We present an essay on the concept of history in light of the current situation in Colombia.
In Don Quixote , Miguel de Cervantes says that history is “a deposit of the actions, witness of the past, example and warning of the present, warning of the future.” Well, this idea according to which history is a teacher, as Machiavelli also said, serves to analyze two positions -among others- vis-à-vis what happens at every moment of crisis, social effervescence, demonstrations, revolutionary attempts, people in a state of rebellion, or whatever you want to call it. In other words, it serves to analyze the current situation that Colombia is experiencing.
In this sense of the historical perspective, the analysis of the past convulsions and the genealogy of the birth, maturation or exhaustion of the revolutions it is easy to identify two main attitudes in tension . On the one hand, a subjective position that ranges from conservative, skeptical, resigned, passive, pessimistic, defeatist and indifferent attitudes and, on the other, attitudes and ways of being and finding oneself that range from spontaneity, active passion, desire, power, naive optimism, drive, creativity, strength and determination.
In the first group is that group of people, especially older people, who have seen many failures in life, legitimize their inertia in the face of what happens in their experience, in their personal experiences that have shown them how every attempt to change the world it is ultimately inane, useless; They are people who have experienced convulsions, states of crisis and from there they infer that no social fright ultimately leads to anything, or that small but never great transformations are achieved. They are empiricists, inductive, vaccinated against optimism and immunized against joyful passions, who firmly uphold their general principle that it is not worth sacrificing so much, that from great human euphoria and struggles against authority and order, only failure or disappointment remains. Of course, this same group can house young people, as there are some with a stiff and marbled spirit; but, above all, in this group are many privileged people who defend order and its restoration because, of course, they benefit from it. Anyone who defends a social order gets some benefit from social immobility. That is why they fear change and despise other options and other prospects for the future. In this group there is conformism with what is real, that con-forming with what is given, the ability to say it with Diego Fusaro. That conformity is conforming to what exists and, implies, not betting anything. It is modeling oneself after a specific life-form. That is why they reject possible configurations and mutations of the social order that houses them. They are not partisans, they do not take sides, and that is precisely why they contribute so that nothing changes.Their skepticism leads them to the imperturbability (ataraxia) of the spirit and that is why they end up housed in the void of a floating present wrapped in astonishing and sweet indifference.
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Now, before going on to describe group two, it must be said that there are also many privileged people who are supportive, empathetic, sensitive, to the struggles of the oppressed or the least favored. That has led them to compromise. Cases have been seen in the history of bourgeois, like Engels, or cultural managers, like Victoria Ocampo, who spent their fortunes and put them at the service of another possible world. But in general terms, the privileged look askance at what is happening and simply remain in their “mere being-there” before the universe.
In group two, that of the utopians, there are restless people, perhaps mostly young people, also adults not annihilated by time and history, not overwhelmed in spirit by harsh experiences … They are the ones who suffer; they are those who suffer the injustice of the totality in force with its suffocating social, political and economic order. They are the kind of people who weigh the world, as the philosopher Simon Weil said, willing to sacrifice for a cause, for an idea. They find the meaning of their life in commitment or struggle. It does not matter if the crisis is organic or a fleeting skirmish. They are people attentive to the contingency of the world, who know that nothing is assured, that they do not give up in the face of failures and that they do not assume “general premises”, with the pretense of absolute truth, based on their limited experiences or past defeats. For this group of people, “history is the realm of freedom in the realm of necessity.” And that is what legitimizes utopia.
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In this second group are the people who know that the present is only a manifestation of the many possibilities that existed in the past; that what exists is a crystallized form of other possible ones left on the shore of effective history. Here it is understood that reason is historical and that what was true in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, for example, slavery, is no longer so today. This set houses all those who consider that utopia is a possible rationality that deserves to risk everything in the present and that ideas are guides for social, collective praxis. They know that nothing is given in advance, nothing is final, but they are on the edge of the razor, the edge of becoming betting. In short, in this dreamer and risky group there are people who know that “the limits of the imagination are the limits of the world”, as my teacher Darío Botero Uribe used to say. In terms of María Zambrano, the human being is understood as a deficient being, a beggar, who to reveal himself and become in history needs to be a “worker of time”. For this reason, in the face of the drowsiness of spirit and inaction of the former, the creative will of the latter is opposed.
These two attitudes, and many others, are played out in the social space; they compete, so to speak, for the hegemonic establishment of the sense of the real. And here again, the story is right. In it there have been satisfied and dissatisfied, dead in spirit and creators, dreamers and dreamers. But the truth is that no change would have been possible without giving everything in the present, for which you have to have your ears wide open, your intelligence well sharpened, and thus make an analysis of the circumstance to, perhaps, generate a new way of thinking. life, a new social order. After all, as Robert Michels said in Political Parties (1969): “Alexander Dumas Jr. once observed that all human progress, in its beginning, had been resisted by ninety-nine percent of humanity. . But this is not important, if we realize that the hundredth to which we belong, since the beginning of the world, has carried out all the reforms for the other ninety-nine, who today enjoy them, but nevertheless continue to protest against the reforms that they remain to be done ”. That ninety-nine percent are the most attended in history.
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