Jorge Brioso and I have spent half our lives in the United States. We arrived by different paths, one year apart—he came in 1996 and I followed in 1997—but we came for the same reason. No American dreams for us. We came to rest. To escape the curse of living through “exciting” times in Cuba; to find out what bored people in the first world. Upon my arrival in the United States, Brioso repeated to me what he had already been warned about: “Yumas are not all that yuma.” To translate, for those not versed in the myths of our supposed anti-American generation deeply enamored with all things American: Americans were not the epitome of swing, uninhibited living, and joyousness that we assumed.
The reality we have lived in “el Yuma” (or the United States) has not provided the historical rest we desired. First, the 1990s—a period expected to mark the ‘end of history’—was disrupted by the upheaval following the collapse of the Twin Towers After this upheaval, wokeism, Trumpism, the assault on the Capitol, and racial and university uprisings have inevitably led us to live again through exciting times. There have been several ways in which we have tried to respond to the astonishing nature of these events. One of my favorites has been engaging in dialogue with my old friend.
It’s not just that Brioso possesses the most brilliant and inquisitive mind I know and is the best informed in philosophical matters. At the same time, Brioso—professor at Carleton College and author of books like La destrucción por el soneto. Sobre la poética de Néstor Díaz de Villegas (“The Destruction through the Sonnet: On the Poetics of Nestor Díaz de Villegas”), El privilegio de pensar (“The Privilege of Thinking”), La lucidez confrontada. La filosofía política de Ortega en contrapunto (“Confronted Lucidity: Ortega’s Political Philosophy in Counterpoint”), and Al modo de Narciso. Especulaciones estéticas (“In the Manner of Narcissus: Aesthetic Speculations”)—possesses essential virtues that served him well in his native Buenavista: common sense, direct knowledge of reality, and clear notions of his strengths and limits. Now I share with you a fragment of the extensive virtual dialogue with my “oracle from Minneapolis” about this America that we have made our own over the past quarter century.
In a previous interview, we spoke—besides the plague then afflicting the planet and the meaning of poetry at that time—of anger and revolt regarding the racial uprisings that erupted in 2020 precisely in Minneapolis, the city where you live, following the murder of George Floyd. Now I want to pick up the thread of anger and revolt to refer to a less circumstantial anger and a more muted but sustained revolt: those that have been happening for years on university campuses and are spreading to the rest of society. I refer to woke culture, driven by Social Justice. If earlier I characterized them as muted, it is only in comparison to previous student movements, such as those of the 1960s expressed through public protests, university takeovers, and other manifestations more in line with the traditional idea of revolt. In this case, in addition to some specific physical protests, the discontent is expressed through social media and the continuous exercise of cancel culture—with the enthusiastic cooperation of university authorities and the faculty in many cases. In your opinion, does this discontent respond to an objective resurgence of social problems—including inequality—a new way of interpreting social issues—and a new awareness of their inequalities—or is it simply the political expression of the most pampered generation in history—as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff claim in their book “The Cuddling of the American Mind”—dominated by a fit of neo-puritanism? To put it more simply: is it a widespread crisis, a special sensitivity, or simply outright spoiled behavior?
I like the term “silent revolt,” although I would add the term tactile or digital, as these are revolts that arise from constant texting or filming—also made possible by the finger clicking a button that allows recording everything seen.
Anyone who resists submitting to norms, customs, and the figures who embody these values is labeled as ‘spoiled’. The notion of being spoiled has become a political factor, particularly since young people burst onto the public stage. If we believe Stefan Zweig, this began with his “generation of young people [who] had ceased to believe in parents, politicians, and teachers.” But even this gesture could be traced back to Kant’s Sapere Aude, which defined adulthood as the capacity to free oneself from any guidance, or form of guardianship: “If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so forth, I need not exert myself at all.” The young person exits minority status, according to this Kantian definition, before their own parents, as they dare to renounce all the dead weight of tradition. One could argue, and here I exaggerate a bit for your amusement, that in modernity only the spoiled reach adulthood. Therefore, I don’t think that’s the way to explain “wokeness”.
