Intolerance and Meaning

For a while now I have been thinking about the multi-decade economic crisis that Puerto Rico is undergoing. People are starting to notice it now because their irresponsible behavior is starting to affect their lives – much like we don't pay attention to our diets until none of our clothes fit. This mismanagement of the Puerto Rican economy has been going on for so long that we have actually bought a whole new set of clothes multiple times. But we truly are at a point of no return. We are about to go blind from diabetes.

The next few years are going to determine what happens in Puerto Rico for the next fifty years, and if we continue business as usual the results will be dire. These moments test the values of the collective that faces them, and any time a group's values are questioned the meanings that comprise an individual's core are also questioned. The more a person identifies with a given group the more his core values will reflect the values of that group.


Recently, in a class I am teaching at the Escuela de Derecho de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, we discussed Jonathan Lear's book "Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation." This book explores the way values are tested in a time of crisis, using the concrete example of the Native American Crow tribe.

During class we tried to use the theoretical framework provided by the book to analyze the situation in Puerto Rico. I firmly believe that what Puerto Rico is dealing with at present is analogous to what the Crow tribe faced, with some important differences.

According to Lear, one of the differences between modern societies and the Crow is that modern societies have access to the histories of other civilizations collapsing. This phenomenon is something we understand happens whereas the Crow did not. The second difference is that compared to the Crow we have more access to new ideas, values, and other modes of thought because we have more connections to other cultures.

However, in some ways as a culture we are less open than the Crow. Unlike the Crow, who had a systematic way to incorporate new insights into their culture, we actively resist new ways of doing things. In Crow society young men were sent out into nature to have a kind of mystical dream that would then be interpreted by the tribe’s elders. This knowledge would then be incorporated into the culture. In one of these dreams a boy who later became a Crow chief dreamt of the coming cataclysm that would forever change the Crow way of life. The dream instructed him to alter his basic values from those of a warrior to also include those of a learner and a listener, someone who could find his excellence in life in the process of learning from everything and everyone around him.

We have analogous systems to bring in new modes of thought to Puerto Rico. For example, it is a common practice for our society to send its young to study college in different cultures in the United States, Europe, or Latin America. However, upon return these members of our society find incredible resistance to any of the new ideas that they bring. There are rote accusations that are leveled against them. The fact that these accusations are rote slogans demonstrates a basic intolerance to different ideas and also demonstrates that this is a social phenomenon and not simply the feelings of one or two individuals. The standard accusation is that the person believes that everything in the United States is better simply because it is from the United States, if that is where the person went to study.

Why go through the process of sending our youth out to gather new ideas if we are going to reject them offhand? What is the source of this intolerance?

The source of the intolerance is precisely the fact that society as a whole is immersed in a struggle for its survival. In this struggle the basic values of the society are under fire and as a result the basic values that individuals use to measure the worth of their own lives is in crisis. Persons are in a position of ontological fragility in which their very ability to lead a worthwhile life is called into question since the values they strive for are themselves in question. The question of being right or wrong becomes the question of having a good life or having an ethically failed life. As a result, people harden their positions lest they have been living a lie and their lives become “worthless.”

We send our youth out because all societies need a way to incorporate new ideas and information, but at the same time Puerto Rican culture, unlike Crow culture, has never known a period where it was not under siege. This has led to the paradoxical situation where we send out for new information, necessary for the continued survival of the culture, but we block said culture from entering the system.

Obviously new culture penetrates the barrier, otherwise I would not be able to write what I am writing in the language I am writing it in. Nevertheless, this barrier exists and prevents any new ideas that may undermine the system from being incorporated. The more central the idea is to the culture the stronger will be the mechanism in its defense.

It is ironic and poignant this idea of intolerance that brought about the most egregious breakdown in civility I have witnessed in an academic setting. While discussing Lear’s text I mentioned this notion of the increase of intolerance based on the danger faced by the society. I mentioned that this increase in intolerance was manifest in the recent protests to Law 7 and in particular to the government layoffs. My students forcefully disagreed. However, I did not want to let the point go so I proposed that even the slogans used by the protesters showed an unreflective intolerance. Specifically, I pointed to the slogan: “que la crisis la paguen los ricos.” Which roughly translates as “let the rich pay for the crisis,” or “the rich should/must pay for the crisis.”

As many forms of intolerance this slogan is just that a slogan. It does not survive close scrutiny. What exactly does the slogan mean? That we should confiscate all property from rich people to balance the budget? That we should increase their taxes to the point where it pays for all the government? Clearly these actions would violate myriad constitutional rights, and more likely than not these actions would fail to solve the short term problem and would exacerbate the long term one.

It is after saying this that the perfect performance of the denied intolerance took place. Here is where an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful student lost it. The student began to yell at me that the slogan was not empty that it had real meaning and was the correct way to solve the problems. I then asked the student to articulate what the slogan meant, but instead of doing this the student continued yelling that the slogan was an acceptable statement and that its meaning was clearly true.

The slogan is no more meaningful than any from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but someone is willing to fight for it because through a combination of repetition, transference, and projection, the slogan, in no way more meaningful now than before, has become the repository of hopes and emotions. The slogan has become a line in the sand that marks a space where the enemy cannot be allowed to pass, because any encroachment past that line threatens the complex web of meanings of the society and its way of life. This in turn threatens the cohesiveness of the individual’s own set of meanings. It threatens the very value of the individual’s life.