Aforismo

Los hombres no necesitamos más sabiduría –no estoy hablando de ciencia– que la suficiente para cubrir de una manera digna la desnudez de nuestra ignorancia. Y ya esto es un privilegio.

Amable Sánchez

La responsabilidad

Responsable: 1. adj. Obligado a responder de algo o por alguien. U. t. c. s.
Responsabilidad: 1. f. Cualidad de responsable.
Responder: (Del lat. respondĕre). 4. tr. Dicho de un animal: Corresponder con su voz a la de los otros de su especie o al reclamo artificial que la imita.
11. intr. Reaccionar, acusar el efecto que se desea o pretende.

Es usual decir que los humanos somos responsables de nuestras acciones y de nuestras omisiones. En una sociedad de personas libres, es claro que los individuos respondemos ante los demás de nuestros propios actos. Si por alguna razón, el vínculo entre las conductas efectuadas y las respuestas exigidas se rompen, toda la estructura de la convivencia social empieza a colapsarse.

La exigencia de responder ante los demás de nuestros actos es esencial para mantener la sociedad. Esto es cierto aun entre animales tan alejados de nosotros como los insectos, cuyas conductas son en gran parte instintivas.

En los dos artículos siguientes podemos observar la enorme importancia de la responsabilidad en la convivencia de los seres sociales. Un artículo en donde se plantea la necesidad de que todos los mexicanos, aun los grandes prelados católicos, respondan de sus actos y otro en el que se observa como las avispas exigen de sus congéneres una respuesta congruente con su apariencia y si no lo hacen son castigadas, es decir se les exige responsabilidad.

Roberto Blum

1. Maneras de celebrar
Jacobo Zabludovsky
El Universal México D.F.

Lunes 23 de agosto de 2010

En vísperas de las fiestas patrias, dos Méxicos muestran en sus preparativos las ideas que rigen sus conductas.
Por una parte el gobierno federal en un disperso proyecto que echa en la misma olla monumentos ridículos y costosos, espectáculos chabacanos importados a precios de oro y mojigangas irrespetuosas con el tono de superficialidad que caracteriza a sus organizadores.
Por el otro, sin proponérselo como acto conmemorativo pero coincidente con ellos, se produce algo que tiene la trascendencia profunda de lo que transforma a una sociedad para mejorarla. Estas fiestas no pasarán a la historia por lo que ocurra en calles y plazas, sino por lo que se está debatiendo desde el lunes pasado ante los tribunales: la definición de nuestra manera de vivir y de nuestro futuro.
La conducta de Marcelo Ebrard va más allá de lo que pudiera considerarse un incidente personal entre un funcionario público y un clérigo. Ciertamente la causa fue una declaración del señor Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, cardenal de Guadalajara, quien acusó a los ministros de la Suprema Corte de haber sido maiceados por el señor Ebrard para avalar la adopción de menores por parte de parejas del mismo sexo. El jefe de Gobierno le exige pruebas. Y el proceso comienza sin saberse cuándo ni cómo terminará.
Importa la sentencia, desde luego, pero el propósito se logró: Marcelo le ha hecho un gran servicio al país al denunciar ante un juez a un funcionario religioso que como cualquier ciudadano está obligado a cumplir la ley. El que acusa debe sustentar con pruebas su afirmación. Y el proceso seguirá su curso, como cualquiera otro, aunque estamos en presencia de una primera vez histórica: el jefe de Gobierno de la capital de la república acude al tribunal para exigir a un cardenal de la Iglesia católica que responda de sus palabras. Un ciudadano frente a otro ciudadano.
Lo que Ebrard aporta a las fiestas patrias, sin esa intención pero como beneficio colateral, es impedir se tuerza la intención libertaria y democrática de los autores de nuestras leyes e instituciones. Las leyes sobre el aborto, los matrimonios de homosexuales y el derecho a que adopten niños son formas de humanizar la relación entre los grupos sociales, sacando de las sombras a minorías satanizadas, integrándolas a un mundo en constante evolución, normalizando su vida en el entendimiento y la tolerancia de los demás. Esa ha sido hasta el momento la única idea inteligente en este tianguis monumental de errores festivaleros, en medio de la confusión entre las lentejuelas de la patriotería y la austeridad del patriotismo.
El señor Sandoval no está de acuerdo. Es natural. Es congruente con lo que representa y defiende. Pero lanzar piedras a casas ajenas cuando la propia tiene techo de vidrio resulta contraproducente. Es innecesario documentar delitos cometidos por religiosos que en los últimos años han indignado a la opinión pública mundial, para recomendar cautela. No se trata de eso, por lo menos no en este Bucareli.
Se trata de la libertad de vivir, la libertad dentro de leyes y principios fundamentales de la justicia heredados del derecho romano: vivir honestamente, no dañar a otro y dar a cada quien lo que le corresponde. Eso es lo que los mexicanos debemos defender y la mejor manera de hacerlo es ensanchar el espacio para cada uno de esos preceptos.
Supongo que el señor Ebrard acudió al juzgado sabiendo las consecuencias de su postura sin precedentes ante jerarcas de la religión que profesan muchos de sus posibles votantes. La carrera por las postulaciones ya está desatada. Ebrard debe haber previsto el peligro de esta pérdida de apoyo, pero la historia nos enseña que desde hace 150 años los mexicanos han sostenido una constante lucha en defensa del Estado laico ante el ataque constante de quienes pretenden recuperar privilegios irreversiblemente desaparecidos. Han sido mexicanos católicos quienes nos dieron, algunos a costa de su vida, el estado laico. Benito Juárez es el gran ejemplo a seguir.
El paso dado por Ebrard no es la movida de un peón en el tablero de la política efímera. Es una declaración de principios ante el embate de un sector poderoso que evoca su originaria afición a la pesca tratando de ejercerla en este río revuelto y desmadrado en que sobrevivimos los mexicanos. Ahora o nunca, porque la ocasión se va con este gobierno.
Se trata de mantener firme el timón de la autoridad institucional frente al aviso de un golpe de Estado en las tinieblas. Ese es el peligro inminente. Otro asunto es la soberbia y los malos modos de quienes juraron entregarse eternamente en cuerpo y alma a la humildad y la prudencia.
Y al amor al prójimo.

