Liberalism

by Leonardo Castellani

Taken from Las Canciones de Militis 

Jean Jacques Rousseau says that, when born, the baby cries ¨I don´t want to be swaddled." The baby does not say it does not want to be slapped, which would be quite natural, but that it does not want to be wrapped, but it does get swaddled nonetheless. "Men are born and remain free and equal" says Rousseau. Born, yes, but they do not remain; poor them if they were to remain! Immediately the mother, with a perverse anti-liberal instinct, begins to establish between her and her baby all kinds of links. Note that links are the pieces that make up a chain.

Men, to say nothing of women, are essentially seekers of chains. It is precisely because of this that they enjoy hearing the sound of broken chains. It is to seek new ones. Love promises, marriage contracts, religious vows, promises of eternal fidelity, strict military discipline, juridical construction of laws, constitutions and Magna Cartas, loyalty to chief, faithfulness to friend, attachment to fatherland ... wherever man can find a chain that frees him from his essential changeability and contingency, and which ties him to something permanent, just as a shipwrecked man clings to a mast, there he feels happy and noble. And what's most phenomenal is that he feels free. One of the freest men I have known was a Jesuit who, besides the fourth vow Jesuits make, had made other five or six vows of his own accord. And he used to say that with one of these he had freed himself from an internal tyranny. I believe he was not lying. All this militates fundamentally against a book of Rousseau's named The Social Contract which I can remember how much I had struggled to understand when I went to school.

What's worse is that another of Rousseau's books, the Émile, is more questionable than the first. According to him, the boy, in reaching school age, is a being who loves washing his face, likes being clean, enjoys going to school and learning everything in books, beginning with botany.

Oh, sweet Botany and Geography!
Oh, comfortable Mineralogy!
You are the three Muses of my ingenuity!

This is Rousseau's boy. But it turns out that real-life boys like playing with mud, wandering the streets, fighting other boys, stealing tangerines, and learning everything by themselves. When a desperate teacher tells a boy he is a rascal, a good for nothing, a disaster, and a scoundrel, the kid that has some respect of himself and who is not a fool or is not unwell, will reply with another of Rousseau's phrases, which is the nucleus of the entire liberal theory invented by this celebrated author: "Leave me alone!". Then is when, by force of circumstances, the two possible meanings of the baby's cry at birth become indistinct; and the teacher, whom the official teacher´s college has taught to respect Émile as the bible of Modern Education, in practice, given also he is not a fool or is unwell, behaves as the most vulgar absolutist and anti-Rousseauist.

Now comes another book by the inventor of liberalism; its title is Julie or the New Eloise. Here liberalism comes applied to women and here my wisdom ends, because I have never been able to read it beyond the first half of the first part, and it has five parts. I did read the entire index, though, which represents a summary of the puzzle, because it is a novel, and left me with a giddiness that lasted an entire afternoon; a mixture of feeling like vomiting or like going to sleep, which is the sickness of the philosopher when he tries to swallow an excessive dose of absurdity in a single gulp. Liberalism applied to women is a perfect failure. There are three words that a woman will never understand and they are: liberty, equality and fraternity.

Liberalism applied to peoples is contained in Rousseau's fourth book, titled The Confessions, which has three volumes, because each of these tomes is longer than the preceding one. There one understands everything. We are dealing with a madman. A madman is the least free of beings, even if it may appear to be the opposite, even when he wanders about loose, because the madman´s stiffness is in the inside... But this Rousseau was a madman of the most dangerous kind, because he was a madman who knew his French quite well and besides, as every madman, imitative mimics. A madman, aside from being a born liar, is a walking fear of being interned and a permanent scrupulousness in working evil in anything he does. To react against these two deadly affections, Rousseau invented the theory of "Leave me alone" and the theory of the essential goodness of man; he defined that everything he did was necessarily good and besides nice and cute. Only an obese man is capable of writing that meticulous description of the trivialities and squalors of his life wrapped in a syrupy scent with an aftertaste of bedbugs and dirty linen, which produces repulsion in us today, but at the time and in his milieu, which seems to be the milieu of the joli and the mignon, produced a considerable effect. It even looks like he would give himself the pleasure of inventing squalors so that he could please himself in embellishing them: like that of having had five children and having abandoned them to a foundlings home. It is believed nowadays, with great physiological and psychological foundation ‒ according to J. Lemaitre ‒ that he never engendered any child. Luckily.

True liberty is a study in obedience. Man frees himself of corruption of the flesh by obeying reason, he frees himself from matter by subjecting himself to the unswerving profile of a form, he frees himself of the ephemerous by tying himself to a style, of the capricious by adapting himself to customs, of solitary infecundity by obeying life, and of his own outmoded and mortal life he frees himself sometimes by obeying Him who said "I am the life." Only the bad poet resorts to the free verse, Lugones used to say. The good poet multiplies the ties of his matter to make the triumph of the form, of which beauty consists. Lugones went to seek the sand and the mud of Río Seco to write his last work, which will survive the cedar, the ivory and the silver of his preceding works. Where the madman, the slave, the prisoner and the boor say: Liberty, the nobleman says: Honor, Beauty, Love and Wisdom. The greatest liberty grows from the greatest rigor, said Leonardo da Vinci: because man is freer to the extent he is stronger ‒ as it is taught at the National Defense Academy in La Plata ‒ and an obsession with liberty is the proof of maximum weakness, which is a weakness of the mind. Who in the world wants to be free as the Uruguayans? ‒ freest men in the world, judging by what they say of themselves.

Well. That obsession with liberty typical of a madman came to serve marvelously the economic forces that at that time sparked, and also the power of Money and Usury, which had also been obsessed with being left alone. They were left alone; technology and products triumphed over blood and soul, and an epoch in which liberty has never been spoken of so much and in which man has never been really less free, was inaugurated. A half-Catholic, half-Protestant and half-atheist heresy ‒ because Rousseau was, in succession, first Catholic, then Protestant and finally atheist ‒ it came to life precisely when we Argentinians were approaching independence. It did us so much harm as a demijohn of wine in a cage of monkeys: and it did not ruin us entirely because, thank God, here were strong Spanish vitamins. And there were also men who were not monkeys.

But the evil worked by liberalism in the Old World, where it was born, was perhaps worse: here the man of the Pampa, the sun and the long distances air the environment. There, in Europe, we have now this terrible war, of which I cannot even think about. And other moral and spiritual destructions much worse, if possible, than that of war, and of which I cannot stop thinking even when I want to; and they burden my mind in a way such, that they make me look prematurely old, and they would also make me crazy were it not for the two celestial consolations of philosophy and journalism.

Philosopher Santayana at one time dreamed of seeing pass four knights in four horses, one black, one sorrel, one bay and the last one white. He saw them pass plumed and armed and asked them:

‒ Where are you heading?
‒ We are going to free the peoples.
‒ Free them from what? ‒ the philosopher shouted.
The crowned man on the white horse answered:
‒ From the consequences of liberty.

Originally published in Cabildo, Buenos Aires, N° 606, June 14, 1944.