Cardeal Avery Dulles

Parte final da trigesima nona e última McGinley Lecture, do Cardeal Avery Dulles, um veterano teólogo, 90 anos, e venerável representante da tradição e ortodoxia. Com esta Lecture ele encerra uma longa e produtiva carreira dedicada a Igreja Católica.

The Quest for Eternal Truth and Wisdom
The present climate of opinion does not favor tradition and orthodoxy, two terms that have negative connotations for many hearers. Our culture is dominated by experimental science, which works by entirely different methods, leaving its own past behind as it forges into the future. Science, we all know, does not rest on a treasury of revealed knowledge handed down in authoritative tradition. Science has wonderfully increased our powers to make and to destroy, but it does not tell us what we ought to do and why. It does not tell us where the universe came from, or why we exist or what our final destination is. And yet some scientists speak as though their discipline were the only kind of valid knowledge.
This brand of scientism has been around for centuries, but only today is it boasting of its powers to displace philosophical wisdom and religious faith, as I noted in my McGinley Lecture “God and Evolution,” a year ago. Already as a college undergraduate 70 years ago, I felt the oppressive nature of a culture that had no place for objective moral norms and meaning. I was desperate for enlightenment about whether there was anything worth living and dying for, as I explained in one of my earliest books, A Testimonial to Grace. That very desperation set me on the path that led through ancient Greek philosophy to Catholic faith.
All of us today are immersed in a culture that lacks abiding truths and fixed moral norms. But there is no necessity for our culture to have taken this negative turn. Ancient philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, had refuted the materialism, relativism, subjectivism and hedonism of their day and had shown the validity of metaphysical knowledge. Western thought followed in the path of cognitive realism for many centuries before the revival of agnosticism in the Renaissance. Catholic believers and indeed all clear thinkers have good reasons not to be engulfed in the superficial trends of the times. In his great encyclical Faith and Reason (1998), which forms the topic of one McGinley Lecture, John Paul II summoned philosophy to resume its original quest for eternal truth and wisdom.
As mentioned earlier, I entered college in a quagmire of confusion about whether life and the universe could make sense at all. I was conscious of the emptiness of a selfish life based on the pursuit of pleasure. Happiness, I gradually came to see, is the reward given for holding fast to what is truly good and important. To some extent the philosophers of antiquity identified these goals. But Christian revelation brought a tremendous increase of light. God alone, I learned from the New Testament, was good and true in an unqualified sense. And the same God in all his beauty and majesty became one of our human family in Jesus Christ, the truth, the way and the life. The most important thing about my career, and many of yours, I feel sure, is the discovery of the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field, the Lord Jesus himself.
As I approach the termination of my active life, I gratefully acknowledge that a benign providence has governed my days. The persons I have met, the places I have been, the things I have been asked to do, have all coalesced into a pattern, so that each stage of my life has prepared me for the next. My 20 years on the McGinley Chair have been a kind of climax, at least from my personal point of view. I often feel that there is no one on earth with whom I would want to exchange places. It has been a special privilege to serve in the Society of Jesus, a religious community specially dedicated to the Savior of the world.
The good life does not have to be an easy one, as our blessed Lord and the saints have taught us. Pope John Paul II in his later years used to say, “The Pope must suffer.” Suffering and diminishment are not the greatest of evils, but are normal ingredients in life, especially in old age. They are to be accepted as elements of a full human existence. Well into my 90th year I have been able to work productively. As I become increasingly paralyzed and unable to speak, I can identify with the many paralytics and mute persons in the Gospels, grateful for the loving and skillful care I receive and for the hope of everlasting life in Christ. If the Lord now calls me to a period of weakness, I know well that his power can be made perfect in infirmity. “Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

Para o texto completo A Life in Theology

Dois poemas de S.Quasimodo

Ed è subito sera


Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da um raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

*

Alla nuova luna

In principio Dio creò il cielo
e la terra, poi nes suo giorno
esatto mise i luminari in cielo
e al settimos giorno si riposò

Dopo miliardi di anni l’uomo
fatto a sua immagine e somiglianza,
senza mai riposare, con la sua
intelligenza laica,
senza timore, nel cielo sereno
d’una notte d’ottobre
mise altri luminari uguali
a quelli che giravano
dalla creazione del mondo. Amen.


Salvatore Quasimodo

O affair BNDES

O recente “affair” Bndes é mais um na longa lista de relações perigosas entre o setor privado e o setor público no Brasil. Contudo, ele esta longe de ser um problema exclusivamente brasileiro. Ao contrário, é comum a todo sistema político aberto, com algum grau de intervenção ou regulação estatal na economia.

O funcionário de carreira de uma estatal amarga alguns anos de baixos salários em troca da construção de uma rede de contatos e aprendizado a respeito da obtenção de valiosas informações úteis em uma futura carreira no setor privado. Ele se inseri em um mercado de trabalho que não esta restrito ao seu atual empregador, o estado; mas inclui, também, futuros empregadores no setor privado. Ate que ponto este agir interferi em decisões que possam beneficiar potenciais empregadores é uma questão controversa.

A quarentena tem sido apresentado como solução para o problema, mas me parece que ela esta longe de ser milagrosa e é, no máximo, apenas um paliativo que evita situações escandalosas, como o caso atual. O tempo de quarentena é muito pequeno para ter influência significativa sobre os conhecimentos adquiridos durante o período em que ele foi funcionário público. O impacto é maior no caso de funcionários que passaram pouco tempo na esfera pública. É o caso dos famosos cargos de confiança ou de indicação política.

