LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

The English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell founded the contemporary Analytic and Linguistic trend in philosophy which is based on the idea that precise analysis of language is critical to philosophical inquiry.  Russell, originally a mathematician wanted to create a logical language to describe the world around him and stated that complex concepts can be resolved into their simplest components, called ‘atomic propositions’. Wittgenstein claimed that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” and his conclusions arrive at ideas similar to Russell’s logical atomism.  He stated that the world is basically made up of simple facts that language is created to describe.

The world, however, insists on working in a different way to the ideal of the philosopher.  Language insists on being far more complex than it ‘needs’ to be.  However much we might wish to simplify the language we speak, users insist on building difficulties into language.

What I am suggesting is that:

·         descriptions of Bertrand Russell’s ‘simple facts’ vary according to language;

·         language develops at different rates historically and geographically, and

·         within the same language area, groups differentiate their language in order to establish identities for social or political reasons. 

The recent book Tingo contains examples of words for actions, situations and things that English has not seen fit to describe, for example: the Czech language has a word litot to describe ‘the state of torment created by the sudden realization of one’s own misery’; Malay has the word geragas that means ‘to comb one’s hair in anger’ and Japanese has a word to describe a woman who looks attractive from the back but less so when seen from the front.

I suppose the example of language and identity most of us first met is the story from the Old Testament:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Judges 12: 5-6

These differences apply to other languages as well.  In southern Africa there is a language known as !Ora (pronounced ‘kora’) which is distinguished by a clicking sound made at the back of the mouth.  This technique taught to babies and is unpronounceable by those not taught to make the sound from their earliest years.  Anyone who has tried to learn Arabic will know the difficulty in pronouncing the ‘r’ sound of that language.  Conversely, Arabs have difficulty in distinguishing between the sounds ‘b’ and ‘p’ and ‘e’ and ‘i’ in English.  There is a wonderful story of a Saudi father phoning a language school in England to ask why his son had not written home.  The school principal called the boy, who said indignantly he had written once a week.  “What did you do with the letters?” he was asked.  “I put them there”, the boy replied, indicating a container marked LITTER.

Within God’s own earthly paradise of Wales, it is worth pointing out that there are many variations of the latter, with a marked division between North and South Welsh.  Thus the ancient tribal identities within Wales are carried forward to the present day. 

The same divisions are apparent among the non-Welsh speaking Welsh: we note that in a very precisely defined area between and including Port Talbot and Swansea, the verb ‘want’ is pronounced as ‘wunt’.  

That is the geographical identity marker but if you go to Cardiff you will find a different marker that denotes the speaker’s identity within social class.  This is the adding of final ‘s’ to all forms of the verb: “I comes home at six o’clock and me and my husband we goes off to the supermarket.” this is a working class construction which I have only found within the city limits of Cardiff.  Since I started to write this, a gas engineer from Cardiff was in my house and produced the construction “he have done it”,  a reversal of the final ‘s’ rule, in the one example of the verb that should have ‘s’. I can only describe this as a form of ‘linguistic perversity’ deliberately done to reinforce the uniqueness of this identity marker.  It must be deliberately done because no teacher ever taught the construction and the engineer has never heard it in the media.  In other words, he is saying: we in this social class in this area have taken to ourselves the right to alter this small part of English.

Back in Britain, other markers reveal age-group identity but do not have a specific geographical limitation: I was at a New Year house party on the Isle of Wight this year and when the crowd of young people (i.e. 25 and below, which is young when you are my age) arrived, you could distinctly detect that subtle change in the vowel sound usually represented by the letters ‘ou’ or ‘oo’, producing ‘yiu’ for ‘you’ and ‘giud’ for ‘good’ that has gradually been creeping into the spoken language of this group (watch TVAM – if you can stand it).  The pronunciation is also accompanied by a vocabulary change that I find particularly annoying.  When asked “How are you?” members of this age group tend to reply: “I’m giud”, which is a response to the question “What is your moral condition?” rather than “How is your health?”  But again, it is limited to this sector of society that is establishing its identity as young, (generally middle class) 21st-century citizens.

