|
Dear Friends in the Humanist Movement, This electronic version of the book is for internal use by members of the humanist movement. We have learned that it’s best to post excerpts or parts rather than the entire book in public areas or the internet, so we have prepared electronic excerpts to post in public areas that also contain contact information, etc. and are included with this file. Feel free to post these excerpts, and be sure to keep the copyright notice attached. Thanks for your support, Paul Tooby Latitude Press P.O. Box 231516 Encinitas, CA 92023-1516 USA 73250.574@compuserve.com 619-632-6396.
Letters to My Friends On Social and Personal Crisis in Today’s World
Silo Copyright © 1991-1994 Silo. English translation copyright © 1994 TWM. All rights reserved. Used by permission.This electronic version of Letters to My Friends: On Social and Personal Crisis in Today’s World by Silo ISBN 1-878977-23-7 is not for resale or commercial use. It is part of the New Humanism Series published by Latitude Press, books reflecting a contemporary humanist approach to the problems in today’s world. We depend on reader support to bring you these books, so if you find them interesting let us hear from you. Write with comments or for a free catalog at 73250.574@compuserve.com or Latitude Press, P.O. Box 231516, Encinitas, CA 92023-1516, USA.
ContentsIntroduction First Letter to My Friends 1. The Present Situation 2. The Alternative of a Better World 3. Social Evolution 4. Future Experiments 5. Change and Relationships Among People 6. A Tale for Aspiring Executives 7. Human Change Second Letter to My Friends 1. Some Positions Regarding the Present Process of Change 2. Individualism, Social Fragmentation, and the Concentration of Power in a Few 3. Characteristics of the Crisis 4. Positive Factors of Change Third Letter to My Friends 1. Change and Crisis 2. Disorientation 3. Crisis in the Life of Each Person 4. The Need to Give Direction to One’s Life 5. Direction in Life and Changing One’s Situation 6. Coherent Behavior 7. The Two Proposals: Coherence and Solidarity 8. Reaching All of Society Starting with One’s Immediate Environment 9. The Social Environment in Which One Lives 10. Coherence as a Direction in Life 11. Proportion in One’s Actions as a Step Toward Coherence 12. Well-Timed Actions as a Step Toward Coherence 13. Growing Adaptation as an Advance Toward Coherence Fourth Letter to My Friends 1. The Starting Point for Our Ideas 2. The Human Being: Nature, Intention, and Opening 3. The Human Being: Social and Historical Opening 4. The Transforming Action of the Human Being 5. Overcoming Pain and Suffering as Basic Vital Projects 6. Image, Belief, Look, and Landscape 7. The Generations and Historical Moments 8. Violence, the State, and the Concentration of Power 9. The Human Process Fifth Letter to My Friends 1. The Most Important Issue: To Know if One Wants to Live, and in What Conditions 2. Human Liberty: Source of All Meaning 3. Intention: Orientor of Action 4. What Should We Do With Our Lives? 5. Moral Consciousness and Short-Term Interests 6. Sacrificing One’s Objectives for Circumstantial Success: Some Habitual Errors 7. The Kingdom of the Secondary Sixth Letter to My Friends document of the humanist movement I. Global Capital II. Real Democracy Versus Formal Democracy III. The Humanist Position IV. From Naive Humanism to Conscious Humanism V. The Anti-Humanist Camp VI. Humanist Action Fronts Seventh Letter to My Friends 1. Destructive Chaos or Revolution 2. Of What Revolution Are We Speaking? 3. Action Fronts in the Revolutionary Process 4. Revolutionary Process and Revolutionary Direction Eighth Letter to My Friends 1. The Need to Redefine the Role of the Armed Forces 2. Continuing Factors of Aggression in This Period of Reduced Tensions 3. Internal Security and Military Restructuring 4. A Review of the Concepts of Sovereignty and Security 5. The Legality and Limits of Established Power 6. Military Responsibility to Political Power 7. Military Restructuring 8. The Military’s Position in the Revolutionary Process 9. Considerations on the Military and Revolution Ninth Letter to My Friends 1. Violations of Human Rights 2. Human Rights, Peace, and Humanitarianism as Pretexts for Intervention 3. The Other Human Rights 4. The Universality of Human Rights and the Cultural Thesis Tenth Letter to My Friends 1. Destructuring and Its Limits 2. Some Important Areas of the Phenomenon of Destructuring 3. Targeted Action Notes
IntroductionThe letters collected here in book form were published separately as the author completed each one. No more than three years have elapsed from the time the author wrote the first of these letters in February of 1991 to when he completed the tenth and final one in December of 1993, but during this time sweeping transformations have taken place in almost every field of human endeavor. If the pace of change continues to increase as it did over this period, a reader from coming decades will have serious difficulty in understanding the world context to which the author continually makes reference, and will hence fail to grasp many of the ideas expressed in these writings.
I would recommend that these hypothetical readers of the future refer to a summary of the events that took place between the years 1991 and 1994, and that they seek an ample understanding of those times, of the economic and technological developments, the famines and conflicts, the trends in advertising and fashion. I would further suggest that they listen to the music of that period, that they view photographs of the architectural and urban landscapes, that they observe the overcrowding in the macro-cities, the vast human migrations, the deterioration of the environment, and the general way of life during that curious historical moment. Above all I would urge that they penetrate the fog of pronouncements and counter-pronouncements issued by the experts and formers of opinion: the philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of that cruel and stupid age.
Although these letters address a particular present situation, they are unmistakably written with an eye toward the future, and I believe that only from that future will it be possible to confirm or refute them.
The collection of letters in this work follows no general plan; it consists rather of a series of occasional expository writings that one may read in any order. Nevertheless, we might classify them as follows:
A. The first three letters focus on the experiences of the individual living in the midst of a global situation that is growing more complex day-by-day.
B. The fourth letter presents the general structure of ideas on which all the letters are based.
C. The remaining letters outline the author’s sociopolitical thought.
D. The tenth letter presents guidelines for targeted action in light of the global process.
Here is a brief summary of the principal themes in this collection of letters:
First Letter: The situation in which we now happen to live; the disintegration of institutions and the crisis of solidarity; the new types of sensibility and behavior now beginning to take shape in today’s world; criteria for action.
Second Letter: Change and related factors in today’s world and the positions commonly taken in facing this change.
Third Letter: The characteristics of change and crisis in relation to the immediate environment in which each person lives.
Fourth Letter: The foundation of the views presented in these letters regarding the most general questions of human life, needs, and basic projects; the natural and social worlds; the concentration of power; violence and the State.
Fifth Letter: Human freedom, intention, and actions; the ethical meaning of social action and activism and their most common defects.
Sixth Letter: The ideological foundation of Humanism.
Seventh Letter: Social revolution.
Eighth Letter: The armed forces.
Ninth Letter: Human rights.
Tenth Letter: The phenomenon of generalized destructuring; applying global understanding to minimum concrete action.
The author has further explored the themes of the fourth letter, so important to the ideological underpinnings of all the letters, in the work Contributions to Thought, particularly in the essay entitled “Historiological Discussions,” and also in the talk “The Crisis of Civilization and Humanism,” which he presented at the Moscow Academy of Administration on June 18, 1992.
The sixth letter develops the central ideas of contemporary humanism. In its dense concentration of concepts this writing recalls political and cultural writings such as the manifestos of the last half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Communist Manifesto or the Surrealist Manifesto, for example.
The use of the term document in place of manifesto in the sixth letter reflects a careful choice of words intended to distance the present Humanist Document from the naturalism embodied in the Dewey-inspired Humanist Manifesto I of 1933, and from the social-liberalism of Humanist Manifesto II of 1974, endorsed by Sakharov and strongly imbued with the thought of Lamont. Although there are similarities between Humanist Manifesto II and the present Document regarding the need for an economic and environmental plan that will not jeopardize personal freedom, there are radical differences between them in both their political visions and their conceptions of the human being.
The sixth letter deserves further comment in view of its extreme brevity in relation to the number of themes with which it deals. In it the author recognizes the contributions of various cultures to the development of humanism, as can clearly be observed in Jewish, Arabic, and Eastern thought. In this sense, this Document cannot be strictly placed in the Ciceronian tradition, as has usually been the case with Western humanisms. In recognizing historical humanism, the author has revived themes previously expressed as early as the twelfth century. I am referring to the goliard poets such as Hugh of OrlŽans and Peter of Blois, whose writings form part of the celebrated Codex Buranus (or Code of Beuren, also known as the “Songs of Bueren” and in Latin as Carmina Burana). Though Silo does not quote them directly, the following passages from his sixth letter recall their words:This is the great universal truth: Money is everything. Money is government, money is law, money is power. Money is basically sustenance, but more than this it is art, it is philosophy, it is religion. Nothing is done without money, nothing is possible without money. There are no personal relationships without money, there is no intimacy without money. Even peaceful solitude depends on money.
We hear a clear echo of the phrase from the Codex Buranus, “...the Abbot in his cell is kept a prisoner by money...” in Silo’s phrase, “Even peaceful solitude depends on money.” Or an echo of the line “Money receives honor, and none in want are loved...” in Silo’s “There are no personal relationships without money, there is no intimacy without money.”
The goliard poet’s generalization, “Money, it is true, makes the fool seem eloquent,” appears in this sixth letter as, “...but more than this it is art, philosophy, and religion.” And of money the poem says, “Money is adored, for it makes such miracles...it makes the deaf hear and it makes the lame walk.” In this poem from the Codex Buranus to which Silo alludes there is an implicit background that will later inspire the humanists of the sixteenth century, in particular Erasmus and Rabelais.
While the sixth letter presents the ideological foundation of contemporary humanism, I feel that an excellent way to provide an overview of this theme is to include here an excerpt from “A Contemporary Vision of Humanism,” a talk given by the author at the Universidad Aut—noma de Madrid on April 16, 1993.
There are two meanings normally ascribed to the word humanism. Frequently people use the word humanism to mean any tendency of thought that affirms the dignity and worth of the human being. Under this broad definition, humanism can be interpreted in the most diverse and contrasting ways.
In its more restricted meaning, placed within a precise historical perspective, the concept of humanism is used to indicate the process of transformation that began between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and that, known as the Renaissance, was to dominate the intellectual life of Europe over the next century. One need only mention the names of Erasmus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas More, Juan Luis Vives, and Charles BouillŽ to illustrate the range and diversity of historical humanism. Its influence continued throughout the seventeenth and greater part of the eighteenth centuries, giving rise to the revolutions that ushered in the Modern Age. The humanist current then seems to have slowly died out, until it was again rekindled toward the middle of this century in debate among thinkers concerned with social and political questions.
The broad outlines of historical humanism are in rough terms as follows:
1. Historical humanism forms a reaction against the Medieval way of life and values. Thus begins a strong recognition of other cultures, particularly the Greco-Roman, in art, science, and philosophy.
2. It introduces a new image of the human being that exalts the human personality and the transforming capacity of human action.
3. It embodies a new attitude toward nature, which now becomes accepted as the environment of humanity and no longer simply as a lower world filled with temptations and punishments.
4. There is a birth of interest in experimentation and research on the surrounding world, and a growing practice of seeking natural explanations without the need to invoke the supernatural.
