can be formulated in the terms used years ago by Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos in the preface to Prof. Edmundo Campos Coelho’s book The Academic Sinecure (Rio, Iuperj, 1988): “The Brazilian university is to a large extent a hoax and a wide variety of parasites inhabit it.” With ease, this conclusion can be extended to cultural journalism and a large part of the publishing movement.

Certainly, there are many valuable individuals in the academic community, as well as in the intellectual world in general. They are the silent majority, and I would be unjust to portray them with the traits of Konders, Munizes, Bornheims, and tutti quanti. However, the public image of this community is still largely represented by that very self-proclaimed vanguard that never stops talking in its name. With the help of a complicit press, they have been turning Brazilian cultural life into an ugly and faceless thing, which, on the scale of malevolence, lies somewhere uncertainly between lies and crimes.

[Date: 03/11/96]

In defense of the strong and oppressors?162

By approving the change in the fourth paragraph of Article 161 of the Penal Code proposed by Senator Marina Silva, a member of the Workers' Party from Acre, the Senate Committee on Constitution and Justice gives the impression of being composed of people who either cannot read or do not care about the consequences of what they write.

The new wording says: “No crime is committed by those who, without violence to the person or serious threat, invade someone else’s rural property (unproductive).” Any awakened brain in full possession of its faculties would add the proviso: “...provided that the invasion is determined by the need for land for the invader’s personal and family sustenance.”

Because there are two possibilities: either the right to invade is a measure intended to protect the poor farmer, or it is a legal trick to grant anyone, rich or poor, landless or with too much land, the right to lay hands on rural property as soon as it is deemed “unproductive.”

In the latter case, the law will preferably protect the cunning rich, who have the means to hire and transport an army of paid invaders overnight and indefinitely expand the extent of their property, with the only condition of doing so with finesse and investing money in the land to make it productive. Once the current wording of the project is approved, within a few weeks, land invasions will become the most prodigious business of all time, the most flourishing branch of the national economy. Particularly benefited will be the large owner of productive land, who, full of capital to invest and eager to expand their domains, but squeezed between unproductive latifundia, will have the greatest ease in displacing a few peons and putting their paw, like a lion, on the lands of their less fortunate neighbors.

The right of the poor to use unproductive land is inscribed in the moral consciousness of humanity as a commandment of Natural Law, which the modern world has disrespected and which the Landless Workers' Movement claims to restore. The general and indiscriminate right to invade unproductive lands is an aberrant invention that will only serve to legitimize the law of the jungle in Brazilian agriculture, to establish legalized banditry, and to give rural conflicts the dimension of a civil war. Is this the objective of Marina Silva, Bernardo Cabral, and everyone else? Are they secret agents of chaos, infiltrated into the legislative power with the purpose of fomenting banditry and disorder? Unable to believe in this evil suspicion, I find it more elegant to hypothesize inattention, lack of awareness, or simple ineptitude.

But not everything is irrationality; perhaps, in this apparent madness, there is a third possible explanation. The Landless Workers' Movement, initially formed by disadvantaged farmers, is now, as reported by the Jornal do Brasil on December 13, “a large company focused on the market and has a bold plan to penetrate the foreign market.” By commercializing products from invaded lands, the MST, the newspaper says, “already exports yerba mate to Germany and Italy and manages a production and commercialization network spread throughout the country.”

If the new wording of the law included the restrictive clause, granting the right of invasion exclusively to the poor and needy, it would eventually exclude the transformed MST from exercising this right. Moreover, adopting the restriction that common sense recommends and ethics demands, each poor farmer would face a categorical choice: either leave the MST and, imbued with their poor condition, exercise the right to invasion or relinquish this right in order to continue prospering as a shareholder of the MST. This would ultimately lead to completely emptying the Movement: having fulfilled its historical mission of ensuring the right to land for the poor, it would dissolve or become an exporting company like any other, retaining only the right to display on the wall the emblems of its former humanitarian achievements.

Faced with this contradiction, the legislator had to choose: either protect the poor and empty the MST or, conversely, favor the MST, even if at the cost of extending the protective wings of the law over all ambitious rich who want to enter the new and promising business of land invasions. Once the new wording is approved, the MST, instead of dissolving in the name of the same ideal that constituted it, will gain the means to perpetuate itself as a millionaire invader company, under the protection of a law that, in the height of irony, will continue to receive from the same abandoned ideal its only possible moral legitimacy.

If the omission of the restrictive clause was determined by some premeditation of this kind, the Senate Committee on Justice will no longer be responsible for a mere sin of historical irresponsibility in the face of the catastrophic consequences that may arise from a poorly worded law but for the crime of consciously legislating in favor of the worst. For there, the opponents of the MST, no longer able to fight it on the field of political rhetoric, will have no choice but to try to defeat it in the capitalist competition, in a mad race to see who can invade more lands, while we, the average Brazilians, remain caught in the crossfire of a duel of giants. Whether I believe in this heinous hypothesis or not is something I dare not even think about.

Fake anti-racism

The column by Ricardo Boechat in O Globo on January 14 reports, with a front-page headline, that a security guard at the InterContinental Hotel barred the entry of a young black woman, mistaking her for a prostitute when she arrived with her husband, Fritz Müller, director of the Swiss Credit Bank. According to the columnist and the cover editor, the incident constitutes the crime of racism. The accusation is repeated on January 15, in an article signed by Hilka Telles, and will probably be endorsed by the consensus of the educated classes, politicians, religious leaders, artists, and, indeed, all the wonderful people.

Fashionable aspects aside, however, the security guard can only be accused of an error of inductive reasoning, to which any one of us would be subject under similar circumstances. Every resident of Rio de Janeiro knows that when they see a well-dressed, middle-aged European man with a black woman on Copacabana beach, they are generally not witnessing a paradisiacal picture of conjugal harmony across racial differences but rather a common case of sex tourism. It is a well-known fact that the occasional attraction of Europeans to black women rarely leads to marriage but, repressed by racism, finds clandestine expression in Rio’s hotels, far from the scrutinizing eyes of neighbors and relatives. There is nothing abnormal or criminal in a doorman or security guard interpreting the scene in the most obvious and customary sense, following a presumption of common sense, and not considering the far-fetched and unusual hypothesis that they are in the presence of a regularly married couple. If this hypothesis coincided with the truth in this case, it did so with a probability of one in a thousand, to say the least. The security guard, far from being a racist himself, should instead be accused of pre-judging the innocent friend of African descent as a sexual adventurer on a furtive expedition, when he was actually going to bed with his legitimate wife. And it is certain that his assumption was not based solely on the ordinary observation of what happens on Rio’s beaches but also on a prejudice forged by the media, which, by disseminating an exaggerated racial sensitivity, end up inducing people to regard the marriage between a white person and a black person, or vice versa, as something rare and implausible, whereas it is the norm and standard in this country of mestizos.

Any person in full use of their mental faculties, not blinded by resentful and demagogic parti pris, can see that the episode was not caused by racial prejudice but, on the contrary, by a widespread atmosphere of exaggerated and neurotic caution, seeking racists under the bed and, when not finding them, inventing them.

Do our journalists wish that the security guard, who is obliged to be suspicious of all young women in principle, should make a systematic exception for black women, based on the idea that many of them are married to Swiss bankers? For God’s sake, let’s make a statistic: how many of the Swiss and Germans who entered Rio de Janeiro hotels last month with black women were their husbands? How many were tourists who, in their home country, would not want to be seen with a black woman?

I was married for over a decade to a black woman, and she was only barred once, at the cinema, because she looked underage at 22 years old. A young woman today would not find the incident flattering and amusing, like she did, but would make grotesque displays of offended dignity and call the press to stage an anti-racist show.

It is frightening to note to what extent the malicious exploitation of irrational resentment has become a common norm among our educated classes, instilling in citizens the fear of using common sense. When reason becomes suspect, fanaticism takes over — and fanaticism does not become less deadly by adorning itself with false intellectual prestige, hiding behind “ethical” pretexts, or being cultivated as a mark of elegance in high society. Does no one in the media realize that the exaggerated fear of being seen as racist puts the individual in a psychologically unsustainable and neurotic position and ultimately makes them commit some gaffe that the malice of a few and the folly of many will retroactively interpret as proof of racism? Does no one realize that the neuroticization of relations between blacks and whites artificially creates racial conflicts under the pretext of avoiding them?

But in the denunciation against the security guard, there is an even more perfidious aspect. Who spread the image of our country as a supplier of black and mulatto women for European sex tourists if not the media, which now throw stones at the unsuspecting InterContinental employee? The display of breasts and buttocks in newspapers and TV shows during Carnival is certainly not an encouragement for Europeans to respect our black women and marry them decently, but rather a direct and frank invitation for them to come and use them in five-star hotels on Copacabana beach. The shameless confession that Brazilian women—or, which is the same thing, mixed-race women—are commodities for foreign consumption becomes, so to speak, officialized at the moment a pornographic magazine has the audacity to call itself Brazil Export. And let’s not say that the poor journalists do this because they are forced by evil bosses: the capitalism of obscenity benefits not only capitalists but also their supposed adversaries on the left, imbued with the belief that mockery and pornography are legitimate weapons against “conservative morals,” just as, complementarily, it is a legitimate resource of ideological warfare to incite resentments and make people believe that resentful envy is the highest ethical standard of conduct. No one among those responsible for such speeches asks if the confluence of so many contradictory stimuli over the head of the citizen can have any result other than to destroy in him reason, critical sense, and the sense of personal autonomy and turn him into a gullible fool vulnerable to any demagogic propaganda.

Facts and ideas, values and speeches, customs and pretexts, everything, absolutely everything, in the Brazilian mental environment, induces and pressures the common man on our streets to see things as the hotel security guard saw them: a Swiss man with a black woman is a tourist with a prostitute. However, after having taught him that things are like this and should be like this, society punishes him for believing in the lesson. The episode does not denounce the racism of an individual but the irresponsibility and mental confusion of an entire culture. It is understandable that a neurosis—whether personal or collective—seeks to exorcise itself through poses of indignation and posturing speeches against scapegoats. Incomprehensible, shameful, unacceptable, is that those entrusted with curing it—intellectuals, journalists, men of culture—prefer to create rationalizations to legitimize hysterical pretense, strengthening the shell of defenses against any invasion of truth and evidence.

To cap it all off with irony, the security guard involved in the incident is himself of mixed race, as was his famous predecessor in the role of scapegoat, the clown Tiririca. In the mindset of hysterical militancy, reporter Hilka Telles should, therefore, be relentlessly accused of being racist for calling him “mulatto” instead of “black,” as demanded by politically correct vocabulary163.

Bearded rooster

Fernando Jorge, Life and Work of the Plagiarist Paulo Francis.

The Dive of Ignorance into the Well of Stupidity,

São Paulo, Geração Editorial, 1996.

I have already made some serious criticisms of Paulo Francis' work, and he, who didn’t even know me personally, responded with compliments to one of my books. I mention this to attest that Francis is a man of uncommon greatness of soul. Capable of occasional baseness, like all of us, but capable, like few, of humbly confessing it, in public, in books whose almost candid frankness makes them dangerous weapons offered, with the generous grace of a medieval knight, to be used as the malicious enemies see fit.

Voluntarily defenseless, exposed to slander by the careless way he talks about himself - and often about others - without the slightest reserve and in a style that is all the more personal the more spontaneous (sometimes bordering on automatic writing), Francis had the courage or imprudence to take on, in recent years, the burden of being the dissenting voice in the unanimous chorus of our press, where the simple fact of not being left-wing is a serious moral defect.

Condensing even further the hatred of his former ideological companions, he also had the audacity to develop, personalize, and definitively make his own the style he helped create in O Pasquim, a newspaper that once symbolized the spirit of an entire generation of intellectuals from Rio de Janeiro. Only Francis dares to write in this language that was once shared by all, and I believe that this is what hurts them the most: to see their common language ripped away and put at the service of the other side.

To complete the picture, Francis always has the candor to write what comes to his mind. Ready to contradict himself when his errors are pointed out - how many times has he not repented of the bad things he said about Tônia Carrero and Roberto Campos, just to mention two cases - he abstains from the most elementary precaution of a journalist targeted by malicious enemies, which is to try to read the article with their eyes a minute before sending it via fax.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that, after a long underground elaboration of resentments and desires for revenge, the massive anger of adversaries suddenly descended upon him from various sides simultaneously, as if obeying a plan. Nor is it surprising that, at that moment, the adversaries sought less to refute his words - too late - than to destroy his person, attacking him at the two points where a man is most vulnerable: in his intimate feelings and in his means of subsistence. They do not want, in fact, to prove him wrong. They want to psychologically crush him, stirring up old wounds with the scalpel of malice, and reduce him to poverty and unemployment, turning his employers against him.

By an enlightening coincidence, at the very moment when Petrobras staged an artificial lawsuit against Paulo Francis in American justice, the book by Fernando Jorge, Life and Work of the Plagiarist Paulo Francis, is brought to light - because it emerges from darkness - under the auspices of the editor Luís Fernando Emediato, a journalist with a relevant record of services rendered to the left-wing establishment.

Regarding the lawsuit, it was naturally rejected by American justice, resulting only in a waste of public money with a useless bravado that a good legal advisor would have recommended avoiding. But it demanded from Francis a multimillion-dollar compensation, something he could not amass in many lifetimes.

As for the book, its purpose of leaving Francis without a job is declared in plain language, with eloquent and direct appeals to the owners of O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo not to publish a single line of his work anymore. In newsroom jargon, this is called “calling for the head” of a colleague, and it has always been considered one of the most sordid maneuvers of the envious professional.

The book is a marvel of malevolence. In five hundred richly illustrated pages, the printing of which must have cost no less than twenty thousand reais (and I won’t be rude enough to ask who financed it), the author aims to demonstrate, allegedly through rigorous research and textual criticism, that the columnist is not only a plagiarist and illiterate but also a sexual obsessed, complexed, resentful, vengeful, charlatan, coward, racist, disgusting, smelly, cowardly, vampiric, cuckold, pretentious, wicked, thieving, vulture, shameless, vile, scoundrel, and furthermore, a farter - a term that the author, undoubtedly momentarily intoxicated by the intestinal vapors of his fetid character, misspells as “peidorento” with only one “r.” All of this, sic, and said, according to the author and editor, without a trace of hatred or ill will, but with the greatest impartiality and for strictly scientific reasons. Quintilian, the patron saint of philologists, must be jubilant in his niche in Erebus because no one has ever placed such high bets on the probative capacity of philological science.

The editor, in the foreword, guarantees that the result of the “rigorously documented” research is crystal clear: Fernando Jorge’s analysis leaves Paulo Francis “completely naked before the readers.” And this nudity is, as Emediato assures, “quite horrible” - a strange expression that, if it means anything, would imply something like “more or less terrible.”

But the art of the philologist does not consist only of collecting words but also of understanding them. The acute semantic sensitivity of the author and his editor is already noticeable in the subtitle, The Dive of Ignorance into the Well of Stupidity, where, given that the well of stupidity in question is Paulo Francis' mind, one cannot understand who could be the diver other than the researcher himself. Unless it also refers to us, ignorant people invited to witness his audacious probing into the abyssal depths of Francis' stupidity, like tourists led to the bottom of oceanic nonsense by the hand of a mentally deranged underwater Virgil.

Displaying this Freudian slip already on the cover, it is not surprising that the book is, in essence, a prodigious effort of research carried out by a mind solidly incapable of grasping the meaning of what it reads.

Starting with the keyword. Whoever takes seriously the author’s promise to show us in Paulo Francis' works one of the most terrifying collections of plagiarism in universal history will be terribly disappointed. “Plagiarism,” according to Fernando Jorge, is any repetition of a phrase from the public domain without indicating the author. According to him, anyone who utters the words “To be or not to be” without adding “as Shakespeare said” is already a plagiarist. Based on this criterion, he accuses Francis of plagiarizing Lenin (for using the expressions “the infantile disease of communism” and “the dustbin of history”), Machado de Assis (“we kill time; time buries us”), Dante (“in the middle of the journey of our life”), John Donne (“for whom the bell tolls”), Winston Churchill (“blood, toil, tears, and sweat”), Luigi Pirandello (“so it is, if you think so”), the filmmaker George Stevens (“that’s the way it goes, humanity”), Ibrahim Sued (“sorry, outskirts”), and even Jesus Christ (“My Kingdom is not of this world”). And so on and so forth.

