Ethics and Culture

OSVALDO FERRARI. Throughout your life, your admiration for Sarmiento's Facundo has been a form of faith in culture, or so it seems to me.

JORGE LUIS BORGES. Yes, culture, it seems to me, is our sole salvation. I wrote my story 'Brodie's Report' around the theme of a rudimentary culture needing to be saved from barbarity. At the start one comes across a minimal culture; then at the end, the Yahoos, men like monkeys, from Book Four of Swift's famous parable Gulliver's Travels. Of course, all culture is more or less rudimentary but we must try to save it. That's the thesis of Facundo- Civilización y barbaric. It's not that Sarmiento thought that civilization was perfect. He believed in progress; but he also believed that civilization, that imperfect culture of the Unitarians, had to be saved from barbarity or the Federal's inclination to barbarity. Unfortunately, Facundo hasn't been chosen as a classic that corresponds to Martin Fierro and its gaucho cult of what's primitive and uncultured. We made that decision and perhaps it's too late to change our minds. But had we chosen Sarmiento's Facundo as our book, given that the Holy Scriptures have disappeared-it's understood that every country has to have its book-our history would have, doubtless, been different. Although Martin Fierro may be superior in a literary sense to Facundo.

FERRARI. You always talk of ethics, you've told me that having ethics is even more crucial-as Kant saw it-than having a religion.

BORGES. Religion can only be justified on the basis of ethics. On the other hand, ethics, as Stevenson said, is an instinct. It's not necessary to define ethics-ethics is not the Ten Commandments. It's something we feel every time we act. At the end of the day, we will, doubtless, have made many ethical decisions. And we will have had to choose-I am simplifying the theme-between good and evil. And when we have chosen good, we know we have chosen good; when we have chosen evil, we know that too. What's crucial is to judge each act for itself and not for its consequences. The consequences of any act are infinite, they branch into the future and, in the end, become equivalent or complimentary. Thus, to judge an act for its consequences seems to me to be immoral.

FERRARI. Now, in the month of your 85th year ...

BORGES. Don't remind me of such sad things. I have let myself live- I am idle and a daydreamer and 85 years have passed. When I was young I thought about suicide, but not now-it's too late. At any moment ... history will decide it.

FERRARI. To me, it seems more happy than sad ...

BORGES. Yes, I am sure I am happier now than when I was young. When I was young, I sought to be unhappy for aesthetic and dramatic reasons. I wanted to be Prince Hamlet or Raskolnikov or Byron or Poe or Baudelaire, but not now. Today, I am resigned to being who I am. And, to summarize: I do not know if I have attained happiness - no one does-but I have sometimes attained a kind of serenity and that's a lot. Also, seeking serenity seems to me to be a more reasonable ambition than seeking happiness. Perhaps serenity is a kind of happiness. Now, I am resigned to life, to blindness. I have ended up resigning myself to longevity which is another evil. I do not think there's a day in my life without at least a moment of serenity-that is enough. Although the dreams that visit me at night leave me in a state of panic rather than happiness.

FERRARI. Borges, in your serenity, you can possibly enlighten me, given that we have talked about ethics and culture, about the importance of an ethical attitude to culture.

BORGES. I do not believe that culture can be understood without ethics. It seems to me that an educated person has to be ethical. For example, it's commonly supposed that good people are fools and intelligent ones are wicked. But I do not believe that-indeed, I believe the opposite. Wicked people are usually also naive. Someone acts in an evil way because he cannot imagine how his behaviour might affect another. So I think that there's some innocence in evil and some intelligence in goodness. Further, goodness, to be perfect-though I do not believe that anyone attains perfect goodness- has to be intelligent. For example, a good and not-too-intelligent person can say disagreeable things to others because he realizes that they are disagreeable. On the other hand, a person, in order to be good, must be intelligent-if not, his intelligence would be ... imperfect, he would be saying disagreeable things to others without realizing it.

FERRARI. You have said that before and it seems very important to me.

BORGES. Yes, I identify wickedness with stupidity and goodness with intelligence. But people do not often do this. They always suppose that good people are simple-minded. No, a person can be good and complex and a person can be evil and extremely simple, as is the case with criminals.

FERRARI. Your vision of all this already existed with the Greeks. They too held this idea.

BORGES. Everything is already there with the Greeks. In English you say, 'The Greeks had a word for it.' That implies that the Greeks have thought of it all, in the West, of course. In the West, those who began to think, and perhaps thought everything, were the Greeks. And we have Rome, but Rome is a Hellenistic extension-Rome cannot be conceived without Greece though one can easily conceive of Greece without Rome. Greece came before and the Greeks were cultured at a time when the Romans were barbarians, when the rest of the West was barbarous.

FERRARI. Borges, it seems important to me to highlight what we mentioned earlier, because the identification of culture with ethics could be a definite way, for us.

BORGES. Or with intelligence, yes.

FERRARI. A culture with an ethical basis.

BORGES. It's indispensable, because if it's not like that then what use is it? For cruelty?

FERRARI. For confusion, perhaps.

BORGES. Yes, for confusion.

FERRARI. You know that one of the fashions of our time is confusion,

and it's often intentional.

BORGES. Yes, it seems that today chaos has become very successful, hasn't it? In literature it has been deliberately sought out. Dadaism, for example and, in some ways, Expressionism too. And Surrealism. Yes, confusion has been sought out. Also, everywhere there's a cult of evil and crime. But that has illustrious precedents, doesn't it? It's enough to think of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. We can see how assassination attracted them.

FERRARI. Well, there's an authentic way to live evil and good. I mean, if it is lived authentically then it's authentic evil and authentic good. But in our confusion and inauthenticity, our lived evil and lived good have grown confused and inauthentic too.

BORGES. It's chaos, in its most confused sense-disorder and nothing else.

FERRARI. We will continue with your serenity helping us see clearly in our confused times.

BORGES. Yes, of course.