The Right to have Bad Taste

¿Have you ever thought that a bad, sour wine from somewhere around the corner is better than a good Spanish rioja or a French cabernet or an Italian sangiovese? For someone who likes wine the difference is sublime and obvious. Now imagine that someone would tell you that they prefer the bad, sour wine from around the corner, and also adds that in the end is only about taste; i.e. that there is no qualitative difference from a random experiment with grapes and a traditionally exceptional rioja or cabernet or sangiovese.

Imagine someone telling you that because he prefers a street hotdog than an Argentinian cut or a top-rate salmon, it is also a matter of taste, and there is not qualitative difference from eating in a food cart than in a good prestigious restaurant. It is all about individual choices and there is no objective quality that ranks some things above others. Now imagine this same person telling you that because more people drinks Smirnoff Ice, or some popular mezcal, massively produced and with extensive marketing for the poor Average Joe, than they drink an eighteen year Scotch, the popular Smirnoff or the burdensome bad quality mezcal are actually better than the Scotch. Or that the random experiment with grapes be better if people drink it and like it more than the rioja and so forth. Sounds ridiculous, isn't it?

Food and drinks are aesthetical experiences, just as music is for hearing, writing is for reading, films are for watching, and so forth. ¿Have you ever heard someone arguing that Independence Day is a better movie than The Godfather? ¿Or that there is no better or worse, because in the end it's a matter of taste, so that it cannot be argued that The Godfather is better in quality than Independence Day? ¿How about comparing Twilight with Hamlet? ¿Or Lady Gaga and Pitbull with Beethoven and Mozart? ¿Or the average street painter with Rembrandt and Picasso? These comparisons, as coarse and brute as they sound, are the logical conclusion of the utilitarian belief that aesthetical experiences are always a matter of taste, and there is no inherent beauty behind artistic expressions; i.e. a metaphysical aesthetical reality that cannot be gauged by the scientific method that only studies physical phenomena.

However some believers in science-as-religion (i.e. not in science-as-science), think that because the scientific method for studying nature has been so successful, only through that method any kind of reality can be grasped and known. Following this premise the only way of knowing what is better and what is worse in artistic expressions is by studying the statistical aggregate of all individual preferences. This leaves Beethoven and Mozart as objects of a minority cult of intellectuals and Pitbull and Lady Gaga as the peak of our civilization. The same can be said of the author of Twilight viz. Shakespeare, or the author of A Game of Thrones viz. Virgil or Dante or Cervantes or Goethe and so forth. Hence, they mistake virtue with popularity, two very distinct things. Of course this is the product of a confusion in some scientists that mistake their method with objective reality. This is translated ideologically as liberal thinking: the idea that individual preferences and choices cannot be morally or aesthetically judged. But they can be judged. To explain this we must understand a couple of things about ignorance.

I think there are three types of ignorance. (1) when someone simply don't know something because it hasn't been taught to him. (2) when someone physically can't know something, as when they are blind and ignore what colors are. (3) When someone is ideologically handicapped to understand something that is within his intellectual reach.

The supreme nature of a masterwork of art, like the 9th symphony or The Aeneid or Gone with the Wind or Macbeth and so forth, can be known. It can be taught to anyone, but it the teaching of it doesn't guarantee that they are going to like it. The masterwork has an inherent aesthetical value independent of our individual preferences. We can acknowledge this, or we can suffer the second and third types of ignorance, so that we cannot understand what is it that makes Beethoven far superior than Pitbull, and we might deduce that Pitbull is better that the German composer because it happens that we extract from it more utility. Hence we suffer from blindness. Our ignorance blocks our understanding and our ability to see the sublime nature of a real and true work of art viz. a popular combination of rhythms. The third type of ignorance can recognize the beauty of Beethoven, but thanks to scientific ideology that disregards anything metaphysical, i.e. the human condition itself, we would conclude that there is no qualitative difference between our taste and that of the common people.

