Yearly archive for 2008

Everyday, students, readers, and listeners send me dozens of questions, and I try to answer as many as I can, but I usually decline requests for religious direction, as I do not consider myself to be the prototype of the most directed person in these questions. Nevertheless, there is a rule of biblical interpretation – and thus also of religious morality – that stems from the very nature of language, one which no sane person can disagree with, though many deny it in practice without knowing it.

I did not learn this rule from anybody else and likely I was not the first one to discover it. After wandering in the minds of believers through the millennia, it ended up popping up in mine, spontaneously, a certain morning, after I had prayed for months to Our Lord Jesus Christ that He would make His words more intelligible to a jackass like me. So I have my reasons to believe that He, Himself, without my noticing it, programmed my brain to accept it. To saints, prophets and illuminated souls, God speaks in a loud voice or in dreams. But donkeys and cranks of my kind can only learn in a state of deep sleep, when we rest totally unconscious and defenseless in the arms of the Lord, as little ones, and for some moments, without any merit on our part, we enjoy a privilege reserved to them. I have followed this rule for years and infallibly it makes things ever more clear to me, be it in deciphering passages of the Bible, be it in the resolution of the perplexities of life. Moreover, the rule is so natural and obvious that only those who did not perceive it fail to follow it.

As it usually happens with the simplest truths, that which is perceived in an intuitive and mute instant requires some logical refinement in order to be exposed in words. To facilitate the explanation I make here a distinction between “norms” and “principles” – distantly inspired by the one made by Kant and Max Scheller between material and formal ethics, but without subscribing to their respective moral philosophies. Every moral system is made up of both norms and principles. Specific norms command or forbid some kind of concrete conduct: do not kill; do not steal; help orphans and widows, etc. When the order is not expressed by a concrete imperative, but by an abstract relationship of proportionality, as in an equation of the type a/b = x/y, then it is not dealing with a particular conduct, but rather with a principle that must be observed in all conducts, in all situations of life. In order to be obeyed, specific norms require distinctions and exemptions, which, based upon their general typological formulation, wisely adapt them to the particular situation of the moment. Of course, “thou shalt not kill”, but whoever refuses to do it in war or in the defense of a threatened innocent may have to face the guilt of exposing others to death, by omission. Certainly “thou shalt not steal”, but who has the right not to steal when the only means of getting a wounded person to the hospital is the car that an unknown owner left with the keys in the ignition? “Thou shalt not bear false witness”, but this does not mean that you are forced to tell the truth when a robber asks you where your boss keeps the money, or when a truculent commissar of the people asks you where your village hid its harvest. Having absolute typological validity, norms enjoy an eminently relative application: relative to the situation, to the intentions, to the character of those involved, to the interference of highly complex cultural, psychological and psychopathological factors, etc. Even though they are permanent in their general obligatory-ness, they require a particular interpretation which is different in each case and circumstance. Many times good people do evil not because they consciously wish to break the moral rule, but because they err in its particular interpretation.

For this very reason, God did not provide us only with rules of conduct, but also with the general principles that must guide their interpretation. These principles, because they are as formal as equations and do not refer to any concrete situation, have an absolute and unconditional validity in all situations and work as a touchstone to assess the interpretation we give to concrete norms. In the Ten Commandments this distinction is clear. When someone asks Him what is the needed to enter into heaven, Jesus answers: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with thy whole mind. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Ten Commandments are therefore made up of two principles and eight rules. The principles are the keys that determine the meaning of the rules in each case. If someone commits adultery, he breaks a rule, but if you throw him to public execration in the streets, instead of pardoning him and counseling him privately, as you would hope it would be done unto you, you sin much more than the adulterer, because you violate a principle. God forgives adulterers, liars, thieves, and even murderers, but he does not forgive one who does not forgive. I may be wrong, but I suspect that in hell there are fewer adulterers than virtuous spouses who have denied them forgiveness.

Throughout the Bible one finds many secondary formal principles, derived from the first ones. They are authentic treasure maps to the tormented soul which, in the complexities of existence, wishes to do right but does not know what is right. One of these principles – one that is most often forgotten, in my estimation – was enunciated by St. Paul, the Apostle: “Test everything; retain what is good.” I do not tire of meditating upon this sentence, and the depth I find in it could fill many books, if I were capable of writing them.

