Diciembre 15, 2008 | Por alejandro-h-rodriguez-giovo | # Enlace permanente
I cannot claim to have a full understanding of the complex political baground and the exact concatenation of events that led to the recent explosion of seemingly random street violence in Athens in particular and Greece in general. Obviously, the shooting of a 15 year-old by the local police, even if accidental, is an abomination anywhere in the world, and particularly in the cradle of democracy.
However, by international standards, Greece remains a nation in which human rights are today fundamentally respected by the state, and democratic processes – corruption notwithstanding – by and large function effectively. I’m sure the Greeks have plenty to be disgruntled about (unfortunately, this is true for the citizens of most nations), but it can hardly be said that they are experiencing intolerable hardship under a ruthless tyranny that must be deposed by any means available.
It is high time that demonstrators in countries that are essentially democratic, and in which the human rights of its citizens are not habitually violated, should realize that their police forces are also entitled to be treated as human beings with equal rights, and not merely as targets for every object the demonstrators can lay their hands on, including the most irresponsibly sadistic and murderous of them all: the petrol bomb.
That the casualty figures among policemen and policewomen are not higher is certainly not due to any humane restraint on the part of demonstrators, but is largely the consequence of the extraordinarily elaborate precautions the police now have to take when facing them, including body armour and shields that would have been envied by mediaeval warriors. It bodes ill for democratic societies when the civil servants whose difficult job it is to safeguard ordinary, innocent, decent citizens, can no longer guarantee law and order simply through their uniformed but unarmed presence, and are treated by angry mobs in a state of self-induced frenzy as mere cannon-fodder.
Such reckless violence on the part of citizens in nations where their basic democratic and human rights are, by and large, respected, deprives them of the right to self-righteous indignation when one of their number is seriously hurt or even killed as the level of violence they have initiated begins to escalate. Such indignation is legitimate when peaceful demonstrations (parading, shouting, banner-waving and passive resistance à la Gandhi) are roughly repressed, and violent action may be understandable when there is no alternative but to overthrow a ruthless dictatorship by force; but what has been happening in Greece is inexcusable.
People who attempt to burn policemen alive are in no position to complain when they are harshly treated as a result. Molotov cocktails in a democratic republic such as Greece are not a romantic gesture of revolutionary idealism – they are a murderous weapon, and those who throw them at police officers, when the latter are merely carrying out their duty of maintaining the order that has been willed by a majority of the citizens, are criminals, and they deserve to be treated as such.
| Por alejandro-h-rodriguez-giovo | # Enlace permanente
Have you ever paused to wonder, when you notice in the supermarket that a long-established item on your shopping list has been repackaged with the brash slogan “NEW AND IMPROVED” (and, more often than not, a modified price tag), what might have been inadequate about the product that had given you satisfaction for years? In the case of, say, a washing powder or detergent, bona fide scientific advances leading to enhanced effectiveness and biodegradability are conceivable, but how would you respond to “new and improved” eggs, or milk, or honey? Leaving aside minor differences that arise from variations among chickens, or cows, or bees, and how they have been bred and fed or – heaven forbid – genetically manipulated, eggs, milk and honey are surely prototypes of food not subject to improvement. We do not spend our shopping lives seeking endlessly better milk, eggs or honey; good milk, eggs or honey – in other words, what is closest to the prototype our taste buds recognize and appreciate – will satisfy utterly our longing for that type of food. No sensible person will demand that farmers should constantly be experimenting with novel approaches to produce improved milk, eggs and honey, using consumers as gustative guinea pigs in the process; it suffices that they take every care and precaution to provide chickens, cows and bees with whatever they need to generate naturally the substances that are unimprovable, staple essences in human gastronomy.
I need surely not add that the association of the terms “new” and “improved”, with the fallacious implication that the former necessarily entails the latter, is no more than a transparent marketing ploy. Yet it is also an assumption that has permeated much contemporary thinking – or rather, conditioned contemporary reflexes (thinking hardly comes into it, alas) – to an alarming degree.
Some years ago I was the recipient of a form designed to serve in the appraisal of a senior administrator in an educational establishment that shall remain anonymous. Virtually every criterion by which this person’s professional performance was to be evaluated hinged on his or her ability to deliver novelty in one way or another. I was filled with a combination of dread and compassion at the thought of this hapless victim of neophilia, striving desperately each day to come up with something new and improved in the field of education as though his job depended on it (and, it would appear, it did). Of course, the educational damage an administrator can do is fortunately limited. But what if teachers were put under similar pressure or, even more perniciously, were contaminated with the neophiliac virus and embarked spontaneously and fervently on a never-ending quest for a “new and improved” education?