For Fernando Jorge’s literary taste, one commits plagiarism by saying “Eppur si muove” without adding: “said Galileo”, or “Hail Mary!” without clarifying in a footnote: “according to the archangel Gabriel”. By this rule, Camões commits plagiarism by opening his epic with the words “As armas e os barões”, instead of “As armas e os barões, according to Virgil”. Then there’s Machado de Assis: “Musa, sing of Mariana’s spite…” instead of: “Musa, sing — Homer would say — Mariana’s spite…” And Shakespeare, another cheap plagiarist, writes “To be or not to be” instead of “To be or not to be, said Parmenides”, as would be decent. But, as a thief who robs another thief gets one hundred years of forgiveness (by the way: as AliBaba used to say), William Faulkner is only half a plagiarist when he titles his book The Sound and the Fury, instead of The Sound and the Fury, apud Shakespeare. Considering these thoughts, I suggest that the title of Ernesto Sábato’s novel, for the sake of morality, be corrected from Abbadón, the Exterminator to Abbadón, the Exterminator, cf. Apocalypse 9:10. Summarizing everything but not wanting to commit plagiarism myself, I declare loud and clear: It’s tough, said Socrates.

I have heard many people criticize Francis for the excess of allusions and insinuations with which he vaingloriously displays a somewhat audacious familiarity with authors and books. What I have never seen, which is an absolute novelty, is a critic being puerile enough to suppose that the columnist from the Diário da Corte, when writing these phrases, intended to pass as their author, relying on the universal inability to perceive the most obvious allusions. But the most fantastic thing is not that someone made this assumption: it is that they piously believed in it and spent years of hard work collecting examples and more examples to illustrate it, without ever noticing anything incongruous, abnormal, deformed, or crazy about it. Since Gustavo Barroso’s Secret History of Brazil, no Brazilian writer has made such an effort to demonstrate, by the inductive method, that 2 + 2 = 5.

Examples of “plagiarism” according to the described model occupy half of Fernando Jorge’s book, one of those industrious collectors of minutiae, whose Benedictine meticulousness only equals his perfect lack of discernment in evaluating the examples.

But some examples deviate from the model, greatly expanding the already so elastic definition. It is also plagiarism, according to Jorge, to use the same predicate and the same verb employed by another author, even though at a different time and referring to a different subject! If Francis, writing about politics, says: “The masses don’t know what they want, but they know what they don’t want”, it’s plagiarism, because Ruy Castro, referring to literary history, had written: “The modernists… didn’t know what they wanted, although they knew perfectly well what they didn’t want”. By the same criterion, if I write “Fernando Jorge is a plagiarist”, I am plagiarizing Fernando Jorge, who used the same verb and predicate before me regarding Paulo Francis.

It is still plagiarism, in Fernando Jorge’s understanding, to use, not whole sentences or half sentences without a subject, but simple figures of speech in common use like “featherless biped”, without citing the author. It must be: “featherless biped, as Plato used to say”, “thinking reed, as Pascal used to say”, and, I add, “ca_zzo_, as Dirty Harry used to say”.

Finally, plagiarism, in Jorge’s concept, is the use of advertising slogans without citation of the source. In this unbelievable book, in all senses of the term, Francis is accused of plagiarism for having casually used the phrase “Love it or leave it” without clarifying that it was “a slogan from President Médici’s time”. But, if this is plagiarism, what can we say about the plagiarism that Jorge himself commits, by mentioning the same slogan without giving the author’s reference (then Colonel Otávio Costa) and without even clarifying that it was not an original invention, but an adaptation of America: love it or leave it! I don’t see, under the present circumstances, how I can escape the accusation of plagiarism myself, by citing these words without referring to the author of the original, who I don’t know and will continue not knowing for the centuries of the centuries, not being mad enough to dedicate the obsessive attention that Fernando Jorge devotes to these matters.

But Jorge doesn’t only denounce plagiarisms, but also errors. “There are hundreds,” according to him, “serious, unforgivable, of various kinds”. I give an example of the scientific rigor with which he proceeds in his investigation. Francis, writing in 1993, cites the sentence “Brazil is not a serious country”, attributing it to Charles de Gaulle, who would have said it during the “lobster war” of 1962. Gross lie, nonsense, intolerable foolishness, proclaims Jorge, informing that, in 1979, the diplomat Carlos Alves de Souza, debunking the widespread mistake in the press, attributed the authorship of the phrase to himself. Jorge doesn’t even remotely notice that:

1º Francis made a mistake along with Flamengo’s fans and there’s no reason to selectively blame an individual for an error that everyone has been making for thirty years before;

2º we don’t even know if it’s a mistake, being pure beatitude to take Alves de Souza’s declaration as gospel truth, without taking into account the highly plausible hypothesis of a diplomatic and convenient white lie.

Another example: “There are no rich hot countries”, Francis writes. “Leviano as always — Jorge rebukes —, Paulo Francis has uttered a big lie. What about the Republic of South Africa? Saudi Arabia? Qatar? Oman, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf?”

Well, to know whether a sentence is true or false, one must first understand the meaning of the terms it uses. In Francis’s article, did “rich country” mean a country with a high GNP and great fortunes thriving alongside poverty, or a country with a good standard of living for the entire population, a First World country? If the phrase was used in the first sense, Francis indeed lied. If it was used in the second sense, it is Fernando Jorge who lies. Now, anyone who regularly reads Francis’s column knows what he means by “rich country”. In this case, Jorge lies twice: by pretending that he doesn’t know this and by hiding from the public that the wealthy Oman has a population of more than 50 percent illiterate, the prosperous Saudi Arabia almost 40 percent, and the opulent Qatar has just over one percent of its population in higher education — indicators more than sufficient to place these countries leagues away from the First World. As for me, I don’t know if there is or isn’t a rich hot country, and, without having thought much about it, the idea that there isn’t any seems even strange to me; but I know that the hot countries mentioned by Jorge are not rich in Francis’s sense.

What is remarkable is that Fernando Jorge claims that he employed his best to write these things: “I spent all this my culture, all this my erudition, risking being called a pedant…” Prudently, the author paused a second before adding, to the inventory of gifts spent on the book, intelligence and good sense.

Finally, Jorge sets out on the task of rectifying the injustices committed by Francis. The method is simple: it consists of beatifying the victims. From Abraham Lincoln to Tarso de Castro, from Jarbas Passarinho to José Genoíno, all those criticized in the Diary of the Court or in Francis’s books appear transfigured by a luminous crown of adjectives: talented, honest, competent, prominent, brilliant, beautiful, adorable, wonderful, indulgent, understanding, kind, generous, admirable. But it’s not just the roll of adjectives that is extensive. Jorge lists exhaustively the names of people he loves, admires and venerates, especially in newspaper newsrooms, leaving the impression that nobody in this medium is bad, only Francis, and insinuating, in passing, that each of these beautiful creatures has the right and duty to aspire for themselves the space of the Diary of the Court. He auctions off Francis’s job and flatters the competitors, encouraging them to make their bids. But all of this is, as the editor assures, done without the least bad faith or ill feelings. As for the first item, I believe: Jorge has the tough good faith of a madman, he does not doubt a single word of what he says and does not remotely imagine that there might be something wrong with his head. Nor will anyone run the risk of warning him, I suppose. Much less the editor, to whom the author’s madness is yielding the profits — financial and political — of a small succès de scandale.

As for feelings, Jorge does not hide them: they are so high, indeed, that he could not hide them in the shadow of his small stature. Here is an example:

"My rotating machine gun, however, does not stop, continues to rattle, to chatter, swallowing its serpentine bullet belts: róróróróróróróróró… taratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatata…" (I did not count the number of “tas”, because I do not have the investigative zeal of Fernando Jorge).

At least the use of this tool — the machine gun — the biographer admits to having in common with the biographee. In the rest, two writers could not be more different: Francis, fat, huge, carefree, always laughing at himself, careless in writing and quoting, confident in his culture, which is — as someone who I do not remember said, but that Fernando Jorge will discover in his notes — what remains at the bottom of us when we forget everything we have learned. Jorge, small, skinny, nervous, constipated perhaps, like librarians in general, meticulous, never trusting memory (perhaps suspecting, not without reason, that nothing has been left at the bottom), always rummaging through the archives in search of commas to drive his tiny curved blades into the skin of unsuspecting enemies.

In the chapter of animal comparisons, I don’t know what animal Francis would be physically, because the rhinoceros is too taciturn, the hippopotamus too lazy, the bear too cunning, the elephant too big. Professionally, he is certainly a tiger — the fearsome creature that does not get along and from which everyone wants distance, except for the Maharajas when they gather in bands to hunt him, prudently mounted on state elephants. As for Jorge, there is no difficulty in this regard. He himself qualifies as “a proud fighting rooster”. Judging by his physical appearance, stamped in three portraits on page 306, and especially considering the crop and the crest, he might be somewhat right, if one admits the hypothesis of a rooster with mustaches. But that doesn’t matter: rooster or hen, to the tiger it’s all chicken.

23/12/96

Intimates of God164

In O Globo on Sunday, Professor Leandro Konder informs us that Dr. Leonardo Boff knows God through direct experience, while the Church of Rome, which only knows Him by hearsay, cannot comprehend the depths of Boff’s mysticism, comparable, according to the writer, to those of Master Eckhart.

The novelty in the article (“The Audacity of Boff”) lies less in what it says about Dr. Boff and more in the revelation it brings about Konder himself: until last week, no one knew that this devoted disciple of Marx and Gramsci believed in God.

Suddenly, he appears not only speaking of God as an objective reality, knowable through experience, but also teaching us to discern among those who speak of God, who are His intimates and who are not. It goes without saying that only the intimates can make this distinction with firsthand knowledge, from which it is deduced that Professor Konder includes himself among the authentic mystics, alongside Leonardo Boff, Master Eckhart, and countless others, having ascended to such heights in the short period from his conversion to the publication of the article.

To believe in this hypothesis requires more faith than believing in God Himself.

Professor Konder does not assert this miracle, but he presupposes it, leading readers to somewhat reluctantly accept the logical consequence of a somewhat delirious hidden premise. If he has an ounce of responsibility, he is morally obliged to clarify and declare the reasons that give credibility to his position. Otherwise, he will force me to continue believing that he, too, only knows God through hearsay, and that he probably hasn’t heard much about Him, given that in his published works, there is not the slightest sign of spiritual readings or any interest in religious matters. And in this case, I will have no choice but to reach a fateful conclusion: Professor Konder talks about God frivolously, with no genuine desire to know Him, and he uses Him only as an occasion to exalt Dr. Boff’s persona. Thus, he must firmly trust that the testimony of the illustrious theologian will be of some value to him on Judgment Day. Now, that is audacity.

Junior Collective Imbecile Award

The “Collective Imbecile Award” was established to honor prominent figures in the national intellectual sphere who stand out for their contribution to the advancement of human stupidity. However, in these days of fierce egalitarianism, it seemed politically incorrect to reject candidates of lesser prestige, beginners, and novices whose initial steps on the path to notoriety indicate a promising vocation in the priesthood of idiocy.

To accommodate this group of contenders, I hereby institute the “Junior Collective Imbecile Award” and, in a sudden burst of generosity, grant it immediately and without hesitation to the psychoanalyst José Nazar, whom I and the world were ignorant of until reading his name in O Globo on January 26, 1997.

Regarding the merits of this decision, I must inform that the candidate, in an interview with a supplement of that publication, inexplicably called “Jornal da Família,” made the following statement:

— The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that no speaking being, in the unconscious, carries the inscription of being male or female. Sexual differentiation occurs in relation to the symbols of the family, study, and work environment. Social inscription depends on the choices within this symbolic universe._

In plain terms: the unconscious is a mental retard who doesn’t even know if it has a penis or a vagina, and the homosexual is a fool who continues to believe in it even after looking in the mirror.

This definition fully coincides with Dr. Freud’s opinion, according to which the human mind is normal when, instead of following the deceptive suggestions of the unconscious, it has learned to make its “choices in the symbolic universe” in a way that aligns with the physical reality of the world, acknowledging, however reluctantly, that a penis is a penis, and so on.

The reason for the award lies in the fact that the interviewee made this statement with the sincere intention of arguing in favor of homosexuality.

This young man has a future165.

Supplementary supplement

Frank talk about abortion166

The answer to the abortion question entirely depends on two questions:

The first question is: Is the fetus in the mother’s womb a human being or not?

If it is not, then it has to become a human being at some point during gestation. There are two classes of imbeciles who bet on this absurd hypothesis.

Spiritualist imbeciles believe that this happens the moment the soul “enters” the body. But the soul is not something alien to the body; it is the very life of the body. For it to enter an existing body, that body would have to be lifeless until that moment. In this case, one must admit that the fetus, in the first few weeks after conception, is completely lifeless. Have you ever heard of anything crazier?

Materialist imbeciles claim that a three-month fetus does not differ in appearance from a fetus of a monkey — an argument that is pure monkey business. Pablo Picasso, when closely examined, is more similar to Neanderthal Man than to Tom Cruise.

Every attempt to prove that the fetus is not human encounters insurmountable contradictions. But denying that someone else is human is the oldest excuse for those who wish to kill them. Nazi science proved, with similar arguments, that Jews were not human.

Once the crazy hypothesis that the fetus is not human is discarded, the second decisive question arises: Is there any substantial difference between killing a human being in the mother’s womb and killing them after birth?

Abortion advocates try to deceive women with flattery, assuring them that everything inside their bodies is theirs, and they can do whatever they want with what belongs to them. This reasoning implies that the fetus is an organ of the woman’s body, not an independent human being. But even if the fetus were an organ, what is an organ? By definition, it is something that cannot be removed without harming the body. How can they claim, in support of the right to remove the fetus, that it is an organ? If it is an organ, removing it would be mutilating the body. And once the right to self-mutilation is accepted, it would be odious discrimination to grant it to those who wish to cut off their own big toe and deny it to those who would fancy something more refined, like cutting off their own head or the rest of their body and walking around with just their head floating in the air.

Having dismissed the absurd hypothesis that the fetus is an organ, the question remains: even if it is something else, does it belong to the woman carrying it in her womb? The answer is no, because it is not made solely of the woman’s ovum but also of the sperm. The sperm is not produced by the mother’s body, but by the father’s, who simply deposits it in the mother’s body. The mother is therefore not the owner of the entire fetus but only of a part; the other part that came from the father, she is merely a custodian of — and she has just as much right to throw the fetus in the trash as a bank has the right to discard the money we deposit with them.

The categorical rejection of the right to abortion stems from crystal-clear evidence that only a stubborn mentality can deny. But the evil lies not in the women who have abortions, misled by despair. It lies in the abortion advocate who, with a smooth tongue, pretends to encourage them to become murderers. If they accept this proposal, one of two things will happen: either they will create yet another reason for guilt, suffering, and despair, or they will have to smother in their hearts any sense of guilt, becoming cold and inhumane like their wicked counselor.

I appeal to the poor and desperate woman who is afraid of bringing a child into the world: Do not believe these false friends. When you hear a congressman, a senator, or a well-established intellectual saying that they support abortion because they feel sorry for poor women, ask them:

— But, doctor, if you are so kind and generous that you offer to help kill my little child, why can’t you give me some money to help it live?

You will see the scoundrel resort to a thousand evasions to avoid answering the question. Of course. Christ said that our words should be “Yes, yes; no, no — anything beyond this is from the evil one.”

