Men, Ideas, and Institutions: Humanism and the Temperament of the People

by ALCEU AMOROSO LIMA

1

A NATIONALITY is — well, what ? No one really knows. The scholars, of course, dispute ABOUT it endlessly. What makes a nation? How can you identify it? What factors comprise it? My own guess, admittedly imprecise, is that a nation is the external form or, in a sense, the expression of a certain philosophy. I do not mean the systematic philosophy of professional philosophers, but rather the everyday, very dynamic philosophy that we mean when we speak of somebody’s “philosophy of life.” In the case of a nation, it derives, I believe, from three sources: the land, the people, and their institutions; and it can best be studied in terms of these three elements. In the specific case of Brazil, it is quite proper to say that the national philosophy is humanism, and that certain aspects of Brazilian culture can only be explained in the light of the humanistic tradition.

First, then, let, us consider the land, the earth. Brazil, many geologists believe, comprises the oldest part of the Western Hemisphere, perhaps the oldest land in the whole world. For this reason, the Brazilian plateau, unlike most parts of America, is dense, hardened earth where there are no earthquakes or volcanoes.

Equally important is the vastness of Brazil. Sometimes North Americans are surprised to learn that, in respect to size, Brazil is one of the first six nations of the world, as large as the United States plus another Texas.

Some nations have been dominated by the idea of space, some by the idea of time, and some by a combination of the two. The American continents give us examples of nations dominated by space: Canada, the United States, and Brazil. Their civilization is recent, and for the first time they are playing a prominent, and integrating role in the history of the world. The nations dominated by time are those which have grown out of the centuries; their long historical continuity is the chief force which has shaped their cultures. I am thinking of the great Latin countries of Europe France, Spain, Portugal, Italy — and even Germany, in spite of the apparent rupture between medieval and modern German history. And finally there are those huge, slow aggregations — the British Commonwealth, Russia, China, and India — in which both space and time influenced the national character.

Vastness, then, is a characteristic of Brazil, and another is variety. For if the central tableland is an extremely old geological formation, the Amazonian region, as Count Keyserling said, “is still in the third day of creation.” There, the earth is so wrapped in the primeval waters that it seems like a piece of Asia or Africa in the midst of America. In fact, the tropical forests of Brazil are very like those of India, and ever since colonial times there has been an interchange of flora and fauna between the two countries over the trade routes. Psychologically speaking, since they face similar tropical conditions, Brazilians are the most “Oriental” people in America, although the impact of specific Asiatic cultures has been greater in Central America. The varieties of soil and weather, of topography and vegetation, give Brazilians good reason to believe in the great possibilities for the development of their country; but they have also caused some of the most serious economic and political problems.

ALCEU AMOROSO LIMA, former Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Pan-American Union, is one of Brazil’s most distinguished intellectual leaders. He has won fame as an author, philosopher, sociologist. and literary critic. He was born in 1893 in Rio de Janeiro and after receiving a law degree he studied for a diplomatic career at the Sorbonne. Prominent in the spiritual Catholic movement, he has devoted many of his books to the study of religion in the cultural development of Brazil.

The Brazilian soil is difficult and rough. There are no high mountains as in Asia or HispanoAmerica, but there are several small mountain ranges which are an obstacle to transportation and the mechanization of tillage. Plains are an exception; there are few navigable rivers and many stony creeks, where the microfauna cause more trouble than do all the macrofauna in Africa. The soil, even when fertile, is easily worn out and eroded; and apparently, there is little of the marvelous liquid wealth underground which has enriched the sister republics of South America. Far from being an earthly paradise, Brazil is a land that defies the human effort to dominate it technologically.

In our overcrowded world, some nations, like those of Europe, can no longer contain their extremely dynamic people within the national frontiers, and others, like the populous Asiatic countries, suffer from a very low standard of living. Hence living space is at a premium, and people emigrate; as a result an underpopulated country may find its own people outnumbered. Birth control and obstacles to immigration, such as have been advocated by some in Brazil, are contrary to common sense. What Brazil needs is more people.

