By RAFAEL MANTOVANI, BRUNO REGASSON & NICOLÁS GONÇALVES*

The disputes over what Brazil is and what it should be reveal discursive labyrinths that show us conceptions of identity, desires and moral perspectives about the future

On April 9, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) sparked a curious discussion on social media: it published the world map with Brazil at its center. Some liked it because they considered it decolonial, while others saw it as an aberration because it went against the established cartographies of our planet. Although it can be seen as a factoid in the face of serious economic, social and climate problems, the discussion reveals a lot about Brazilians' perception of themselves, the country and their relationship with the world.

In 1943, Joaquín Torres García made a drawing of South America inverted according to cartographic standards. Nowadays, it is a design that is very popular on the left. Not coincidentally, criticism of the map with Brazil centralized came from the right, associating the map with a supposed “lack of notion” for wanting to make Brazil a central country, when, in reality, it would have a peripheral role. Were those who praised him lunatics or, in reality, were those who criticized him those affected by the mongrel complex (Nelson Rodrigues' happy expression for a feeling of Brazilian inferiority, a narcissism in reverse)?

The superficial discussion about the map reveals discursive labyrinths that show us conceptions of identity, desires and moral perspectives about the future. The disputes over what Brazil is and what it should be are not new today. Since the 19th century, with independence, the country's issues and possible ways of resolving them have been discussed. And the suggestions on how to resolve them are guided by social and moral conceptions: that is, they are based on analysis regarding reality, but they also have ethical preferences. Diagnosis and prognosis are, therefore, two facets that complement each other when thinking about Brazilian society.

The serious discussion about the country's ills generated very pessimistic views both in common sense and in intellectual, academic and political discussions. What would be the evils that would prevent Brazil from realizing its capabilities? And once the problem has been diagnosed, what would be the most appropriate project to solve social problems and fulfill our potentials satisfactorily? Again, the answers differed greatly. Evidently, this movement is not neutral, it is not devoid of moral conceptions of society and it varied from right to left.

Suggestions about who we should be inspired by, since the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century, alternated between Europe and the United States, with a few voices defending their own organization, without copies. Thus, the discussion also concerned national autonomy: (i) would we have the capacity to invent ourselves as a society, (ii) should we have already established good standards to inspire us or (iii) would we have to import successful models? Knowing that there is a great predisposition to accept North American sociopolitical and economic models as an object of desire to be implemented here, we ask ourselves: would the average Brazilian effectively accept the ethical reasons and social disputes that drive the society of the United States? United as praiseworthy?

Narcissus in reverse

With their eyes focused on Europe and the United States, our intellectuals were often interested in our absences: lack of civil society, representative bodies, material wealth, political integration, urbanity, industry, white workers...

Independent Brazil was born from a political process all its own: it had almost no anti-colonial nativism. Our Independence generation was the same one that was committed to the project of the Luso-Brazilian Empire (that is, instead of political emancipation, it was betting on the creation of a political regime combined with Portugal, in the style of the United Kingdom).

Project frustrated by the Porto Revolution, in which the Portuguese were intransigent in trying to restore the colonial pact with Brazil to the way it was configured before the opening of the ports in 1808. José Murilo de Carvalho demonstrates how this elite was homogenized in education and training … in Coimbra. Formed through European lenses, many of our heroes of the colonial rupture saw civilization only there, while here, according to them, “barbarism” reigned.

Maria Odila Dias, in The interiorization of the Metropolis, identifies this feeling among the national political elite. Separated from the rest of the population by an abyss, these men were united by material interests, but also by a double insecurity. The first, a personality crisis: are we really civilized? The second, a social phobia. Between 1791 and 1804, an uprising of enslaved people in Haiti led to the abolition of slavery and the country's independence. Our rural aristocracy feared being replaced by the repetition of this episode on national lands. Due to this fear of “barbarism”, many of our social, economic and political institutions remained intact: the monarchy, the state type and slavery.

The delay diagnoses were diverse. According to many of the authors, we had the cursed heritage of Iberian culture, which we carried thanks to our bad luck of having been colonized by the wrong country. Or else, we would be victims of geographic determinism: our biome, relief and tropical climate would definitively impede settlement, territorial occupation and economic development. But the most perverse way of explaining Brazil's delay, certainly, was the one that understood that the country's scourge was its racial mixture.