What I’ve tried to set out so far is that language is used in all its aspects: pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, as a way of identifying ourselves as members of particular subgroups, in other words – tribes.  When I taught Nigerian students at Cardiff University many of them had facial scars in patterns denoting tribal origin.  Those identity markers could never be changed without the help of plastic surgery but language markers can change.  The identities of the Nigerian students were modified linguistically according to their life patterns: if one parent were married to someone from a different tribe, the offspring would speak both tribal languages as well as one of the three major languages of Nigeria: Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba.  Another level was added to denote educational status – speaking English.  And even within English there are official subdivisions: Educated Nigerian English and Pidgin.  In other words, the combination of languages spoken by a Nigerian gives that person a very precise social and geographical identity, and I would guess that there are generation differences there today as well, thanks to globalised media.

One of the paradoxes of language is that more traditional societies may have extremely complex language forms.  The Harvard palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson described it this way:

Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers.  The oldest language that can be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view.

Indeed, the most powerful language the world has ever seen in terms of geographical coverage and possibly the most powerful one in terms of flexibility and imaginative scope (thanks to Chaucer and Shakespeare), the one I’m using at the moment, is paradoxically one of the simplest in terms of pronunciation and grammar.  The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is admittedly idiosyncratic thanks to the way William Caxton adapted the pronunciation of his time to the letter combinations he used on his new printing press, but imagine having to speak Chinese, where the same word may be pronounced with four different intonations that give it different meanings.  The vocabulary of English is immense but a basic and perfectly adequate book was created in the 1930s to teach English that used only about a thousand words.  We shall speak later of the lack of masculine/feminine differences between nouns, but think also of the simplicity inherent in not having to use a subjunctive, using an alphabet rather than ideograms and only one written form.

What the complexity of Chinese does, of course, is to reinforce the separateness of the Chinese Empire, which spent many centuries in voluntary isolation from the rest of the world, as did Japan, another country whose language remains stubbornly difficult to learn – even for the Japanese.  When I lived there I would sometimes ask native Japanese people to translate a written text and they would spend several minutes deciphering the (originally Chinese) ideograms.  There are four different written forms in Modern Japanese, not to mention the different forms of language used by men and by women.  And the different verbs to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects: ‘aru’ is for inanimate while ‘iru’ is for animate ones. In negative sentences, ‘nai’ and ‘inai’ are used respectively.  This is one reason the Japanese proudly call themselves ‘differently different’.  All this has the effect, in China and Japan, not only of keeping foreigners outside their culture and from sharing their identity, but also of creating an internal identity differentiation between those who have learned more than the basic 3,000 ideograms and those who have not. 

The thesis of this essay is based around precisely this point of the unnecessary complexity of language and why it is created.  The idea finally crystallised in my mind when I translated an article about the indigenous languages of the Amazon basin for a colleague of mine at the University of Brasilia.  (In parenthesis, it is worth noting that this friend is a Catalan born in Spain but working in France who speaks to me only in French.  Modern Catalans do everything they can to avoid speaking Castilian Spanish because, like the Welsh, they are re-establishing a tribal identity that a powerful central state had tried to stamp out.)

In my friend’s article I noticed that he was describing two things: an immensely complex grammatical structure created by Stone Age peoples and secondly, that within the overall family of languages known as Tupi-Guarani, there were differences in these structures that occurred in two dimensions:

·         firstly, changes that had occurred in the history of some variants had not yet occurred in other forms of the same language family, and

·         secondly changes are occurring today in some areas that are not happening in others. 

So the differences are both chronological and geographical.

Most of these indians live in the Brazilian Amazon and of course in Brazil as a whole the major language is Portuguese.  Paradoxically, one of the most striking aspects I find, living in Brazil, is the very lack of regional variation within the Portuguese language, except for the Northeastern region.  So, on the one hand we have the indian tribes demarcating their identities by means of language difference (reinforced by body painting) whereas the larger, modern state that has been imposed over them is characterised by linguistic unity except in the Northeast, which has a strong tradition of military and cultural resistance on the part of its black slave community.