I am interested in the “woke” identity as a new type of human, perhaps the last offspring of modernity and the first specimen of the era to come. The “woke” are not modern because for them the time of revolution and the future has ended. “Wokes” retreat to entrench themselves in affiliations and seek in the past a new way of connecting and they understand the past not as tradition but as an infinite history of oppressions and exclusions. From the future, they only expect a great ecological catastrophe that they hope to stop by returning to pre-modern ways of living. On the other hand, they share with the moderns the belief that necessity should not be understood either as the forms of coexistence that ultimately prevailed in history or as the organic limitations imposed by our bodies and physical reality. They aspire to what is possible, but what is possible, for them, no longer resides in the future. They dismantle what the past consecrated to see if they discover in its rubble an unprecedented possibility of meaning. They aspire, and in this they are clearly pre-modern, to a monotheism of values: to unite the good, the beautiful, the just, and the true. But they believe, and in this they are heirs of modernity, that they can only reconstruct these notions from what tradition denied, discarded, silenced. I will focus only on two aspects of this group’s ideology: their notion of equity and what they call “inclusive language.”
Plato himself, in Book VI of “The Laws,” distinguishes between arithmetic and geometric equality. Arithmetic equality does not recognize hierarchies, it is blind, indifferent to any distinction of qualities. Equality that points to identical quantity, the uniform distance maintained relative to a paradigm or unit of measure. For example, equality before the law proposes a principle, at least at an ideal level, that points to an equivalent position and responsibility that all should have before the normative apparatus of the State. For Plato, absolute equality is arithmetic (that which defines what is united by measure, weight, and number) and is used to distribute magistracies; but there is another, which he believes is better, that is proportional (geometric), much more difficult to discern. This is a gift of the gods, particularly Zeus, who measures justice, since he gives greater honors to the more virtuous, “while granting to those who have the opposite of virtue and education what is appropriate to each in proportion.”
The geometric equality is proportional in the sense that it defines both the correlation between what is not equal and the equality between peers. Let me give you a more recent example. The old regime, as it existed before the French Revolution, conceived of three Estates or Orders: the nobility, the clergy, and the third estate or commoners (the rest of the population). The king, the sovereign, the vicar of God on Earth, had to treat his subjects equally, which meant treating them as equals with their peers within the same estate, but also recognizing the hierarchy, the proper proportion, and the privileges each estate possessed: acknowledging the value each person of the same status had, the differences in merit each rank carried.
For a contemporary perspective on these two concepts of equality, I recommend you the work of Teresa M. Bejan.
The American Revolution, in its Declaration of Independence, mixes both principles. It recognizes the moral dignity of all as equals simply by being human, “All men are created equal,” but also respects the right, the freedom of each to pursue their happiness and good living according to their own merits and abilities. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” ‘wokes’ might retort with clear Orwellian echoes. And this would be a legitimate claim against a republic that needed a civil war to abolish slavery and maintained racial segregation until the nineteen-sixties. It is worth clarifying, moreover, that one does not need to belong to the group that pretends to be always alert to notice this contradiction. Samuel Johnson himself, as early as 1775, had already pointed it out: “How is it possible to hear the loudest cries for freedom from those who trade in blacks?” However, the stance of the ‘wokes’ is much more radical. They allege the existence of systemic racism and sexism that corrode all democratic institutions. And as a weapon of combat against this system of continuous oppression, they propose their notion of equity. This notion unprecedentedly mixes the two notions of equality that I outlined earlier.
From their standpoint, the concept of geometric equality is radicalized in trying to find a proportion for everything that had lived, up until this moment, outside the norms, beyond common sense. They aspire to a concept of proportional equality capable of turning exceptions into the only rule. It should be clarified that only that which was denied, discarded, expelled by the reigning normative systems acquires the status of exception. All eccentricities are accommodated—even those previously seen as deficits under traditional evaluative standards. However, any notion of merit, wish is always equated with privilege, is dismissed. In this sense, woke equity is arithmetic, as it does not recognize any difference in quality or excellence that has not been imposed by a system of power and subjugation. Their concept of inclusive language stems from their notion of equity.
‘Wokes’ aspire to monopolize language, and the evaluative framework inherent in it, by imposing new ways of naming things. The radical nature of their gesture lies in the attempt to grant citizenship, to give reality, to something that is merely a subjective perception: to turn into a norm what is merely individual idiosyncrasy. Someone perceives themselves in a certain way, and although there is no social or biological data to corroborate it, an attempt is made to impose that vision on reality. That is what is achieved when a change in language is forced: what has been termed as ‘inclusive’ language. When a group labels something in a particular way, even if it’s just a matter of self-perception, that designation begins to take on a reality of its own. Language opens a space in the world for everything that begins to be designated similarly by a group of people.
Those who rebel against the ‘wokes’ realize, in their own way, that common sense has been hijacked. That is why conspiracy theories have proliferated. They feel that they are being forced to live in the fiction that others have constructed. There is no other option then but to live outside of that new common sense where they do not recognize themselves. By imposing perceptions of reality based solely on feelings, without the need for external validation, ‘wokes’ have transformed language into a chimera. That is the conspiracy that Trumpers talk about. And at least in this they are right.
