Foxes Don't Build Kingdoms

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’ve just finished Wellsprings, a collection of essays by Peruvian public intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa. Mostly transcriptions of lectures given over the years, the chapters have little collective coherence, save the author’s well-developed worldview. A few of these essays are well written and important, in particular Vargas Llosa’s discussion of nationalism.

Mostly looking at the specter of disintegration lurking over contemporary Spain, with Basque, Catalan and Galician regions gradually gaining autonomy, Vargas Llosa insists persuasively that nationalism is culturally stultifying and ultimately impoverishing. In its place he recommends some kind of open-ended multi-cultural cosmopolitanism.

Well-read, well-thought and yet unsatisfactory. Vargas Llosa rightly looks at the temptation to nationalisms of all kinds, and the contradiction between democracy and individual rights, on the one hand, and patriotic peer pressure on the other.

Nationalism is tempting because it promises a glue to our fractured world—but an exclusionary and oppressive glue, demanding we submit all our dreams to those of the collective whole.

Still, what are we left with? Tolerance, perhaps—but that’s a negative value, a refusal to distinguish. Not going to work. Cosmopolitanism? Vargas Llosa fails to give us a vision for universal human living worth living for. Religion? That’s as much a dead end as nationalism, he says, because all claims to read direction into history are threatening to human development.

Wellsprings feels like a field trip through Western intellectual history, with a well-read guide and master story-teller. That he leaves us with no clear answers, only problems, is hardly the point. Vargas Llosa wants to be a fox—a dilettante with many little ideas—instead of a hedgehog, who insists on imposing onto all of human experience a comprehensive ideology.

He also confesses that foxes, lacking in conviction, rarely build kingdoms. Accordingly, this is a book of little ideas. Vargas Llosa’s best insights are about how individual people are to live with each other. When it comes to how many peoples should live with many other peoples, he seems strangely empty of ideas.

Urbana.org All Things New Blog - nationalism

Foxes Don't Build Kingdoms