Pra mim uma questão subjacente à de "mérito = produtividade" e à das
cotas é a seguinte: o quanto nós devemos deixar os losers se ferrarem
só por eles serem losers?
Vou me dar a liberdade de fazer uma citação grande, abaixo, de um
livro absolutamente genial - "The Lives of Animals", do J.M. Coetzee;
não tenho a tradução dele para Português ("A vida dos animais" -
Companhia das Letras) online, mas tem um PDF do original aqui:
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/Coetzee99.pdf
Deixa eu dar uma explicação. Toda vez que a gente discute
meritocracia, critérios de mérito acadêmico, cotas, etc, a gente
indiretamente está discutindo também "esquerda", "direita", "política"
(tanto micro quanto macro), etc - que são coisas com uma carga
emocional fortíssima... espero que a gente desta vez tenha a
maturidade de usar a discussão mais pra cada um explicitar a sua
posição e entender a dos outros do que pra cair na histeria e nos
ataques ad-hominem...
Por outro lado, eu SEI que nós - membros da lista, como um todo - não
temos maturidade pra isto; eu sei que apesar das minhas boas intenções
daqui a pouco este thread vai ter 200 mensagens, muitas super
agressivas, como o thread sobre homeopatia, várias pessoas vão estar
espumando de ódio de outras, vamos ter mais algumas mensagens pedindo
que o moderador da lista (!!!) tome providências, e meia dúzia de
pessoas vão se desinscrever da lista... mas uma coisa que eu aprendi
este ano é que isto é inevitável, e não é problema meu.
Mas voltando à citação que eu vou pôr abaixo. Um dos grandes temas do
"A vida dos animais" é que não dá mais pra gente fingir que fechar os
olhos pro sofrimento dos losers é algo que só os monstros fazem - todo
mundo faz isto, em maior ou menor grau - e tá na hora da gente fazer
algo melhor com relação a genocídios do que ficar histéricos num
momento, e depois esquecer deles.
(Lembrem que a minha motivação original pra postar isto era: o quanto
a gente deve pleitear para coleguinhas losers? E: se a gente estivesse
na posição do Décio, será que a gente conseguiria ter alguma empatia
pelos coleguinhas losers? Bom, lá vai...)
"Between 1942 and 1945 several million people were put to death
in the concentration camps of the Third Reich: at Treblinka alone
more than a million and a half, perhaps as many as three million.
These are numbers that numb the mind. We have only one death of our
own: we can comprehend the deaths of others only one at a time: in
the abstract we may be able to count to a million, but we cannot
count to a million deaths.
"The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka --
Poles, for the most part -- said that they did not know what was
going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might
have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said
that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they
did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.
"The people around Treblinka were not exceptional. There were
camps all over the Reich, nearly six thousand in Poland alone,
untold thousands in Germany proper. Few Germans lived more than a
few kilometres from a camp of some kind. Not every camp was a death
camp, a camp dedicated to the production of death, but horrors went
on in all of them, more horrors by far than one could afford to
know, for one's own sake.
"It is not because they waged an expansionist war, and lost it,
that Germans of a particular generation are still regarded as
standing a little outside humanity, as having to do or be something
special before they can be readmitted to the human fold. They lost
their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance
on their part. Under the circumstances of Hitler's kind of war,
ignorance may have been a useful survival mechanism, but that is an
excuse which, with admirable moral rigor, we refuse to accept. In
Germany, we say, a certain line was crossed which took people beyond
the ordinary murderousness and cruelty of warfare into a state that
we can only call sin. The signing of the articles of capitulation
and the payment of reparations did not put an end to that state of
sin. On the contrary, we said, a sickness of the soul continued to
mark that generation. It marked those citizens of the Reich who had
committed evil actions, but also those who, for whatever reason,
were in ignorance of those actions. It thus marked, for practical
purposes, every citizen of the Reich. Only those in the camps were
innocent.
"`They went like sheep to the slaughter.' `They died like
animals.' `The Nazi butchers killed them.' Denunciation of the camps
reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and
slaughterhouse that it is barely necessary for me to prepare the
ground for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third
Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like
animals.
(...)
"The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in
common -- reason, self-consciousness, a soul -- with other animals?
(With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to
treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonoring
their corpses.) I return to the death camps. The particular horror
of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there
was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared
with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too
abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves
into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said,
`It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.' They did not say,
`How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?' They did not say,
`It is I who am in that cattle car.' They said, `It must be the dead
who are being burnt today, making the air stink and falling in ash
on my cabbages.' They did not say, `How would it be if I were
burning?' They did not say, `I am burning, I am falling in ash.'
"In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the
seat of a faculty, sympathy. that allows us to share at times the
being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and
little to do with the object, the `another,' as we see at once when
we think of the object not as a bat (`Can I share the being of a
bat?') but as another human being. There are people who have the
capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who
have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them
psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose
not to exercise it.
"Despite Thomas Nagel, who is probably a good man, despite
Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes, with whom I have more
difficulty in sympathizing, there is no limit to the extent to which
we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no
bounds to the sympathetic imagination. If you want proof, consider
the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on
Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the
existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did
not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event,
the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment
of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the
existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way
into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being
with whom I share the substrate of life.
"I return one last time to the places of death all around us,
the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we
close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet as far as I can
see our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can
do anything, it seems, and come away clean.
"We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and
did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they
were inwardly marked by the aftereffects of that special form of
ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose
suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like
to think they woke up haggard in the mornings, and died of gnawing
cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the
opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it;
that there is no punishment."
[[]],
Eduardo Ochs
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