The first thing that a reader of A Nova Era e la Révolution Cultural must notice is the attribution, by Olavo de Carvalho, of a vital role for the left for a democracy. In 1994, he lamented as follows: “For some time, I nourished the foolish hope that the PT would expel the Gramscian poison from itself and transform itself into the great socialist or labor party. , which Brazil needs to compensate, in the defense of the interests of the small, the apparently irreversible neoliberal advance in the world and to provide, through the healthy game of forces, the regular and harmonious movement of the rotation of power that is the normal pulse of the democratic organism” . (p. 24)
This rotation, of course, took place between left and right : Olavo, “if it were lawful to dream”, would dream “of a moral reform of the PT itself, which, renouncing the revolutionary purpose of ‘taking power’ , could become the great socialist party that, in a future and ideal Brazilian democracy, would alternate in power with a rightist party, each compensating and correcting the mistakes of the other. If there is one thing that the history of democracies teaches, it is this: it is good that there is a left, it is good that there is a right, and it is not good that one of the two removes the other from power permanently.” (p. 122) In 1994, for Olavo, being on the left was not inherently bad. Nor was it bad or undemocratic to be a socialist. Gramscism in particular was bad.
That Olavo changed his mind is obvious at the beginning. The fourth edition followed the custom of putting the previous notes in reverse chronological order: first comes a general introduction to the trilogy, written in 1996, then a note to the second edition, made in June 1994 (from which I took the first quote), and then the previous note of the first edition, made in January of 1994 . The editor, Sílvio Grimaldo, added as a postscript an interview he did with Olavo de Carvalho in 2014, that is, twenty years after the book was released.
Turno of 180º in two years
The reader then starts the book in 1996, when Olaf explained the design of William Blake used on the cover of the book, with Behemoth under the direction of God, subduing Leviathan. For Olaf, in 1996, the right was Behemoth, the beast obedient to God and helped by him, in charge of subduing the left, which was Leviathan.
I quote the pages 12 and 24 , so no one can say I’m making it up: “For Blake, although Behemoth represents the set of forces obedient to God, and Leviathan the spirit of denial and rebellion, both are equally monsters, cosmic forces disproportionately superior to man, which move combat each other on the world stage, but also within the human soul. However, it is not up to man, nor to Behemoth, to subdue Leviathan. Only God himself can do it. Christian iconography shows Jesus as the fisherman who pulls the Leviathan out of the water, trapping his tongue with a hook. When, however, man flees from the inner combat, denying the help of Christ, then the destructive struggle between nature and unnatural, or infranatural, rebel forces is unleashed. The struggle is transferred from the spiritual and interior sphere to the external scene of History. This is how Blake’s engraving, inspired by the biblical narrative, suggests to us, with the synthetic force of its symbolism, a metaphysical interpretation regarding the origin of wars, revolutions and catastrophes: they reflect the resignation of man in the face of the call of the inner life. By stealing the spiritual life that frightens him, but which he could overcome with the help of Jesus Christ, man gives himself up to material dangers in the bloody scenario of history. In doing so, he moves from the sphere of Providence and Grace to the sphere of fatality and destiny, where the appeal to divine help can no longer have any effect, because there truth and error, right and wrong, but only blind forces of implacable necessity and impotent rebellion. In terms of more recent history, that is, in the cycle that began more or less at the time of the Enlightenment, these two forces clearly assume the meaning of rigid conservatism and revolutionary hübris. Or, even simpler, right and left.”
In just two years, there was a 96º turn in perspective policy of Olavo de Carvalho. From simple essential elements to democracy that should alternate in power, left and right became antagonistic cosmic forces, one of which must be fought by Christ himself. Big change!
The change remains unexplained. In the afterword of 2014, Olavo comments on his naive attitude towards Lula. He said that he radically changed his mind after learning about the São Paulo Forum “at the end of the decade 90, thanks to dr. José Carlos Graça Wagner, who had a huge collection of documents about the organization”. Considering that 96 is more towards the middle than towards the end, there was a profound philosophical shift between 94 and 96 which seems to have gone unnoticed by its readership and by itself.
One thing remained
The rest, however, seems to have remained quite stable – which is impressive, given that the book, with all the transitory elements as a chronicler, he ties all the facts into a consistent story, framed in the vision of politics as a spiritual battle initiated in an intimate forum. This is a very relevant trait in philosophy, since it is a cosmovision opposite to economism.
The most famous economist philosopher is Marx, for whom the social world is explained through relations economic. The most famous critique of this view is perhaps The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , by Max Weber. According to him, it is not true that matter determines capitalist society, but rather, as the title says, something as ethereal as spirit. Although Brazilian Marxists had read Weber, they did not understand anything, and they chose between speaking ill of Uncle Sam for being a Protestant, therefore, capitalist, or making viral whimpers against Brazil, which will not become capitalist before the inexorable laws of History
Olavo’s way of explaining the world, then, is a thousand leagues away from Marx and close to that of Weber, whose intellectual heir, Voegelin, he divulged in the Brazil.
We will close for today with a concrete and elementary example of this. Olavo believes that there is a Gramscian revolution underway that consists of altering culture and training men to act in accordance with a new morality. In the distant years 90, the PT called itself a party of Ethics, and based all its moral superiority on the supposed absence of corruption in its party. An anti-corruption puritanism authorized him to put his finger in the face of others.
At the same time, blood crimes were considered materially determined, emptied of their moral content. He was born poor, he is a thief who kills to steal. Did he kill to steal? It’s because he was born poor. Why was he born poor? Because of society. And back in the 90 there was already this practice of treating the murderer as a victim and the corrupt person as an executioner. Judge Lalau and PC Farias were portrayed in the press in a much darker way than Fernandinho Beira-Mar and William Professor do CV. By the way, at the time, according to the chronicler, the press and the intelligentsia were not ashamed to treat him as a wronged hero.
to consider a crime against State property (which is corruption) something more serious than a crime against life. It is a subversion of western morality that brings it closer to the USSR, where corruption was worth capital punishment and murder was a few years in jail.
The idol of the ethical PT has passed. But the alert remains against the false Prophets of Ethics that make the anti-corruption flag the country’s main issue. Behind them hides a totalitarian morality.