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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

quinta-feira, 26 de dezembro de 2019

A tragédia de Hannah Arendt no caso Eichmann - Daniel Maier-Katkin, Nathan Stoltzfus (The American Scholar, 2013)

BOOK ESSAY - SUMMER 2013

Hannah Arendt on Trial

The 1963 publication of her “Eichmann in Jerusalem” sparked a debate that still rages over its author’s motivations
By Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus | 
The American Scholar, June 10, 2013


Fifty years ago, The New Yorker published a series of articles that became one of the most controversial books of the 20th century: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The articles dealt with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who coordinated the logistics of transporting millions of European Jews to their death during World War II. Arendt portrayed Eichmann and other Nazi criminals not as hate-filled, anti-Semitic monsters but as petty bureaucrats and spoke openly about the role played by Jewish councils in the deportation and destruction of their own people. Arendt’s central insight into what she called “the banality of evil”—that great crimes can arise from mindless conformity and thoughtlessness about the humanity of others—came paired with sharp criticism of Israeli insensitivity to legitimate Palestinian claims and disregard for the rights of minorities and neighbors.
Arendt suffered ferocious personal attacks that continue today, 37 years after her death. Criticism of her Eichmann book inevitably incorporates some variant of the assertion that she felt herself to be more German than Jewish and was a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew—a strange charge against a woman who worked on behalf of Jewish organizations most of her life. The 50-year battle over Arendt’s reputation has pitted her defenders against those who would deflect her criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish, thus turning people away from her ideas about democratic pluralism and regional cooperation without having to discuss them.

Soon after the Eichmann pieces began to appear, civil rights activist Henry Schwarzschild warned Arendt that Jewish organizations in New York were furiously planning a campaign against her and that she should expect to be the object of great debate and animosity.
Siegfried Moses, a friend from Arendt’s youth who had immigrated to Israel and risen to the position of state comptroller, sent a note to Arendt on behalf of the Council of Jews from Germany, declaring war on her and her Eichmann book. Moses then flew to Switzerland to meet with Arendt and demanded that she stop the book’s publication. She refused, warning him that the intensity of criticism was “going to make the book into a cause célèbre and thus embarrass the Jewish community far beyond anything that she had said or could possibly do.” Indeed, literary critic Irving Howe would describe the vitriolic public dispute that ensued as “violent,” while novelist Mary McCarthy would liken it to a pogrom.
It began on March 11 with a memorandum distributed by the Anti-Defamation League alerting its members to “Arendt’s defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi Holocaust,” by which they meant her reporting that evidence at the trial showed that leaders of Jewish communities across Europe had negotiated the orderly demise of their communities with Eichmann. The ADL followed up with a pamphlet, “Arendt Nonsense,” which called the Eichmann articles evil, glib, and trite.
On May 19, 1963, The New York Times published a highly critical review of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Michael A. Musmanno, a retired Navy rear admiral who had served as a judge at the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals and was then a sitting justice on Pennsylvania’s supreme court. Musmanno had also appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the Eichmann trial. In her book Arendt had disparaged Musmanno’s testimony that Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told him at Nuremberg that Hitler’s madness had come about because he had fallen under Eichmann’s influence. Even the prosecution knew this was a fabrication. Musmanno wrote in the Times that Arendt was motivated by “purely private prejudice. She attacks the State of Israel, its laws and institutions, wholly unrelated to the Eichmann case.”
That summer New York intellectuals weighed in. A review by playwright and critic Lionel Abel in Partisan Review accused Arendt of having portrayed the Nazis as more aesthetically appealing than their victims. Journalist Norman Podhoretz’s review in Commentary concluded that Arendt had exemplified “intellectual perversity [resulting] from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” Zionist activist Marie Syrkin wrote in Dissent that Eichmann was the only character who came out better in the book than he went in and accused Arendt of manipulating the facts with “high-handed assurance.” Arendt had published often in all three journals.
In July, when she came home from Europe, where she had been traveling since the articles appeared, Arendt wrote to a friend, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, that her “apartment was literally filled with unopened mail … about the Eichmann business.” Much of it bordered on hate mail, like the letter from a woman in New Jersey who began with a declaration that she had never read the Eichmann book and “would never read such trash” and concluded with the hope that “the ghosts of our six million martyrs haunt your bed at night.”
More measured criticism came in a letter from Gershom Scholem, a friend from Arendt’s youth and then a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He affirmed his “deep respect” for Arendt but characterized the tone of her book as “heartless,” “flippant,” “sneering and malicious,” replacing balanced judgment with a “demagogic will-to-overstatement.” He could never think of her, he wrote, as anything other than “a daughter of our people” but admonished her for insufficient Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people: “In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I find little trace of this.”
Arendt replied that she came not from the German Left but from the tradition of German philosophy and that of course she was a daughter of the Jewish people and had never claimed to be anything else: “I have always regarded my Jewishness as one of the indisputable actual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as basic gratitude for everything that is as it is.” But you are quite right, she told him, in what you say about Ahabath Israel. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”

