Superguilty

I have not read Jordi Gracia's essay about The Melancholy Intellectual - not for lack of interest, but because I can't find a copy anywhere. To judge at second hand from what others write about this essay, however, it seems that in it he mentions no names. None of the "melancholy intellectuals" he attacks have been arraigned in person. However, I must admit that I am just that sort of person. Am I a wet blanket?

He attacks those who see the present epoch as one of decadence, at least in the fields of education and culture, and fail to perceive the wonders of our age; those who turn their backs on technological innovations, and deplore the abandonment of old ways.

I do feel myself to be guilty of seeing the present time as an especially idiotic one, but this does not necessarily make me melancholic, or nostalgic for past decades. I was 20 years old in 1971, yet I do not feel any particular nostalgia for the journalism of the 1970s, which seemed to me foolish and boring, and moreover responsible for much of what is worst about journalism today. But, since I did not want to be backward in those days, I submerged myself in lots of foolish trends and contributed to them, in spite of my reservations. This is understandable enough when you are 20. What is not so understandable is the determined modernity of people who are now fully adult, yet have to be forever keeping up with trends. If there is a "melancholy" intellectual, there is also a "chronological" one: the one who rushes to embrace the latest idea at the expense of contradicting himself every few years, and who fails to notice that chronological order has little to do with progress, except in strictly technological terms.

If such a person had lived in the early 19th century in Spain, he would have maintained that the reign of Ferdinand VII was better than that of Charles III, given that it came afterward in time. Or that the French Revolution was a backward step, seen from 1825. This type of person often coincides with another, whom I have called the adulator of youth: the man or woman, middle-aged or old, who abjectly praises what the young of each decade are doing or saying, regardless of whether it is a step forward or backward, or brilliant or stupid.

Of course this epoch has wonderful things. But I see a lot of other things I am unable to like, although I have never lived in a time that seemed to me "golden." I am incapable of celebrating the mediocrity of politicians or their limitless idiocy; or the fact that the language, written and spoken, is growing ever more impoverished and confused, a thin swill of words, with the occasional collaboration of the Academy to which I belong; or that there is more information but also more ignorance, ever more confidently expressed. I have no patience with buzz-words, and break out in a rash whenever I hear expressions such as "alternative systems," "era of information," "dominant ideology," "late capitalism" and "dictatorship of the markets."

I find it hard to take an interest in novels focused on fascination with the internet and such things. To me it is like having been fascinated by the airplane or the telephone when they first appeared. No doubt novels, now forgotten, were written around these inventions. I cannot feel happy when teachers, of whatever country, tell me about university students who are not far above technical illiteracy. Or when I see how courtesy and reasonable discussion have practically been banished from the face of Spain, while puritanism and prohibitionism grow apace.

In short, I admit to being superguilty. I don't know whether of "melancholy," but at any rate of something. I admit to feeling like an anachronism, and rightly so. To rebel against it is to undertake the task of Sisyphus - an endless task, and generally a ridiculous one.