This is inevitable in thinking that only extension is subject to knowledge and not intention. Science can understand everything except the human condition, because everything human is filled with intention and lacks extension. That is, it's filled with metaphysical meaning and devoid of physical relevance (I'm vaguely using Collingwood against Russell in this argument). Masterworks of art have an aesthetical intention of beauty, virtue and are ultimately the peaks of civilization's achievements. The only extension that they have is how many people like them, and how much utility they extract from it.

The problem with liberals and those of economic intellectual orientation is that they do not understand that there is a taste for garbage and bad things. People can consciously enjoy and like something qualitatively bad. People can have bad tastes. And there is nothing wrong with it. But not because it is not wrong it follows that there are no qualitative differences between high culture and popular culture. I myself like Pitbull's music very much. I think it's perfect for parties, perfect for a joyful time, I extract a lot of utility from him. But I also acknowledge that it's a bunch of garbage, and I have the right to like and enjoy garbage, just as some times I enjoy the food carts better than a delicious restaurant, or watching a terrible movie like Schwarzenegger's Commando (a movie I like a lot) than The Godfather. Another example: I don't like Shakespeare as much as I think I should. I don't extract from it the sublime experience I get from Tolstoy, Virgil or Dostoyevsky. But not because I don't feel so much attracted to his plays, he is less of a genius. I'm the one with the problem. It is me the one that cannot connect with his art. I'm the one suffering from ignorance. But the masterwork remains the same.

Now, the difference between liking Mozart more than Beethoven, or Tolstoy more than Dostoyevsky, or Milton more than Shakespeare, or Homer more than Virgil, is a matter of taste, because we are talking about geniuses and their masterworks. You can prefer one over the other without degrading the any of them. We acknowledge the geniality of all of them and we pick our preferences among them. But what we cannot do is following this same reasoning with other artistic expressions that are intuitively of a lower level.

In few words, the perception of a work of art does not depend exclusively in the affection created in the subject in the form of utility. The reality of a trully artistic work lies in its capacity to imitate beauty in itself, as a virtue and as a sign of excellence viz. mediocrity. Just because someone might enjoy more the visage of a public housing project architecture over Florence Cathedral or Istambul's Hagia Sofia doesn't mean that all qualitative, metaphysical, aesthetical differences are levelled. Anyone unable to comprehend this suffers from a dreaful lot of ignorance.

Nothing comes out of the blue

Define a Christian society. I define it as a present living generation gathered around a national flag whose ancestors five generations earlier were vastly of a Christian confession.

Like all definitions, it has an arbitrary element. The arbitrariness lies in setting the boundaries of the concept, but the content of the concept must be real, in that it denotes something that exists. The content of the concept is more or less ambiguous in that it expressely says "were vastly of a Christian confession". This ambiguity cannot be avoided, given that no society of a national scale can be proved to be 100% pure in ideological and confessional content. Variations will always exists. So, "vastly of a Christian confession" demands the use of intuition viz. reason. We know when a society is vastly Muslim, e.g. Egypt, even though we know for certain that Christian Coptic minorities survive within it. The same is applied to most of our Western national societies, whose pluralism obfuscate reason when identifying the original ideology or confession of the given people.

We can say, for the sake of precision, that a society has a confessional or ideological adjective attached to it when no farther than five generations earlier than the present living one has the same mean and mode relating to the respective adjective. Hence, a Christian society would be one whose population of ancestors five generations earlier were in mean and mode of a Christian confession.

The reason why tracing back into ancestral background defines today, and not simply the content of today, is that human societies are always and without exception the product of historical conditions which lie in the past generations. A definition of a current society based only on living conditions assumes that the present does not need the past to have existed, which is, of course, nonsense. It is logically inconceivable that a present would subsist without its subsequent past. "The past is never dead. It's not even past" Faulkner.

The reason why I'm asking myself this is because of the problem posed by secularism. Where does secularism come from? The question is too abstract to denote anything. It would be more precise to ask: where does Western secularism come from? This implies that secularism depends on the culture that produces it. It is not a universally concrete notion. It is a historically concrete notion.

There is a narrative of Western secularism that aims at de-Christianizing societies, by promoting a form of society that sometimes contradicts and even destroys the Christian background from which it comes. I'm talking about the reality show-liberal-everything goes type of thinking. What I'm trying to say is that the secularist narrative plays at ignoring the historical fact that it comes from a particular cultural background; that of European Christianity. This leads to a misunderstood notion of secularism that is played against its Christian origin.

