The current pandemic exposes the fallacy of some dogmas about postmodernity, and is itself part of the list of false statements of logical or empirical evidence. According to the defenders of that imaginary culture, the social and political forms defined in the Enlightenment and in the English Revolutions (17th century), North American and French (18th century) melted away. The modern order would be in question, especially institutions such as the State. With globalization – another dogma assumed without many questions by academics, politicians, journalists – came the obsequies of countries that demanded sovereign power for themselves and their friends or enemies. Another dogma: if there are no individual and collective rights guaranteed by the democratic State – an achievement of the aforementioned revolutions – it would be necessary to privatize public services. The surplus of sovereign power can only maintain two functions: following the market, especially the financial one, and repressing popular uprisings contrary to the dictates of the stock exchanges.
The recipe was applied in Europe, even by “left-wing” administrations, in the USA by “democratic” governments, in Asia, Africa and South America. The current pandemic (others can certainly occur) is fueled by the unprecedented urbanization of human life . Its strongest beginnings come from the 14th century, but it has accelerated since the end of the Second World War. Billions of human beings headed to the outskirts in search of survival. This is historical data: population concentration worsened various European and global plagues, such as influenza. Providing services for such masses (water, sewage, health, education, security, food, culture, technology) requires a lot of technical, human, political and financial resources. With public institutions eroded by privatization and tax forgiveness for large companies and fortunes, the states' cash flow is running low. The masses driven towards the megalopolises, placed there in prisons with no space to breathe, are the biggest victims of death and life without tomorrow. Urban powers have always been taken over by “unexpected” diseases that kill more than in many wars. It is urgent to rethink the logical, legal, political and scientific assumptions of the doctrines mentioned at the beginning, returning to State power and reconfiguring its three monopolies: that of the legal norm, of force, of taxes. Without such measures millions will perish from homelessness. We will arrive almost dead in the kingdom of brute nature, where everyone is everyone's wolf. In fact, the Leviathan phrase did not come to Hobbes by chance. Translator of Peloponnesian War, he knows how much in an endemic – like the one that led Athens to ruin – the bonds between humans degrade towards ferocity. [I]
Elias Canetti comments on Thucydides' passage in mass and power. He considers the epidemic an exemplary case of the masses under attack. According to Canetti, the events that bring together masses in the modern world belong to the category of hordes in flight or in pursuit. A relevant point brought up by Maclleland [II] is that biology, strategic for understanding pandemics, assumed in Canetti's thinking is not close to Darwin. Strategic point because many doctrines about the masses and elites, especially those that defend a supposed meritocracy in education, directly or surreptitiously assume the thesis that the “inferior” fall victims to diseases, misery, ignorance in “natural” processes. ” where the best are chosen. Thus, modern genocides are sacralized. No. Biology close to Canetti's thought is found in Pasteur. I quote Maclleland: “The whole theory of masses is linked to numbers; multitudes are numbered in thousands, and masses in millions; Crowd theory in its modern forms would have been unnecessary, perhaps impossible, without awareness of the bustling life of large cities, in a world whose population is constantly increasing and pressed for space. Canetti thinks that the origin of such a 'magic million' goes beyond urbanization and population growth with the discovery (...) that the world was once overpopulated to an unimaginable degree by masses of hostile bacilli that fight with man (... ) to live now is to live among countless millions; Crowds are everywhere and demand the attention of the sciences.” [III]
Within nature, masses exist and gather, are decimated and reappear in the four elements. It's no different with humans. Hence, let's say, the enormous difficulty in establishing prophylactic isolation in overpopulated cities during pandemics. Restricting groups in limited spaces goes against what happens on the physical, biological, psychological and social planes, which all shape and are shaped by the technical activity of men. It turns out that such a restriction can bring tremendous results. Canetti shows that the interior of the masses is a kind of Hobbesian natural kingdom. Concentrated in small spaces, their clashes grow, violence and fear follow them. It is also no accident that the Germans, swallowed up by the First World War, having reduced their territory, began to delight in increasingly larger spaces. The frantic search for Lebensraum led them to the murder of six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, millions of German, French, English and Soviet warriors. Concentrating masses in small spaces serves as a trigger for hatred, resentful ideologies that, to be momentarily satisfied, require the full adherence of groups and individuals to the mass that operates through the hordes. To achieve this end, murderous leaders encourage the generation of virulent masses. But they need to repress them so that they follow a path favorable to political control.
