1
It has been well said that there are pessimism that are like inverted
optimism. In their discontent with the status quo, and their renouncement and
condemnation of it, they teach the necessity of a new start.
To be saved from pessimistic negation, humanity should avoid believing that all
is well at present. Rather, it should have faith that it is possible through
life’s growth to arrive at a better state, which can be discovered and hastened
by human action.
There is a false and vulgar view of
education as wholly subordinate to utilitarian ends. By a premature
specialization this can proscribe the teaching of anything that is
disinterested or ideal. Such materialism can devalue the natural wealth of our
minds, making them narrow and incapable of seeing more that the one aspect of
something that immediately touches them. These minds are separated by a frozen
desert from other minds in the same society that have settled on other aspects
of life. The necessity for each of us to devote ourselves to some determined
activity—some special form of learning—surely need not exclude the realization,
for the intimate harmony of our spirit, of the destiny common to all rational
beings.
5
And though it is a necessary condition of progress, the need for specialization
brings with it visible evils. These may not only lower the horizons of
thought, thus distorting the image of the universe, but may also reduce the
spirit of human solidarity by fencing off individual habits and affections. Auguste
Comte noted well this peril of advanced civilizations. A high state of
social advancement had for him the serious inconvenience that it facilitated
the appearance of narrow and bounded minds—of brains "very efficient under
one aspect and monstrously inept under all others". The belittling of the
human brain by continual exercise of one mode of activity is compared by Comte
to the miserable lot of the laborer who by the division of labor is condemned
in a factory to devote all his energies to the invariable repetition of a
single mechanical activity. In each case, the moral result is to inspire the
narrow specialist with a disastrous indifference to the general interests of
humanity.
7
The
basic principle of your development, your motto for life, should be to maintain
the integrity of your humanity. No one function should ever prevail
over that final end. No isolated force can satisfy all reasonable objects of
individual existence, just as it cannot by itself produce the ordered harmony
of collective existence. Like the deformity of the body produced by a
restricted action, deformity of the mind results from a narrow form of
culture.
The Importance of a Sense of Beauty
8
Just as the first impulse of religious profanation will be directed to what is
most sacred in the holy sanctuary, so the common deterioration I
warn you against will begin by your despising a sense of beauty. Of all
things of the spirit, this sense provides the most delicate, clear vision of
the loveliness of things. This is what withers most quickly in a life limited
to the invariable round of a meaningless circle, leaving it to be a treasured
relic abandoned to the care of the few. The
emotion for beauty is to the refined feeling of other ideal modalities as the
jewel is to the ring. The effect of a rude approach is like that of a blow
and soon has a fatal effect: an absolute indifference settles in the average
soul, where there should be perfect love. The stupor of a savage in the
presence of the complicated mechanisms of civilization is not more intense than
the dazed wonder with which too many educated men regard acts conceding a
serious reality to what is beautiful in life.
9
Of all the elements of education that go to make up a full and noble view of
life, surely none can justify our interest more than art. For as Schiller
eloquently wrote, no other discipline offers a culture that stimulates more
fully all of the mind’s faculties. Even if the love and admiration of beauty
did not themselves create a lofty impulse in the rational mind, or were not
worth cultivating for themselves alone, a high moral motive would propose the
culture of the aesthetic sentiment as crucial for all. If no one is without
moral sentiment, its development carries with it the duty of preparing the mind
for a clear vision of what is beautiful. Believe me, an educated sense of the
beautiful is most effective in forming a delicate sense of justice.
10 I
am convinced that he who has learned to distinguish the delicate from the
common, the ugly from the beautiful, has gone half the way to knowing the evil
from the good. It is true mere good taste is not, as the dilettante might wish,
the only criterion of human actions. Yet, one should not, with the narrow
ascetic, consider it a lure to error, a deceitful guide. Good taste is not a
sure guide, but it can help steer one’s vision. As humanity progresses, it will
see that the moral law is but beauty of conduct…
The
Threat of Utilitarianism
11
The concept of a human life formed by the harmonious development of our entire
nature, including our feeling for the beautiful, is opposed by utilitarianism.