It is not against the spirit of secularism to accept the Christian background without which it would have never emerged. Philosophically both are distinct, but historically, that is really, they are not. Atheists feel disgruntled with such definitions, because they are the first in society to act against our Christian past, not realizing that in it lies the core of our identities, values, and normative claims. By de-Christianizing our societies with a false notion of secularism, they only undermine the true basis from which our normative claims are raised, in an intellectual project that is self-defeating. Normative claims simply cannot hold in themselves in the pure abstract, but only to philosophers, who are a negligible minority of any society, usually ignorant and unattached from real and daily problems. Their self-righteous feelings to free all individuals from the bondage with our inheritance only leaves a vacuum. No rational notion ever fills the life of anyone without the help of traditions.

All I'm saying is that the Western European civilization still is a Christian civilization, and that many of our institutions are the secular versions of our theological times. E.g. international congresses are nothing but the modern versions of the ecumenical councils; our parliaments, the nationalized versions of the estates of the realm; the European Union nothing but the Medieval idea of imperial unity (both failures, by the way), etc. In the Americas the Christian background is still an accepted idea, though we seem to be going down the unfortunate doom of nihilistic Europe. Hopefully, we will do better than that for a couple more hundred years.

My Borges' vision of Marx

The Circular Ruins is one of my favorite short stories by Borges. I don’t have an academic degree in literature, so what I’m about to say might have already been said before, but if that’s the case, I’m unaware of it.

I think that The Circular Ruins is a metaphor of Marxism. It came to my mind the first time I read it years ago, and it happened to me again this time. Of its own story Borges said that “everything is unreal” (Fictions, prologue, 1941). He might have been frank with this three-word introduction, but I think there is much more of it.

The argument of the story is that the wise man, or magician, that comes to live in the circular ruins wants to “dream a man: he wanted to dream him with thorough integrity and impose him on reality.” He even says that “the purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural.” The rest of the story is the struggle of this wise man to create inside his dreams a perfect human being. In order to achieve it, he practices various strategies that do not work so well at the beginning, and ends up asking the help of supernatural beings, or gods. At first it seems to be a completely fantastic story, with the usual references to enigmatic problems and descriptions common in Borges writings. But going back to the argument of conceiving a perfect man in order to impose it on reality, I cannot avoid thinking that the wise man is Karl Marx.

Now, Marx was too careful to fall into utopianism, and he thoroughly hated it. The gigantic effort he did to device his immense sociological system of dialectical materialism was an impressive rhetorical narrative to disguise what really is a utopia with the mask of scientific reality, which we can trace as early as his The German Ideology (1846). He knew that the man he was calling for was inexistent during his lifetime, but the vast majority of his thinking consists in proving that the true human condition has the potential to one day become that man, by changing the world in which he lives, hence changing him. This is what fallows logically from dialectical materialism, inherited from Hegel’s dialectic. And this is precisely one of Marx’s major mistakes: he thought that he was conceiving the true material human being, whereas what he was doing was making out of a logical deduction an empirical claim; an obvious fallacy.

To go back to The Circular Ruins, the first device developed by the wise man is to dream an amphitheater full of students to whom he is imparting a lecture. He was “looking a soul that deserved to participate in the universe,” that is someone who legitimately can be imposed on reality, according to the first argument. The purpose was to find out who of those students was the true man he was looking for, by digging in their intellectual abilities. Soon he finds out that they are a crown of uncreative, unintelligent repeaters of his doctrine. The wise man is an eminent professor, a thinker, a philosopher, like Marx. But his doctrine only produces ideologues, like most Marxists. The wise man is disappointed by his followers (like Marx in his late years) and wakes up very distressed.