An essential element in the urbanization suffered by Humanity lies in the excess granted to policies of repression of the masses. Right now in Brazil, millions of jobless people are going hungry and losing hope of survival. “Warnings” from the Public Ministry appear in the press about “vandalism” and “looting” that terrify commerce, banks and industries. [IV] Social commotions are predicted and the blame for the danger is placed on the hungry crowds. There is nothing new in such behavior from elites followed by middle classes around the world. In fact, since the beginning of the supposed Christian and Western civilization, the masses have been presented as an eternal danger threatening “good societies” and their political regimes. But with urban concentration, in the transition from feudalism to the State provided with a center of power, the police were invented, as well as bureaucratic armies, killing machines in the public apparatus. The culture of planned repression against the poor masses begins, the “birds of prey” in the words of John Locke, liberal but not enough to tolerate popular insurrections. [IN]
Of the three monopolies of the modern State – legal norms, taxes and physical force – the last one has become increasingly necessary to maintain the others and its dominance in social and political power. In Brazil, the arms monopoly was not established immediately with Independence. The custom of the farmers, whose private armies (the henchman schemes) helped to define command in the municipalities, persisted in the National Guard under their control, now as Colonels. Strong resistance to the National Army came in the name of an alleged “federative” program to reiterate its strength and domination over poor populations. Even after the deployment of the Army, coronelism remains and generates a democratic deficit within the country.
The Army, since its inception, has presented an important intellectual characteristic. There are studies on the use of science and techniques in it. A classic accurately describes the first steps of the republic and the importance of positivism in the formation of military leadership. Rereading Ivan Lins would do a lot of good to the military today silent in the face of a Finance Minister who boasts of having read eight books on each process of national reconstruction in Europe. The training of a high-ranking military officer at the beginning of the republic included mathematics, physics, chemistry... biology and other sectors of research. [YOU] In addition to the cult of science, the military defended state secularism and the predominance of civil power. During the Military Question which, followed by the Religious Question, accelerated the fall of the Empire, the Senna Madureira case occurred. This unfolds into two episodes: first came the attitude of Lieutenant Colonel Senna Madureira against the contribution to the military montepio. Punished, he brings the rafter Francisco José do Nascimento (nicknamed Dragão do Mar who refused to transport slaves) to the Shooting School the following year. The tribute causes Madureira to be punished. As a result of the penalty, there is a ban on military personnel discussing national issues in the press. The uproar was great and on February 2, 1887 Benjamin Constant, at the Military Club, defended the subordination of the uniform to civil power. Ivan Lins highlights the statement: “If, in the democratic regime, the preponderance of any class is condemned, there must be much greater condemnation for the predominance of the sword, which always has easier and better means of executing abuses and arrogance”.
I return to the pandemic and the masses. The positivist project for Brazil, in educational terms, required that cities concentrated in the Atlantic, without further extensions into the interior, apply themselves to science, techniques and, Last but not least, to secular thinking. The same happens in the Army. Despite its dictatorial program (which followers distanced from dictatorships such as the Bonapartists), positivism values public debates, free press and the separation of the State and churches. Although it was rooted in the military and civilian elites, the Comtean doctrine did not reach the urban masses even under the ecclesiastical mantle. The silent war to reach crowds was won by the Church. The latter, since the end of the 19th century, has guided its social control through the mass movement. In the 30s, in immense processions of the Eucharistic Congresses, the use of crowds by the Catholic Hierarchy to maintain control of society became clear. [VII] Positivists were against the establishment of the university. They feared that the Church would control it. Comte's followers in Brazil value research institutes and popular education in technical and scientific fields. The defense of science and secularism is centered on academic and military elites. The Church's program wins, with the presence of conservative Catholics in the Ministry of Education for decades. This is the case of Alceu Amoroso Lima and his colleagues from Revista The Order. The positivist program of broad popular education in the scientific sectors was defeated. The country did not follow the path of valuing science and the positivist military remained active, especially in the educational institutions of the Armed Forces. The sowing of hatred towards science had been planted in the country. The Vargas dictatorship protects the Church’s plan and with it protects itself from “enemies”. Instead of preparing an administration of the masses through scientific teaching, there is a reaffirmation of authoritarianism, the cult of the dictator, and the persecution of defenders of secular education. Symbolically, the consecration of Brazil to the Sacred Heart – Christ the Redeemer – defined the direction of theological-political power, enemy of science, propagator of miracles in the reduction of the people to the status of a herd.