Can you believe in someone who has nothing better to do for a poor woman than to advise her to kill her child? When they come to give you this advice, ask them if it wouldn’t have been good if their own mothers had followed it while there was still time. Ask them if, with the same audacity they deny the human condition to the fetus, we are not sometimes entitled to doubt that they themselves are human. They will smile awkwardly and change the subject. They are a deceitful and ill-intentioned bunch. Beneath their feigned kindness, they are damned Nazis.

Miserable Circus167

— How does philosopher Olavo de Carvalho view the current state of philosophy in Brazil?

First and foremost, as a rural and pedantic imitation of the most vulgar aspects of European and North American academic philosophy, swallowed without any critical selection. The Brazilian mental slavery is reflected in the language used by our university philosophers: a Germanized, Frenchified, or Anglicized Portuguese, full of mannerisms and affectations, which bears no resemblance to the language of Machado de Assis or the language of the ordinary man on the street, who, to me, are the two highest authorities in matters of style. Those who can only philosophize in the language of their neighbor are the ones who think with their neighbor’s head. And since head transplantation does not exist, it becomes evident that the person who speaks like this is not really thinking, but merely mimicking, imitating something they don’t truly understand. Secondly, it is a philosophy in which bureaucratic, functional, career-oriented, and corporatist considerations – not to mention disguised or overt political factionalism – predominate widely over inner life, deep meditation, or even simple and pure study. Discounting the honorable and infallible exceptions, it is a miserable little circus.

— As a writer with great literary effectiveness, what relationship do you establish between philosophical issues and poetic issues?

Everything we know through our senses is first reorganized by the imagination. Without imaginative synthesis, no conceptual synthesis is possible. Thus, the person who grasps an important notion through imagination has two options: either express it artistically – poetically, pictorially, etc. – and immediately integrate it into the ambient culture, into the common language, or wait a little longer until it is more deeply integrated into the total body of their own general conceptions. In the first case, they are a poet. In the second, a philosopher. The only difference is this: the philosopher is a poet who decided to wait a little longer, while the poet is a philosopher who was in a hurry. That’s why premature genius is more common in poetry than in philosophy. Everything starts with poetic imagination. Those who lack it have nothing. Those who possess it can choose their path, like young Plato, who, after hearing Socrates, gave up being a poet and then had to wait until he was fifty or sixty to achieve his literary fulfillment, now in the role of a philosopher. Or like young Dante, who, upon reading Aristotle, thought it better to put his teachings into verses as soon as possible. And there are others who find themselves in between, like Nietzsche, who meditated too much to be a poet and too little to be a philosopher.

— Should we celebrate the death of ideologies in the name of philosophy? Or will this death imply a lack of defined positions in the field of poetic and social pragmatics?

I do not believe that the two major ideologies have died; they married and are giving birth to a monstrous child: the State, which is liberal capitalist in economics and socialist in everything else. The neoliberals are mistaken in thinking that economic freedom automatically brings other freedoms. In fact, the old leftist intelligentsia has gained important positions in the New Order and pushes for new legislation that inevitably increases the State’s intervention in citizens' private lives, reducing their freedom to act and even their freedom to think. Having given up on establishing a socialist economy, they are creating a socialism of the psyche, which, while flattering the masses with promises of new social rights, actually creates more police stations, more courts, more surveillance, more bureaucracy, and more oppression. Capitalists are pleased because the State does not interfere in their lives. Left-wing intellectuals are also content because the State fulfills all their demands and treats them well. It is the common people who suffer, as their lives become burdened with more and more laws that oppress and complicate their existence. As the intellectual left continues to complain, their tears are crocodile tears: they have never had the power and prestige they currently possess in the United States, England, or Germany, even in communist regimes. And the more Brazil integrates into the so-called New Order, the more Brazilian intellectuals will gain power, and the more they will pretend to have none.

— Can philosophy still provide paths for a man to rediscover himself?

It can, but there are two problems: on one hand, philosophical effort is too heavy for the common man, the worker, the ordinary citizen. Only an astounding genius – a genius of willpower – could spend eight hours a day working in a bank and then deeply examining Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Tragically, free time in technological society decreases instead of increasing. This creates a culture of haste, which is a culture of dispersion and neurasthenia, leaving people unable to philosophize. On the other hand, philosophy as a university profession tends more and more to adapt to this culture instead of offering creative alternatives. For these reasons, philosophy retains, in essence, its liberating potential, but the conditions to achieve it are increasingly elitist, partly due to the very intellectuals who vociferate against elitism so that nobody realizes they are the elite.

— Do you believe in a perennial philosophy, permeating through the ages, even amidst the most diverse and conflicting philosophies?

Certainly, but anything perennial cannot fully manifest in temporal forms. Works of time and history indicate or symbolize eternity, but certainly cannot accomplish it. Therefore, perennial philosophy, as I understand it, cannot be fully expressed as a finished doctrine. Like everything alive, it takes on diverse and seemingly opposing forms (I find it, for example, in Schelling and St. Thomas). True perennial philosophy is the deep vocation of man to seek unity; trying to crystallize this vocation into a doctrine that would make the search unnecessary would be self-contradictory. The important thing is, as they say, not to drop the ball, to start again in search of unity every time it disappears from our eyes, veiled by the confusion of the world and the controversies of scholars.

— In your view, what is the perspective for major traditional religions in the next millennium?

Either they learn to love, understand, and marvel at the unity of their diversity, or the State will reduce them to useless relics. I am very happy to see Pope John Paul II – the most remarkable man of this century – addressing Muslims and Buddhists as brothers. One man who has done his best for interreligious brotherhood in Brazil is Rabbi Sobel, in São Paulo. A scene that moved me deeply was when, in the mosque of São Paulo, an Egyptian sheikh, upon seeing a girl with a crucifix around her neck, praised her for being a Christian in a materialistic world. More or less as the Italian philosopher Enzo Paci said, either we understand each other beyond our differences, or the bureaucracy that dominates the planet will use these differences as a grid to roast us alive.

To philosophy students168

— What is the strength of a philosopher in a deeply massified society?

It is like a small tranquilizer pill in the body of a neurasthenic: it won’t cure them, but it will give them a brief moment of calm and lucidity during which they can make decisions that can change their life. If society knows how to benefit from the presence of the philosopher, all the better. If not, the philosopher, without blaming anyone, will calmly retreat to their corner to teach themselves what others refused to learn.

— What is the importance of Aristotle for human knowledge?

It is twofold: the importance of what he has already given us, and the importance of what he can still give us. The first consists of the dozens of sciences he founded – comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, logic, history of philosophy, literary theory, psychology, etc. – and the metaphysical conceptions that inspired Christian medieval times. The second consists, above all, of his vision of an organic unity of knowledge – an ideal that the 20th century pursued in vain, but which Aristotle’s philosophy can still substantially assist.

— Your book The Collective Imbecile is going into its third edition. What is the philosophical scope of your criticism of the dominant intelligentsia?

Every cultural manifestation has some underlying philosophical thesis, which can remain implicit and unconscious. The technique I use in The Collective Imbecile is to make explicit the assumptions underlying Brazilian cultural production and then critically examine them. In many cases, it becomes clear that their only strength lied in remaining hidden: once brought to light, their absurdity becomes evident. Sometimes, revealing the historical origin of a dominant belief is enough to demoralize it instantly. An example is the belief that everything in life is political, that politics is an omnipresent dimension, that every human action has a political significance and therefore everything must be judged politically. This belief, openly or covertly professed by many on the Brazilian left, has its origin in the doctrines of Carl Schmitt, the theorist of the Nazi State. Just revealing this fact will make those who subscribed to the thesis question it critically, if they are honest. My book is not only intended to denounce a state of affairs but also to uncover the intellectual roots of certain beliefs and habits that depress and weaken human intelligence.

— In your view, what assistance can religion provide for a comprehensive understanding of the world?

What is religion? It is the ritual staging of a set of symbolic messages of fundamental importance for the preservation of man’s human status. Moral rules are part of this grand theater, in which we must sincerely and devotedly participate because it is the only source of life and health for the human spirit. Even when the norms of a religion seem strange or absurd when viewed from another culture or from the pretended naivety of the skeptic, they must be accepted wholeheartedly because their deep meaning is only revealed to those who love them. Loving them does not mean obeying them mechanically and blindly, but simply not having a suspicious and malicious attitude towards them. The wisdom that lies at the core of religions does not reveal itself to a malicious gaze. This is what Christ means when he asks us to become like children. However, malice is the number one commandment of modern intellectuals, starting with Voltaire. The modern intellectual, full of suspicion and fear, fears being deceived by the messages of Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, and ends up being deceived by cheap liars like Voltaire and Marx, who lead them into bloody and senseless political adventures. Consider this: the French Revolution killed ten times more people in one year than the Inquisition had killed in six centuries. Despite this, in the modern imagination, it is the Inquisition that remains the image of violence. Especially in Brazil, and particularly in USP, there has been an epidemic of studies on the Inquisition, with extensive media coverage, giving the impression that the inquisitorial phenomenon is at the root of Brazilian violence, which is a tremendous absurdity. In three centuries, the Inquisition, throughout the Americas, not just in Brazil, did not execute more than three hundred people: one hundred per century, one victim per year. It is a ridiculously small number compared to the number of people the indigenous tribes killed at the same time or the homicide rate of any municipality in Baixada Fluminense today.

— In a moment like this, how can a philosopher reach out to a youth that doesn’t even have prospects for economic survival?

The message of the philosopher to young students, regarding financial difficulty, is simple: the worse your economic condition becomes, the more you should hold on to your intellectual vocation. Do not succumb to the pressure of a world that wants to kill your spirit by tormenting you with financial problems. The world, in the biblical sense of the term (i.e., the worldly society), only respects those who despise it. During the First World War, physicist Werner Heisenberg, then a teenager in a city reduced to poverty by the siege and bombings, hid in the basement of a church to read Plato and discuss Malebranche’s metaphysics with his friends. Those were the decisive years of his formation: he could have lost them by waiting for better days to study. But nothing in this world can overcome the determination of a man faithful to his spiritual vocation. Do not be intimidated, do not give up. The reigning rubbish will not prevail over the sincerity of your efforts. I say this from the experience of someone who, over more than two decades of poverty, with a wife and children to support, never stopped studying for a single day, making use of every free moment and renouncing all kinds of travel and entertainment. I never waited for my situation to improve before studying, and I assure you: be stubborn, and one day the world will give up trying to dominate you with hunger.

— What is the connection between art and philosophy?

Art is, in the order of time, the first and most basic form of knowledge. It is the imaginative synthesis that precedes all conceptual elaboration. Therefore, artistic education should be the first given to a child or a young person. This includes geometric drawing, as a preparation for mathematics (a point that Prof. Jarbas Maciel has emphasized very pertinently here in Recife), observation drawing of living forms as preparation for natural sciences, music, theater, and narrative arts as preparation for historical science, and oratory as preparation for philosophy, etc. Without artistic culture, nothing can be achieved. Imagination bridges the gap between the sensible and the intelligible, as Aristotle said. Without a trained and capable imagination, conceptual thinking floats in the void as mere formalism, and the person never gains a sense of truth in their thoughts.

The relationship between art and philosophy can also be approached from a deeper, metaphysical perspective, as Schelling does. But for now, talking about the pedagogical aspect is sufficient.

— What do you think of José Arthur Gianotti’s proposal to occupy Darcy Ribeiro’s seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters?

It is coherent: it puts the void in place of the emptiness. But Darcy had at least verbal talent, was funny, and amiable. It was an easy and superficial brilliance, but it was brilliance. Gianotti is the embodiment of opacity itself. If I were to vote, I would choose Bruno Tolentino, Franklin de Oliveira, or Antônio Olinto.

— You said that people no longer seek wisdom or guidance for living in philosophy. So, what do they seek in it?

They seek what education generally offers: a profession and political power – everything that, when taken as essence instead of mere accident, can lead a person away from the inner concentration necessary for the pursuit of wisdom. Philosophy thus becomes a misosophy – a horror of wisdom.

The weapons and the New Order169

Trying to justify the law that punishes citizens who keep a revolver at home without informing the world, Minister Nelson Jobim declared that we, Brazilians, are not prepared for the use of firearms. Did you understand? We are not prepared: so the government comes and, with the care of a father, takes away the dangerous toy from our hands. But if we are unprepared to defend ourselves, is the government prepared to do it for us? Haven’t we seen government after government faltering, trembling, failing, or remaining silent in the face of the rising tide of crime and proving incapable of even controlling corruption and violence among its own officials? What authority does a father have who, without the strength to guarantee the safety of his children, also takes away their means of defending themselves?

To support this insolent little law, the minister resorts to a supposedly statistical argument: the majority of victims who attempt to defend themselves with guns fare poorly. But what significance can this statistic have if it is based on reported incidents and if, by definition, the citizen who successfully expels assailants with a bullet does not report the occurrence, precisely so as not to surrender the weapon that saved him?

The statistics reflect cases in which the citizen is disarmed and shot by the assailants. But when the one who dies or gets injured is the criminal, that’s when the citizen comes out badly. The whole of Brazil saw, on TV, the admirable old woman from Ibitinga, SP, who confronted two robbers with gunfire, sending one to the hospital. The police, who could never have arrived in time to help her, limited themselves to doing what Nelson Jobim likes: they took the old lady’s revolver. The Ibitinga bandits have already been warned: they can return calmly, the danger has passed—the fearsome old lady is disarmed. Come in, rob, kill, and, if you feel like it, rape. Nelson Jobim will sleep with a clear conscience, having protected grandma from herself.

Another argument from the minister is even more wretched: most robberies are committed with stolen weapons. I ask: So what? Will registering the weapons prevent someone from stealing them? If registration were a guarantee against theft, there would be no car theft.

The senseless registration will only serve one thing: to improve the technical standard of the robberies. From now on, before invading a house, the criminals will take the precaution of obtaining, from the informants that are never lacking in the police, the updated information that is the basis of precise planning and effective action: does the owner have weapons? How many? Of what caliber? The absurd law violates domestic secrecy and exposes the defenseless citizen to the gaze of criminals.

But deep down, the minister’s argument makes sense: it reflects the cunning of a government that, elected to privatize the economy, only intends to do so at the expense of nationalizing everything else: morals, customs, human intimacy. No Brazilian government, elected or imposed, has ever dared to go so far in the control that this one is trying to exercise over the minds of its citizens. Gently, quietly, it is entering, taking over everything, reshaping our lives and souls according to the pattern of its values, which, remaining implicit and discreet, are never discussed, much less contested.

No one seems to feel the invasion. Accustomed to fighting only in the macroscopic field of ideological confrontations, Brazilians do not realize the minimalist subversion—the “molecular aggression,” as Antonio Gramsci would say—that slyly implants the dictatorship of psychological engineering among us. The strategy is simple: yield and please in the visible, conquer and dominate in the invisible. The citizen knows the value of financial stability, the government gives him financial stability; he knows what human rights are, the government gives him human rights; in return, it asks him for things that, at the moment, seem of negligible value: small moral concessions, insensitive changes of habit. But these changes, immaterial and innocuous as they may seem, affect the basis of human personality and the pillars of culture; they affect values, which determine actions and conduct.

Compared to overt despotism, which arouses resistance and therefore has a relative force, this subtle form of power is much closer to absolute power: power that is not contested because it is not seen. Only in recent months has the amiable tucano Leviathan taken two giant steps: it has taken possession of our corpses, declaring itself the presumptive owner of them until proven otherwise, arrogating the right to chop them up and distribute them in pieces to whomever it pleases; then it comes with this promise to free us from the fearsome danger we expose ourselves to by holding a weapon by its handle— a charitable mission in the name of which, with a simple anonymous denunciation, law enforcement agents will be able to search our homes while we, like good boys, look with gratitude and reverence at these angels of tenderness who come to protect us from ourselves. And the citizen, in accepting these changes in exchange for alleged constitutional benefits, falls into the oldest trap of weak souls: propter vitam vivendi perdere causas—in exchange for life, he loses what makes life worth living.