At this point the story suffers a break in which the wise man must depart temporarily from his mission in order to rest and think it through from the beginning. He realizes how arduous, time consuming and difficult it is to conceive such a man. He takes longer and longer, paying attention to every detail of his body, as detailed and as long as Das Kapital (1867). But when he finishes it, the man won’t wake up. The creation is so unreal that the creature remains unconscious of his potential for living. Just as the 19^th and 20^th centuries saw failed revolutions, because Lenin’s new man wouldn’t be born to start the final revolution of all; the revolution that would impose the new man on reality, making capitalism obsolete and the entrance to the final stage of history, communism, possible.

The wise man gives up and asks the gods for help. He realized that his intellectual quest is supernatural. This is where Marxism reaches its delusional peak, because claiming the ultimate social scientific truth, what they are looking for cannot be naturally reached. So, how can it be scientifically true? It can’t. Marxism must yield to the fact that it has all been a dream, an arbitrary act of imagination, a violent will to make reality the way it wants it to be, and not the way that it simply is. Marxism turns totalitarian. In Arendtian sense, it uses violence to force upon men and reality the form that it wants them to have. This is the horrible true material conclusion of Marxism, and it has the name of Stalin, the truest of all Marxists. However, Marxism today wants to naively reject this claim (for good reasons though).

In the last part of the story, the wise man manages to wake his imaginary man into reality by the help of the god of fire (godly fire is the metaphor for totalitarian violence). His son travels somewhere to other ruins to teach the new doctrine (to disturb other countries politics). One day some travelers tell the wise man that his son has proved to be invulnerable to fire. Of course, he is nothing but a product of imagination, a ghost, an unreal man. The wise man is afraid that his son might realize that truth, hence undermining his life experience and existence. But suddenly a fire breaks around the circular ruins, burning them. When the wise man tries to escape he realizes that fire cannot hurt him. He is also a product of someone else’s imagination. He cannot experience true human suffering. He cannot understand the true human condition. If he would have, he wouldn’t have tried to conceive the perfect man in the first place. Fire, the technology of totalitarianism to create the perfect man, ends up destroying the ruins themselves, and demonstrating the wise man that he has been living a fictitious life. This is the tragic outcome of all the mythical heroes of Marxism, from Trotsky to Che Guevara and beyond.

If Borges didn't mean to make a metaphor of Marxism, at least I find it strikingly similar.

The Paradox of Agnosticism

Agnostics tend to say that their disbelief in God is based on the argument that God's existence cannot be proved. Hence, they usually ask for empirical demonstrations and they even say that on such conditions they are open to believe. I find this reasoning highly problematic and ultimately paradoxical. In few words, I think true agnosticism is impossible.

First, if we conceive (i.e. logically imagine in our minds) something like the Abrahamic God, we come to realize that It cannot exist. Because the requisite for something to exists is an origin or birth, a history and a death. This can be make of pagan deities and idols, who traditionally in mythology have supernatural births, supernatural lives, and even in some cultures, supernatural deaths. They exist because they come into the world, just as human beings. They are not eternal.

Contrariwise, the Abrahamic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is eternal. Or as it is stated in Revelations 22:13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End". God is the philosophical "being" Itself, as when It presents Itself to Moses in Exodus 3:14 by saying "I am that I am." If Gods is something, It is a concept, so It cannot exist. In logical language, It subsists, just like logical concepts. It can only be conceived by us, but not seen by us. This is also summarized by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:18 when he writes, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal". In the same way, concepts are not seen anywhere but conceived in our minds, because they are eternal. Our relation to God works in a very similar fashion, and the act of truly conceiving God is called faith. Just as concepts cannot be empirically demonstrated, God cannot be demonstrated. So the question for God's existence is misleading, and nonsensical.


The question of the being of God is, then, logical and never empirical. It is the principle of the existence of the universe itself, but not anything inside the universe.


This leads us to our second problem. Agnosticism asks something to be proved empirically through the method of scientific inquiry, when the conceptual and logical structure of the problem itself, the thing been asked to be proved, has no possible empirical expression. To put it straightforward: 
1.1) The concept of God cannot be empirically proved because, 
1.2) given that there would be an empirical proof, it means that it can be tested. 
2.) Hence, if it can be tested, it cannot be eternal, but particular. 
3.) If it is not eternal but particular, it cannot be God.
4.) God does not exist.
5.) If there is God, It does not exist but subsist.
6.) We call faith the act of truly conceiving God.