There was a time when immutability was the norm in educational matters. Ancient sources and assumptions were revered uncritically, and antiquity was synonymous with quality and reliability. (There is, of course, a valid case for revering and inculcating Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, Augustine and Aquinas, which need not apply to every charlatan, quack and alchemist who happened to be alive a millennium or two ago.) Greek and Latin were the only acceptable languages of instruction, and for Ben Jonson affectionately to mock Shakespeare for his “small Latin, and less Greek” was tantamount in 1623 to alleging today that Seamus Heaney, great poet though he may be, can’t be trusted to spell correctly half of the words he employs. The prevailing dogmas of the educational establishment, hypnotized by the mindless mantra that newer is better, have undergone a sea-change in recent decades, with the depressing result that today hardly anyone can even decipher – let alone read, write or speak – ancient Greek or Latin. Worse still, scarcely anyone is even remotely interested in doing so. Plato, Aristotle and company are fast becoming vestigial names, hollow sounds devoid of identity and meaning.
But surely such irrelevant expertise in archaic languages and authors was jettisoned to make way for updated and upgraded forms of knowledge, some will argue. Perhaps they have a point – but only if we give precedence to, say, information technology – a mere medium, a humble tool – over the wisdom of mankind as crystallized in the minds of its greatest thinkers.
The current cult of modernity is, of course, not new. It is a spin-off of the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”, of the Industrial Revolution, and of dramatic XIX and XX Century developments in science and technology – two fields in which genuine, cumulative and unlimited advances seem possible. The trouble is that this assumption of exponential progress has been laid like a cuckoo’s egg in other areas of human endeavour, such as the humanities, the arts and – need I add – education, where it has hatched and swelled into a monster that is displacing the authentic, core values of these disciplines. There can be no unlimited progress in, say, history, literature or pedagogy; this is an uninformed and arrogant illusion. There are changes and fashions, there are rises and falls, there are scrupulous and slapdash practices, there is excellence and decadence, there is waxing and waning, but there is no steady, systematic, infinite process of improvement. The particular priorities of one generation simply replace the preferences of the previous one; the latest batch of freshly indoctrinated, jargon-spouting smart-asses, clutching diplomas on which the ink is not yet dry, browbeats its predecessors into acquiescence. Veterans in any educational institution have seen fad after fad come and go and come again, but when they point out that today’s “new and improved” strategy had already been introduced 30 years previously and then substituted by a refurbished version of the status quo ante ten years later, no one listens to them.
Moreover, novelty tends rudely and arrogantly to displace existing virtues or strengths rather than aggregate with them, and the putative advantages of what is new are gained only at the expense of established qualities. Learning by rote was a sacrosanct educational strategy in the late 1800s – never mind whether anything was understood. Today, in contrast, self-awareness, spontaneous self-expression and self-confidence are what is cultivated – never mind content or facts. Consequently, an increasing proportion of students is leaving school (or university, for that matter) without a clue about, for example, who Dante or Cervantes or Milton or Goethe were, when they lived or what they wrote. But at least they will be in touch with their inner selves, and speak or write with illiterate confidence about, like, whatever, and stuff like that. Know what I mean? One prays that they know what they mean.
Knowledge is, indeed, the crux of the matter. Endless soul-searching and hypothesizing in a vacuum about educational methodology and “learning to learn” is no substitute for the transmission of concrete knowledge. Thinking processes are doomed to banality and shallowness when the thinker is devoid of knowledge, of anything substantive to think about. Hence the danger of neophilia, which is inimical to knowledge, because – with the possible exception of ongoing scientific research* – knowledge is rooted in the past and is largely retrospective, whereas neophiles are indiscriminately and demagogically prospective. Neophilia is doubly damaging, because it also camouflages, packages and markets mediocrity and ignorance. Neophiles, with their arsenal of intimidating verbiage and self-fulfilling prophecies, are relentlessly on the offensive, lest they should be exposed for what they are: empty vessels that make the most sound. Since their awareness of the past is so poor, neophiles aggressively advocate a headlong rush into the future, as if we were not all doomed to get there anyhow, at the uniform rate of 60 seconds per minute. Their obsession with modernity overlooks the fact that whatever is happening now is modern by definition; accordingly, the reactionary views I am expressing in this article could not be more up-to-date.
Neophilia can be harmful to your mental health, and fatal to your students’ education. But take comfort: regular doses of Dostoevsky, capsules of Confucius, potions of Pascal and shots of Shakespeare should suffice to inoculate you against its most deleterious manifestations.
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* Not even scientific research, however, is immune to neophilia. Professor Jérôme Biollaz, médecin chef à la division de pharmacologie clinique in Lausanne’s Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, deprecates the lucrative trend towards medical innovation for its own sake and adds, “ Nous vivons dans une société où l’on pense que ce qui est nouveau est forcément mieux.”(“Les géants de la pharma sont-ils des menteurs ?”, Tribune de Genève, 6th November 2004, p. 4)
| Por alejandro-h-rodriguez-giovo | # Enlace permanente
No resulta muy elegante criticar al amable anfitrión de mi uno de mis“blogs” (horrendo neologismo que casi justificaría no tener uno). Pienso, sin embargo, que El País de Madrid no es exactamente un alfeñique en el mundo del periodismo, así que lograra sobreponerse y sobrevivir a mis comentarios.