Reasoning with the ideological stereotypes of three or four decades ago (nationalization = socialism; privatization = capitalism), we do not understand the sinister composition of the new type of state that is forming in the framework of the New World Order, where increasing capitalist freedom in the economic sphere is allied with the more strongly centralized socialist dirigisme in the social, moral, educational, and psychological spheres—a formula that satisfies, at the same time, businessmen, state bureaucracy, and activist intelligentsia. As a lucid friend of mine, the writer Antônio Fernando Borges, says: right and left, united, will never be defeated.

Seen on a global scale, this unheard-of growth of state power over the lives of citizens contrasts most frighteningly with its progressive impotence in the face of the declared enemy. No government in the world today has the authority to claim a monopoly on the means of physical security: crime is more prosperous than any nation on earth, growing by 7 percent per year, doubling every decade, and the World Bank, officially including in its analyses the variable called Gross Criminal Product, already recognizes the impossibility of distinguishing, in the planet’s financial system, the clean part from the dirty one. The expression “fifth power” is no longer just a linguistic twist. It indicates that a large part of the world’s population now shelters under the protection of the heads of international trafficking, paying no attention to the so-called established powers. We are facing a singular historical phenomenon, the formation of a new ruling class, without a homeland or face, dictating laws and ruling the world outside all theories, which have been increasingly fictional for two centuries, that legitimize all known forms of government.

To make things even more complex, the multinational organized crime cannot be fought on the scale of national borders: alongside the globalization of the economy, there arises the phenomenon of globalization of public security. Along with crime, the power of international organizations—UN, Unesco, World Bank, World Health Organization—grows, becoming more arrogant and invasive each day in dictating norms to nation-states. These, for their part, seeing their power diminish in the face of the rising and prosperous world government, seek to ensure themselves within their respective territories, expanding the tentacles of fiscal, police, judicial, educational, and welfare bureaucracy. This is how states become all the more powerful within their respective territories the more they bow to international dependence. Whether national or global, whether the power of the state or that of the gangs, power grows—and the margin of action for citizens diminishes as the rosy-colored range of their nominal “rights” widens. The apparent antagonism between national powers and globalization hides the intensification of the old conflict that Alain summed up in the expression le citoyen contre les pouvoirs, the citizen against the powers—a citizen who, not even being able to grasp the extent of the forces that subjugate him, is increasingly, in relation to them, not like a subject before a king, but like a mortal before the gods.

And the most ironic thing is that all these powers use the same ideological discourse to legitimize themselves, increasingly uniform on a global scale, as along with crime and the economy, the media also globalize. This discourse invariably revolves around freedom, democracy, and human rights. Whether in the name of nations, the planet, order, or disorder, it exalts the citizen and seeks to awaken in him the impulse to claim, the ambition to be heard, “the awareness of his rights”—without ever bothering him with the reminder of a duty, so as not to awaken him from his magnificent dream of a slave transfigured into a king and so that he does not become aware that, by shouting against lesser powers, he always contributes to the strengthening of some greater power. Here is an unheard-of novelty in the history of ideas. All old powers sought ostentatiously to exalt or deify the ruler, awaken in the subjects the conscious desire for submission. Only modern powers, unimaginably stronger and indestructible than their predecessors, legitimize themselves by the modesty with which they make themselves invisible, while simultaneously exalting, through flattery, the vain illusion of increasingly powerless citizens.

Assembly of the unconscious170

If the amount of attention and homage given to intellectuals were an indication of high culture, Brazil would be among the most cultured countries in the world. Here, it is still possible to change the course of history through protest shows and writers' manifestos, things that in the rest of the universe only elicit yawns. Isn’t it curious that the opinion of writers is so powerful precisely in a country where reading is scarce? This question came to my mind when I saw the press giving prominence to the thirty intellectuals who gathered at the home of writer Alcione Araújo to discuss the direction of the nation’s life.

Everywhere else, indeed, the cult of maîtres-à-penser is a thing of the past. Young people used to kill and die for Charles Maurras and Jean-Paul Sartre. Today, the opinion of a Lévi-Strauss only stirs the literary circles. It has no popular audience compared to that of an evangelical preacher. It is true that the mediatic intellectuals—as Pierre Bourdieu calls them—have emerged to fill the gap between high culture and pop culture. They are the semi-literate ones dominating the cultural sections of the media. But while they set the trends, they are not objects of devotion like their macroscopic predecessors.

Why do things happen differently in Brazil? One word that comes to mind automatically is “backwardness.” We would be in a pre-historical phase, worshipping an extinct religion of men of letters, Carlylean heroes and successors, in turn, of Church saints. But this explanation is false because in Brazil, the devotion to literati has been growing in popularity since the 1960s, when notable intellectuals, now an endangered species, began to become scarce. Since then, the language has deteriorated, education has declined, and the public has increasingly understood less of what it reads.

So, the paradox goes deeper: the prestige of writers grows in inverse proportion to the ability to read them. The conclusion is fatal: it has nothing to do with popular devotion to genius creations. After the golden generation that entered the literary scene in the 1930s died out, the cult of great men died prematurely: only the mediatic intellectuals remained, feeding on the corpse of the stillborn, so drained that it has no substance left other than the evanescent image of a prestige whose foundations no one remembers anymore. Hence the apparent paradox of not needing to create great works to become an object of devotion: what is venerated is the image of intellectuals, not their works; what they say, not what they write. Their fame celebrates the victory of the oral and the visual over the written and the thought. Intellectual debate becomes a mere performance aimed at sustaining reputations that would otherwise be inexplicable.

The causes go back a long way: since the 1930s, the Communist Party organized “intellectual workers” in cells, unions, and front organizations—an absurd concept that brought together samba musicians and nuclear physicists, primary school teachers and poetic trance bankers, with no other bond than the uniformity of ideological discourse disguised as cultural representation. Defections after Khrushchev’s report, the increasing preference of the left for informal and discreet forms of adherence, have not changed anything in the fundamental solidarity, which still supports the spirit of unanimity.

This fictitious unity has been maintained through forceful exclusions. In 1964, at least four of the greatest figures of our intelligence—Manuel Bandeira, Augusto Frederico Schmidt, and Miguel Reale—took the side of the new regime. Their opinion was immediately excluded from the list of significant ideas, creating the impression that national intelligence was on the left, and on the other side, there was only the brute force of illiterate sergeants. A gross lie. The only comparable farce is the democratic pathos in the speeches of the servants, often professionals, of the Cuban dictatorship.

With these precedents, it is not surprising that collective pronouncements of intellectuals are most of the time grotesque simulations of thought. One of them, coming from the meeting at Alcione Araújo’s house, attributes the nation’s woes to neoliberalism when neoliberalism, for now, only exists among us as a proposal, miles away from any realization, blocked by formidable obstacles in Congress and beyond, and could only have harmed Brazil through the methods of The Terminator. But not content to locate the cause of past events in the future, the thirty also denounced the “loss of the identity of the Brazilian people,” while, beating their chests, collectively called themselves “builders of the national imaginary,” without realizing that, with identity having its abode in the imaginary, the blame for its loss can only be legitimately attributed to the builders themselves.

The secret identity of the Collective Imbecile

Who is the Collective Imbecile? — asks me the magazine República. I regret to disappoint it, but this protean and innumerable entity is not exactly anyone, precisely because it is legion. Moreover, it essentially consists of gaps, lacks, deprivations, vacuities and deficiencies, more or less like what the scholastics called privative reason entity. However, unlike this fearsome creature of medieval logic, it materially exists and acts in this world, as can be felt in their own flesh by any observer endowed with a scrotal bag or equivalent organ. The difficult part is not to feel it, for it is everywhere. The difficult part is to give it an identity, when one of the foundations of its existence is precisely the denial of the principle of identity, as can be inferred from the characteristic logical procedures of its representatives, which I do not list here because they are already known to the distinguished public.

But, unable to identify it with ID, Social Security Number, and other legal-administrative properties that singularize the citizen of our days, I can however point to its most remote known ancestor: Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea.

Let’s recall the facts. Having the truth right before his eyes, and judging that denying it outright would be too vulgar and ostentatious for a man of his status, he preferred that solution that today we would call tucana and, from atop the fence, pondered with an air of wisdom: Quid est veritas?

Next, he invited the crowd to resolve, by shouting vote, the thorny philosophical question. The crowd resolved it by the method that Georges Sorel would later come to call direct action: it suppressed the truth physically.

Pontius, happy to achieve the expected effect without having to ostentatiously get his hands in the muck, washed them, suggesting, to those who had eyes to see, that he indeed had put them there. But no one had eyes and no one saw anything. To this day, washing one’s hands means, as incredible as it may seem, that they were clean.

In this episode, we have all the traits that define the Collective Imbecile:

1 — It is dual: it is born from the unlikely marriage of the snobbish intellectual with the enraged rabble.

2 — It is a rabid fanatic with a stylish touch of relativist skepticism. It is the body of Bakunin with the head of Anatole France. It is therefore not surprising that among the heads that roll at each of its passages through the world, it ends up including its own.

3 — Between truth and falsehood, it has the impartiality of indifference. But, like a true Chinese sage who acts by not acting, it makes its omission the engine of history, yielding to the initiative of the masses and allowing the miracle of praxis to transmute theoretical contradictions into physical violence, which is, in the end, the only decisive response in the eyes of the skeptic.

21/04/97

Collective Imbecile Award

Regulation

I– OF THE PURPOSES

Art. 1– The Award is established with the main purpose of encouraging voluntary self-lobotomy, uterine regression, diving into darkness, total forgetfulness and other cultural practices sanctioned by the Constitution of 1988 and by national traditions.

Art. 2– The Award will also express the recognition of the Brazilian intellectual community to anyone who gives it the slightest pretext, reason, occasion, or decent justification to not understand something.

II– OF THE CANDIDATES

Art. 1– To compete for the award, it is necessary to meet three conditions, which in essence are four or five:

§ 1 - Be a wonderful person.

§ 2 - Say or do something that decidedly helps the public to know less today than yesterday, and tomorrow less than today.

§ 3 - At least implicitly deny the principle of identity, the navigability of water, the anteriority of past times and the existence of whatever.

§ 4 - Be against the state of things and in favor of state things.

§ 5 - Have no intention, especially when caught with pants down.

§ 6 - React to the award with a superior silence or, if it cannot be contained, with words that merit a new award.

III– OF THE AWARD

Art. 1– The winner will be chosen by a committee of 15% of the total cost of the work. The vote will be secret, sneaky, and stealthy.

Art. 2– The name of the winner will be announced at an uncertain date and place, by unusual and surprising means.

Art. 3– The name of the winner, along with an exhibition of the reasons for the award, will be part of the first edition of the book The Collective Imbecile to be printed after the fait accompli. After that, nothing more can be done for the unfortunate one.

Art. 4– Anyone who receives two consecutive annual awards cannot enroll in competitions in the following years, nor will it be necessary, as the judging committee will grant them, for life, the medal of Individualized Collective Imbecile.

The Collective Imbecile in News

Tough fight for the 1997 award!

Do not cry, my son: the 1997 Collective Imbecile Award promises the public all the emotions of a vibrant dispute.

From the half-light of 1995, from the growing obscurity of 1996, we now move on to the stage of massive darkness, where extinguished intelligences fight with a sickle to see who sees less.

Among the favorite candidates, the name of theater director Gerald Thomas stands out, like the midnight sun. Tremble, adversaries! What he brings in terms of achievements is not a small mess. Leaving the other contestants far behind, the creature from the shadows declared, in an article published in O Globo on February 20, that the death of Paulo Francis, Antônio Callado and Darcy Ribeiro closes a historical cycle that began with… René Descartes!

After giving us this news, which frankly, no one would have suspected, he informs us further that, with the Cartesian epoch so well represented by these three writers closed, another cycle emerges, personified, who would have thought, by Gerald Thomas himself.

  1. Or better yet: give up, reader. You will never be able to fill this in as literally as Paulo Roberto Pires, Emir Sader, Leandro Konder, Muniz Sodré, Gerd A. Bornheim, and André Luiz Barros did (Note from the 2nd edition).↩

  2. Some malicious readers who fled high school asked me if these mysterious letters were not a coded translation of “p.q.p.” I patiently explained to them that no; they were an abbreviation of “as we wanted to demonstrate”, in turn a vernacular adaptation of Q.E.D., quod erat demonstrandum (“what was to be demonstrated”), a formula that geometry books, when there were any, placed at the end of successful theorem demonstrations. I used them, naively, thinking everyone knew them, without realizing that, in the new Brazil, culture is old age. [Translator’s Note: In the original Portuguese text, Olavo uses “C.Q.D.” as an abbreviation for “como queríamos demonstrar” (“as we wanted to demonstrate”), a phrase often used in mathematical or logical arguments to indicate the successful conclusion of a proof. This is a typical Portuguese-speaking adaptation of the Latin phrase “quod erat demonstrandum” or “Q.E.D.” commonly used in English. The phrase “p.q.p.” (puta que pariu) is a vulgar expression in Portuguese, which the author denies is the meaning of "C.Q.D."]↩

  3. However, I cannot complain of having been entirely misunderstood. The reviews of The Garden of Afflictions by Antônio Fernando Borges in the Jornal do Brasil and by Vamireh Chacon in the Jornal de Brasília offered quite accurate interpretations of my thinking.↩

  4. See Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations (Rio, Stella Caymmi / IAL, 1993)↩

  5. Why did I take this period as an example? For no particular reason: only because the book had to start and end somewhere. If I didn’t arbitrarily impose an end, the collection of samples could continue indefinitely and become an end in itself because, while the collective imbecility may not be eternal, it seems to be at least infinite in its productive capacity. And this book, to accompany it (which was not part of my plan), would have to be a periodic publication, a newspaper section like Stanislaw Ponte Preta’s Febeapá. It would be the Febeapá of intellectuals…↩

  6. Despite forming a trilogy, each of the three books can be read independently without hindering comprehension.↩

  7. Since none of the ideas that compose the mental constellation of the collective imbecile are of national origin, the attentive reader will not escape the observation that this book, focusing on the Brazilian case, constitutes a critique of contemporary culture on a global scale, or at least Euro-American. Brazil becomes illustrative of certain more dangerous trends embedded in this culture precisely because of its position as a passive and defenseless recipient of influences that, in their countries of origin, are sometimes challenged, fought, and defeated by the conscious opposition of valuable intellectuals. The Collective Imbecile can also be understood as an informal and journalistic preface to my larger study, The Eye of the Sun. Essay on Intelligence and Consciousness, which in its first part will address in a more systematic way, with a broader and more uniform historical perspective, the struggle of collectivist fallacy to subjugate and pervert human consciousness, and in the second part will focus on the same subject from the purely theoretical perspective of gnoseology. And to the more attentive reader, the unity of the present book will be evident behind the form of a collection — the unity of a unique approach cast upon diverse and occasional samples.↩

  8. Cyclical reactions of superficial nationalism cannot counteract this. They are founded on the idea that the nation must have independent thought before the national thinkers have it. They delegate the responsibility that falls on concrete individuals to an abstract collective. They replace servile collectivism with xenophobic collectivism, isolating us from the world for a while until we fear falling behind again. It is a vicious circle.↩

  9. “The decision of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to remove the French language from the selection test for diplomats brought a polemic and, in its wake, an observation: the influence of French culture in Brazil is a thing of the past… Actress and filmmaker Norma Bengell (…) states: 'The new generations are more connected to American cinema.’ Writer Marcos Santarrita laments: 'It seems that ideas have dried up in France. The last original thoughts in France were those of Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty.’” (Berenice Seara and Elizabeth Orsini, “Autumn of a Cultural Reference,” O Globo, March 30, 1996) These paragraphs show that, first, the shift in influence became conscious and accepted; second, Brazilian intellectuals, in general, only follow the most visible parts of the production of ideas abroad; thus, from the impoverishment of Parisian cultural media, they deduce the exhaustion of French cultural production and quickly turn their attention to a more attractive focus. However, the fact is that in recent decades, France has given us Pierre Boudieu, Éric Weil, André Marc, and René Girard — thinkers much deeper and more consistent than Sartre or Camus — and infinitely more valuable than all the academic minds of the USA combined. They are just outside the lowbrow circle of attention. See further the chapter “The Mote and the Beam”.↩

