German philosopher, and utopian socialist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), alarmed at what he saw as the Jewish danger to the West, once wrote that "I see no other means of protecting ourselves against them than by conquering their Promised Land and sending them all there".Fichte might have been too harsh on the Jews. It would be difficult today in Portugal to have such animosity against them. Even though an increasing number of Portuguese middle and upper class intellectuals like to see themselves as Jews or having Jewish ancestry - a rather unsurprising fact in a country where Jews lived for millenia -, the truth is that the Jews are a tiny minority - in all, five hundred people - and a well integrated community, to the point that the country has even had recently a Jewish President. This is most certainly a testimony to the extraordinary capacity of the Portuguese people to mix and live peacefully with other people.
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Thus, I might have been unfair to the majority of the Portuguese people when in my previous post I characterized them generally as being untrustfull of their fellow citizens and always ready to call upon the government to set up fiscais to control them. I should be more precise now and say, rather, that this is a typical, if not an exclusive, feature of the way of thinking of the intellectuals in the country.
Modern, secular, Portuguese intellectuals owe their origin to a class of university trained professionals that for more than one and a half century dominated the cultural and political landscape in the country - the lawyers graduated at the Universidade de Coimbra, for more than 150 years the only university existing in Portugal.
It is the culture of lawyers, with its characteristic adversity towards each other, in which life is transformed into a battlefield of mutual blame, suspicion and accusations, that is responsible for the pervasive attitude among Portuguese intellectuals of mutual hate, rivalry and rancor, and for their tendency to join in ideological groups permanently at war with each other.
It is this culture that explains why reading Portuguese newspapers, watching political or even academic debates, one gets the impression that the Portuguese do not trust and do not like each other and are thus constantly calling for fiscais and new laws to control the citizenry. It goes without saying that the people who make the laws to control their fellow citizens are the lawyers themselves, and the fiscais, certainly those in the top and most rewarding positions, are typically people with a degree in law.
As the Portuguese society joined the European Union in 1986 and opened to the World, many Portuguese students were sent abroad to study science, economics, medicine and other fields. Coming from a small, closed, country, this openess certainly helped them to broaden their outlooks regarding life and the universe. There is one field, however, where students could not go abroad because it is a field distinctively Portuguese, and that is law. This people have remained forever closed in their narrow, archaic, corporativistic, adversarial way of thinking and they remain, in my view, the greatest obstacle to an open, progressive, and truly free Portuguese society.
It was in this state of mind that, a few days ago, I entered the New Year. I could not free myself of thinking about Fichte´s solution to get rid of what he saw as the inconveniences caused by the Jews in the Germany of his time. Thus, for 2008 my great wish turned out in my imagination to be that I would become sufficiently wealthy to send all the Portuguese people having an academic background in law - Direito, as it is called here - to a paradise island for a period of ten years, with all conveniences of life freely available.
Thus, I might have been unfair to the majority of the Portuguese people when in my previous post I characterized them generally as being untrustfull of their fellow citizens and always ready to call upon the government to set up fiscais to control them. I should be more precise now and say, rather, that this is a typical, if not an exclusive, feature of the way of thinking of the intellectuals in the country.
Modern, secular, Portuguese intellectuals owe their origin to a class of university trained professionals that for more than one and a half century dominated the cultural and political landscape in the country - the lawyers graduated at the Universidade de Coimbra, for more than 150 years the only university existing in Portugal.
It is the culture of lawyers, with its characteristic adversity towards each other, in which life is transformed into a battlefield of mutual blame, suspicion and accusations, that is responsible for the pervasive attitude among Portuguese intellectuals of mutual hate, rivalry and rancor, and for their tendency to join in ideological groups permanently at war with each other.
It is this culture that explains why reading Portuguese newspapers, watching political or even academic debates, one gets the impression that the Portuguese do not trust and do not like each other and are thus constantly calling for fiscais and new laws to control the citizenry. It goes without saying that the people who make the laws to control their fellow citizens are the lawyers themselves, and the fiscais, certainly those in the top and most rewarding positions, are typically people with a degree in law.
As the Portuguese society joined the European Union in 1986 and opened to the World, many Portuguese students were sent abroad to study science, economics, medicine and other fields. Coming from a small, closed, country, this openess certainly helped them to broaden their outlooks regarding life and the universe. There is one field, however, where students could not go abroad because it is a field distinctively Portuguese, and that is law. This people have remained forever closed in their narrow, archaic, corporativistic, adversarial way of thinking and they remain, in my view, the greatest obstacle to an open, progressive, and truly free Portuguese society.
It was in this state of mind that, a few days ago, I entered the New Year. I could not free myself of thinking about Fichte´s solution to get rid of what he saw as the inconveniences caused by the Jews in the Germany of his time. Thus, for 2008 my great wish turned out in my imagination to be that I would become sufficiently wealthy to send all the Portuguese people having an academic background in law - Direito, as it is called here - to a paradise island for a period of ten years, with all conveniences of life freely available.
I am quite sure that one month later that paradise island would be turned into an inferno. But I am equally sure that the almost ten million Portuguese people remaining in the country would enjoy the most prosperous, free and peaceful decade of their lives.
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