THE CALL OF THE TRIBE


I would never have written this book had I not read Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station more than twenty years ago. This fascinating study traces the evolution of the idea of socialism from the moment when the French historian Jules Michelet, intrigued by a quotation, started to learn Italian to read Giambattista Vico, up to the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg, on April 16, 1917, to lead the Russian Revolution. I then had the idea for a book that would do for liberalism what the American critic had done for socialism: an essay that, starting in the small Scottish town of Kirkcaldy with the birth of Adam Smith in 1723, would trace the evolution of liberal ideas through their main exponents and the historical and social events that caused them to spread throughout the world. Although it is quite different from Edmund Wilson’s book, this was the early inspiration for The Call of the Tribe.

It might not seem so, but this is an autobiographical work. It describes my own intellectual and political history, the journey from the Marxism and Sartrean existentialism of my youth to the liberalism of my mature years, a route that took me through a reappraisal of democracy helped by my readings of writers such as Albert Camus, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler. I was being drawn to liberalism by certain political events and, above all, by the ideas of the seven authors to whom I dedicate these pages: Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich August von Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel.

I discovered politics when I was twelve, in October 1948, when a military coup in Peru led by General Manuel Apolinario Odría overthrew president José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, a relative of my mother’s family. I think that it was during Odría’s eight-year reign that I developed a hatred for dictators of any stripe, one of the few invariable constants in my political outlook. But I only became aware of the social dimension, that Peru was a country weighed down by injustice, where a minority of privileged people exploited the vast majority in abusive fashion, when, in 1952, I read Out of the Night by Jan Valtin in my final year of school. This book led me to go against the wishes of my family, who wanted me to attend the Catholic University—then the place where wealthy young Peruvians studied—as I applied to San Marcos University, a public, popular university, not cowed by the military dictatorship, where, I was sure, I would be able to join the Communist Party. The party had almost been eradicated by Odría’s repressive measures when I entered San Marcos in 1953 to study literature and law, its leaders imprisoned, killed, or forced into exile; and it was trying to reconstitute itself as the Cahuide Group that I belonged to for a year.

It was there that I received my first lessons in Marxism, in clandestine study groups, where we read José Carlos Mariátegui, Georges Politzer, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and we had intense discussions about socialist realism and “left-wing” communism, branded by Lenin as “an infantile disorder.” The great admiration I felt for Sartre, who I read devotedly, inured me against dogma—we Peruvian communists at that time were, in the words of Salvador Garmendia, “few but very sectarian”—and in my reading group I adhered to Sartre’s theory that upheld historical materialism and class struggle but not dialectical materialism, which caused my comrade Félix Arias Schreiber to label me in one of our discussions as “subhuman.”

I left the Cahuide Group at the end of 1954 but I remained, I believe, a socialist, at least in my readings, an interest that took on fresh impetus with the struggle of Fidel Castro and his barbudos in the Sierra Maestra and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in the final days of 1958. For my generation, and not just in Latin America, what happened in Cuba was decisive, an ideological watershed. Many people, as I did, saw Fidel’s epic achievement as a heroic and generous adventure, of idealistic fighters who wanted to end the corrupt dictatorship of the Batista regime, and also as a means of establishing a nonsectarian socialism that would allow for criticism, diversity, and even dissidence. Many of us believed this, which explains why, in its early years, the Cuban Revolution had such great support the world over.

In November 1962 I was in Mexico, sent by Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, where I worked as a journalist, to cover an exhibition that France had organized in Chapultepec Park, when the Cuban missile crisis erupted. I was sent to cover this event and was on the last flight by Cubana Airlines to leave Mexico before the blockade. Cuba was in a state of general mobilization, fearing an imminent invasion by U.S. marines. It was an impressive sight. Along the Malecón, small antiaircraft guns called bocachicas were operated by young men, almost boys, who put up with the low-level flights of U.S. Sabre jets without firing at them, and radio and television gave instructions to the people as to what to do when the bombing started. What they were living through brought to mind the emotion and enthusiasm of a free and hopeful people described in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, when he reached Barcelona as a volunteer at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Profoundly moved by what seemed to me to be the personification of socialism in freedom, I joined a long queue to donate blood. Thanks to my old companion at the University of Madrid, Ambrosio Fornet, and the Peruvian Hilda Gadea, who had met Che Guevara in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz regime and had married and had a daughter with him in Mexico, I spent time with a number of writers connected to Casa de las Américas and its president, Haydée Santamaría, whom I met briefly. When I left, some weeks later, young people were singing in the streets of Havana, “Nikita/mariquita/lo que se da/no se quita” (“Nikita, you little poof, what’s given can’t be taken back”) because the Soviet leader had accepted Kennedy’s ultimatum and withdrawn the missiles from the island. Only afterward did it become known that in this secret agreement John F. Kennedy had promised Khrushchev that in return for the removal of the weapons, the United States would refrain from invading Cuba and would withdraw its Jupiter missiles based in Turkey.