2. Painted Paper Wasps Punish Phonies
A new study suggests wasps bully peers that misrepresent their fighting abilities
By Ferris Jabr
Scientific American

August 20, 2010

Before a fight, many animals size up their opponents—however briefly. Even a once-over can provide crucial information about whether to stay and risk injury or turn and flee. Some animals have evolved telltale signs or behaviors that allow them to efficiently judge one another's strength and avoid any unnecessarily costly battles. Deer assess their peers' antlers, and some birds and lizards intimidate one another with prominent patches of color.
But what evolutionary pressures prevent an animal from deceiving its peers by looking like a bully when it's really a pushover? A new study published August 19 in Current Biology suggests that paper wasps control for this kind of deception using social punishment. Wasps beat up phonies.
To help establish stable hierarchies of dominance, highly social paper wasps called Polistes dominulus rely on distinct facial markings—bold black tattoos on their bright yellow faces. Dominant wasps display more fragmented facial patterns than submissive wasps, and the insects use these markings to determine who should submit to whom.
"They're kind of like karate belts for the wasps," says Elizabeth Tibbetts, a biologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and lead author of the study. "If someone wears a black belt, they are saying they are a good fighter, but you could imagine someone choosing to wear a belt of any color, even if they're not that good." Wasps can't change their faces at will, Tibbetts points out, but an advantageous mutation could plausibly create cheaters that boast talents they do not have.
To investigate how wasps read one another's faces, Tibbetts turned to some standard laboratory tools—paintbrushes and ink. She painted the faces of one group of paper wasps so that they advertised stronger fighting abilities than they really possessed. For the control group, she simply painted over the markings inherent in the wasps' faces, without changing their patterns. She also gave some wasps a hormone that made them more aggressive and others a hormone that did not change their behavior. Tibbetts then set up a series of duels, each between two wasps that had never met before: one wasp had been manipulated in some way and the other wasp's face and behavior were completely unaltered. She observed each match for two hours, waiting to see who would establish dominance—during which one wasp finally mounts and subdues another.
Any of Tibbetts's manipulations that interfered with the usual facial reflection of fighting abilities also interfered with the wasps' normal social interactions, preventing them from establishing typical social hierarchies. Wasps with gentle faces that behaved aggressively because of the hormone treatment had a lot of trouble convincing their rivals to submit. And the submissive wasps to which Tibbetts applied intimidating makeup were bullied again and again. As soon as their opponents discovered their deception, they were punished.
Tibbetts thinks this kind of social punishment could be particularly useful in long-term contests over valuable resources, during which wasps have the opportunity to repeatedly test the accuracy of their rivals' markings.
"Punishment not only hurts the cheater but provides a benefit to the punisher," Tibbetts says. "Over the course of the interaction, the punisher realizes that maybe their opponent's signal is not accurate. If they trusted the signal, they would have lost out."