Eugenicists such as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906) and Oliveira Viana (1883-1951) brought studies avant-garde of intellectuals such as Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936). In a highly mixed country like ours, these eugenicist discourses found a favorable space here and biologicalist theses on racial inequality were developed.

The positive signs would obviously be in the white population, while the negative signs would be in the black and indigenous population. Miscegenation, therefore, would be a problem: it would impede our modernization and democratization. And what would be the path to democracy? Aryanizing the country by mixing “superior mestizos” with whites, encouraging selective immigration, political exclusion and, ultimately, birth control.

Tupi or not tupi?

However, our intellectuals did not live solely on desires for whitening: a broad desire to achieve “civilization” stimulated their imaginations. But how? Should we copy models from other countries? If so, which ones? Of those praising the copy to the United States, we can point to the prominent figures of Quintino Bocaiúva (1836-1912) and Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948).

Minister Quintino Bocaiúva, one of the most prominent figures in the republican coup, had enormous admiration for American institutions and defended their transplantation to Brazil, but not without translation. It would be due to the Americanism of the Argentine constitution of 1853 and the example of constitutionalist presidents such as Domingo Sarmiento, Nicolás Avellaneda and José Alcorta, who taught him about the need for a conservative skeleton, based on the state of siege, for the liberal federative body of the regime. . Only in this way would it be possible to control the country's internal struggles and consolidate republican authority.

Meanwhile, Quintino Bocaiúva tried to strengthen ties with the North American government, which seemed, on the one hand, willing to recognize the republic of the United States of Brazil (as the country was called in its first republican version), which imitated its constitution and its flag, however, on the other hand, he was concerned about the military presence within the new government. The European powers at the time had no intention of recognizing the government led by Deodoro da Fonseca before the United States of America did so. At the end of January 1890, the North American nation recognized the government and realized the functionality of the subordinate position that Brazil offered.

Monteiro Lobato, some time later, would praise the “states” (a word chosen by Lobato himself) in his work America, written after three years of living in the United States. For him, American America is seen as a land of giants. From the complex naturalistic mix between race, culture and environment would derive the spontaneous force of the North Americans responsible for the natural progress of that place, something very different from what would occur in tropical lands, lands of excess and lack of control. It is there, in the “states”, that what matters. “A novel by Alencar or Macedo doesn’t wake up anything in my soul; already the books by Jack London, Melville and even those by Mark Twain with scenes from Mississippi resonate with me”, he wrote in 1932.

But there was another side to this coin. A contemporary of Quintino Bocaiuva, Eduardo Prado (1860-1901) highlighted the harmful influence of copying on the North American system. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982), in turn, a contemporary of Monteiro Lobato, would do the same some time later.

Eduardo Prado strongly defended, in particular, Spanish influence over the tropics, stating that the miscegenation that began during the period of Moorish domination over the Iberian Peninsula, added to the miscegenation already occurring in Latin American territory, would have the capacity to create a race capable of survive in the “terrible” environment of the region. He claimed that the alleged ineptitude of the mixed-race men who lived in America in his time was just a widespread prejudice spread by “northern men”.

His Catholicism appears in his work and in his admiration for the Spanish way of life that had arrived in America. He pointed out that Catholicism made men equal by placing whites, blacks and mestizos under the same roof, within the same church, kickstarting the myth that spanned the 20th century and still accompanies us in the 21st: “racial democracy”. The United States and its pagan religion, in the thinker's eyes, transformed men into machines, distorting an assumption he considered humanist. The Brazil of the future, in its redemptive version, should be monarchist and deeply Catholic.

The young Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was greatly influenced by Eduardo Prado's ideas. Like him, Sérgio Buarque carefully observed our Iberian roots, seeing with better eyes those that had come from Spain than those that came from Portugal. By focusing more heavily on utilitarianism Yankee, exemplifies this by saying that it was born from the idea that happiness could only be achieved by the extreme simplification of life: “the utilitarian style of today's Anglo-Saxons is spreading throughout the world”, he complained in February 1921. They both believed in nativist solutions of Iberian origin. One could not imitate something that was not inscribed in our historical forge.