My support for the Cuban Revolution lasted for most of the sixties. I traveled five times to Cuba as a member of the International Council of Writers affiliated with Casa de Las Américas and I defended the revolution in manifestos, articles, and public acts, both in France, where I was living, and in Latin America, where I traveled quite regularly. In those years I took up my Marxist readings again, not only the classics but also work by writers identified with the Communist Party, or close to it, like György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Lucien Goldmann, Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che Guevara, and even the ultraorthodox Louis Althusser, professor at the École Normale, who later became insane and killed his wife. However, I remember that, during my years in Paris, once a week I would stealthily buy a copy of the paper deplored by the left, Le Figaro, to read the column by Raymond Aron, whose penetrating analyses of current events made me uneasy but also captivated me.

Several events at the end of the sixties began to distance me from Marxism. There was the creation of the UMAP camps in Cuba, where, behind the euphemistic term, Military Units to Aid Production, there lay the reality of concentration camps where counterrevolutionaries were kept with homosexuals and common criminals. My visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1968, when I was invited to a commemoration related to Pushkin, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I discovered there that, had I been a Russian, I would have been a dissident in that country (that is, a pariah) or I would have been rotting in the Gulag. That made me feel somewhat traumatized. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and the journal Les Temps Modernes had convinced me that, despite everything that was wrong with the U.S.S.R., it represented progress and the future, a country where, as Paul Éluard put it in a poem that I knew by heart, “there are no prostitutes or thieves or priests.” But there was poverty, drunks sprawled in the street, and a widespread apathy; one felt everywhere a collective claustrophobia due to the lack of information about what was happening inside the country and in the rest of the world. One just had to look around to realize that although class divisions based on money might have disappeared, in the U.S.S.R. the inequalities were enormous and were exclusively related to power. I asked a talkative Russian, “Who are the most privileged people here?” He replied, “Submissive writers. They have dachas for their holidays and they can travel abroad. That puts them way above ordinary men and women. You can’t ask for more!” Could I defend this model of society, as I had been doing, knowing now that it would have been unlivable for me? And my disappointment with Sartre was another important factor, the day I read in Le Monde an interview with Madeleine Chapsal where he stated that African writers should give up literature and dedicate themselves first and foremost to revolution and to creating a country where literature might then become possible. He also declared that, faced with a child dying of hunger, “La Nausée ne fait pas le poids” (“Nausea has no weight”). I felt I had been knifed in the back. How could he say that, this man who had made us believe that writing was a form of action, that words were acts, that writing influenced history? Now it turned out that literature was just a luxury that could only be allowed in countries that had achieved socialism. At that time I began to read Camus again and to agree with him, realizing that he had been right in his famous polemic with Sartre over the Soviet concentration camps. His idea that assassinations and terror began when morality became divorced from politics was as plain as could be. I later charted this evolution in my thinking in a short book that brought together articles on both writers that I had written in the sixties: Entre Sartre y Camus (Between Sartre and Camus).1

My break with Cuba, and, to some extent with socialism, came as a result of the then very famous (though now almost no one remembers it) Padilla affair. The poet Heberto Padilla, an active participant in the Cuban Revolution—he became vice minister of Foreign Trade—began to make some criticism of the cultural politics of the regime in 1970. He was first virulently attacked by the official press and then jailed, with the absurd accusation that he was a CIA agent. Indignant at this news, five friends who knew him—Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Josep María Castellet, and I—drafted a letter of protest in my apartment in Barcelona, which was signed by many writers throughout the world, including Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia, and Carlos Fuentes, all protesting this outrage. Fidel Castro replied in person, accusing us of serving imperialism and stating that we would not step on Cuban soil again for “an indefinite and infinite period of time” (that is, for all eternity).

Despite the campaign of abuse that I received as a result of this manifesto, it lifted a great weight from me; I would now no longer have to feign an adherence that I did not feel to what was happening in Cuba. However, it took me a few years to break with socialism and reassess the meaning of democracy. It was a period of uncertainty and reappraisal during which I slowly began to understand that the “formal freedoms” of so-called bourgeois democracy were not a mere appearance that covered up the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but rather the boundary between human rights, freedom of expression, and political diversity and an authoritarian and repressive system in which, in the name of the one truth represented by the Communist Party and its leaders, all forms of criticism could be silenced, dogmatic orders could be imposed, and dissidents could be buried in concentration camps or even “disappeared.” With all its imperfections, which were many, democracy at least replaced arbitrary action with laws and allowed free elections and independent parties and unions.