Even during the 1964 dictatorship, the military did not completely abandon science and technology. Often grandiose projects were initiated with the help of university students. Even with the hunt for “communists” on campuses, the military guarded research centers. Despite interventions against the human sciences, they were maintained and, in some cases, encouraged. The founding of Unicamp highlights the ambiguity of the dictatorial government: on the one hand, it persecutes academic opponents of the regime and, on the other, it dialogues with university knowledge. [VIII] And so it was in the years in which the government officially became civilian, after the dictatorship. I highlight one point: during the last decades the military seemed restricted to constitutional functions. They continued their scientific and technical studies. Embraer establishes a similar routine, the dealings of Armed Forces researchers with fields civilians has made significant progress.
However, the military linked to science and academics are limited to a small audience, if we consider the Brazilian population masses. Science and technology, far from the positivist projects and liberals from São Paulo who founded USP, did not reach the popular classes. At the same pace, communication and popular control techniques improved in audiovisual, TV, telephony (first e-mails, then Torpedo, then “social” networks, Whatsapp and similar), generating a persuasive power and unprecedented command in human history. Without at least average scientific knowledge, masses begin to “opinion” in the only usual way: by hearsay without logical or empirical analysis. Universities and laboratories, although they produce essential knowledge for survival and social progress, are isolated from the crowds that consume persuasive communication and control techniques. This barrier can be noticed whenever there are cuts in financial resources for scientific and technical research, something practiced since the FHC, Luiz Inácio da Silva and Dilma Rousseff governments. The removal of resources to encourage investigations (in all specialties) does not face popular resistance, quite the opposite. Thus, the power of knowledge in dealing with the masses in the national territory rapidly decreases.
In another aspect, the military is now called upon to intervene in matters not covered by its role, especially in police repression. Gradually they are put into clumsy operations on urban outskirts, maneuvers that authorize proceedings against civil rights. In Rio de Janeiro, in the fight against drug traffickers, it was common for judges to decide sentences and processes installed in Army trucks. To the exact extent that civil governments are fragmented and lose legitimacy due to corrupt acts (since the Presidential Reelection Amendment) the military is called upon to resolve matters pertaining to the Justice, police or other civil institutions.
I return to the educational issue and the masses. Both the positivists and the liberals who idealized university education (I still cite USP) considered that higher research should be practiced by knowledge elites, but with mandatory dissemination among the mass population, the role of the State. The positivist military knew the program of the Positivist Catechism. The Proletarian Library lists 150 titles for popular sectors to read. The collection is divided into four sectors, including history, science and poetry. Nominated authors? Buffon, Broussais, Lavoisier, Condorcet, Carnot, Lagrange, Bichat, Blainville, Navier, Poinsot, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Cabanis, Gall, Barthez, Dante... The fact that the list is addressed to proletarians shows the positivist impetus. The State should ensure that the masses leave the realm of superstition, moving towards knowledge that, although not rigorous like that of researchers and scientists, prepared them for thought and control of information. [IX]
Throughout the republic, military and civilian liberals paid a lip services to the mass education program. Despite the progress achieved through many struggles, sacrifices and heroism, the ideal was not realized. Except for initiatives such as those led by Paulo Freire and Darcy Ribeiro, inspired by Anísio Teixeira, little was done in that sector. But civil and military groups linked to scientific research made efforts towards that plan. With the 1964 regime there was a great opening to popular education. Instead of the old rigorous schools, the public network welcomed students in droves. But the State did not adapt to the new effectiveness. The number was huge but the educational program was not designed effectively. Furthermore, given the spectacular number combined with the inefficiency of teaching, preparatory courses for entrance exams appeared for those who could spare the time and money. The entrance exam presents itself as a barrier for the “negatively privileged” (Max Weber's term). Such courses are organized in capitalist terms, generating “universities. The industry of “university” institutions becomes part of the Stock Exchange, an additional business.
Public universities realized very late the unfair system dominated by the entrance exam. Proposals emerge to reduce unequal access to campus, quotas appear to remedy the injustice. Poor, black and indigenous young people are welcomed but not enough to generate capillarity between the campuses and the masses. It was already too late to define the link between people and academic researchers. The mass devoid of knowledge but with immediate access to communication tools had already formed. And such a mass, without information, does not know that cell phones and computers require a lot of intellectual effort. She begins to spread mysological messages on an unusual scale. And everything is simultaneous to the predominance in “public opinion” of pastors, ideologues, and fascist politicians who attack science and deny knowledge.