Um funcionário público racional dividiria sua carreira profissional em duas fases: a primeira, no setor publico dedicada a criação da rede e aquisição de conhecimentos valorizados no mercado; a segunda em uma carreira lucrativa no setor privado. Este, por ex, parece ser o caso do comportamento dos funcionários públicos no Reino Unido e em outras democracias e ,aparentemente, também no Brasil. Contudo, o comportamento dos dois funcionários do Bndes( um de carreira e outra político) não me parece se adequar a esta regra e ser mais um indicativo da nossa fragilidade institucional .

French theory in America(Deconstrucionismo)

Derrida( e cia) no Brasil ainda é levado muito a sério, já no mundo anglo-americano o oposto parece ser verdadeiro. É o esperado, já que ele nunca foi aceito nos mais importantes deptos de filosofia, isto para não mencionarmos a controvérsia de Cambridge nos anos 90.

O artigo abaixo resenha um livro que trata deste tema.

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision. What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act, a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early ’90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this theory that I thought had run its course. It became clear that it had a second life, or a second run, as the villain of a cultural melodrama produced and starred in by Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball and other denizens of the right, even as its influence was declining in the academic precincts this crew relentlessly attacked.

It’s a great story, full of twists and turns, and now it has been told in extraordinary detail in a book to be published next month: “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press).
The book’s author is Francois Cusset, who sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about.

Certainly mainstream or centrist intellectuals thought there was a lot to worry about. They agreed with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who complained that the ideas coming out of France amounted to a “rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment” even to the point of regarding “science as nothing more than a ‘narration’ or a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others.”

This is not quite right; what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the “I” facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.

The solution to the problem in the rationalist tradition was to extend man’s reasoning powers in order to produce finer and finer descriptions of the natural world, descriptions whose precision could be enhanced by technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes, atom smashers, computers) that were themselves extensions of man’s rational capacities. The vision was one of a steady progress with the final result to be a complete and accurate — down to the last detail — account of natural processes. Francis Bacon, often thought of as the originator of the project , believed in the early 17th century that it could be done in six generations.

It was Bacon who saw early on that the danger to the project was located in its middle term — the descriptions and experiments that were to be a window on the reality they were trying to capture. The trouble, Bacon explained, is that everything, even the framing of experiments, begins with language, with words; and words have a fatal tendency to substitute themselves for the facts they are supposed merely to report or reflect. While men “believe that their reason governs words,” in fact “words react on the understanding”; that is, they shape rather than serve rationality. Even precise definitions, Bacon lamented, don’t help because “the definitions themselves consist of words, and those words beget others” and as the sequence of hypotheses and calculations extends itself, the investigator is carried not closer to but ever further way from the independent object he had set out to apprehend.

In Bacon’s mind the danger of words going off on their own unconstrained-by-the-world way was but one example of the deficiencies we have inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve. In men’s love of their own words (and therefore of themselves), he saw the effects “of that venom which the serpent infused…and which makes the mind of man to swell.” As an antidote he proposed his famous method of induction which mandates very slow, small, experimental steps; no proposition is to be accepted until it has survived the test of negative examples brought in to invalidate it.

In this way, Bacon hopes, the “entire work of the understanding” will be “commenced afresh” and with better prospects of success because the mind will be “not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, and the business done as if by machinery.” The mind will be protected from its own inclination to err and “swell,” and the tools the mind inevitably employs, the tools of representation — words, propositions, predications, measures, symbols (including the symbols of mathematics) — will be reined in and made serviceable to and subservient to a prior realm of unmediated fact.

To this hope, French theory (and much thought that precedes it) says “forget about it”; not because no methodological cautions could be sufficient to the task, but because the distinctions that define the task — the “I,” the world, and the forms of description or signification that will be used to join them — are not independent of one another in a way that would make the task conceivable, never mind doable.

Instead (and this is the killer), both the “I” or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The “I” or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which “it” (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us.

It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist “out there”; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

This may sound impossibly counterintuitive and annoyingly new-fangled, but it is nothing more or less than what Thomas Hobbes said 300 years before deconstruction was a thought in the mind of Derrida or Heidegger: “True and false are attributes of speech, not of things.” That is, judgments of truth or falsehood are made relative to the forms of predication that have been established in public/institutional discourse. When we pronounce a judgment — this is true or that is false — the authorization for that judgment comes from those forms (Hobbes calls them “settled significations”) and not from the world speaking for itself. We know, Hobbes continues, not “absolutely” but “conditionally”; our knowledge issues not from the “consequence of one thing to another” but from the consequence of one name to another.

Three centuries later, Richard Rorty made exactly the same point when he declared, “where there are no sentences, there is no truth … the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.” Descriptions of the world are made by us, and we, in turn, are made by the categories of description that are the content of our perception. These are not categories we choose — were they not already installed there would be nothing that could do the choosing; it would make more sense (but not perfect sense ) to say that they have chosen or colonized us. Both the “I” and the world it would know are functions of language. Or in Derrida’s famous and often vilified words: There is nothing outside the text. (More accurately, there is no outside-the-text.)

Obviously the rationalist Enlightenment agenda does not survive this deconstructive analysis intact, which doesn’t mean that it must be discarded (the claim to be able to discard it from a position superior to it merely replicates it) or that it doesn’t yield results (I am writing on one of them); only that the progressive program it is thought to underwrite and implement — the program of drawing closer and closer to a truth independent of our discursive practices, a truth that, if we are slow and patient in the Baconian manner, will reveal itself and come out from behind the representational curtain — is not, according to this way of thinking, realizable.