Agnostics do not follow this reasoning logically, but introduce a fallacy in the middle way. For example: If there is a God, it should be subject to empirical demonstration. But anything subject to demonstration can be anything but God, because the concept of God can only be eternal. This reasoning is obviously paradoxical and there is no way of solving it. i.e. if God is empirically proved, then, it is not God. If it cannot be proven, then I will doubt its existence. But doubt here is an euphemism to hide pure and simple atheism.

Conclusion: agnosticism doubts God by presenting a paradoxical problem that has not logical solution, never mind empirical. And because this paradox is inevitable in the reasoning of all agnosticism, their claim to be open to believe is nonsensical. It is a conscious or unconscious rhetorical device to disguise atheism. Hence, agnosticism is logically inconsistent and ultimately impossible.

A Reflection on Human Rights

With human rights mania, I’ve always asked myself, what differentiates a plausibly human right from an unwarranted one. The reason why the difference should be made is because contemporary experience shows a huge variety of human rights, so varied that we have grounds to ask ourselves if such wide expansion of basic rights doesn’t make them spurious in the end. By human rights I assume we are talking about the basic rights that belong to a human being by virtue of his human condition. The question, then, is about the basic rights of human beings.

Let me illustrate my point with an example. If having food is a basic right, and there is no possible way to provide food for lack of it, then the right becomes spurious, i.e. a mere rhetorical act without denoting an empirical fact. This is actually what happens with many so called basic rights. Take access to internet as another example. If there is no technology and technical resources to provide internet freely, how can it be a basic right? We would be forced to admit that the configuration of the universe itself is breaking this basic right, which is the same as to say that the universe is illegal. Sounds ridiculous, isn’t it?

So, no access to any kind of resource can be reasonably considered a basic right, because it is not in the hands of human capabilities to provide these rights indefinitely. This is the reasonable conclusion from the empirical facts that material resources are subject to changes of fortune, i.e. it is subject to natural changes in the environment, so that its supply cannot be considered absolute or eternal. And because its supply cannot be expected to be absolute, they cannot be basic. Nothing which is changing and tangent is absolute, so it is not basic at all. When we catalogue tangent rights with basic rights, we make the notion of basic rights itself spurious. And because we, in the West, don’t want to do that, we should simply discard as mere nonsense any pretention to make out of a tangent right a basic right.

This is not to say that tangent rights are not important. Nothing farther from what I’m trying to say. They are important, but we must acknowledge that they are of a different nature. They are always subject to environmental changes of fortune; which includes, of course, history. To clarify, tangent rights are positive rights. The reason why I call them tangent is because they are the kind of rights that belong to persons when they are positioned in the historical and cultural context that allows them to have those rights, assuming that under another context, persons would not have them.

What is, then, a basic right? It is the guarantee of non-interference from other human actors in an aspect of the human condition without which the person would not survive. This assumes that individuals want to remain alive. It also assumes that a basic right is an aspect of the human condition that it would not be reasonable to ask of a person to surrender. And by reasonable I mean that it cannot be asked of a person to surrender a right without which it would cease to exist. To illustrate with an example, it cannot be asked of a person to cease to eat to the point of starvation. Access to food might not be a basic right, but access to the possibility of eating by one’s capacities is.

Technically speaking, basic rights relate to physiological necessities, which is not the same to say physiological impulses. All physiological necessities are impulses, but not all impulses are necessary for the purpose of survival. Eating, sleeping and defecating are necessary for survival. Reproduction or coitus is not. But eating, sleeping and defecating imply other things, because they cannot be accomplished without certain actions from the person. In order for these needs to be met, the person must be able to move, and must own the product of his labor force. In order to move and labor, the person needs to think, and to associate himself with other thinking and acting human beings. Because without thinking, men cannot do anything, and without associating himself with other men, he cannot combine his labor force in order to make it productive, without these two rights, men would not be able to survive as men. Besides these, it sounds very unlikely that there would be other basic rights.

Summarily they are:

1)     Eating, sleeping and defecating.

2)     Freedom of movement.

3)     Property ownership (which can be collective or individual, because both work).

