The heteroclite nature of the government elected in 2018 stands out to attentive observers. A single idea is shared: the transformation of social and political actors into the Great Satan to be defeated by iron and fire. The children of Hell would be the written press, public universities, the ideological left and intellectuals, in addition to, of course, movements that bring together minority groups. As for the rest, multiple interests are clashing in the rush to appoint ministers and secretaries, each of them representing a powerful lobby: industry (weapons have a privileged status), private schools (whose hunger for resources threatens campuses and institutions like the S system) [1], sects led by pastors/politicians, conservative wings of the Catholic Church (led by Cardinal Tempesta), ruralists refractory to the preservation of the environment, indigenous and quilombola rights over chunks of land.
The list could be long, but the hard core is found in those named above. “Princes command the people and interest commands princes (...) the prince can be mistaken, his Council can be corrupted, but only interest never fails. Whether it is understood well or badly, it makes States live or die.” [2] The Duke of Rohan, military man, diplomat, statesman (in Richelieu's era the title is relevant) accurately diagnoses the State's greatest illness, an illness that still affects him today: if the political leader does not understand the true interest of the country, all hope of salus populi, the command weakens in the medium and long term, other nations take the lead. It is no coincidence that later, in the 19th century, Fichte said, when commenting on Machiavelli's policy, that if a State does not grow, enemies strengthen themselves to its detriment. [3]
In today's world, the great board of international strength brings the game of technology. If it is true that since the first steps of humanity we have lived in a technosphere (to use Leroi-Gourhan's term, which I will quote later), people who do not have the means to generate technical knowledge about nature and society are doomed to serve the interests of other people. It is for a similar reason that universities, laboratories and libraries must be the first interest of governments. In Brazil, to our discomfort, investment in the sector has been neglected. Some time ago, Fapesp published a survey showing that if research institutions were considered, from Recife to Porto Alegre, we would be able to compete with important countries in Europe. We lacked an investment policy that would allow the transfer of knowledge to industry, in innovation programs. Fapesp is the only reliable source in the process, with a successful program in that regard.
Shortly before Rousseff's impeachment, Finep (at the time directed by Glauco Arbix and others) announced the investment of many financial resources in innovation. But during the Rousseff government itself, given the crisis that shook the Federation, the States and municipalities, immense sums were extracted from research and innovation. The disaster worsened during the period dominated by Temer, when unprecedented cuts were made to Capes, CNPq, Finep, and the entire research funding network. Public universities (the only ones where advanced research is practiced) were placed in financial trouble, if not subjected to baseless repressive acts, as occurred at the Federal University of Santa Catarina with the suicide of the rector.
This is how the speeches of future State ministers bring uncertainty and fear to the Brazilian scientific and humanistic community. I take the example of the person responsible for universities and Science and Technology in the country. In his first speech, Marcos Pontes says that in the administration he will fight “internal and external enemies with the same sacrifice of life”. [4] In the same speech he talked about recovering the S&T budget, raising it above the paltry 1% or little more of GDP. The fact is that for a long time, even before the Dilma/Temer period, presidents and ministers have proposed increasing the share of GDP dedicated to the sector. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised, before his first term, something around 4% of GDP for the area. One more bravado in curriculum of that leader. But let's focus on the enemies, internal or external.
It is at least imprudent in a country where the National Security Doctrine has flourished, to repeat a slogan that served the exceptional government to invade laboratories, libraries and classrooms. Just read the historical bibliography. And it should not be said, as a general who is also a minister said, that this is a pure invention to discredit the regime. [5] In the aforementioned Doctrine, defined in the Cold War, the world is seen as a clash between communism and democracy, the Western and Eastern world. In addition to the ethnocentric ghosts brought about by such a cleavage, we had nationalisms that separated legitimate ideas, those of the “Christian, free and democratic world”, from “exotic” ideas whose effect was to rip out the patriotic fiber of our people. Whatever came from the West was correct and should be accepted. What came from the East needed to be exorcised. This is how a prominent writer, Gustavo Corção, cast doubt on sending Sputnik into the cosmos... It could only be propaganda against our culture. It is in such a context that the thesis of the “internal enemy” thrived, the subversive who would ruin national values.
In mental attitudes that divide and separate “ours” and “theirs”, friend and enemy, there is no place for science and techniques. Such ways of acting, by definition, enter a universal circuit, that of humanity. A technique created in an enemy country – in ideological, religious, military terms – can be useful for our collective. Conflicting beliefs and ideals do not impede, but encourage exchanges of scientific instruments and concepts. Only when elements foreign to the inventive process in science are decisive, in States whose temptation is totalitarian or authoritarian, do political, ideological and religious doctrines serve as an obstacle against the discoveries of science and technology. It is necessary to agree: in investigation there are no friends or enemies, but competitors. A discovery does not receive its importance from the friendship or enmity of other groups, or sectors within a given collective. So let's see.
