Começo este tema para vos dar a conhecer alguns excertos de textos que considero fundamentais para a compreensão da natureza humana.
As linhas que se seguem são de Theodor Dalrymple, retirados de "Our Culture, What´s Left of It".
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASI ... 67-8630045Textos reveladores da realidade cultural ocidental e do que está em risco. Objectivamente, o que dá razão à existência das forças armadas e de segurança.
I learned early in my life that if people are offered the opportunity of tranquillity, they often reject it and choose torment instead. My own parents chose to live in the most abject conflictual misery and created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg. There was no reason external to themselves why they should not have been happy; reasonably prosperous, they lived under as benign a government as they could have wished for. Though they lived together, they addressed not a single word to one another in my presence during the eighteen years I spent in their house, though we ate at least one meal a day together; once, as a child, I was awakened in the night by the raised voice of my mother exclaiming to my father, "You're a wicked, wicked man." Those are the only words I ever heard pass between them. It was like a bolt of lightning on a dark night: dazzling but unilluminating. For the rest, their silences were highly nuanced, expressing resentment, aggression, injured innocence, exasperation, moral superiority, and all the other dishonest little emotions of which the human mind is capable. They continued their absurd, self-dramatizing civil war to the end of my father's life: on his deathbed, my father, by then long separated from my mother, said to me, "Tell her she can come if she wants to," to which my mother's reply was, "Tell him I’ll come if he asks me." They stuck to their principles and never did meet: for what is mere death by comparison to a lifelong quarrel?
For a long time I pitied myself: had any child ever been as miserable as I? I felt the deepest, most sincere compassion for myself. Then gradually it began to dawn on me that the education I had received had liberated me from any need or excuse to repeat the sordid triviality of my parents' personal lives. One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is. If henceforth I were miserable, it would be my own fault: and I vowed never to waste my substance on petty domestic conflict.
It was the time of the Vietnam War. Pictures such as those displayed in "Requiem" seemed to uncritical and arrogant youth to unmask the falseness, the hypocrisy, the hidden but always underlying violence of Western civilization. It was the time of the Glaswegian psychiatrist R. D. Laing, according to whom only the insane were sane in an insane world, while the sane were truly insane. The family was the means by which society passed on and perpetuated its collective madness; and the Cambridge social anthropologist Edmund Leach famously said in a series of lectures on the BBC that the nuclear family was responsible not for some but for all of the misery of human existence. (Pol Pot was but a few years away.)
For obvious reasons, I was not entirely well disposed to family life or to the supposed joys of bourgeois existence, and therefore swallowed some of the nonsense whole. Like the photographers, I was only too desirous of escaping what I supposed to be the source of my personal dissatisfactions. But not for very long: for I soon carne to realize that the peculiarities of my personal upbringing were not a reliable prism through which to judge the world. The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as meanspirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent; and a rejection of everything associated with one's childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it.
It was in Africa that I first discovered that the bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic. I was working in a hospital in what was then still Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. I was still of the callow - and fundamentally lazy - youthful opinion that nothing in the world could change until everything changed, in which case a social system would arise in which it would be no longer necessary for anyone to be good. The head nurse on the ward in which I worked, a black woman, invited me to her home in the township for a meal. At that time and in that place, social contact between blacks and whites was unusual, though not actually illegal.
She was a splendid, kindly, hardworking woman. She lived in a township in which there were thousands of tiny, identical, pre-fabricated bungalows, the size of huts. The level of violence in the township was very great: on Saturday night the floors of the emergency department of my hospital were slippery with still-flowing blood.
In this unpromising environment, I discovered, the nurse had created an extremely comfortable and even pretty home for herself and her aging mother. Her tiny patch of land was like a bower; the inside of her house was immaculately clean, tidy, and well-though cheaply-furnished. I would never laugh again at the taste of people of limited means to make a comfortable home for themselves.
Looking around me in the township, I began to see that the spotlessly clean white uniform in which she appeared every day in the hospital represented not an absurd fetish, not the brutal imposition of alien cultural standards upon African life, but a noble triumph of the human spirit-as, indeed, did her tenderly cared-for home. By comparison with her struggle to maintain herself in decency, my former rejection of bourgeois proprieties and respectability seemed to me ever afterward to be shallow, trivial, and adolescent. Until then I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a ~ejection of the superficiality and materialism of bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of tom, worn-out, and tattered clothes-at least n public-by those in a position to dress otherwise without a feeling of deep disgust. Far from being a sign of solidarity with he poor, it is a perverse mockery of them; it is spitting on the graves of our ancestors, who struggled so hard, so long, and so bitterly that we might be warm, clean, well fed, and leisured enough to enjoy the better things in life.
To base one's rejection of what exists - and hence one's prescription for a better world-upon the petty frustrations of one's youth, as surely many middle-class radicals have done, is profoundly egotistical. Unless consciously rejected, this impulse leads o a tendency throughout life to judge the rightness or wrongness .f policies by one's personal emotional response to them, as if motion were an infallible guide. Only connect, was E. M. Forster's enigmatic injunction to his readers at the end of Howards
End: to which I should prefer the injunction, Only compare. One's supposed sufferings are then not so great after all and give no special insight into the world as it is or as it should be.
But the overestimation of the importance of one's emotional responses is very widespread. It could be seen in the comment book available to visitors to the "Requiem" exhibition. Most of the visitors who wrote more than a word or two imagined that their personal responses to the pictures were sufficient for them to pass judgment on the war itself, indeed on all war. It seemed to occur to none of them that the justness or otherwise of the war could not be judged by the pictures alone, and that they needed a lot more information to make this judgment-for if such photographs had been published of Allied soldiers and civilians during the Second World War, they might, in the absence of any other information, be taken as evidence of the wrongness of resistance to Nazism.
It is not surprising that emotion untutored by thought results in nearly contentless blather, in which-ironically enough-genuine emotion itself cannot be adequately expressed. "What hurts so much," wrote one person who had visited the exhibition, "is that we humans keep doing this war / killing thing. We must hammer our guns into Plows and STUDY Peace." There were pages and pages of this kind of sentiment, which aimed to combine thought with emotion and missed both. The comment of an Italian stood out like a beacon of truth in this murk of dishonesty: "É molto emocionante. Se non fosse Ia guerra, che cosa farebbero i reporter?"