4)     Freedom of thinking (which is not the same as freedom to express everything that one thinks).

5)     Freedom to associate with other men for the purpose of economic production.

I assume that if any person takes any of these from any other person, the latter would not survive for long. And I also assume that all human societies have generally respected these rights for the vast majority of their populations, institutionally forming them distinctively according to historical and cultural context. Any society denying any of these to a population is truly denying basic human rights. This definition allows us to define precisely the notion of crimes against humanity, when it can be proved that some persons deprived a particular population of these rights systematically. Other kinds of violations are upon tangent rights; which means that they are relative to historical, normative and cultural context, i.e. there can be no crimes against humanity with the systematic violation of tangent rights.

To clarify rights (3), (4) and (5), it does not imply that the individual lives in a liberal society. A slave might not own himself, but the product of his labor is reattributed by the master in order to keep the slave alive. What we see in slave-master relationships is a division of labor where the master puts all the thinking and the slave puts all the labor, and the fruits are distributed unevenly. Right (5) is the indispensable requirement for division of labor, which includes any kind of division of labor, e.g. slavery, serfdom or wage labor. The only problem of a state of slavery is that it is in the hands of the master to deprive the slave of any of these basic rights. So a state of subjection of such nature does not protect effectively the basic rights of slaves, even though he might still enjoy them by virtue of the slave being fed and clothed by the master. What I’m saying is that even a slave has basic rights when the master allows him to survive, even when they are not positively established. But such guarantee of protection of basic rights is very poor. That’s why we have created tangent rights that are more effective in the protection of basic rights.

This is a ius naturale conception, because any pretention of reaching basic rights is ius natural as opposed to ius positum. It assumes that all human beings have these rights by virtue of their human condition, independently of positive law.

Citizenship rights, on the contrary, are always tangent rights, because they depend on a republican constitution in order for a person to have them. The enfranchisement of citizenship rights will also depend on the form of the republic itself, i.e. if it’s democratic or oligarchic. These will always be positive rights. Persons have them because they are established in positive law. Otherwise they don’t have them. These form part of a huge Western tradition of citizenship that includes rights as freedom of speech, right to vote, to access to office, freedom to form political associations, etc. Because they are tangent, they cannot be filed among human rights. Otherwise we would have to reach the absurd conclusion that the universe has been illegal for most of the time.

I conclude by saying that tangent and positive citizenship rights are the most effective institutional arrangements in order to protect everyone’s basic rights. This is one of the reasons they are so important. It assumes that people will engage in these rights in order to make them effective. Inaction makes positive citizenship rights spurious.

Besides the basic rights already listed, we cannot speak of anything else as basic. In few words, if a right is not established, and it’s not basic, the person doesn’t have it. Hence, liberal claims to protect tangent rights that are not positively established are mere rhetorical arguments.

How to judge History without Self-Righteousness

Frequently in my social relations I find people that practice ethical and normative judgments on history. From a retrospective point of view, i.e. from today toward the past, it seems reasonable to speak of the errors, mistakes and crimes of our ancestors (because when we criticize the past, we inevitably criticize our ancestors).  This is commonly done by establishing a more or less universal conception of the good and justice, assuming that today is closer to the realization of that conception than the past was. It assumes that we know better than our ancestors did. In few words, the conceptions that we use to criticize our present and our immediate past are logically transferred to pass judgment on the far past. I am a strong advocate of our capacity to judge our present (and by present I include our immediate past and our immediate future). Because only through this capacity, which is always relative to our vantage point, can we participate in the public realm through speech viz. violence. 

Now, if we do not accept that our capacity to judge is always relative to our vantage point, it follows that we claim an absolute truth, and the possibility to speak with those that dissent from us becomes impossible. In the realm of logical arguments we cannot exchange truth for falsehood. Whereas in politics there is no truth or falsehood but simply vantage points. This is why I reject any political speech that claims universality. They are antidemocratic, because democracy demands exchange of arguments, and this is only possible when arguments are relative. This regards to our capacity to judge our present.