In the full flush of the attack, Mary McCarthy stepped forward as Arendt’s champion. Writing in the Winter 1964 issue of Partisan Review, she observed that the hostile reviews and personal attacks on Arendt were written almost entirely by Jews.  She dismissed Lionel Abel’s assertion that Arendt made Eichmann aesthetically palatable: “Reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the Jews who died in the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not my impression.”
Fevered discourse continued to rage across the pages of Partisan Review’s next issue. Marie Syrkin accused McCarthy of intellectual irresponsibility and ignorance, and writer and historian Harold Weisberg characterized her defense of Arendt as wholly lacking in charity and logic. Poet Robert Lowell countered that Arendt’s only motive was a “heroic desire for truth.” Journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald called Eichmann in Jerusalem a masterpiece of historical journalism and defended McCarthy’s “brilliant” observation that the split over the book was between Christians and Jews, especially “organization-minded Jews.”
In 1965, Jacob Robinson, an adviser to the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, published a 400-page denunciation of Arendt’s scholarship, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative. With the assistance of teams of researchers in New York, London, Paris, and Jerusalem, Robinson scoured Arendt’s book and found 400 “factual errors,” including such minutiae as the misspelling of a first name. Some of the things he listed, it turned out, were not errors at all. Nevertheless, an essay by historian Walter Laqueur in The New York Review of Books asserted that Arendt lacked the factual knowledge needed to make a scholarly contribution. Laqueur characterized Robinson as “formidable,” an eminent authority on international law, an erudite polymath with knowledge of many languages and unrivalled mastery of sources. Robinson’s motivation for undertaking a full-scale refutation of “Miss Arendt’s” flippant display of cleverness, Laqueur wrote, was the natural “resentment felt by the professional against the amateur.”
Arendt had been reluctant to react publicly to the controversy, preferring to let her work speak for itself. In January 1966, however, she responded, in The New York Review of Books, to Laqueur’s essay. Laqueur, she wrote, was so overwhelmed by Robinson’s “eminent authority” that he had failed to acquaint himself with the facts. For a start, she had not written a narrative about the Jewish catastrophe, but only a report about a trial. She criticized the prosecution for repeatedly raising questions about why there had not been more Jewish resistance during the Holocaust—a line of questioning she dismissed as Israeli militarist propaganda. She also pointed out that Robinson was not a historian but a lawyer who had published practically nothing prior to his book. The honorific of “eminent authority” had been attached to him only after he joined the chorus of critics attacking her. What is formidable about Robinson, Arendt concluded, is that his words were amplified by the Israeli government with its consulates, embassies, and missions throughout the world, along with the American and World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the ADL, in a coordinated effort to characterize her book as a posthumous defense of Eichmann and her as the evil person who wrote it.
Arendt worried that the backlash against the Eichmann book had blown the controversy out of proportion and that partially informed people would believe “all the nonsense” critics were spouting. At the height of the scandal, however, Jaspers assured her that she would emerge with her reputation intact: any fair-minded person who read the Eichmann book would see her seriousness of purpose, honesty, fundamental goodness, and passion for justice. “A time will come that you will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel, as they are doing now for Spinoza,” he wrote. “They will proudly claim you as their own.” Now, as the debate began to subside, Jaspers wrote that though she had suffered greatly, the critical uproar was adding to her prestige.
Arendt wrote back that she had been warmly received by the mostly Jewish students who had turned out in substantial numbers for her lectures on politics at Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and other universities. “The funny thing,” she told Jaspers, was that after speaking her mind openly about “the formidable Mr. Robinson,” she was once again “flooded with invitations from all the Jewish organizations to speak, to appear at congresses, etc. And some of these invitations are coming from organizations that I singled out to attack and named by name.”
In the next few years she would collect a dozen honorary degrees from American universities and be inducted into both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded her its Emerson-Thoreau Medal for distinguished achievement in literature. In Denmark, where Jews had been heroically protected during the Nazi occupation, Arendt in 1975 received the Sonning Prize (worth the equivalent of roughly $200,000 today) for “commendable work that benefits European culture.”