These four aspects of historical humanism converge in the same objective: to galvanize a new confidence in human beings and in their creativity, viewing the world as the kingdom of humanity, a kingdom that can be mastered through a knowledge of the sciences.
From this new perspective one finds expressions of the need to construct a new vision of the universe and of history. At the same time, the new conceptions of this humanist movement spur a reevaluation of the religious question in its dogma and liturgy as well as in its organizational structures, which so permeate the social structures of the Middle Ages. Humanism, as a correlate of the changing economic and social forces of the period, represents a revolutionary new force that is increasingly conscious and oriented toward questioning the established order.
In response, the Reformation in the German and Anglo-Saxon worlds and the Counter Reformation in the Latin world attempt to halt the spread of the new ideas, reimposing the traditional Christian vision in an authoritarian way. The crisis spreads from the Church to the State structures. Finally the revolutions at the close of the eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries bring to a close the age of empire and monarchy by divine right.
Then, following the French Revolution and the wars of independence in the Americas, Humanism all but disappears, although it persists as a social background of ideals and aspirations that fosters economic, political, and scientific transformations. Humanism retreats in the face of concepts and practices instituted with the close of the Colonial period, the Second World War, and the bipolar Cold War alignment of the world.
It is in this situation that we observe a reopening of debate regarding the meaning of the human being and nature, the justification of political and economic structures, the orientation of science and technology, and the general direction in which historical events are heading.
The first signs of this renewed debate appear among Existential philosophers: Heidegger’s rejection of Humanism as simply one more metaphysics in his “Letter on Humanism,” Sartre’s defense of it in his Existentialism and Humanism, and Luijpen in refining a theoretical framework in his Phenomenology and Humanism. Other noteworthy efforts were made by Althusser in the anti-Humanist position he presented in For Marx and by Maritain in appropriating humanism from its position as an antithesis of Christianity in True Humanism.
Having traveled this long road to the most recent discussions in the field of ideas, it is clear that Humanism today must define its position not only as a theoretical conception but also in terms of social action and practice. The state of the humanist question must today be articulated with reference to the conditions in which the human being actually lives. Such conditions are not abstract, and it is therefore not legitimate to derive Humanism from a theory of nature, a theory of history, or a faith in god.
The human condition is such that the immediacy of the encounter with pain and the need to overcome that pain are inescapable. This condition, common to so many other species, in the human being includes the additional need to foresee how in the future pain will be overcome and pleasure obtained. This human foresight is based on past experience and on the intention to improve present conditions. The work of human beings, accumulated in social productions, is transformed as it passes from one generation to others in the ongoing struggle to surmount the natural and social conditions in which they live.
Humanism therefore defines human beings as historical beings, whose mode of social action is capable of transforming both the world and their own nature. This point is of capital importance, for if it is accepted one cannot then affirm any natural law, natural property, natural institutions, or finally a future human being the same as that of today, as though the human being were complete now and forever.
Today the age-old theme of the relationship between the human being and nature takes on renewed importance. On reconsidering it, we discover this great paradox in which human beings appear as without fixed character or nature, while at the same time we become aware of one constant in them: their historicity. This is why, stretching the terms a bit, we can say that the nature of human beings is their history, their social history. Each new human being who is born, then, is not simply equipped genetically to respond to the environment as though identical to the first representative of their species, but is rather an historical being whose personal experience unfolds within an accumulating social landscape, within a human landscape.
Yet we find in this social world that the intention we all hold in common – to overcome pain – is being negated by the intention of other human beings. What I am saying is that there are some human beings who naturalize others by negating their intention, converting them into objects to be used.
The tragedy of being at the mercy of natural physical conditions impels human social effort and science toward new achievements to surmount these conditions. In the same way, the tragedy of being subject to social conditions of inequality and injustice impels the human being to rebel against this situation, in which we find not blind forces at work but rather the interplay of other human intentions.
Those human intentions that negate the intention of others, that discriminate against other human beings, are to be judged within a wholly different context from that used to judge a natural tragedy, where there is no intention. This is why, in every act of discrimination, a monstrous effort is always made to establish that the differences between human beings are given by nature, whether physical or societal, that the differences at any rate are established by the interplay of blind forces, devoid of human intentions. So it is that racial, ethnic, sexual, economic, or other distinctions are made, and then justified by “laws,” whether genetic or market. In every case, however, those who discriminate against others have to rely on distortion, untruths, and bad faith.
To sum up the two basic ideas outlined above, which frame the state of the question for today’s humanists, first is the idea of the human condition as subject to pain, with the corresponding impulse to overcome this pain, and second is the definition of the human being as a social and historical being.
The foundational Document of the Humanist Movement (see Sixth Letter p. 69) observes that we will pass from pre-history into a truly human history when the violent animal appropriation of some human beings by others ceases. In the meantime one cannot begin from any other central value than that of the human being, fully realized and free. This is synthesized in the following declaration: “Nothing above the human being, and no human being beneath any other.” If God, the State, money, or any other entity is placed as the central value, this subordinates the human being, creating the condition for the subsequent control or sacrifice of others.
As humanists we have this point very clear. We may be atheists or believers, but we do not begin with our atheism or our faith as the starting point for our vision of the world or for our actions. We begin with human beings and their immediate needs. As humanists, we state the fundamental problem as follows: to know if one wants to live, and to decide in what conditions to do so. All forms of violence – physical, economic, racial, religious, sexual, ideological, and so on – that have been used to restrain human progress are repugnant to humanists. Every form of discrimination, whether subtle or overt, is something that humanists denounce.
The following issues, then, mark a clear dividing line between Humanism and anti-Humanism: Humanism puts labor before big capital, real democracy before formal democracy, decentralization before centralization, anti-discrimination before discrimination, freedom before oppression, and meaning in life before resignation, complicity, and the absurd.
Because Humanism is based on freedom of choice, it offers a valid ethic; because Humanism believes in intention and freedom, it distinguishes between error and bad faith. This is how humanists define positions. We see ourselves not as having come out of nowhere, but as tributaries of a long process and collective effort. We are committed to our own times, even as we envision a long struggle that extends toward the future.
We affirm diversity, in direct opposition to the regimentation imposed until now. This regimentation relies on explanations that it is diversity itself that places the elements of a system in dialectic, so that to exercise respect for every particularity will unleash centrifugal forces of disintegration. Humanists hold exactly the opposite point of view, emphasizing that it is precisely the subjugation of diversity in this time that is leading to conditions that will prove explosive for rigid structures. This is why humanists place the accent on an emerging convergence of direction, a convergence of intention, and why we oppose the idea and the practice of eliminating supposedly dialectic conditions within a given human group.
Here ends our excerpt from this talk by the author.
The tenth and final letter establishes the limits of destructuring, focusing among many possible areas on three forms of destructuring in which this phenomenon takes on special importance: the political, the religious, and the generational. The letter also warns of the resurgence of fascist, authoritarian, and violent neo-irrationalist trends. In illustrating the idea of combining a global understanding with initiating action in the minimum sphere of one’s immediate environment, the author makes a phenomenal leap of scale in which as readers we find ourselves back beside our neighbor, our coworker, our friend.
The letter makes a clear proposal that activists reject the mirage of superstructural political power because such power has been fatally wounded in the ongoing process of destructuring. In the future it will no longer matter who is president, prime minister, senator, representative, or deputy. Political parties, unions, and labor organizations will continue to drift ever further from their human base. The State will undergo a thousand transformations, and global decision-making power will be concentrated in only the largest of corporations and international finance capital, until finally this whole system is overtaken by the collapse of the para-State. What, then, would be the value of an activism that strives to occupy what are only empty shells within a democracy that is merely formal? Clearly, actions must be proposed within the immediate environment of each person, since it is only from there, based on concrete conflicts, that real representation can be built. But the existential problems of the social base are not expressed exclusively as economic and political difficulties, and therefore a party that espouses a humanist ideology and instrumentally holds elected offices may have institutional significance, but will still be unable to meet the real needs of the people. It is from the social base and as a broad movement, decentralized and federative, that new power will be constructed. The questions that all activists need to ask themselves are not “Who will be the next president or prime minister, the next representative or deputy?” but rather “How can we organize our centers for direct communication, our network of neighborhood councils? How can we give participation to all the organizations of the social base, no matter how small, through which people express their work, sports, art, culture, and religiosity?”
This Movement should not be conceived of in formal political terms, but instead as a process of converging diversity. Nor should the growth of this Movement be conceived of within the old mold of a gradualism that will supposedly gain space and social strata a little at a time. It should instead be proposed in terms of a “demonstration effect,” characteristic of a multi-connected planetary society that is quite capable of reproducing and adapting a successful model in social environments that are very distant and different from one another. In sum, this final letter outlines a minimum type of organization and a strategy of action that correspond to the situation of today’s world.
While I have limited my comments in this introduction to the fourth, sixth, and tenth letters in the belief that they have called for further references, citations, and complementary commentaries, I urge the reader not to overlook the many other letters, which do such a remarkable job of coherently tying together the broad range of contemporary humanist concerns, including, for example, human rights which are considered in the ninth letter, the current role of the armed forces treated in the eighth letter, the current state of activism discussed in the fifth letter, as well as each individual’s personal ethical choices and possible coherence amid today’s turbulent events which is considered in the third letter.
J. Valinsky January, 1994
Insert descriptive text which supports the above header. Insert descriptive text which supports the above header.
Insert descriptive text which supports the above header. Insert descriptive text which supports the above header.
First Letter to My Friends
Dear Friends,
For some time now I have been receiving correspondence from various countries requesting that I explain or elaborate on certain of the subjects addressed in my books. For the most part what they have sought are explanations about such concrete issues as violence, politics, the economy, the environment, as well as social and interpersonal relationships. As you can see, these concerns are many and varied, and it is clear that the answers will have to come from specialists in these fields, which of course I am not. Yet while trying as far as possible not to repeat what I have written elsewhere, hopefully I will be able to present a brief outline of the general situation in which we are now living, along with some of the principal trends looming on the horizon.