Brazilian nationalisms

The history of our nationalisms is complex and demonstrates the tortuous and multiple paths that nationalizing ideologies can take. In the 19th century, our main national concern was anti-Portuguese or official, on the part of the Crown. National projects actually became more complex in the 20th century.

One of these projects began to take shape here in the 1910s. Denying foreignisms, denouncing copyism and valuing a supposed analytical realism, authors such as Alberto Torres (1865-1917), Azevedo do Amaral (1881-1942) and the aforementioned Oliveira Viana began to assert a political nationalism based on the need for their own solutions to the country's specific problems. But this organicist conception, which negatively analyzed the privatism of Brazilian society, resulted in a project of organization at the top of the dispersed and amorphous nation. Build, through the political art of leaders, the Brazilian people. Coherently, important names from this generation became part of the authoritarian project of the Estado Novo in 1937.

Whether we would copy, create or practice anthropophagy also became an aesthetic question at the beginning of the 20th century. The modernists' concern about the direction of art was in tune with a new perspective on Brazil's ills: from then on, it was understood that perhaps the country's problem was not racial or climatic, but rather caused by diseases that afflicted the country. poor people. Taking care of it would become the political solution, understanding and praising its cultural and artistic elements would be the new sociocultural directive.

Answering what Brazil was would involve our corners, understanding the language, music and visual arts of the people hitherto forgotten by the elites. This perspective animated the Brazilian left from then on. Who would be the oppressed people who would truly represent Brazilians and who could redeem us from capitalist injustices? The vilified hillbilly, the fisherman, the farmer, the samba dancer, the worker.

Intellectual vanguards positioned on the left produced a lot of culture with this. Even during the dictatorship, as Marcelo Ridenti tells us in his book In search of the Brazilian people, despite being authors hated by economic elites, these avant-gardists provided a lot of material for conservatives. Such vanguards praised elements of national identity, which was not necessarily contradictory to the perspective of national elites on the right. In their artistic productions, they could not act out their ultimate desire due to censorship: the end of private ownership of the means of production was prohibited.

It is said that this was one of the formulas found by the major media to deal with such cultural producers: they would be great, but, due to the military dictatorship, they could not go beyond praising Brazilianness, as if they talked about socialization of the media, production would be censored. Interestingly, the culture of iê iê iê, widely publicized by the recent, but already robust Brazilian cultural industry, inspired by foreign and North American standards, was viewed with bad eyes by the military wings.

Therefore, there was a primary difference between the two nationalisms: does nationalism aim at revolution or order? Would the aggrandizement of the Brazilian image be to break with capitalist norms or would it be based on fear of disturbances? For groups on the left, it was about pointing out local idiosyncrasies to transform the status of a country subjected to imperialism. It was a call to insubordination.

Unlike this, for those positioned on the right, the call to Brazilian specificities was presupposed to show its specific (and, perhaps, noble) place in the capitalist order and count on the tutelage of the richest and most militarily strong countries. In the civil-military coup of 1964, what mattered most was fear regarding the working classes associated with the petty bourgeoisie.

The fear of sedition, which had existed since the 19th century and went by the name of Haitianization, appeared once again as a unifying element for the dominant classes who renounced a leading role in their own economy to become supporting and protected by the large international monopolies. Of course, there were also military conglomerates that believed in the need for an autonomous country, not subject to an imperialist nation. However, let us focus on the prominent wings that effectively determined the direction of national politics.

Under the military dictatorship, it remained to be found what would be the specific place of the Brazilian in the capitalist gear, with us being protected by the security offered by a military sense given to that curious patriotic pride of being subject to the United States and, by homology, we could perhaps also be a great nation. In this way, the strange attitude of a Brazilian president who adheres to the ideas of the extreme right of saluting the Yankee flag becomes understandable.

The reactionary nationalism of Bolsonarism artificially creates a people, governs directly in their name and against their enemies. As Christian Lynch and Paulo Henrique Cassimiro point out in Reactionary populism, The speech draws, in its origins, from Olavist reactionism. Olavo de Carvalho's reactionary culturalism wants to regenerate what he considers to be authentic Brazilian culture. Brazil would be inserted in the “Western” world, this West essentialized as the “Judeo-Christian civilization” of which the United States would be the great protagonist.