¿Cuándo la vida les pertenece a los vivos?

La revista Scientific American publica un interesante artículo acerca de varias cuestiones éticas a las que la medicina actual se enfrenta cada día con más frecuencia. Las definiciones de que es la vida y que es la muerte se han complicado debido a los avances de la ciencia.

La inocencia que gozábamos en la niñez de la humanidad ya no es posible recuperarla y ahora que estamos entrando en una etapa de mayor madurez, deberemos dejar atrás las historias y fantasías en las que poníamos nuestra confianza. Ser adultos parecería que es enfrentar la realidad con los ojos bien abiertos y sin estar cobijados por mitos y cuentos que nos hacían sentir seguros o que nos daban respuestas sencillas a problemas complicados.

Roberto Blum

When Does Life Belong to the Living?

With thousands of people on the waiting lists for organs, doctors are bending the rules about when to declare that a donor is dead. Is it ethical to take one life and give it to another?

By Robin Marantz Henig

Death used to be a simple affair: either a person’s heart was beating, or it was not. That clarity faded years ago when heroic medical technology started to keep hearts beating in definitely. Although we have had decades to ponder the distinctions between various states of grave physiological failure, if anything our confusion has grown. When is it ethical to turn off a ventilator or remove a feeding tube? When does “life support” lose its meaning? And most critically, at what point is it acceptable to cut into a body and remove the heart that could save another life?

These issues are not academic. They raise questions about health care costs—is it worth using expensive machinery on a body that is for all intents and purposes dead?—as well as about dignity in end-of-life care. This year’s “death panel” subplot of the health care debate fed off the real fears people have about being taken advantage of when at their weakest.

Scientific American, August 19, 2010

Aforismo

La vida de cada hombre no es más que una gota de rocío y el alma vive en ella hasta que se evapora.

Amable Sánchez

The Most Pressing Question

What is it, finally, that divides the believer from the atheist? The question comes to mind in observing renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens endure, in full public view, metastatic esophageal cancer. In a remarkable Vanity Fair column, then in an interview with the vapid Anderson Cooper on CNN, and once again in a videotaped interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hitchens has movingly described his condition, his experience of chemotherapy, and many other aspects of his illness.

But the statements that have sparked the greatest discussion are the ones in which Hitchens declares that those religious believers who hope he will undergo a deathbed conversion are bound to be disappointed. Any such conversion, if it happened, would be the product of a brain consumed by cancer and a body wracked by pain. It should not be taken seriously, in other words, as a genuine expression of the beliefs and desires of the man known as Christopher Hitchens. It should instead be dismissed as the deluded ramblings of someone driven out of his right mind by suffering and disease. And the statements of a man in such a state tell us nothing worth knowing, either about him or about God.

Hitchens would be gratified to know that his comments reminded me of a writer we both revere: Holocaust-survivor Primo Levi. More specifically, Hitchens’ statements reminded me of how, during my time working for the theoconservative journal First Things, a devoutly Christian colleague reacted to a passage of Levi’s that I had admired for years as an incomparably powerful expression of stoicism, courage, and integrity.

Here is Levi, from The Drowned and the Saved:
“I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.”

When I referred to this passage in the First Things offices, my pious colleague reacted with visible disdain, which he conveyed in the following way: In his fear and trembling before annihilation, Levi felt for the first time in his life the call of God. And how did he respond to this call? By refusing it. And why? Because it would have embarrassed him. Far from being admirable, the statement was an almost demonic expression of the deadly sin (and singularly Christian vice) of pride.