Consider this. St. Paul, throughout his letters, enunciated several rules of conduct, more detailed than those contained in the Ten Commandments. If you read these rules, you already know what is good or bad, according to the teaching of the Apostle. Whence then the need to “test”? The very distinction between principles and rules implicitly contains the answer. For you to avoid bad conduct it is not enough to know that typologically, i.e. generically, it falls under the classification of “bad”. Human conduct is not guided by abstractions, but by the direct and sensitive perception of situations. It is necessary for you to “see” with your own eyes good and evil. Human beings do not learn only by hearsay – even if the Word heard is God’s: we learn by experience, by the slow, laborious, and painful distinction between good and evil not in general simple definitions, but in hallucinatingly complex and ambiguous situations of real life. The symbol of bread in the Eucharist means the moral, practical virtues, while the wine means the spiritual ones, of a purely inner order. “By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat” means exactly this: the little good that may be found in us comes mixed with evil, and will have to be separated from it little by little, through experience, through trial and error, as in a long alchemic decantation. God can, of course, preserve you from committing this or that sin by an act of Grace, but He is not obliged to do so and even less is He bound to immunize you beforehand against all possible sin. Moreover, what greater Grace can you receive from God than His promise to justify errors as soon as in the path of experience they are frankly admitted as such?

If the Apostle distinguishes between the experience and its selective conclusion, he presupposes that not everything that will be tested will be good, but that everything must be tested in light of learning and of good, not out of the vulgar wish to try it just for trying, neither out of a forged and artificial doubt. Plato said that “the truth you know is the truth you obey.” As soon as you have clearly seen that some conduct is bad you have to avoid it by all means. Until then, you have a certain margin of justified error, as an inherent requirement to the very notion of learning, with the condition that you confess the error as soon as you notice it as such and that you do not insist upon it after that. When you have discovered what is good, do not let go of it for all the money in the world.

I, who am dumb and worthless, and on top of that also careless and lazy, have seen a very tiny piece of good, one that compared to my illustrious self is about the size of infinity. I saw it thanks to the Pauline counsel. It is from there that the stable and serious part of my soul comes from, a minute part, but much better than the whole of it, which I hope to improve little by little to the last day, as other pieces of good shine through here and there in the obscurities of my mind. Certainly, I proceed by steps. I am patient and tolerant with myself while amidst confusion and doubt, but as soon as I see things clearly, I do not cut my wretched self any slack. In an instant I shift from the tenderness of caresses to the rigor of the ferule.

I do not know another method and I do not recommend this one to those who know a better one. To the others, I say with the Apostle: test everything.

In his book America and the World Revolution (Oxford University Press 1962), a transcript of conferences given at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1961, Arnold Toynbee wrote:

“If we wish to avoid massive suicide, we have to have our world State as quickly as possible, and this probably means we will need to install it in a non-democratic form to begin with.”

This was not a prophecy, it was a proposal. Or rather, it was a reaffirmation of a proposal that had already been under development in the upper echelons of the Anglo-American establishment at least since 1928, when Herbert George Wells published the first popular version of the plan, under the highly suggestive title The Open Conspiracy. Some historians trace the project back to the end of the 19 th century and list its presence as one of the causes of World War I, but we need not go back that far. The best studies on the life and work of Wells (W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State, Yale University press, 1961; Michael Foot, H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells, Washington, DC, Counterpoint, 1995) leave no doubts as to the role played by the author of The War of the Worlds in the transformation of a general idea into a viable political project. Like Wells, Toynbee was not only an intellectual but also an activist, an intimate collaborator of the British government and globalist circles. His monumental work, A Study of History(1939-1961), provides a unified vision of world historical development indispensable for preparing the ground for the advent of world government.

The most recent state of implementation of the plan drawn up by these visionaries can be appreciated from the following paragraphs published in the Taipei Times of February 2006, to which no Brazilian political commentator paid much attention, even though their author was no less than Richard Haass, president of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), the most powerful think tank in the United States and practically an antechamber of the US presidency:

“In the age of globalization, states should give up some sovereignty to world bodies in order to protect their own interests.

Some governments are prepared to give up elements of sovereignty to address the threat of global climate change. Under one such arrangement, the Kyoto Protocol, which runs through 2012, signatories agree to cap specific emissions. What is needed now is a successor arrangement in which a larger number of governments, including the US, China, and India, accept emissions limits or adopt common standards because they recognize that they would be worse off if no country did.

Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker…. Sovereignty is no longer a sanctuary.”

Observations:

1. The success of appealing to examples of commerce and “global climate change” shows that the world State plan can, on the one hand, be legitimized as a unified response to problems of an international scale and, on the other hand, in itself supports an alarmist trend regarding nonexistent problems in order to legitimize itself by false and fraudulent means. In 2006 the slogan “global warming” still might have looked like a friendly warning. Two years later, not only do thousands of scientists openly contest this dogma, but even school children are capable of debunking the legend foisted on the world by the billionaire campaign in which ex-vice President Al Gore serves as the poster boy (see Al Gore’s global warming debunked – by kids!).

