Klaus Hart Brasilientexte

While travelling through the East, I made contact with monks in Tibet, Mongolia, Japan and China. They were serene, modest and reclusive, at peace in their saffron coloured habits. Recently I observed the crowds in Sáo Paulo airport: the waiting room full of executives with mobile phones, worried, anxious, and generally eating more than they should. For sure they had already had breakfast at home, but as the company offered another one, they ate voraciously. This made me reflect: ”which of these two models brings happiness?

  
I met Daniela, aged 10, in the elevator at 9am and asked her: ”Didn™t you go to school today? Her reply to me was ”No, I go to school in the afternoons[1] <#_ftn1> . I responded: ”That™s good, so in the morning you can play and sleep until later. ”No, she said, ”I have so many things to do in the morning¦ ”What things? I asked. ”English classes, ballet, painting, swimming. And she began to recite her routine as a robotic child. I thought: ”What a pity, Daniela didn™t mention having a meditation class!

We are building super men and super women, totally equipped but emotionally infantile. This is why companies now consider that the EI (Emotional Intelligence) test is more important then the IQ test. There is no point in being a super executive if one cannot even relate to others. How important it would be if school curriculums were to include meditation classes!

A progressive town in the state of Sáo Paulo had, in 1960, six bookstores and one gym, today they have 60 gyms and three bookstores! I am not against building one™s body, but I worry about the disproportion between improving the body and the spirit. I think it is good that we will all die slim: ”How was the dead person? ”He looked wonderful, no cellulite! But what happens to subjectivity, spirituality and loving idleness?    

Formerly we talked of reality: the analysis of reality, being immersed in reality, knowing reality. Nowadays the word is virtuality. Virtual is the word. One can have virtual sex on the internet where one does not contract AIDS, there is no emotional involvement and it is controlled by the mouse. Locked up in his room in Brasilia a man can have an intimate friend in Tokyo without even having to worry about knowing his neighbours next door or who live on the block! Everything is virtual, we enter virtuality regarding all values and there is no commitment to what is real! The process of the abstraction of language, of feelings, is very serious: we are virtual mystics, virtual religious, virtual citizens. Thus reality goes another way, for we are also ethically virtual.

Culture starts where nature ends. Culture is the refining of the spirit. Television in Brazil “ with only a few honourable exceptions “ is a problem: each week we have the sensation that we are less cultured. The word today is ˜entertainment™, with Sunday therefore being the national day of collective idiocy. The presenter is an idiot, those who go and present themselves on the stage are idiots and those who waste time watching the shows are also idiots. Since publicity is not able to sell happiness, they pass on the illusion that happiness is the result of the sum of pleasure: ”If you drink this drink, wear these tennis shoes, or this shirt, buy this car, you will make it! The problem is that, as a rule, one does not make it! Those who fall into it develop desire in such a way that they end up requiring psychoanalysis. Or take medication. Those who resist increase their neuroses.

Psychoanalysts try to find out what to do with their patients™ desires. Where to put them? I, who don™t belong in that area, allow myself the right to give a suggestion. I believe there is only one way out: turn desire inwards. If it  is turned outwards, it has nowhere to go! The big challenge is to turn desire inwards, to like oneself, to start to see how good it is to be free of all this globalizing, neo liberal, consumerist conditioning. Thus one can live better. As a matter of fact, for good mental health three requirements are indispensable: friendships, self esteem and lack of stress.

There is religious logic in post modern consumerism. If a person goes to Europe and visits a small cathedral city, they should try and learn the history of that city “ the cathedral is the sign that it does have a history. In the Middle Ages cities acquired status by building a cathedral, today, in Brazil, shopping centres are built. It is interesting, the majority of shopping centres have the architectural lines of stylized cathedrals, one cannot go to them dressed any old how and one must wear one™s Sunday best. In them one has a sense of paradise, there are no beggars, street children or dirty sidewalks…

One enters these cloisters to the sound of post modern Gregorian, the music of dentists™ waiting rooms. Helped by beautiful priestesses one finds the various niches, all those chapels with the venerable objects of consumption. Those who can pay cash feel they are in the kingdom of heaven. If they have to pay with a post dated cheque or a credit card or a special cheque, they feel they are in purgatory. But if they can™t buy something, for sure they feel they are in hell¦ Luckily, they all end up in the post modern eucharist, sitting with others at the same table sharing the same juice and the same McDonald™s hamburgers¦    

I am in the habit of telling the sales persons who surround me at the door of the shops ”I am only having a Socratic stroll. When they look astounded, I explain: ”Socrates, who was a Greek philosopher, also liked to rest his mind by walking through the commercial centre of Athens. When sales persons like you approached him, he would tell them ˜I am only looking at how much there is to sell which I do not need in order to be happy™.

[1] <#_ftnref1>  Brazilian schools as a rule have a morning and an afternoon session only “ the children are free for half the day.

*Frei Betto is a writer, author of ”O Desafio Ético (The Ethical Challenge) (Garamond), written together with Luis Fernando Veríssimo and others.

ABOUT THE AUTOR

He is a Brazilian Dominican with an international reputation as a liberation theologian.
Within Brazil he is equally famous as a writer, with over 52 books to his name.  In 1985 he won Brazil™s most important literary prize, the Jabuti, and was elected Intellectual of the Year by the members of the Brazilian Writers™ Union.

Frei Betto has always been active in Brazilian social movements, and has been an adviser to the Church™s ministry to workers in Sáo Paulo™s industrial belt, to the Church base communities, and to the Landless Rural Workers™ Movement (MST).