A possible interpretation for this situation is that, within the indian tribes, a permanent state of identity separation has been deliberately maintained because inter-tribal warfare was an important part of the culture: it was a form of population control and, as one of its motives was wife-stealing, it brought new blood into the genetic structure of small tribes. 

For the European colonisers of Brazil on the other hand, political and social unity was vital to maintain power over a state the size of Europe populated by a relatively small number of Europeans, and the homogeneity of the Portuguese language was a major force in achieving this.  During World War II, when President Vargas allied Brazil with the anti-Nazi powers, he banned German and Italian language newspapers among the sizeable immigrant groups who spoke those languages.  If we accept this argument, the impenetrability of the Northeastern dialect and accent may possibly be attributed to a kind of linguistic resistance movement on the part of black slaves.

(In what may be a parallel situation to the Amazon, there are apparently 300 languages spoken among the tribes of the relatively small area of Borneo and these tribes too, at least until recently, lived in a state of permanent but controlled warfare with their neighbours.)

I tried this theory out on my Brazilian wife, who was not convinced, but in fact she provided an example that tends to confirm it: in the 19th-century wars with the Spanish colonists of Uruguay, prisoners taken on the ill-defined frontier were told to say the Portuguese word pãozinho (small loaf of bread); if they pronounced it pãosinho in the Spanish manner, their throats were cut: an updated version of the ‘shibboleth’ technique.

A specific example of unnecessary complication of language is that of gender in nouns.  I’m sure we can all recall the problems remembering if cage and plage in French are masculine or feminine and then remembering to make adjectives agree with them both by gender (and by number – another unnecessary complication that English doesn’t have).  Mercifully, English has done away with this complication, but why on earth does it exist in the first place?  Linguists have attempted to reconstruct the earliest known language, proto-Indo-European, and have found evidence of gender difference in its nouns, a characteristic inherited by the languages developed from it.  The idea seems to be that the language first of all distinguished between human and non-human (i.e. neuter) nouns and then divided the human ones into male and female.  This works well enough with ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘bull’ and ‘cow’, but why on earth should a table be feminine in Latin and later French and Spanish?  Why is a woman feminine in German but a girl neuter?

In Latin, the word Sol (Sun) was masculine and the word Luna (Moon) was feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but in German (and Germanic languages in general), the opposite occurs. The learner of a language thus must regard the gender as part of the noun, and memorize accordingly to use the language correctly. A frequent recommendation is to memorize the definite article and the noun as a unit.  Even in English we have remnants of this: some personal pronouns have different forms based on the natural gender of the thing referred to: e.g. ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’, ‘his’, ‘hers’ and ‘its’ though in the plural, we use the common ‘them’ and ‘their’.  

Gender-specific pronouns vary considerably across languages: there are languages that have different pronouns in the third person to differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, like Hungarian and Finnish, but this distinction is usually forgotten in spoken Finnish.

Conclusion

Development of language change is chronological and digressive – in other words, some Tupi-Guarani language elements change faster in some versions than in others, and they change in different directions.  The same can be said of languages on a global scale – in India, English is still constructed in patterns of the 1930s; in the United States there are regional differences between the East and West coasts. I have also tried to show how language differences are used to create a social class identity as well a tribal one.  Finally, there is the use of language to create cultural identity, as shown by the words and phrases describing actions like combing one’s hair in anger.  We can also say that there is no such thing as a primitive language: language complexity is unrelated to economic and scientific development.  The English-speaking world dominates science and technology and uses a relatively uncomplicated language to describe its triumphs, but Finnish is one of the most complex languages in the world and the Finns stand up well in terms of science and technology.  The Japanese and Chinese languages share many of the same linguistic complexities but in Research and Development the Japanese are light years ahead of China.  Finally, the most striking element in all of this is that language difficulty seems to be deliberately built into languages, first of all to mark those who belong to the tribe, secondly to keep strangers out.  We could start talking about mutations in Welsh, but I promise, you really don’t want to know….