Opting for liberalism was above all an intellectual process that took a number of years. I was greatly helped by living in Britain at the time, teaching at the University of London in the late sixties and, later, witnessing firsthand the eleven years of the government of Margaret Thatcher. She belonged to the Conservative Party but she was guided as a politician by convictions and above all, an instinct, that were profoundly liberal; she was very similar to Ronald Reagan in this respect. When she assumed office in 1979, Britain was a country in decline, where Labour (and also Tory) reforms had been running out of steam, mired in increasingly statist and collectivist routines, although public freedoms, elections, and freedom of expression were all respected. But the state had grown everywhere with the nationalization of industries and with policies, such as in housing, for example, that made citizens ever more dependent on state benefits. Democratic socialism had made the country of the industrial revolution lethargic, as it now languished in monotonous mediocrity.

The government of Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) was a revolution, conducted within strict legal boundaries. State enterprises were privatized and British companies stopped receiving subsidies and were forced to modernize and compete in a free market, while council houses, which governments up until then had rented out to people with low incomes—thus maintaining electoral clientelism—were sold to their tenants, in line with a policy that sought to turn Britain into a country of property owners. Its borders were opened to international competition while obsolete industries, such as coal, were closed down to allow for the renovation and modernization of the country.

All these economic reforms, of course, led to strikes and social mobilization, like the miners’ strike that lasted two years, during which Margaret Thatcher showed a courage and a conviction that Britain had not seen since the days of Winston Churchill. These reforms, which, in a few years, made the country the most dynamic society in Europe, were accompanied by a defense of democratic culture, and an affirmation of the moral and material superiority of liberal democracy over authoritarian, corrupt, and economically bankrupt socialism that resonated across the world. These policies coincided with those being implemented in the United States under president Ronald Reagan. At last there were leaders at the head of Western democracies who had no inferiority complex with regard to communism, who highlighted achievements in human rights, equal opportunities, and respect for individuals and their ideas, in contrast to the despotism and economic failure of the communist countries. While Ronald Reagan was an extraordinary disseminator of liberal theories that he doubtless understood in a rather general way, Mrs. Thatcher was more precise and ideological. She has no qualms about saying that she consulted Friedrich von Hayek and that she read Karl Popper, whom she considered to be the most important contemporary philosopher of freedom. I read both men in those years and from that time The Road to Serfdom and The Open Society and Its Enemies became fundamental texts for me.

Although on economic and political issues Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had an unequivocally liberal outlook, on many social and moral issues they defended conservative and even reactionary positions—neither of them would have accepted gay marriage, abortion, the legalization of drugs or euthanasia, which seemed to me to be legitimate and necessary reforms—and on these matters, of course, I disagreed with them. But taking everything into account, I am convinced that both made a great contribution to the culture of freedom. And in any event, they helped me to become a liberal.

I had the good fortune, through my old friend the historian Hugh Thomas, to meet Mrs. Thatcher in person. Thomas was an adviser to the British government on Spanish and Latin American affairs and he organized a dinner of intellectuals in his house in Ladbroke Grove to pit Mrs. Thatcher against the tigers. (The left, was, of course, the most vehement enemy of the Thatcher revolution.) She was seated next to Isaiah Berlin, whom she spoke to the entire evening with the utmost respect. Also present were the novelists V. S. Naipaul and Anthony Powell; the poets Al Alvarez, Stephen Spender, and Philip Larkin; the critic and short story writer V. S. Pritchett; the playwright Tom Stoppard; the historian J. H. Plumb, from Cambridge; Anthony Quinton, the president of Trinity College, Oxford; and someone else whose name escapes me. She asked me where I lived and when I replied Montpelier Walk she reminded me that I was a neighbor of Arthur Koestler, whom she had clearly read. The conversation was a test that the intellectuals set the prime minister. The delicacy and good form of British courtesy scarcely disguised deep-seated aggression. The host, Hugh Thomas, opened fire by asking Mrs. Thatcher if the opinion of historians interested her and helped her in any way when it came to government concerns. She answered the questions clearly, without being intimidated or putting on airs, with conviction for the most part, but, at times, expressing her doubts. At the end of the dinner, after she had left, Isaiah Berlin summed up very well, I think, the opinion of most of those present: “Nothing to be ashamed of.” And yes, I thought, quite a bit to be proud of to have a leader with such mettle, culture, and convictions. Margaret Thatcher was going to travel to Berlin in the coming days, where she would visit for the first time the wall of shame erected by the Soviets to stop the increasing number of citizens fleeing from East Germany to West Germany. There she would deliver one of her most important speeches against authoritarianism and in defense of democracy.