  10. And even when, driven by remnants of nationalism, we choose to venerate primarily among American authors those who are the most severe critics of their country’s culture, we end up consolidating our position as passive consumers without a selection criterion; because the production of self-criticism is one of the most potent industries of a culture affected by a radical lack of substance, and for decades, Americans have had nothing to communicate to the world other than the echoes of their domestic conflicts. A sane global audience should normally respond to this local discussion with the most superb disinterest. However, due to editorial marketing, it ends up appearing universally important, especially in the eyes of people incapable of formulating their problems in their own terms and thus needing to shape their internal debate by a foreign agenda. As a result, the more American intelligence closes in on egocentric provincialism and loses the sense of universal measure, the more we, south of the Rio Grande, tend to make it the standard of universal measurement: we exchange the sense of history for the sense of American current events. In one fell swoop, we alienate ourselves from both ourselves and the universe, letting the mad giant drag us and imprison us in his delirium of self-analysis. By imitating a culture that has lost itself, we lose ourselves even more, and we are no longer capable of judging it or ourselves. A sad example of this is the exaggerated admiration we grant to certain current critics of American culture without noticing that they tell us nothing that has not already been said, and better, by someone from past generations.↩

  11. The most curious thing here is that people stop being Marxists but don’t know how to be anything else because everything they have read in their lives has been seen through Marx’s eyes. The result is that these ex-Marxists continue to reason within a framework defined by dialectical materialism, class struggle, and all the other classical concepts of Marxism that no longer dare speak their name…↩

  12. Old Bernanos, a prophet, warned that one should never show evil to imbeciles, let alone make them aware of it. First, because they have more ease than other people in feeling indignant; second, because they have an uncontrollable propensity to gather in thousands, in millions, to reinforce each other’s anger; third, because, once angry for a just cause, they lose all sense of proportion in producing reparatory injustices. The destiny of the world would have been different if the images of war, poverty, hunger, and social exclusion had not intoxicated the brains of millions of young imbeciles with just anger, predisposing them to find solace in the promises of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler.↩

  13. If it is not understood, one can consult N. Berdiaev, Les Sources et le Sens du Communisme Russe (Paris, Le Seuil, 1948, Chapter I). But if the reader cannot find Berdiaev’s book, he can resort to his own domestic copy of the Bible (I Cor.: I:26), where, as I learned from C. S. Lewis, the most precise definition of the referred class can be found: sofoi kata sarka, sofoi kata sarka, “wise according to the flesh.”↩

  14. Marilena Chauí, “Ética e Universidade,” in Ciência Hoje (Revista da Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência), vol. 18, no. 102, August 1994. The sentence is somewhat peculiar but, in content, very elucidative. It informs us that psychoanalysis and Marxism, despite the deceptive statements on the covers of their respective books, were collective discoveries, since the individual consciousnesses of Messrs. Freud and Marx, closed in their insurmountable limits, could never have conceived of such things. The irrefutable proof is that everyone was already a psychoanalyst before Freud and a Marxist before Marx, and these two gentlemen entered history only in the roles of deceived husbands—the last to know.↩

  15. One of the many missing chapters in this book would address the festive and mistaken reception given in this part of the world to the book by the Portuguese neurologist Antônio Damásio, O Erro de Descartes (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1996), and to Daniel Goleman’s Inteligência Emocional (translated by Marcos Santarrita, Rio, Objetiva, 1996). Both of these books emphasize an obvious truth forgotten or disregarded by the North American psychological establishment: the processing of emotions is more decisive for good intellectual performance than IQ. However, both authors, to publicize this idea, resorted to the advertising gimmick of opposing their advocacy of emotional intelligence to the “rationalism” of Descartes and Kant. This is, of course, a mere figure of speech that is not based on a historically accurate view of the doctrines of these two thinkers but on their popular image, brutally simplified and caricatured (Descartes, a rationalist in metaphysics, was in ethics a rather “irrational” voluntarist, and calling Kant a rationalist is the mark of an illiterate). In Brazil, however, Damásio and Goleman were taken literally, with rustic naiveté (see the section “Ideias” of the Jornal do Brasil, April 6, 1996), resulting in a gross apology for emotion against reason, founded on the dumbest confusion between emotions and their intellectual processing, as well as on the complete lack of distinction between direct and aesthetic or imaginative emotion. All of this, of course, flatters the anti-intellectual prejudice of certain sectors of the public and takes advantage of the success of the film Sense and Sensibility as an excipient for book sales. It is, in short, an unspeakable baseness that reduces the journalism of ideas to the level of scientific popularization for adolescents.↩

  16. One of my previous books—Uma Filosofia Aristotélica da Cultura—already suffered the same fate, although it said nothing negative about anyone and confined itself to harmless speculations about Aristotle’s logic.↩

  17. See the chapter “Carta a Oxfordgrado” later on.↩

  18. It is also predictable that some may dispense with entering into psychological comments, not because they are particularly discreet but because they imagine, not without some reason, that for definitively sullying a reputation, ideological labeling is much more effective than direct personal defamation, and it has the advantage of appearing intellectually elevated. A good part of the public is, in fact, in no condition to conceive, under the name of “critical analysis,” anything more intelligent than the calculation of relative coefficients of progressivism and reactionarism, from which the precise mathematical criterion for admitting or rejecting an author in the circle of respectable people is obtained. See the chapter “Fanatismo sem nome” later on.↩

  19. See Osman Lins, Do Ideal e da Glória. Problemas Inculturais Brasileiros (2nd ed., São Paulo, Summus, 1977) and Evangelho na Taba. Outros Problemas Inculturais Brasileiros (São Paulo, Summus, 1978).↩

  20. Hence, the virginal scandalized reactions of our literati to the sharp criticisms—and, in content, nothing but fair—made by Bruno Tolentino of a translation by Augusto de Campos. I will comment on this later.↩

  21. Furthermore, if The Collective Imbecile provokes irritation and displeasure, it will not be for long: not only will it be forgotten soon, but also the public’s interest in the minor characters it deals with will fade away. Besides, I myself will not return to the subject since, unless Providence decides otherwise, I will conclude my career as a polemicist with this book and devote myself henceforth to theoretical works on topics that will not arouse the slightest commotion in this country.↩

  22. Further explanations about the purpose of this book can be found in note 27.↩

  23. J. Miglioli, “The critical role of the Marxist intellectual,” Novos Rumos no. 163, Apr. 30, 1962. Reproduced in “Communism in Brazil. Military Police Inquiry no. 709,” Rio, Army Library, 1966, vol. II, p. 230. — See further considerations on this text later in the chapter “Nameless Fanaticism.”↩

  24. Robert Hughes, “Culture of Complaint. The Fraying of America,” translated by Marcos Santarrita, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1993, pp. 97-98; from the original “Culture of Complaint. The Fraying of America,” New York, 1993.↩

  25. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (New York, Oxford University Press, 1929, reed. 1947).↩

  26. I analyze this episode in more detail at the end of my book O Jardim das Aflições (The Garden of Afflictions).↩

  27. See, for example, the monumental work by Whitall N. Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, Pates Manor, Bedfont (Middlesex), Perennial Books, 1971, reed. 1981. There are no arguments against twelve hundred pages of perfectly consistent facts. — More eloquent still is Order and History, by Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge, Louisiana University Press, 1956/1987).↩

  28. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.↩

  29. In our cultural press, it is common to say at every turn that such and such theory “was overturned”, “was abandoned”, “fell”, etc. These irresponsible expressions only serve to deceive the public, leading it to confuse the sufficient scientific refutation and the mere disuse or forgetting of a theory. Many theories go out of fashion without ever having been refuted or even put into discussion. Others, although unanswerably refuted, continue shrouded in prestige. In the history of sciences and philosophy, the complete refutation of any theory is rather a rare case than a general rule. Ironically, one of the classic examples of exhaustive refutation in philosophy is that Husserl made of psychologism. This was at the turn of the century, and nonetheless, psychologism continues to appear in public as if it were still a respectable theory — exactly as in Swift’s quip about the man who had died a few days earlier but who continued to walk the streets because he had not been notified of his own death.↩↩

  30. One of the most harmful effects of spreading this belief is the complete alienation of individuals from their most immediate and obvious sensations. A psychologically sound person should have an approximate idea of their bodily health through the simple sensations of vitality, well-being, and harmonious bodily functions. The average North American citizen—intoxicated by a hundred years of pragmatism—can no longer have this spontaneous self-awareness and relies more on laboratory tests than their personal sensations. They don’t go to the doctor because they feel unwell, but so that the doctor can inform them if they should feel unwell, given their “objective” state of health—where “objective” (God help us!) means the relationship between the results of laboratory tests and the accepted “healthy” average. This is how the progress of science can go hand in hand with an increase in stupidity.↩

  31. Pretending not to know and ending up not knowing—that is the essence of collective imbecilic reasoning. This essence manifests itself in a variety of different forms, ranging from the “right line” of old PCs that suppressed from History events and characters incompatible with the version approved by unanimous consensus, to a type of “scientific rigor” that consists of denying the existence of everything that the present scientific community still lacks the means to prove exists—criteria whose only logical foundation is faith in the omniscience of the academic community and the complete ignorance of those outside it. Another manifestation of the same reasoning is the journalistic criterion of defining as important only the events that appear in newspapers, a criterion that one of the best professionals in the field—Rolf Kuntz—called autophagic.↩

  32. Indeed, some, such as José Arthur Gianotti and Bento Prado Jr., raised objections against Rorty’s arguments inspired more or less by Marxism. However, these objections were feeble, simply because Marx is too burdened with problems to come to anyone’s aid. None of the old saints of national devotion can stand against the cunning of neopragmatist argumentation. Rorty knows this and that’s why he smiles so much: he amuses himself with his Marxist opponents as a seasoned seducer enjoys the feeble protests of waning chastity. After all, it is always among the followers of old false ideologies that new false ideologies find their adherents, with the ease of a boy shaking branches loaded with ripe pitanga berries.↩

  33. This is the case, for example, with Paul Nizan and, among us, with José Américo Motta Pessanha, who trace their roots back to none other than Epicurus, resulting in a strange mixture of Marxism and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. See my book The Garden of Afflictions.↩

  34. And what the hell is the difference between “correct line” and “politically correct”? What good did it do to destroy the machinery of communist mental censorship if now the entire intellectual community pounces on us like a band of commissars to inspect, patrol, pressure, blackmail, threaten, and defame? Worse still, sheltered under the general conviction that “communism is dead,” the new commissars are free to act just like the old ones, without anyone being able to accuse them of being communists. It’s the ultimate trick of the most histrionic of ideologies: pretending to be dead to assault the gravedigger.↩

  35. And, of course, with the resulting general imbecilization, the thesis of the “insurmountable limits” of individual consciousness, which I mentioned in the Prologue, will be confirmed as a self-fulfilling prophecy.↩

  36. It was here, and not in American universities of the 1980s, that the “rebellion of the elites” began, as Christopher Lasch mentions (see The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, trans. Talita M. Rodrigues, Rio, Ediouro, 1995). All the characteristics Lasch attributes to modern intellectual elites—abstract utopianism, the image of reality as a malleable matter ready for any reform, thinking based on models rather than facts, etc.—are all present in the revolutionary “intelligentsia” of 1789.↩

  37. It is significant that the century of democracy, of government by the masses, is also the century of secret power—the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad, etc. These entities have had much more influence on the production of contemporary history than all parliaments and elections combined. Similarly, the democratization of education is merely a façade to disguise an unprecedented elitization of access to knowledge. Thousands of colleges and universities provide the masses with a parody of culture that amounts to nothing more than professional training for subordinate jobs, while a few elite schools in each country suffice to provide the ruling class with the effective knowledge necessary for governing the world. In the United States, for example, the public education system expands and renews itself daily, satisfying the ambitions of the lower classes and updating pedagogical techniques according to the fashion of the day, while the elite that will occupy the Parliament, the Executive, and the presidencies of major companies is still formed exclusively by a couple of hundred traditional schools—some with a hundred or two hundred years of existence—that remain faithful to the principles of liberal education and care little for the pedagogical fads that fascinate middle and lower-class families. The university education of the masses is pure folklore, in the strictest sense of the etymology.↩

  38. Recognizing the reality of rhetorical interferences in scientific investigation is one thing; accepting rhetorical argumentation as a criterion of scientific truth is another. The attacks of the “holist” movement against positivist scientism have resulted mainly in the establishment of a scientism in reverse. Positivism arrogated to existing science the merits and authority of the pure ideal of apodictic knowledge. Holism, observing that scientific practice falls far short of this ideal, simply assumes existing practice (rhetoric included) as the norm and disregards the ideal altogether. However, it does not relinquish the authority of the scientific caste; rather, it confers on it, additionally, the prestige of non-scientific forms—literary, religious—of knowledge. The modern academic only acknowledges the poverty of their specialized scientific knowledge to better pose as a “uomo universale” of the Renaissance and offer opinions on all subjects.↩

  39. Even a comprehensive work like Wilson Martins' “História da Inteligência Brasileira” doesn’t even mention our greatest philosopher, to whom an Italian encyclopedia devoted an entire page-long entry (“Enciclopedia Filosofica,” Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate, Firenze, Sansoni, 1968). Having sent Mário Ferreira’s works to the prominent critic from Paraná, hoping to see them mentioned in the second edition of his History, then in preparation, I received an extravagant response in which those books “escaped his area of specialized interests.” I do not intend to judge this attitude of a writer I hold in the highest admiration. Nevertheless, it is curious.↩

  40. Review of: Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, trans. Talita M. Rodrigues, Rio, Ediouro, 1995.↩

  41. Lula is not here being focused on as an individual but as a sample. What I assert about him applies to many similar cases.↩

  42. This difference seems to be completely unknown to Dr. Enéas, Lula’s fiercest detractor and a caricature of a cultured man.↩

  43. I cannot help but see this as an offense to the dignity of the poor class, especially since I myself am the son of a worker (in the printing industry) and have never enjoyed the facilities that Lula’s admirers consider indispensable for acquiring culture.↩

  44. A fact of enormous historical and symbolic importance, the first listener converted by Mohammed’s preaching was a black man, the Nubian slave Bilal; who, immediately tortured by followers of the old tribal religion, became the first martyr of Islam.↩

  45. Regarding Mr. Verger, it is important to remember that the ambiguity of his character goes beyond the simple fact of being a white person as the supreme authority of the black religion: Mr. Verger is a two-faced being, a mixture of anthropologist and holy father — a position that allows him to change the tone of his discourse according to the demands of the moment, sometimes speaking about the African cult with the freedom of a detached scientific observer, and at other times with the authority of an official spokesperson. This duality of roles, in turn, allows him to enjoy the prestige of religious authority without having to bear the corresponding responsibility. The hierarchs of other religions, while receiving veneration and obedience from their followers, must, on the other hand, answer to society for any doubtful or extravagant points of their doctrine in the eyes of non-believers. A rabbi will not shy away from bearing the burden of representing before the goyim and valiantly defending the national exclusivism that is one of the principles of his religion and a source of irritation for non-Jews. A Muslim imam will not hesitate to shield himself against the criticisms that Christians, Jews, or atheists may make against polygamy or the female obligation to wear veils. A Catholic priest will wager his honor and life in defense of a sexual morality that adversaries of the Church accuse of being repressive and detrimental to health. None of these priests are in a position to evade the demands that outsiders may make on their religion. Precisely this is the position that Mr. Verger occupies in Brazilian society. He is heard as an authorized representative of his religion, but when challenged about any absurdity or ugliness others see in it, he can always evade a response by taking refuge behind his role as a scientific observer, which remains detached from his object of study even when he identifies with it to the core. For example, in his recent book Ewé: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society (Salvador, Odebrecht, 1995), he provides us with various recipes for “mandingas” used in Candomblé to “kill people,” without anyone accusing him of preaching a homicidal religion — because, after all, he is speaking as a scientific observer and not as a spokesperson responsible for the belief he preaches. This is a privilege that no religious authority in this world can invoke.