That’s a loss, but it’s not a loss of anything in particular. It doesn’t take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it — one epistemology — has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked “What’s your epistemology?” you’ll give a different answer than you would have given before. The world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way.

This is not the conclusion that would be reached either by French theory’s detractors or by those American academics who embraced it. For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset’s main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity — a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda — and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.

If “presences” — perspicuous and freestanding entities — are made by discursive forms that are inevitably angled and partial, the announcement that any one of them rests on exclusions it (necessarily) occludes cannot be the announcement of lack or error. No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

Criticizing something because it is socially constructed (and thus making the political turn) is what Judith Butler and Joan Scott are in danger of doing when they explain that deconstruction “is not strictly speaking a position, but rather a critical interrogation of the exclusionary operations by which ‘positions’ are established.” But those “exclusionary operations” could be held culpable only if they were out of the ordinary, if waiting around the next corner of analysis was a position that was genuinely inclusive. Deconstruction tells us (we don’t have to believe it) that there is no such position. Deconstruction’s technique of always going deeper has no natural stopping place, leads to no truth or falsehood that could then become the basis of a program of reform. Only by arresting the questioning and freeze-framing what Derrida called the endless play of signifiers can one make deconstruction into a political engine, at which point it is no longer deconstruction, but just another position awaiting deconstruction.

Cusset drives the lesson home: “Deconstruction thus contains within itself…an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement. In order to use it as a basis for subversion…the American solution was..to divert it…to split it off from itself.” American academics “forced deconstruction against itself to produce a political ’supplement’ and in so doing substituted for “Derrida’s patient philological deconstruction” a “bellicose drama.”

That drama features deconstruction either as a positive weapon or as an object of attack, but the springs of the drama are elsewhere (in the ordinary, not theoretical, world of economic/social interest) because deconstruction neither mandates nor authorizes any course of action. Participants in the drama invoke deconstruction as a justification for reform or as the cause of evil; but the relationship between what is either celebrated or deplored will be rhetorical, not logical. That is, deconstruction cannot possibly be made either the generator of a politics you like or the cause of a politics you abhor. It just can’t be done without betraying it.

But, Cusset observes, “Americans do not take kindly to things being impossible,” and even though the “very logic of French theoretical texts prohibits certain uses of them,” they have not refrained from “taking a criticism of all methods of putting texts to work and trying to put them to work.” The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.

Stanley Fisch

Fonte: NYTimes, 08.04.08

Sem medo de ser feliz

No artigo desta segunda-feira, na Folha, meu velho Mestre, apresenta, novamente argumentos exagerados sobre a situação econômica presente e futura do país. Segundo ele “ o país já voltou a condição de deficitário em conta corrente, e, alem da gradual transformação em uma fazenda e uma mina, corre-se o risco de termos nova crise de balanço de pagamentos em dois ou três anos”(p..B2,).

Ele parece não perceber que o déficit atual é bem diferente daquele do período do Governo FHC. É so olhar atentamente para os dados para perceber que ele é resultado do crescimento econômico, o qual, por vez, ocorre em bases melhores, em grande parte devido, às mudanças estruturais que vem alterando(para melhor) a economia brasileira desde o Governo Collor.

É um exagero retórico alardear a transformação do pais em “fazenda e uma mina”. Isto implica em negar todo o processo de modernização da economia brasileira, ai incluído, a modernização do setor agrícola.

O risco de crise do BP é pouco provável. Este é um dos poucos pontos positivos do sistema de metas de inflação, o que não implica afirmar ser este modelo imune a este tipo de crise, mas a probabilidade dela ocorrer é muita pequena.

Aparentemente, meu caro Mestre, realmente tem medo de ser feliz.

A leitura conservadora da relação entre doutrina social católica e as leis econômicas

A leitura conservadora da relação entre a Doutrina Social Católica e a leis econômicas é pouco difundida entre nós, e uma boa introdução é o "paper"Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Law: An Unresolved Tension do Thomas E.Wood, Jr. Abaixo um trecho deste texto:


"The primary difficulty with much of what has fallen under the heading of Catholic social teaching since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) is that it assumes without argument that the force of human will suffices to resolve economic questions, and that reason and the conclusions of economic law can be safely neglected, even scorned.4 In fact, as with the German Historical School that Ludwig von Mises opposed, proponents of Catholic social teaching effectively deny the very existence of economic law. Their position therefore neglects altogether the role that reason must play in assessing the consequences of seemingly "progressive" economic policies, as well as in apprehending the order and harmony that can exist within complex (in this case market) phenomena. This attitude runs directly counter to the entire Catholic intellectual tradition, according to which man is to conform his actions to reality, rather than embarking on the hopeless and foolish task of forcing the world to conform to him and to his desires. This corpus of thought wishes to force reality into outcomes that cannot be realized by will alone.
Thus, for example, that every man should earn a "family wage" that allows his family to live in reasonable comfort is a desirable social goal. The suggestion that such an outcome can be brought into existence by decree, however, that man’s will can establish such a state of affairs by his ipse dixit alone, and that no recourse to any so-called economic law can be of any help in ascertaining the probable outcome of such measures, is no more intellectually defensible than the suggestion that man’s desire to fly renders superfluous any need to take into account the law of gravity.
In sum, much of the economic counsel set forth as Catholic social teaching over the past century suffers from logical flaws and is factually mistaken in a number of its assertions. Such a position, whether or not its proponents realize it, represents the triumph of will over intellect, of the substitution of arbitrary will and desire for a rational assessment of laws of social interaction and the inevitable consequences of violent interference in that interaction. Such a posture, in addition to the damage it does to the existing stock of wealth and to social comity itself, is thoroughly uncharacteristic of the Catholic Church, an institution that has always emphasized the mind’s ability to perceive (and to rejoice in) the orderliness of God’s creation and to conform itself to it. Truth, say Catholic catechisms, consists of the conformity of mind to reality. Catholic "social teaching," on the other hand, too frequently demands that man allow mere desire and sentiment to form his judgment in economic matters, rather than assessing the consequences of economic measures with the aid of economic law, and rather than looking in the economic realm for the order and regularity to which the Church points in so many other areas as reflections of the orderliness of God himself."

