A few days ago I participated in one of the well-being meetings sponsored by SER. It was in Córdoba and I chatted with Pilar Gómez, Bernardino León, Manuel Jabois and Pedro Blanco. The issue was polarization. I summarize in this column the core part of my interventions because, while I was speaking, I realized that I myself am extremely polarized and, in some way, I am glad. I began by commenting that choosing the term “polarization” is counterproductive: perhaps the issue should be approached from the need to recover an “imperfect” democratic consensus, created in the Transition; a consensus whose imperfections today are the origin of an oil stain that is spreading. In the Transition, perhaps inevitably, gaps were left open that hinder the functioning of democracy: after the death of the dictator, scandalous portions of power, money, and justice continued to be in the same hands. Added to this scratchy texture characteristic of our democracy is a global neoliberalism that steals or alienates the noblest words in our lexicon: democracy—transmuted into demagoguery and ochlocracy—, freedom, individual, culture…
“Memory” is a stolen word that exemplifies that sinister confluence between the mark of a poorly healed past and a techno-feudalist present. For the sake of national conciliation, the concept of democratic memory is distorted, putting in the same bag the horrors of the war committed by any side, the coup against the Second Republic and the forty years of Francoist repression. The forgetting of this historical responsibility makes possible the birth of a party like Vox, which has the paradoxical virtue of awakening the sympathies of the nostalgic survivors and of the young people who see it as hope in the heart of a demonized corrupt democracy in which everything The world steals and no one is brave.
The deformation of the historical narrative overlaps with the contempt for memory as a faculty of intelligence, an ability for learning, an indispensable starting point for conceptual relationships, thought and criticism. For affection even. It is essential to know something—and remember it—to build knowledge. To deconstruct it, too. That is the basis of education and the essential cognitive optimism in the times of the 5G wave, particle acceleration and Google, patron saint of externalized memory and the usurpation of criteria to find the perfect tuning of the tuning forks among the noise. . Search engines search for you, comparators compare for you and, in saving time and energy, they choose for you. They stretch out the thread to you not to find the way out of the maze, but rather like to a fish. They tell you what the maze consists of. In the end, among all the dandruff Of the discourses of modernity, only a discourse is legitimized that pretends not to be: that of the market, that of our free elections in the market. That of the advertisements of banking entities or companies that speculate on the universal right to health. Or to education. All clients. With client rights. Anyone who cannot be a client, because she is not worth it, let her rot.
In this context, broadcasting from the heat is barbaric, but I don’t know if euphemism is a procedure to avoid engaging in hate speech, or an excess of caution. The requirement for equidistance can also be barbaric. Censorship. Like the one perpetrated by the UNED against the documentary Palestine, a denied land. It is alleged: “A biased vision in favor of the Palestinian people.” Just kidding, right? Sometimes you can only be Palestinian, black, working. And be a little polarized.