For a long moment, which lasted another quarter-century after her death in 1975, Arendt had beaten back her detractors, with her reputation intact. New Yorker editor William Shawn wrote that Arendt’s death had removed “some counterweight to all the world’s unreason and corruption,” that she had been “a moral and intellectual force that went beyond category,” and that her influence “on intellectuals, artists, and political people around the world was profound.”
More recently, though, the battle over Arendt’s reputation and the value of her work, especially Eichmann in Jerusalem, has been joined again, rekindled by evidence in Arendt’s papers that as a young woman, she had a love affair with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It was known that Arendt had been Heidegger’s student, but the posthumous revelation of their romantic relationship by Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, came as a bombshell.
Arendt and Heidegger were lovers for about six months, beginning in November 1924. She was an 18-year-old philosophy student; he was 35, married with two children, and was in something of a creative frenzy writing Being and Time, the all but inscrutable masterpiece that established his position as an existentialist. Arendt thought she was his muse. The love affair cooled by summer, when Heidegger withdrew into family and professional life, and there was less and less contact. Arendt appears to have suffered the bittersweet longings of unrequited love.
What seemed a final break between them occurred when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Arendt fled Germany, and Heidegger very publicly joined the Nazi Party and was elevated to the position of Rektor at Freiburg University. He resigned after one year, having fired the Jewish faculty, disbanded the university senate in favor of a Führer system of governance, and exhorted students to military service, often ending his speeches, right arm stretched out and up in salute, with “Heil Hitler,” repeated three times. After the war he downplayed the significance of all this and told transparent lies about the past, claiming to have done it all in an effort to protect the university.
Nevertheless, five years after the war, Arendt reconciled with Heidegger. She was in Germany directing a State Department project to preserve and distribute unclaimed Jewish cultural property looted by the Nazis—mostly books and religious artifacts—to synagogues and Jewish museums, libraries, and universities around the world. Passing through Freiberg, she sent a note to Heidegger, who came to see her. A lifelong friendship and affectionate correspondence ensued. After the affair became public, Heidegger’s reputation as a Nazi seeped into the Eichmann controversy, giving new shape to the old calumny that Arendt was a pathologically self-hating Jew, whose opinions about Israel and Jewish politics were not to be taken seriously.
Arendt’s latter-day critics maintain that she was so blinded by schoolgirl love that she either could not see what a bad man Heidegger was or did not care; that she so adored him and the German intellectual tradition he represented that she was driven to forgive him; that her affection for Heidegger and everything German explains how she could distort Eichmann into something banal and display such shocking insensitivity toward Jewish victims.
It is as if Arendt’s detractors conflate Heidegger with Eichmann, a mass murderer whose execution Arendt supported. Whatever his sins, Heidegger was not one of the leaders of the Third Reich, nor was he involved in planning or executing war crimes or crimes against humanity. He was, after 1934, an increasingly irrelevant professor of philosophy. Despite his early enthusiasm for Nazism, there is little evidence suggesting Heidigger was ever an anti-Semite. Granted, he was never forthcoming about his past, not even in a final interview published by prior agreement after his death. Still, he was not Adolf Eichmann.
Arendt understood the distinction, once referring to Heidegger as a man who lied at the drop of a hat in order to manage a situation. Heidegger nurtured fantasies of power as the foremost Nazi intellectual and had grandiose ambitions to restore philosophy to a state of grace not known since the Greeks, but his ignorance of the world, Arendt concluded, prevented him from seeing that the Nazis were interested only in people who thought as they did. In a public address honoring Heidegger on his 80th birthday, Arendt referred to his Nazi time as a mistaken “escapade,” spent primarily in “avoiding” (which implies willfully looking away from) the reality “of the Gestapo’s secret rooms and the torture cells of the concentration camps.”
Her critique was not strong enough for Heidegger’s most severe critics, nor for Arendt’s. Heidegger scholar Emmanuel Faye asserts that Heidegger’s texts reveal an inveterate Nazi not only during the Hitler years but before and after as well. Faye finds that even Being and Time, written 10 years before the Nazis came to power, is so thick with veiled proto-Nazi messages that it should be shelved next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Literary critic Carlin Romano, in a 2009 review of a book Faye wrote about Heidegger, laid the philosopher’s guilt at Arendt’s feet, identifying her among the acolytes who venerated the “pretentious old Black Forest babbler.” Journalist Ron Rosenbaum adds that it will never be possible to think about Arendt or her “intellectually toxic relationship” with Heidegger the same way again because of her “lifelong romantic infatuation with the Nazi-sympathizing professor.” He dismisses the “banality of evil” as the “most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language” and finds Arendt’s use of it “deceitful,” “disingenuous,” and “utterly fraudulent” in relation to Eichmann, concluding that the man responsible for the “logistics of the Final Solution” simply could not be “a banal bureaucrat.”
Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial (2011) concludes that Arendt was just plain wrong about Eichmann. On the basis of “new” evidence that Eichmann was a bully, braggart, and liar, Lipstadt proposes to supplant Arendt’s image of the banal bureaucrat with a hate-filled, mad-dog, anti-Semitic monster.
Arendt was wrong, Lipstadt declares, to think that Eichmann “did not really understand the enterprise in which he was involved.” But this is certainly not what Arendt meant when she concluded that the trial had been a “long course in human wickedness [that] had taught us the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Lipstadt’s insight into Arendt’s supposed misjudgment of Eichmann is based on the reporting of a French journalist, Joseph Kessel, who was present at the trial on a day when Arendt was not. When damaging depositions of SS officers were read aloud, Kessel could detect “the passion and rage of the true Eichmann” beneath the “hollow mask” of a bumbler that he held up to the world.
Why does Lipstadt think Arendt was unable to detect Eichmann’s true character? Because, she tells us, Arendt was writing for only one person, the only person whose approval mattered to her: Martin Heidegger. A more plausible understanding of Heidegger’s significance in the history of the Eichmann book is that during her first postwar encounter with her former mentor, in 1950, Arendt intuitively recognized the banality of evil: Martin was still Martin. He had behaved despicably, but she recognized his humanity and admired his genius. The epiphany when she saw Eichmann a decade later was that, even at that level of culpability (so far beyond Heidegger’s), the motives for direct participation in mass murder were still fundamentally banal: not blood lust but ambition to advance one’s career, to enjoy status and opportunity, to fulfill an oath of loyalty, to be regarded as capable, a leader, a good fellow, perhaps to have a place in history.

