Carles Porta and the murder of democracy
Is Trump killing democracy? Are we witnessing a crime in real time? In a few decades, will we need a historian Carles Porta to elucidate the dark plot? Are we still in time to avoid the tragic death? Let us shed light on the darkness. And what better light than that projected by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu and company three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, when they taught us the joy of reasoning, thinking and feeling freely, when they instilled in us confidence in progress and science.
We delve into the Enlightenment with the help of the writer Martí Domínguez, who has compiled an anthology of wisdom from those wise men, The light of lights (Editorial Angle). Please read the collection of revealing quotes that I have chosen thinking about what the current occupant of the White House is doing and saying, probably the least enlightened American president –both in knowledge and spirit– since the independence of the USA.
"The happiness of America is intimately linked to the happiness of humanity; it will become the respectable and safe asylum of virtue, honesty, tolerance, equality, and tranquil liberty," wrote in 1837 the Marquis de La Fayette, a soldier born in 1757 who participated in both the French and American Revolutions.
"One does not feel like a liar when one is accustomed to being one," said the playwright Pierre de Marivaux (1732).
"It is generally easy to conclude that the men most disposed to be wicked are usually the most inclined to conceive the idea of a terrible divinity, and that, at the same time, they have imagined in this hideous idol almost the same inclinations to riches, gifts, blood, carnage, and victims as there are among men," said Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, a utopian proponent of abolishing property, in 1754. [How does Trump imagine the God he thinks saved his life in the campaign bombing? This is how he himself described what happened: "I had blood all over me, and yet in a way I felt very safe, because I had God with me. I should not be here today; if I am on this stage it is thanks to the grace of almighty God. Many people say it was a providential moment."
"About the sixth sense, that which allows us to differentiate the true from the false, the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, everything seems to conspire against it." Madeleine de Puisieux (1720-1798), writer and feminist friend of Diderot.
"We often put at the head of government people whom we as individuals would never have let run our business." Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thriroux de Arconville, a novelist, translator and chemist known for her study of the putrefaction of plant and animal matter, wrote in 1760. Now the putrefaction that concerns us is another: that of democracy.
"History is a long and monotonous compilation of the misfortunes of man, and too often the panegyric of public criminals, because in general they can be called that heroes", according to Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau.
"The friends of truth are those who seek it and not those who boast of having found it," according to the mathematician, philosopher and politician Nicolas de Condorcet, 1791. He too wrote that "any society that is not enlightened by philosophers is deceived by charlatans" (1794).
"Discord is the greatest evil of humanity, and tolerance is the only remedy," wrote the combative Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence, in 1764, according to whom tolerance "is a prerogative of humanity": "We are all full of weaknesses and errors; Let us forgive each other our stupidities, it is the first law of nature."
And finally: "Opinion is the queen of the world, because stupidity is the queen of fools," according to one of the maxims of the lucid and skeptical moralist Nicolas Cham.