I agree with those who believe that there is currently a hijacking of common sense, but it has not been replaced by another. After decades of discussions about political incorrectness, no one has any idea where the line of correctness currently lies, as the notion of political incorrectness is being renewed daily. The idea that this is a conspiracy seems less sustainable to me: conspiracies and their respective theories imply secret agreements, a more or less defined structure with its leaders (unless we blame everything on Soros), and specific objectives to achieve in the meantime. In the case of the woke attitude (which goes beyond the boundaries of a specific generation and, even among those considered woke, is often an intermittent attitude, taking occasional naps in the midst of its vigilance), there does not seem to be any pre-established agreement, consistent political or intellectual leaders, or concrete objectives: apart from sounding the alarm upon discovering new forms of oppression, aggression, or microaggressions, this woke attitude doesn’t seem to seek anything other than a permanent digital state of siege.
When I refer to a new type of human, I am not speaking of a specific social group or generation, but rather of a new horizon from which meaning is generated—a horizon that dictates what can be said and, by extension, what can be thought, done, and desired. That is why I speak of the production of a new common sense: the configuration of the statements that can be expressed at a certain historical moment, the imposition of certain vocabulary, and the vetoing of others, and the evaluative attitudes inherent in certain words. The Spanish philosopher Higinio Marín, in one of the best definitions I know on the subject, describes it as habits of the heart, following Alexander Tocqueville’s beautiful expression: “cartographies of vital relevancies [that] outline the cordial assumptions of reason and meaning, including what is considered conceivable and real.” You and I find much of what they assert to be senseless because we are situated in another vital and affective-evaluative space, but it must be recognized that our position, at least within the university—which is our workplace—is increasingly marginal and even anachronistic. It could be argued that the university is a minority space (although 54.3% of working-age adults have earned a college degree or another form of postsecondary credential, according to the Lumina Foundation), but it is where almost all those in charge of the emotional education of citizens are formed. A telling example of how deeply these new norms about what can be said, done, or felt have permeated society is seen in reggaeton—the genre least known for reverence or political correctness. Even its most successful artist, Bad Bunny, does not dare to ignore these boundaries. The key to his success, and this is an important signal, lies precisely in embracing them. The publishing industry—including the textbooks used to teach literacy—and the art market, to name just two other examples, respond to similar standards. If something defines a new common sense, it is the proposal of a new concept of taste; what is considered appropriate to desire or fantasize about. Common sense defines what an era understands as sanity, and what is affirmed, thought, or desired outside of this space takes on the character of a chimera or a delusion; neither of which, at least in these times, are considered marketable. I believe that the common sense being shaped before our eyes is not yet hegemonic—nor should any perspective be in a society that considers itself democratic—but I recognize that many do not share my view.
What a significant portion of the American population feels is that there has been a takeover of the main institutions that constitute a country’s normative apparatus: the press, the educational system, the judicial system itself, and even the public health authorities. This takeover is what they define as a conspiracy. However, the only way to combat that conspiracy is to join a new plot. When meaning is produced outside the aforementioned institutions, one needs to conspire, as it is done outside the boundaries of what society legitimizes as public. It is not merely about escaping a language in which they do not recognize themselves, but they are convinced that the only way to free themselves from it is to produce meaning outside the spaces controlled by the state, which, from their perspective, are almost all of them. Those who conspire breathe together—live, desire, think, act—but they do so outside the spaces consecrated for it. Trumpism has the structure of a conspiracy, a plot. January 6 was both an anomaly and not. It was unprecedented because, never before in the Republic’s history, had citizens themselves stormed one of the symbolic centers of power. Yet, it was not entirely anomalous, as this movement, unwilling to let state norms shape its sentiments, believed that power could only be seized by force—through an uprising that aspired to be a coup
Trumpism is also a silent revolt, despite all the clamor that accompanies it, because it vociferates from spaces that—concerning the new common sense being configured—lie on the borders of the intelligible.
We should not forget that a large part of the population feels trapped between these two revolutions, the radical and the conservative, each accusing the other of intolerance, of wanting to appropriate the public square of discussion, of imposing their rules, and in fact leaving less space for those of us who do not share the woke aberrations or Trumpian reactionary views. There are many of us who want to cling to a certain idea of understanding, of sanity that is beginning to seem outdated but which we consider not only the essence of a democratic society but also of understanding between individuals, groups, or even different societies — what the Dictionary RAE (Spanish Royal Academy of Language) defines as “common sense”: “the capacity to understand or judge in a reasonable manner,” a type of definition that would lead Mark Twain to say that common sense is the least common of the senses.