We are in the middle of a civilizational crisis. In it, the technological and scientific orders are relevant. In crises like this, signs of growing imbalance emerge between the ways of using old instruments and the appropriation of new ones. André Leroi-Gourhan, an important ethnologist of the 20th century, indicates an essential dialectic in the transfer of the ancient to the recent, a process that defines a situation that challenges the Homo sapiens since its origins. It is about borrowing and invention. There is no such thing, says the researcher, as invention without borrowing and vice versa: only those who can borrow means of manipulating nature generated by others can invent. When a society seeks only to invent, without bringing in other people's techniques, it falls into the sterile search for absolute originality. If you only borrow forms from outside, your creative streak dries up.
The technological field determines social life. The technique is a whole: given a trait, all the others are defined, with greater or lesser density and coherence. [6] “The human process, arising from biological constraints, developing in the order of signs, hurried by industry and figured by communication techniques, is cumulative. The past of the species conditions the future of the ethnicity.” [7] It is a slow construction of humanity that produced our upright posture, language, imagination, memory. [8] All these steps take place through adaptation, something constant in the evolutionary movement. There is only production in societies by constraint. Evolution transforms the tendencies acquired by the species. The faculties mobilized over millennia by the brain and hands become unconscious but active in human societies.
The hand is situated between matter and the human [9]: gestures, words, common life. This chain takes on an increasingly faster pace. “One of the most astonishing features of human evolution is the liberation of the tool, the replacement of natural tools with more effective tools.” For society to exist, work produces instruments, language, and marital exchanges. “Man is (...) his product, a being who knew and could accommodate his contingency, take advantage of himself and his environment”. Social life is “a biological option” produced by human technology. Since ancient times, humanity has lived in a “technical environment”, whose tendency is to replace the natural.
If society is induced by technological procedures, it, in turn, is “an attractive force that precipitates technical progress”. The instruments prolong biological conditions, even denaturing them. There are no isolated instruments and knowledge, just as there are no individuals abstracted from each other. The first “social character of the group is that it is technically versatile”. Without functional solidarity, the “transition from the zoological species to the ethnic species” is impossible. The instrument is at the basis of social life: “technology remains in the middle zone between biology and sociology, exactly on the unstable line where, imperceptibly, the species becomes ethnicity”.
Man “is the only animal that constitutes a technical means. In a similar evolution, the 'humanization' of the instrument depends on language and presents itself as a factory of instruments endowed with language or memory, with symbolic capabilities (programming). “The most astonishing material fact, certainly, is the 'liberation' of the instrument, but in reality, the fundamental fact is the liberation of the word, the unique property that man has of placing his memory outside himself, in the social organism”. Without collective memory there is no future for man as a species or individual. “Each human group is animated by two opposing but combined forces: one integrates it ever more within itself, intensifies and comforts internal tendencies, closing force and sufficiency index; another, makes it permeable to the outside, opens it to borrowing, unzipping force”. The two forces define collective technical growth. They guide the double-sided process called “borrowing” on the one hand and “invention” on the other. Both contribute to an autonomous social whole in the global environment, with its nuances and differences, due to various historically acquired trends.
Borrowing instruments and systems of instruments, knowledge and systems of knowledge from another community and at the same time inventing new instruments and knowledge is not contradictory. An illusion is imagining that a human group can live solely on borrowing or pure original invention. Not all groups have all the same instruments and knowledge at the same time. Some develop certain resources, others increase their ability through others. Within the same collective, some sectors have different ways of producing and using mechanisms, with large or small inequalities in form and targets. The technique “is either polytechnic, or it doesn’t exist”.
All groups lend and are endowed with inventive strength. “To privilege invention over borrowing would be to suppress History and contingency.” On the other hand, remaining only on loan would mean “affecting the group with total passivity” making the environment inane, due to “absolute permeability to external force”. This, if it is unique, becomes ruinous for the continuity of a people. Borrowing and invention temper each other and their measure is the adaptation of the group to the conditions of the previous natural and technical environment, placed in front of concrete individuals, bringing bioethnic constraints to be mastered, through new knowledge and instruments, fruits of borrowing and invention , so that the collective continues to exist. For this, the concept of fixation is core.
