I
The world war has not only changed and fractured the economy and politics of the West. It has also modified or fractured its mentality and spirit. The economic consequences, defined and specified by John Maynard Keynes, are no more obvious or sensitive than the spiritual and psychological consequences. Politicians, statesmen, will perhaps find, through a series of experiments, a formula and a method to solve the former; but they will certainly not find an adequate theory and practice to nullify the latter. It seems to me more likely that they must adapt their programs to the pressure of the spiritual atmosphere, from the influence of which their work cannot escape. What differentiates the men of this epoch is not only doctrine, but above all, feeling. Two opposing conceptions of life, one pre-war, the other post-war, impede the intelligence of men who, apparently, serve the same historical interest. Here we see the central conflict of the contemporary crisis.
The evolutionist, historicist, rationalist philosophy, in pre-war times united, across political and social borders, the two antagonistic classes. Material well-being, the physical power of the cities had engendered a superstitious respect for the idea of progress. Humanity seemed to have found a definitive path. Conservatives and revolutionaries practically accepted the consequences of the evolutionist thesis. Both sides coincided in the same adherence to the idea of progress and the same aversion to violence.
There was no shortage of men whom this flat and comfortable philosophy failed to seduce or capture. Georges Sorel, one of the most acute writers of pre-war France, denounced, for example, the illusions of progress. Don Miguel de Unamuno preached Quixotism. But most Europeans had lost the taste for adventures and heroic myths. Democracy was gaining the favor of the socialist and trade union masses, pleased with their easy gradual conquests, proud of their cooperatives, their organization, their “people’s houses” and their bureaucracy. The captains [capitanes] and the orators of the class struggle enjoyed a popularity, without risks, that numbed in their souls all revolutionary inconstancy. The bourgeoisie allowed itself to be led by intelligent and progressive leaders who, convinced of the stolidity and imprudence of a policy of persecution of the ideas and men of the proletariat, preferred a policy aimed at taming and softening them with clever transactions.
A decadent and aestheticist temper was spreading, subtly, in the upper strata of society. The Italian critic Adriano Tilgher, in one of his remarkable essays, defines the last generation of the Parisian bourgeoisie as follows: “The product of a civilization that was often secular, saturated with experience and reflection, analytical and introspective, artificial and bookish, this generation that grew up before the war had to live in a world that seemed consolidated forever and secured against all possibility of changes. And it adapted to this world effortlessly. A generation whose nerves and brain were worn out and tired by the great fatigues of its parents: it could not stand tenacious efforts, prolonged tensions, sudden jolts, loud rumors, bright lights, open and agitated air; it loved gloom and the twilight, sweet and discreet lights, muffled and distant sounds, measured and regular movements.” The ideal of this generation was to live sweetly.
II
When the atmosphere of Europe, near the war, became too charged with electricity, the nerves of this sensual, elegant or hyper-aesthetic generation suffered an unusual discomfort and a strange nostalgia. A little bored of vivre avec douceur [living gently], they shuddered with a morbid appetite, with a sick desire. They demanded the war, almost anxiously, almost impatiently. The war did not appear as a tragedy, as a cataclysm, but rather as a sport, as an alkaloid or as a spectacle. Oh!, la guerre [the war], — as in a novel by Jean Bernier, these people foresaw it and predicted it — , elle serait trés chic la guerre [she would be very chic during the war].
But the war did not correspond to this frivolous and stupid prognostication. The war did not want to be so mediocre. Paris felt, in its bowels, the grip of the war drama. Europe, conflagrated, lacerated, changed its mentality and psychology.
All the romantic energies of Western man, anesthetized by long periods of comfortable and linguistic peace, were reborn tempestuous and arrogant. The cult of violence was resurrected. The Russian Revolution instilled in the socialist doctrine a warrior and mystical spirit. And the Bolshevik phenomenon was followed by the fascist phenomenon. Bolsheviks and fascists did not resemble the pre-war revolutionaries and conservatives. They lacked the old superstition of progress. They were testimony, conscious or unconscious, that the war had shown humanity that events superior to the foresight of science and also events contrary to the interest of Civilization could still happen.