In other eras, a certain idea of “cultural malaise” has been used as the unifying thread in this type of description. Here, in contrast, I will focus on the rapid changes taking place in the economies of different countries, as well as in their customs, ideologies, and beliefs, in an attempt to trace the particular type of disorientation that today seems to be asphyxiating both individuals and entire peoples. Before entering the subject at hand, I would like to remark on two points. The first has to do with the world that has disappeared – a subject that may seem to some to be treated with a certain nostalgia in this letter. I will say on this point that those of us who believe in human evolution are not in the least depressed by the changes we see. On the contrary, we would like to see events accelerate faster still as we try to adapt ourselves increasingly to these new times. The second point concerns the style of this letter – a style some may interpret as completely lacking in nuance, presenting these themes as it does in such a “primitive” way – so unlike the formulations of those whom we criticize. Regarding the form of expression that these champions of the “New World Order” might prefer, I simply offer the following comment. When speaking of these people, passages from two very different literary works keep echoing in my mind, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Each of these exceptional writers foresaw a future world in which, through means either violent or persuasive, the human being is finally overwhelmed and reduced to an automaton. But I believe that, influenced perhaps by an undercurrent of pessimism which I will not attempt to interpret here, both writers in their novels attributed rather too much intelligence to the “bad guys” and too much stupidity to the “good guys.” Today’s “bad guys” are very greedy people who have many problems, but who are in any case wholly incompetent to orient historical processes, processes that clearly elude both their will and their capacity to plan. These people, who are not very studious, are served in turn by technicians who possess only fragmentary and woefully inadequate resources. So I will ask you not to take too seriously those few paragraphs in which I have amused myself by putting in their mouths words they have not actually spoken, although their intentions do indeed go in the direction indicated. I believe that these matters should be approached without the customary solemnity so characteristic of this dying age, that instead they should be treated with the irreverent good humor one finds in letters exchanged between true friends. 1. The Present Situation
From the beginning of history, humanity has evolved through working to achieve a better life. Yet today, across wide regions of the planet, and in spite of the enormous advances achieved by humankind, what we see are power, economic might, and technology being used to murder, impoverish, and oppress people – destroying, moreover, the future of the generations to come and the overall equilibrium of life on this planet. While a tiny percentage of humanity now possesses great wealth, for the majority even their basic needs remain unmet. While in certain areas there may be sufficient jobs and adequate wages, in many other areas the situation is disastrous. And everywhere the most humble sectors of society undergo horrors each day simply to avoid starvation. Today, and solely by the fact of having been born into a social environment, every human being should have access to an adequate level of nutrition, health care, housing, education, clothing, and services. And when they reach an advanced age, all people need to have a secure future for the remaining years of their lives. People have every right to desire these things for themselves, and they have every right to want their children to have a better life. But today, for thousands of millions of people, even these basic aspirations remain unfulfilled.
2. The Alternative of a Better World
Numerous economic experiments have been tried, with mixed results, in attempts to moderate the aforementioned problems. Today’s trend is to apply a system in which we are told that hypothetical “market laws” will automatically regulate social progress, avoiding in this way the economic disasters of the previous experiments in controlled economies. According to this scheme, wars, violence, oppression, inequality, poverty, and ignorance will all fade away without any untoward consequences. Countries will integrate into regional markets, until finally we arrive at a global society that is without barriers of any kind. In this way, we are assured, just as the standard of living for the poorer sectors of developed regions will rise, so too will the less advanced areas receive the benefits of this progress. The majority of people will adapt to this new arrangement, which competent technicians and business people will set in motion. If, however, something should fail to work out, it will certainly not be because of any problem with these infallible “natural economic laws,” but only because of the shortcomings of those particular specialists – who, as happens in business, will simply be replaced as often as necessary. At the same time, in this “free” society the public will choose democratically among different options, always provided, of course, that their choices lie within this same system. 3. Social Evolution
Given the present circumstances, it is perhaps worthwhile to briefly reflect on this alternative, which is currently touted as the way to achieve a better world. Indeed, a great many economic experiments have been tried, yielding rather inconsistent results. Yet notwithstanding this, we are nonetheless being told that this latest experiment holds the only solution to our fundamental problems. There are, however, certain aspects of this new proposal that some of us fail to grasp.
First, there is the question of economic laws. It could appear plausible that, as in nature, there are certain mechanisms that through their free interplay will automatically regulate social evolution. However, we find great difficulty in accepting the argument that any human process, and certainly the economic process, belongs to the same order as natural phenomena. On the contrary, we believe that human activities are non-natural, that they are instead intentional, social, and historical. These particularly human phenomena do not exist in nature in general or in other animal species. Then, since economic processes reflect human intentions and interests, in light of events we see nothing to support the belief that those with control over the well-being of humanity are concerned with overcoming the difficulties of others less privileged than themselves.
Second, the assertion that societies have progressed notwithstanding the vast economic differences that have always separated the few “haves” from the majority of “have-nots” seems quite unsatisfactory. History demonstrates that peoples have advanced when they have demanded their rights from the established powers, and that social progress has clearly not been the result of some automatic “trickle down” of the wealth accumulated by one sector of society. Third, it seems rather excessive to hold up as models certain countries that by operating within this so-called free market economic system have achieved a high standard of living. These countries have, after all, undertaken wars of expansion against other countries. They have imposed colonial and neo-colonial systems. They have partitioned nations and entire regions. They have exacted tribute through methods based on violence and discrimination. Finally, they have taken advantage of cheap labor in weaker economies, while at the same time imposing unfavorable trade terms on them. Some will argue that these procedures are no more than what are known as “good business deals.” However, they cannot affirm this and then still claim that the economic development of these “advanced” countries has taken place independent of a special and unequal type of relationship with other countries. Fourth, we frequently hear of the scientific and technical advances and the initiative that “free market” economies foster. But it is clear that scientific and technical progress began from the moment human beings invented clubs, levers, fire, and so forth, and that this progress has continued in a process of historical accumulation that has paid little heed to any particular economic form or set of market laws. If, on the other hand, what they are trying to say is that the wealthy economies attract the largest part of the supply of talented people, that they have the resources to pay for equipment and research, and finally that they can provide more motivation in the form of greater compensation, then it should also be noted that this same phenomenon has occurred since ancient times, and is neither limited to nor the result of any one type of economy. Rather, it is simply that in this particular time and place – independent of the origin of such economic strength – an abundance of resources has accumulated. Fifth, there remains the expedient of explaining the progress of “advanced” communities as the result of certain intangible natural “gifts” – special talents, civic virtues, hard work, organization, and the like. This is, however, no longer a rational argument, but instead a kind of devotional affirmation that, with some sleight of hand, obscures the social and historical realities that explain how those peoples were formed. There are many of us, of course, who lack sufficient understanding to see how, given its historical background, the present market scheme will be able to survive even in the short run. But that forms part of another discussion – one that includes the question of whether this “free market economy” really exists at all, or whether in reality we are perhaps dealing with various forms of protectionism and indirect or disguised control, through which those in charge promptly loosen the reins in those areas where they feel in control and tighten them in areas where they do not. If this is the case, then every new promise of progress will remain in practice limited solely to the explosive development and spread of science and technology, which is independent of any supposed automatism in economic laws. 4. Future Experiments
Today, as throughout history, whenever necessary the prevailing scheme will simply be replaced by another that supposedly “corrects” the defects of the previous model. But all the while wealth will continue to concentrate step by step in the hands of an increasingly powerful minority. At the same time, it is clear that neither evolution nor the legitimate aspirations of the people will come to a stop. So it is that soon we will see the last of any naive assurances that the end of ideologies, confrontations, wars, economic crises, and social unrest is at hand. And since no point on Earth is unconnected to the rest, both local solutions as well as local conflicts now rapidly become global. One other thing is certain: That which has prevailed until now can no longer be maintained – neither the present schemes of domination nor the formulas for struggle against them. 5. Change and Relationships Among People
The regionalization of markets, like the demands for local and ethnic autonomy, underscore the disintegration of the nation state. The population explosion in poorer regions is stretching to the breaking point all attempts to control migration. The large extended rural family is fragmenting, displacing younger members toward the overcrowded cities. The urban industrial and post-industrial family has shrunk to the minimum, while at the same time the macro-cities must absorb an enormous influx of people who were formed in disparate cultural landscapes. Economic crises and the conversion of productive models are giving rise to renewed outbreaks of discrimination.
In the midst of all this, technological acceleration and mass production result in products that are obsolete almost before they reach consumers. This continuous turnover of objects has a correspondence in the instability and dislocation so visible in contemporary human relationships. By now, traditional “solidarity,” heir to what was once known as “fraternity,” has lost all meaning. Our companions at work, school, in sports...even old friends have all taken on the character of competitors. Within couples, both partners struggle for control, calculating from the beginning of the relationship whether they have more to gain by staying together or separating. Never before has the world been so closely interconnected, yet each day individuals experience a more anguishing lack of communication. Never before have urban centers been more populous, yet people speak of their “loneliness.” Never before have people needed human warmth so much as now, but any approach to another in a spirit of kindness and help elicits only suspicion. This is the predicament to which our hapless people been abandoned, each isolated individual being led to believe in the greatest unhappiness that he or she has something important to lose – an ethereal “something” that is coveted by all the rest of humanity! Under such circumstances, the following story may be related as if it reflected the most authentic reality. 6. A Tale for Aspiring Executives
“The society now being set in motion will at last bring us prosperity. But apart from the enormous objective benefits, there will also be a subjective liberation of humanity. Old-fashioned ‘solidarity,’ a notion proper to poverty, will no longer be necessary, for by now practically everyone agrees that you can solve almost any problem with money, or its equivalent. We will therefore dedicate all our efforts, thoughts, and dreams toward this end. With money, you can buy fine food, a nice home, and afford travel, entertainment, high tech playthings, and people to carry out your wishes. At last there will be efficient love, efficient art, and efficient psychologists to correct any personal problems that remain. And soon, even these problems will be resolved, thanks to new developments in neurochemistry and genetic engineering. “In this society of abundance we will see suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, and all those other insecurities of the urban dweller simply fade away – as is sure to happen any day now, we are assured, in the economically developed countries. Discrimination will disappear as well, and communication among all people will increase. No longer will anyone have to bear the sting of needless rumination on the meaning of life, loneliness, sickness, old age, or death, because, with the appropriate courses and a little therapeutic help, it will be possible to block these sorts of reflections that until now have been such a hindrance to society’s output and efficiency. Everyone will trust everyone else, because competition at work, school, and in personal dealings will result in mature relationships. “The last of the ideologies will finally disappear and no longer be used to brainwash people. Of course, no one will interfere with protest or nonconformity about minor things, provided that people express themselves through the appropriate channels. As long as they do not confuse liberty with license, citizens may gather (in small numbers, for reasons of hygiene), and may even express themselves outdoors (provided that they do not disturb others with noise pollution or publicity materials that could deface the municipality, or whatever it will be called in the future). “The most extraordinary thing of all, however, will come to pass when police surveillance is no longer necessary, because every citizen will have resolved to protect others from the lies that could be inculcated by some dangerous ideological terrorist. On encountering suspicious activity, these guardians of the public welfare will rush to the news media, where they will find a warm welcome, and a warning will quickly be issued to the public. But the activities of these responsible citizens will not end there, for they will write brilliant studies, which will be published immediately. They will organize forums in which experts and pundits who shape public opinion will elucidate these things for the unwary, who would otherwise be at the mercy of the dark forces of state economic control, authoritarianism, anti-democracy, and religious fanaticism. “It will, moreover, hardly be necessary to pursue these troublemakers. With such an efficient information system in place, no one will dare go near these dangerous elements for fear of being contaminated. “The more serious cases will be efficiently ‘deprogrammed,’ and will publicly express their gratitude at being reintegrated into society and for the benefits they have received on recognizing the gifts of freedom. “As a result of all this, those diligent guardians who have warned the public – if they were not sent specifically to carry out this vital mission – will be able to emerge from their anonymity and sign autographs as they attain the social recognition that befits their high moral character and, as is only logical, receive a well-deserved reward. “The Company will be one big happy family, assisting with all phases of education, relationships, and recreation. Thanks to robots and automation, physical labor will no longer be required, and working for the Company from one’s own home will provide genuine personal fulfillment. “As a consequence, society will no longer have any need for organizations aside from the Company. Human beings, who have struggled for so long to achieve well-being, will at last reach the heavens – leaping from planet to planet they will discover true happiness. And that is where we will find our young citizen: well-established, competitive, charming, acquisitive, triumphant, and pragmatic – above all pragmatic – an executive in the Company!” 7. Human Change
The world is changing at a dizzying pace, and people can no longer hold on to much of what they believed unquestioningly until now. The acceleration of events is generating instability and disorientation in every society, rich and poor alike. In this situation of change, both traditional leaders and their “formers of public opinion,” as well as old political and social activists, no longer serve as points of reference for people. Yet a new sensibility is being born that corresponds to these changing times. It is a sensibility that grasps the world as a whole – an awareness that the problems people experience in one place involve other people, even if they are far away. Increasing communication, trade, and the rapid movement of entire human groups from one place on the planet to another all attest to this growing process of globalization. As the global character of more and more problems comes to be understood, new criteria for action arise. There is an awareness that the work of those who desire a better world will be effective only if they make their efforts grow outward from the environment where they already have some influence. In sharp contrast to other times, so full of empty phrases meant only to garner external recognition, today people are beginning to find value in humble and deeply felt work, work done not to enhance one’s self-image, but rather to change oneself and bring about change in one’s immediate environment of family, work, and friendship. Those who truly care for people do not disdain this work done without fanfare, this work that proves so incomprehensible to those opportunists who were formed in an earlier landscape of leaders and masses – a landscape in which they learned well how to use others to catapult themselves to society’s heights. When a person comes to the realization that schizophrenic individualism is a dead end, when they openly communicate what they are thinking and what they are doing to everyone they know without the ridiculous fear of not being understood, when they approach others not as some anonymous mass but with a real interest in each person, when they encourage teamwork in both the interchange of ideas and the realization of common projects, when they clearly demonstrate the need to spread this task of rebuilding the social fabric that others have destroyed, when they feel that even the most “unimportant” person is of greater human quality than some heartless individual whom circumstance has elevated to what is, for now, the pinnacle of success – when all this happens it is because within this person destiny has once again begun to speak, the destiny that has moved entire peoples along their best evolutionary path, the destiny that has been so many times distorted and so many times forgotten, but is always rencountered in the twists and turns of history. Today we can glimpse not only a new sensibility and a new mode of action but also a new moral attitude and a new tactical approach to facing life. If I were pressed to be more specific I would simply reply, though it has been said time and again over the last three millennia, that today people are experiencing anew the need for and the true morality of treating others as they want to be treated. I could add to this, almost as general laws of conduct, that today people are aspiring to:
1. A certain proportion, in which one tries to give order to the most important things in one’s life, dealing with them as a whole and not allowing some aspects to move ahead while others fall too far behind. 2.A certain growing adaptation, in which one acts in favor of evolution rather than momentary concerns, turning away from the various forms of human involution.