I also met Ronald Reagan in person, but at a very large dinner at the White House, having been invited by Selwa Roosevelt, the then chief of protocol. She introduced me to the president and in the briefest of conversations I only managed to ask him why, since the United States had writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, or Dos Passos, he always referred to Louis L’Amour as his favorite novelist. “Well,” he told me, “he was very good at describing something very American, cowboy life in the old West.” He did not convince me here, of course.

Both were great statespersons, the most important of their day, and both contributed in a decisive way to the collapse and disintegration of the U.S.S.R., the greatest enemy of democratic culture. But neither of them were charismatic leaders, like Hitler, Mussolini, Perón, or Fidel Castro, who appealed to the “spirit of the tribe” in their speeches. This is the term given by Karl Popper to the irrationality of the primitive human being that nests in the most secret recesses of all civilized people, for we have never completely overcome that yearning for the traditional world—the tribe—when men and women were still an inseparable part of the collective, subordinate to the all-powerful sorcerer or chief who made every decision for them, where they felt safe, free of responsibilities, submissive, like animals in a pack or herd, like human beings in gangs or soccer crowds, lethargic in the midst of those who spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, and hated outsiders, people different from them, whom they could blame for all the calamities that befell the tribe. The “tribal spirit,” a source of nationalism, has, along with religious fanaticism, been responsible for the largest massacres in the history of humanity. In civilized countries, like Great Britain, the call of the tribe could be seen in those big spectacles, like soccer matches or the open-air pop concerts that the Beatles or the Rolling Stones gave in the sixties, in which the individual disappeared, swallowed up by the mass, finding a momentary escape, which was both healthy and cathartic, from the daily drudgery of being citizens. But in certain countries, and not just in the third world, this “call of the tribe,” which democratic and liberal culture—ultimately, rationality—had sought to free us from, had reappeared from time to time in the guise of dreadful charismatic leaders, under whom citizens revert to being a mass in thrall to a caudillo. This is the substratum of nationalism that I had detested from a very early age, intuiting that it was the antithesis of culture, democracy, and rationality. That is why I had been a man of the left and a communist in my early years; but, in recent times, nothing has illustrated the return to the “tribe” better than communism, under which sovereign responsible individuals regress to being part of a mass submissive to the dictates of a leader, a sort of religious holy man, the bearer of irrefutable sacred truths, which revived the worst forms of demagogy and chauvinism.

In those years I read and reread many of the thinkers to whom I have dedicated these pages. And many others who might also have figured, like Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, the Argentine Juan Bautista Alberdi, and the Venezuelan Carlos Rangel, these last two truly exceptional cases of liberalism on the continent of Latin America. At that time I also made a trip to Edinburgh to lay flowers at the grave of Adam Smith, and to Kirkcaldy to see the house where he wrote The Wealth of Nations, where I discovered that all that was left of the house was a crumbling wall and a plaque.

It was in those years that my political convictions were shaped and I have defended them in articles and books since that time. It was these convictions that led me, in Peru in 1987, to oppose the nationalization of the finance system proposed by president Alan García in his first term of office (1985–1990) and to found the Freedom Movement and stand as presidential candidate for the Democratic Front in 1990 with a program that proposed a radical transformation of society in Peru, to turn it into a liberal democracy. I should say, in passing, that although my friends and I were beaten at the ballot box, many of the ideas that we outlined in that long campaign of almost three years, which are in this book, did not disappear but have gained ground in ever broader sectors of society and are now part of the political agenda in Peru.