    It is evident that this ambiguity, though convenient and timely, is not due to any Machiavellian premeditation plotted by Mr. Verger, whose personal integrity I believe is beyond any suspicion, but rather a conjunction of circumstances that make Afro culture in Brazil a crucible of all ambiguities, a welding of all indefiniteness.

    To make matters worse, no religious authority in this world is morally allowed to teach the practice of rituals without being convinced of the efficacy of those rituals. A rabbi will not subject boys to the bar mitzvah, nor will a priest baptize them, while telling them at the same time that these are probably ineffective rites, with no effect in this world or the next. But the peculiar nature of Mr. Verger’s religion and the even more peculiar position he occupies within it allow him to teach homicidal rites while leaving in a convenient ambiguity the questions that a sound religious conscience would never fail to seek clarification on: Do these rites work or not? Are they practiced or not? Because if they are explicitly ineffective, then his religion is a sham. If they work, it is inherently homicidal. If they work and are commonly practiced, it is no longer just a homicidal doctrine, but a widespread and legitimized homicidal custom sanctioned by religion. Let us agree that these are uncomfortable questions. But why grant Mr. Verger the privilege of remaining in indefiniteness about these questions when other religious authorities are constantly challenged even for improper violence unrelated to or contrary to the dogma — which their co-religionists may have committed in the past?

    A country where a book like Mr. Verger’s succeeds among intellectuals and is discussed in all newspapers without anyone remembering to discuss these points is truly a country that cultivates unconsciousness in a flowerbed of half-words.↩

  46. Some demagogues and soft-headed intellectuals believe that black people should be granted the right to a kind of compensatory discrimination — a kind of discrimination that, through mysterious logical arts, is exempt from the stigma of racism. People who think this way applaud Minister Edson Arantes do Nascimento when he proclaims that “blacks should only vote for blacks” — a selective principle that is, in fact, twice racist: first, for selecting candidates by their color; second, for being a privileged principle that only black people have the right to claim and practice, because if a white person systematically refuses to vote for black candidates or a Jew for non-Jewish candidates, they will immediately be accused of racism. Thus, the same discriminatory procedure is racism in some cases and not in others, proving that some are more equal than others.↩

  47. The Portuguese dominator already realized this during the time of colonial Brazil. In Bahia, the Malês, who practiced the Muslim religion, constituted a cultured and strong community — more educated than the ruling class and threatening to become as powerful as them. Their unity frightened the Portuguese, who therefore encouraged the slaves to remain loyal to their original cults so that they would not become Islamized. In the revolt in which the Malês even dominated the capital of Bahia, the followers of the “Afro” cult were an armed force that the Portuguese used to liquidate the rebels. But to this day, our theorists of the black movement have not drawn the most obvious conclusions from this.↩

  48. Arabs today represent no more than 8% of the Muslim population.↩

  49. This text was written almost a year before the depressing episode in which Prof. Gilberto Velho made statements to the press about my work, admitting he hadn’t read it (see O Globo, December 28, 1994). Therefore, it is not a retaliation. Perhaps, it is a psychic anticipation.↩

  50. May 21, 1994.↩

  51. Memórias do Cárcere, I, 1.↩

  52. Guerra sem Fim (Endless War), by Manchete, authored by José Louzeiro.↩

  53. São Paulo, Rocco, 1994.↩

  54. Note from my book The Garden of Afflictions: Chap. II, § 15:

    — Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff took diabolical pleasure in humiliating Western intellectuals, leading them to believe in the most blatant absurdities, only to unmask himself afterwards and reveal, in the act, the idiotic credulity of his highly educated audience. He knew the vulnerable point in the soul of every tough materialist and hit it mercilessly. The modern Western intellectual indeed has the deepest incapacity to perceive spiritual fraud, which he confuses with mere charlatanism, believing that precautions against the latter are enough to protect him from the former. Gurdjieff was obviously not a charlatan but someone endowed with real powers, and it was enough for a Westerner to verify this to submit to him with reverence and fear, considering him a spiritual master. “When a man no longer believes in God,” Chesterton said, “it is not that he believes in nothing: he believes in everything.” Gurdjieff proved this all the way; he showed that the supposedly rational defenses of the modern intellectual against religious illusion left him defenseless against spiritual fraud, just as a neurotic’s defenses against therapy make him even more defenseless against neurosis. A striking example can be found in Muniz Sodré’s book Extreme Games of the Spirit (São Paulo, Rocco, 1990). Confirming the authenticity of the phenomena produced by the Brazilian thaumaturge Thomas Green Morton was enough for Sodré, a typical Brazilian social scientist with a Marxist background, to prostrate himself before these phenomena as signs of the Spirit. “Non in convulsione Dominus”: only a perfect ignoramus in religious matters can suppose that God bends forks.↩

  55. Max Weber, Economia y Sociedad. Esbozo de Sociología Comprensiva, ed. Johannes Winckelman, trad. José Medina Echavarría et al., México, FCE, 1944, reimp. 1984, p. 328.↩

  56. V. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (ed.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York, Galaxy Book, 1958, p. 154.↩

  57. Written in December 1993, published in the magazine Imprensa n° 80 (May 1994).↩

  58. Introductory text sent to the students of my course “Aristotle in a New Perspective,” a few weeks before the start of classes (May 1995), at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Salvador, BA.↩

  59. This seems to include philosophy professors as well. Some time ago, I sent a paper on Aristotle to the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), and months later, I received a “critical evaluation” from someone who was considered an expert in the matter there. However, as I could verify, it was a special kind of expert who confused St. Gregory the Great with St. Albert the Great, “apophantic” with “apodictic,” boldly claimed that no one in Europe knew Aristotle until the 12th century, and to top it all, wrote “verossímel” instead of “verossímil”. Naturally, I sent a report to SBPC about the case, under the title “De re aristotelica opiniones abominandæ,” which I have since circulated as an insert in my book “Uma Filosofia Aristotélica da Cultura” (Rio, IAL/Caymmi, 1994). An enlightening read, recommended as a shock treatment for those infected with the academic version of the “imbecile collective syndrome”.↩

  60. Josiah Royce, “The World and the Individual,” First Series, Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1976, p. 6.↩

  61. Translator’s note: The text said “concurso”, referring to public competitive examinations in Brazil that individuals must pass in order to acquire certain government and public sector jobs. This system, prevalent in Brazil, is purportedly designed to ensure equal opportunities and merit-based hiring. The winners of concursos are generally believed to have landed cushy sinecures.↩

  62. Letter sent on September 16, 1994, to the editor of the Culture supplement of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, João Moura Jr.↩

  63. The manifesto, published in O Estado de S. Paulo on September 16, 1994, bore the signatures of dozens of prestigious intellectuals, including João Cabral de Melo Neto, Marly de Oliveira, Luís Costa Lima, José Miguel Wisnik, José Lino Grünewald, Marilena Chauí, Gilberto Gil, and Caetano Veloso. Some later claimed to have signed without knowing exactly what Augusto de Campos would put above their esteemed names. It is safer to sign blank promissory notes than intellectuals' manifestos.↩

  64. TACRIMSP — HC — Judge Valentim Silva — JUTACRIM 37/86.↩

  65. Heleno C. Fragoso, Lições de Direito Penal, São Paulo, Bushatsky, 1976, p. 225.↩

  66. These sensitivities, by the way, are hypocritical. Pretending to be scandalized by something trivial is a childish trick that politicians in the countryside use to give the caipira audience an impression of innocence. If you state some obvious truths, these saints-on-a-stick immediately feel an irresistible urge to display/conceal their vile passions through feigned shock. They then say, “Oh, how much hatred he has!” — or better yet, with a pout like an old English lady: “How much haaate!” — so that the audience understands that nothing but pure love exists in their hearts. Is there still anyone who falls for this? Poor Tolentino: thirty years away from Brazil, and one forgets that these things still exist.↩

  67. The rappers arrested in São Paulo on November 27th for inciting violence sang: “I don’t trust the police, damn racists.” This is the culmination of six decades of anti-police culture, which had another memorable moment with Chico Buarque’s song “Chame o ladrão” (Call the Thief). But after Gabriel o Pensador was applauded by the intelligentsia for “artistically” expressing his desire to kill a President of the Republic, what more can we expect? According to the former Federal Prosecutor, Saulo Ramos, there is no crime of incitement to violence in “artistic works.” But does it make sense to demand good service, honesty, and patriotism from a professional class whose constant and systematic disparagement has been incorporated into the national culture, under the protection of the State? Wouldn’t that constitute discriminatory behavior against a fundamental right, a clear violation of Article 5, § XLI of the Federal Constitution? If the lyrics of the rap song do not typify the crime of incitement to violence, they are a clear apology for prejudice. Why is it not considered a crime to call an entire professional category “damn racists” if it is a crime to use the same epithet against Jews or Blacks? Is the racial bond more sacred or deserving of official protection than the professional community, even if it involves a category of government employees? One more thing: is any garbage put into music an “artistic work”? Anyone who knows the nature of at least eighty percent of popular music, which is more commercial than artistic, understands that the term “art” has served merely as a safe conduct for the practice of crime. In any case, the people have already judged the rappers: they stoned them.↩

  68. The loss of the sense of the connection between intention and guilt is a serious symptom of personality pathology. Nevertheless, I saw on TV Record (program 25ª Hora on November 28th) Deputy Irede Cardoso defending the legalization of abortion under the argument that when it occurs due to natural causes, it is not a crime; thus, in Her Excellency’s opinion, it is odious discrimination to punish it only when done by the woman’s free will — an argument that, although Her Excellency doesn’t realize it, applies ipsis litteris to death in general. I consider it truly serious that there are people willing to seriously argue with someone capable of saying such a thing, which can only be answered with a strong dose of triperidol.↩

  69. A year after the publication of this article, I see that it has somewhat inhibited the apology for banditry, but it has not entirely eliminated the prejudices on which it is based. In an interview in Veja's “Yellow Pages” in November 1995, Delegate Hélio Luz, a man far from any conscious complicity with anything illicit, falls into a scandalous contradiction when describing the present situation in Rio de Janeiro precisely because his vision is distorted by the bias of a class prejudice. On one hand, he claims that the biggest problem of the Rio de Janeiro police is that the criminals have better and more abundant weapons than the officers. On the other hand, the priority in fighting crime is not direct confrontation with armed gangs, but the investigation of prominent figures, the upper-class men who finance organized crime. Now, an individual with a head full of criminal intentions but armed only with a checkbook represents only a virtual and long-term danger: to realize his intentions, he has to contact, recruit, equip, and train a squad of petty criminals, which is not done overnight, and, to complicate things, he has to do all this indirectly, through intermediaries, to keep his respectable identity hidden. Those who are robbing and killing on the streets, those who represent an immediate danger to the population, are petty criminals armed with grenades and machine guns, not the white-collar criminals who hired them ten or twelve years ago. Second, it is absolutely impossible for gangs paid by some rich guy not to have, after so much time of professional practice, acquired financial autonomy to dismiss their former employers and operate on their own. Third, if the police arrest a white-collar criminal, the petty criminals who worked for him will immediately seek employment with another crime entrepreneur — exactly as the Mafia’s henchmen changed families in case of the death or arrest of their boss — or they will establish themselves on their own, so that, once the upper classes are sanitized, the lives of the people on the streets will continue to be a hell. In Delegate Luz’s reasoning, there is the typical confusion of a man with a Marxist background between causes and facts, between the social roots of crime and crime as such. Based on this confusion, he believes that the authority’s primary mission is to eliminate the remote causes of crime, not to combat crime de facto. Now, I ask: if a ferocious dog comes at Delegate Luz with its teeth showing, what reaction does he consider more urgent at that moment: to subdue the dog or to fine the owner? And if the streets are infested with rabid dogs, what can we say about a police force that, instead of restraining them, first investigates who their owners are? Banditry is not a structure, a monarchical institution in which cutting off the head brings down the entire body: it is a chaotic and protean being, capable of instantly reorganizing itself in a million different ways, through millions of unforeseen tricks; thus, it is utopian to pretend to eliminate it as a whole by only attacking the command centers: it must be fought at retail, criminal by criminal, street by street, bullet by bullet. Here it happens exactly as with certain diseases that, once established, can no longer have their deep causes attacked before eliminating their most immediate and dangerous effects and symptoms. The doctor who, faced with a patient with diarrhea caused by bad eating habits, tries to remove the causes first, feeding the patient before suppressing the immediate symptom, will achieve only one certain result: the patient’s death. — On the other hand, it is only the stupidest demagoguery that can pretend to eliminate banditry through marches and protests, as if robbers and kidnappers were white-collar criminals concerned about their respectable image. All of this reveals an obstinate refusal to focus on the problem of banditry on the level at which it is situated — obviously a police-military issue — and an obsessive desire to view it from a political perspective, an area where our intellectual class feels more secure but is far from where the problem lies.↩

  70. The evil that is legitimized under the pretext of fighting for a just society is the very essence of socialist morality. If anyone wants to learn more about it, read The Demons by Dostoevsky, which discovered the nature of this perversion while it was still in its embryonic stage.↩

  71. See Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, New York, Scribner’s, 1960 (1st ed., 1932).↩

  72. Cf. document cited in William Waack, Camaradas. Nos Arquivos de Moscou. História Secreta da Revolução Brasileira de 1935, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1993, pp. 55-56.↩

  73. A famous episode in this epic had the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade as its hero, serving as secretary of the National Congress of Writers. He had to defend the minutes of the meeting with kicks to prevent them from being stolen by the communists interested in falsifying the results of the elections for ABDE.↩

  74. Upon reading these lines, writer Antônio Callado became furious and wrote to the newspaper protesting against the publication of my article, in which he identified three infamous sins: 1st, it was signed by an illustrious unknown; 2nd, it misidentified the stolen objects, which were actually optical instruments of little value; 3rd, it failed to understand the ironic meaning of the Proudhon quote. Disregarding the first accusation, which was too foolish, I responded that: 1st, the stolen objects could have been socks or billiard cues, and it would not make the slightest difference to my argument; 2nd, any irony present was unintentional. Callado, confronted with the ambiguity of his attitude towards violence in Rio, and having no counterarguments, clung to trivial details in an attempt to discredit me. Several days later, columnist Joyce Pascowitch, in Folha de S. Paulo, reported that Caetano Veloso was “outraged” by my accusations against the intellectual class, as if frothing with rage were a refutation. O Globo, in turn, published a statement by the anthropologist Gilberto Velho, who summarily condemned my article (without giving any reason for doing so, perhaps because he believed his opinion to be self-evident) and took the opportunity to speak ill of my book Uma Filosofia Aristotélica da Cultura, which, surprisingly, he admitted not having read. The complete irrationality of these three reactions is the best evidence that the thesis of O Imbecil Coletivo is sadly correct: something is amiss in the national brain.↩

  75. “The Federal Police has lost all its potential for action. Smuggling is now rampant at all borders. Thousands of investigations are being shelved in police stations due to neglect and lack of personnel, increasing impunity.” This description, outlined by Prof. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (“Crime and Governance,” Jornal do Brasil, Nov. 14, 1994), is perfectly accurate. But, if the professor tells the general truth, he conceals the specific truth. The decline of the Federal Police coincides with its massive infiltration by agents from the PT and CUT, who transformed this repressive agency into an agitation machine incapable of fulfilling its legal duties but capable of intimidating the government with strikes, protests, riots, threats, and rockets fired at the ministries' windows. By arming the Federal Police against the authorities, the PT’s agitation disarmed it, ipso facto, against the banditry. As it is not convenient to say this, the professor generically accuses “the government” of a police debacle for which the government is, in fact, the victim. It is not the first time that the left has resorted to the tactic of provoking disorder and then accusing the government of not maintaining order.

