Translated by: Joaquín Hernández Ibáñez (www.galeon.com/jhitranslations) - joaquinhernandezibanez[at]yahoo.es
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
<<European people are the inventors of individualism – synthesis of Socratic and Christian traditions – [an individualism that must] be adapted to social considerations (…) by means of institutions>>
Salvador de Madariaga, “Carácter y destino en Europa”, 1980, Espasa-Calpe.
Masses helped bourgeoisie in the fight against aristocrats’ privileges, giving way to the so-called modern and revolutionary society. In the era of this modernity’s obvious crisis, they gave their freedom to populist leaders where they could harbour improvement hopes, promoted in promises of popular government, being these either from proletarians or from socially mediocre people.
Some thinkers and intellectuals of the last century European post-war focused about the sociological amazement coming from individual submission, -not to the majority or mass agreements, as it would be hoped in a democratic system, but just to the delusions of an elite, groups of leaders of dictators-.
The atrocities committed in the name of an ideology, belief or religion, came true once the masses, not feeling safe and watching their people impelled to live life with the challenges and achievements of a free man or woman (diminished in their self-esteem by science and the techniques that make them worry less about hunger and natural diseases and more about themselves) decide to give their freedom in exchange of a virtual leader or leader belief which allows them to be others the ones who take the blame and think for them. This sovereignty surrender, in exchange of a childish security feeling, brought terrible consequences.
According to some thinkers of aristocratic mentality, good taste and values from nobility and cultured elite have been vulgarized, confronted by the mass tyranny throughout the public and formal instruction. The common of people demands to intervene in their own destiny and their taste to be considered the best for the generality. A philosopher dared to affirm that the romantic love, so universal, is just within the reach of a few people, and what the majority calls “to fall in love” is not but just conventionalism, or, as a post-modern thinker would put in the same tune nowadays, an invention of musical TV channels’ pop songs.
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Historically, the more cultural and educational level folks have had, the more autonomy they have demanded. It is not strange that the Soviet Union collapsed at the time when the economical crisis, -urged on the weapon race pressure-, joined in the glasnost or recovery of the freedom of expression rights that Gorbachov encouraged together with the perestroika, forcing the already cultured, -thanks to the educations of masses-, Soviet society, to ask for the idealized dreams of Occident. It is not strange, having learnt from historical examples like these, the nowadays disinformation we are subdued to by the concentration in small groups and hands of all the mass media of the world, broadcasting an excess of slanting and insignificant information to hide diversity.
Like present reaction towards so much pollution, Internet can be taken as an example. A virtual space that is not anonymous in democracies and that is more controlled than most people think, and that in dictatorial regimens is censored or turned off. The network of networks has become a centre for amateur journalists, crammed with forums and blogs where the question is to raise a particular voice at an early time, from the free citizen or the intoxicated one, against those official editorials lines which are broadcasted by the classic media according to the events.
The written and plebeian word, spread throughout the digital world, has come back when some people announced its decease before the audiovisual empire and the impossibility to tell own truths before the typical station edits it. Censorship now called political correctness.
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When I was a child people told us that in the future we will reach the stars and we will be immortal; maybe they were fairy tales to prepare us to the virtual future we were doomed to, longing other inexistent worlds to forget about the own one.
Now we would be happy just living in harmony with life here, in a more modest Earth.
<<As mentioned above, those media that are addressed to the larger audience (and in particular TV and print) do not emphasize youth's civic engagement but rather their violent behaviours and their detachment from civic values. Their representation revolves around their acts of vandalism, drugs use, lack of humanitarian engagement and political apathy
We can imagine very easily that the type of civil commitment that interests the youth of 2004 is not placed at national level, as it was the case in the last century. Youth's political commitment is often emotional and focussed on concrete realities. Their claims are usually extremely precise, but not political or institutional. We are far away from a traditional military attitude, today people act led either by enthusiasm or by their absolute rejection, without forgetting that the culture of transgression plays a determinant role.