St Augustine sermons discovered

Six previously unknown sermons of St Augustine of Hippo have been discovered at Erfurt University in central Germany, a find that the head of the university's library department, Thomas Bouillon, has hailed as "most significant".

Three researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered and identified the texts in a more than 800-year-old manuscript collection in the Bibliotheca Amploniana at Erfurt. Isabella Schiller, one of the three Viennese researchers, noticed that the small, 270-page, book of sermons by St Augustine (354-430), which she was working on, contained sermons that were not listed in her databank.

Three of the sermons concern almsgiving. St Augustine examines the relationship between giving alms to the bishop and the latter's duty to support his flock in return. In another sermon about St Cyprian, who was martyred in 258, Augustine criticises the practice of holding drunken orgies on martyrs' feast days. And one sermon is on the reality of the resurrection of the dead and on believing in the truth of biblical prophecies.

St Augustine's preaching in the cathedral at Hippo Regius - the Algerian port of Bone today - attracted people from many parts of northern Africa. Large crowds from the then flourishing city of Carthage came, some of whom brought their scribes with them. The scribes took the sermons down and St Augustine would correct their copies afterwards. Some collections of his sermons reached England via Italy by the year 1000, according to the Dutch St Augustine specialist Professor Hans van Oort. It is thought that the newly discovered sermons are part of one such collection and were copied in England. Structural and handwriting similarities to English manuscripts point to the likelihood that they reached the continent via England.

The Bibliotheca Amploniana at Erfurt University is the largest complete book collection of any one medieval scholar in the world. Its 600 volumes were left to the university by the Westphalian theologian and doctor of medicine Amplonius Rating de Berka (1363-1435).
The newly discovered sermons will be published in a Viennese journal on philology and patristics, Vienna Studies: Journal for Classical Philology and Patristics, and on 15 April the three researchers - Ms Schiller, along with Dorothea Weber and Clemens Weidmann, will give a lecture on their discovery at Erfurt University. The Austrian Academy of Sciences is the world's leading institute for research on St Augustine.

Fonte:Christa Pongratz-Lippitt , The Tablet, 05 April 2008.

The consensus for free trade among economists — has it frayed?