By the way, when Tocqueville analyzes American society from his European perspective, he is constantly appealing to what the RAE understands as “common sense.” He praises or criticizes what happens in American society, not in terms of how close it comes to the model of the society from where he comes — or what could be considered good or bad taste — but rather in terms of the positive or negative effects these differences have on the development of society, a society that, although it might disgust his European audience, might also seem reasonable after all. For those of us in that no man’s land, unsure if we are a majority or not, are there no other options left but to join one of these two revolutions or watch as that space of sanity disappears beneath our feet?
Nietzsche said that only what lacks history can be defined. Common sense has, like many of the great concepts of moral and political philosophy, a tangled history. It would take too much space to clarify here all the nuances that this concept has in the philosophical tradition, so I will use the two examples you mentioned to better explain myself.
The definition that RAE privileges and that Mark Twain parodies in the phrase you cite is known in the tradition as sensus communis naturae, a concept that refers to both the rational nature of all humans and the agreement that this implies regarding certain principles or truths that are considered self-evident and therefore acceptable to everyone, at least potentially. The problem, and this is what Mark Twain refers to, is that when we try to make sense of reality, we are neither so rational nor do we easily agree on what is supposed to be evident. Thomas Paine, for example, gave the title Common Sense to the pamphlet in which he advocated for American independence, despite knowing very well that the ideas he defended in it, those he defined as constitutive of common sense, “are not sufficiently in vogue to enjoy general favor.” He was even convinced that there were forms of government, such as the one suffered by the English people or those imposed on their colonies, that prevented access to certain truths defined by him as natural. Thus, only through war could the American people liberate themselves from that yoke, full of prejudice and delusion, which prevented them from hearing “the simple voice of nature and reason.”
The inherent ambiguity of the concept of common sense is reflected in Jefferson’s statements regarding the writing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776: “The object of the Declaration was not to discover new principles or new arguments, never before thought of, nor even to try to say things that had never before been expressed, but to present to mankind the common sense of the subject […] It was intended to be an expression of the American mindset.” On the one hand, by appealing to common sense, the revolutionary character of the document is diminished. It is not about thinking or expressing anything new—radically breaking with what has been considered and said by tradition—but about articulating, in a clear and definitive way, what was already in everyone’s mind. However, what Jefferson defines as “American mindset” did not exist fully until the signing of this document; the thirteen colonies existed, but there was no American nation to which a specific mindset could correspond. Moreover, there was still a long way to go, even in the emerging American nation, to achieve the desired consensus that Jefferson postulates regarding the most important idea carried by his document: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The concept of common sense that I am advocating for here is based on the Aristotelian notion of koinḕ aísthēsis—which is usually translated into Latin as sensus communis—the common language of the senses, of sensitivity. It assumes that when we give meaning to reality, we do so not only with reason but also with our senses, perceptions, affections, and passions; with the habits of the heart and of the spirit. What an era understands by sanity, and nothing else is common sense, implies both reason and our sensitivity and imagination. Madness is both unreason and a disorder of the senses, passions, and our imaginative faculty. Furthermore, this position assumes that reason and affections are distinctly expressed at different historical moments—understanding always takes place within a tradition, shaped by one’s own prejudices (understanding this latter notion based on the rehabilitation it underwent through Gadamer and hermeneutics). Sense is given to reality with the feet buried in the mud of history.
I will explain with the other example you mention. Tocqueville seeks to find in the United States of America a new sense of the common: the democratic revolution has been realized on the old continent at a material level, without laws, ideas, and customs having occurred the necessary change to make this abrupt rupture with the Old Regime useful. The revolution broke the old belief system, but it was not able to establish a new one. Tocqueville describes the bankruptcy of common sense he perceives in Europe in the following terms: “it is as if in our days the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and acts to beliefs had been broken. The sympathy that has always been observed between feelings and ideas seems destroyed and all the laws of moral analogy seem abolished.”
In the most promising possibility that Tocqueville discovers in the United States, a synthesis is created between tradition and innovation, between “religious genius and the genius of freedom” that he believes is essential to build a new system of affections, the shared sensibility necessary to live in this new political regime. What he seeks in the United States of America is a civilizational model that can save a government and civil society dominated by equality of conditions and thus predisposed to the democratic fate of the two great dangers that, he believes, threaten this new political form: the tyranny of the majority or anarchy.