The more recent battles over Arendt’s reputation and her criticism of Israeli policy and Jewish politics have taken a desperate turn with their focus on her love affair with Heidegger. Everything else about their relationship was known in 1963. The assertion that Arendt was hard-hearted and uncaring is supported by nothing new and is no stronger now than it was 50 years ago.
Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil remains undiminished: human character is malleable, not fixed; in the right circumstances masses of otherwise ordinary, decent, law-abiding people can be transformed into collaborators and perpetrators of reprehensible crimes against humanity.
Likewise, her depiction of the Eichmann trial as political theater is still cogent. Arendt was not alone in her criticism of the prosecution: the Israeli judges also complained that the prosecutor relied on survivors’ inflammatory testimony about the horrors of the Holocaust without showing a connection to the defendant. What Arendt hoped to learn in Jerusalem was how Eichmann had done his work, how the mass murders had been organized and implemented. Who had said and done what with and to whom? But the prosecutor’s ambition was to capture the imagination of Israeli youth and world Jewry with a retelling of the suffering of the Holocaust.
Real justice, in Arendt’s view, requires full disclosure, including self-disclosure, not only retribution for Nazi crimes against humanity but also an effort to understand how political systems can produce the complicity of perpetrators, bystanders, and even victims. If evil is banal, it can turn up anywhere, even among victims, even among Jews, even in Israel.
Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus coauthored this article. Maier-Katkin is the author of Stranger From Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. Stoltzfus is the author of Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protests in Nazi Germany. Both are on the faculty at Florida State University.