The version of Brazilian history he prefers is the one that passes through the perspective of Casa-Grande, patriarchal families of European descent, Bandeirantism reimagined as a parallel to the March to the West and, of course, the Brazilian military dictatorship. The people, in the Bolsonarist version, have ethnicity, religion and origin. Hence the possibility of articulating “patriotism” and staunch alignment with the United States as a discourse. “Brazil is so big”, he says, “it could be the United States”.

This alignment is still influenced by other ideological and political phenomena. There is the theology of dominion, or dominionism, with Pentecostal bases and a high degree of paranoia that defends the transformation of civil life into a spiritual war, including within the scope of State control. Thus, the alignment may undergo some variations, being more enthusiastic about the presidency of a Donald Trump than that of a Joe Biden.

The global articulation of the far right is, obviously, also essential to understand the relationship between Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. Giving due weight to these considerations, the approach is based on the desire to see Brazil protected by the great power of Judeo-Christian civilization. Having taken different forms, some secular, we find this disposition in other moments of our nationalisms on the right.

Mirror, my mirror...

There is a lot of common sense that seems to have sided with those who wanted to copy the North American model. But would those who complain when we don't align ourselves with the USA (or even Europe) want to live in a society with these other values ​​that guide its political positions?

O LOBBY In the United States, for example, it is not a crime. Here yes. In the United States, it is almost a given that corporations control the State. In Brazil, there is also this perception, however, as something ethically reprehensible. In other words: we have a perception that there are more problems in public management here because we add an element that is not seen as a crime in the United States.

Even if we fail to achieve this possible virtue, understanding this relationship as something to be corrected shows a different conception of who should be the leader of political power. We should reduce corruption rates by legalizing LOBBY, that is, do we come to understand that it is the market that holds the State's legitimate monopoly, as permitted in the USA?

And the convictions that guide the idea of ​​public health? Today, in Brazil, any speech in favor of the extinction of the Unified Health System is completely impossible. It is an almost unshakable common sense that education and health are a duty of the State and a right of the citizen.

The debate in the United States is quite different. The idea of ​​everyone for themselves generated a social security and public health system that no Brazilian would consider even in their worst nightmare. In the United States, having a terminal and/or expensive illness and being treated by the public system, without having to dispose of an asset, is an unthinkable reality.

In an interview that one of the authors of this text carried out with Charles Rosenberg – On the history of medicine in the United States, theory, health insurance, and psychiatry: an interview with Charles Rosenberg –, the American historian spoke about how unthinkable it is, for an American, to believe that the life expectancy of a Cuban is similar to his. To this, we could add that it would be unthinkable for US citizens to have a healthcare system like the SUS, implemented and functioning. The richest society in the world understands that if you get sick, that's your problem. Not here.

At the end of the Second World War and with the beginning of the discussion about the welfare state, a huge debate arose in the United States regarding the ways in which the world had already thought about public health. Basically, the question was: being one of the richest societies in the world, should we leave everyone to their own devices? There were examples of other, less individualistic models that could provide answers that would be more satisfying to a caring community.

However, politically, the United States took the opposite stance. The boldest proposal towards solidarity has been that of Barack Obama. Although very far from ideas such as universality and mandatory service provision, it became a laughing stock among Republicans. In Brazil, this discussion would never exist. What is required is the opposite: the SUS needs the financing it needs. It would never be said that it would be too costly and that it should be extinguished.

By way of conclusion, we can evoke the phrase that became a mantra from Tom Jobim: “Brazil is not for beginners”. Not that it is that difficult to understand, but it is evidently a country with several narrative disputes and many other proposals regarding what to do. Based on evidence about socioeconomic inequalities or climate, racial and moral illusions, we create countless certainties about which direction society should take.

And this interweaving of different impressions about us, others, and the colonialisms that cross us is curious, which, instead of transforming dreams into nightmares, has the capacity to transform nightmares into dreams.

*Rafael Mantovani He is a professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at UFSC. Book author Modernizing order in the name of health: the São Paulo of military, poor and slaves (1805-1840) (Fiocruz). [https://amzn.to/3YnbySW]

*Bruno Regasson is a doctoral candidate in political sociology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).

*Nicolás Gonçalves is a doctoral candidate in political sociology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).

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