This theory views our whole activities as governed by their relation to the
immediate ends of self-interest. The criticism of narrow utilitarianism as the
spirit of our century—meted out by idealists with all the rigor of an
anathema—is based in part in a failure to recognize the necessity for its
titanic efforts. By subordinating the forces of nature to the human will, and
by expanding material well-being, utilitarianism prepares for the flowering of
future idealisms, in the way that laborious spreading of fertilizer revives an
exhausted soil. The transitory predominance of the potent energies of utilitarianism in
the agitated and feverish life of the last hundred years explains, although it
does not justify, many of the painful yearnings, many discontents and
grievances of the intelligence that show themselves either by a melancholy and
exalted idealization of the past, or by a cruel despair of the future.
12
Democracy
has been accused of guiding humanity, by making it mediocre, to a holy empire
of utilitarianism . . . To confront the problem one must first recognize
that if democracy does not uplift its spirit by sharing a strong interest in
ideals with its preoccupation with material interests, it leads fatally to the
favoring of mediocrity. It then lacks, more than any other social
system, barriers within which it may safely seek a higher culture. Abandoned to
itself, without the constant guidance of some active moral sanction that
purifies and guides its motives for dignifying life, democracy will gradually
extinguish the idea of any superiority that may not be turned into a more
efficient training for the war of interests. It is then the most ignoble form
of brutalities of power.
13 In the life of the Americas [in 1900], the
duty of putting forward a true conception of our social state is doubly
needful. Our democracies grow rapidly by the continual addition of a vast
cosmopolitan multitude, by a stream of immigration. This
is merged with a social nucleus already too weak to make an active effort at
assimilation and so contain the human flood by those dikes that an
ancient solidity of social structure can alone provide—that is, a secure
political order and the elements of a culture that have become deeply rooted. This
rapid growth exposes our future to the dangers of a democratic degeneration
that smothers under the blind force of the mass all idea of quality, deprives
the social consciousness of all just notion of order, yields its class
organization to the rough hands of chance, and causes the triumph of only the
most ignoble, unjustifiable supremacies.
14 It
is, of course, true that our selfish advantage—not the virtue of it alone—bids
us be hospitable to immigration. Long ago, the need to people the emptiness of
the desert made a famous publicist declare, "To govern is to
populate." But this famous aphorism contains a truth that must not
be too narrowly understood: it must not ascribe civilizing virtues to mere
numbers. To govern is first of all to populate by assimilation, and then by
education and selection. If the emergence and growth of the highest human
activities require a dense population, it is precisely because great numbers
make possible both the most complete division of labor and the birth of elements
of strong leadership that bring about the predominance of quality over quantity.
The multitude, the anonymous mass, is nothing by itself. It will be an
instrument of barbarity or of civilization according as it has or lacks the
presence of high moral leadership. There is a deep truth in Emerson's paradox
that every country on earth should be judged by its minorities and not by its
majorities.
Equality of Opportunity, Not Results
15 Any equality of conditions in the order of
society, like homogeneity in nature, is an unstable equilibrium. From the
moment when democracy achieves its perfect work of leveling unjust
superiorities, the equality so won should be a new starting-point. A
challenging affirmation remains. And the
affirmation and glory of democracy consist in revealing and employing the true
superiorities of men by means of proper incentives.
16 We
must seek to gradually nurture in people the idea that democracy involves a necessary
subordination, recognition of true superiorities, and an instinctive yet
conscious cultivation of all that multiplies human worth in the sight of
reason.
Popular education thus acquires its supreme interest considered in relation to
such a work, and with thought for the future. And it is at school where we
first mould the clay of the multitude. There, arise the first and broadest
manifestations of social equity. Schools are consecrated to the equal right of
all to learning and to the most efficient means for superior attainment. They
have to round out a noble task—to deliver as prime objects of its instruction a
sense for order and a will for justice, together with recognition of legitimate
moral authority.
