No idiocy like educated idiocy.(Review)

Man is born rich, but almost everywhere is poor.

It is to the elucidation of this paradox that many of the finest minds of Latin America have been devoted for nearly a century. And the best answer they have been able to give is that most men are poor because a few men are rich. And, by the same token, those few men are rich because most men are poor. On this view, wealth is a form of institutionalized plunder. Nothing had to be --or remains to be--discovered, invented, or developed. The wealth of the world has been the same since the beginning of time and will remain the same until the end of time. Hence your slice of the economic cake, both personal and international, necessarily decreases the size of mine, and thus poverty is always someone else's fault. This means that the wealth of Europe and America was erected on a foundation of cheap bananas.

These ideas--a kind of anti-Semitism sans the Jews--are so absurd that they are almost auto-refuting, at least for anyone with a few facts at his disposal and a minimal ability to think connectedly. Yet they have had an historical importance and influence vastly disproportionate to their intellectual merit, and have even constituted an unassailable orthodoxy among Latin American intellectuals, some of them of great distinction. Indeed, it was hardly possible for someone to be considered an intellectual at all in Latin America unless he subscribed to these ideas. A man who pointed out their logical and empirical shortcomings was considered a traitor to the patria and most likely in the pay of the CIA to boot.

The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot(1) is therefore a deeply iconoclastic book, to an extent that no one unfamiliar with Latin American intellectual life, economic theorizing, historiography, and even theology would suspect. The dialectical ease with which the authors are able to dispose of prevailing orthodoxy is no guide to the courage that is necessary to do so. For Latin American literati to argue that the poverty of Bolivia or Honduras is not caused by the rapacity of the United States is a little like arguing in Saudi Arabia that the prophet was the victim of a psychiatric disorder.

The book works best as a kind of twentieth-century bestiary, in which appear the sea-monsters of Latin American political economy and philosophy. It is a valuable work of historical conservation because it is not impossible that in a few years it will be denied that such foolish ideas were ever given wide currency. (The Library of St Antony's College, Oxford, threw out its Ceausescu-era Romanian collection within weeks of the dictator's downfall, since they were no longer `relevant.')

The "Latin American Idiot" of the book's title is not, of course, the uneducated peasant or slum-dweller, because it takes a degree of education to be able to deny obvious truths and defend obvious falsehoods. The Idiot of the title is thus the university-educated intellectual trained in what must now, alas, be called the inhumanities. This type, produced in ever larger numbers, discovered to his chagrin that his accession to the educated minority did not automatically reward him with the high position in society of which he believed himself worthy and to which he also believed himself entitled. Nothing was left for him but the sour consolation of resentment, and the theory that wealth is the cause of poverty (and vice versa) fitted his bill perfectly.

Latin American universities (which, ever since the reform movement in 1919 at Cordoba University in Argentina, have cherished and defended their autonomy from the state) were for many years centers of revolutionary ferment in which it was dangerous for students to dissent from the ideas of the Latin American Idiot. To think differently was to risk social ostracism or worse. Revolutionary squalor reigned everywhere, and a situation developed in the 1970s and 1980s in which there was violent anarchy within the confines of the university, tempered by the operation of death squads without. Sendero Luminoso ("The Shining Path") was perhaps the ne plus ultra of Latin American idiocy, indeed its platonic distillation, and it was entirely the product of Ayacucho University in Peru.