Youth's commitment exists, is very concrete and works mainly at a planetary level. Kyoto, Porto Alegre, the no-global movement, Amnesty International, the action of non-governmental organizations are triggers that will mobilize them. It seems legitimate to argue that youths feel citizens of the world, of another world, a different world, more human and more pacific. Nonetheless, the media that are destined to the big public rarely mirror this reality. Similarly, the media destined to youth rarely mention these themes. There are some exceptions in political songs and in web sites that attempt to be "alternative" and advance counter-cultures. Two examples will suffice to provide evidence of that: Manu Chao's Clandestino which tackles universalism, no-global culture and illegal immigration, and Renaud's Manhattan-Kaboul which evokes the Youth taken in hostage by History, with its wars and its interest's conflicts>>
Glocal Youth. “Youth and media in Europe - Representation of citizens”, 2004, http://www.glocalyouth.net/eng/rep_europa.htm
Why some European young people, as a matter of law because they have been born and they reside in France, are still confined in depressing outskirts, bad connected with the downtown? Why is it strange that they feel furious and, in a rather organized way, in surprising vandal acts, devote their free time to the new sport of burning cars in the public street? Will it have something to do with the fact that their parents and grandparents emigrated to that country as colony citizens or on behalf of them, and now, as it happened in medieval times, the blood in their veins hasn’t got enough pedigree to have recourse to national citizen as a matter of law?
A huge mass of children and young people, from many different cultures, in all corners of the world, are now members of the same global village. New generations, not being mingled yet but for the first time in History, are being educated, in an informal yet influenced way, under common coordinates, cultural, social and especially vital ones, which I dare to summarize in:
- Seize the moment, carpe diem, it just matters the here and now. “Live fast and leave a nice corpse”.
- Violence as the only way to fight the different ones, to triumph and to survive in the fight against non-satisfied necessities.
- Stop thinking, because it means effort and it makes existence less beautiful.
- Abandon oneself to the aseptic immediate and most pleasant stimuli from virtual recreations.
- Avoid anxiety and discomfort, avoiding life troubles by means of drugs, both legal and illegal, prescribed by doctors and authorized staff.
- Transform sex in a consumerism and recreation object, instead of a great opportunity of using its wild and full energy as experimentation resource to the service of non-verbal communication among individuals.
- Deny death, its thought, its presence in the public sphere and even its place in life, increasing the practice of corpses cremation to the detriment of burials which demand an own place.
We already know, thanks to last century experiences, that leading a complete new generation under the same baton was and is the intention of dictatorships and megalomaniac people and can lead towards disaster. It will be in our hands to pass the baton we don’t finish running, or to use batons in behalf of our village family quarrels, where the new lives are always the ones used as cannon fodder and selfishness shield of the old generations’ madness.
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We started 21st century in a Europe whose background situation doesn’t seem very different from the one at the beginning of 20th century, when the Allies encouraged two World Wars after the breakdown of modern ideals which didn’t solve Europe’s problems. The European Economic Community and the stage of the Cold War, which some people naïvely consider as that one where the Third officiously ended, prevented a new and real world confrontation. The threat of a Mutual Assured Destruction calmed down in truce the reality of worldwide non-satisfied individual and social demands.
Wars haven’t disappeared as it was expected after the horrors of the First World War last century. Its ghost goes round the planet, not a worldwide threat this time, but global. Europe should try to be an added value to the world, before the absence of a larger demographic weight or raw material that do exist in other regions, trying to be a Peace power of the knowledge and the competences, which can only be achieved with an increase in education and the awareness of what they are and what they need to be their citizens. The reality is that Europe, in spite of denoted efforts, seems not to become the exception, “Talking Cricket” or desired arbitrator, but sometimes a scouting party in the global disaster riding the horse of his younger brother: USA.
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Post-modern politics follows a Chinese shadows game. The ones who promised to save the masses from the selfishness catastrophe of a few privileged ones have become proclaimed new saviours of our wallets. Our economic health as a thermometer of our spiritual health.
Ideologies have died for those politicians subsumed by the establishment, who have no scruples in borrowing contrary ideas among them and their parties, using the mask of confusion of the world turned upside down where everything is fine. You can find, with historical surprise, left-wings defending moral values or collective rights they denied in the past, like the homosexuals ones, considered as sick bourgeoisie rights by the past revolutionary left-wing. On the other hand, the conservative right-wing ones, forget about the tradition they defended so much to adopt without problems the liberalism. They mess up inside without knowing if that means they don’t have to pay attention to the moral teaching from their confessors (condescending, for example, their daughter to use miniskirt), o that they are free to do whatever they want with all the money that gets into their pockets, just to expose two little harmless examples.
