Liberalism

by Father Leonardo Castellani, SJ

Taken from “Las Canciones de Militis” Biblioteca Dictio Vol. 19

>Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope Sánchez Mejorada

Says Jean Jacques Rousseau that when a child is born he cries “I want not to be swaddled”. He pronounces swaddled with a light lunfardo accent, but he doesn’t say he does not want to be spanked, which would be quite natural but that he does not want to be wrapped in diapers. But he is wrapped in diapers nevertheless. “Men are born free and they remain free and equal,”  says Rousseau. Born they are but do not remain free ¡poor they if they had to remain free! The mother immediately, with a perverse anti-liberal instinct begins to establish between her and her  baby all kinds of links as in a chain.

Men, not to say women, are essentially seekers of chain. Precisely for that reason it is that they like the sound of chains so much. It is for the purpose of seeking other chains. Oaths of love, marriage agreements, religious oaths, promises of eternal faithfulness, strict military discipline, juridical formulation of laws, constitutions and Magna Cartas, loyalty to the chief, probity with a friend, attachment to the homeland … wherever man can find a chain that frees him from his essential mutability and contingency and that ties him to something permanent, as a shipwreck survivor to a mast, there he feels happy and noble. And what is more amazing is that he feels free. One of the freest men I have known was a Jesuit who in addition to the fourth oath that the Jesuits make, had made other five or six oaths on his own. And he would say that with one of them he had been freed from an internal tyranny. I believe he wasn’t lying, All this fundamentally  militates against a book by Rousseau named The Social Contract which I remember how difficult it was for me to understand when I went to school.

What’s worse is that another book by Rousseau, the Emile, is still more doubtful than the one above. According to it, the child, in reaching school age, is a being who loves to wash his face, who likes to be clean, who enjoys going to school and learning about everything, beginning with botanics, in books.

Oh, sweet Botanics and Geography!

Oh, comfortable Mineralogy!

You are the three muses that entertain me!

This is Rousseau’s child, but it turns out that the real child likes mud, rambling around in the streets, fighting  other children, stealing apples, and learning about everything on his own. When the desperate teacher tells him that he is a rascal, that he is a good for nothing, that he is a disaster, that he is shameless, any kid that respects himself and is not a fool and is not crazy responds with another phrase from Rousseau which is the nucleus of all liberal doctrine invented by this celebrated author: “leave me alone”. It is then when in the rule of circumstances, the two meanings of the word swaddle are muddled, the teacher, who in Teacher’s College was taught to respect the Emile as the bible of modern education behaves in practice, also if he is not a fool and is not crazy, as the most vulgar absolutist and anti-russeauist.

Now follows another book, called Julia or the New Eloise, by the inventor of liberalism. Here comes liberalism applied to women and here is where my knowledge ends because I have never been able to go beyond the first half of the first part, and it has five. I did read the entire index which contains a summary of the intricacies, because it is a novel, and left me with a vertigo such that I was unable to work the entire afternoon, a combination of urge to vomit and to fall asleep, which is the illness of the philosopher when he swallows an excessive amount of absurdity in one gulp. Liberalism applied to women is a perfect failure. There are three words that a woman will never understand and they are liberty, equality, fraternity.

Liberalism applied to nations is in Rousseau’s fourth book, called The Confessions, in three volumes because each of these volumes is longer than the one before. There one can understand everything. It is about a madman. A madman is the least free of men existing, though it may appear to be the opposite, even when he is loose, because a madman is seized up on the inside …  But this man Rousseau was a madman of the most dangerous kind because he was a madman who knew French very well and, besides, as every madman, imitative mimics. A madman is besides a born liar, an ambulatory fear of being locked up and a permanent scruple of doing wrong in anything he does. To react to these two killing affections, Rousseau invented the theory of “leave me alone!” and the theory of the essential  goodness of man; he defined that all he did was necessarily good and besides joly and mignon. Only an obsessed man is capable of writing with minute detail that description of the trivialities and filthy things in life wrapped in a caramelized whiff with an aftertaste of bedbugs and dirty clothes which now causes repulsion in us but in the living conditions of his time and place, that seem to have been the ambiance of the joly and of the mignon it produced a considerable effect. It even seems that he pleased himself by inventing dirtiness to give himself the pleasure of embellishing them, such as that one that he had five children and abandoned them to a foundling home. It is now believed with ample physiological and psychological foundation, according to J. Lemaitre, that he never engendered any child. Thank God.

True liberty is a state of obedience. Man liberates himself of the corruption of the flesh by obeying reason, he liberates himself from matter subjecting himself to the adamantine profile of a form, he liberates himself from the ephemeral by tying himself to a style, of the capricious adapting himself to the customs, of his solitary infecundity by obeying life. and of his mortal life he sometimes frees himself, losing it in obedience to Him that said  “I am the the Life”. Only the bad poet asks for the free verse, would say Leopoldo Lugones. The good poet multiplies the ties of his subject matter to make the triumph of the form more visible, of which beauty consists. Lugones went to look for the sand and mud of Rio Seco to make his last work that will survive the cedar, the marble and the silver of his prior works.Where the madman, the slave and the plebeian say: Liberty, the nobleman says Honor, Beauty, Love or Wisdom. Maximum liberty comes from maximum rigour, said Leonardo da Vinci: because man is freer to the extent he is stronger – as it is taught in the lecture on National Defense at La Plata – and the obsession with liberty is proof that the maximum weakness is the weakness of mind. Who is there in the world that wants to be free as the Uruguayans, who, according to themselves, are the freest men in the world?

Well; such an obsession for freedom, typical of a madman, came to serve the economic powers marvelously, which at that time broke loose; and the power of Money and Usury which were also obsessed with being left alone. They were left alone: over the soul and the flesh technology  and marketing triumphed; and all over the world an epoch was inaugurated in which never before has been talked so much about liberty but never has Man in reality been less free. A heresy partly Catholic, partly protestant and partly atheist – because Rousseau was successively protestant, Catholic, and atheist – he came to life just when we Argentinians were becoming independent. It brought us as much evil as a demijohn of rum in a cage of monkeys; and not, it did not entirely ruin us because by the grace of God we had here strong Spanish vitamins. And also, there were men that were not monkeys.

But the evil liberalism did in the old world where it was born was perhaps worse. Here the pampero, the sun and the long distances aerate much. There in Europe we have now this horrible war that I cannot even think of. And other moral and spiritual destructions much worse than war, if at all possible, that I cannot stop thinking of them even if I want to, and burden my mind in a way such that I untimely get old and they would also make me a madman if I had not the two celestial consolations of philosophy and journalism.

Philosopher Santayana dreamed sometime that he saw four horsemen on four horses, one black, one brown, one bay and the last one white. He saw them pass plumed and armored aand asked them:

– Where are you going?

– We are going to liberate peoples.

– Liberate them from what? – the philosopher shouted.

The crowned man on the white horse answered:

– From the consequences of liberty.

CABILDO, Buenos Aires N° 606, June 14, 1944.