2. The procedures used to impose global list reforms bypass normal democratic channels via decisions made in secret sci-tech and administrative commissions whose activity can hardly be understood by the public (see Golpe de estado no mundo). The speed of the changes makes it impossible for the ordinary citizen to make sense of the events. “Public opinion,” which, generally speaking, is now little more than a set of vague impressions with little connection to reality, then becomes a mere tool for instituting changes that it will never be able to understand or influence. Toynbee’s program emerges, quite plainly implemented: the world State does not suppress democracy, it engulfs it. Democracy continues to exist, but as an organ in a larger body that embraces and controls it without its being in the least aware of this.

3. If other facts that I have cited in my articles have not abundantly proven it, the case of the Kyoto accord will suffice to show an obvious fact that many Brazilian nationalists refuse to understand, namely, that the control centers of globalist power are not found in the American government, nor do the interests of the global State identify in the least with those of good old “Yankee imperialism.” From California to New England, from Florida to Oregon, no one is unaware that submitting to the extension of the Kyoto accord implies destruction of the American economic base, reducing the United States to the status of a second-class power. Nor is it lost on the general public that other globalist projects proposed by the CFR, such as the Treaty of the Law of the Sea, or the dissolution of the borders with Mexico or Canada, would complete this destruction and close the chapter of the American nation in history. Curiously, the most lucid left-wing intellectual in the world, Antonio Negri, has explained and repeated a thousand times that the “Empire” and “United States” are not one and the same thing, that the global empire that is taking shape is supranational not only in its objectives but also in its only internal constitution (not that Negri was the first to discover anything. With minor differences, the essence of his concept of the Empire, published in 2000 by the Harvard University Press under the title Empire, was already all in my book O Jardim das Aflições [The Garden of Afflictions], of 1996). But the fact that not even the word of a renowned leftist suffices to unravel the confusion of globalism and Americanism shows in itself that much of Brazilian nationalism is only a form of morbid atavism rather than intelligent patriotism. The everyday discourse of politics reflects this. Indeed, while the only empire that exists in the world is the one referred to by Negri, in Brazil, the term “empire” is used as a synonym with “United States,” taking its cue from Fidel Castro’s communist rhetoric (see “Nuestro espiritu de sarificio y el chantaje del Imperio,” of April 25). Thus, the great true Empire, with the Latin American left as one of its chief instruments, is spared public hostility, which is turned specifically against the one nation that, ironically – but not coincidentally – is precisely the one offering the greatest obstacles to Imperial designs.

4. The globalist scheme fostered by the CFR is not the only one out there. There is a Sino-Russian globalism consolidated under the Shanghai Pact, which operates essentially by two routes: the financing of terrorism and the control of entire nations by means of the most formidable corruption machine that has ever existed in the world. And then there is an Islamic globalism, which expands by immigration, which is used as a weapon of cultural warfare, in a highly efficient strategy of occupation from within. The relationships between these three schemes of control are extremely intricate and subtle. The Shanghai Pact, for example, is ostensibly a reaction of the left to “imperialist globalism,” but in reality, does not oppose it in any way, opposing only the United States, and thereby helping globalism undermine American resistance (the faulty Brazilian language pattern mentioned above is a local example of this phenomenon). The Islamic and Sino-Russian schemes can be seen, to some extent, as competing with each other, but here as well, a web of caveats and ambiguities renders any schematic simplification prohibitive.

5. No country can “confront” oppressive globalism, but each one has the obligation to integrate itself into it as beneficially as possible for its own people, without in any way compromising its vital interests. However, this calls for a highly trained intellectual elite capable of navigating the twists and turns of the most advanced and complex historic change of all time. In Brazil, this elite does not exist at all, and the assumption that our institutions of “higher” learning can provide it is so ridiculous it does not merit discussion. The courses that have not been reduced to the level of training centers for militants are dominated by the most rudimentary of economic pragmatism, or by academic formalism that can only reason in terms of institutions and doctrines without ever getting down to basic issues. As far as I know, the only Brazilian concerned about training this elite is yours truly, but as you know, I can only work on a very small scale in proportion to my resources, or rather, to the lack thereof. Brazil seems doomed to go through this perilous time without understanding where it is headed or who is leading it.

Translated from the Portuguese by Donald Hank