2019: annus horribilis to Department of State under Trump - Robbie Gramer (Foreign Policy)

A Rocky Year for U.S. Diplomacy

Whether it was confrontations with Iran and China or the never-ending Ukraine imbroglio, 2019 was a tumultuous year for American foreign policy.

President Donald Trump speaks alongside U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the White House.
President Donald Trump speaks alongside U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the White House in Washington on June 21, 2018.  Win McNamee/Getty Images
As the State Department grapples with top foreign-policy priorities abroad, it’s weathering a political firestorm at home. U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior diplomats are trying to revive stalled nuclear negotiations with North Korea and peace talks in Afghanistan, a protracted crisis in Venezuela, and winding down the deadly conflict in Syria. 
But in Washington, the department is reeling as it finds itself at the center of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry into Trump. Career diplomats, including former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, acting Ambassador William Taylor, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, and others were thrust into the national spotlight as they were compelled to testify before the bitterly divided congressional panel investigating Trump. The president and his allies have castigated the career diplomats, plunging the diplomatic corps’ morale to new lows and sharpening the divide between career and politically appointed officials in Foggy Bottom. 
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo first came into office in 2018 vowing to restore the State Department’s “swagger.” But the secretary of state—eyeing his political future with a possible Senate run in Kansas—has avoided defending the career diplomats drawn into the political storm. 
Here are five reads on the rocky year America’s diplomatic corps has had—and the impacts on U.S. foreign policy abroad, from Ukraine to China to Iran.

1. U.S. Diplomacy’s ‘Gordon Problem’ Goes Way Beyond Gordon Sondland

by Robbie Gramer, Nov. 21
The high-profile impeachment saga has had the side effect of bringing national attention to presidents tapping political donors with no diplomatic experience as ambassadors. Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, is wealthy former hotel magnate and campaign donor who muscled his way into Ukraine policy and found himself at the center of fiery House hearings investigating Trump for impeachable offenses. This piece analyzes the trend among Democratic and Republican administrations to gift deep-pocketed donors ambassadorships and outlines how some former career diplomats see Sondland as a warning for future U.S. foreign-policy missteps if the trend continues—something Washington may regret as China beefs up its own diplomatic presence in all corners of the world. Thus far, only one Democratic candidate in the 2020 election race—progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren—has pledged to stop the practice of handing off ambassador posts to wealthy novices. 

2. Fear and Loathing at Pompeo’s State Department

by Robbie Gramer, Colum Lynch, and Elias Groll, with Amy Mackinnon, Nov. 1
Some career diplomats feel betrayed by Pompeo’s refusal to offer any public support for the officials dragged into the impeachment investigation, even as the president and his allies continue to criticize them and cast doubt on their loyalties. But if Pompeo’s exact role in the events that led up to the impeachment inquiry isn’t yet completely clear, one thing is: He has a bright political future in the Republican Party. The department’s waning faith in their boss doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on his rising stardom in Trump’s Republican Party. As Pompeo inches closer to running for Senate in Kansas to shore up a hotly contested Senate map in 2020, Trump’s base and other factions of the Republican party have high hopes for him.

