Ser um centrista, ou um moderado, nunca foi a mais grata das posições. A história usualmente não nos recorda, pois são os heróis (às vezes os vilões) que atraem as hagiografias e as estátuas nas praças. Nas grandes batalhas políticas, somos os primeiros a ter a voz abafada na troca de dardos retóricos dos militantes e, mesmo quando estamos no governo, viramos uma nota de rodapé para os radicais da vez. Perdemos mesmo quando ganhamos: pois ganhar, sendo um centrista, é conciliar posições, minorar antagonismos, construir uma sensação de normalidade -- e, se as coisas estão normais, não há nada de especial nelas, certo? Nossas maiores virtudes são justamente as maiores responsáveis por nossa invisibilidade. Não ser notado é a marca de nosso sucesso e também, não raro, de nosso fracasso.
Pois bem. Nestes tempos em que nazistas perdem a vergonha de fazer "Sieg Heil" para Trump, em que conspiracionistas se fazem passar por pensadores respeitáveis (e alguns dos que o são parecem não fazer caso de tão exótica companhia) e professores universitários, artistas, ativistas e uma horda de gente bem-intencionada entra num delírio coletivo negacionista para não assumir suas responsabilidades perante o atual mal-estar nacional -- para que fazer autocrítica quando se pode ser o mártir de um "golpe"? --, encontrei esta joia de Leszek Kolakowski, um ensaísta polonês famoso por sua história do marxismo. Neste artigo, ainda que em tons levemente humorísticos, Kolakowski mostra o cerne do centrismo: pegar o melhor das ideologias disponíveis e tentar aplicá-lo, evitando os exageros e deslizes que costumam vir no pacote. Não tive tempo de traduzir, mas deixo aqui como registro.
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"How to be a
Conservative-Liberal-Socialist"
By Leszek Kolakowski
Motto: "Please step forward to
the rear!" This is an approximate translation of a request I once heard on
a tram-car in Warsaw
A
Conservative Believes:
1. That in human life there never
have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with
deteriorations and evils; thus, in considering each project of reform and
amelioration, its price has to be assessed. Put another way, innumerable evils
are compatible (i.e. we can suffer them comprehensively and simultaneously);
but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy
them fully at the same time. A society in which there is no equality and no
liberty of any kind is perfectly possible, yet a social order combining total
equality and freedom is not. The same applies to the compatibility of planning
and the principle of autonomy, to security and technical progress. Put yet
another way, there is no happy ending in human history.
2. That we do not know the extent
to which various traditional forms of social life--families, rituals, nations,
religious communities--are indispensable if life in a society is to be
tolerable or even possible. There are no grounds for believing that when we
destroy these forms, or brand them as irrational, we increase the chance of
happiness, peace, security, or freedom. We have no certain knowledge of what
might occur if, for example, the monogamous family was abrogated, or if the
time-honored custom of burying the dead were to give way to the rational
recycling of corpses for industrial purposes. But we would do well to expect
the worst.
3. That the idee fixe of the Enlightenment--that envy, vanity, greed, and
aggression are all caused by the deficiencies of social institutions and that
they will be swept away once these institutions are reformed-- is not only
utterly incredible and contrary to all experience, but is highly dangerous. How
on earth did all these institutions arise if they were so contrary to the true
nature of man? To hope that we can institutionalize brotherhood, love, and
altruism is already to have a reliable blueprint for despotism.
A
Liberal Believes:
1. That the ancient idea that the purpose
of the State is security still remains valid. It remains valid even if the
notion of "security" is expanded to include not only the protection
of persons and property by means of the law, but also various provisions of
insurance: that people should not starve if they are jobless; that the poor
should not be condemned to die through lack of medical help; that children
should have free access to education--all these are also part of security. Yet
security should never be confused with liberty. The State does not guarantee
freedom by action and by regulating various areas of life, but by doing
nothing. In fact security can be expanded only at the expense of liberty. In
any event, to make people happy is not the function of the State.
2. That human communities are
threatened not only by stagnation but also by degradation when they are so
organized that there is no longer room for individual initiative and
inventiveness. The collective suicide of mankind is conceivable, but a
permanent human ant-heap is not, for the simple reason that we are not ants.
3. That it is highly improbable
that a society in which all forms of competitiveness have been done away with
would continue to have the necessary stimuli for creativity and progress. More
equaliity is not an end in itself, but only a means. In other words, there is
no point to the struggle for more equality if it results only in the leveling
down off those who are better off, and not in the raising up of the
underprivileged. Perfect equality is a self-defeating ideal.
A
Socialist Believes:
1. That societies in which the
pursuit of profit is the sole regulator of the productive system are threatened
with as grievous--perhaps more grievous--catastrophes as are societies in which
the profit motive has been entirely eliminated from the production-regulating
forces. There are good reasons why freedom of economic activity should be
limited for the sake of security, and why money should not automatically
produce more money. But the limitation of freedom should be called precisely
that, and should not be called a higher form of freedom.
2. That it is absurd and
hypocritical to conclude that, simply because a perfect, conflictless society
is impossible, every existing form of inequality is inevitable and all ways of
profit-making justified. The kind of conservative anthropological pessimism
which led to the astonishing belief that a progressive income tax was an
inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the kind of historical optimism on
which the Gulag Archipelago was based.
3. That the tendency to subject the
economy to important social controls should be encouraged, even though the
price to be paid is an increase in bureaucracy. Such controls, however, must be
exercised within representative democracy. Thus it is essential to plan
institutions that counteract the menace to freedom which is produced by the
growth of these very controls.
So far as I can see, this set of
regulative ideas is not self-contradictory. And therefore it is possible to be
a conservative-liberal-socialist. This is equivalent to saying that those three
particular designations are no longer mutually exclusive options.
As for the great and powerful
International which I mentioned at the outset--it will never exist, because it
cannot promise people that they will be happy.
From Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity
on Endless Trial (University of Chicago, 1990).
