If you asked me what the object and purpose of this short text was, I don’t know what I would answer. It does not intend to impose, or even defend, a point of view on any subject. He also does not want to participate in any controversy. He only has the title he has because he needed one.
Perhaps it is nothing more than an outburst, a reflection of an obscure and inexplicable discomfort. Bernardo Soares wrote “my head and the universe hurt”. Without intending to share this pain, or even understand it, I also feel something hurting, not physically, but in the environments that surround me. Something like acute “holistitis”!
The world, or a significant part of it, as well as the human beings who inhabit it, are strange. They are more intransigent, less adept at talking and reaching consensus with those who think differently, more isolated and closed off, more inclined towards authoritarian – or even violent – solutions to individual or collective problems (maybe they have always been more or less like this and what I lack is memory – or maybe not).
The feeling I get, when talking to friends or reading what is written in the newspapers, is that we are approaching (if we haven’t already experienced it), not the end of history, but a significant change – at least on the scale of my life – in the way human beings face their difficulties. And the prospects worsen significantly if newspapers are replaced by social networks, according to what I hear from some who participate in them.
A few days ago I read in a newspaper the phrase “drinking wine gives many Portuguese people cancer”. It was, apparently, an appeal that was intended to be ironic – inspired by an old commercial message that promoted the consumption of wine –, expressed in poor Portuguese, which is becoming common (cancer doesn’t happen, it happens). Well looked at, it would be, rather, an intimation – rather, an intimidation – not to make people drink less wine, but to make them stop drinking the drink completely.
Two things seem certain to me: the first, scientifically proven, is that excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages harms health; the second, for which there is no scientific evidence, is that alcohol, even drunk in moderation, significantly increases the risk of cancer. But what the author of that sentence intends is not to reduce the consumption of alcoholic beverages: it is simply to prohibit it. Even at the cost of an unfounded or even intentionally false statement.
Some time ago, some young people, called “activists”, got involved in various acts of contempt, shouting more or less abstruse slogans, including the phrase “get rid of the planes”. Apparently, they want an immediate end – everything they want is, inevitably, immediate – of air transport, guilty, without the right to defense or trial, of the degradation of the environment, that hated mortal sin, with no forgiveness, nor mitigating, permissible.
These extreme positions, hostile to any dialogue, are what deserve the epithet of radical. Radicalism translates into the systematic refusal to seek consensual solutions to problems. Radicals feel they are masters of the truth and do not accept transactions or balancing conflicting interests. The most popular – and irritating – manifestation of radicalism is the expression “red lines”. They imagine people enclosed in squares limited by lines of that color, on the inside the “good” ones, on the outside the “bad” ones. Or the opposite, which is irrelevant in this case.
Moderation, on the contrary, feeds on dialogue, promotes consensus, and is satisfied with compromise. The moderate has his own ideas, of course, but accepts that they may not be the best. You are willing to compare them with the ideas of others, assuming willingness to change your own.
Moderates admit that electric vehicles are the future, but they do not think it is possible or intelligent to bury combustion engines now. Moderates do not abuse red meat and ultra-processed foods, but they do not consider it sensible or reasonable to impose veganism, depriving us of beautiful cheese or banning ham.
Finally, the oxymoron: I confess to being a moderate, radically moderate!
Former president of the Constitutional Court