3. The United States Can’t Cede the U.N. to China

by Michael McCaul, Sept. 24
Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, raised the alarm bells in September of China’s growing clout at the United Nations, an issue the Trump administration has tried to respond to even as it castigates the international body and pares back U.S. commitments to it. McCaul expresses concern that China will use its growing power to “bend the U.N. system in support of its own authoritarian agenda.” Other lawmakers on both sides of the aisle share his concern, reflecting a broader and growing battle between the United States and China on the diplomatic front.

U.S. Ambassador to Canada Kelly Knight Craft delivers a statement at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Oct. 23, 2017.
U.S. Ambassador to Canada Kelly Knight Craft delivers a statement at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Oct. 23, 2017.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press via AP

4. A Republican Rainmaker Comes to Turtle Bay

by Colum Lynch, with Robbie Gramer, June 4
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley quickly emerged in the chaotic first year of Trump’s tenure as one of the strongest voices in the administration. Her successor, Kelly Knight Craft, hasn’t garnered nearly as much clout or headlines, but her appointment says a lot about how the Trump administration views the U.N. Craft is the first ever U.S. ambassador to the international institution who comes from a class of political donors with next to no government or foreign-policy experience before the administration started. Craft, the wife of a wealthy coal magnate, previously served as Trump’s ambassador to Canada, and her appointment reflected the administration’s interest in elevating political donors to senior government roles. This profile explains more.

 

5. Echoes of Iraq in Trump’s Confrontation With Iran

by Michael Hirsh and Lara Seligman, May 8
An analysis of the Trump administration’s confrontational approach to Iran suggests disturbing similarities to the run-up to war with Iraq. Not least was the dominant role of then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, who as a senior official in the administration of President George W. Bush was a fierce advocate of war who was accused of manipulating intelligence to justify an invasion. 
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RobbieGramer

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terça-feira, 24 de dezembro de 2019

Dois anos atrás, uma declaração de princípios e valores pessoais: ainda vale...

Uma “velha” declaração (2017), ainda válida

O que vai abaixo é uma espécie de declaração de princípios e valores, feitos ao sabor do teclado, sem preparação e sem reflexão, apenas juntando os elementos que acredito essenciais numa vida dedicada à leitura, à reflexão, ao ensino, enfim, ao conhecimento e à inteligência. Ela passa por uma mensagem unilateral e erga omnes.