Existing technology may allow us to stop depending on oil, dependency sustained by particular interests not by real necessities; undoubtedly allows participating directly in the taking of political decisions. The democratic representatives’ election process is out-of-date long time ago and citizens usually don’t belief in politicians more than they would do with other dogmatic leaders. It is not strange that everyday people don’t mobilize and much less that they protest. It is surprising, on the contrary, that there are still civil initiatives like the one which has concluded with the acceptance in the last Lisbon Treaty of the formula “a million signatures” of communitarian Europeans to propose legislative reforms which come from citizens and that are taken into account by the Commission.
The general low participation in elections, along both sides of the Atlantic, leaves the door open for political governments to disappear, in the very near future, replaced by private corporations of technocrats, who transform politics in a pantomime of the interest of the plutocracy of the capital with which it is already dancing almost completely. In the same way, appealing to their professionalization, armies are becoming private, clearly in the United States as more timidly in Europe, the last necessary and irreversible step to the dismantling of the democracy in favour of police oligarchy.
McLuhan, the famous visionary of the global village, said decades ago that politicians offered old answers to present questions. The written above partly deals with emphasizing that everyone, at the beginning of the new millennium, <<try to fly spaceships just knowing how to drive decimononic trains>>.
Our problems now are not just ours, but everyone’s, so part of the solutions resides in each of us.
<<Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité>>
In the Third world both shirtless missioners coexist with civil aid workers living in chalets full of comforts fortified like are fortified their original countries’ rich frontiers. They work and negotiate there to clean the consciences of the charitable inhabitants of the First World. Those who help the most helpless ones to try to survive human injustice, maybe do so by high humanist, religious or spiritual ideals. In most of the times, even unconsciously, they really act not because of philanthropic reasons but waiting the salvation in eternal life or hoping they are good people, which, independently we are so or not, it is always an ideal we aspire to, according to the education we have received.
It took a long time to change in Occident the charitable mentality of giving your wealth’s crumbs you have plenty of, by the one of teaching the helpless ones how to earn their daily living and strategies to leave their poverty. More complicated task, which requires a higher effort and which makes us really equal among human beings; equality that the richest ones, considering ourselves elected beings, want to avoid at all costs.
A lot of effort and money is invested in investigating the conditions which drive to poverty, assuming that they are the poor ones the ones to be blamed for their situation, whereas nobody seems to dare to invest their time and money in investigating the rich ones, just in case they discover that maybe they are the ones to be blamed, because of action or omission, for the real bad life conditions of the disinherited ones. Similar words were expressed by the anthropologist Marvin Harris with a critic towards the anthropology of poverty when there wasn’t an analogue one of the wealthy which could give more objectivity when dealing with the reasons why someone is excluded and, which is more important (something that fills with money the pockets of gurus, editorial companies and which crams the supermarkets’ shelves with self-help in use books), how to become rich, what makes the difference between the rich and the poor. These studies would help us to know better which success keys determine why a minority concentrates in their hands the resources and power vetoed to the great majority of the planet.
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The last handle to the modernism ideals was breaking down with the fall of the Berlin Wall and so, pure and apparently free commercial relationships ended the value of any human activity; the pragmatic philosophy spreads triumphantly to all life fields.
We are not worth anymore according to what we are or believe, only according to what we say or believe, would it be better or worse paid, in a press tribune.
We have become orphans and dreamless, worshiping our animal or technological pets, which caress us in exchange of daily feeding, believing in the dream that their love is true and not reptile. We buy things that, if they disappoint us, if we don’t like them anymore, or if they break down, are replaced by new ones, fulfilling that childish feeling of controlling our wishes. We avoid the common place where women and men are measured, among equals, in wishes, share happiness and troubles of life: the conflictive relationship that entails real human interaction.
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<<We don't need no education>>
Roger Waters. “The wall”, 1979, Pink Floyd.
Youth, education and society, magical trident. Human beings have the extraordinary ability to, not just learning, but teaching others, creating the so-called culture.
Education, -I hope not just for some utopian people-, should be based in the dialogue between different methods to create integrating cultures, instead of excluding the individual particularities, which, at the same time, will generate more culture because of its non-adapted diversity. Beyond the pragmatic reality, this should be the mission of those teachers who are truly worried by the society where they live, from the early moment we asked ourselves what and for what we educate, since the Greek sophists until present e-learning.
It is true that formal teaching is effective, because we quite soon forget the energy and way of being ourselves when we are children and young people, labelling that time as primitive and irresponsible.
