by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
In the distant days of my childhood, I knew many respectable people. This last adjective was then a label that ladies of all ages and men over fifty wore on their foreheads. Not always deservedly, of course, but they wore it.
Was it hypocritical to use this label when it was not deserved? Undoubtedly. However, I do not know whether hypocrisy is the worst thing in this matter. The Gospel stigmatizes hypocrisy with insistence and indignation, which is to say that it is a great evil, but not necessarily the worst of evils. A French writer, whose name I don’t remember, said that hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.[1] This thought is not lacking in finesse.
Today, things have changed. In countless settings, respectability is an adornment as old as a powdered wig or a three-cornered hat. Only people who are deeply discredited insist on wearing it. The poor adornment of yesteryear then serves to hide the sun with a sieve.
But respectability was still in vogue fifty or sixty years ago. As I was saying, I met many respectable people in a rustling mixture of authentic and inauthentic elements.
At first glance, the respectable crowd attracted me. They seemed immune to the vulgar stridency of jazz and to the excesses Hollywood spread around the world. So I turned my attention to them. What did they think? How did they view the new world of the “après-guerre”? What method did they use to contain the rising tide of disrespectability and vulgarity? I then realized that, apart from the honorable exceptions of style, the respectable were fundamentally attached to routine and felt settled in flattering situations in a full, slow, and comfortable world. As a result, they had no interest in changing anything, nor in taking action to prevent anything from changing.
There was a mutual understanding between them and those who formed the new wave of those old times: the new wave neither mocked nor bothered them but simply bowed in respect and moved on. For their part, the respectable people let the new wave people do as they pleased. At most, they shook their heads and muttered a little.
Sometimes, the respectable ones smiled discreetly. For example, I remember a very respectable lady who smiled as she told her close friends the “latest” news about her not-so-respectable, merry young reveler son. She would leave the house at the crack of dawn to attend Mass and take communion. In those bygone days, the atmosphere in all churches was one of the utmost respectability. One day, as the lady crossed the garden toward the street on her way to church, she saw something moving strangely. It was her son, trying to hide behind a rose bush. Returning home completely drunk at that hour, he realized, through an alcohol haze, that it was not inappropriate for his mother to see him in that state of degradation. For her part, wrapped in her respectability, she thought it best “not to see” her son. She found the episode funny and later told the story, somewhat smugly, to her friends.
Dare everything, but as much as possible in secret. This was the line of conduct the non-respectable adopted toward the respectable. The latter reciprocated by allowing everything and pretending not to see. No one argued. So, in 1978, the world slowly but surely slid into this quagmire, which neither the respectable nor the non-respectable wanted to reach at the time, yet which most likely fascinated both groups in their subconscious. Horrified yet fascinated, a frog hypnotized by a snake walks toward it. Nothing can prevent it from following this mysterious fascination to death.
In this sense, I remember a very respectable gentleman who created an atmosphere around himself that was archetypally opposed to communism. However, his position on communism was enigmatic. He never attacked it. When the conversation around him on the subject continued, making his silence inexplicable, he invariably said, in a sententious tone: “In Brazil, there is no reason to fear communism; the people are not ready for it.” I felt like shouting: “What is this maturation process? Do you see communism like a tumor not yet ripe to burst into pus, or a delicious fruit not yet ripe to whet our appetite?”
Such were the respectable people of the 1920s. In each decade, death reaped the respectable and brought a new wave of fifty-somethings to replace them. These were the men who, when young, hid behind rose bushes. In this way, the respectable men of the 1920s were replaced in their armchairs by those of the 1930s, who were far less concerned with their respectability. And so it went on.
In this way, respectability—which I analyze here only as a mere adornment of social life—has been deserting social life.
At some point in this lengthy article, I said that optimism was the windbreak for this respectability. I was just reminded of that optimism while reading some interesting articles in the serious London fortnightly East-West Digest, published by the Foreign Affairs Publishing Company (issues from the second half of December 1977, the second half of January, and the first half of March this year).
These studies show how the Labour Party, the left-wing political group in the British Parliament, was very slowly intoxicated by communist doctrine, to the point that it is now the dangerous spearhead of communism in the United Kingdom. There, the Communist Party is a corpuscle of insignificant electoral expression. It is valuable only—and increasingly so—because the considerable number of key positions it holds in the powerful Labour Party is growing all the time. Now, judging by the studies in the East-West Digest, communism has become, at the heart of Labour, more or less irreversible.
Yet, it was a dogma among many respectable people of my time that laborism had nothing to do with communism. On the contrary, it was the greatest guarantee that communism would not take hold in traditional England.
In Brazil, as elsewhere, people with this optimistic respectability believe that moderate leftism is the bulwark against communism. The stronger the bulwark, the more distant a communist regime seems. Until they realize that, in relation to communism, the left is a cardboard dam. It breaks the waves but leaves itself soaked. After a while, the dam acts as a filter, letting water seep into the area it should be defending.
But the respectable people of yesteryear did not see this. Nor do their successors today, many of whom are ultra-technical experts in international affairs.
And so, the communist cause advances with the help of a “respectable” “cardboard” reader who will crumple this article and exclaim indignantly, “Let’s silence this man because in this age of freedom it is intolerable to say such things.”
As if democracy were not the right to dissent!
[1] Les Maximes de La Rochefoucauld, No. 218.