Alan Blinder focuses on online outsourcing of services in his own writings as also in the present debate organized by Ben Friedman; but the issues raised are far more general for free trade itself, and have been advertised as such by the media. So, for both analytical and public-policy reasons, I cast my own contribution very wide, putting Blinder’s arguments into necessary perspective.
Turn to the leading American newspapers these days and you will read about the “loss of nerve”, even “loss of faith”, in free trade by economists. Then, you get incessant protectionist pronouncements from the New Democrats (i.e. those successful in the latest elections) in the Congress, and calculated ambiguities on free trade from the Old Democrats (such as Hillary Clinton who infamously asked for a “pause” in ratifying trade deals) as they run for President. When challenged by the proponents of free trade, these politicians now typically say: “Ah, but economists no longer have a consensus on free trade”, citing these very same stories they read in the newspapers.
You might think therefore that the days of free trade are behind us in the US. Indeed, this clamor against free trade is so intense that we may soon turn to PBS and find a Requiem for Free Trade composed and performed from England by Sir Paul McCartney. Yet, all this hype reminds me of the cartoon where two dervishes are idly sitting on the desert sands, next to their camels, and one is reading the excitable Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram and telling the other: “It says that we are in ferment again”.
The truth of the matter is that free trade is alive and well among economists, their analytical arguments in favour of it, developed with great sophistication in the postwar theory of commercial policy, having hardly been dented by any original arguments by the few economists, including Alan Blinder in today’s debate, arrayed against it.
The Latest Celebration of the Flight from Free Trade by Economists
If one looks at the most recent flood of journalistic stories on free trade, it is astonishing (as I document below) how often they have been written in funereal overtones in recent years and with disregard for the historical reality that such stories have been recurrently written in the last twenty years in major newspapers and magazines. The latest stories are by reputed journalists such as Lou Uchitelle of the New York Times (January 30, 2007) and the team of Bob Davis and David Wessel in the Wall Street Journal (March 28, 2007). They often also profile the “dissenting” economists such as William Baumol (with his co-author, the hugely renowned mathematician Ralph Gomory) and Alan Blinder who is before us today.
But if their enthusiasm in imagining the failing health, even the demise, of free trade betrays ignorance of earlier such analyses that came to nought, it is equally noteworthy that these journalists are contradicted by others whose analysis of the robustness of trade among economists is more accurate. Thus, even as Davis and Wessel were writing their story of “second thoughts” on free trade, (March 28, 2007) in the Wall Street Journal, a conservative newspaper, and proclaiming that “In many ways, the debate over free trade is moving in …the direction [of the skeptics and opponents]”, I drew the attention of Davis in a telephone interview to the column by the brilliant and acute Eric Alterman in The Nation (February 12, 2007), today’s most influential leftwing magazine, which correctly complained instead of the continuing approbation of free trade by economists: “This column is not going to settle the dispute over whether the United States needs a tougher trade policy. I happen to think so, but I don’t expect to convince, say, Paul Krugman or Jagdish Bhagwati that I am right and they are wrong. My question is: Why does the opinion of the [political] majority of the country get nothing but contempt in public discourse?”
To gain necessary perspective on the current media stories about the economists’ yet-again disappearing consensus on free trade, let me then turn to document different episodes in recent years when false notes of alarm were sounded over free trade, similar in hype to those of the motley crew that I have just cited as the latest journalists writing in a similar vein. I will assess and dismiss the “heretical” arguments that were advanced against free trade in each episode; in fact, I was cast by the media in the role of the defender of free trade in all these episodes.
Earlier Episodes of Media Frenzy
Episode 1. The Rise of Japan: Krugman and Tyson By far the most striking dissent over free trade, the equivalent of a Category 5 storm, came from my MIT student, Paul Krugman, one of the truly profound figures today in the theory of international trade, who extended the theory of imperfect competition to trade theory and began to argue that “Free Trade was Passe After All” in the late 1980s, about two decades ago. The effect on the media, and on the opponents of free trade, was electric, largely because the rise of Japan, and the allegations that it was protectionist while the US was a free trader, had fed the frenzy that called for a reputable economist as an icon for protectionists.
Robert Kuttner, now the Editor of The American Prospect and long a skeptic on free trade, celebrated Krugman’s apparent heresy. Karen Pennar wrote in Businessweek (February 27, 1989), under the heading “The Gospel of Free Trade is Losing Its Apostles”, that “Free Trade is good for you…Now more and more economists aren’t so sure”. Aside from Krugman, Laura Tyson (also one of my most distinguished MIT students) was quoted in support of “using trade policies to promote and protect industries and technologies that we believe to be important to our well-being”, a position that was rejected by the Stanford economist Michael Boskin in the famous and politically-costly words: there is no difference between potato chips and semi-conductor chips.
Take just two of the main arguments, starting with Tyson’s advocacy of trade policy as an instrument of industrial policy. Tyson claimed that industries with externalities ought to be protected. But the problem with this is that it is very hard for policymakers, and very easy for lobbyists, to decide which industries have the externalities. As the Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, as good a Democrat as you can find, once remarked: I know there are lots of industries where there are four dollars worth of social output to one dollar worth of private output: my problem is that I do not know which ones they are. Besides, Michael Schrage of The Los Angeles Times decided to actually look at how potato and semiconductor chips were made and, while the proponents of industrial policy obviously thought that semiconductor chips were made with sophisticated technology but not potato chips, the reality turned out to be very different. The Pringle chips, available in mini-bars in fancy hotels are made by PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay subsidiary in virtually automated factories; whereas semiconductors involve mindless fitting of boards by workers with little advanced skills but much patience and ability to survive boredom. Moreover, I noted at the time in a review in The New Republic (May 31, 1993) of Laura Tyson’s influential book, Who’s Bashing Whom?, the exaggerated concern with what you produce as defining your economic destiny is a quasi-Marxist obsession bordering on folly. You can produce potato chips, export them and import computers which you may use to do creative things. Equally, you could produce semi-conductors, export them and import potato chips which you could munch as a couch potato, mindlessly watching television and turning into a moron. What you “consume”, in a broad sense, is likely to be far more important to you and your society’s well-being, than what you produce.
However, Krugman’s theoretical modeling of imperfect competition among firms producing differentiated products, and the modeling of oligopolistic industries (by Krugman’s contemporaries such as Gene Grossman of Princeton, my equally remarkable MIT student just behind Krugman), did raise problems for free trade at a deeper level. To understand this, consider that the last two centuries since Adam Smith wrote about the virtues of free trade had in fact witnessed repeated dissent from front-rank economists such as Keynes at the time of the Great Depression. In essence, the argument for free trade is an extension of the argument for the Invisible Hand: that if market prices do not reflect social costs, then the Invisible Hand, which uses market prices to guide allocation, will point in the wrong direction. During the Depression, evidently the market wages (which were positive) exceeded the social cost (which was zero because of widespread unemployment). So Keynes became a protectionist. Similarly, if polluters are able to pollute without having to pay for it, we would be overproducing in the polluting industry because its private cost would be below the social cost (which should include the cost being imposed through pollution). Again, the case for free trade would be compromised. Each generation seems to have discovered some market failure, appropriate to its time, which would then undermine the case for free trade.
But, writing in 1963 in the Journal of Political Economy, I made a simple point which turned out to be revolutionary for the case for free trade: I argued that if the specific market failure was eliminated by a suitable policy, then the case for free trade would be restored. So, if we were to introduce a “polluter pay” principle (or, tradable permits which would equally charge those who wanted to pollute), we would then be able to exploit the gains from trade fully by adopting free trade. The case for free trade had been restored after two centuries of recurrent doubts.
But there was just one important catch. If the market failure was in domestic “markets” such as labor markets where there may be imperfections such as rural-urban wage differentials or sticky wages which led to wages that exceeded “true” labor cost, then my argument was correct: and the vast majority of such imperfections were indeed in domestic markets. But if these imperfections arose in international trade, then fixing these failures would involve using tariffs and so free trade could not be restored as the appropriate policy. So, if a country or its producers had some power in international markets to raise the prices at which they could sell by offering lower quantities for sale, they would do better with what economists call “an optimal tariff”, an argument going back to the time of Adam Smith. Paul Krugman was dealing with precisely such imperfections.
But eventually Krugman and other trade economists came back to free trade in several writings, abandoning Kuttner et.al. to twist in the wind. Essentially, this was done through less watertight, but nonetheless compelling, “political-economy” arguments. One set of economists, among them Avinash Dixit of Princeton, returned to the fold by saying that “there was no beef”: i.e. that the product market imperfections were, on empirical investigation, not substantial enough to warrant departing from free trade. Another set of economists, Krugman among them, bought into the argument that protection would make matters worse, not better. My radical Cambridge teacher Joan Robinson used to say that the Invisible Hand worked by strangulation; the less drastic Krugmanesque demonstration that it was feeble when there were product market imperfections was now combined with the view that the Visible Hand would be crippled instead. Yet others thought that, once we allowed for tariff retaliation, it was unlikely that those who initiated protectionism would survive such retaliation to break open a bottle of champagne.
The protectionists who had celebrated Krugman as their icon were disappointed, even furious: Kuttner would write fierce critiques of Krugman, for instance, for years. But the truth of the matter is that, even as these economists came back to the fold on free trade, Japan ceased to be a threat and the hysteria over Japan, thick as a dense fog, subsided. Free Trade as our choice policy option was back in business.
Episode 2. The Rise of India and China: Paul Samuelson. But then the rise of India and China would lead to another Category 5 storm. This time, it came from the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, my teacher at MIT. Writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 2004), he argued, combining mathematics not accessible to journalists with colorful language that was, that the advocates of globalization were ignoring the reality that the rise of India and China would mean that the welfare of the US could take a hit 1.
