It is convenient to read the great thinkers of the past because this allows us to better understand the present. In 1930, José Ortega y Gasset told the students gathered in the auditorium of the University of Madrid, who demanded a university reform, that the fundamental mission of the university was to transmit culture and that this mission was above his other two ( teaching and research), because while the latter were important parts of life, culture was life itself. Each era or historical time has a repertoire of ideas about the world. That repertoire is precisely culture and it is essential for man to function correctly. “Culture is what saves vital shipwreck, what allows man to live without his life being a senseless tragedy or radical degradation.” Culture is essential to be “up to its time”.
The accumulation of knowledge in our time, said Ortega, is exorbitant and it is not possible, as in ancient times, for someone to even briefly cover the gigantic volume of existing knowledge. But neither can anyone, without very serious consequences, escape from culture. Whoever does not dominate the basic ideas of his time (physical image of the universe, central themes of technology, knowledge of history, basic functioning of the economy, society and politics, main currents of art and philosophy, etc.) is a barbarian He may be a good doctor, engineer or mathematician, but all other activities of his will be deplorable. “If, unfortunately, one of these modern barbarians came to have absolute power in the society to which he belongs, the consequences would be catastrophic.” Years later, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel, Chávez and others would take it upon themselves to prove him right.
Being educated does not mean possessing erudite knowledge in one or several fields of knowledge, but knowing and mastering the most significant elements of the great themes of the time, as the necessary baggage to elaborate a synthesis or quintessence of the totality and with it to be able to recreate a reasonably faithful integrating image of the world and of the man of our time. This allows us to know why things are the way they are, why certain ideas are wrong and why some political decisions generate resistance and unleash conflicts that disturb the order, coexistence and progress of nations.
“Today we are going through a time of terrible ignorance,” Ortega proclaimed to the Madrid students. He blamed the 19th century universities for this lack, which, dazzled by science and technology, relegated culture to the background. “If that barbarism, in the frenzy of a revolution, swept them away, they would lack the last reason to complain.” Precisely what happened to the universities in the countries where the great upheavals feared by Ortega occurred. What happened in Spain (the Civil War) and in the rest of Europe (the totalitarianisms of the left and right), dramatically demonstrated the correctness of his prediction. “Today the bourgeois classes rule in advanced societies, but if tomorrow the workers ruled, the issue would be the same: they will have to live up to their time, otherwise they will be supplanted.” Again, events in the USSR and China confirmed the correctness of his judgment.
All of the above has a premeditated purpose: to ask ourselves if the current situation in Venezuela is related to the ideas of the great thinker. Have our political, business, cultural and social leaders lived up to their time in these years of national disgrace? Obviously not, if it had been, the situation would be much better. If the leaders of yesterday, those of the misnamed Fourth Republic (1958-1998), were uneducated, and there are reasons to say they were, the current ones, those who rose to power with the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in 1998, they are so much more. It is evident in what they say, do and in their own personal traits: arrogant, conceited, cynical, lying and cruel. A whole manifestation of ignorance. They lack the necessary ethical and cultural principles to overcome their complexes and base instincts.
The catastrophe caused by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century (fascism, Nazism and communism) was not an impediment for Venezuelan Chavismo to take Cuban Castro-communism as a management model, an imitation of those failed systems. There is no greater proof of ignorance, in the Ortegan sense, than that barbaric decision that devastated the country. But the thing does not end there. The opposition leadership also has that disorder. At the crucial moment of the struggle, when the regime had lost popular support and was in a precarious situation, the opposition leaders fragmented for reasons that they will never be able to justify to the country. They frustrated millions of compatriots who, in the midst of abuses, persecutions and deaths, had fought with them for years. The immense opposition mass became discouraged, immobilized and took refuge in electoral abstention. This is how the crushing defeat of Chavismo was aborted, which, with everything and its trickery, would have occurred in the 2017 and 2018 elections. Given this experience, the inevitable question arises: will we be able to get out of the national disaster with leaders, from one to the other? bando, who are not up to their time?