3. A certain well-timed action, in which one retreats when facing a great force (not every little obstacle) and advances when that force weakens.
4. A certain coherence, in which one accumulates those actions that bring one a feeling of unity, of being in agreement with oneself, and reject those actions that generate contradiction, that are registered within oneself as disagreements among what one thinks, feels, and does.
I do not feel it is necessary to elaborate on why I say that people are feeling anew “the need for and the true morality of treating others as they want to be treated,” although some may object that this is not in fact how people act today. Nor do I believe it necessary to give lengthy explanations about what I understand by “evolution” or by “growing adaptation” as opposed to adaptation based on permanence. Concerning the parameters for knowing when to retreat or advance before a great or weakening force, people will certainly need to be able to recognize precise indicators beyond those mentioned here. Finally, it is obviously not easy to implement the proposal of accumulating unifying actions or, from the opposite point of view, rejecting contradictions, when dealing with the contradictory situations that touch our lives. All of these considerations may be true, but if you review this letter you will see that these things have been discussed within the context of a new type of conduct to which people are today beginning to aspire – a type of behavior quite different from that to which people aspired in other times. In this letter I have tried to note those special characteristics we see beginning to take shape that embody this new sensibility, this new type of personal conduct, and this new form of interpersonal action – all of which, it seems to me, go beyond a simple critique of today’s situation. And while we know that criticism is always necessary, how much more necessary is it to do things in a new way – a way that is different from that which we criticize! With this letter I send my warmest regards,
Silo
February 21, 1991
Second Letter to My Friends
Dear Friends,
In the previous letter I focused on the situation in which we now live and on certain tendencies visible in contemporary events. I also used the opportunity to discuss various proposals that defenders of market economics proclaim as if these were the inescapable preconditions for all social progress. I made note of the continuing decline in solidarity and the crisis of references now taking place. Finally, I outlined some positive characteristics that are beginning to appear in what I called a new sensibility, a new moral attitude, and a new tactical approach to facing life.
Some of my correspondents have expressed their disapproval of the tone of that letter, feeling it touched on subjects that are too grave to allow such irony. But let’s not be so melodramatic – the system of proofs presented to justify the ideology of neoliberalism, social market economics, and the New World Order is so riddled with inconsistencies that this is hardly something to get worked up about. I would like to point out that while the foundations of that ideology have long been dead, soon that entire edifice of ideas will be overtaken by a crisis so evident that even those who confuse meaning with expression, content with form, and process with circumstance will finally perceive it. Just as the ideologies of fascism and real socialism died long before these systems collapsed in practice, so too will the right-thinking people of today be caught by surprise as they recognize the collapse of the present system only after the fact.
Doesn’t this all seem a bit ridiculous? It’s like sitting through the same bad movie time after time. As we watch it over and over we begin to scrutinize tiny details – imperfections in the walls of the movie sets, the camera angles used, and whether the actors have shaved carefully – while the lady sitting beside us is overcome with emotion at what she is seeing for the first time, and what, for her, is reality itself. On my own behalf, then, I might point out that I have not mocked the enormous tragedy that stems from the imposition of the present system, but instead the monstrous pretensions and grotesque end of this system – an ending that we have already witnessed before on too many previous occasions. I have also received correspondence requesting more precise definitions of the attitudes recommended for facing the present process of social change. Before making any recommendations of this kind, however, I believe it would first be useful to try to understand the principal positions now held by various groups as well as by isolated individuals. Here I will limit myself to presenting the most popular positions, giving my views in those cases that seem to be of greatest interest.
1. Some Positions Regarding the Present Process of Change
Throughout the long ascent of humanity progress has occurred in a slow process of accumulation up to the present time, when the pace of economic and technological change has begun to outstrip the speed of change in social structures and human behavior. Many factors in society are becoming more “out of phase” all the time, which is generating growing crises in today’s world. This problem can be approached from various points of view. Some believe that the current disarticulation will automatically regulate itself, and they therefore recommend that we not attempt to direct this process, which would in any case be impossible to orient. This approach embodies an optimistic-mechanistic thesis. Still others believe we are heading toward an inevitable explosion – they hold a pessimistic-mechanistic thesis. Various moral currents are also making their appearance, attempting to stop change and, as far as possible, return to some original past where they assume that comfort is still to be found. They represent an anti-historical position. Meanwhile, all around us we hear a rising chorus of voices from contemporary cynics, stoics, and epicureans. The first deny that there is importance or meaning in any action at all. The second face events unflinchingly, even when everything goes badly. Those who adopt the third position seek personal benefit in every situation, thinking only of their own hypothetical well-being, which extends, at most, to their own children. As in the final stages of past civilizations, many people today are opting for positions that pursue individual salvation, assuming that no task they might undertake with others could have any meaning or possibility of success – at most others have a useful role to play only insofar as they profit one within a speculation that is strictly personal. That is why aspiring business, cultural, and political leaders perfect and polish their public images, striving to seem credible so that people will believe they think of and act on behalf of others. This is, of course, a rather fruitless task, because by now everyone knows the tricks and no one believes in anyone else. The old values – religious, patriotic, cultural, political, union, and so on – have all been subordinated to money in a landscape in which solidarity and, therefore, any collective opposition to the contemporary scheme of things has been eroded, even as the social fabric continues to unravel. Afterwards, another stage will follow in which this inordinate individualism will be outgrown – but that is a theme for later on. With our landscape of formation weighing us down and our beliefs in crisis, we are not yet in any condition to admit that this new historical moment is approaching. Today, whether we wield some small measure of power or depend absolutely on the power of others, we all find ourselves touched by this individualism – a situation in which those who are better placed in the system have a clear advantage. 2. Individualism, Social Fragmentation, and the Concentration of Power in a Few
Individualism necessarily leads, however, to the struggle for the supremacy of the strongest and the pursuit of “success” at any price. This position began among a few who, relying on the acquiescence of the majority, respected certain rules of the game among themselves. In any event, this stage will soon exhaust itself and it will become “all against all,” because sooner or later the balance of power will tilt in favor of the strongest, and then the rest, either together or in alliances of various factions, will end up dismantling this fragile system. In the meantime, however, as economies and technologies continue to develop, the powerful minorities continue to change along with them, perfecting their methods to such a degree that in some wealthy areas the majorities now effectively transfer their discontent to secondary aspects of the predicament in which they live. It appears that people generally no longer question the system as a whole but only certain urgent aspects when these strike close to home. Because of this, there are some who suggest that despite the overall rise in the world’s wealth and standard of living, the great masses of humanity who are left behind will simply be content to await a better life in some distant future. All of this demonstrates an important shift in social behavior. And if this has occurred, activism for social change will continue to weaken as traditional political and social forces are left devoid of proposals. With the emptiness of individual isolation only partially filled by those structures that produce goods and leisure activities, the fragmentation of personal and collective life will continue to increase.
In this paradoxical world, all centralization and bureaucracy will be swept aside, breaking with the former structures of management and decision making. Yet at the same time, this deregulation, decentralizing, and liberalizing of markets and procedures will leave the field wide open for the concentration of wealth and power to flourish on a scale unknown in any previous era, as international finance capital continues to flow into the hands of an ever more powerful banking system.
The political class will experience a similar paradox in that they will have to champion these new values, which in eroding the power of the State will simultaneously undermine their own leadership role. It is little wonder then that for some time they have been replacing words such as “government” with other words such as “administration,” trying to lead “the public” (no longer “the people”) to understand that a country is now a business. In any event, and until the consolidation of a global imperial power, conflicts between regions could well occur as previously they occurred among countries. Whether such confrontations will be limited to the economic sphere or spill over into the arena of limited warfare, whether massive and incoherent unrest will as a consequence erupt, whether governments will fall pulling down countries and whole regions, will not in the least deter the process of concentration toward which this historical moment is heading. Local grievances, inter-ethnic fighting, migrations, refugees, sustained crises – none of these will alter the general picture of the increasing concentration of power. And when the recession and unemployment become chronic among the populations of the wealthy countries, the stage of liquidating any remaining liberalism will have finished, ushering in the politics of control, coercion, and emergency in the finest imperial style – and who then will be able to speak of a free market economy, and what importance will it have to maintain positions based on an uncompromising individualism? In this letter I will also respond to other concerns that my correspondents have raised concerning how to characterize the current crisis and its associated tendencies.
3. Characteristics of the Crisis
Let us turn now to the crisis of the nation state, the crisis of regionalization and globalization, and the crisis facing society, the group, and the individual.