Although Samuelson had been careful that this did not mean that US should respond with protection, the protectionists thought that they had another icon, this time the arguably greatest economist with Keynes of the 20th century and a longtime proponent of free trade, in their camp! Kuttner was back in business; and there were numerous stories in the magazines and newspapers, matching those when Krugman arrived on the scene almost twenty years earlier: e.g. Aaron Bernstein “Shaking Up Trade Theory” in Businessweek (December 6, 2004), Steve Lohr “An Elder Challenges Outsourcing’s Orthodoxy” in The New York Times (September 9, 2004), among many others. Samuelson was careful, as reported by Steve Lohr form his interview for the Times story, to emphasize that his analysis “was not meant as a justification for protectionist measures”. But that was lost in the unwarranted inferences against free trade by the protectionists.
Now, economists have long appreciated that external (“exogenous”) developments could hurt an economy. In fact, my Cambridge teacher, Harry Johnson, wrote exactly on this issue in the 1950s, when the dollar was scarce and Europeans opted for the pessimistic view that US growth would harm them (much as many believe to be the case for the US as India and China are growing), and he argued that Europe could benefit instead. To see this by analogy, imagine what weather does to your welfare. If a hurricane hits Florida, that hurts. But if a good monsoon arrives in India, that helps.
So, only an unsophisticated economist (and Samuelson is right that there are some, though not necessarily the ones he cited) would rule out the logical possibility that the rise of China and India could harm the US. That part is not news. But what became news in the popular imagination, fed by much of the media and by protectionists, was that if such a pessimistic possibility actually transpired, the appropriate response was protectionism. To see this again very simply, suppose that a hurricane does damage Florida. If Governor Jeb Bush were to respond to this by shutting off trade with the rest of the US, if not the world, he would only be increasing Florida’s anguish. And Samuelson, whose scholarship in unimpeachable and who is no creature of passions or politics, evidently did not make this elementary error.
As this truth filtered through, as many economists noted this and Samuelson himself emphasized from time to time, the protectionists lost their new icon. Besides, increasingly economists exploring the subject showed that the pessimistic possibility that the rise of India and China so they became “more like us” could reduce the US gains from trade by depressing the prices of US exports, was not a likely outcome. As countries got similar in endowments, they could profit hugely from trade in similar products (or variety), as another student of mine, Robert Feenstra (who is today the leading applied economist on trade and heads the NBER Program on trade policy) in his Bernhard Harms Prize acceptance speech, and my brilliant Columbia colleague David Weinstein, demonstrated empirically for the postwar period when Europe and Japan rose again from the ashes. Besides, the immediate political source of worry, the scare created by the outsourcing of a few call-answer and back-office jobs to India (which Alan Blinder has bought into, I am afraid), also subsided as it became evident that the notion that all online trade was one-way was at variance with the facts.
Episode 3: India and China and Fear of Outsourcing: Alan Blinder. But outsourcing happened to revive again, a couple of years ago, when the distinguished macroeconomist Alan Blinder, with us today, who was deeply influenced by Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book on globalization --- which seemed to translate the credible statement by Bangalore’s remarkable IT entrepreneurs-cum-scientists such as Nandan Nilekani that they could do everything that Americans could do into the frightening non sequitur that therefore Indians would do everything that the Americans were doing --- published an essay in Foreign Affairs (April 2006) that bought into the line that outsourcing of services on the wire would increasingly export American jobs to these countries and imperil the US and its working and middle classes. So, he was now turned into a new icon for the protectionists even though Blinder always said that he was still a free trader but…! Davis and Wessel (Wall Street Journal) built their story against free trade around him; he made it to the National Public Radio and even to the iconic TV program, Charlie Rose.
But Blinder missed out on the fact that outsourcing on the wire (i.e. without the provider and the user having to be in physical proximity as with haircuts), which is Mode 1 of supplying services in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the Uruguay Round agreement in 1995, was the mode tha t the US and other rich countries were keenest about: they saw that they would be the big winners, as no doubt they are. For all the call-answer services and other low-skill services now imported from countries such as India, there are many more high-skill and high-value services by rich-country professionals in architecture, law, medicine, accounting, and other professions.
But Blinder has now shifted ground to arguing that, as services became tradable on line, the number of jobs which would become “vulnerable” would rise pari passu. And he lists upward of 40 million jobs today that are so afflicted. And he concludes that we need to augment adjustment assistance and improve education in response. There is much that may be contested here. E.g. if you wish to talk about flux, talking only about Mode 1 (online transmission of services) is incomplete. Trade economists know that this is only one of possible modes in the supply of services: e.g. transmission of services without the physical proximity of suppliers and users of the services. Transmitting x-rays digitally from Indiana to be read in India is one example. But then doctors can go to patients; and patients to doctors. The GATS agreement recognizes four distinct modes of Service “transactions”.
As it happens, the different Modes were distinguished in a couple of articles in The World Economy in the mid-1980s by me and by Gary Sampson and Richard Snape and astonishingly made their way into the GATS agreement within a decade: a remarkable triumph for us economists 2 .I described the basic distinction between service transactions that required physical proximity and those that did not, whereas Sampson and Snape brilliantly sub-divided the former into those where the provider went to the user and the other way around.
Blinder who does not appear to have known all this when he wrote his celebrated Foreign Affairs article, any more than I know about the relevant intricacies of macroeconomics where he holds the comparative advantage instead, has been wrong therefore to think only of Mode 1. In fact, the possible flux arises in more ways today than he talks about. That is also true because of direct foreign investment. E.g. when Senator Kerry talked about outsourcing, he meant also, confusingly, the phenomenon where a CEO closes down a factory in Nantucket and opens it up in Nairobi, or when that same CEO simply invests in production in Nairobi instead of in Nantucket.
But the bottom line from the viewpoint of trade policy is that hardly any serious trade economist or policymaker has objected to providing adjustment assistance (or improving education) in living memory. The first Adjustment Assistance program in the US goes back to 1962 during the Kennedy Round negotiations: Kennedy and George Meany of AFL-CIO signed off on it. Virtually every trade legislation since has tried to improve on it. And many trade economists including myself in the late 1960s, and others such as Lael Brainard, Robert Lawrence and Robert Litan at Brookings in recent years, have written extensively and continually on the subject. Blinder, who started talking poetry, has therefore wound up talking prose. We free traders have no problem with him as he is on the same escalator even if he is behind us. If he is to remain the new icon for those who oppose free trade, they have to be pretty desperate.
So, these three balloons with journalists aboard, waving banners against free trade, have lost their helium. Free trade has continued to maintain its credibility among economists. Of course, there have been other, less influential assaults on free trade --- among them, I must count that by Baumol and Gomory (2000) who have enjoyed nonetheless some exposure, especially from the influential leftwing columnist William Greider in The Nation (April 30, 2007) and ironically also from the supply-side economist Paul Craig Roberts in his assault on outsourcing in the Wall Street Journal 3.
I might say simply that these authors make one important but familiar point, with little policy relevance as I argue now. It is the old one, which I learnt as a student from R.C.O.Matthews, my Cambridge tutor in 1954-56, who had written a classic paper on increasing returns, with others such as the Nobel Laureate James Meade and Harry Johnson following soon after, showing that sufficiently increasing returns would imply multiple equilibria and that this in turn implied (among other things) that there could exist a better free trade equilibrium than the one we may be in. Matthews and Meade, and many others such as Murray Kemp, had made this observation but by using the analytical device that the increasing returns were external to the firm but internal to the industry, a device that enabled perfect competition to be maintained. By the time Paul Krugman was writing his dissertation in the 1970s, economists had learnt how to handle imperfect competition; and so Krugman managed brilliantly to show multiple equilibria in this different, and more realistic, setting. Trade economists had known these arguments for almost half a century and taught them from standard textbooks such as mine (with Panagariya and Srinivasan). The analytical buzz therefore from the Baumol-Gomory book of 2000 was muted.
But when translated into policy prescription, all it could mean was that industrial policy, buttressed Tyson-style by appropriately tailored trade policy, could nudge us towards the “better” equilibrium. But neither author managed to do this, as far as we know. So, paraphrasing Robert Solow on externalities, one might say: yes, if scale economies are important, there could be multiple equilibria and we could use trade and industrial policies to choose a “better” equilibrium; but, alas, who can plausibly compute this better equilibrium? Besides, it is hard to imagine today that, with world markets so large due to the death of distance and extensive postwar trade liberalization, there are any industries or products left where the scale economies do not pale into modest proportions. Baumol and Gomory, a brilliant pair indeed, therefore do not carry any policy salience, in my view 4.
But one assault that is ongoing, and has had an impact on the New Democrats for sure, is that by economists associated with the AFL-CIO (such as Thea Lee), and with the labour-movement-influenced think tank Economic Policy Institute (such as Lawrence Mishel). In their view the pressure on unskilled wages, and progressively on the middle class as well, is to be traced to trade with the poor countries. None of this seems to face up well to the empirical studies of the subject. In an op.ed. titled “Technology, not globalisation, is driving wages down” in the Financial Times (January 4, 2007), I argued that the vast numbers of empirical studies (including by Paul Krugman) had shown that trade with poor countries had a negligible impact on our workers’ absolute real wages (as against the relative wages of the skilled and the unskilled 5. [Nor did alternative ways of tying the depressed wages to trade (and even unskilled, illegal immigration) have any empirical salience.] Harvard University Kennedy School’s prolific trade expert Robert Lawrence, in a splendid unpublished recent paper, concurs with this view, concluding that the impact of trade on the slow growth of wages does not “show up” in his analysis of the data.
The New Democrats who continue to believe nonetheless in this imaginary downside of free trade are not doing anyone any good. In fact, they use these erroneous beliefs to stop trade liberalization and to use every trick in the book to intimidate weak nations into accepting inappropriate labor standards in the hope of raising their cost of production to moderate the force of competition that they fear 6.
Paul Krugman, in one of his columns in the New York Times (May 14, 2007) did say that his own research earlier had shown that trade did not depress wages. But then he added: “But that may have changed” (italics inserted). The suggested reason was that “we’re buying a lot more from third-world countries today than we did a dozen years ago”. But it is easy to show that you can multiply such imports and still not have any effect on real wages. This particular case against free trade remains unproven and will not rise above the level of innuendos until some dramatic empirical study demonstrates otherwise.