Some young people can’t resist the penitence of education, most of the times of knowledge and ideologies, least of times of competences and development of own creativity, in a world of programmed instruction. To prevent they becoming asocial nihilists, other types of education can be used. Non-formal education is one of them, which should benefit all of us. Education in abilities, unaccredited but planned, with aims to reach and to evaluate if they have been reached, but out of exams and comparative competitive external ranges; even out of four walls. Education throughout sport, art, living together and above all, wit, so that young people are able to ‘learn to learn’ what is good for their individual life and society, beyond worrying about they will become later an hermit or a perpetual globe-trotter.
It was long time ago when the crisis of formal and school learning was announced. During the 20th century, the inefficacy of formal education to face social crisis, especially the ones that Europe faced against during the two World Wars, made obvious the necessity of changes in educative methodologies.
During the 60s, with the social revolutions which tried to find alternatives to the 19th century ideals which brought us to the Wars, they appeared a lot of concepts and methodologies to work in the field of education of abilities and attitudes, developed in the army and young work sectors among others, especially in the Anglo-Saxon field. Three kinds of global methodologies about education can be exposed, which tried to find their own space without integrating, facing today the necessity to build bridges which join them, with the hope of creating a better education, for a better society. These are called in a general way, formal, non-formal and informal education or learning and shyly, so as not to lose their social power the ones, their freshness and effectiveness the others, have slightly changed from being ignored to interact, so they visit each other copying ones or claiming their acknowledgement others.
A future fusion is necessary and longed to integrate the precised knowledge to be skilled enough to hold certain attitudes when you live for learning new things, practicing them and trying to create liveful societies. In the new era we are aware that learning is something without an expiring date and that happens all along our lives. We have to risk the knowledge adventure the same we have surrendered to the consumerism one, following the example of that master of the Ancient Greece who didn’t stop at his wish to learn how to play an instrument despite of their disciples commented in disbelief that he was too old to do it.
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At last we seem to be aware of the fundamental importance of the critic thinking and of not learning just that in which you are educated but in which you need for living, ‘learn to learn’, out of a strictness and imposition of timetables and master classes.
A small future hope may reside in the fact that the offering of different and opposite fundamental truths which the media offers us, the daily informative intoxication, could become us all, beginning with the young ones, in people able to learn critic thinking. Boomerang effect of the confusion and stopping to believe in immutable and deceit laws, abiding by the reality of facts and not by virtualities and lies of the interested interests.
<<I walk alone in the sunrise
the city desert
of angels>>
365 days [Unpublished].
In Europe there are no dictatorships anymore but it is full of mediocre dictators who would long to be so just for self-defence.
Facing the informative saturation and Kafkaesque complexity of the global world, a lot of people, young or not, prefer to think that they are chosen by the system of governments of the dominant multinational at that moment, like the Calvinists could think they were chosen by God because of their wealth. We can find them around us with a self-sufficiency and vain satisfaction airs which many times hide their fear of the day when their mask falls down, letting us see their useless authenticity, their reduction to a barcode, to end devoured by the other tigers that behave like him or her.
Others, more helpless or weak, accept the status quo with adoration, like the Big Brother was adored in the Orwellian novel, but this time a one without a real face, because it doesn’t need it, meanwhile we live in democracies where the monopoly of the ‘single thought’ impedes to become represented.
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A surprising component of the Hungarian mood is melancholy, the self-satisfaction in the pessimism they have. Feeling sorrow about oneself, without a particular reason, is like a national sport, as well as complaining a lot.
I remember once, János, one of my pleasant workmates, a romantic artist, grumpy and with the soul of a child, told me a sentence in Hungarian to cheer me up when there were problems among the crazy Europeans we were there: “Save yourself”. This way, coldly said, was surprising and it seemed to me a strange way to show support. Advising to sort problems out on your own didn’t seem very supportive nor comforting, even if he said it in an honest and empathic way in front of my exaggerated rows, and not in the pejorative sense you could expect.
Could this life philosophy developed by my adoption compatriots be seen like a third way in human communication? Between becoming an isolated and lonely hermit in cubicles where you try to survive yourself, or individuals whose lives are regulated up to the last minute by totalitarian savior societies, the solution, those who try to save themselves with sympathy and company from the ones who face the same problems and challenges.
