El artículo original en español puede leerse aquí.
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The yearning, longing, and nostalgia; the glance, whether light and unconscious or deliberately melancholic and pained, cast upon the simple life of the countryside is a major literary motif of our time. By “literary,” we mean it in the broadest sense. Tracing the outlines of this malady of the soul, which, as we see, afflicts not only self-proclaimed traditionalists, leads us again today to cinema.
The critique of naive pastoralism, as we might call it, for which we take Blasco Ibáñez as a literary representative, can at least take pride in its realism. The fiercest antitraditionalism – and perhaps the most respectable precisely for its ferocity – cannot be separated from anti-Catholicism. The enemy of political tradition, if with even a shred of reason, knows they are compelled by their own principles to also oppose religious tradition. One cannot combat the King without opposing Christ the King. That is why we find more respectable (more intelligent, more honest, and at least consistent) leftist atheists than right-wing democrats.
The observation made by authors and intellectuals of this vein is astute (and we agree entirely): a traditional society, when severed from its unifying element – the Catholic religion – eventually falls into the most atrocious and brutal forms of civil violence.
The naturalists, realists, and other 19th- and early-20th-century writers who fortunately evade categorization [What commonality could there possibly be between The Passion Figures of Christ by Miró and Bohemian Lights by Valle-Inclán, save for both authors being labeled as modernists?], have painted a portrait of Spain under liberalism. In this depiction, remnants of the Ancien Régime persist, though stripped of their moral counterbalance: the omnipresent censorship of the Church, and what we recently called the universal spur toward goodness – the threat of eternal damnation for being bad.
Clearly, the Decalogue alone is insufficient to make men virtuous, and the Church requires the secular arm to enforce the laws of the Catholic City. Equally clear, however, is that the State, with its immense capacity for action constrained by the vast realm of conscience, cannot function without the decisive support of the entity capable of obligating the inner forum of man. This was understood by defenders of the Ancien Régime and by communists alike. Yet the role of God – whether in society as a whole or the believer’s conscience – cannot be played as effectively by the will of the Party, no matter which party it is.
The inevitable conclusion, they tell us, is that the old social and political structures must also be abandoned, given that their animating spirit, the common faith, has deserted them or been forcibly removed. Recognizing this does not require agreement with any of the principles behind the exclusion of the Faith from the public sphere. As we have said and will repeat: if Azaña was correct in declaring that Spain has ceased to be Catholic (a truth more evident today than ninety years ago, hence our present-tense framing), then it is fair and reasonable for the left to pursue agrarian reform. We add only that the disappearance of faith in Spain is not irreversible, and we must labor for its evangelization above all else. Or, if you prefer: the communal life structures that even their detractors implicitly miss have not been irretrievably consigned to the dustbin of history.
The honesty of our enemies, former Catholics turned revolutionaries, is contrasted, narratively (as we have often noted, we are not engaging in philosophy here), with the naïveté of others who are also our adversaries, though they display it through haughty disdain rather than furious tirades: the age-old revolutionaries who, moreover, are Protestants.
Although less known on this side of the Atlantic, a vibrant movement today romanticizes the simple life of field labor (or, in this case, the vast sea) personified in Newfoundland’s fishing villages. These were once teeming with marine life, until overexploitation led, in very recent times, to a pause, protection, and redirection toward less invasive activities. We shall not delve into ecological debates here. What interests us is how this sudden cessation of the traditional way of life among the people of the region has impacted the collective conscience and how that impact has been expressed through that privileged vehicle of human reflection – one that precisely conveys all the questions Philosophy must later seek to answer – namely, literature.
The primary flaw with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world is its incorrigible optimism, which, of course, leads it to overlook (whether due to obiter dicta, presumably, or more likely, a lack of intellectual courage) the missing pieces of the puzzle.
In the thought-provoking (if flawed) film The Grand Seduction, unemployed fishermen from a quaint, idyllic village on Canada’s coast must use every means at their disposal (legitimate or otherwise) to persuade a young doctor to settle permanently in their town. This is the essential condition for a wealthy corporation to build a factory that promises to revive local employment. Here, nearly everyone relies on government subsidies paid to fishermen forced to dock their boats permanently.
The village’s residents, who somehow maintain intriguing bonds of neighborly solidarity, all rally around this campaign for a doctor and a factory. There is indeed something worth fighting for: perhaps the lost honor of husbands unable to support their wives. Yet lost honor does not foster friendship or neighborliness. Were it not an American film, one might suspect the story is about acute class consciousness. However, class consciousness rarely materializes in bribes to entice a future employer to bring industrial production in a corner of the coast that until then had known no other sense of community than its wooden plank houses. Perhaps all that remains is the hope of salvaging (almost literally) the pieces of the old society, where people fished and went to the local pub to watch the match, with the hope that, someday, the fish will return, and with them, the community.
The retired fishermen in The Grand Seduction have no intention of leaving their small village and aim to preserve their way of life in the most traditional way possible: the old society has vanished – let’s save what remains!
Yet something is missing, beyond the fish. Something that, evidently (as everyone knows, starting with the film’s protagonists), the new factory cannot provide: a common cause. The mere communal generation of wealth and consumer goods cannot be called a common cause. Because what we mean, precisely, when we speak of a common cause in this context, is a final cause. And things never possess the nature of a final cause, not even things consumed collectively at a feast.[1]
The neighbors may have worked side by side and cooperated in a fleeting imitation of a traditional society to secure jobs for the entire town at the new factory. But once that goal, which, let’s admit, is somewhat petty and short-sighted, is achieved, how can community life be kept alive?
The maritime songs featured in the film offer a hint. One such tune, the delightful Polly Moore, performed by The Dardanelles, tells of a young sailor bidding farewell to his fiancée before departing:
«If God pleases to spare my life, when I return, I’ll make you my wife.»
When fishermen prayed, I do not claim fish were always abundant or that overfishing wasn’t a genuine threat. Nor do I deny the existence of shipwrecks or maritime disasters. Perhaps those things happened, and fishing communities lived under similar threats to those that undermine them today, with one exception. When fishermen (and the tenant farmers) prayed, they shared a powerful common cause for solidarity, good neighborliness, and collaborative work for the shared good, regardless of Fortune’s favor.
When indispensable pieces are missing from the fabric of society, when the church in the little Newfoundland fishing village serves merely as a makeshift town hall in emergencies, then all postmodern traditionalist optimism serves only to invent pleasant but ultimately hollow film plots. Charming, yes; revealing a deep and heartfelt longing for a simple life, certainly. But offering no hope of reaching a safe harbor.
G. García-Vao
[1] See Work on a Human Scale I and II.
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