Notes1. Paul Samuelson, “Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 18(3), Summer 2004. back to textMy own article, “The Muddles over Outsourcing”, written with Arvind Panagariya and T.N.Srinivasan, appeared in the same journal in Autumn 2004, Vol. 18(4), right after Samuelson’s, and was regarded by many in the media as a “response” to Samuelson. It was not; we were not even aware of the Samuelson article when we wrote ours. Our article was in fact the first analytical exercise, with a number of theoretical models, exploring trade in services; and it was also the first to argue that several critics and commentators, including economists, were muddling up very different notions of what “outsourcing” meant and hence muddling their arguments, in turn. 2. Jagdish Bhagwati, “Splintering and Disembodiment of Services in Developing Nations”, The World Economy, Vol. 7, June 1984; and Gary Sampson and Richard Snape, “Identifying the Issues in Trade in Services”, The World Economy, Vol.8, June 1985. back to text3. William Baumol and Ralph Gomory, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests, MIT Press; Cambridge, 2000. back to text4. There is one other argument in Baumol and Gomory which does not rely on scale economies. It is simply that technology may diffuse abroad and that this may create difficulties for the United States. This is similar to the concerns that India and China may become more similar in endowments and hence the gains from trade may diminish for the United States. But I have dealt with that argument already in discussing Samuelson. back to text5. There has also been dispute about how stagnant real wages have been, with some economists such as Marvin Kosters and Richard Cooper arguing that, once benefits and perks outside of strict wages are allowed for, the stagnation turns into slow growth. But I avoid this debate, arguing only about the explanation of stagnation or slow growth, as the case may be. back to text6. I have dealt with the phenomenon of export protectionism in the form of demands for higher labour standards in the poor countries in my book, In Defense of Globalization, Oxford 2004, and particularly in the Afterword to the new edition issued in August 2007. In discussing the protectionism that now characterizes the New democrats, I have dealt with this issue in several other places, such as the Financial Times and do not enter that set of arguments here.

