Sydney M. Williams
“The Call of the Tribe,” Mario Vargas Llosa
March 22, 2023
“‘Spirit of the tribe.’ This is the term given by Karl Popper to the irrationality of
the primitive human being that nests in the most secret recesses of all civilized people,
for we have never completely overcome that yearning for the traditional world –
the tribe – when men and women were still an inseparable part of the collective…”
Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-)
The Call of the Tribe, 2023, English translation
Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru and a Nobel Prize winner for literature, is a journalist, novelist, and essayist. As he writes in the introduction, he conceived of a book on liberalism after having read what Edmund Wilson had done for socialism in To the Finland Station. This is a collection of essays on seven individuals who contributed to liberalism: Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich August von Hayek, Sir Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Sir Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel. Six of the seven grew up in 20th Century Europe when freedom was threatened by both fascism and communism.
As well, the author reveals his personal views. “Liberalism is a doctrine that does not have answers to everything, as Marxism purports to do, and it has a place for divergence and criticism around a small but unequivocal core set of convictions, for example that freedom is the supreme value; it is not divisible or fragmentary, but rather indivisible, and must be evident in every sphere – be it economic, political, social, or cultural – in a genuinely democratic society.” He writes that liberals are not anarchists, that they want a “strong and efficient state,” which “must guarantee freedom, public order, the respect for law, and equal opportunities.” But, as he writes: “Equality before the law and equality of opportunities do not mean equality of income, something no liberal would propose. For that would be possible only in a society run by an authoritarian government that would ‘equalize’ all citizens economically through an oppressive system, doing away with different individual capacities…This would imply the disappearance of the individual, subsumed into the tribe.”
The essays are chronological, based on the birth date of the subject. Adam Smith (1723-1790), while called ‘Father of Economics,’ was more interested in “how society functions.” Vargas Llosa writes: “He always thought of himself as a moralist and philosopher.” He quotes Smith: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” In writing of José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1890), The author notes of how he differs from Marx in the use of the word “mass,” a word which to Marx meant the proletariat, a social class with no significant ownership in the means of production. To Ortega the mass “is a group of individuals who have become deindividualized, who have stopped being freethinking human entities and have dissolved into an amalgam that thinks and acts for them, more through conditioned reflexes – emotions, instincts, passions – than through reason.”
We read that Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) is one of three modern thinkers to whom he (Vargas Llasa) owes the most from a political perspective – the two others being Popper and Berlin. Vargas Llasa writes: “The great enemy of civilization is, for Hayek, constructivism or social engineering, which looks to develop intellectually an economic and political model and then implant it in reality, something that is only possible by force – violence that degenerates into dictatorship – and which has failed every time it has been attempted.” The notion of central planning – something we now see in the West – was detested by Hayek and Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994). Austrian born to a Jewish family that two generations earlier had converted to Protestantism, Popper saw first-hand how the call of the tribe (in the form of anti-Semitism) spread quickly in a society he thought so open: “Planning, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to the centralization of power….to the destruction of freedom and to totalitarian regimes…”
Raymond Aron (1905-1983) was “a dispassionate intellectual, with a penetrating but showy intelligence and a cold clear prose…” Like all of the individuals about whom Vargas Llasa writes, Aron grew up in an unstable Europe. He quotes him: “…the highest living standards have been achieved in states that have political democracy and a relative free economy.” “But,” Vargas Llasa adds, “this panorama does not justify optimism, because developed, democratic society is under threat today. Its main enemy is the state, an entity that is essentially voracious, oppressive, and bureaucratic…”
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), a Latvian educated in England, became a professor of social and political theory at Oxford. “Berlin’s liberalism consisted, above all, in the exercise of tolerance, in his constant endeavor to understand his ideological enemy…” Berlin is quoted: “I am bored by reading people who are allies…What is interesting is to read the enemy…” In writing about Jean-François Revel (1924-2006), a man who spent most of his life as a socialist, Vargas Llasa writes: “With his independence…and his systematic defense of freedom whenever it is threatened or diminished. Revel seems like an Albert Camus or a George Orwell for our times.” Like them, Revel was misunderstood by many of his compatriots.
It is the call of the tribe that concerns Mr. Llosa. The tribal spirit is “a source of nationalism [that] has, along with religious fanaticism, been responsible for the largest massacres in human history…In certain countries, and not just in the third world, this ‘call of the tribe,’ which democratic and liberal culture – ultimately, rationality – had sought to free us from, has reappeared in the form of charismatic leaders, under whom citizens revert to being a mass in thrall to a caudillo…Nothing has illustrated the return of the ‘tribe’ better than communism, under which sovereign individuals regress to being part of a mass submissive to the dictates of s leader…”
This is a short (276 pages) but important book, especially in today’s world of soundbites. At a time when dissent is increasingly disallowed, The Call of the Tribe is a paean to liberalism, to freedom. In writing of Hayek, he thinks of today: “Ideas that, for him, played such an important role in the life of free nations have deteriorated, and in the modern world images now have the prominence that ideas once had…screens have replaced books as the primary source of knowledge and information for what is called public opinion.”
How true. Once read, this book should remain on your shelves for reference and re-reading.
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From the Publisher
Praise for The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa and John King
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