A ningún lector asiduo le puede resultar sorprendente que El País defienda posturas ateas o en todo caso agnósticas – ya conocemos la línea editorial, teñida de anticlericalismo arcaico, del periódico. Pero eso no significa que deba ser ciegamente colaboracionista o, en el mejor de los casos, ingenuo con los estridentes militantes ateos del el mundo anglosajón, hasta el punto de dedicarles dos página enteras y más bien admirativas (Los ateos se hacen fuertes, “Vida y artes”, 24 de noviembre del 2008). Hay que ser servil o cándido para hacerle el caldo gordo a Richard Dawkins, rey del chutzpah (palabra insustituible que significa insolencia descarada en yídish), un mero biólogo narcisista, aunque astuto y hábil escritor, que sienta cátedra de filosofía sin haberse tomado la molestia elemental de leerla o comprenderla. Señalemos de paso que el autor que Dawkins cita con mayor frecuencia en su engendro seudo filosófico The God Delusion (El espejismo de Dios) es ni más ni menos que Dawkins.
En cuanto al infantil eslogan ateo “Probablemente no hay Dios, así que deja de preocuparte y disfruta de la vida”, para qué perder el tiempo refiriéndose a la famosa apuesta de Pascal, o citando a Dostoyevski (“Si Dios no existe, todo está permitido”), o señalando que obviamente se puede disfrutar de la vida bastante más creyendo en Dios que sintiéndose un amasijo provisorio y fútil de moléculas en un universo indiferente a la existencia humana; más bien, en el actual contexto de hedonismo capitalista desenfrenado, conviene recurrir (como de costumbre) a Shakespeare: “What fool hath added water to the sea, / Or brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy?” (“¿Quién ha sido el imbécil que le añadió agua al mar, / O trajo un haz de leña a la ardiente Troya?” – Tito Andrónico, III, i, 69-
| Por alejandro-h-rodriguez-giovo | # Enlace permanente
Que Barak Obama haya decidido mantener a Robert Gates como ministro de defensa es una verdadera cachetada a los millones de estadounidenses que lo eligieron como símbolo de ruptura total y definitiva con la horrenda era Bush. Gates, ex-director de la CIA (¡lindo antecedente!) no podría estar más comprometido con la política genocida del actual gobierno norteamericano en Irak. Por otro lado, Obama ha expresado, según parece, su firme intención dedicar aún mas tropas y recursos a la conquista de Afganistán – lo cual, aún desde un punto de vista imperialista, es tiempo perdido (por no hablar de vidas perdidas, en particular las de los sufridos civiles afganos), como lo han comprobado otros ejércitos invasores, desde Alejandro Magno hasta la Unión Soviética, pasando por el Imperio Británico. Se suponía que Obama era lo suficientemente inteligente como para haber aprendido las lecciones de la historia.
Por otra parte, Obama se ha referido nuevamente a los “enemigos” de los EE UU, que deben ser “derrotados”. ¿Quiénes serán? No conozco ningún pueblo o país que esté intrínsecamente enemistado con la nación norteamericana. Es cierto que hay millones de personas en el mundo que se sienten explotadas, humilladas o agraviadas por la prepotente potencia yanqui, y que a veces desahogan su impotencia con espantosos atentados. Pero pienso que hasta el Hamas y el Hezbollah (los Talibanes tal vez no) finalmente caerían bajo el encanto de los EE UU, si ese gran país se tomara la molestia de mostrarse más seductor que agresor. Recursos no le faltan; tan sólo es cuestión de encauzarlos con fines pacíficos. Será que la opción agresiva genera mayores ganancias para el “complejo industrial-militar” del cual se quejó el propio General Eisenhower.
En el fondo, casi todo el mundo está dispuesto a amar a los EE UU. Holywood es el arma más poderosa de la cual disponen los norteamericanos, y la historia de Obama parece haber sida escrita por uno de sus guionistas para enternecer y entusiasmar a la humanidad entera. A ver si el nuevo presidente sabe aprovechar ese capital de simpatía – por ahora, vamos mal.
| Por alejandro-h-rodriguez-giovo | # Enlace permanente
It is a tragedy that when, to the delight of the rest of the world, the citizens of the United States of America have at long last elected a president who seems both highly intelligent and humane, one of his first mooted measures should be to allow full federal funding of “human embryonic stem-cell research”. I employ quotation marks because this technical, innocuous-sounding formula is of course a euphemism for the creation and use of very small human beings in experiments that will kill them, for the putative benefit of other human beings who were fortunate enough to survive that early and vulnerable stage of their existence.
The scientific evidence available today no longer allows us to view a fertilized human ovum as anything other than as a tiny, rapidly developing person, carrying within him or her the complete DNA master-plan that will largely determine what he or she will be like as a child and adult. Otherwise, there would be nothing in principle to prevent scientists from pragmatically eschewing the sentimental term “baby” and employing “neonates” as raw materials for experiments.
No human being, irrespective of his size or ability to stand up effectively for his rights, should ever be regarded merely as a means to an end; every human being is an end in himself. The full appreciation and application of this principle must be at the core of every civilized and truly humane society. Surely President-elect Obama – a man who promises to match the intellectual calibre and philosophical vision of Jefferson or Lincoln – has the moral intelligence to understand this.
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