Today I open a collaboration with the Sul Informação long programmed. The title of this first chronicle corresponds to the generic name of the rubric in which all the following chronicles will be integrated. As it is the first, I intend through it to frame the spirit that will move the others – being longer for that too.
I don't know how often I will publish, because this will depend on my assessment of the motivation to occupy the public space with my words and my ideas: identifying something worth saying publicly is, for me, an increasingly task difficult, for the reasons explained below.
On the one hand, because I don't feel any vocation for commenting on the so-called “media agenda” – and, on the contrary, I recognize that quality and that competence in several commentators and columnists that I regularly follow on television, in newspapers, on blogs, on facebook. With all of them I debate, with all of them I learn.
On the other hand, because I know that the act of reading longer and more thoughtful texts requires a dedication, time and silence that consumer voracity, post-modern acculturation and the effects of precariousness and extreme hardness that have reached labor relations and the exercise of professions transforms, for many, into a sacrifice that they are unwilling to make or are unable to undertake. All of this makes the choice of themes and the way to present and develop them more thorny.
I now turn to the explanation of the generic name that will serve as a reference for the remaining chronicles: «On the margins of uncertain time».
I imagine the time of enormous uncertainty that we live like a river. And I see myself vigilant on one of the banks of this mighty watercourse moved by violent currents, so strong that they drag anyone who lives in it or enters carelessly alone or unprotected. In the place where I chose to stay, this flow still flows through the banks that he himself was digging, but I know that an unexpected torrent of rain will be enough for, freeing himself from them, to invade everything around him, maddened and infuriating, as it has already happened at other stops. Aware of the danger of me too being dragged, I watch, perplexed, restless, at times helpless, at times sad, the maelstrom with which he takes before him the unwary and weakened lives that plunge into him without mooring. Writing, for me, is reaching out and, who knows, helping one of them to regain their foot. In the mirror of those troubled waters I seem to be standing still, I seem to be silent, but I am not.
This river so powerful and menacing has many faces, depending on the point of view.
One is that of savage capitalism which the technicist euphemisms now call “economic neoliberalism”. I don't know, in flesh and soul, what is this neoliberalism that economists are surely perfectly capable of defining, but every day I clearly see the marks of its savagery in exhausted bodies, in conformed spirits, in aimless revolt, in dislocation the sense of sharing in community. I see it taking over almost every space in which we move, trying to drown in its depths the promise of being more and more free, of being less and less unequal, of living in an increasingly solidary society. One of his greatest victories is having managed to almost disappear from the common vocabulary his real name, which I repeat here, following the courage of Pope Francis whenever he exposes him: wild capitalism. Each of his gestures and actions triumphantly announces his intention to defeat the social-democratic (and Christian) idea – generous, but comparatively naive and brittle – of “capitalism with a human face”.
Another of the faces of that river is that of the ascent, without bloodshed and through the skillful manipulation of the instruments that democracy gives them, of the extreme right-wing populisms, contaminating the agenda of democratic and democratic parties with their words and their poisonous ideas. of social communication, feeding on the weakening and social detachment caused by the wild drift of capitalism and by the vices and villains of the democratic regimes themselves. to your protagonists I called vultures, in a recent intervention inspired by a sublime poem by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen ("The old vulture"). How vultures work in flocks, how vultures have their sense of smell specially developed to detect flesh putrefaction from a great distance, as vultures are scavengers, as vultures are patient. And I abhor old vultures and their apprentices.
Another face I see when I look at the river is that of self-centeredness exacerbated by social networks. It is a narcissistic, misshapen, uncommitted, acculturated individualism – in short, superbly postmodern, even when they themselves are not aware of it. One of the most vile identity marks of postmodernism was that it was the ax that took the roots of thought, contrary to what the poem of Carlos Oliveira sung by Manuel Freire: postmodernism ahistoricized everything, thus becoming one of the greatest allies of savage capitalism. This is his underlying lesson that so many reach without realizing it: «There is no depth, there is no truth, there is no reality, there is no stability, there are no defined borders. Everything is nothing, everything is everything, nothing is nothing, nothing is everything. Your opinion on this subject is worth as much as that of the expert who has spent years studying it. Lies and truth have the same value – especially if your opinion (which you have the right to call “your truth”, even when based on a lie) is reinforced by many 'laiks' virtually deposited by the members of the tribe, also virtual, in which you are entrenched».
Although I know that it is more multifaceted, I will describe just one more face of this river, closely related to the previous one: the progressive disappearance of tolerance as a factor for individual growth and for the building of the democratic system. The sentence that best sums up this very difficult learning process – by a biographer of Voltaire – goes like this: “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it to the death. / I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it» (Evelyn Hall, The friends of voltaire, 1906). Which is very different from: «Stay in yours, I'm in mine.» What I have just said seems contradictory to my firm condemnation of the populist extreme right. It is not, because, like freedom, tolerance also has limits: I am not tolerant of those who, even if covertly, lead these movements, using the prerogatives that democracy offers them to destroy them.
One of the most effective victories of this unbridled river with a thousand faces is the fact that the paragraphs I have just written seem radical to some of the readers of this chronicle. I am aware of this and yet I decided to write them. I don't like radicalism, but I love radicalism as the exercise of an intellectual radiance solidly supported by roots deeply buried in the fertile humus (from which humility is also made) and which returns to it, restless, before rising again. In the chronicle activity that I start today, I will try to elevate myself at a time, wishing with that to contribute so that others may elevate themselves. Without ever taking its feet and its roots from the humus to which I will always return.
Yes. For this new journey, I leave from a place where I am vigilant and standing, on one of the banks of this mighty river of violent currents, so strong that they drag anyone living in it or diving alone or unprotected. And I know the only way not to be dragged along by it is to refuse to be alone in the margins of uncertain time.
Author António Branco is a professor and was rector of the University of Algarve
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