2023-11-13 01:32:00
There are categorical statements that are nothing more than “commonplaces”, but they are used in any discourse as if they had the value of a “revealed truth” to shut down the debate. In the public sphere, its use is very common in the political and cultural fields.
The Manual of Intellectual Self-Defense, a collective volume coordinated by Gustavo Noriega, aims to highlight the commonplaces that the “silly” progressivism that we knew how to achieve usually uses in its discourse.
Of course, someone could approach such a book around the commonplaces of conservatives, or liberals, or libertarians, and a long etcetera, because they also have them.
The cultural and political debate is as it is (blurred) at a global level because almost no one wants to interact with others. So, instead of taking the trouble (and taking the risk) to explain something properly, there are those who create a barrage of commonplaces.
For Leopoldo Kulesz, editor of Libros del Zorzal in charge of the introduction, commonplaces are “abusive statements, lies that are established with impunity as truths and that give a patina of sophistication” to any speech.
We have here seven essays that act as presentations of “cases.” Between one and the other, the forcefulness of the argument and the link between the theme and the author’s specialty may vary. But everyone is in perfect harmony with the proposal.
Loris Zanatta describes populist discourse’s assimilation of religious discourse to oppose “the pluralist dialectic of democracy,” which means, in practice, that “populists have problems with freedom.” Cecilia Denot explains how anti-Zionism has become “the form of anti-Semitism that spreads most rapidly today.” Leonardo D’Espósito addresses the rhetorical resources of those who deny that Cuba is “the most successful military dictatorship that Latin America had in terms of duration and corruption.” Gabriela Saldaña investigates the institutional political impact of a series of commonplaces that are organized around Peronism, in the style of “only Peronism can govern this country.” Quintín tries to understand why “anti-communism gets a bad press” and discovers that those who praise communism do not talk about communism but about democracy. Andrea Calamari tries to elucidate when feminism stopped being liberal (that’s how it was born) and mutated, supposedly, into “a militancy for socialism.” And Noriega dismantles the commonplaces that were used to distort the method and scientific knowledge during the pandemic.
Read together, they expose the worrying expansion of populism, which is not only present in political discourse, but has become dominant in the cultural worldview that promotes the pseudo-progressivism that is criticized.
Intellectual self-defense manual. Zorzal Books. Intellectual self-defense manual. Gustavo Noriega (coordinator). Edhasa and Books of the Thrush. 224 pages. $8,700
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