Conservatism and liberalism are different things, as Hayek argued in a famous essay. Which does not mean that there are not points of convergence and shared values between liberals and conservatives just as there are between democratic socialism—social democracy—and liberalism. Remember, for example, that the great economic and social transformation of New Zealand was initiated by a Labour government and its finance minister Roger Douglas, and was supported and extended by Ruth Richardson, the finance minister of a Conservative government (1984–1993). We should not, therefore, think of liberalism as just another ideology, one of those secular acts of faith that are so prone to irrationality and dogmatic truths, just like all religions, from the primitive magical-religious forms to the most modern. Among liberals, as the figures in this book illustrate, there are often more disagreements than agreements. Liberalism is a doctrine that does not have answers to everything, as Marxism purports to do, and it has a place for divergence and criticism around a small but unequivocal core set of convictions. For example, that freedom is the supreme value, it is not divisible or fragmentary, but rather indivisible, and must be evident in every sphere—be it economic, political, social, or cultural—in a genuinely democratic society. Not understanding this fact is what led to the failure of all the regimes that, in the sixties and seventies, tried to stimulate economic freedom but were despotic, generally military dictatorships. These ignorant people thought that a market policy could be successful under repressive and dictatorial regimes. But many democratic initiatives also failed in Latin America, because they respected political freedoms but did not believe in economic freedom—the free market—which is what brings material development and progress.

Liberalism is not dogmatic; it knows that reality is complex and that often ideas and political programs must adapt to this reality if they wish to be successful, instead of trying to bind it to rigid forms that often lead to failure and political violence. Liberalism has also generated its own “infantile disorder,” sectarianism, as can be seen in certain economists who are bewitched by the market as a panacea capable of resolving all social problems. These people in particular should be reminded of the example of Adan Smith himself, the father of liberalism, who, in certain circumstances, even allowed privileges like subsidies and controls to remain in place for a time should their removal cause more harm than good in the short term. This tolerance shown by Smith to his opponents is perhaps the most admirable of all the traits of liberal doctrine: accepting that this doctrine might be wrong and its opponent might be right. A liberal government should deal with social and historical reality in a flexible manner, not believing that all societies can be contained within a single theoretical framework, for this is a counterproductive attitude that leads to failure and frustration.

We liberals are not anarchists and we do not wish to do away with the state. Quite the reverse, we want a strong and efficient state, which does not mean a large state involved in doing things that civil society can do better under a system of free competition. The state must guarantee freedom, public order, the respect for law, and equal opportunities.

Equality before the law and equality of opportunities do not mean equality of income, something that no liberal would propose. For that would be possible only in a society run by an authoritarian government that would “equalize” all citizens economically through an oppressive system, doing away with different individual capacities, imagination, inventiveness, concentration, diligence, ambition, work ethic, and leadership. This would imply the disappearance of the individual, subsumed into the tribe.

So it is right that, beginning from a more or less similar point, individuals would have different incomes according to how much or how little they contribute to the benefits of society as a whole. It would be stupid to ignore that people are intelligent and obtuse, diligent and lazy, inventive and unadventurous and slow-witted, studious and indolent, and so on. And it would be unjust, in the name of “equality,” that everyone should receive the same wage despite their different aptitudes and merits. Societies that have tried this have hampered individual initiative, subsuming these individuals into an anodyne mass where a lack of competition demotivates them and stifles their creativity.

But there is also no doubt that in very unequal societies, such as those in the third world, the children of the most prosperous families enjoy infinitely greater opportunities to be successful in life than those of poor families. For that reason, “equal opportunity” is a profoundly liberal concept, despite the small bands of dogmatic, intolerant, and often racist economists—there are many in Peru, all Fujimoristas—who abuse the term.

That is why it is so important for liberalism to offer young people a high-quality education system that allows each generation a common starting point from which legitimate differences in salary can later emerge based on the talent, the effort, and the service that each individual offers to the community. It is in the world of education—secondary, technical, and university education—where we find the greatest injustice in terms of privilege, where some young people receive a very high level of education while others are condemned to a rudimentary or inefficient system that can only offer them a limited future, failure, or mere survival. This is not a utopia but something that France, for example, achieved in the past with free public education, which was often at a higher level than private education and was accessible to all. The crisis in education suffered in France recently has seen a decline in standards but this is not true of Scandinavian countries, or Switzerland, or Asian countries like Japan and Singapore, which guarantee equal opportunities in the field of education—secondary and higher—without this being detrimental in any way, quite the reverse, to their democratic way of life and their economic prosperity.

Equal opportunity in the field of education does not mean having to ban private education in favor of public education. Not at all: it is important that both exist and compete because there is nothing like competition to advance higher standards and progress. The idea of competition between educational establishments was an idea of a liberal economist, Milton Friedman. The “school vouchers” program he proposed has had excellent results in countries where it has been applied, like Sweden, giving parents a very active participation in the improvement of the education system. The “school voucher” that the state gives to parents allows them to choose the best schools for their children, thus giving greater state aid to the institutions that attract, because of their quality, the largest number of applications for places.


Copyright © 2018 by Mario Vargas Llosa

Copyright © 2023 by John King