The military, driven by the relative success of its repressive interventions in the outskirts, begins to espouse thesis of the extreme right, the enemy of knowledge. With Bolsonaro's election, an obscurantist religious face emerges that promises perpetuity in power as long as the ecclesiastical agenda, Protestant or Catholic, is obeyed. Thus, we return to the Vargas period, but with “evangelical” hegemony. Fundamentalist churches assume something unthinkable in the Protestantism of the 16th and 17th centuries, the war, previously a Catholic privilege, against science.
I add the combination of the Bolsonaro government – and its neoliberal economists who want to privatize everything – and the military. For the first time in Brazilian history, people in uniform assume a cordial attitude towards speeches that wish to reduce secularism and the State's duties towards public services. I conclude: the Armed Forces do not continue the past policy of defending science and technology, aspiring to educate the masses. Today, the military takes advantage of opportunities for their personal lives in governments, defends corporate agendas and no longer has a doctrine of science and technology for the Brazilian State. In the recent and unfortunate video of the ministerial meeting, watched by the entire Nation, we saw the political thinking of the Armed Forces torn apart by the Minister of Economy. “I read eight books about each economic recovery process in Europe.” In a university that respects itself, such an assertion would prevent a master's student from going to the Bank, such is the poverty displayed without hesitation. But the general next door, responsible for an economic recovery plan for Brazil after the epidemic, remained silent and did not provide the pedantic minister with any appropriate response. Thus, unfortunately, the Brazilian military fails to value science by obeying ignorant pastors or economists who defend private interests and not the state. They serve as an instrument for old foxes to regain control of positions and funds, such as the Centrão de Robert Jefferson. Instead of decreasing, the distance between knowledge generators and the popular mass increases. This, in turn, follows like Destiny a lethal vocation: to serve as a bargaining chip for powerful people and remain without the knowledge that would allow them to leap from the status of vulgarity (may Spinoza be reread...) to that of citizenship. . The coming times will make the role of the Armed Forces even sadder, taking Benjamin Constant's dream far away: that of making the military sector serve civilian governments, and not vice versa. And make science the foundation of a sovereign country. Every day we hear more and more military personnel who are losing their historical heritage, criticizing Justice and Parliament as simple far-right militants. And we have the trials of coups in favor of delusional obscurantists placed at the service of evangelical sects that are enemies of science and human rights. Thus, the graph that indicates the civilizing degree of the armed wing of Brazilian state power shows a sharp drop. Towards barbarism. The portrait of Benjamin Constant is being removed at the Military Club. In its place comes the effigy of General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira. It marks new times of coups, repression, intimidation directed at republican powers and, above all, intolerance against science.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[I] A significant passage from the Hobbesian translation of Thucydides. People, in the epidemic, feared nothing from the gods “nor laws of men awed any man, nor the former because they concluded it was alike to worship or not worship from seeing tha alike they all perished, nor the latter because no man expected tha lives would last till he received punishment of his crimes by judgment”. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 53, The complete Hobbes Translation (London, University of Chicago Press, 1989), page 119.
[II] See JS McLelland: The Crowd and the Mob, from Plato to Canetti (Unwin Hyman, 1989).
[III] Mclelland, page 294.
[IV] For example, the suggestive warning from the Public Ministry regarding the “undesirable” events of the pandemic brought by the coronavirus: “Prosecutor warns Covas about risks of looting and vandalism in São Paulo”: https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2020/05/20/promotoria-alerta-covas-sobre-riscos-de-saques-e-vandalismo-em-sp.htm. On the use of force by modern States, cf. Ann L. Phillips, “Prosperity and Monopoly on the use of force” at link https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/12036.pdf
[IN] Maria Sylvia Carvalho Franco: “All the World was America”, John Locke, liberalism and property as an anthropological concept”, USP Magazine, Dossie Liberalism/Neoliberalism, http://www.revistas.usp.br/revusp/article/view/25952
[VI] Ivan Lins, History of Positivism in Brazil (São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1964). A significant and useful study was published by Maria Isabel Moura Nascimento “The Empire and the first attempts to organize National Education (1822-1889) in http://www.histedbr.fe.unicamp.br/navegando/periodo_imperial_intro.html#_ftnref1
[VII] Romualdo Dias: Images of OrderCatholic doctrine about authority in Brazil. . Ed. Unesp.
[VIII] A classic about Unicamp is the book by the late Eustaquio Gomes: Or Mandarim. Reading it allows us to notice the huge difference between dictatorial policy and what is happening today under the Bolsonaro government.
[IX] See Robert Fox: The savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
