Portugal today. The elections, the ideas, the young

The title of my article today is not new. The subtitle yes, is. José Gil, the author of Portugal today, the fear of existing (Water Clock, 2007), is the father of the expression that I summon: ‘Portugal today’. But this today, being still the same today for eighteen years, is not exactly – in the form and content – the ‘today’ of the Portuguese philosopher and teacher. In one of the exciting passages of this striking book (but who reads it, or relay today?), José Gil hits in one of the targets where we have to get it right if we want to understand (and try to solve) a problem that we have with ourselves: Portugal.

In this book, the author of the 2007 rehearsal wrote: “The European Union has already entered us and modified our geographical map, our laws, our economy, has disappeared many ancestral behaviors, disturbed our social affectivity, shifting it, abolishing it in multiple cases. But if Europe comes in us, we have not yet entered Europe. The economic and technological transformations that the European Community imposes on our country, we respond with the resistance (especially passive) that rests on old survival intelligence strategies that have decades, perhaps centuries. Molded into unconscious strata, they condition the main reflexes of defense, constituting a true barrier to ‘development’.

José Gil Digno, then the reasons for our delay: we did not do ‘radical revolutions’ in education that, according to Gil, is ‘first condition of development’. We also did not operate changes essences in the economy and public administration, tax reform and scientific research. José Gil does not refer to justice – but here also the doldrums, the resistance. Thesis: «We have lost – we are missing – a unique opportunity. Our fragile economic fabric is outlined day after day. Portugal risks disappearing ».

I confess that this thesis of José Gil – that Portugal is in danger of disappearing – is, in my view, absolutely correct. It is a thesis that has its roots (so as not to go further) in a certain cultural broth in which the concept of decay of the generation of 70, the esoteric and prophetic texts of a certain person, who also wrote about politics, without forgetting Eduardo Lourenço, who, for example in the splendor of chaos, advanced with a similar thesis: the outline of Europe is already a reflection of our dilution. The Eduardian question was always this: we suffered from an excess of identity. For Antero (or for Eça, or Oliveira Martins, but also to António Sérgio, whose effort to rationalize the country gave nothing), for person and others who came later – poets, philosophers, fictionists – the question will be that Portugal, from century to century to decade, has been forgetting to know who and what it is. But it is possible and desirable that in these nearby elections, politicians and commentators, analysts and other experts, they see well what will not speak throughout the campaign.

From the subject that will not be spoken of the deserved depth – here is the Gordian knot of the Portuguese issue, at least since Antero (since Garrett?, That of Portugal in the scale of Europe?). It is at school, through what it is today of tension and contradiction, violence and effort (of many who resist), – sometimes – actions of overcoming who teaches and who learns; That’s where, it said, that this is all this ‘future Portugal’. If, on the one hand, Europe has entered us, modifying ourselves, we have not yet entered Europe, because, despite the end of a rural Portugal, we remain equal to ourselves in the degenerating atavism of the ‘national-underreirism’. This is especially true in the field of education.

The impunity of a certain leading elite, the crumbness and temptation of the corruption that José Gil speaks, we have to add a new fact: the mental reality of a large majority of the generation of students born in 2009, 2010, 2011, the ‘digital natives’. They are Portugal today that is still afraid of existing. Or rather, they are this Portugal today who, thinking that exists, knows nothing about themselves, knows nothing about Europe, will know little from the world. They think otherwise. They have another language. The ‘they’ I speak, however, has no less talent or capabilities to make a change of what had certain Portuguese generations of the twentieth century, in particular the gold generation of politicians, artists, poets, Portuguese thinkers born between 1915 and 1935/40. What happens is that today, when we go to schools and see the inculture, the violence, the goodness of tastes, fashion and opinions, we rarely have the courage to say that what we see is our fault. Wow: that is, from the fathers and mothers; Politicians and teachers, other agents of the community – all of us – we have regarding how, in the name of a stupid idea of ​​freedom and democracy, we have been infantilized and pretentiously look at these ‘digital natives’.

In this election campaign we can see the artificial and childhood mode as Pedro Nuno Santos will be addressed to the Portuguese. The elders (who have been working for decades have not seen in him an equal, but a JS boy, being pushed by a party without paintings) smile. Just like smiling at so many others: from the voice of coins to the centimeters of Mendes; From the admiral’s silences to the end of the rock-liberal gaze… we have nothing but the result of decades of poor education. Montenegro (as Marques Mendes was wrong !!) is not, even by shadows, ‘better than the order’. There is no charisma, you don’t have to know, speak and think badly. There is no readings, put your feet for your hands-it’s just a commonplace maker. In this particular he and Pedro Nuno are no different: they give us hear what we have heard since Socrates, from Cavaco! Promises – and a hand full of nothing. The remaining candidates are like the swallows: they will come to another next season to try their luck. Ventura, opportunistic, after this unseemly plebiscite to the morale of the PM will be a candidate for the next pan. To the left of the PS, to a greater or lesser extent, newspapers and televisions will do why they don’t have much time to say what they think. Providing it is the doctrinal way as a journalist of the state channel cheated the secretary general of the PCP. And, in good rigor, the Magna issue about Portugal will be left: what education? And for lack of humanistic vision of our politicians, what decision is we responsible to us taxpayers and voters, in case of a conflict that the elites seem to want to want? Portugal and the illiterateness of those today in the secondary and university, in the 3rd cycle or in professional courses is, for these elites, the field where hatred, the animality that always rules need to command, direct, dominate.

The values ​​will all say in unison, because the brand new ones are governed. No. The point is that the environment is the message and the politicians we have do not understand that to defend freedom and democracy urges to do pedagogy and not indoctrinate or manipulate. Telling the truth to the younger ones, this would be the only way to still in time to tell them that democracy is not synonymous with barbarism, dictatorship of banality. There is a question that no politician will ask us – or will ask you, young people – and the question is this: Who should you know nothing, nothing want to know and feel only, about life, a very huge tiredness?