The conversation Broken Promiseswhich the rain forced to move from its original location in the Plaza de España to the Hall of Columns of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, has maintained, despite this change in a closed space, the freshness of a spontaneous exchange. “You have always defended that philosophy must be attached to the street,” stressed the director and founder of elDiario.es, Ignacio Escolar. “Reflecting does not depend on whether an academy or a school makes it possible, but on what happens precisely when social, political or cultural codes are broken,” responded Marina Garcés during a dialogue organized within the framework of the Festival of Ideas.
The philosopher linked this issue to the central point of the dialogue: promises. He believes that there is “a public language of the promise made only to not be kept, which depends on its ability to seduce or compete more than on its truthfulness.” A language that we accept “for convenience in the face of the elements,” despite the suspicion or distrust of those who promise us something that we almost certainly know will not come true. “We want to hear promises even if we know they are not true,” Ignacio Esolar added.
Garcés recently published the essay The time of promisesin which he explores precisely the role played by this intangible form of agreement, as well as its scope and non-compliance. As director of the Master of Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), the Barcelona philosopher has much to say about the way in which political promises are broken or continually fail, both in the private and public spheres. to the given word.
Religious Promises and Political Threats
Garcés distinguishes an older generation that “feels a total rejection of the language of promise, as something that comes from a power (State, God or capitalism) that has given itself, but also of a shared or equal promise that has disappointed.” He speaks instead of “the audacity of the younger ones to make the future present, which is exactly what promises do.”
Escolar asked if in the history of humanity there was a more important question than the religious question. For Garcés, “at least at the Western level, it is the basis of a cultural structure that establishes the link with others, the promise as the basis of the alliance of a people with the word of God and as the basis for the organization of a people.” common time. He wonders if “no matter how secular we think we are, we have gotten rid of this structure and no longer really believe in this promise of salvation.”
This religious promise, from salvation to the idea of a promised land, leads to “an authoritarian structure.” Therefore, from his point of view, “this type of narrative integrates with common sense and the past to, for example, assume that a generation lives or has lived better than the one that preceded it.” “It is not like that. There are times when historical phenomena break out, and then it is appropriate to ask who is the subject of this, us,” he added about a promise of constant progress that, when it does not materialize, affects the feeling of “fraud and resentment.”
If you listen carefully, the far right does not make promises, it plays with the language of guilt and threats, and it is the most effective in terms of primary emotions. Nobody believes that there are solutions anymore, so they do not sell solutions or collective promises, just resentment.
Marina Garces
— Philosopher
Garcés invites us to “interpret promises, not just receive them.” Thus, he advocates listening, rethinking, and even breaking promises, rather than assimilating them indiscriminately, captive to a “language of frustration that the extreme right appeals to.”
Consider, however, that we live more in a period of threats than promises, but that the two feed off each other. “Despite their banal and false reverberation, promises remain effective as schools of frustration,” he explained. Escolar illustrated this with Brexit, a promise transformed into an executed threat that has led to new frustrations and tensions. “If you listen carefully, the extreme right does not make promises, it plays with the language of guilt and threat, and this is the most effective thing in terms of primary emotions. No one believes that there are solutions anymore, so they do not sell solutions or collective promises, just resentment,” says the author of unfinished philosophy (2015).
From ‘the desire to be deceived’ to promises that don’t speak of promises
Ignacio Escolar wonders if there is “a desire to be deceived,” to which Garcés responded that “there is a desire to play with a card, even if you know it is a deceived card.” “Resentment is more profitable than disappointment. When someone says that immigrants eat dogs, they don’t expect people to believe it, but it doesn’t matter, it manages to move,” the philosopher explained. “Like the poster of File X with the message I want to believe“, added Ignacio Esolar.
“Do you think that one of the reasons for the broken promises is the lack of freedom and movement in politics?” he said, citing as an example the Housing Law or the regularization of housing leases that were canceled before being processed. “You are mixing power and freedom,” Garcés replied after an explanatory nod with which he expressed his doubts. “What is at stake today in the political space is what it means to have power and what it is necessary to be able to do. If those who have power say they cannot do, we will have to review what it means to have power, transform politics into the power to do and not into having the power. Freedom requires something other than having power if we want it to work in favor of freer societies,” the intellectual explained.
Escolar cited Adolfo Suárez’s “I can promise and I promise” to determine whether the consequences of this statement justify abandoning the literal use of the word “promise.” Garcés stated that today “none of the promises of this speech have been kept, neither the territorial, nor the union, nor the social, nor the economic.” He emphasized that “the duplication of the promise [no solo promete, puede prometer] “He tried to show that he was the only one capable of carrying them out, which later turned out not to exist.” A phrase that “in performative terms created legitimacy in someone who had none to prevent the Franco regime.” Garcés recalls that words “create realities and destroy them, they also kill.”
“Were we more naive or were we less involved in the collective?” Escolar said of the growing skepticism about promises. According to Garcés, overinformation and the accumulation of stimuli partly explain this. And that before, the religious and patriarchal promise covered this space (for example, he abandoned another meaning of the word “promise”). He advocates “inventing ways that do not depend on these old structures, but that do not depend on the trivialization of the word either.”
The capitalist promise versus that of the current left
“What is the promise of capitalism?” Ignacio Esolar highlighted. His interlocutor distinguished two. On the one hand, “the guarantee: if you work, you will have a better life.” In parallel, “the disruptive: if you constantly invent and innovate, even if it is your own life, you could continue to play.” The “adaptive servitude” that the philosopher already studied in her book apprentice school (2020). A promise that generates exhaustion, discomfort.
And at the same time, the left was retreating, both agreed on their objectives. A language of “rescuers, of rescue, when at other times he spoke of conquests.” “Basically, it is a conservative idea,” Escolar added. Garcés defends an active memory, a memory according to which rights or democracy itself are not a given privilege. But above all, he advocates “the construction of something common, opening politics and the State to the real exercise of all the spaces, times and places in which we take the possibility of deliberating, deciding, entering into conflict or wanting to coexist with others.” A reconfiguration more “of the political than of the political.”
Faced with this, “there is a bureaucratic apparatus that increasingly distances those who do from those who decide, something I clearly appreciate in the field I know best, which is education,” the writer lamented. He believes that we should opt for other terms instead of “regenerating democracy” and struggling to “reinvent or reimagine”, once the political parties have clearly shown their limits and shortcomings. He calls, within “the limits of limited time that make it difficult to think about new futures”, to propose possibilities that allow “to imagine and build other horizons”. As promised, it doesn’t sound bad.