17
There is no distinction more easily lost sight of in the popular mind than that
between equality of opportunity and actual equality—either of influence or of
power—among members of organized society. All
have the same right to aspire to a moral superiority that may justify and
explain an actual position of superiority; but only those who have truly
achieved the former should be rewarded by the latter. The true and worthy
notion of equality rests on the assumption that all reasonable beings are
endowed by nature with faculties capable of a noble development. The duty of
the state consists in seeing that all its members are so placed as to be able
to seek without favor their own best. It must arrange things so as to
bring to light each human superiority, wherever it exists. By this process,
when inequality comes after initial equality, it will be justified; for it will
be sanctioned either by the mysterious powers of nature or the deserving merit
of personal effort.
18
Rationally conceived, democracy always
admits that indispensable aristocratic principle that concedes superiority to
the better person when recognized and sanctioned by common consent. It
consecrates, as much as aristocracy, the recognition of equality; but it favors
such qualities as are truly superior—those of mind, character, and virtue. It does not immobilize them into a separate
class that shall have the execrable privilege of caste. Instead, it renews them
continually from the living fountain of the people, making justice and love the
reason for choice. Wisely recognizing the selection and predominance of the
best equipped as necessary for any progress, it avoids the humiliation that in
other human contests falls to the lot of the vanquished.
19
If one could say of utilitarianism that it is the word for the English spirit,
the United States may be considered the incarnation of that word.
Its gospel is broadcast on every side to teach the material miracles of its
triumph. And Spanish America is not to be regarded, in its relation to the
United States, wholly as a dwelling place of savages. Yet, the mighty confederation of the north is realizing over us a sort
of moral conquest. Admiration for its greatness, its strength, is a sentiment
that is growing rapidly in the minds of our governing classes, and even more,
perhaps, among the multitude, easily impressed with victory or success. And
from admiration it is easy to pass to imitation. Admiration and belief are
already for the psychologist but the passive mood of imitation.
20 So it happens that the vision of a voluntarily de-Latinized South America,
achieved without compulsion or conquest, and constructed in the likeness of its
Northern archetype, floats already through the dreams of many who are sincerely
interested in our future. This vision satisfies them with suggestive parallels
they discover at every step, and appears in constant movements for reform or
innovation. We have our mania for the
North. It is necessary to oppose to it those bounds which both feeling and
reason indicate.
Not that I would make of those limits an absolute negation. I well understand
that inspiration, enlightenment, and great lessons lie in the example of the
strong […]But I see no good in diluting the character of a people—its personal
genius—by imposing on it a foreign model. Once the originality of their
character is sacrificed, it can never be replaced. Nor do I subscribe to the
ingenuous fancy that this result may be obtained artificially or by process of
imitation
21
Perhaps our South American character lacks the defining contour of a
personality. But even so, we
Latin-Americans have an inheritance of race, a great ethnic tradition, and a
sacred bond that unites us to immortal pages of history and puts us on our
honor to preserve this for the future. The cosmopolitanism that we have to
respect as the irresistible tendency of our development need not exclude
fidelity to the past, nor respect for that molding and directing force the
genius of our race must use to fuse of the elements of the American of the
future.
Liberty in the United States
22 Any severe judgment formed upon our neighbors of
the North should be preceded, as in the courtesies of fencing, by a respectful
salute. This is easy for me. Failure to recognize their faults does not seem to
me so insensitive as to deny their qualities. Born—to use Baudelaire’s
paradox—with the innate experience of liberty, the people of the United States
have kept themselves faithful to the law of their birth. They have developed
with the precision and certainty of a mathematical progression the fundamental
principles of their social organization. This gives to their history a unity
that, even if it has excluded the acquirement of different aptitudes or merits,
has at least the intellectual beauty of being logical. The traces of its
progress will never be expunged from the annals of human right, because they
have been the first to evoke our modern ideal of liberty—to convert it from the
uncertainty of experiments and visions of Utopia into the imperishable bronze
of a living reality…
23
The United States has carried out many of the most daring deeds that in the
perspective of time will distinguish this century. Theirs is the glory of
having revealed completely the greatness and dignity of labor, thereby
accentuating the firmest note of moral beauty in all our civilization. It is a
vital force that antiquity abandoned to the abjection of slavery, and which we
today identify with the highest expression of human dignity, based on conscious
exertion of its own merit. Strong, tenacious of purpose, they have placed in
the hands of the mechanic in their shops and the farmer in their fields the
mystic key of Hercules, and have given human genius a new and unwonted beauty
by clothing it with the leathern apron of the hand-worker. Each one of these
goes forward to conquer life as his Puritan ancestors did the wilderness.
