The Root of Latin America's Suffering

A literary and philosophical take on chaos in the Americas.

It is evident to most both within and without Latin America that the region has a more volatile, unstable, and corrupt existence, both politically and socially, than that of its European founders. The corruption and politics of envy in particular stand out.

Within Latin America itself there are macroregional divisions worth making, not to speak of the entire hemisphere. While the politics of envy have infected the social and political life of all the West, and has its hooked tendrils firmly upon the heart of the American anglosphere, it may nonetheless be said that Canada and the United States have, among American nations, historically been least affected by this corruption. Brazil too, as bumpy a ride as it may feel in living moments, has enjoyed a relatively peaceful and even prosperous history. Spanish America looms largest when corruption and envy are considered as truly disruptive, revolutionary, violent, and oppressive forces in the Americas.

Even within Spanish America there are distinctions worth making. Why is the southern cone, for example, so much more stable and less violent than the equatorial nations, especially those along the Spanish Main?

Something to do with tropical dispositions, perhaps? Some malarial miasmic malaise that oozes off the equatorial line?

No. Those are the countries that were liberated by Simón Bolívar, rather than by José de San Martín and his southern coalition.

The degree to which nations in the Americas are subject to the daemonic spirits of envy, fratricide, subornation, and all social and political corruptions is the degree to which its founders looked for inspiration to the French Revolution.

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Throughout this piece I use the term Romantic in the simplest manner possible: the Romantic movement emphasized emotion and, above all, individualism. This is the core of it, so that anything sublime or antique is extraneous, or of an accidental nature rather than an essential.

I have footnoted in several portions, but I have not required a scholarly standard of the piece. The hope is that it will inspire some thought, and perhaps suggest further reading.

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It is said that near the end of his life Simón Bolívar asked his doctor if he knew who the three most outstanding fools of the world had been. Upon receiving a negative response, he said: “The three greatest fools have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote, and…I!”

In 1824 Bolívar wrote the marquis of Toro: “Understand, my dear marquis, that my sadnesses come from my philosophy, and that I am more philosophical in prosperity than in adversity. I tell you this that you might not believe that my state is a sad one, much less my fortune.”

On this theme the immortal Miguel de Unamuno had this to say:

“Each man may be judged by his favorite readings.”

And, “Does this bit about the man sad in prosperity and sad by philosophy tell you nothing? Might Bolívar have arrived at the feeling of metaphysical anguish shared by all the greats, the terrible voice that surges out of the silence of eternal shadows and says to us: and all this, for what?

“Let us not forget that he had read Rousseau, the patriarch of pessimism, and that he carried with him those two volumes of The Social Contract that had belonged to Napoleon’s library, which the English general Roberto Wilson had gifted to the Liberator…”¹

And now you know what I consider to be the great tragedy of Latin America: its poverty and corruption are thoroughly Rousseauvian, with not a trace of the offsetting vigor of the Anglo-Saxons, or the possibility of the resigned and hard-won wisdom of imperial Spain.

The nations of Latin America, most of all Spanish America, suffer from having none of the anthropological and political virtues, but all of the vices, inherent to the transplanted American civilizations.

They were founded with an eye toward Revolutionary France, especially those liberated by Bolívar; to this day the children of San Martín are more prosperous. The Latin American revolution of independence was Romantic in all the worst Byronic moronic ways. Recall that Byron was a much-trumpeted Romantic Liberator of Man, and died fighting as such a liberator, on the campaign trail in Greece in 1826, fifteen years after the liberation of Venezuela and two years after Bolívar wrote about being sad.

One of Unamuno’s life projects was to get the hispanosphere to stop looking toward France for inspiration. He mocked the philosophers, artists, etcetera who said they knew Paris. Unamuno wrote that they knew neither France nor Paris, but only international Paris, i.e. the Paris full of internationals, made for and by internationals. You know, the Paris of Karl Marx and the Paris Commune.

Rousseau leads to Romanticism leads to individualism leads to socialism leads to national socialism leads to Communism.

Most English speakers think only of the poets and novelists when they think of Romanticism. This is a mistake. Think of their social writings. Of their pamphlets, manifestos, letters. Think about the way they lived their lives, the things they tried to achieve.²

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Some paragraphs below from Miguel de Unamuno’s essay The Knight of Melancholy Visage: an Iconographic Essay, from the collection El Caballero de la triste figura, Madrid, 1963. Translation my own.