But when we speak about our far past things change. We no longer participate in the public debate that belonged to our ancestors. We cannot fully understand their context from and within which they acted. Hence our capacity to judge morally is out of context. This means that our moral claims regarding the far past are simply irrelevant. This is common knowledge among historians today. But not among people outside the field of history, many of whom are very fond of passing judgment on the far past, even though they are completely out of context. For many of them, passing judgment on the far past justifies their normative conceptions that they use to judge today's world. For example, when many say that colonialism is bad, and they use this principle to argue that NATO states should stay out of the Middle East, it follows that the Unites States should have stayed out of the western regions of North America, that the Spanish should have stayed out of the Americas back in the 16th century, that the European knights should have never gone in pilgrimage to the Holy Land back in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so forth (these as very frequent examples). Moreover, it follows that the Mongolians should have never invaded half of Eurasia, that the Roman Republic should have never invaded its Italian and Mediterranean neighbors, that the Persians should have never crossed the Hellespont, that Thutmose III should have never invaded Canaan, and so forth. In few words, history should have never been, following the principle that some people use today to judge NATO's involvement in the Middle East. This is a reductio ad absurdum that shows how ridiculous it is to use the present conceptions of our capacity to judge when judging the far past. I say that we should only use them in a conversation when judging our present.

I think many are afraid that, because they do not consistently apply their present normative conceptions to the far past, their conceptions might be erroneous. I also think that this structure of reasoning is based on the arrogant will to present arguments of universal validity. When some people are engaged in an intellectual conversation they need to believe that what they claim is somehow universal, so that it makes sense to them that they are defending it in the first place. They fail to realize that public arguments are always relative, and that it is perfectly fine that it should remain that way. When they have a problem with the relativity of public argumentation, they also fall in the arrogant discourse of passing moral judgment on the far past, as it would be logically consistent. Unfortunately logic is the most authoritarian form of discourse that there is, and for what regards to democracy, this form of speech is unwarranted, and it remains solely in the realm of classrooms of eminent professors. This is a major difference between academia-street and main-street.

However, as a follower of Humanism, I do not pretend to be neutral when talking about history and the far past. I am aware that I am constantly passing judgment. But it is of a completely different sort that when passing judgment on current affairs. Instead of consisting of normative claims, my way of judging the far past is aesthetical; i.e. it focuses mainly on the resonance of historical facts, on the basis that I like some stories and I dislike others. It is not about what I think it should have been, but what I find to be impressive, spectacular, worthy of honor and respect, independently of my normative conceptions that I use to judge today's world. In this way I can admire both the Spanish conquistadores as well as the beauty of the Aztec civilization. Both are amazing to me, and I find the tragedy of their confrontation a wonderful story. Because for me tragedy is not inherently bad but an entelechy of human history. I study history as the best spectacle of all. Just as people don't judge morally the content of the works of Shakespeare, nor they think that Macbeth should have never happened, I think of history in the same exact way. The fact that I think killing is morally bad does not obstruct my reasoning in appreciating Julius Caesar's murder, Urban II's call for the First Crusade, Cortés conquest of Mexico and Cuauhtémoc's last stand, Robert E. Lee's brave defense of the Confederate States of America, or Lenin's revolutionary genius. For me all historical actors always commit moral wrongs. But I do not pay attention to the moral elements in their actions, but just the resonance of their deeds. And that is what makes them spectacular and worthy of respect. All history should be appreciated.

This is the difference between our capacity to judge current affairs, and our capacity to judge our ancestors. They are of two different kinds, and if we do not separate them, intellectual problems arise. The first one is the reductio ad absurdum that follows if we think history should have never been when we use our normative conceptions to judge the far past, and the second is the moral nihilism that denies good and evil when we use the same aesthetical form of judgment applying it to the present.

Paul Auster's Leviathan and the End of American Liberty

This morning I was about to finish the second novel I’ve read from Paul Auster, and I must admit that I was afraid that it would disappoint me as the previous one (City of Glass) did. Not that City of Glass (1985) is a bad novel. I enjoyed it a lot and I think it’s terrific. But the ending just blew it off. Today I want to make a short comment on Leviathan (1992). Not only is the beginning really grasping, but so is the ending

The book’s title is already curious. Leviathan is a Biblical monster, especially prominent in the books of Job, and Jonah, but it’s also the title of Thomas Hobbes’ groundbreaking political treatise of 1651. This should be kept in mind because, even though the main plot seems to have barely any relation to the origin of the name leviathan, it becomes the word around which Auster brings together various notions that are originally separate.