In the context of the process of globalization, the flow of information is accelerating as the movement of both people and goods continues to increase. Technology and growing economic power are becoming concentrated in businesses that are ever more powerful. And this phenomenon of accelerating interchange is now encountering the limitations and slowed pace that are produced by traditional structures such as the nation state.
The result is that within each region national borders are becoming blurred. This means that countries are having to make their legislation more homogeneous, not only in matters of trade regulations, duties and tariffs, and personal documentation, but also in adapting their systems of production. Changes in labor and social security laws cannot be far behind. Ongoing accords among these countries will show that a common legislature, judicial system, and executive will provide improved effectiveness and quicker response time in managing the region. Primitive national currencies will give way to some type of regional medium of exchange that will avoid the losses and delays of previous exchange operations.
The crisis of the nation state is a readily observable fact, not only in those countries that are joining to form regional markets but also in those whose battered economies have fallen significantly behind. Everywhere voices are being raised against entrenched bureaucracies, demanding the reform of established schemes. Old resentments as well as local, ethnic, and religious rivalries are resurfacing in regions where countries have recently been formed as a result of partitions, annexations, or artificial federations. And the traditional State is having to face this centrifugal tendency at just the time that growing economic difficulties are calling into question its effectiveness and legitimacy.
Phenomena of this type are growing in the areas of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. These problems will also deepen in the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean, and Asia Minor. In a number of countries of Africa that have been artificially delimited we are beginning to see such symptoms as well. Accompanying these breakdowns are large-scale migrations of refugees toward borders, which can threaten the equilibrium of an entire region. With any significant imbalance in China, this phenomenon could spill directly into more than one other area, especially in light of the present instability in the former Soviet Union and the countries of continental Asia.
In the meantime, the regional centers of economic and technological power have become configured: the Far East, led by Japan; Europe; and the United States. While the rise and influence of these regions exhibit an apparent polycentrism, events demonstrate that the United States with its military might in addition to its technological, economic, and political power is now in a position to control the world’s key lines and areas of supply. In the process of increasing globalization, this lone remaining superpower is emerging as the governing force in present events, whether the other regional powers like it or not. This is the ultimate meaning of the New World Order.
It seems that we have yet to reach a time of peace, although the threat of world war has receded for now. Local, ethnic, and religious upheavals, social unrest, mass migrations, and limited wars still appear to threaten the supposed present stability. As the less wealthy areas fall still further behind the growth of the technologically and economically accelerated areas, they become more “out of phase,” which only compounds their problems. Latin America is a case in point, for even as the economies of various countries experience important growth in coming years, their dependence on the centers of power will be increasingly evident. As the regional and world power of multinational companies continues to grow, as international finance capital continues to concentrate, political systems lose autonomy and their legislation must adapt to the dictates of these new powers.
Today we see the functions of increasing numbers of institutions being directly or indirectly supplanted by various departments or foundations of the Company, which in some areas has developed the means to oversee everything from cradle to grave for both employees and their children: birth, education, career placement, news and information, marriage, recreation, social security, retirement, death, and burial.
there are already places where citizens can avoid old-fashioned bureaucratic paperwork and get by with only a credit card and, increasingly, with just electronic money. And when people use electronic money, a record is made of not only their expenditures and deposits, but also of a wealth of other pertinent information on their background, habits, movements, present status, and so forth, all duly computerized. Of course, while this does free some people from a few minor delays and concerns, these personal conveniences also serve a disguised system of control. Along with the growth in technology and the accelerating rhythm of life, political participation diminishes and decision-making power becomes ever more remote and intermediated.
The family is shrinking and flying apart into the minimum unit of increasingly mobile and changeable couples. As interpersonal communication becomes blocked, friendship disappears, and competition poisons all human relationships to the point that no one trusts anyone else. The sensation of insecurity that people are feeling is no longer rooted in the objective fact of rising crime and violence, but stems above all from their state of mind. It must be added that social, group, and interpersonal solidarity are rapidly disappearing, that drug addiction and alcoholism are continuing to spread devastation, and that suicide and mental illness are spiraling dangerously upward. Of course, everywhere there is still a healthy and reasonable majority, but the symptoms of such advanced disarticulation no longer allow us to speak of a healthy society.
The landscape of formation in which the new generations have grown up contains all the elements of crisis previously cited, and these elements form part of their lives just as much as their technical and career training, as much as elements like soap operas, the advice of celebrity experts in the mass media, affirmations about what a perfect world we live in and, for more privileged youth, the diversions of motorcycles, travel, clothes, sports, music, and electronic gadgets. The problem of this landscape of formation in the new generations threatens to widen the already enormous gap between sectors of different ages, bringing to the fore a virulent generational dialectic of both great depth and vast geographical extension.
It is clear that the myth of money has long since been incorporated at the pinnacle of the scale of values, with everything else increasingly subordinated to it. A large segment of society does not want to hear about anything that could remind them of old age or death, shunning any theme related to the meaning and direction of life. And we must recognize that this is not altogether unreasonable, since reflection on these subjects in no way coincides with the scale of values established in the present system.
The symptoms of the crisis are by now too serious to disregard, yet some will maintain that this is simply the price we must pay in order to exist at the close of the twentieth century. Others affirm that we are entering the best of all possible worlds. The background for both of these affirmations comes from this particular historical moment, when the whole scheme of things has not yet entered crisis, although particular crises are proliferating rapidly. People’s appreciation of events will change, however, as the symptoms of disintegration accelerate and they feel the growing need to establish new priorities and new projects in life. 4. Positive Factors of Change
One cannot question the entire development of science and technology simply because some advances have been or are being employed against life and the well-being of all. In any questioning of science and technology one must first reflect on the characteristics of the prevailing system, which all too often applies advances in knowledge toward spurious ends. Progress in medicine, communications, robotics, genetic engineering, and myriad other fields can of course be applied in a destructive direction. The same holds true of employing technology in the irrational exploitation of natural resources and the generation of industrial pollution, with attendant widespread contamination and deterioration of the physical environment. All such misuse of technology constitutes a grave indictment of the negative character that now commands both the economy and social systems.
Today it is clear that society has the capacity to solve the problems entailed in feeding all of humanity, and yet every day we see starvation, malnutrition, and inhuman suffering increase around us. In short, the established system is not disposed to face these problems and relinquish its fabulous profits in exchange for an overall improvement in the human condition and standard of living.
It must also be pointed out that the process carrying us toward regionalization and finally globalization is being manipulated by special interests to the detriment of humanity as a whole. It is clear, however, that even burdened with such distortions this process is opening the way toward a universal human nation. The accelerated change taking place in today’s world is leading to a global crisis for the system and a consequent reordering of many factors. And all of this will be the necessary condition to reach a reasonable stability and harmonious development of the planet. Accordingly, despite the tragedies that can be anticipated as the present global system deteriorates, the human species will prevail over all particular interests. This faith in the future is rooted in an understanding of the direction of history that began with our hominid ancestors. This species, which has worked and struggled over the course of millions of years to surmount pain and suffering, is not now going to yield to the absurd. This is why we need to understand processes that are more ample than simple immediate circumstance, and to support, even if we do not see immediate results, everything that goes in the direction of evolution.
When courageous human beings who are moved by a spirit of solidarity become disheartened it slows the march of history. But it is difficult to grasp this broader meaning if one does not also organize and orient one’s personal life in a positive direction. What is at work here is not the interplay of mechanical factors or historical determinism – it is human intention, which tends to make its way through all difficulties. I hope, my friends, to move on in the next letter to other more reassuring topics, leaving aside observations concerning such negative factors in order to outline proposals that correspond to our faith in a better future for all.
With this letter I send my warmest regards,
Silo
December 5, 1991
Third Letter to My Friends
Dear Friends,
I hope that this letter will help simplify and give order to my views on the present state of affairs. In it I also want to consider some important aspects of the relationships between individuals and between individuals and the social environments in which they live.
1. Change and Crisis
In this time of great change, individuals, institutions, and society all find themselves in crisis. And the pace of change – and the intensity of these individual, institutional, and social crises – will only continue to increase. This portends further upheaval, which broad sectors of society will perhaps be unable to assimilate. 2. Disorientation
Today’s transformations are taking unexpected turns, resulting in widespread disorientation about the future and confusion about what to do in the present. In reality, it is not change itself that is so disturbing to us, because we can recognize many positive things in contemporary developments. What is troubling is not knowing in what direction these changes are heading, and therefore not knowing in what direction to orient our actions. 3. Crisis in the Life of Each Person
Everything around us – the economy, technology, society – is undergoing enormous transformations. But above all it is in our own lives that we experience these changes: in our workplaces, our families, our friendships, and not least in our ideas and what we believe about the world, other people, and ourselves. Amid the rush of events we find many things exciting, yet other things confuse or paralyze us. Our own behavior and that of others all too often seems incoherent, contradictory, and as lacking in any clear direction as the events around us. 4. The Need to Give Direction to One’s Life Since change is inevitable, it is of fundamental importance to guide it, and there is no other way than to begin with oneself. One must find in oneself a direction for this chaotic change, whose future course is unknown to us.
5. Direction in Life and Changing One’s Situation Individuals do not exist in isolation. Thus, if they truly give their lives direction, this will change their relationships with the people in their families, their workplaces, and everywhere they carry out their activities. Giving direction to one’s life is not simply a psychological problem that can be resolved within the head of an isolated individual; on the contrary, it is resolved by changing – through coherent behavior – the situation in which one lives with others. When we become excited by our successes or depressed by our failures, when we make plans for the future or resolve to change our lives, we often forget the fundamental point: The situation in which we live involves relationships with others. We can neither explain what happens to us nor make any choice in our lives without also including certain people and concrete social ambits. Those people who are of special importance to us and the social environments in which we live place each of us in a particular situation, and it is from this situation that each of us thinks, feels, and acts. To deny this or to disregard it creates enormous difficulties both for us and for others. One’s freedom to choose and to act is delimited by these circumstances. Any change one desires to make cannot be proposed in the abstract but only with reference to the actual situation in which one lives. 6. Coherent Behavior
If my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions are in agreement, if they all go in the same direction, if my actions do not create contradiction with what I feel, then I can say that my life has coherence. But though I am true to myself, this does not necessarily mean I am being true to those in my immediate environment. I still need to achieve this same coherence in my relationships with others, treating them the way I would like to be treated.
Of course there can also be a destructive type of coherence, which can be seen in those who are racists or fanatics or in those who are violent or exploit others. It is clear, however, that their relationships with others are incoherent, because they treat others very differently from the way they desire to be treated themselves.