Comtean Positivism and its Effects on Political Development in Brazil

Positivism

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) saw one universal law at work in all sciences: the ‘law of three phases’ which says that society has gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. He also gave the name ‘Positive’ to the last of these.

• The Theological phase was seen as preceding the 18th-century Enlightenment, in which man’s place in society and society’s restrictions upon man were controlled by God.
• The Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a higher plane than the authority of any human ruler.
• The Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, was one in which people could find solutions to social problems and put them into practice.

Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and, for the first time, ‘social physics’ for which he later invented the term ‘sociology’).  Comte saw sociology as the last and greatest of all sciences, one that would include all other sciences, and would integrate their findings into a cohesive whole. His emphasis on the interconnectedness of different social elements foresaw modern functionalism. (In the philosophy of mind, Functionalism says that what makes something a particular type of a mental state does not depend on its internal constitution, but on the way it functions in the system of which it is a part).

Comte’s explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. He said: “If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them”.

He also coined the word ‘altruism’ to refer to what he believed to be a moral obligation of individuals to serve others and place their interests above one’s own. He opposed the idea of individual rights, maintaining that they were not consistent with this supposed ethical obligation

During his lifetime, Comte’s work was sometimes viewed sceptically because he elevated Positivism to a religion and named himself the Pope of Positivism. There are still one or two Positivist temples in Brazil.  He also re-worked the calendar, naming months after distinguished thinkers such as Homer and Aristotle.

His emphasis on a quantitative, mathematical basis for decision-making remains with us today. It is a foundation of the modern notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision-making. His description of the continuing cyclical relationship between theory and practice is seen in modern business systems of Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement where advocates describe a continuous cycle of theory and practice through the four-part cycle of ‘plan, do, check, and act’. The theories of Management by Objectives, fashionable in the 1960s, are clearly coherent with Positivism and were adopted by the leaders of the 1964 military coup in Brazil.

Positivism in Brazil

Positivism is the key to much of the social and political as well as intellectual history of Latin America in the second half of the 19th century. It was more popular there than anywhere else, even France. The Roman Catholic form of society remained, but among many intellectuals it was discredited, waiting for something to take its place. Positivism satisfied the needs of Latin American thinkers who had rejected Spanish and Portuguese culture and were trying to prove their independence by adopting French ideas. Catholicism, they maintained, was a tool of Iberian imperialism, and it had kept Latin America in a state of amoral, chaotic backwardness.

The Positivism of Auguste Comte promised progress, discipline, and morality, together with freedom from the tyranny of theology. Positivism influenced every country in Latin America, but none as much as Brazil. In Brazil the Positivist ‘Church and Apostolate’ became a reality unique in the world. Several Brazilians were students of Comte, but Machado Dias, who had studied in Paris under Comte in 1837-38, was a prophet in that he wanted a republic based on Positivist ideals to replace the Empire of Pedro II - something which did not happen until 1889.

Interestingly, one of the founders of the Brazilian Positivist movement was a woman, Nísia Floresta.  Having won fame as the founder and director of a school in Rio de Janeiro, she and her daughter moved to Paris, where they became close friends of Auguste Comte, who in his Twelfth Annual Confession refers to “the noble Brazilian widow” as a “precious pupil.”

While there were Positivist groups in all the states of Brazil, the most important and the most influential one was that in the capital, Rio de Janeiro. The imperial court of Pedro II attracted the social and intellectual elite of the country, and Rio de Janeiro was the principal entry for European culture. The influence of France was preponderant in all matters except politics, a domain in which the Empire cultivated English ideals. However, French Positivism was destined to undermine the Empire politically. About 1870 four Positivist magazines began to appear, followed in 1876 by A Revista do Rio de Janeiro, an important Positivist organ. The Positivists made no secret of the fact that the Empire was incompatible with Positivist Republicanism and told Pedro II so. He, with characteristic broadmindedness, made no attempt to repress the Positivist movement. As elsewhere in Brazil, Positivism had first developed around 1860 in medical research, especially in the field of cerebral physiology, but it soon affected every phase of thought, including political theory.