The soul of a people is impregnated with the coming hero before he sprouts into the light of life, she presages him as the distillation of a spirit already diffuse in her, and awaits his advent. In each age, it is said, arises the hero that is needful. It is clear; as in each epoch the hero breathes the great ideas of “then”, the only ones great in that “then”; he feels the needs of his time, unique to their necessary time, and in some or others he is saturated. And every other hero than the one who has been needful ends in misery or contempt, in the gallery or in the madhouse, or perhaps on the gallows.

The hero is nothing less than the collective soul individualized, that which by feeling more in unison with the people, feels in a certain fashion more personal; the prototype and result, the spiritual mode of the people. And it cannot be said that they steer such a one, but rather that they are his conscience and the word of his aspirations.

The hero, presaged in august pregnancy, is very often far too sublime to dress in mortal flesh, or the world that is to receive him is over-narrow, so he sprouts instead as an ideal, legendary and novelesque, not from woman’s womb but from man’s fantasy. These are heroes who live and war and guide the people to the fight, and in it sustains them, no less real and alive than those of flesh and bone, tangible and perishing. The great Captain, either Francisco Pizarro or Hernán Cortés, carried his soldiers to victory, but it is no less sure that Don Quixote has sustained the energies of struggling fighters, infusing them with verve and faith, consolation in defeat, and moderation in victory. With us he lives and in us he breathes…¿Did Homer make Achilles, or Achilles make Homer?

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How much do I hate the Romantics? Well, I wrote a poem about it here…and it’s about a man, a hero, a stand-in for the spirit of the age: Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “Hero of Two Worlds”, fighter/liberator/unifier in Brazil, Uruguay, and Italy. There are statues of him all over South America, including in Buenos Aires. Writing to his audience there, Unamuno suggests that the “pedagogy of statues”³ is such that this statue of Garibaldi teaches the people that they are not yet a nation. He represents an identity imposed from without, both as foreigner and philosopher. Not much of a philosopher, in this case. But an imposer of a philosophy, one thoroughly Romantic and Revolutionary.

Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Here is the ultimate irony of Romantic nationalism. Imagine Garibaldi showing up in Sardinia or Sicily to recruit an army. The peasants cannot be told they are to be freed from the Church. They would reasonably ask what would bind them and give them identity, since until the Enlightenment all men were homo adorans. They cannot be very well told that their prospective liberators are Freemasons and Romantics who think that each man should seek to be as individual and fulfilled as possible; they would not be satisfied to hear that the old yokes must be thrown off in order to permit selfishness; they could not be told that ideology and “progress” was to be the only things that bound them. What poor man would risk his life under the banner of self-worship, hedonism, and autogratification? Recall that at this point Communist rhetoric had not yet developed its explanatory dialectic. Rather than being given ideology, the peasants in Italy are told that they must fight for their women and their children. They are fed blood and soil. Mussolini loved Garibaldi; on the other hand, Che Guevara loved Garibaldi.

Italy before it was “Italy”.

The irony of the women and children, blood and soil rhetoric was that it needed to divorce the cause from real towns, real valleys, real farms. The actual soil under the peasants’ feet was not at issue. In fact, the Rousseauvists and Romantics longed for unification, for bigness, for a reality in which there would be only individuals and the world. No longer would there be Sicilians or Venetians. One day, in a far-distant fulfillment of their gospel, there would be no Ottomans or Christians either. There would no peoples, only people. But saying so to the masses wouldn’t do. The only way to get Sicilians to be Italian was a rhetoric of envy.

And so arises the Communist dialectic, absolutely confluent with European unification movements.

By the end of his life, the political party Garibaldi is part of is literally called Estrema sinistra, the Extreme Left.