    Blaming “the government” for the left’s mistakes seems to be indeed the professor’s mental strategy:

    “Organized crime and gangs were able to take control of many areas only with the consent of various levels of the public power. State governments do not disarm the gangs because it does not suit the interests of several groups entrenched within the State apparatus or in social groups that give them political support.”

    The professor does not clarify which groups he means. The vague and imprecise manner of speaking leaves the impression that he is referring to something already known and assumed, a cliché. “Groups entrenched within the State apparatus” is an expression that commonly designates bankers, capitalists, contractors, and right-wing politicians who supported the dictatorship. Is the professor talking about them? It cannot be. There is no information about any connection between these people and the hillside criminals. But the groups that do have such a connection, the professor cannot name — because they are left-wing groups: ex-guerrillas and some old leaders from the Jango period, who, after exile, returned to politics with the help of criminals and now remain “entrenched within the State apparatus.” Accusing these groups would not be good form: it would divide the left’s forces, something that a gentleman like Prof. Pinheiro would never allow himself. So, he prefers to speak vaguely, so that, through automatic association of ideas, the bad impression ends up being directed towards the right and the “elite” — which obviously does not include the intelligentsia.

    The professor’s intention to discredit the work of the Armed Forces is evident: “Let us free ourselves from the fantasy of useless military choreographies.” And he offers, in place of fantasy, the real “scientific” solution: “The participation of the Armed Forces must be subject to civilian command.” Which civilian command? The state government that, through omission and complicity, created the current state of affairs? Or the federal government that, by ordering the intervention of the Armed Forces, is already in charge of the process? Between absurdity and redundancy, the professor’s proposal remains undefined. Undefined, but not entirely. A few lines later, he finally comes clean: “In Rio de Janeiro, it is unthinkable to consider any consistent initiative without the participation of the entities that make up Viva Rio.” There’s the secret: the command of the fight against crime cannot be in the hands of the Armed Forces or the elected civilian authorities, at the state or federal level; it must be transferred to the self-appointed entities “representing civil society” — which, in the final analysis, means the left-wing intelligentsia. My God, does everyone in this country only speak “pro domo sua”? The atavistic mentality, which fears the outdated hypothesis of militarism more than the real and present threat of armed delinquency, ends up interpreting the situation according to the perspective of its own group’s interests, considered more urgent and important than the needs of the population: instead of helping in the fight against crime, let’s divert our energy to the old conflict between the intelligentsia and the military — a chapter already closed in history, which Prof. Pinheiro wants to revive to the detriment of current tasks. Looking at the present through the eyes of the past, he shows that he is less interested in fighting crime than in ensuring a command post for his own caste, which he assumes is more reliable than the Armed Forces or the elected federal government. The intelligentsia is the most corporatist of corporations.↩

  76. This is indeed what happened a few months after the publication of this article in the Jornal do Brasil.↩

  77. Jorge Maranhão, Media and Citizenship. Do It Yourself. Rio, Topbooks, 1993.↩

  78. Of course, all of this is only valid if we accept the assumption — for Jorge Maranhão, unquestionable — that NGOs are truly independent entities serving only their explicit purposes. However, this assumption is put into question by recent news, according to which these organizations, receiving million-dollar donations from unknown sources and operating outside any state supervision, may actually represent a fearsome power serving secret interests. See the report “NGOs Moviment Millions Without Control,” O Estado de S. Paulo, Nov. 20, 1994.↩

  79. Media and Citizenship, pp. 30-31.↩

  80. Ibid.↩

  81. Uma Filosofia Aristotélica da Cultura. Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos. Rio, IAL & Stella Caymmi, 1994. As for the empire of marketing, see also the “Final Remarks” of my book A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural. Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci (id., ibid.).↩

  82. Mídia e Cidadania, p. 34.↩

  83. Section 4 of this chapter is a document sent to the poet Bruno Tolentino in August 1994 to serve as a starting point for an exchange of ideas about the current state and prospects of Brazilian culture. We intended to summon other intellectuals to broaden this discussion, but the practical obstacles that both Tolentino and I faced made the project unfeasible.↩

  84. See later, “The Speck and the Plank”.↩

  85. These themes and problems typify the internal discussion of a party’s intellectuals. The abnormality, in the Brazilian case, is that they practically monopolize the national culture as a whole. The whole of our intellectuals has been absorbed in the internal debate of the militant left, in the dialectics of the Gramscian “collective intellectual.”↩

    1. It is false that the dictatorship significantly hindered or impeded the exercise of any intellectual activity, unless the mere lack of official support should be interpreted as an impediment, or as an obstacle to intellectual life, simply by prohibiting propaganda against the regime.
    1. There was never any censorship of books or cultural publications, and it is ridiculous to claim that the confiscation of books by Che Guevara and Régis Débray constitutes a significant cultural loss. It is understandable that militant leftists, traditionally considering “agitprop” as the highest or sole purpose of intellectual life, view any impediment to revolutionary propaganda as a substantial harm to culture. However, we must understand that this rhetorical device does not constitute a valid criterion for diagnosing the state of culture and only serves to confer moral monopoly over cultural activities to leftist militancy.
    1. Even notoriously leftist intellectuals, banned from the state university, were able to continue their activities freely in the private sphere, as evidenced by the uninterrupted and highly meritorious work of Cebrap.
    1. Press censorship did not extend to cultural news or ideas discussion.
    1. Since the mid-Geisel period, freedom of the press has been fully restored.
    1. The period of freedom the nation has enjoyed since the Figueiredo government has far exceeded the duration of the repression period.
    1. Intellectuals were right to denounce any episode of repression of freedom of thought, even isolated and exceptional, as an intolerable scandal. However, it is unjust for them to be impressed by the impact of their own protests and to assess, self-hypnotically, the frequency and extent of these episodes by the magnitude of the indignation they arouse. The seizure of a single book is revolting, but it is not enough to establish a general repression of thought.

    ↩

  87. A country that publishes the complete works of Antonio Gramsci, Carl G. Jung, or Simone de Beauvoir before even having a full translation of Plato and Aristotle bets much more on the surface of the day than on the deep currents of History. We are, in this sense, very Portuguese. Portugal was the last country in the West to translate the Bible, but it was one of the first to echo, through Luís Antônio Verney and Cavaleiro de Oliveira, not to mention the Marquis of Pombal, the new ideas of the Enlightenment. Before blaming religion for Portugal’s backwardness, this fact must be faced.↩

  88. Combating social injustices is a permanent human activity on Earth. It is a “constant of the human spirit” and is not dependent on any particular philosophy, much less a specific theory of History. The prophets of Israel were already engaged in this when Karl Marx did not even exist as a project of a spermatozoon. Militant social idealists should not feel orphaned with the decline of Marxism, just as the swan in the fable was deeply mistaken in feeling orphaned when abandoned by the ducks and chickens.↩

  89. The recognition of the failure of Marxism will remain a hypocritical exteriority until we subject ourselves to a kind of ideological psychoanalysis that clears from our subconscious the habits and values acquired during our affiliation with Marxism. Speaking against communism in genere is of no use if, in the face of particular and concrete cases, we continue to see, feel, and evaluate things through the Marxist prism, either automatically or due to ignorance of other alternatives. The assumption that intellectual life has no other or higher mission than to serve politics is one of those beliefs that continue to operate more or less unconsciously in the minds of our lettered class, despite their rejection of Marxism. Not that such beliefs necessarily need to be abandoned, but they should no longer be accepted without examination. One of the most grotesque and immoral traits of our artistic class is undoubtedly due to this Marxist tic. I refer to the habit of giving the demand for million-dollar remunerations the appearance of a revolutionary protest with deep social significance. When someone like Chico Buarque claims to feel exploited when receiving one hundred thousand reais for ten minutes of singing, just because the payer is a multinational corporation, pretending to be a worker and a militant fighting for an increase in the minimum wage, he must be mercilessly exposed as a charlatan.↩

  90. A culture solely concerned with national self-definition, as Brazil has been producing since Romanticism, committing itself even more to this path after Modernism, is an umbilical-centered culture that has nothing else to offer the world but “images of Brazil.” No one reads Shakespeare or Goethe to get to know England or Germany but to know themselves. What does Brazil, in this sense, have to offer the world, humanity? A culture of universal value is one that teaches and moves people long after the country where it originated has disappeared. Would one need to have a great interest in Florentine history to benefit from reading Dante? Militant nationalism — not to mention militant sociologism — is perfectly dispensable in building a great national literature. But it seems this provincialism comes from Portugal. How to explain that the Portuguese, without ever having translated the Latin texts of the great Portuguese philosophers of the Renaissance into their language, continue to believe that Portugal has produced nothing great in philosophy, except for the nationalist prejudice that what is not written in Portuguese is not Portuguese culture? A German would be astonished if we told him that Leibniz is not a German philosopher because he wrote in French and Latin. See the chapter “Nationalism and Dementia” later on for more on this.↩

  91. Yes, because Vicente, rightist as he was, and perhaps even a little fascist, nevertheless gave an example of democratic tolerance by opening the pages of the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia, of which he was secretary, to thinkers of all ideological shades, without patrolling anyone; and he would have done the same as the head of the Department, where, on the contrary, he was patrolled and censured by the apostles of democratic freedom.↩

  92. The ideological motives for these omissions and oversights are flagrant: Vicente was a grumpy right-winger, Mário a confessed anarchist - worse still, a strange and uncatalogable type, a mix of Proudhonian anarchist, Thomist Catholic and Pythagorean Gnostic.↩

  93. An example of the typical incapacity of the Brazilian “intelligentsia” to distinguish documentary importance from intellectual value is provided by Mr. Roberto Moura in his response to Bruno Tolentino’s accusations regarding the confusion between culture and show business. See the chapter “The VIPs and the differences” later on.↩

  94. The figures of saints and heroes revered by popular imagination represent and strengthen the moral ideals of a nation, and it is extremely important, vital even, that the virtues projected there are authentic, so that the morality of the people is authentic. Capistrano de Abreu already praised the wisdom of the Swiss who, having discovered the historical futility of the episode of William Tell, had it removed from school books, this edifying character that threatened to become a corrupting caricature. From this point of view, the ethics campaign in Brazil, opportunely enthroning saints improvised by the media, who do not withstand deeper examination, confused, debased, and corrupted the moral sense of the people - a harm not compensated by the mere punishment of a few fraudsters of the day.↩

  95. Graciliano Ramos, Reports, organized by Mário Hélio Goulart de Lacerda (Editora Record).↩

  96. “‘We decided to edit the reports because they always aroused great interest among Graciliano’s work lovers, especially during the impeachment of Collor, when the discussion about ethics came to the fore’, explains the editor Sérgio Machado, from Record.” Jornal do Brasil, Dec. 23, 1994.↩

  97. In any conscious country, this extraordinary character, perhaps the most expressive symbol of the Jango era, would be the subject of books, films, and TV programs. Brazil preferred to forget him, probably because the exhibition of his story would be enough to take away all the moral authority of the left to denounce corrupt people. With the figure of Tião erased from the picture, it was even possible to politically beatify Jango’s image.↩

  98. Carlito Maia, “Modernity is the new name for Nazism”, Imprensa nº 81, June 1994.↩

  99. The most talented Marxist historian in England, E. P. Thompson, has even built his book The Making of the English Working Class (London, Penguin, 1968) on the admission that class is not an economic reality, but “a state of mind”. Notwithstanding, Thompson, with that intellectual honesty typical of the left-wing academic, continues to declare that his analysis is Marxist.↩

  100. Flaps of the Martins edition, São Paulo, 1954.↩

  101. Written on June 2, 1995.↩

  102. Among those who were thus left to their own devices was the eminent critic and historian Otto Maria Carpeaux, a Jew on his father’s side - and even more targeted by Nazi repression because he had been the secretary of Dollfuss, the Austrian ruler who was overthrown and assassinated by the German invader. Rejected by Jewish organizations, Carpeaux finally found help at the Vatican, which allowed him to escape to Brazil.↩

  103. Please note that these lines were written months before the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin - a fact that manifestly demonstrated the division of Jewish consciousness.↩

  104. It is worth remembering that even ideologies with a frankly delusional content can attract the adherence of calm and sane people. An individual’s participation in social psychopathy does not obviously imply that he himself is a psychopath. This is so elementary that I am surprised to have to explain it to a professor of law, who, I suppose, has studied quite a bit of forensic psychiatry.↩

  105. Torn by the clash of corporatism, Brazil longs in vain for unity — and this unsatisfied longing is the soil where the malignant seed of unanimism thrives, a poisonous plant that feeds the collective imbecile and from where it draws strength to crush all personal and divergent thought. Paulo Francis attributes our unanimist tendency to Catholic heritage (O Globo, Nov 17, 1994). He is wrong: France and Italy are also Catholic, cradles of very personal polemicists.

    As for Jesuitism, just compare Sertillanges and Teilhard de Chardin to see that the Company accommodates the most opposing tendencies. Francis, one of the most informed men in this country, is out of touch with Church History.↩

  106. The definition adopted by the constituents reflects the confusion between “culture” in the anthropological sense and “culture” in the pedagogical sense. The first is a descriptive scheme, the second is an axiological, evaluative criterion. To erect in value the “culture” in the anthropological sense is a primary mistake, because, anthropologically, cannibalism, slavery or child prostitution are as cultural as praying or helping the poor. The origin of this mistake lies in another propensity of Brazilian culture: its sociologism. It consists in the hegemony of the Social Sciences over the other sectors of knowledge, including Pedagogy and Philosophy. It is a subject that I will address in my book The Anthropophagous Anthropologist. The Misery of Social Sciences.↩

  107. Another tragic error to which nationalist dementia leads us is our proud and suicidal effort to fabricate a “national language” independent, distinct from that of Portugal, Angola, etc. What advantage does a literature gain by restricting the number of readers who understand it? Wouldn’t it be much better to have an international language?↩

  108. See Revisão Crítica do Cinema Brasileiro, Rio, Civilização Brasileira, 1963.↩

  109. See Johan Huizinga, “Patriotism and Nationalism in European History”, in Men and Ideas. History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, transl. by James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle, New York, Meridian Books, 1959.↩

  110. This type of nationalism helps to sustain the widespread confusion that Brazilian intellectuals make between the documentary importance and the intellectual value of literary, theatrical works, etc. See, later, the chapter "Money is culture or Todo es igual".↩

  111. There is no lack of those who see in our inability to understand ourselves according to universal standards the sign of a secret and mysterious vocation for some kind of superior knowledge, unreachable by common mortals. Prof. Amálio Pinheiro, from PUC São Paulo (“In the countries of metonymy”, in José Luiz Goldfarb., ed., SBHC, 10 Years: Annals of the IV National Seminar of History of Science and Technology, São Paulo, Nova Stella, 1993), suggests that the space-time confusion of Latin American peoples, immersed in macumba and immune to the “exclusion logic” of Western culture, makes them more apt than Europeans to understand certain subtleties, such as those of the quantum conception of the universe, inaccessible to an “individualistic and phallocentric culture” (a term he borrows from Anthony Wilden). Poor Max Planck, who died misunderstood by phallocentric European scientists and never had the opportunity to explain his theories to an assembly of paisdesanto…

    Similar ideas were defended, four decades ago, by Vicente Ferreira da Silva and, before him, by Oswald de Andrade. Prof. Pinheiro merely resumes, in semiotic language and with shades of Fritjof Capra’s holism, an old tradition of nationalistic-philosophical tangolomango. And long live us!

    Not coincidentally, these glorifiers of Latin American mixórdia — invariably fierce critics of “European phallocratic rationalism” — always base their arguments on the appeal to doctrines recently imported from Europe, taken, without the slightest critical discernment, as axiomatic and indisputable. Thus, the circle closes, in which a claim of originality and radical autonomy is based on a new subservience to the foreign authority of the day. Oswald appealed to Bachofen and Freud. Vicente, to a mixture of D. H. Lawrence and Heidegger. Prof. Pinheiro, now, appeals to holistic logic, which doesn’t even exist except as a proposal.