That unity of thought, feeling, and action, that unity between the treatment one asks from others and the treatment one gives to others – these are ideals that are not realized in everyday life. Here is the point: to adjust one’s conduct in the direction of these personal and social proposals. These values, taken seriously, give life a direction that is independent of any difficulties one may face in realizing them. If we observe things well – not in static but in dynamic – we will understand this as a strategy that continues to gain ground as time passes. Here, one’s intentions do matter (even though one’s actions may at first not coincide with them), especially if these intentions are sustained, perfected, and extended. These images of what one wants to achieve are firm references that give direction in every situation. What is being proposed here is not very complicated. We are not surprised, for example, when people dedicate their lives to pursuing great wealth, even when they lack any tangible reason to believe they will achieve it. This ideal spurs them on, despite the absence of relevant results. Why, then, is it so difficult to understand that these ideals of how to treat others and personal coherence can provide a clear direction for human conduct? And these ideals can give one direction despite the fact that these times are neither conducive to having the treatment one asks correspond to the treatment one gives nor to having one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions be in agreement. 7. The Two Proposals: Coherence and Solidarity
To have one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions go in the same direction and to treat others as one wants to be treated – these two proposals are so simple they can be viewed as mere naivetŽ by people accustomed to the usual complications. Yet underlying this seeming simplicity lies a new scale of values in which coherence comes first, a new morality in which one’s actions are not a matter of indifference, and a new aspiration that entails a consistent effort to give direction to human events. Behind this apparent simplicity one is either staking one’s future on a meaning in life that will be truly evolutionary, both personally and for society, or one is following a path that leads toward disintegration. As mistrust, isolation, and individualism increase, they erode the fabric of society, and we can no longer rely on old values to provide the cohesion among people that is so essential. The traditional solidarity found among members of a given class, or within associations, institutions, and groups is rapidly being replaced by a savage competition, from which not even the closest bonds of marriage or family escape.
As this process mechanically proceeds to dismantle social structures, a new solidarity cannot arise out of the ideas and conduct of a world that has already disappeared – it can come only from the concrete need that people have to give direction to their lives. And this new direction will entail changing the environment in which they live. This change in their environment, if it is to be true and profound, cannot be imposed from without, cannot be set in motion by external laws or any form of fanaticism. It can only come from the power of shared opinion and minimum collective action with the people who make up the social environment around them. 8. Reaching All of Society Starting with One’s Immediate Environment We know that by changing our situation in positive ways we will be influencing our surroundings, and that others will share this point of view and form of action, giving rise to a growing system of human relationships.
So we must ask ourselves: Why should we go beyond the immediate environment where we begin? The answer is simple: To be coherent with the proposal of treating others in the same way we want them to treat us. Why wouldn’t we pass on to others something that has proven to be of fundamental importance in our own lives? If our influence begins to expand, it means that our relationships and therefore the constituents of our environment have also developed. This is a factor we need to bear in mind right from the first, because even though our actions may begin in one small area, their influence can project very far. And there is nothing strange in thinking that others will decide to accompany us in this direction. After all, the great movements throughout history have followed this same course – logically, they began small, and then developed because people felt these movements interpreted their needs and concerns. If we are coherent with these proposals we will act in our immediate environments, but with our vision placed on the progress of society as a whole. For what meaning is there in speaking of a global crisis that must be faced with resolution if society is only going to end up as isolated individuals for whom others have no importance?
Out of common need, then, those working together to give a new direction to their lives and to events will create environments for direct communication where they can discuss these themes. Later on, as awareness spreads through many means of communication, this surface of contact will grow. A similar process will occur as people create organizations and institutions compatible with this proposal.
9. The Social Environment in Which One Lives
We have already seen that the impact of this swift and unpredictable change is experienced as crisis – the crisis with which individuals, institutions, and entire societies are now struggling. So, although it is indispensable to give direction to developments, how can one do this, subject as one is to the action of larger events? Clearly, one can direct only the most immediate and nearby aspects of one’s life, and not the operation of institutions or society at large. Nor is it easy attempting to give direction to one’s life, since no one lives in isolation; everyone lives in some situation, in some environment. We may think of this environment as the universe, the Earth, our country, state, province, and so on. each of us has, however, an immediate environment – the environment in which we carry out our daily activities. This is the environment of our family, our work, our friendships, and our other activities. We live in a situation of relationship with other people, and this is our particular world, which we cannot avoid as it acts on us and we on it in a direct way. Any influence we have is on this immediate environment, and both the influence we exercise on it and the influence it exerts on us are in turn affected by more general situations – by the current disorientation and crisis. 10. Coherence as a Direction in Life
If we want to give a new direction to events, we must begin with our own lives and include the immediate environment in which we carry out our activities. But the question remains: To what direction will we aspire? Without doubt to one that provides coherence and support in such a changeable and unpredictable environment.
To propose that one will think, feel, and act in the same direction is to propose coherence in life. Yet putting this into practice is not easy, because the situations in which we find ourselves are not entirely of our own choosing. We find ourselves doing the things we need to do, even though these things may not at all agree with what we think or what we feel. We find ourselves in situations over which we have no control. To act with coherence, then, is more an intention than a fact – it is a direction, which if kept before us guides our lives toward increasingly coherent conduct. Clearly, it is only by exerting influence within one’s own immediate environment that one will be able to change any aspect of the overall situation in which one lives. In so doing, one will be giving a new direction to one’s relationships with others, and they will be included in this new conduct. Some may object that their employment or other factors cause them to frequently change their residence or other aspects of their lives. But this in no way affects the proposal, for every person is always in some situation, is always part of some environment. If we are striving for coherence, the treatment we afford others must be of the same type as the treatment we demand for ourselves, no matter where we are.
There are, then, in these two proposals the basic elements for giving direction to our lives to the extent of our strength and possibilities. Coherence advances as a person is increasingly able to think, feel, and act in the same direction. And we extend this coherence to others – because only in this way are we ourselves being coherent. And in extending this to others we begin to treat other people the way we would like to be treated. Coherence and solidarity are directions, they represent conduct to which we aspire. 11. Proportion in One’s Actions as a Step Toward Coherence How can we advance in the direction of coherence? First, we need to maintain a certain proportion in the activities of our daily lives. We need to establish which among all the things we do are most important. For our lives to function well, we need to give the highest priority to what is of fundamental importance, less to secondary things, and so on. It could turn out that simply by taking care of two or three main priorities we will achieve a well-balanced situation.
We cannot allow our priorities to be turned upside down or to become so fragmented that our lives grow out of balance. To avoid having some activities proceed far ahead while others fall too far behind, we need to develop all of our activities as a connected whole and not as isolated actions. It is all too easy to become blinded by the importance of one activity and to allow this single priority to unbalance all of our other activities. And then, because our whole situation has been jeopardized, in the end we fail to accomplish what we had considered so important.
It is true that at times urgent matters arise that we need to deal with right away, but it should be clear that this in no way means we can go on indefinitely postponing the things necessary to maintain the overall situation in which we live. It is a significant step in the direction of coherence to establish our priorities, and then to carry out our activities in appropriate proportion.
12. Well-Timed Actions as a Step Toward Coherence
There is a daily routine we follow that is set by schedules and timetables, our personal needs, and the workings of the environment in which we live. Yet within this framework there is a dynamic interplay and richness of events that go unappreciated by superficial people. There are some who confuse their routines with their lives, but they are in no way the same, and quite often people must make choices among the routines or conditions imposed on them by their environment.
Certainly it is true that we live amid inconveniences and contradictions, but it is important not to confuse these things. Inconveniences are simply the annoyances and impediments that we all face. While they are not terribly serious, of course if they are numerous or repeated they can increase our irritation and fatigue. Without question we have the capacity to overcome them. They neither determine the direction of our lives nor stop us from carrying a project forward. They are simply obstacles along the way that range from the minor physical difficulty to larger problems that may nearly cause us to lose our way. While there are important differences in degree among inconveniences, they all lie within the range of things that do not stop us from going forward.
Something quite different happens with what are called contradictions. When we are unable to carry out our central project, when events propel us in a direction away from what we desire, when we find ourselves trapped in a vicious circle from which we cannot escape, when we do not have even minimal control over our lives, then we are ensnared by contradiction.
In the stream of life, contradiction is a sort of countercurrent that carries us backward in hopeless retreat. This is incoherence in its crudest form. In a situation of contradiction, one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions oppose each other. And though in spite of everything it is always possible to give direction to one’s life, one has to know when to act. In the routine of daily life we often lose sight of whether or not our actions are timely, and this occurs because so many of the things we do are codified or set by convention. But when it comes to major difficulties and contradictions, we must not make decisions that expose us to catastrophe.
In general terms, what we need to do is to retreat when faced with a great force, and then advance with resolution when this force has weakened. There is, however, a great difference between the timid, who retreat or become paralyzed when faced with any difficulty, and those who take action to surmount the difficulties, knowing that it is precisely by advancing that they will be able to get through the problems.
At times it may happen that it is not possible to go forward immediately because a problem arises that is beyond our strength, and to tackle it head on without due care could lead to disaster. This problem we are facing that is now so large is also, however, dynamic, and the relationship of forces will change, either because our influence grows or because the problem’s influence weakens. Once the previous balance of forces has shifted in our favor, that is the moment to advance with resolution, for indecision or delay at that point will only allow further and perhaps unfavorable changes in the balance of forces. Well-timed action is the best tool to produce a change in the direction of one’s life. 13. Growing Adaptation as an Advance Toward Coherence
Let us further consider the theme of direction in life – of the coherence we want to achieve. To propose a direction toward coherence raises the question: To which situations should we adapt? To adapt to things that lead away from coherence would, of course, be highly incoherent, and opportunists suffer from a serious shortsightedness on precisely this point. They believe that the best way to live is simply to accept everything, to adapt to everything. They think that to accept everything, as long as it comes from those with power, is to be well-adapted. But it is clear that their lives of dependence are very far removed from what could be understood as coherence.
It is useful to distinguish three kinds of adaptation: being unadapted, which stops us from extending our influence; decreasing adaptation, in which we do not go beyond accepting the established conditions in our environment; and growing adaptation, through which we build our influence in the direction of the proposals outlined here.
To close, let us synthesize the themes of this letter:
1. Driven by the technological revolution, the world is undergoing rapid change, which is colliding with established structures and the formative experience and habits of life of both individuals and societies.
2. As change makes more factors in society become “out of phase,” this generates growing crises in every field, and there is no reason to suppose this will diminish; on the contrary it will tend to intensify. 3. The unexpectedness of today’s events clouds our ability to foresee the direction that these events, the people around us, and ultimately our own lives will take. 4. Many of the things we used to think and to believe in no longer work. Nor do we see adequate solutions forthcoming from any society, any institution, or any individual – all of whom suffer the same ills. 5. If one decides to stand up to these problems, one must give direction to one’s life, striving for coherence among one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. And because we do not live in isolation, we must extend this coherence to our relationships with others, treating them as we want to be treated. While it is not possible to fulfill these two proposals rigorously, nonetheless they constitute the direction in which we need to advance, which we will be able to accomplish above all if we make these proposals permanent references, reflecting on them deeply. 6. We live in immediate relationship with others, and it is in this environment that we must act to give a favorable direction to our lives. This is not a psychological question, a matter that can be resolved solely in the head of an isolated individual, it is related to the concrete situation in which each of us lives.
7. Being consistent with the proposals we are attempting to carry forward leads us to the conclusion that it would be useful to extend to society as a whole those elements that are positive for ourselves and our immediate environment. Together with others who are moving in this direction, we will put into practice the most appropriate means to allow a new form of solidarity to find expression. Thus, even when we act very specifically in our own immediate environment we will not lose sight of the global situation that affects all human beings and that requires our help, just as we need the help of others.