Amor: a Carmen Lícia, e a toda a minha família, que ainda vai crescer...
Atitude geral: ceticismo sadio, sempre;
Paixão: pelos livros, em todas as suas formas, de quaisquer idades, tempo e lugar;
Comportamento: contrarianista tranquilo;
Educação: de preferência autodidata, nas leituras, nas viagens, na observação do mundo, tal como ele é, nas experiências da vida, mais do que nas instituições regulares;
Dedicação: ao ensino, à transmissão do conhecimento, pois é uma forma de aprender;
Ideologia: a da racionalidade, que também pode ser uma mania ilusória;
Religião: nenhuma em especial, ou nenhuma tout court, ou seja, irreligiosidade total e absoluta, mas profundo respeito pelas religiões (não todas, como podem ser essas “teologias da prosperidade” ou aquelas muito intolerantes), pois elas estão e estarão conosco por toda a existência humana, quer gostemos ou não;
Vocação: não muito bem definida: entre aprender, ensinar, propor, enfim, aquela mania que tem todo letrado pretensioso de ser conselheiro do príncipe, sem desejar sê-lo verdadeiramente, pois sabe que príncipes não seguem os pretensos conselheiros;
Projeto de vida: colaborar nesse vasto empreendimento reformista para deixar o Brasil um pouquinho melhor, quando eu o deixar (ou quando ele me deixar), do que o país que eu encontrei, quando tomei consciência, na minha primeira adolescência, da porcaria que era em termos sociais, humanos, educacionais e políticos;
Aspiração: que toda criança pobre, ou da modestíssima condição social como era a da minha família, em minha infância, pudesse ter, atualmente, uma educação pública comparável em qualidade à de que eu desfrutei, em décadas passadas, e que me habilitaram, justamente, com a biblioteca infantil que frequentei desde antes de aprender a ler, a adquirir as alavancas necessárias para ascender na escala social, apenas pela dedicação ao estudo, pelo conhecimento acumulado, pelo saber adquirido autodidaticamente, pelo esforço próprio, enfim;
Alergia: à burrice, não à ignorância dos que não tiveram chance de aprender, mas à obtusidade daqueles que tendo chance de o fazer, preferiram ficar na escuridão;
Aversão: à estupidez de certos letrados, por fundamentalismo, ideologia, oportunismo ou qualquer outro motivo não legítimo;
Objetos de desejo: livros, sobretudo aqueles antigos, não mais disponíveis em livrarias, e difíceis de encontrar em bibliotecas medíocres como são as nossas;
Mania: de ler o tempo todo, em qualquer circunstância, em qualquer lugar (menos no banho pois já fizeram livros digitais mas ainda não impermeáveis, a não ser os de bebês), mania que pode irritar quem me dirige a palavra nos momentos de concentração, e quando eu respondo “sim, sim...”;
Escola econômica: aquela que apresenta os melhores resultados práticos, com pouca, ou até nenhuma teoria; já passou da hora de aderir a este ou aquele guru das “melhores receitas econômicas”, e se contentar com a modesta racionalidade dos procedimentos testados e aferidos como efetivos; eles geralmente passam mais pelos mercados livres do que pela regulação estatal (mas reconheço que parece impossível desembaraçar-se desses ogros famélicos que nos dominam);
Filosofia política: a da maior liberdade individual, o que não chega a ser uma filosofia política, mas é um princípio de vida a que se chega depois de se conhecer todas as construções humanas que pretenderam organizar a vida em sociedade;
Política prática: nunca fazer parte de nenhum partido, nunca adentrar na política com ares de salvador da pátria, mas observar e estudar a todos meticulosamente, pois dependemos todos, quer queiramos ou não, da atividade daqueles que se dirigem à política por vocação, por interesse pessoal, por oportunismo, ou por qualquer outro motivo não confessado;
Time de futebol: nenhum, absolutamente nenhum; apenas apreciando alguns jogos;
Lei: a do maior esforço, ou seja, nunca se contentar com as explicações simplistas, mas sempre questionar o fundamento de qualquer afirmação ou argumento que são apresentados;
Responsabilidade: totalmente individual, ou seja, nunca atribuir à sociedade, ao Estado, ou até à família, aquelas bobagens que cometemos, que são cometidas por seres totalmente adultos e absolutamente responsáveis pelos seus atos;
Desafio constante: procurar defender o que se acha certo, aquilo de que se tem certeza de ser o melhor, mesmo em detrimento da conveniência pessoal, ou de interesses momentâneos;
Princípio, valor e finalidade de vida: sempre aprender, sempre procurar transmitir o que se sabe (as vezes até o que não se sabe exatamente também, mas que se desconfia que pode ser útil), sempre fazer o melhor dentro das possibilidade de cada um, nos limites da capacidade individual;
Finalizando: procurar fazer tudo o que me dá prazer intelectual...

Addendum: ficaram faltando alguns elementos indispensáveis na vida mundana:
Dinheiro: justo o necessário para comprar livros, viajar, frequentar restaurantes italianos de par le monde; o resto é mesada para pequenas despesas...;
Bebida: sem maiores vícios: taças de vinho nas refeições, cervejinha nas horas vagas;
Outros vícios?: quase nenhum: não jogo, não fumo, não faço apostas, não assino correntes em favor ou contra qualquer coisa, inclusive em prol de distribuição gratuita de livros; basta-me uma velha mania, com uma autoimposição adicional: começar a colocar os livros e papéis em ordem, terminar aqueles escritos essenciais deixados de lado por trabalhos de circunstância ou conjunturais, se expor menos, usufruir mais dos pequenos prazeres da vida, ser menos autocentrado, ou seja, várias tarefas a mais...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 25 de dezembro de 2019 
(sobre texto de novembro de 2017)