So a Christian considers pride a sin and a (Jewish) atheist does not. That’s hardly news. But my colleague’s—and Levi’s, and Hitchens’—positions were actually about more than this. At a deeper level they were about anthropology and what be called the epistemology of religious truth.
In their statements, Levi and Hitchens imply that a person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself. This is the outlook of the scientist (Levi was a chemist), the philosopher, the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic. From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts. Far more reliable are the sober, critical reflections of a man in good health, protected from danger, insulated from threats to his well being. That, for Levi and Hitchens, is a man at his best and most capable of determining the truth of things.
Religious believers—including my devoutly religious colleague at First Things—make very different assumptions about the proper path to truth and what constitutes a man at his best. As Rod Dreher noted in a post about Hitchens’ recent statements, a Christian believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries. That we greedily crave good things for ourselves—many of which (fame, fortune, honor, glory) only the luckiest will ever acquire, and some of which (happiness unmixed with sorrow) no one will ever enjoy within the limits of our finite lives.

For the religious person, human beings are at their best when they accept these truths and live humbly in their light, offering up their existential anguish as prayers, opening themselves up to the possible existence of a providential divinity who will answer those prayers and grant salvation from the horror of obliteration. Human beings are at their worst, by contrast, when they deny the fact of their frailty, deluding themselves into believing in their self-sufficiency. (This is where the critique of pride comes in.)

Levi and Hitchens reside in the first camp, believing that they are most themselves when they are healthy and free—at the height of their human powers; whatever they may feel or say (or be tempted to say) in moments of weakness or degradation deserves to be dismissed as inauthentic. But the devout reside in the second camp, insisting that human beings are truest to themselves—most authentic—when they are most vulnerable.

Which of them is right? That is perhaps the most pressing human question—and the one that points to what might be the deepest, most intractable division between the believer and the atheist.

Damon Linker
August 10, 2010

The Limits of the Coded World

In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys were not deliberating, but rather reacting to visual stimuli, researchers were able to plausibly claim that the computer could successfully predict the monkeys’ reaction. In other words, the computer was reading the monkeys’ minds and knew before they did what their decision would be.

We have no reason to assume that either predictability or lack of predictability has anything to say about free will.

The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will decide before they themselves know it, what is left of the notion of human freedom? How can we say that humans are free in any meaningful way if others can know what their decisions will be before they themselves make them?

Research of this sort can seem frightening. An experiment that demonstrated the illusory nature of human freedom would, in many people’s mind, rob the test subjects of something essential to their humanity.
If a machine can tell me what I am about to decide before I decide it, this means that, in some sense, the decision was already made before I became consciously involved. But if that is the case, how am I, as a moral agent, to be held accountable for my actions? If, on the cusp of an important moral decision, I now know that my decision was already taken at the moment I thought myself to be deciding, does this not undermine my responsibility for that choice?

Some might conclude that resistance to such findings reveal a religious bias. After all, the ability to consciously decide is essential in many religions to the idea of humans as spiritual beings. Without freedom of choice, a person becomes a cog in the machine of nature; with action and choice predetermined, morality and ultimately the very meaning of that person’s existence is left in tatters.

Theologians have spent a great deal of time ruminating on the problem of determination. The Catholic response to the theological problem of theodicy — that is, of how to explain the existence of evil in a world ruled by a benevolent and omnipotent God — was to teach that God created humans with free will. It is only because evil does exist that humans are free to choose between good and evil; hence, the choice for good has meaning. As the theologians at the Council of Trent in the 16th century put it, freedom of will is essential for Christian faith, and it is anathema to believe otherwise. Protestant theologians such as Luther and Calvin, to whom the Trent statement was responding, had disputed this notion on the basis of God’s omniscience. If God’s ability to know were truly limitless, they argued, then his knowledge of the future would be as clear and perfect as his knowledge of the present and of the past. If that were the case, though, then God would already know what each and every one of us has done, is doing, and will do at every moment in our lives.

And how, then, could we be truly free?

Even though this particular resistance to a deterministic model of human behavior is religious, one can easily come to the same sorts of conclusions from a scientific perspective. In fact, when religion and science square off around human freedom, they often end up on remarkably similar ground because both science and religion base their assumptions on an identical understanding of the world as something intrinsically knowable, either by God or ourselves.

While our senses can only bring us verifiable knowledge about how the world appears in time and space, our reason always strives to know more.