When the Paris Commune revolted in 1871 and took over parts of the city for two months, the world of “workers” exploded. In his apologias for the Commune he would not call himself a Communist, for he said that “the thing that is driving the Parisians to war is a sentiment of justice and human dignity…not communism, as the scurrilous detractors of the proletariat wish to define it, as communism consists of making the poor rich and the rich poor”. But this was simply a matter of labeling. “When certain doctrines can be cleaned away, ones that were perhaps introduced by the malevolence of its enemies, it will be…the continuation of the emancipation of human law. Shouldn't a society (I mean a human society) in which the majority struggle for subsistence and the minority want to take the larger part of the product of the former through deceptions and violence but without hard work, arouse discontent and thoughts of revenge amongst those who suffer?” Like all communists everywhere, examples of communism which failed were not real communism and real communism always worked. He interacted with and defended the London-based First International, then known as the International Working Men’s Association, whose doctrine had been principally formulated by a young Karl Marx. In 1871 Garibaldi told a friend that he put aside “certain unacceptable maxims, such as ‘property is theft, inheritance another theft’”⁴ as unworthy of debate. Within a year, The International had split into two separate congresses, Mikhail Bakunin being expelled for having called Marx’s doctrine authoritarian. This new group were known as anarchists, and worker’s movements and socialist organizations through western Europe were immediately divided, fighting each other and attempting to recruit each other away from their apostasies.

As an aside, this is why anarchy and communism are socially associated, even though it seems bizarre to those of us downstream of the victory of authoritarian communism to think of anarchists and communists at once. That is just chronal myopia. Once upon a time, internationalism and communism were…wait for it…Romantic. Individual and individualistic. Everyone follow their heart’s desires but still follow the Golden Rule. The dissolution of all power and authority was necessary for this Romantic vision.

Garibaldi hated any federal proposals, which would have denied the good of a unitary state. French Socialist politician Louis Blanc called him the soldier of revolutionary cosmopolitanism.

Louis Blanc, by the way, admitted to the inevitable necessity of centralization, if capital were to be destroyed, proposing a Ministry of Progress for The International (see image). This will be relevant shortly. It was because of the “tragic side of the social problem — that society must henceforth necessarily become a blessing to the one party and a curse to the other.⁵ “No political revolution could solve this gigantic riddle…the question was to discover a theory, a formula, a term imparting to the world a new force, as the word ‘Christianity’ once had done.”

Garibaldi lauded the basic principles of The International before its split, for “1. Its name, which does not make any distinction between the African and the American, the European and the Asian, and therefore proclaims the fraternity of all men whatever nation they belong to; 2. The International does not want priests, and consequently does not want lies; 3. It does not want standing armies to perpetuate war, but a citizen’s militia to maintain order at home; 4. It wants the administrative government of the Commune. And this is one of the greatest glories of Paris, as this means that the capital of France, which naturally has the most to gain from a central government, spontaneously renounces its metropolitan domination that has lasted through all the centuries.”⁶

Again, Garibaldi: “Why don't we pull together in one organized group the Freemasonry, democratic societies, workers' clubs, Rationalists, Mutual Aid, etc., which have the same tendency towards good?”⁷

In 1867, when the Inaugural Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom had met in Geneva, Garibaldi had been there, leaping up to greet the anarchist Bakunin, "the cry passed from mouth to mouth: 'Bakunin!' Garibaldi, who was in the chair, stood up, advanced a few steps and embraced him. This solemn meeting of two old and tried warriors of the revolution produced an astonishing impression .... Everyone rose and there was a prolonged and enthusiastic clapping of hands.”⁸ Marx was there too, of course, taking over institutions, as was his wont. He had insisted that The International take no official part, but encouraged as many delegates to attend as possible, saying “The International Working Men’s Congress was in itself a Peace Congress, as the union of the working classes of the different countries must ultimately make international wars impossible. If the promoters of the Geneva Peace Congress really understood the question at issue they ought to have joined the International Association.” At the same speech Marx rather ominously claimed that “those who declined putting their shoulders to the wheel to bring about a transformation in the relations of labour and capital ignored the very conditions of universal peace.”⁹ In short, the seeds of the League of Nations and the United Nations were competition…the International Working Men’s Congress was already going to bring peace to the world.

This is the Romantic ideal: the abolition of every fence, of anything civilizational that keeps my from being Rousseau’s ideal man, in some far future utterly unencumbered by civilization but still possessing fruit of labor and techne.

That is also the socialist ideal. Men like Blanc and Marx, unlike their associate Garibaldi, never waged war or personally wielded the violence they encouraged in the streets. They nonetheless made their willingness to force this new world clear. In this, they grew beyond Romantic socialism and communism…such anarchy was impractical and unimplementable.