I believe that the fading of the ground upon which the center—the “middle” or “common ground”—stood is related to the crisis of the foundational narratives that nurtured the American nation. These myths endowed the country with a civil religion that, although often interpreted diametrically opposed by the two political parties that alternate in governing the country, provided at least formally a common space for potential agreements, however tenuous, and respected dissents, at least the right to the existence of the opposing political force. In a classic article, Bertrand Russell reflected on the weakness of Western democracies in the face of totalitarianism, due to their lack of grand myths. Myths channel passions towards a common destiny, guarantee nations the longing for a future in common. The only exception mentioned by the British philosopher was the United States of America. But, as mentioned earlier, we live in another historical moment. I cannot imagine anyone today, at either pole of the political spectrum, repeating the phrase that Whitman includes in his preface to the 1855 edition of The Leaves of Grass: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”. Two of the great myths that cohesively bound the American Union, the myth of the country in which almost all belong to the middle class, or at least perceive themselves as such, and the myth of the individual who invented himself and thereby founded modern freedom—the first nation where the law is the only king, to say it again with the words of Thomas Paine whom I have already quoted—have been greatly eroded in recent years. The 1619 movement, which grants the year in which the slave trade commenced the status of a foundational event, and the slogan around which Occupy Wall Street organized (the 99 percent against the 1 percent, the people against the oligarchy), are clear examples of this. The MAGA movement (Make America Great Again), for its part, is a retrotopia—to use Zigmunt Bauman’s neologism—a reactionary attempt (in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word) to restore a supposed lost golden age so that the great myths of the American nation become reality once again.
There are historical moments, like the one we live in now and that attests to the European history of the twentieth century, in which the pursuit of a center, regardless of the number of people who aspire to it, has something quixotic about it: trying to build a world where it no longer exists and with materials, a belief system, that are considered anachronistic, obsolete. The bombardment of the waterline that supported the center expands, moreover, from other fronts. It is very likely that in this century the United States will cease to be the world’s leading economic power—it has long ceased to be the moral compass of the West—although it will remain the world’s leading military power for some time. Historically, whenever the first military and economic power do not coincide, the conflict has been resolved with war. They will be indirect wars (proxy wars), like those usually waged by nuclear arsenal powers. However, the potential impact that the loss of its global prominence would have on American public opinion could be devastating, as it would deal a fatal blow to perhaps the most deeply rooted myth in the American nation: the messianic role that America has believed itself to have regarding the rest of the world. Is Trumpism just a footnote in American political history, or will it rearticulate a new political subject that will redefine the Republican Party and force it to redesign or split into several political forces? Will the first democratic republic of modern times survive a second term of Donald Trump? Can the Democratic Party appeal to the American population with new notions of communalism, as Mark Lilla incessantly asks for in his books and articles, and move beyond the politics of inherent differences in the identity agenda and the implosion of normative devices into a myriad of exceptions? And one of greater scope: could the United States reactivate the hopes of its citizens and captivate their imagination again from a perception of its destiny and its history totally secular, assuming the crisis of its foundational myths?
I will try to define at a normative level—to recover the center, it is necessary to restore the emotional and conceptual prestige of norms, of normality—what that center or middle point means. I will take a leap in time, towards the first democratic polis, Athens, and its first great legislator, Solon. For Solon, the center or middle point—it is meson or en mesoi—is the place where the common, the public, is founded. It must be clarified that this space must not be confused, in any sense, with a notion of neutrality, which would lead to not taking sides for any of the warring factions. Among Solon’s laws stands out one that Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives, qualifies as the most strange and singular of all: that which condemns to atimia, to the loss of political and civil rights—participation in the assembly, the right to claim before a jury, the ability to be elected to a magistracy, etc.—to those who remained neutral in a civil war. Factions privatize the city, splitting it into incompatible interests. The middle or center is constructed to propose a common space, to accommodate the litigating parties. The stásis, the division of the political community into different factions or sides, entails the privatization of public space. The archon positions himself with his shield, as the wise Athenian says in one of his poems, in the middle of the armies ready for battle. The center is never a closed space, although it is limited by the litigants that surround it. The concept that defines this territory, metaíkhmion, the space that rises between two armies in conflict, exposes the work of the magistrate and the institutions that intend to establish a public terrain to resolve conflicts without aspiring, from a fictitious and artificial consensus, to annul them. This prevents institutions from closing themselves within a belief system that is intended to be immovable or dissolved into quarrels, into dissensions, and that never reach a meeting point. The center— the space from which a society articulates what it considers common— is the imaginary place from which the institutions of the State are founded. In it, attempts are made to find normative frameworks that allow the different claims of justice arising from civil society to be intelligible and compatible. From that space or no man’s land, as you define it in your question, from which none of the factions has yet appropriated, from that no man’s land, what is common, public, is founded.
* Translated from Spanish by Fiona Baler and Jorge Brioso.