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Which are the main problems when you change your already known surroundings for new airs and environments? They are usually the same, the human relationships and living together with strangers or with friends with whom you have to share opinions, visions, manias, and customs. Every time there are more women and men of all ages living happily on their own, longing just the romantic times of living together with idyllic partners or inseparable colleagues of adventures who you met by chance and who are now far because of vicissitudes of destiny, changes in their partners or adventures’ partners.
I suspect that it is more usual changing housemate or workmate when you live with someone with the same culture than when you have to do so with completely strangers of different cultures. I firmly think that taking for granted that two people are going to go on well because they have some points in common, like age, sex, language, lunch times… friendship, it is the easiest way to later misunderstand each other and want to fall apart because “opposite poles attract whereas equal ones repel”. So, the hypothesis is that for making sure of a happy living together, is it better that the others are as much different and opposite to you? Representatives of the furthest costumes and ways of life? Going with an ERASMUS, European Volunteer Service, or whatever grant to study, collaborate or work abroad and to stay in a residence or flat with foreign students would be the best warranty of happiness.
I don’t think it is like that. At the beginning you can excuse manias and differences of living together as a consequence of the different cultural customs, trying hard to sort conflicts out with dialogue and interest. As times goes by, you start considering the difficulties as the other’s fault, because s/he is a damned self-interested and selfish person.
Society of hermits, things are never going to go well if you don’t have an own room where you can take delight in your intimacy and manias; intimacy, sometimes necessary, which is trying to be destroyed besides the Welfare State, arguing even that it is an obstacle to people’s understanding.
As the zenith of the multicultural living together in the students ERAMUS flat which Francisco Hidalgo shared in Liverpool, he wrote:
- FRENCH-ROMANIAN GIRL: <<I can’t stand these guys, I’m leaving>>
- POLISH GIRL: <<The guys are ok, they could clean more thou>>
- KENYAN GUY: <<Isolated in my 10 sq meters paradise of expensive leisure such as Playstation and DVDs, who needs to socialize?>>
- GERMAN GIRL: <<The Spaniard is my man, the Frog is his mate... Achtung Achtung!!!>>
- FROG + SPANIARD: <<We rule this place... Cheers Wack!>>
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When more complexly communicated we are, throughout technological veils, we find more uncomfortable living together with the ones who are too similar to ourselves.
Places which before were of coexistence look every time like a stage where it is represented the communicative rootlessness of a society where you look for being free and autonomous and, for being so, you have to be all day competing with enemies, who are the others, and you find yourself in the next door room, in the supermarket, at work and in bed…
We fill our life with continuous work and the most superficial occupations because it is impossible for us, it frightens us, to be others, to get our desires through the others, who, the most of times, disappoint us although keep us alive at the same time without wishing to admit it.
It is not strange that a lot of Islamic fundamentalist bloom after being educated at the West World. They are not, as the want us to believe, uncultured village people, economical and socially depressed and used as cannon fodder by faction seditious, but university students, living day by day the reality of compulsory assimilation towards an occidental culture based in the nihilism of a compulsive consumerism and the competitive individualism, not very desirable compared with their parents and brothers’ culture, idealized because it is rooted in the social solidarity and the communal salvation.
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Both in the report “Limits to growth” of the before mentioned Club of Rome, and among a lot of intellectuals and paleoanthropologist, it is dealt the need of a universal awareness of what is the human race and what it has to fulfil as a race living in a same planet. Humankind is in crisis and not few of these scientists and thinkers affirm, the most daring in public stands but most of them in private ones, the more than plausible extinction of Humankind, as in the past we wiped out due to violence the rest of human races or as they were wiped out, by natural reasons, the dinosaurs, true emperors of the Earth before our existence. Is it a question of the life cycle in the Universe or of the radical moment we are facing?
This need of a common human race identity worldwide, make us suspect that we have entered, being reluctant to admit it, in a new age where Humankind faces a great and crucial challenge; also full of opportunities. The different human beings, with the improvement of mass media and transportation means, leading to geographic distances and linguistic barriers been reduced, cannot ignor or conquer themselves anymore. They agree to a dialogue named “Alliance of Civilizations” or just a realistic ‘active listening among equals’, or we follow the ostrich strategy to face the colonizing reductionism and urgent and massive wishes: we hide our heads and we let ourselves to be controlled by an invisible hand, accepting the danger coming from a global culture not made by consensus but handled by particular interests.