Even Garibaldi could not keep his hand from ideological violence. For example, he acknowledged that secular state education must be compulsory. Regardless, he never let go of the sublime individual hope that each man might be his own God. Recall, the Rousseauvists and Romantics longed for unification, for bigness, for a reality in which there would be only individuals and the world. There would be Many, and there would be One. But mostly Many.

Garibaldi never admitted to himself that a world of two levels must always collapse into one. Marx and Blanc chose One; Garibaldi and Bakunin chose Many. Nothing else had authority for Garibaldi: no families, no households, no churches, no authority at all that was anything other than the Individual. No one to tell anyone what to do.

It turns out that when there are only One and Many, the only legitimate relationships are ones of power. I say legitimate because the other relationships are of corruption, which necessarily arises as individuals among the many realize they need some third thing for protection.

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It is Garibaldi’s socialism that has triumphed in the West. It is a socialism of the heart, a wish that each individual be his own god, and that each individual be forced to be his own god. How? Don’t ask inconvenient questions. Continue to pretend you’re an anarchist, even when you’re at the head of an army or a political committee.

Garibaldi’s socialism is Lennon’s. You heard me. Lennon, not Lenin.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

What happens when nobody joins the dream, but suffering continues? Okay, I’ll answer the inconvenient question. You pull a gun, of course.

This is the Romantic socialism that makes icons of murderers like Che Guevara, that admirer of Garibaldi.

Guevara was a poet. Really. You can find some of his work online. I think we should list him as the last Romantic poet, heir to Shelley and Byron. They could all share the title Destroyer of Families.

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It was Garibaldi’s socialism that was present at the founding of the Latin American republics. They hadn’t realized that was its name; they still thought it was romantic. Not even Garibaldi understood that: scholars today say he evolved into a socialist, but the reality is simply that he and Romanticism grew up.

Freemasons, Rationalists, all these collections of individuals out to build societies based on reason and free of priests, this is the Bolivarian dream.

This is the Bolivarian dream that immediately corrupted. Of course. Reason is not the basis for collaboration or peace, for society. Love is.

Really, anything with power and authority can force collaboration for at least a while. Honor is such a thing. Shame. Pleasure. But not Reason. Reason is not immediate; your reason cannot touch another’s. Reason can only mediate between collaboration on one hand and honor or shame or pleasure or whatever power on the other. Here is the reason for you to collaborate, you are convinced it will bestow honor, avoid shame, win pleasure. Reason does not bind together; there is no society of reason. Rather, it makes us each individuals, alone and realizing we must protect ourselves from these other thoroughly Rational and Romantic individuals who seek their own pleasure.

This anarchy is what prevails in Latin American society. Corruption flourishes when the only two authorities anyone recognizes are the Individual and the State. This was the dream of Reason, the dream of the French Revolution, the dream of Rousseau, the dream of the Romantics. Never has there been a sleazier, bloodier, more cruel or capricious crew. The dream of Bolívar is what makes for bolivarianismo today, it is what is starving the people of Venezuela. There are only two authorities, the State and the Individual.

No wonder he was sad. Bolívar saw it for himself. Everything immediately corrupted. In adversity, he had had the purity of the cause of Liberation and Revolution. In prosperity, he had nothing but time with which to look at what a two-tier world, a world without mediation, looked like. And it looked like something a fool would have built.

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Unamuno isn’t wrong about the Latin American gaze toward France.

The American War for Independence¹⁰ was based on the Englishness of Americans. The founders of the nation looked at England square in the eye, and justified themselves as Englishmen. As Englishmen they claimed to have certain rights, and on that basis the new nation was formed.

If the Spanish-speaking world had looked to Spain rather than turbulent revolving revolutionary France, perhaps its destiny would have been different. Spain certainly took an unRomantic route. Still, the Americas were where the Spanish and Portuguese crown had worked out the Enlightenment philosophies that they had used to wrest power from the Roman church. For two centuries the colonial tendency had been toward growing independence and autonomy, until the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1767¹¹ and the destruction of their work across the Americas. Until the centralization of empire, as logically required by the Enlightenment, the same logic that led nations, principalities, and kingdoms to become nation-states.

Looking to Spain, what would not have been in play was the radical flattening of Rousseau and the indulgent envious selfishness being fostered in France.