Through fixation, the previous environment – especially the technical one – absorbs the borrowings, becomes capable of inventing. “The important thing in a loan is not the object that enters a new technical group, it is the destiny given to it by the internal environment”. Those who lend “can use and, at the limit, invent”. (Guerin). There is a difference between “having” an instrument or knowledge and “fixing” it. Only in the second case “the instrument is digested by the environment, integrated into its capital, because it is harmonious with the group's pre-existing polytechnic. The concept of fixation defines the relevance index”. The important thing is not to know whether a people has computers or cars, advanced medicine or surgery. It matters if he fixes them, increases their tendency. Instruments separated from the system mean little to a collective.
It is not the pair “loan/invention” that most allows us to understand how a people survives and expands. The “fixation/float” pair is more important. The technique is fixed polytechnic. Forges in the past tense, computers today, constitute instrumental complexes. “All means of elementary action on matter are represented there.” Without setting trends, collectives are not autonomous from others. “Masses, groups, individuals, manifest, with the same constraints, the same effort at individualization”. Memory and the strength to invent are lost, if borrowings made from other peoples are not fixed, producing new instruments and concepts, which, in turn, come into contact with other instruments and concepts in a thousand ways, in an equilibrium that is always unstable but progressive and refining, in short, if a people is condemned to only consume the technical results of other collectives, they tend to lose their individuality, passing into their passive death.
It is regrettable that in Brazil, laboratories and their operators, libraries and their inhabitants, are not only harassed by governments, but also by public opinion. It is very worrying that a future minister, in charge of science and techniques, follows ideological dogmas that reached their peak in the Cold War. And ignore that in dealings between countries, what is paramount is the strength of technical borrowing (which does not take into account ideologies and enmities) that allows invention, a means for a people to have industry and commerce that allow them to live and survive. Dangerously, such doctrines about internal or external enmity today return in the company of theoretical propositions that were supposedly written to combat terrorism and corruption. This is the “enemy’s criminal law”, which in Brazil is gaining followers at the same pace as it weakens the guiding idea of human rights. If science and technology ignore ideological or religious boundaries, exceptional regimes, most of which are chosen in accordance with democratic rules, tend to put up barriers to the circuit of knowledge.
By persecuting those who do not accept political dogmas, authoritarian governments lose brains that move, through dismissal from their positions by representatives of the regime or through voluntary exile, to countries that welcome them and manage, through them, to increase their scientific, industrial and military strength. . This is how the hunt for opponents, inside or outside the campuses, leads to the impoverishment of an entire people, subjected to the disastrous choices made by those in power. Let us hope that the statements made by the future Minister of Science and Technology are denied or attenuated as much as possible, for the good of our country. Diverting resources to school privatism, or making an anachronistic preaching about friends and enemies, is providing clear evidence that the country's greater interests are ignored. The consequences will be, as always, disastrous.
[1] “Federation of Private Schools takes action at TCU against Sistema S”, Valor Econômico, 05/11/2018.
[2] Rohan, Henri: De l ´intérêt des princes et des Etats de la chrétienté, edition Christian Lazzeri (Paris, PUF, 1995), p. 161.
[3] According to Fichte,There are two rules of national defense: 1) The neighbor, unless he is constrained to consider us as his natural ally against another power fearful to both of us, is ready continually, on the first occasion, as long as he can do so. safely, growing at our expense. He must do so, if he is prudent, and he cannot neglect it, even if he were our brother. 2) It is not enough to defend our territory, but we must undisturbedly keep our eyes open to everything that can influence our situation, and never tolerate anything changing to our disadvantage within the limits of this influence, and not hesitate for a moment if we can change things to our advantage; for we must be sure that the other will do the same as long as he can, and if on our side we hesitate and leave the initiative to him. Those who do not grow, diminish when others grow” Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Machiavelli et other écrits philosophiques et politiques de 1806-1807, translated by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. Paris: Payot, 1981.
[4] Folha de São Paulo, 31/10/2018.
[5] The USP black book, which can be read in PDF: https://www.adusp.org.br/files/cadernos/livronegro.pdf
[6] Evolution et Technique. Paris, Albin Michel, 1973. All of this argument is taken from my article, published in the magazine Foreign policy, volume 24, number 1 and 2: “Sovereignty, secrecy, democratic state”.
[7] Michel Guerin, “Leroi-Gourhan, notre Buffon”. Révue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2, 1977, p.174. For convenience purposes, I will follow Guerin's commentary on Leroi-Gourhan's works step by step. This part of the exhibition directly uses the cited article
[8] Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, TI Paris, Albin Michel.
[9] Items examined by Leroi-Gourhan in the second chapter of L' Homme et la Matière. Paris, Albin Michel, 1972, p.43 and ss