Another consequence of so much living space is the multiplicity of activities. A diversified land permits a diversified civilization. Brazilian unity is based on variety, and to understand it, one must distinguish among the levels of culture, which range from the very primitive to the most advanced.

Three important cultural levels may be classified as the primitive, the caipira or hillbilly, and the Atlantic. The least developed cultural group, the primitive, is in fact prelithic, that is, still living largely in a pre Stone Age civilization. The second group includes the sertanejo or back-country population from the farms and villages, where the Atlantic culture, at least in its material aspects, is slowly penetrating. The Atlantic culture itself is the advanced and articulate civilization of the great cities, where the commercial, fashionable, and intellectual elites are gathered. The coexistence, and sometimes — as in Rio de Janeiro — the close proximity, of highly developed and very primitive cultures is one of the most typical aspects of life in modern Brazil.

But we can also distinguish a number of cultural zones in Brazil, which cut across the different levels of cultural development. For instance, the Northeastern and Northwestern, the Southern and the Central. It would be impossible to analyze these different cultures here; but it is enough to point out, perhaps, that they are quite different and distinct, though not antagonistic, and that their different modes of living lead immediately to an obvious consequence; the elasticity of political institutions in Brazil. Brazilian democracy is not the result of political idealism, but the necessary consequence of the social conditions, the characteristics of the land, and the psychology of the people; it is the realistic outcome of the nation’s need for stability in spite of such diversity.

Brazilians from the inland — the jagunço, often a religious fanatic; the caboclo, backwoodsman; the matuto, countryman; the piraquara, or peasant from Paraíba do Sul (each region uses different names) — are not Euclides da Cunha’s Hercules Quasimodo nor Monteiro Lobato’s Squatting Man, the two extremes of realistic optimism and pessimism. Instead, they are well adapted to their surroundings, and they are capable of a skill superior to that of ordinary farmers anywhere else. At the same time, their techniques and equipment are often old-fashioned, and undoubtedly their work is undermined by waste and inefficiency. This is our main labor problem. The Brazilian makes a great effort, and the result is poor, in no way proportional to his work. It cannot be solved by setting aside the question of social justice and concentrating on problems of efficiency and wealth, as some have recommended. The moral problem and the social problem are the same: justice and productivity are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. Both are part of the chief problem which is always in Brazil, the human problem.

2

IT HAS often been said that the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western civilization is that, whereas in the Orient the object or thing prevails over the person, in the West the person prevails over the thing.

It is dangerous to push such a broad generalization very far because there are literally thousands of exceptions to it. Nevertheless, it contains a useful element of truth. In the East, nature prevails. Scenery dominates art and literature, as the doctrine of immanence dominates philosophy. Man is almost a supernumerary, a latecomer cluttering up the scene. But in the West, at least since the time of Christ, civilization has been based on the primacy of human beings. Society dominates nature, just as man dominates society. In philosophy, Reason; in economics, Property; in polities, Freedom; in society, Law; in art, the Subject—these are the prevailing elements in European civilization, and they have been transmitted to America. In the West, a kind of innate humanism has inspired historical trends and social institutions.

Brazilian humanism derives from European and Western humanism. However, within this general principal of man’s primacy in the West, there has been a variety in the distribution of values, and we can say that Portuguese-Brazilian civilization, more than any other form of Euro-American humanism, is fundamentally subjective and homocentric. The predominance of man over land and institutions is the central characteristic of Brazil, but there are others which also must be recognized.

In the first place, there is the ascendancy of sensibility over reason. Brazilians are naturally affectionate. Lyricism, a feeling for imagery, and saudosismo, our special form of nostalgia—these are the traditional marks of the Portuguese temperament, and in Brazil they have been accentuated, rather than modified, by the other elements of African influence. Genuine goodness very often may derive from this affectionate psyche, and when it does it is a positive element which must be defended and cultivated. But the negative aspect of the same psychological characteristic is sentimentality, which Brazilians must always fight against.

