The Naïveté of the Smart

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, September 23rd, 2000

The 20th century thought itself very smart because it discovered, with Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, that the highest human qualities could cover prejudices of class, repressed desires and the search for compensations for resentment.

In light of these revelations, the image of the great men the previous centuries had exalted shattered into a dust cloud of small miseries, to such a degree that it has become necessary to explain their feats and notable works as imaginary projections of their cultural environment.

By the end of the century, it has become a fad in academic circles to produce pejorative biographies, committed to bringing up the sins, flaws and blind spots in the souls of the best individuals, so as to suggest to the masses of readers that in those characters nothing special existed that had not been put there by fame’s serendipity, by a well-orchestrated marketing campaign or by a convergence of arrangements convenient to the interests of the dominant class.

Having taken then to extreme consequences the modern impulse to delight in masochistic self-corrosion, the 20th century seemed not to have a greater motive for pride than its stubborn suspiciousness which made it, after so many centuries of dreams and delusions, the first not to allow self-deceit.

This bizarre cold-eyed arrogance, which rejoices in the contemplation of its own misery because doing so invests its bearer with the sovereign power of undoing with a laconic statement the highest values and hopes, is the perfect inversion of Christian humility, which only searches out its own sins with such rigidity so as to through them exalt the glory of Divine healing.

While the Christian humiliates himself so God may exalt him, modern man humiliates himself to humiliate others. God frightens us because He keeps in His hands, and not in ours, the secret of salvation; the discourse of modernity scares us because it persuades us that it holds the ultimate secret that there is no salvation.

The model of supreme wisdom to which modern intelligentsia aspires is certainly the devil. He cannot save us; but he can justify our damnation in ever increasingly scientific ways. This demonic ascension has become so disseminated and obligatory in the academic environment, that it has practically identified itself with the image of scientific knowledge in general, to the point that, when one speaks of faith and charity nowadays, it is often under the tone of some paternalistic concession that intellectual rigidity makes to childish needs of consolation and illusion unsurpassable by that majority of the population who has not yet reached the highest levels of conscience reserved for academics with cold eyes and mocking grins.

It was in an advanced stage of this development that the idea emerged to crumble, after the divine images, the very human qualities that manifested them. The attraction exercised over the masses of ordinary readers by the pejorative biographies and the insulting diagnoses of the psyche of great men can be easily explained by the mechanism of seduction. “Seduction” derives from the Latin sub ducere, “conduction or attraction from below”: dominating the mind of a subject by appealing to his worst qualities, to his weaknesses and his fears.

Above all to envy. Envy is a feeling of inferiority which finds relief in the contemplation of others’ real or imaginary inferiority. Incapable of overcoming his own weaknesses, the envious man finds consolation in the idea that everybody has such flaws in equal measure. It is the democracy of complexes.

This kind of academic literature aims at awakening in the reader that which John Le Carré called “typical corrosive perception of the weak”. To have disseminated such a thing among the educated classes made the 20th century feel particularly smart.

But what will seem supremely naïve to future historians is that such vast numbers among the educated classes of a certain age believed in the possibility of apprehending the personality and the genius of a Goethe, of a Shakespeare – and that is not to mention saints and prophets – through the examination of the flaws and sins they had in common with the rest of humankind, without taking into account what they had that was different. If their weaknesses are precisely the same as everybody else’s, it still needs to be explained why not everybody manages to write “Faust” or “Hamlet” – and much less operate miraculous healings or make prophecies confirmed by time.

To relieve the stress of this uncomfortable question, academic engineering conceived theories such as desconstrutivism and the aesthetic of reception, which, deviating the attention of the readers from the structural unity in which the superior meaning of the great works is apprehended, dispersed their intelligence in the contemplation of the infinity of separated elements that compose them or the inexhaustible variety of reactions that the public of various times and places had to these works.

Invariably, to the dispersion of intelligence follows the crumbling of the object: in the end what is negated is the very integrity of the works, which is the same as saying: their very existence.

By these means, the uncomfortable feeling mentioned above is definitely solved, since no one can feel humiliated by what does not exist.

That thousands of envious people around the world should give in so easily to the temptation of this cheap relief and piously believe in childish intellectual tricks conceived to obtain it, is what will make of the 20th century, in the vision of times to come, the most naïve century of History.

Translation: Fábio Lins - Proof Reading: Jacqueline Baca