8. The precipitous changes in today’s world lead us to to seriously propose the need for a new direction in life. 9. Coherence does not begin and end in oneself, rather it is related to one’s social environment, to other people. Solidarity is an aspect of personal coherence. 10. Proportion in one’s activities consists of establishing one’s priorities in life, of not letting them grow out of balance, and basing one’s actions on these priorities. 11. Well-timed actions involve retreating when faced with a great force, and advancing with resolution when it weakens. When one is subject to contradiction, this idea is important in making a change of direction in one’s life. 12. It is unwise to be unadapted to our environment, which leaves us without the capacity to change anything. It is equally unwise to follow a course of decreasing adaptation to an environment in which we limit ourselves to accepting the established conditions. Growing adaptation consists of increasing the influence we have in our environment as we advance in the direction of coherence.
With this letter I send my warmest regards,
Silo
December 17, 1991
Fourth Letter to My Friends
Dear Friends,
In previous letters I have given my views on society, human groups, and individuals in relation to this moment of change and loss of references in which we happen to live. I critiqued certain negative tendencies in the development of events and outlined the better-known positions held by those who claim to have answers to the urgent concerns of these times.
It should be clear that all of these considerations, whether well or badly formulated, correspond to my particular point of view, and this in turn finds its foundation in a certain set of ideas. No doubt due to an awareness of this on the part of some of my correspondents, I have received encouragement to make more explicit from what point of view, from “where,” my critiques and proposals are developed. After all, in the course of our daily lives ideas occur to us that may or may not be very original, but that in any case we don’t claim to justify. And increasingly we find that we hold one idea today and the opposite one tomorrow, without going beyond the frivolity of an everyday appreciation of things. Each day, then, we believe less – not only in the opinions of others but even in our own – as we become accustomed to seeing opinions as something transient, changing from hour to hour as they fluctuate with the volatility of the stock market. And if among these varied opinions some do possess greater permanence, it is only because they are consecrated by the fashion of the day, which will always be replaced by the fashion of tomorrow. I am not defending the value of unchanging opinions, I am simply pointing out the current lack of consistency among opinions generally. In truth it would be very interesting for changes in people’s opinions to come about based on an internal logic and not simply as though bending before every erratic wind. But who today has any taste for internal logic, with so many flailing around as though drowning in these turbulent times. Even as I write this, I am keenly aware that what I say will not even be able to enter the heads of certain readers, because they will have failed to find one of the three possible codes they demand, which are: 1. That this letter provides them with entertainment; or
2. That this letter provides them with something they can use at once in their business; or
3. That this letter coincides with what is consecrated by fashion.
I am certain that these few paragraphs beginning with “Dear Friends” and extending to here will leave certain readers as thoroughly bewildered as if they were written in Sanskrit. Yet every day these same persons understand matters of great difficulty ranging from sophisticated banking operations to the exquisite niceties of computer network administration. Somehow, however, such people find it impossible to understand that in this letter I am speaking of opinions, of certain points of view, and of the ideas that serve as their foundation – and of the impossibility that they will understand even the simplest of these things if these matters do not correspond to the landscape they have assembled in the course of their educations and their compulsions. So this is how things stand! Having addressed that question, I will now try to summarize in this letter the ideas that form the foundation of my views, critiques, and proposals. I will exercise care in presenting things not to go much beyond the level of advertising slogans because, as we are cautioned by many learned and expert journalists, organized ideas are “ideologies,” and these, like doctrines, are today only instruments of brainwashing employed by those who oppose free trade and social economics in the marketplace of opinion, which these guardians so carefully regulate for our benefit. Those people who conform to the demands of post-modernism today – who heed the requisites of haute couture with evening wear, flashy ties, shoulder pads, running shoes, and dapper jackets, who follow the dictums of deconstructionist architecture and destructured decor – demand of us that the elements of our discourse not fit together. And let us not forget that their critique of language repudiates as well all that is systematic, all that is structural, and everything related to processes! Of course, it will come as no surprise that this position corresponds to the dominant ideology of the Company, in whose representatives there is a horror of history, just as they are horrified at ideas in whose formation they have not had a hand and in which they have not been able to purchase a substantial percentage of shares.
All bantering aside, let us now begin with a brief inventory of our ideas, at least those that seem most important. (Much of what follows was included in a talk presented by the author in Santiago, Chile, on May 23, 1991).
1. The Starting Point for Our Ideas
We do not initiate our conception of things with the affirmation of generalities, but rather in the study of the particulars of human life: what is particular to existence, what is particular to the personal register of thinking, feeling, and acting. This initial position means that the conception outlined here is incompatible with any system that starts from an idea, the material, the unconscious, the will, society, and so forth.
If someone accepts or rejects a given conception of things – however logical or eccentric it may be – it is always the person who is in play, accepting or rejecting this conception. The person does this, not society, or the unconscious, or matter. Let us speak, then, of human life. When I observe myself, not from a physiological point of view but from an existential one, I find myself here, in a world that is given, neither made nor chosen by me. I find that I am in a situation with, in relationship with phenomena that, beginning with my own body, are inescapable. My body is at once the fundamental constituent of my existence and, at the same time, a phenomenon homogenous with the natural world in which it acts and on which the world acts. But the nature of my body has important differences for me from other phenomena, to wit:
1. I have an immediate register of my body;
2. I have a register, mediated by my body, of external phenomena; and
3. Some of my body’s operations are accessible to my immediate intention. 2. The Human Being: Nature, Intention, and Opening
It happens, however, that the world appears not simply as a conglomeration of natural objects, it appears as an articulation of other human beings and of objects, signs, and codes they have produced or modified. The intention that I am aware of in myself appears as a fundamental element for the interpretation of the behavior of others, and just as I constitute the social world by comprehending intentions, so am I constituted by it.
Of course, I am speaking here of intentions that manifest in corporeal action. It is through the corporeal expressions of, or by perceiving the situation of the other, that I am able to comprehend the meanings of the other, the intention of the other. Moreover, natural or human objects appear as either pleasurable or painful to me, and so I modify my situation, trying to place myself in favorable relationship to them.
In this way, I am not closed to the world of the natural and other human beings, rather precisely what characterizes me is opening. My consciousness has been configured intersubjectively in that it uses codes of reasoning, emotional models, schemes of action that I register as “mine,” but that I also recognize in others. And, of course, my body is open to the world insofar as I both perceive and act over the world. The natural world, as distinct from the human, appears to me as without intention. Of course, I can imagine that the stones, plants, and stars possess intention, but I find no way to hold an effective dialogue with them. Even those animals in which at times I glimpse the spark of intelligence appear as basically impenetrable to me and changing only slowly from within their own natures. I observe insect societies that are completely structured, higher mammals that employ rudimentary technology but still only replicate such codes in a slow process of genetic change, as if they were always the first representatives of their respective species. And when I observe the benefits of those plants and animals that have been modified and domesticated by humanity, I see human intention opening its way and humanizing the world.
3. The Human Being: Social and Historical Opening
To define human beings in terms of their sociability seems to be inadequate, because this does not distinguish them from many other species. Nor does capacity for work stand out as their most notable characteristic when compared to that of more powerful animals. Not even language defines them in their essence, for we know of numerous animals that use various codes and forms of communication.
All new human beings, in contrast, find themselves living in a world that is modified by others, and it is in their being constituted by this world of intentions that I discover their human capacity of accumulation within and incorporation to the temporal – that is, I discover not simply a social dimension but a socio-historical one. Viewing things in this way, we can attempt a definition of the human being as follows: Human beings are historical beings whose mode of social action transforms their own nature. If I accept the above, I will also have to accept that such beings are capable of intentionally transforming their own physical constitutions. And this is just what is taking place.
This process began with the use of instruments by human beings which, placed before their bodies as external “prostheses,” allowed them to extend the reach of their hands and their senses and to increase both their capacity for work and its quality. Although not endowed by nature to function in either aerial or aquatic environments, they have nevertheless created means to move through these media and have even begun to leave their natural environment, the planet Earth. Today, moreover, they have begun to penetrate their bodies, replacing organs, intervening in their brain chemistry, carrying out fertilization in vitro, and even manipulating their own genes. If by the word “nature” one is trying to indicate something permanent and unchanging, then today this idea has been rendered seriously inadequate, even when applied to what is most object-like about human beings, that is, to their bodies. And in light of this, regarding any “natural morality,” “natural law,” or “natural institutions,” it is clear that nothing in this field exists through nature, but on the contrary that everything is socio-historical. 4. The Transforming Action of the Human Being
Along with the conception of a human nature is another prevalent conception that has asserted the passivity of the consciousness. This ideology has considered the human being to be an entity that functions primarily in response to stimuli from the natural world. What began as crude sensualism has gradually been displaced by historicist currents that, at their core, have preserved the same conception of a passive consciousness. And even when they have emphasized the consciousness’s activity in and transformation of the world more than the interpretation of its activities, they have still conceived of its activity as resulting from conditions external to the consciousness. Today, these old prejudices regarding human nature and the passivity of the consciousness are once again being asserted, this time transformed into neo-evolutionary theories embodying such views as natural selection, determined through the struggle for the survival of the fittest.
In the version currently in fashion, now transplanted into the human world, this sort of zoological conception attempts to go beyond earlier dialectics of race or class by asserting a dialectic in which it is supposed that all social activity regulates itself automatically according to “natural” economic laws. Thus, once again, the concrete human being is overwhelmed and objectified. I have noted those conceptions that, to explain the human being, have begun from theoretical generalities and maintained the existence of an unchanging human nature and a passive consciousness. We maintain, quite the opposite, the need to start from human particularity, that the human being is a socio-historical and non-natural phenomenon, and that the human consciousness is active in transforming the world in accordance with its intention. We see human life as always taking place in a situation, and the human body as an immediately perceived natural object, immediately subject as well to numerous dictates of each person’s intention. The following questions therefore arise: – How is it that the consciousness is active, that is, how is it that its intentions can act upon the body and through the body transform the world? – How is it that the human being is constituted as a socio-historical being? These questions must be answered from particular existence so as not to fall again into theoretical generalities, from which a dubious system of interpretation might be derived.
To answer the first question, one must apprehend with immediate evidence how human intention acts over the body. To answer the second, one must begin from evidence of the temporality and intersubjectivity of the human being, rather than beginning from supposed general laws of history and society.
I will not go into greater detail here regarding these questions, as this would take us away from the broad themes of the present letter. For a more extensive treatment I refer you to two essays in the work Contributions to Thought1 that deal with the above questions. The first essay, “Psychology of the Image,” studies the function that the image fulfills in the consciousness, highlighting its aptitude for moving the body through space. The second essay, “Historiological Discussions,” studies the theme of historicity and sociability. 5. Overcoming Pain and Suffering as Basic Vital Projects
In the work Contributions to Thought it is observed that the natural destiny of the human body is the world, and to verify this it is sufficient to observe the body’s conformation. The body’s sensory apparatus and those for feeding, locomotion, reproduction, and so on are naturally shaped to be in the world. Further, it is through the body that the image launches its transforming charge – not to copy the world, not to be a reflection of a given situation, but on the contrary to modify a given situation. In the course of daily events, objects are either limitations on or amplifications of corporeal possibilities, and the bodies of others appear as a multiplication of those possibilities insofar as they are governed by intentions that are recognized as similar to those governing one’s own body. Due to the condition of finiteness and temporo-spatial limitation in which they find themselves and which they register as physical pain and mental suffering, human beings find it necessary to transform both the world and themselves. Overcoming pain is not simply an animal response, then, but a temporal configuration in which the future is paramount, and which becomes transformed into a fundamental impulse of life even though it may not be present as something urgent at any given moment. In this way, and aside from the immediate, reflex, and natural response to pain, the deferred response to avoid pain is spurred by psychological suffering in the face of danger, re-presented as future possibility or as present fact when pain is present in other human beings.