A second characteristic of Brazilian humanism is the precedence of the abstract over the concrete. Ideas prevail over things. Furthermore, Brazilians are more at ease with concepts than with ideas, and still more at ease with words and figures than with concepts. Of all the aspects of literature, eloquence is the one that Brazilians like best. Brazilians have a natural tendency to make abstractions out of individual events; and they generalize easily and do not hesitate to jump to conclusions.

As a matter of fact, this tendency often leads Brazilians to confuse the abstract and the general. The genuine metaphysical abstraction, which leads one to the realm of essences, is foreign to the Brazilian’s intellect. Instead, he indulges in lazy generalizations, passing from accuracy to vagueness. This is often unfortunate, of course; but on the other hand it allows Brazilians to feel at home in the spheres of high culture where quick generalizations and large ideas lead to effective communication.

A result of this tendency is the Brazilian’s preference for the extemporized over the prepared. He dislikes detailed work; he is impatient, eager for quick results, and capable of brilliant extemporizations. In military language, he is more expert in tactics than in strategy. Skill, ability, smartness (in its good sense, but also its bad), are typically Brazilian. The famous word geitinho, “little special solution,” typical of our popular vocabulary, gives us an expressive idea of the Brazilian people. Some Brazilians even say that only extemporized actions can bring good results — a dangerous paradox, although not entirely false.

Another aspect of the Brazilian psyche is the reliance on talent rather than scholarship. Because the Brazilian intelligence is broad and sparkling, Brazilians trust it much more than they trust culture or, especially, education. Learning in Brazil is deplorably inadequate. Colleges and universities are a recent development, and they are still on a rather high-schoolish level. Brazilians lack the passion for research, for analysis and deep study, and they depend on their natural intelligence. Perhaps it: can all be summed up by saving that the Brazilian is by nature an amateur and not a professional. He does things because he likes to, not because he has to. One feels that, by contrast, men in the United States are more professional, and that life in North America is highly professionalized. People are identified by their occupations, and professional rank is very important. For this reason, vocational training has become an exceedingly prominent part of education in the United States. In Brazil, on the other hand, professional nomadism is the rule. Brazilians wander from occupation to occupation, putting off— sometimes indefinitely — the time when they must choose a permanent profession. Hence people in Brazil are usually known, not by the occupations of their working hours, but by their families, their social positions, or simply by their personal habits and temperaments.

The chief point is, however, that all these characteristics go a long way toward explaining Brazilian humanism. Almost instinctively, it seems, Brazilians choose the man, the person, in place of the values of efficiency, political idealism, or the other incitements of the modern world. There is nothing vague or putative about this aspect of Brazilian humanism; it can be seen clearly in the fashions, politics, and working habits — the whole style of living —of the nation. The human being, with his dignity, character, and feeling, his claims to moral and spiritual recognition, is at the very center of Brazilian civilization.

3

THE third element of Brazilian humanism, the nation’s institutional life, remains to be discussed. Generally speaking, institutions tend to perpetuate themselves, and thus they are a conserving force in any culture. If a proper tension can be maintained between institutional conservatism and the dynamic forces of change and advancement, a strong and vigorous culture is likely to be the result. This means, in the case of Brazil, that the traditional institutions must share the people’s generally humanistic concepts of behavior and must satisfy the demands of the individual person.

The basic institution in any country is the family, and in Brazil the family has been the most important source of national stability. A big family, united, hierarchical, and based on love, sacrament, fecundity, and autonomy, has been the point of departure for Brazilian social organization since the sixteenth century. Not isolated persons, but families— foreign as well as Brazilian—cleared the land after the conquest, extended the frontiers to the West, and stabilized the bandeiras, which were raids for Indian slaves and gold treks into the interior. Families created political authority, as well as politics in general, in the rough inland farming communities. This tendency toward family autonomy is the source of one of the most unusual and characteristic aspects of Brazilian history: its peacefulness. The most important events in Brazilian history occurred without bloodshed—the change from the colonial period to the Empire, and from the Empire to the Republic. Brazilian revolutions have been remarkably easygoing, and political life has been guided more by the ideas of harmony and conciliation than by ideas of struggle and violence. All this is due primarily to the essential domestic organization of Brazilian society and to the increasing importance of the role played by women.