Persistent followers of a creed of individual energy that makes every man the
craftsman of his destiny, they have modeled their commonwealth on a kind of
imaginary population of Crusoes who, as soon as they have learned the rough art
of taking care of themselves, will turn to making themselves into a stable
state. From their energies devoted to research, industry, and philanthropy,
they have achieved results that are the more marvelous in that they were
secured with the most absolute integrity of personal liberty.
24
The people of the United States have a sleepless and insatiable instinct of
curiosity, an impatient eagerness for enlightenment. Carrying a fondness for
public education almost to the point of monomania, they have made the common
school the surest prop of their prosperity, believing that the mind of the
child should be the most cherished of their precious things. Their culture, while far from being
spiritual or refined, has an admirable efficiency so far as it is directed to
practical ends and their immediate realization. And from all this spring’s
a dominant note of optimism, confidence, faith, which makes them face the
future with a proud and stubborn assurance.
25 If
by a sincere recognition of what is great and brilliant in the genius of that
mighty country I have now acquired the right to complete the pictur one
question full of interest presents itself: Does that society at least tend to
realize the ideal of rational conduct which satisfies, to the heart’s desire,
the intellectual and moral dignity of our civilization?
North American life, indeed, describes
the vicious circle Pascal drew attention to—the ceaseless seeking for
well-being that has no object outside of itself. Its national prosperity is as
immense as its incapability of satisfying even a mediocre view of human
destiny. Titanic in its enormous concentration of human will-power, in its
unprecedented triumph in all spheres of material aggrandizement, its
civilization yet produces as a whole a singular impression of insufficiency, of
emptiness.
26
After thirty centuries of growth under classic and Christian influence man can
with reason ask what in this new world are the guiding principles—the
ideal substratum, the ulterior end of all this concern with the positivist
interests that so preoccupy that mighty multitude. The answer will be that same
exclusive interest in material triumphs. Orphaned from the profound tradition
that attended his birth, the North American has not yet replaced the inspiring
ideality of his past with any high unselfish conception of his future. He lives
for the immediate reality of the present, and for this subordinates all his
activities in the egoism of material well-being, albeit both individual and
collective.
28 Sensibility, intelligence, manners—each is ineptly selected
by that enormous people; and this, with the mechanical ordering of their
material activities, makes a chaos of all that pertains to the realm of the
ideal. It is easy to trace this ineptness from its most obvious manifestations
to the more intimate and essential ones. Prodigal of riches—for meanness is not
his fault—the North American has learned only to acquire by them the
satisfaction of his vanity and material luxury, not by the chosen note of good
taste. In such a surrounding true art can only exist as rebellion by the
individual. Emerson and Poe are like stray species expelled into a foreign
habitat by some geological catastrophe.
29
And so the outcome is that out of their entire struggle with ignorance the only
gain has been a sort of universal semi-culture
and a profound indifference to higher ideals. . . As fast as the general
ignorance decreases, so, in the air of that giant democracy, higher learning
decreases and genius itself vanishes.
30
In the domain of moral attitudes, the mechanical impulse for the utilitarian
has, indeed, been countered by a strong religious tradition. But one may not
conclude that even this has given to the direction of conduct a real,
disinterested principle. . . North American religiosity, derived from the
English and exaggerated, is merely an auxiliary force for the penal law.
31
Even if the moral critique were not to descend below the honesty and moderation
of Franklin's utilitarianism, the ultimate collapse of that society—as de
Tocqueville wisely said of a society educated narrowly with similar notions of
duty—would surely not be in that superb and noble decadence that affords the
satanic beauty of tragedy in the downfall of empires. Rather it would end in a
kind of pallid materialism, drab culture, and finally the sleep of an
enervation without brilliancy, in the silent decay of all the mainsprings of
the moral life. In a society that does not find the higher manifestations of
self-denial and virtue obligatory, practical considerations will always make
the limits of obligation recede indefinitely. And the school of material
prosperity, always a rude teacher of republican austerity, has carried even further
the simplification of the concept of rational conduct that now obsesses the
mind.