Overcoming pain, then, appears as a basic project that guides action. This is what has made possible communication among distinct human bodies and intentions in what is known as the social constitution. The social constitution is as historical as human life; it configures human life. Its transformation is ongoing, but in a different way than in nature where change does not occur as the result of intentions.
6. Image, Belief, Look, and Landscape
Let us suppose that one day I go into my room, and I see the window. I recognize it, it is familiar to me. I have not only a fresh perception of it, but also acting in me are my previous perceptions of it which, converted into images, have been retained within me. Suddenly, I notice a crack in one corner of the windowpane. “That wasn’t there,” I say to myself, on comparing the new perception with what I retain from my previous perceptions. And I also feel a sense of surprise. The window of previous acts of perception has been retained in me, but not passively as in a photograph, rather actively, in the way that images function. What has been retained in me operates in the present with respect to what I perceive, even though the formation of those retentions pertains to the past. In this way the past is always present, always being updated.
Before entering my room I took it for granted, it was a given, that the window would be there in good condition. It was not that I was thinking about it, but simply that I was counting on it. The window itself was not explicitly present in my thoughts at that moment, rather it was co-present. It was within the horizon of objects contained in my room.
It is due to what is co-present, to this retention that is updated and superimposed on the perception, that the consciousness infers more than it perceives. And it is in this phenomenon that it is possible to see the most elemental functioning of belief. In this example I would say to myself: “I believed the window was in good condition.” If upon entering my room I had seen phenomena proper to a different field of objects, for example a motorboat or a camel, this surrealistic situation would have seemed unbelievable, not because those objects do not exist but simply because their location in my room would be outside the field of my co-presence, outside the landscape I have formed that acts within me, superimposing itself on every single thing that I perceive.
Now then, in any present instant of my consciousness I can observe the inter-crossing of what has been retained and what is being futurized in me as they act co-presently and in structure. In my consciousness, the present instant is constituted as an active temporal field of three different times. Here things take place very differently from the way they occur in calendar time, where today is separate and distinct from yesterday or tomorrow. On the calendar and on the clock, now is different from no longer and from not yet, and events are ordered one after the other in a linear succession that I cannot claim to be a structure, but is rather a subgroup within a complete series that I call a calendar. I will return to these ideas again when we consider the themes of historicity and temporality later on.
For now, let us continue with the previous notion that the consciousness infers more than it perceives, through its use of what comes from the past as retentions, superimposed on present perception. In each look or act of looking that I direct toward an object, what I see is distorted. This is not meant in the same sense that modern physics explains our inability to see the atom or wavelengths that lie above or below our thresholds of perception. What I am referring to is the distortion related to the superposition of the images of retentions and futurizations on perceptions in the present.
Thus, when I contemplate a beautiful sunset in the countryside, the natural landscape that I observe is not determined by and in itself. Rather, I determine it, I constitute it through the aesthetic ideal that I hold. And the special peace that I feel gives me the illusion that I contemplate passively, when in reality I am actively superimposing numerous of my own internal contents on the natural object itself. This phenomenon holds not only for the present example, but for all looks that I direct toward reality.
7. The Generations and Historical Moments
Social organization continues and expands, but this cannot take place solely through the presence of social objects that have been produced in the past, that we make use of in the present, and that we project into the future. Such a mechanism is too simple to explain the process of civilization.
Continuity is given by the different generations of human beings, which do not exist side by side, separate and apart from each other, but rather coexist, interact, and transform each other. These distinct generations, which make continuity and development possible, are dynamic structures. They are social time in motion, without which civilization would fall into a natural state, losing its character of being a society.
It happens, moreover, that in every historical moment the generations that coexist have distinct temporal levels, retentions, and futurizations that configure different landscapes of situation and belief. For the active generations, the bodies and behavior of children and the elderly constitute a presence that betrays where they have come from and where they are going. So, too, both ends of this triple relationship can recognize their extreme temporal positions. And this situation never stops or remains static, because while the active generations age and the elderly die, the children grow up and begin to occupy active positions. In the meantime, new births continuously reconstitute society.
When, as an abstraction, we “interrupt” this ceaseless flow, we can speak of a certain historical moment in which all members located in the same social setting can be considered contemporaries, living in one same time. But it should be noted that not all contemporaries are coetaneous, that is, they are not all the same age, nor do they have the same internal temporality in terms of landscapes of formation, present situation, and projects. What happens in fact is that a generational dialectic is established between those who are in the “layers” that lie closest to each other and who are trying to occupy the central activity, the social present, in accordance with their different interests and beliefs. It is this internal social temporality, and not as some philosophies of history would have it the succession of phenomena placed linearly one after another as in calendar time, that structurally explains the historical becoming in which the different generational accumulations – that is, the accumulating landscapes of the distinct generations – interact. Constituted socially in an historical world in which I continue to configure my landscape, I interpret that toward which I direct my look. This is my personal landscape, but it is in addition a collective landscape for large numbers of people in this time.
As has been previously observed, different generations coexist in the same present time. As an elementary example, those who were born before the transistor was invented and those born into the world of computers are both now living in the same moment. Numerous such coexisting configurations differ from each other in their experiences – not only in the ways that they act, but also in how they think and how they feel – and what used to work in one epoch regarding social relationships and modes of production has slowly, or at times abruptly, ceased to function. People expected a certain result in the future; that future arrived, but things did not turn out as projected. And that former mode of action, that former sensibility, that former ideology – none of these any longer coincide with the new landscape now asserting itself in society. 8. Violence, the State, and the Concentration of Power
Human beings, through their opening, their freedom to choose between situations, their ability both to defer responses and to imagine their future, also have the possibility to negate themselves, to negate aspects of their bodies, to negate their bodies completely as in suicide, or to negate other human beings. It is this freedom that has allowed a few to illegitimately appropriate the social whole, that is, to negate the freedom and intentionality of others, reducing those others to prostheses, to instruments of the intentions of the few. Therein lies the essence of discrimination, with physical, economic, racial, sexual, religious and other forms violence as its methodology.
It is through power over the apparatus of social regulation and control, that is, the State, that violence can be established and perpetuated. Because of this, social organization will require an advanced type of coordination that is safe from any concentration of power, whether private or of the State.
When it is claimed that privatizing all areas of the economy will make society safe from the power of the State, what is not disclosed in this is that the real problem lies in the monopoly or oligopoly, which simply transfers power from the hands of the State to the hands of a para-State, no longer managed by a bureaucratic minority but now by that private minority itself as it continues to advance this process of concentration.
The various social structures from the most primitive to the most sophisticated are all proceeding toward ever greater concentration. Eventually they will reach the point that they become immobilized and begin a stage of dissolution, a stage that will give rise to new processes of reorganization, but at a higher level than before.
From the beginning of history, society has proceeded toward globalization, and there will come a time of maximum concentration of arbitrary power, displaying the character of a world empire, which will be without any further possibilities of expansion. The collapse of this global system will follow the logic of the structural dynamics of all closed systems, in which disorder necessarily tends to increase.
Just as the process of the current structures tends toward globalization, however, so does the process of humanization proceed toward increasing opening of the human being, moving beyond both the State and para-State toward decentralization and de-concentration in favor of a superior form of coordination among autonomous social particularities.
Whether everything ends up in chaos and civilization starts anew, or we begin a stage of progressive humanization, does not depend on inexorable mechanical designs, but on the intentions of individuals and peoples, on their commitment to changing the world, and on an ethic of liberty, which by definition is something that cannot be imposed. And we will aspire no longer to formal democracy, controlled until now by the special interests of the various factions, but instead to real democracy in which direct participation can be realized instantaneously, thanks to communication technologies that are every day more able to bring this about.
9. The Human Process
Those who have diminished the humanity of others have in so doing necessarily brought about new pain and suffering, rekindling in the heart of society the age-old struggle against natural adversity – but now between on one side those who wish to “naturalize” other human beings, society, and history, and on the other side the oppressed, who need to humanize themselves in humanizing the world. That is why to humanize is to move beyond objectification to affirm the intentionality of every human being and the primacy of the future over the present situation. It is the image and representation of a future that is both better and possible that allows the modification of the present and makes every revolution and all change possible. This is why the pressure of oppressive conditions is not in itself sufficient to set change in motion, rather it is necessary to realize that such change is possible and that it depends on human actions.
This struggle is not between mechanical forces, it is not a natural reflex. It is, rather, a struggle between human intentions. And that is precisely what permits us to speak of oppressors and the oppressed, of the just and the unjust, of heroes and cowards. This is the only thing that allows the meaningful practice of social solidarity and commitment to the liberation of those who suffer discrimination, whether they are a majority or a minority.
For more detailed considerations regarding violence, the State, institutions, the law, and religion, and so as not to exceed the limits of this brief letter, I refer you to the work entitled The Human Landscape.2
I do not believe that the meaning of human actions has to do with senseless upheavals or “useless passions” that end in nothing but absurd disintegration. I believe that the destiny of humanity is oriented by intention, and that as people become increasingly conscious of this intention it opens the way toward a universal human nation. From what we have previously seen it is abundantly clear that human existence does not simply begin and end in a vicious circle of self-enclosure, and that a life aspiring to coherence must open itself, expanding its influence toward people and social ambits, advancing not only a concept or a few ideas but precise actions that extend the growth of freedom.
In the next letter I will leave aside these strictly doctrinal themes in order to focus once more on themes involving the current situation and personal action in the social world.
With this letter I send my warmest regards,
Silo
December 19, 1991
Fifth Letter to My Friends
Dear Friends,
Along with many people who are concerned about the unfolding of present-day events, I frequently find myself in the company of those who have been active in progressive political parties and organizations. Many of them have yet to recover from the shock they received with the fall of “real socialism.” Today, all over the world, activists by the hundreds of thousands are choosing to withdraw into the concerns of their daily lives, making it understood with this attitude that they believe their old ideals have been foreclosed. What for me represented simply one more episode in the disintegration of centralized structures – indeed something anticipated for over two decades – came for them as an unexpected catastrophe. Yet this is not the time for everyone to simply drop out of sight, because as the current political form dissolves this leaves a disparity of forces that is opening the way for a system that is monstrous in both its conduct and its direction.
A couple of years ago I attended a rally where older workers, working mothers with their children, and small groups of young people raised their clenched fists together as they sang the words to their anthem in unison. Their banners were waving as the echoes of their glorious calls to struggle rolled across the scene. And upon seeing this I thought of just how much good will, risk, tragedy, and striving, all moved by heartfelt convictions, had been lost along a road leading to the absurd negation of any possibilities of transformation.
How much I would have liked to accompany that moving scene with a song to the ideals of old militants – those who, giving no thought to the outcome, remained steadfast in their combative pride. And all of this gave rise in me to strongly mixed feelings, and today at a distance I ask myself: What has happened to the many good people who struggled in solidarity for something greater than their own immediate interests, for wh |
|