The family is an organically stable unit, but within this stability there has nevertheless been a certain transformation of values: the father’s authority has decreased, the mother’s influence has increased, and the children have become more “emancipated.” This evolution can be seen clearly if we compare the colonial family of four hundred years ago with the family of today.

If the norm of family life is characterized by the father’s responsibility, the mother’s kindness, and the children’s obedience, then the colonial family in Brazil suffered from an exaggeration of these functions. As Capistrano de Abreu has written, “ Father was cross, mother was submissive, and the children were frightened.” In part this may have been caused by the centuries of Mozarabic influence in Portugal, and in part by the austerity of existence in the American colonies. In any case, the modern tendency is in just the opposite direction; in an effort to correct the excesses of the colonial family, modern Brazilians have exaggerated the contrary aspects of family life. The father’s authority is being suppressed, the mother is mundanized, and the children are completely and prematurely set free. To a certain extent also this tendency is simply the result of a Brazilian imitation of foreign manners. But even so, the family remains the strongest element in Brazilian society.

4

THE school is an extension and specialization of the family. The truth of this can be seen very clearly in Brazilian history, for education in Brazil has traditionally been private and pragmatic: it has been a matter of training at home and on the job. Schools came later. When they did come, they were at first controlled by the family; only gradually did outside social groups — the Church and the religious orders, and then the State—take on the direction of the schools. Brazilians have been slow to develop the idea of the school as a separate social institution, which explains why they were the last nation on the continent to establish universities, and even today their schools and universities suffer from a comparative lack of autonomy and freedom.

We have seen already that Brazilians lack a sense of professionalism, and this is reflected in the social institution which is usually called “labor.” In Brazil there is no adequate rationale of labor, nor much unity among workers as workers. Instead, a sense of economic individualism has led to the growth of plutocratic capitalism and to an essentially political way of dealing with economic problems. The result, inevitably, is a kind of incipient statism, which in turn reacts unfavorably upon the Brazilian’s sense of individual and family autonomy. What Brazilians need is a sense of enterprise, a labor community in which capital, labor, and technique join to promote stability and economic vitality. In fact, however, the economic aspects of life in Brazil are badly muddled. Natural ability and a productive adjustment between man and nature form one side of the picture; but waste, inefficiency, unprofessionalism, and class antagonisms form the other.

If the family is the basic social institution which makes for stability in Brazil, the State should be the institution which expresses that stability. The State as a political structure encompasses all other institutions and is a continuous articulation of the tensions between authority and freedom. Unfortunately, in Brazil the State has never been more than partly successful, and it has never been truly representative of Brazilian civilization. The reasons for this lie in the fact that the State has always been outside-in and upside-down.

By outside-in, I mean that the State has developed, not as an organic expression of Brazilian civilization, but as a series of imported experiments. During the colonial period, of course, political authority lay in the absolute dominion of the overseas metropolis. During the Empire, parliamentary institutions were imported, patterned after French and British models, and they had no real historical development in Brazil. In the period of the Republic, Brazil has imported what I may call “ presidentialistie” institutions from the United States, and again, with no tradition of an elected executive, the system has foundered and works only because it has been propped up by a number of makeshift devices. In other words, Brazil has no organic political structure, no political institutions which are characteristically Brazilian and participate in the native Brazilian humanism.

By upside-down, I mean simply that there has been too much government in Brazil. The political tradition has been characteristically authoritarian, no matter what outward form the State has taken during the different periods of Brazilian history. The importance of government has always been stressed; the government has usually been topheavy; and there has been little inclination to derive either governmental authority or the forms of governmental action from the will of the people. The result is that today, in matters of politics, Brazilians are conformistic. They are not partisanminded, or even very strongly public-minded. The two extremes of absenteeism and oligarchism have predominated in the politics of the Brazilian capital. All of these are signs of political immaturity.