    As long as our claim to independence leans on the authority of the dernier cri in philosophy, it will be a living contradiction and an expression of our impotence.

    A people, to have mental independence, don’t need to have any brand new and extravagant scheme of perception sanctified by European and North American philosophical fashion. They just need to have the courage to reason.↩

  112. Rio, José Olympio, 1973, p. 151.↩

  113. Notebook Ideas from Jornal do Brasil, June 23, 1991.↩

  114. FEBEM is an abbreviation for “Fundação Estadual para o Bem-Estar do Menor,” or “State Foundation for the Welfare of the Minor,” a now-extinct Brazilian governmental institution responsible for the custody of juvenile offenders.↩

  115. Os Herdeiros do Poder (The Heirs of Power), Rio, Revan, 1994.↩

  116. December 4, 1994.↩

  117. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les Intellocrates. Expédition en Haute Intelligentsia (The Intellocrats. Expedition in High Intelligentsia), Paris, Ramsay, 1981. I do not know if the study has been updated since then.↩

  118. See, for example, the works of E. Digby Baltzell: Philadelphia Gentlemen. The Making of a National Upper Class, Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1958, and The Protestant Establishment, New York, Random House, 1964.↩

  119. Brazil simply does not have elite education, it does not have differentiated schools for the education of the governing classes, and this is indeed abnormal: political democracy does not survive a complete democratization of education, in the massifying sense. See above, note 35, end, and then read: Peter W. Cookson, Jr., and Caroline Hodges Persell, Preparing for Power. America’s Elite Boarding Schools, New York, Basic Books, 1985, to know how a country of winners educates its future rulers. A country that believes in an elite education for all, or in popular education for members of the elite is, by its own choice, a country of losers. What I am saying here has nothing to do with elitism or conservatism. Lenin never thought that the elite of the proletariat should receive only proletarian education, or that all proletarians should be part of the elite. But in Brazil a plebiscitary egalitarianism seems to have invaded even scientific education.↩

  120. In August 1992, it was too early to declare that the campaign for “Ethics in Politics” was just such a maneuver. The course of events confirmed this depressing hypothesis. I explain this more thoroughly in the end of my book O Jardim das Aflições.↩

  121. Instead of abandoning these traditions, the Brazilian intellectual circles seem determined to cling to them with renewed fanaticism. From mere sociological and anthropological relativism, they are moving, in 1994, towards Richard Rorty’s absolute relativism. This confirms the hypocritical opportunism of their moralizing discourse.↩

  122. The contradictions of the campaign for “Ethics” go even further. I transcribe here, for the use of those who have the time and means to deepen the examination of the subject, some notes that I took when these articles were published, in a Diary where I keep the seeds of future investigations that I never get around to conducting:

    "Hidden premises in the ethics debate:

    (A) The standard used to judge the conduct of public figures is not the dominant local custom, historically ingrained but an ideal model copied from other countries, such as Switzerland and the USA, unquestionably admitted as paragons of morality. The explicit acknowledgment of this premise would reveal the impracticality of the desired “correct conduct” for the following reasons:

    **1st** The first-world "correct conduct" is rooted in Protestant ethics. How can it be imposed by decree in a predominantly Catholic country dominated by sects like Candomblé, Umbanda, Spiritualism, etc.? How to reconcile the public morality of Switzerland with the religion of Haiti? Candomblé, moreover, is a "religion without morals," demanding nothing from its followers regarding conduct, which is why it is considered an ideal religion by many intellectuals.

    **2nd** Swiss or North American moralism is the Siamese twin of capitalism, whereas here it is intended to combine it with anti-capitalist sentiments that are partly rooted in our Catholic heritage and partly in the dominant socialist ideology among our intellectuals. An example is the national hostility towards lobbying - a legitimate practice in any capitalist democracy, which, like many others of the same kind, assumes a criminal appearance here.

    **3rd** In the 19th-century USA, political immorality was accepted as a natural fate, according to Tocqueville's testimony. If not so, how could the primitive accumulation of capital, the basis of economic progress, have occurred? Political moralization campaigns only began in the present century when great fortunes were consolidated. Nascent capitalism is incompatible with the proliferation of social rights and excessive moralistic oversight. Hence the indecision, the constant back-and-forth in our politics: we want to establish capitalism while implementing the welfare state and moralizing, perhaps even socialism. The primitive accumulation of capital has become a sin, a crime in Brazil - the result is, on the one hand, the poverty, which is then intended to be fought with more social rights and more moral control, and on the other hand, the advantageous position in which foreign companies find themselves, negotiating with our government under better conditions than national companies.

    (B) The judgment of immorality is made based on residual Christian assumptions (as Savigny’s diagnosis regarding the foundations of modern law remains valid), despite the widespread rejection of explicit Christian morals. The moralistic attack, therefore, reaches its victim from three sides: it is guilty according to a residual stereotype of Catholic morality, the “ethics” of first-world capitalism, and the socialist ideology of our intellectual circles. But who could satisfy, at the same time, three divergent moral systems?"↩

  123. Subsistence of the species, not the individual. It is clear, therefore, that the fact that a certain number of people are affected by this anomaly does not directly threaten the human species, and this is precisely why homosexuality can be accepted as socially neutral, or irrelevant behavior. But irrelevant, or socially acceptable, does not mean “normal.”↩

  124. Originally “sua vaca”, literally “you cow”.↩

  125. Attention, reviewer: pseudos, with s and in singular, is a Greek term, not a flexion error.↩

  126. It was also significant that Bornheim, in addition to labeling me as resentful and eager for self-promotion, accused me of a sin that, in his ethics, must be the most serious of all: being an unknown, someone devoid of the celebrity status that he, an illustrious individual, demands from his interlocutors. If I understand correctly what lies behind this, it is academic celebrity that he is referring to. The professor ensconced in his chair does not allow himself to be questioned by someone “from the outside”—as if the university had a monopoly on intellectual prestige. Corporate privilege ultimately dictates that the university has the right to interfere in issues that affect the entire population but does not allow an outsider to make any demands on a member of the clan on behalf of the public.↩

  127. Letter sent to the newspaper O Globo on October 30, 1995.↩

  128. J. Miglioli, “The critical role of the Marxist intellectual”, New Paths no. 163, Apr 30, 1962.↩

  129. Interviewed by TV Globo on May 5, 1996, Caetano Veloso opposed Wilson Martins’s diagnosis with the following refutation: “Garbage. Garbage. Garbage. Garbage. Garbage.” Quod erat demonstrandum. I must acknowledge: I never imagined that Caetano could perform such a dialectical tour de force. If he continues evolving this way, he will soon be wiping his bottom without mommy’s help.↩

  130. It is easier to cast doubt with malicious insinuations or defend with inflamed words the credibility of people than to discuss the veracity of ideas and the quality of works. It is due to a sheer lack of IQ, even as a blatant neurotic compensation for the lack of IQ, that the cultural press of Brazil has been more concerned with Tolentino’s personality—as well as his VIP friendships—rather than with the analysis and comprehension of his work.↩

  131. It has never interested me to confirm or deny the alleged curriculum vitae claimed by a vain poet and challenged by his grumpy detractors: poets are not made with letters of recommendation from others but with their own poems. I do not need Starobinsky—or even Tolentino himself—to open my eyes and see that “The Announcing Angel” or “The Serpent Charmer” are among the highest achievements of the spirit in the Portuguese language; that a comparable force is only found in Camões; that even Drummond or Bandeira did not reach this level. I can see this because I have two eyes in my face, without blinders, and brains in my brain, without rust, and because I use them without anyone’s permission, relying solely on the authority of the rational animal that God himself granted me, just as he did—even I suppose—to Mr. Massi. Because I lack the malevolent blinders and cerebral rust of Mr. Massi, I can also, with the greatest tranquility, see that a poem like “The Specter”—which the author holds in such high regard—is merely an aesthetic and philosophical deception; that several other verses by the author are silly concessions to a fashionable anti-intellectualism; and that these accidental slip-ups do not in any way undermine the firmness of a work that stands perfectly well without the endorsement of Starobinsky, mine, Mr. Massi’s, or anyone else’s. — I will consider any attempts to belittle the value of my critical judgment by alleging that I speak of a friend as utterly contemptible. For I sought Tolentino’s friendship precisely after having read some of his poems, judging that it would be worth being friends with a man of the spiritual stature required to write them—certainly much greater than that required to obtain titles at Oxford. And now I say it is worth it, with or without the Oxfordian nihil obstat so necessary for vacillating boys who now make themselves guides of others' opinions to disguise the insecurity of their own judgment.↩

  132. J. Miglioli, loc. cit.↩

  133. Rejected by O Globo.↩

  134. A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural. Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci, Rio, IAL & Stella Caymmi, 1993, p. 70 of the 2nd edition.↩

  135. Jornal do Brasil, March 30, 1996.↩

  136. See above, the chapter “Money is culture or: Todo es igual”.↩

  137. Parreira was excluded from this category, in extremis, by the miraculous intervention of Roberto Baggio in the last penalty kick.↩

  138. The intellectuals' disgust for extra-official charity seems to have contaminated public opinion in general: a survey by TV Globo, broadcast on Fantástico in November 1995, indicated that 91% of the inhabitants of Rio and São Paulo are against the habit of giving alms. Far be it from me to assume that all these very Christian people prefer just to keep the money in their own pocket. The reasons underlying their attitude must be of high morality and profound sociology. The only risk these Christians run is that at the Last Judgement Christ will tell them: “I was hungry and you sent me to Betinho. Betinho I know who he is, but you I do not know.”↩

  139. Some intellectuals to whom I read or mentioned this Appendix were outraged. It wasn’t fair, according to them, to make fun of Prof. Konder, whose extraordinary kindness, politeness, and good faith entitled him to a celestial niche protected against any harsher criticism or cruel mockery. My response is: — Prof. Konder’s sweetness of personality is a benefit reserved for those who share his intimacy. We, the public, receive from this gentleman only his ideas, and we have the right, the duty to judge him by them only. Whoever defends the rights of majority stupidity against solitary intelligence is, in every sense of the word, a man with a brutal mentality, a barbarian, a violent person; in every sense of the word, I repeat, and even more so in the sense given to it by Éric Weil — a sense much more fearsome, by the way, than its common definition. If Prof. Konder’s good manners make the brutality of his ideology invisible to his friends' eyes, it’s because amica veritas, sed magis amicus Konder.

    Moreover, why should philosophical responsibility above all personal consideration be a human quality so inferior to Prof. Konder’s politeness?↩

  140. The joke is not mine: it’s in the book of memoirs — unpublished — of the talented lawyer and humorist.↩

  141. Letter to the newspaper O Globo. June 23, 1996.↩

  142. Article submitted to O Globo on June 17, 1996. Not published.↩

  143. After submitting this article, I received information that the erudite Prof. César Leal also published a profound study on Tolentino’s poetry. I have not read it, but I know that Prof. Leal is also from Recife, which indicates that the intellectual population of Brazil can be divided into only two ethnological types: flat-heads and hollow-heads.↩

  144. Letter sent to Jornal do Brasil on August 4, 1996. Not published.↩

  145. Published in the Jornal do Brasil on September 2, 1996.↩

  146. Published as paid content by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy in the Jornal do Brasil on September 2, 1996.↩

  147. In the first edition, with less text but printed in larger letters.↩

  148. Published as a sponsored article by the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy in Jornal do Brasil on September 7, 1996.↩

  149. Letter sent to the Jornal do Brasil, which, until the moment this book went into print, showed no sign of wishing to publish it.↩

  150. Published in O Dia, September 17, 1996.↩

  151. Sentence from Professor Gerd A. Bornheim. I cannot imagine how high he thinks I could go by stepping on his head. To reassure him, I promise that from now on, I will walk the streets with the utmost care.↩

  152. Published in O Globo on September 27, 1996.↩

  153. Letter to O Globo, September 21, 1996.↩

  154. For instance, one detail that didn’t fit into the paid article was that André Luiz Barros had not acted in the case as a mere professional reporter but as a concerned party (without informing the public), as he himself had been criticized in my book for the poor quality of his previous work. The complete response contains many other facts of the same nature that the public has the right to know.↩

  155. JB published this letter but omitted the last paragraph._↩

  156. Published as a paid article in the Jornal do Brasil on September 28, 1996, accompanied by reproductions of the following documents: (a) invoice from JB against the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy; (b) statement from the employees of Faculdade da Cidade Editora, Luiz Antonio Pessoa Soares, and Silvia Sczupak, attesting that João Ricardo Moderno had supervised the formatting of the book cover and, after suggesting modifications, authorized its publication; (c) cover of João Ricardo Moderno’s book, Estética da Contradição; (d) photo of João Ricardo Moderno at the book launch of “O Imbecil Coletivo,” at Teatro da Cidade, Rio de Janeiro, on August 22, 1996.↩

  157. Published in Folha de S. Paulo, October 21, 1996.↩

  158. The Folha translated poorly: in English, “to minimize” has the sense of “to diminish” or “to reduce,” which the Portuguese verb “minimizar” lacks. “Minimizar” in Portuguese means to downplay the importance of a problem and not to correct it.↩

  159. Now, it is “minimizar.”↩

  160. Published in O Dia, October 10, 1996.↩

  161. Published in ADB, Bulletin of the Brazilian Diplomats Association, Year I, No. 30, December 11, 1996.↩

  162. Published in O Dia, December 30, 1996.↩

  163. In recent years, it has become fashionable, obligatory, and a sign of civility among the talking classes to appeal to mixed-race individuals to stop considering themselves as mixed-race and “assume their blackness.” This is as sensible as appealing to a bull terrier to stop considering itself half terrier and declare itself a pure bulldog.

    The argument, the only argument put forward in favor of this proposal, is that this is how it is done in the United States: any person with a black ancestor is black, even if 80, 90, or 99 percent of their blood is white. It is implied that everything done in the United States is superior and worthy of imitation, including segregating races in neighborhoods, beating up blacks in white neighborhoods, whites in black neighborhoods, and Indians in both these places.

    North American mixed-race individuals only identified as black because the hideous ideology of racial purity stamped them with indelible ink. Then, reactively, they made a rhetorical device to express their repugnance for white society. All that North American adherents of mulatto blackness can claim in their defense is that if they lie, they were forced to do so by white people. It is psychologically explicable and politically effective, but even so, the lie remains a lie, both biologically and culturally.

    Biologically, it is a lie because the mulatto who identifies as black is half white, three-quarters white, or four-fifths white.

    Culturally, it is a lie because the supposedly confessed black speaks the language of white people, dresses like white people, has economic activity like white people, uses technology like white people, and an entirely copied political discourse of white people like Rousseau, Montesquieu, Marx, Lenin, and I don’t know how many others.

    Nevertheless, it is true that if we add the blacks to the mixed-race individuals, we have 60 percent of the population and an equal share of the electorate. The party that manages to rally the contingent of mixed-race individuals under the banner of blackness will dominate the country with the greatest ease: for the first time in the world, a racial party will have taken power in the name of fighting racism.↩

  164. Letter to O Globo, January 21, 1996.↩

  165. The “Jornal da Família” receives an honorable mention for not having noticed anything.↩

  166. Read on the program of Heitor Bastos-Tigre, Rádio Imprensa, Rio de Janeiro, December 4, 1996.↩

  167. Interview with Ângelo Monteiro. Diário de Pernambuco, Recife, March 2, 1997.↩

  168. Interview with Isaura Pessoa de Moura. Published in Minerva. Informe Filosófico. Órgão do Centro Acadêmico da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, No. 5, May 1997.↩

  169. Jornal da Tarde, São Paulo, 17 Apr. 1997.↩

  170. Jornal da Tarde, São Paulo, 1 May 1997.↩

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