Corruption and the Influence of
Big Business
34
Any casual observer of the political customs of the United States will tell you
how the obsession of material interest tends to steadily enervate and eradicate
respect for law or justice. […]A democracy not subject to a superior
instruction, not trained in liberal schools to the understanding of true human
excellence, tends always to that abominable
brutality of the majority. This despises the greater moral benefits of
liberty and annuls in public opinion all respect for the dignity of the
individual.
And today [1900] a new and formidable power arises to accentuate this
absolutism of numbers: the political influence of a plutocracy represented by
the agents of trusts [Standard Oil, etc], monopolies of production, and lords
of economic life. This is one of the most noteworthy and significant features
of the United States of today.
35
In the eye of history a great civilization, a great people, is one that after
its time has passed still leaves the chords of its memory vibrating, a new and
divine portion of the sum of things. . . An organized society that limits its
idea of civilization to the accumulation of material abundance, and of justice
to its equitable distribution among its members will never make of its great
cities anything that differs essentially from the heaping up of anthills. Populous, opulent cities do not suffice to
make civilization immutable, intensive. They are indeed necessary for the
highest culture, for its natural atmosphere. The soul of the great man can rarely grow from amid the petty
interests of small towns. But this quantitative side of a nation’s greatness,
like the size of its armies, is but means, not results.
36 But please remember that when I, in the name of their soul’s rights, deny
their utilitarianism the right to impose itself on the world as a mold or
model, I do not in the least assert that its labors are wasted even in relation
to those things that we may call soul interests. . . Without the arm that
clears and constructs, there might now be no shelter for the brain that thinks.
Without some certain conquest of the materiality, the rule of the
spiritualities in human societies becomes impossible.
José Enrique Rodó (1872-1917) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to a Catalan father
who died when Rodó was
twelve. Rodó received his primary education in Montevideo but was
largely self-taught, reading in libraries during the free time offered by
part-time employment. Rodó became a director of the
Uruguay National Library and taught Western literature at Montevideo
University. Nevertheless his primary occupation was in writing essays, literary
criticism and journalism. In this way he became one of Uruguay’s leading
philosophers.
In his essays, Rodó sought to establish moral and
aesthetic values that included respect for the cultural traditions of Europe
(primarily, France, England, and Spain) and a desire for a unique South
American culture, distinct from that of the United States. He argued that the
character of a civilization should be judged on the basis of the grandeur of
its thought, that it should protect itself from the vulgarity of the masses,
and that, as a democracy, it should avoid nurturing mediocrity. In other aspects
of his philosophy, Rodó has been termed an evolutionary pantheist.
His writing was in the “modernista” literary style, a convoluted form
of expression showing a sophisticated acquaintance with language but impeding
communication. Nevertheless, the ideas Rodó expounded—including the
threat to indigenous
cultures posed by United States materialism, and the need to preserve humanistic
values—have lasting value.
The excerpts were taken from his
book Ariel, a text that initially appeared in 1900 as a series of
essays, when Rodó was 29. In this, the speaker is an elderly professor
(Prospero), lecturing his favorite students in a seminar before they go out
into the world. He is advocating that they should nurture the spirit of
Shakespeare’s Ariel, which for Rodó
symbolizes the noble, soaring aspect of the human spirit—the ideal to which
humanity ascends, effacing the vestiges of brute sensuality symbolized by Caliban.
Questions to answer:
1.What does Rodó say about specialization?
2. Describe the importance that Rodó gives to art and
beauty in life.
3.What is the threat of Utilitarianism and
Democracy? According to Rodó, what is the glory of
democracy?
4.What are the dangers of
Mass Immigration in Latin America?
5. According to Rodó, what
are the virtues and vices of the United State? What do you think about it?
6. What is the influence of
big businesses in the U.S? Do you agree? Why?
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