So yeah, I think internationalism is a root of Latin America’s troubles. These were countries founded by men who believed in men rather than nations. The nation-states of the region became nations of convenience rather than the historic nations that they might have been, or might have grown up into if they had had mediating authorities between the people and the State.

More than anything, we understand that the solution is not some salvador de la patria, not a new party or ruler, not committees or commissariats. It is not centralization, even if benign. Nor is the solution some form of centralized, socialized support of individuals and families. These two poles are the reason Latin America oscillates back and forth between socialism and social fascism, always tending back further and further left.

Any “support” of individuals and family would need to devolve to them some sort of real authority, some way of saying to the State, “to here, and no further”. This is something the State lacks the ontological power to do.

The solution is a strong, uncoopted Church. And not Rome, which has been a wordly political entity for centuries now, and was in fact coopted by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns long ago, and by other powers after.

A robust and healthy Church can provide cover for Latin Americans to begin to live as humans once more, in communities with real power, and local magistrates who are not warlords. A healthy Church can provide cover for federalism and localism.

The solution is in proclaiming and living the gospel that Jesus saves and reigns. In affirming the dignity of man as lying not in his animal or own anima, but in his being as imago dei. The solution is in the grace of making Christian things, things that have a native and God-given authority of their own, rather than granted by the State.

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I’ve spent most of this post sketching out, skeletoning out, really, how Romanticism naturally turns into Communism. I’m not willing to write a book, but hopefully tracing such a path in the life of Garibaldi is compelling enough to show how globally pernicious such philosophy is. I encourage you to read on, in the myriad of ways that I hope have been suggested.

More at some other date, perhaps, about why Jesus and Quixote were not fools.

1. All the above quotes from Miguel de Unamuno’s article Don Quijote y Bolívar, published in La Nación, Buenos Aires, 30 January 1907.

2. If you want, for sentimentality’s sake, to claim that Wordsworth and Coleridge were not Romantics, I wouldn’t fight you. Again, look at their other writings, what they tried to achieve. Wordsworth was such an instinctive conservative, Coleridge a tortured but true religious.

3. A phrase of the Argentinian writer Ricardo Rojas, and Unamuno’s ideas above are in echo of what Rojas had written. They had corresponded about national identity, especially European versus American identity.

4. This quote and the preceding in this paragraph are garnered from chapter 23 of Garibaldi: Citizen of the World, by Alfonso Scirocco. The book is a bit hagiographic (e.g. claiming that he’d learned in Montevideo how hard it was for a foreigner to be in supreme command of an army, while ignoring that he’d offered his services to the Union in the American Civil War on the condition that he be supreme commander), but a good resource for anyone interested in the early connection between communism and globalism.

5. Image from The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 168, London, Saturday, December 17, 1864.

6. Letter to Arthur Arnold, September 1871. From Garibaldi: Citizen of the World, by Alfonso Scirocco.

7. From Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall. This is (mostly) the book that inspired the poem I wrote about Garibaldi, linked to above.

8. Report from a Russian positivist quoted in Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, 1993, p. 34. Cited in Bakunin’s idea of revolution & revolutionary organisation, Red & Black Revolution, no. 6, Winter 2002.

9. From The Bee-Hive Newspaper August 17, 1867, reporting on a meeting of the IWMA Central Council.

10. I refuse to call it a Revolution, even though it may be called so for legitimate reasons; the stench of the bloody sans-culottes that fills my nostrils every time I speak the word is more than I am willing to stand.

11. Ever see the movie The Mission? Recommended. Jeremy Irons, Robert DeNiro. Anyway, here’s the Wikipedia explanation of the Suppression of the Jesuits:
The suppression of the Society of Jesus was the removal of all members of the Jesuits from most of Western Europe and their respective colonies beginning in 1759 along with the abolition of the order by the Holy See in 1773; the papacy acceded to said anti-Jesuit demands without much resistance. The Jesuits were serially expelled from the Portuguese Empire (1759), France (1764), the Two Sicilies, Malta, Parma, the Spanish Empire (1767) and in Austria and Hungary (1782).

Monarchies attempting to centralise and secularise political power viewed the Jesuits as supranational, too strongly allied to the papacy, and too autonomous from the monarchs in whose territory they operated.