The bourgeoisie, frightened by Bolshevik violence, appealed to fascist violence. It had very little confidence that its legal forces would be sufficient to defend it from the assaults of the revolution. But, little by little, the nostalgia of the crass pre-war tranquility has begun to appear in its state of mind. This life of high tension disgusts and fatigues her. The old socialist and trade union bureaucracy shares this nostalgia. Why not return — it wonders — to the good, pre-war weather? The same sense of life spiritually unites and accords these sections of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, who are working in concert to disqualify the Bolshevik method and the fascist method at the same time. In Italy, this episode of the contemporary crisis has the sharpest and most precise contours, there, the bourgeois old guard has abandoned fascism and has agreed on the terrain of democracy, with the socialist old guard. The program of all these people is condensed into a single word: normalization. Normalization would be the return to a quiet life, the eviction or the burial of all romanticism, all heroism, all right-wing and left-wing Quixotism. Nothing to regress, with the fascists, to the Middle Ages. Nothing to advance, with the Bolsheviks, towards Utopia.
Fascism speaks a belligerent and violent language that alarms those who only aspire to normalization. Mussolini, in a speech, said “It is not worthwhile living as men and as a party, and above all, it would not be worth calling oneself a fascist, if one did not know that one is in the middle of the storm. Anyone is able to sail in a sea of prosperity, when the winds blow the sails, when there are no waves or cyclones, the beautiful, the great, and I would like to say [that] the great, is to sail when the storm is raging. A philosopher Maman said: live dangerously. I would like this to be the watchword of the young Italian fascism: to live dangerously. This means to be ready for everything, for any sacrifice, for any danger, for any action, when it comes to defending the homeland and fascism.” Fascism does not conceive of counter-revolution as a vulgar and police enterprise, but as an epic and heroic one. An excessive thesis, incandescent thesis, exorbitant thesis for the old bourgeoisie, which absolutely does not want to go that far. Let the revolution be stopped and thwarted, of course, but, if possible with good manners. The club should not be used except in extreme cases. And we must not, in any case, touch the Constitution or the Parliament. We have to leave things as they were. The old bourgeoisie longs to live sweetly and parliamentary. “Freely and calmly,” wrote Il Corriere dalla Sera in Milan, arguing with Mussolini. But both of the terms designate the same longing.
Revolutionaries, like fascists, for their part, propose to live dangerously. In revolutionaries, as in fascists, one notices an analogous romantic impulse, an analogous Quixotic humor.
The new humanity, in its two antithetical expressions, reveals a new intuition of life. This intuition of life does not appear, exclusively, in the belligerent prose of politicians. In some ramblings of Luis Bello I find this sentence: “It is convenient to correct Descartes: I struggle, therefore I exist.” The correction is indeed timely. The philosophical formula of a rationalistic age had to be: “I think, therefore I exist.” But in this romantic, revolutionary and quixotic age, the same formula no longer serves it. Life, more than thought, desires to be action today, this is combat. Contemporary man needs faith. And the only faith, which can occupy his deep being, is a combative faith. They will not return, who knows until when, those times of living with sweetness. The sweet pre-war life generated nothing but skepticism and nihilism. And from the crisis of this skepticism and this nihilism, there is born the rough, strong, peremptory need for a faith and a myth that moves men to live dangerously.
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*Published in Mundial: Lima, January 9, 1925, Transcribed in Amauta: Nº 31 (pages 4–7). Lima, June-July 1930. And included in the anthology by José Carlos Mariátegui, which the National University of Mexico published, in 1937, as the second volume of its series of “Thinkers of America” (pp. 124–129). Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/dos%20concepciones%20de%20la%20vida.htm>.