The Church is naturally one of the most important institutions in Brazil. Brazilians are predominantly Roman Catholics and have been ever since the first Portuguese sailors celebrated the discovery of the country in a Mass sung on the shore. Brazil was founded during the great age of the Church’s expansion, when the mariners of the Renaissance opened the whole world to European civilization. The Church in Brazil was formed on a wave of enthusiasm which still is found in many of the native religious traditions and ceremonies.

In speaking of the Church in Brazil, there are two important points to be made. First, Brazillike all the other American civilizations — was not born primarily in the movements for political conquest or economic expansion. In Protestant as well as Catholic America, the chief motives of the sixteenthand seventeenth century colonists were religious. In some cases, it was the desire to spread the faith; in others, the need to achieve spiritual autonomy. In Brazil, at least, this has meant that religious problems immediately became central to the working of the new society, and have remained so to this day: the religious question is the central and capital point around which, avoidably or unavoidably, for or against, all others turn.

Second, for Roman Catholics the Church is neither a political nor a purely spiritual institution. Its institutional character is much more direct and inclusive. For the Church’s dogma is the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church as the very presence of Christ mystically incorporated with all the faithful. Hence the Church invades and, in a sense, precedes every other mode of life, and this means that the Church has always been the keystone of Brazilian society. The history of Brazil, if it is not precisely the history of the Brazilian Church, is at least the history of the problems which have arisen in connection with the Church, as a result of the impingement of every other social and political factor upon the Church’s influence.

5

AT THE beginning, I said that a nationality is a philosophy of life, and I hope that my brief analysis of Brazilian humanism has served to make my meaning clear. But it should also be clear by now that because it is a philosophy of life, it refers to something living and organic. Indeed, it is almost impossible to speak of a nation without using these words from biology. In the modern world, nations have become so real and so important that we believe almost instinctively in their living personalities, and when we see a nation, such as Germany, which has appeared to change its personality, we feel troubled, and perhaps even refuse to believe it. Like all living creatures, nations have a first duty to themselves — to preserve themselves by preserving their continuity. This does not mean that they must resist all change, for what is changeless is usually dead; but it does mean that they must resist total change, destructive change. IN other words, they must measure each new age, with its characteristic ideas and innovations, against their fundamental philosophies, beliefs, and ways of life in order to assure a consistent evolution. l nfortunately-or perhaps fortunately — there is no certain means by which such measurements can be made, and only the endless processes of individual questioning and response can bring about a proper adjustment between permanence and change.

A few things are fundamental. We are more interested in preserving the different characteristics of the Brazilian mind than in achieving a definitive amalgamation of the Brazilian race. Furthermore, the Portuguese language is a basic pillar of our nationality. There should be no conscious design to create a Brazilian language, but on the other hand no obstacles should be raised to hinder the free development of our daily speech. Under the Empire there was a great respect for culture; today we sometimes confuse “book” culture with actual creation and are too prone to think that education does not need to be encouraged. Actually the Ministry of Education has been struggling against illiteracy for twenty-five years. Another enemy of our culture is the moral corruption of our political and economic life. Morality is not a secondary or successive element. It is concomitant with technique. Without a moral sense technical facilities are just as bad as no technique at all. In short, if we maintain our moral principles and our religious faith as fundamental values of our dynamic civilization, we are being true to our national destiny.

Brazil is plagued by many grave problems, especially in the spheres of politics and economics, which no serious-minded Brazilian can overlook. Most of Brazil’s troubles can be traced to the conflict which has occurred whenever the nation, in her haste to develop quickly, has sheered away from her traditional, deeply engrained humanism. The temptations to do so have been enormous. For centuries Brazil has been a subordinate nation, first to Portugal and Europe, later to North America. Naturally her few idealists have felt that “progress” could be made by importing the systems and institutions of the “superior” countries. But idealism itself is contrary to the Brazilian’s emphasis on human values, and the foreign systems and institutions have been like so many wrong-sized shoes.

Yet if the Brazilians of today face many problems, their heads and especially their hearts are still sound. The humanistic outlook still prevails. There is every reason to think it will continue to prevail and will triumph over the obstacles it encounters.

Translated by Silvia Amoroso Lima Ferreira