The leader of Positivist Republicanism in Rio de Janeiro was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhāes. The Escola Politécnica was a focal point of Positivism and at least ten professors there, including Benjamin Constant, were Positivist leaders. The students they imbued with Positivist ideas became teachers in many of the leading schools of Brazil.

Whereas earlier Positivism had had its most marked impact on medicine, now the instrument of Positivism was mathematics. The Positivists were the brains of the Republican movement which brought about the fall of the Empire in 1889, and Benjamin Constant was its leading intellectual figure. The peaceful transition from Empire to Republic was facilitated by a mutual respect unique in Latin American history. Despite Benjamin Constant’s declared Republicanism, the imperial court not only kept him as a royal preceptor, but also offered him a title, which he refused. To Benjamin Constant’s dismay, for he openly preached the subordination of the military to civilian authority, the republic was dominated by the Army. The Republic came into being because the Army refused to continue capturing fugitive slaves. Slavery thereby broke down, and in 1888, in the absence of Pedro II, the government abolished slavery. The Empire thus lost the support of the landed aristocracy, and it collapsed in 1889.

The Republican movement had won the decisive support of the Army when Benjamin Constant persuaded Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca to join its ranks. Deodoro da Fonseca accepted the Presidency of the Republic, although he had expected Benjamin Constant to take the post. Benjamin Constant, acclaimed as the founder of the Republic, was named Minister of War in the provisional government, but when the Republic created the Ministry of Education, Postal Service and Telegraphs as one bureau, he moved over to it. He died in 1891 so his role as an active Republican leader was cut short.

The division between the ‘apostolate’ of Miguel Lemos and Teixeira Mendes and the orthodox Positivism of Pierre Laffitte, which Benjamin Constant followed, continued to divide the Republicans. The latter group was more democratic, but even it talked about the need for a ‘dictatorship,’ by which it meant a strong executive. There were many young officers in the constituent assembly, all declared Positivists, and all in favour of an authoritarian regime. The result was that the assembly adopted a presidential form of government, whereas the Empire had been parliamentarian. The Church was separated from the State, and religious freedom proclaimed. Traditional militarism was discouraged, and the Army became essentially an organ for civic betterment, thus anticipating the ‘civic action’ roles of Latin American armies in the twentieth century.

The Brazilian Republic adopted as its flag a representation of the firmament showing the position of the stars, especially of the Southern Cross, at the moment the Republic was proclaimed. Over it appears the Positivist motto ‘Order and Progress’ against a representation of the Southen Cross and the attendant stars that were showing above Rio de Janeiro on the day of the proclamation of the Republic. For decades the Positivist church in Rio de Janeiro was a gathering place for national leaders. It continued to function long after Positivist churches had closed in France and elsewhere. In the latter part of the 20th century, it leads a precarious existence, non-Catholic religious activity having been diverted to evangelical Christianity, spiritualism and neo-African cults, all of which are booming.

An example of Positivism in action at this time concerns slavery, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888 and was a burning issue, especially in the Northeast. Pereira Barreto was opposed to immediate and complete abolition. In line with Comte’s thesis of social dynamics, he preferred a gradual approach. This was the attitude of most Brazilian Positivists, but it was sufficient to anger the landowners. One Positivist, Celso Magalhães, was a district attorney; his career was ruined because he prosecuted, unsuccessfully, the wife of a slaveowner who had stabbed a slave baby to death because it was white and because she suspected her husband was the father. The anger of the Positivists against universities and the Roman Catholic Church can be understood in the light of the experience of Domingos Guedes Cabral, whose Positivist-inspired thesis on The Functions of the Brain (1876) could not be presented at the University of Bahia because of the opposition of the Church.

The southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, became the most important stronghold of Positivism in Brazil. It was probably because of the proximity of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and because of the virtual absence of slavery that Republicanism was much stronger in Rio Grande do Sul than in the rest of Brazil. The two tendencies met and gave rise to the simple equation: Positivism equals Republicanism.

When Getúlio Vargas a politician from Rio Grande do Sul, who had a Positivist background, seized the national government, he established a dictatorship which, while it reflected fascist developments in Europe, was a culmination of the dictatorial trend within the political philosophy of Brazilian Positivism. The main feature of the Rio Grande do Sul Constitution, derived from Positivist principles, was the division of powers and the attempt to achieve a balance between authority and freedom. In fact it was authoritarian, and Positivist Republicanism in the New World was usually dictatorial. At the same time it is claimed that the constitution of the state of Rio Grande do Sul was the first in the New World to embody articles defending the rights of workers.

Modern Brazil: Military Rule and Redemocratization

From 1961 to 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart had been initiating economic and social reforms; policies which annoyed Brazil’s elites and threatened U.S. and Western interests in the country. In 1964, Goulart was overthrown by a military coup backed by the CIA, and a military regime lasted from 1964 to 1985. During this time, there was intense economic growth at the cost of a soaring national debt, and thousands of Brazilians were deported, imprisoned, or tortured. Politically motivated deaths are numbered in the hundreds, mostly related to the anti-guerrilla warfare between 1968-1973; official censorship, though not stringent, also led many writers and artists into exile.

During this period we see the elements of Positivism that had founded the Republic - rationalism and authoritarianism - being used by the military authorities to respectively justify and impose their developmentalist policies.  These policies effectively involved turning Brazil into a source of cheap labour for US and European industry.  The Positivist motto inscribed on the Brazilian flag: “Order and Progress”, was transformed by the dictatorship into its philosophy of “Security and Development”.  Opposition to the government’s policies was denounced as a danger to national security and the country adopted its own version of US anti-Communist paranoia.

The focal point of the military dictatorship’s adaptation of Positivism to modern conditions was that the Higher War College in Rio de Janeiro, and many officers who trained there also went on training missions to the United States.  On these missions and they learned about the adaptation of Management by Objectives from the business world to the military context.  When they seized power in Brazil they tried to adapt the same theory to running the country.  From a purely theoretical point of view, they had a point: the country was lagging behind in developmental terms, it was not making the most of its immense natural and geographical resources and its politicians and civil servants enjoyed high levels of corruption.

What better then than rule by the military, who were traditionally not particularly interested in personal profit, were not landowners and, in the absence of any international wars to fight, could turn their sense of patriotic duty towards improving the lot of their fellow countrymen?  Obviously, there would be inconvenient opposition to these altruistic moves coming from those wishing to preserve their own personal privileges but as the modern army interpreted Comte, altruism must sometimes be enforced by means of authoritarianism.

Trades unions were neutralised, newspapers were censored, universities (which some of the 19th-century Positivists had wished to abolish) had senior military officers installed on the campuses in order to keep an eye on ‘subversive’ lecturers.  In comparison with Chile and Argentina, the numbers of those tortured and killed were negligible, nevertheless most people in Brazil know someone who fell foul of the regime in one way or another.

And the result?  Initially there was an economic boom but after 21 years, the officers of the dictatorship themselves were ready to return to barracks, with the country’s foreign debt immense and out of control and (partly due to the Falklands War) the mood of the developed world having changed in relation to military dictatorships.  Brazil’s economic development was then and is now characterised as a cheap manufacturing centre for the developed world, from the vast Carajás iron ore mine to cheap agricultural products such as soya.  The division between rich and poor - one of the most extreme in the world - was then and remains now largely unchanged.  From 1994-2002 a centre-right government ran the country reasonably well but since 2003 Brazil’s version of Britain’s New Labour has shown itself to be extremely corrupt, politically incompetent though at the same time economically competent, mainly because the restrictions imposed on it by the international financial community do not permit financial irresponsibility.