Let me explain what I mean by way of an example. Imagine we suspend a steel ball from a magnet directly above a vertical steel plate, such that when I turn off the magnet, the ball hits the edge of the plate and falls to either one side or the other.

Very few people, having accepted the premises of this experiment, would conclude from its outcome that the ball in question was exhibiting free will. Whether the ball falls on one side or the other of the steel plate, we can all comfortably agree, is completely determined by the physical forces acting on the ball, which are simply too complex and minute for us to monitor. And yet we have no problem assuming the opposite to be true of the application of the monkey experiment to theoretical humans: namely, that because their actions are predictable they can be assumed to lack free will. In other words, we have no reason to assume that either predictability or lack of predictability has anything to say about free will. The fact that we do make this association has more to do with the model of the world that we subtly import into such thought experiments than with the experiments themselves.

The model in question holds that the universe exists in space and time as a kind of ultimate code that can be deciphered. This image of the universe has a philosophical and religious provenance, and has made its way into secular beliefs and practices as well. In the case of human freedom, this presumption of a “code of codes” works by convincing us that a prediction somehow decodes or deciphers a future that already exists in a coded form. So, for example, when the computers read the signals coming from the monkeys’ brains and make a prediction, belief in the code of codes influences how we interpret that event. Instead of interpreting the prediction as what it is — a statement about the neural process leading to the monkeys’ actions — we extrapolate about a supposed future as if it were already written down, and all we were doing was reading it.

To my mind the philosopher who gave the most complete answer to this question was Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s view, the main mistake philosophers before him had made when considering how humans could have accurate knowledge of the world was to forget the necessary difference between our knowledge and the actual subject of that knowledge. At first glance, this may not seem like a very easy thing to forget; for example, what our eyes tell us about a rainbow and what that rainbow actually is are quite different things. Kant argued that our failure to grasp this difference was further reaching and had greater consequences than anyone could have thought.

The belief that our empirical exploration of the world and of the human brain could ever eradicate human freedom is an error.

Taking again the example of the rainbow, Kant would argue that while most people would grant the difference between the range of colors our eyes perceive and the refraction of light that causes this optical phenomenon, they would still maintain that more careful observation could indeed bring one to know the rainbow as it is in itself, apart from its sensible manifestation. This commonplace understanding, he argued, was at the root of our tendency to fall profoundly into error, not only about the nature of the world, but about what we were justified in believing about ourselves, God, and our duty to others.

The problem was that while our senses can only ever bring us verifiable knowledge about how the world appears in time and space, our reason always strives to know more than appearances can show it. This tendency of reason to always know more is and was a good thing. It is why human kind is always curious, always progressing to greater and greater knowledge and accomplishments. But if not tempered by a respect for its limits and an understanding of its innate tendencies to overreach, reason can lead us into error and fanaticism.

Let’s return to the example of the experiment predicting the monkeys’ decisions. What the experiment tells us is nothing other than that the monkeys’ decision making process moves through the brain, and that our technology allows us to get a reading of that activity faster than the monkeys’ brain can put it into action. From that relatively simple outcome, we can now see what an unjustified series of rather major conundrums we had drawn. And the reason we drew them was because we unquestioningly translated something unknowable — the stretch of time including the future of the monkeys’ as of yet undecided and unperformed actions — into a neat scene that just needed to be decoded in order to be experienced. We treated the future as if it had already happened and hence as a series of events that could be read and narrated.

From a Kantian perspective, with this simple act we allowed reason to override its boundaries, and as a result we fell into error. The error we fell into was, specifically, to believe that our empirical exploration of the world and of the human brain could ever eradicate human freedom.

This, then, is why, as “irresistible” as their logic might appear, none of the versions of Galen Strawson’s “Basic Argument” for determinism, which he outlined in The Stone last week, have any relevance for human freedom or responsibility. According to this logic, responsibility must be illusory, because in order to be responsible at any given time an agent must also be responsible for how he or she became how he or she is at that time, which initiates an infinite regress, because at no point can an individual be responsible for all the genetic and cultural forces that have produced him or her as he or she is. But this logic is nothing other than a philosophical version of the code of codes; it assumes that the sum history of forces determining an individual exist as a kind of potentially legible catalog.

