Pensadores, conquistadores and Latin American mythmaking

Abstract

w hY does Latin American society give up its spiritual autonomy and join itself like a parasite to another society that begins to mold it and endow it by increasingly handing down its accomplishments? One reasonable answer is this: the essential feature of North American society is the search for change, the construction of an ever different destiny. In this quest, North Americans consider only their own society as a point of reference. To be a permanent center of new initiatives governed by its own internal dialectic, the United States does not follow the lead of Europeans. Europe and the rest of the planet are yoked to the American engine, which sometimes advances in the direction of astral space, and other times gets immersed in the microuniverse of biogenetics. The United States drags with it the other countries of the world in the direction of innovation and toward the acceleration of growing technological complexity. We Latin Americans, with more inhabitants than the United States, possess as much or more potential wealth. Spawned by Europe--just as the United States--we have universities that are more than four hundred years old. We have urban centers that were already established when Chicago was a prairie overrun by buffalo. Unconsciously, we have renounced our contribution to shaping our own destiny. Today we treat and tomorrow we will cure those illnesses that some foreign laboratory could already fight effectively. We will live longer because of advances in geriatrics in California or Texas. We will have fewer children because of birth control methods perfected in New York or Tokyo. We will learn better if our teaching methods come to terms with computer technology, devised by multinational corporations. We will be taller or shorter or we will have fewer abnormal children, if genetic transmission chains are correctly deciphered at Harvard or Stanford. We will have more fun if the video recorder is perfected and made cheaper in the Silicon Valley. All of these things are given or sold to us ready-made. Everything that we are and will be is given to us because we do not control our own lives. We move along indifferently without even a plan against the essential immorality that tolerates this paralysis of creativity. In the bloody history of our social struggle, no group has had as its main goal the assumption of an active role in the shaping of our national destiny. We become hoarse crying out for our rights, but we have forgotten our responsibilities to ourselves and to concerns that link us to our destiny. We are accustomed to passing the guilt and responsibility on to others. We do not realize that in almost five centuries at a university such as San Marcos, hardly a discovery of scientific importance was made, and not one original idea was advanced in the humanities. Nothing and nobody except ourselves would prevent an Edison, Bell, Freud, Kant, Einstein, or Heidegger from flourishing in Lima, Havana, Caracas, or Mexico City. Latin American societies do not encourage new ideas. We are unconcerned with the task of changing the world in which we live. We do not allow for our own creativity. It would be wrong to suggest that we live in backward societies that despise changes, since we are so pleased to notice them when they occur. We are simply reluctant to initiate those changes on our own. We have not understood that it is audacity and innovation that determine the course of history, not the other way around. We have not understood that it has been five centuries since the object of our civilization has been change. That is why we have become marginal nations.