Conclusion

The conclusion we may draw from this is that while the inheritance of Comtean Positivism, the lesser known rival to Marxism, has not caused as much human misery as the latter, in the case of what we might call the ‘Northern’ societies, it has had a certain amount of success.  When applied to what we might call ‘Mediterranean’ societies however, the rationalism that Comte advocates cannot overcome personal loyalties that place duty to the individual and family above altruism in favour of the general good.  The Brazilian officers who seized power in 1964 enjoyed 21 years of laboratory conditions in which to apply their neo-Comtean Positivism and at the end shuffled away from power with very little measurable progress to show for it.

ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN

I’m going back to John Donne to reflect on the sudden death recently of a man for whom I had greatest respect.  When I heard the shocking news Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 10 came to mind (I’ve included a modern ‘translation’ after it).

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Do not be proud, Death, even though some people have called you powerful and fearsome, because you are neither of those things. Because, poor Death, the people you think you kill do not die, nor can you kill me.  Since we take great pleasure in rest and sleep, which are imitations of you, then we shall have even more pleasure from you yourself, and our best men go to you before anyone else, to enjoy peace for their bodies and the delivery of their souls [to God].  You are a slave to destiny, to fortune, to kings and to desperate men and live with poison, war and sickness.  And if opium or magic can make us sleep as well or better than your actions, why do you swell with pride?  After a brief period of sleep we shall wake up to enjoy eternal life where there will be no more death and Death, you will die.

A few days ago we lost a very good man.  Paulo Renato Souza, Brazil’s Minister of Education for eight years during the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, died of a heart attack at the appallingly early age of 65. I was not a close friend of Paulo but we were friendly enough to have sailed together in his boat, which I later sold for him as he had rather more important things to do, trying to reform and modernise the educational system of a country the size of half a continent where social conditions range from the wealthiest of suburbs to riverside communities reachable only by boat, via some of the largest and most violent slums in the world.

 

The technical details of his innovations, the most important of which involved objective assessment of educational attainment both within Brazil and measured against other countries through the PISA system, together with schemes for extending access to schooling, providing books to the furthest outposts of the country and encouraging distance learning, are matters of official record. What the record does not show is the manner in which the man approached the immense problems put before him, a manner I can only describe as ‘graceful toughness’.

Looking objectively at Mediterranean cultures such as that of Brazil, the outsider is struck by the savage selfishness of their citizens when personal privileges are questioned.  Shaking up the complacent lives of teachers and educational bureaucracies is a short route to attracting vituperative criticism (we are seeing a version of it in Britain today, and this is a society where people are used to making personal sacrifice for the general good), yet Paulo Renato rode over these petty attacks with the self-confidence of strong man doing what was right – in contrast to the hysteria of weak men clinging to dogma which characterised his critics.

Paulo Renato was a Renaissance man in a shabby world of specialists – he enjoyed his sailing, though when I knew him work prevented him from doing it as often as he would have liked; when he visited a relative who had just had a baby I watched him give an informal lecture on how the bones of the infant skull knit together; he enjoyed his wine and his cigars and his house had good paintings.  We read his career path and it seems to have been an uninterrupted rise from one post of immense responsibility to another and yet this was not achieved by crawling to authority: he was working for a United Nations agency Chile when Pinochet seized power and he and his wife Giovanna took into their own house refugees from Brazil whose position in this new dictatorship had become perilous – at one time hosting 17 of them.  He and Giovanna also housed for a year a family member branded a ‘dissident’ by the Brazilian dictators, but they never boasted of these acts nor sought to gain personal or political capital from them

In life Paulo was an inspiration to those of us working in education at a far lower level and even his death reminds of another of John Donne’s reflections: “Do not ask who the funeral bell is ringing for – it’s ringing for you”.  The best thing those of us can do who are lucky enough to still be in the world and have the chance to do something useful in life is to take a lesson from Paulo and keep trying to make the world a better place.