Auster’s Laviathan is a story told by a novelist called Peter Aaron, who recounts his friendship with another writer, Benjamin Sachs, who at the book’s very beginning is accidently killed by a bomb in a deserted road in northern Wisconsin. The entire novel is, then, the explanation of how and why Ben Sachs died that way. The story goes around how they met their respective wives, their respective divorces, their respective lovers, and the respective coincidences that entangle most of their relations, and so forth. It would be a quite conventional story if it weren’t because the reader knows that the main character ends up blowing himself when the bomb he was building detonates by accident. And the shadow of this horrible death is cast all over the novel. You just want to know why he ends up like that, and, in the meantime, many interesting things happen, basically because Paul Auster is an outstanding storyteller.

Sachs’ first book is called The Big Colossus, and the name is a very important detail that the perspicacious reader will not overpass. First, it’s a reference to the Statue of Liberty (which plays a major role in the story), given that it’s a huge statue at the entrance of an important sea port, just as the Colossus of Rhodes was back in the times. And second, because at the moment of his death, Sachs had left an unfinished novel he wanted to call Leviathan. Both are names of gargantuan-size beings, which means Auster is implying a relation between both names. Thanks to this we can grasp the Freudian aspect of Auster’s character buildup. For example, by the middle of the novel Sachs starts becoming more and more depressed as he becomes conscious of his insignificance in the world. He had been in jail (where he wrote his first novel) for opposing conscription during the Vietnam War. He was a man of ideals; left-wing ideals. And as the Reagan era moves forward (the story takes place mostly during the 80’s), with patriotic Americanism and chauvinism reigning everywhere in the political environment, men like Sachs become less prominent, and ultimately ignored. There is a point of the story in which Sachs hides himself in a bookstore and finds his novel, The Big Colossus, piled among other irrelevant titles completely forgotten, for the humiliating price of five bucks. This was the turning point where he decided that he wanted to be a radical activist and stops writing, which is the main decision that led to his death. The immense emptiness he feels makes him leave his adorable wife and drop from the world, and it was due to his ego being absolutely hammered by his surroundings. This is the book’s psychological dimension.

But the richness of Leviathan spreads to mystical and symbolic levels. There is a traumatic episode in Sachs childhood that took place when he was visiting with his mother the Statue of Liberty. Inside the statue, his mom had a panic attack that became a painful memory that might have been the unconscious motive for targeting years later smaller replicas of the statue all over the United States. A very famous passage of Jonah (1:17) says: “But the LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.” The “big fish” is a translation of the Hebrew word “dag,” which is also traditionally translated as “leviathan”. In few words, Auster makes the episode inside the Statue of Liberty analogous to the Biblical episode in Jonah 1:17, where the statue plays both the role of a monstrous creature as well as the hero’s savior. This leads to my final interpretation.

All of this is set on a political background that never takes the front stage until the novel’s final moments, when Sachs drops writing and becomes a radical anarchist. In his rather insane quest to fight the government, he finds himself fighting a gigantic monster, which is the same symbolic image Hobbes makes of the modern state in his Leviathan of 1651. But the Statue of Liberty, as Auster explicitly mentions, is not a controversial symbol like the American flag. Everyone agrees with the ideas it represents, whether they be real or fantastic. But when Sachs sets on this personal mission to destroy this national symbol all around the U.S., he is making the point that what his country used to stand for, liberty, is being destroyed. It doesn't exist anymore. It has been swallowed by the leviathan state, if you wish. The statue itself, the one in Liberty Island in New York City, was a monstrous structure that had swallowed him in his childhood. Its external appearance and immensity only hides a inside shallowness. Hence the main question Auster’s book presents: Has American liberty being swallowed by the monstrous Federal Government?

The conclusion of the book is particularly pessimistic. But as my usual readers might be aware of, I like that.