wild

Nobel prize winner economist George J. Stigler once said that the World is governed by interests, not ideas. This was Stigler´s way to set a line between himself and some of his colleagues, like Friedman and Hayek, who truly believed in the power of ideas to shape society and who spent most of their lives preaching about them.

Stigler´s emphasis on the primacy of interests over ideas is a useful insight to analyze Portuguese society. The Portuguese do not believe in ideas to change society, certainly not in abstract ideas or theories. And yet, this is a country of missionaries, of people who, to some extent, lived by ideas alone and who colonized half of the World literally by preaching - and sex.

Ideas in this conservative country were always a world apart where a tiny intellectual elite - originally, priests - would see that the norms of social behaviour were followed, and eventually would rationalize the more practical matters of life, like business and sex. One event of Portuguese history might help to shed some light on this point.

When Fernão de Magalhães was returning home from the first trip around the World he stopped at the islands which would become known as the Phillipines. His crew was mostly Portuguese. When the sailors set foot on land, there was an instant attraction between them and native women. Wild sex erupted spontaneously and soon local men became jealous of the Portuguese. Some conflicts arose, threatening the hospitality accorded to the navigators. Magalhães then called on the chaplain to discipline the men. At the mass, the chaplain told them that it was a grave sin to have sex with unchristian women. The sailors sat silently hearing the priest. Once the mass was over, they went back to the women, first baptized them, and then went on with sex as wildly as before. This might have been the first case of safe sex recorded in modern Western history.

This episode might help to explain the role that Portuguese culture reserves for ideas. The purpose of ideas is not to change society, but to rationalize practical behaviour, which is dictated by interests. That is why Portuguese society never produced, and is not expected to produce, great thinkers and philosophers. Their expertise is of a different kind. They are experts at producing reasons for doing what is in their interest to do. Excuses, not ideas, are their true intellectual business. As for ideas, specially new ideas and ideologies, they import all of them, originally from France and Germany, lately from Britain and the United States.