The point to stress, however, is that this catalog is not even legible in theory, for to be known it assumes a kind of knower unconstrained by time and space, a knower who could be present from every possible perspective at every possible deciding moment in an agent’s history and prehistory. Such a knower, of course, could only be something along the lines of what the monotheistic traditions call God. But as Kant made clear, it makes no sense to think in terms of ethics, or responsibility, or freedom when talking about God; to make ethical choices, to be responsible for them, to be free to choose poorly, all of these require precisely the kind of being who is constrained by the minimal opacity that defines our kind of knowing.
As much as we owe the nature of our current existence to the evolutionary forces Darwin first discovered, or to the cultures we grow up in, or to the chemical states affecting our brain processes at any given moment, none of this impacts on our freedom. I am free because neither science nor religion can ever tell me, with certainty, what my future will be and what I should do about it. The dictum from Sartre that Strawson quoted thus gets it exactly right: I am condemned to freedom. I am not free because I can make choices, but because I must make them, all the time, even when I think I have no choice to make.
________________________________________
William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His next book, “An Uncertain Faith: Atheism, Fundamentalism, and Religious Moderation,” will be published by Columbia University Press in 2011.

Decíamos ayer… (18)

Conocí al Dr. Manuel Ayau, Muso, en 1977, cuando comencé a impartir clases en la Universidad Francisco Marroquín. Entonces nuestra relación fue esporádica y relativamente distante. Durante estos últimos años tuve la oportunidad de verlo más frecuentemente, de tratarlo más de cerca, y de admirar su temple y su talla.

Un día, mientras me guiñaba un ojo con una pizquilla de picardía, me dijo: “Yo antes me creía infalible. Ahora ya no”. El día que lo velábamos en la Plaza de la Libertad, de la UFM, alguien me dijo que el sacerdote que lo había atendido en los últimos momentos de su enfermedad le había comunicado que Muso no tenía miedo.

Ahora que ya no está físicamente entre nosotros, pretendo subrayar estos dos aspectos: no ser infalible y no tener miedo. ¿Puede ser el hombre algo más que esto? Saber que no se es infalible y aceptarlo es un signo de humildad, de sabiduría y de madurez. Saber que no se es infalible y no tener miedo es un signo de serenidad. Todos los hombres son falibles, pero eso no constituye ningún problema, al menos ningún problema grave. El problema –muy grave a veces– es que muchos creen que son infalibles y así actúan. La infalibilidad implica orgullo, engreimiento, autosuficiencia, prepotencia, exclusión de todos y de todo lo que no encaje en ese círculo. El infalible no atiende a razones ni acepta más verdad que la suya, o la que él cree que es la suya. El infalible no sirve a nadie, pero está convencido de que todos tienen obligación de servirlo. Y lo curioso del caso es que el infalible tampoco tiene miedo: ¿a qué, a quién, de qué y por qué?

Poco margen quedaría para las objeciones, si esto se quedara así. Que un cegato no vea puede ser una desgracia sólo para él. Pero que un cegato se empeñe en ser guía de otros, y además esté convencido de que así debe ser, es una desgracia para todos. Esto, lamentablemente, tiene muchas aplicaciones, en muchos círculos y en relación con muchas jerarquías. Valga sólo, como ejemplo general, pensar en los Gobiernos. Como ejemplo particular, pensar en el nuestro. ¿Hasta cuando seguiremos haciendo agua, antes de irnos definitivamente a pique?

Si Muso, a pesar de no creerse infalible, no tenía miedo, sólo puede ser porque se sabía y se sentía libre. Y tenía toda la razón: ¿qué puede temer el que es libre, como no sea perder su libertad? Pero hay una libertad radical que nunca se pierde. Y no es que no sufra amenazas, pero nunca se pierde. Es la libertad que –aparte de tiempos, normas, caprichos, golpes de suerte, incentivos o tentaciones de una u otra laya– nos constituye en tales. En cambio, el infalible se cree libre, cuando realmente es preso de su torpe, ciega e inexistente infalibilidad.

Muso:¡Sigue adelante! Aquí vamos, detrás de ti.


Amable Sánchez Torres

Aforismo

Sólo empezarás a vislumbrar un horizonte más claro el día que dejes de confundir la pobreza de espíritu con un espíritu pobre.

Amable Sánchez