Jagdish Bhagwati

Fonte: WTO

Concord Hymn

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee


Ralph Waldo Emerson

Temores

É estranho falar de medo do crescimento em um país com um histórico de taxas fantásticas de crescimento no passado. Retórica ou realidade? O fato é que a década perdida e a instabilidade macroeconômica parecem ter deixado uma herança terrível: o medo do crescimento, ele é real e a prova é o temor expresso nas declarações de diretores e ex-diretores do Banco Central. É preciso superá-la, sem cair no seu extremo oposto: um crescimento sem a preocupação com a sua sustentabilidade.

Um outro temor, este velho conhecido, é do crescimento da importações. O aumento das importações já era esperado, já que o crescimento da demanda interna para uma dada oferta interna implica necessariamente, em aumento de importações. Alem deste aumento, natural, aumentou, também a importação de bens de capital que é bastante salutar.

Mendonça de Barros

O engenheiro Mendonça de Barros, esta otimista, falando em um circulo virtuoso de crescimento econômico, que somente um desastre mundial conseguiria parar. Na entrevista a jornalista que menos entende de economia na mídia nacional, ele deu um exemplo de lucidez e capacidade analítica. É bom lembrar que ele é do PSDB, mas sua filiação partidária não, parece, interferir em suas análises. Este é um comportamento que deveria ser adotado por todos.

O argumento central dele e, em parte, do José Camargo, que não concorda com o seu otimismo, parte do reconhecimento da importância das mudanças estruturais pelas quais vem passando a economia brasileira, desde o Governo Collor. Os frutos delas estariam começando a aparecer agora e seriam o início de um longo processo de crescimento sustentável, ou seja ótimas taxas de crescimento com estabilidade macroeconômica.

É um bom argumento e me parece correto. Alias, venho apresentando, há um bom tempo, esta tese aos meus alunos que, influenciados, pelo discurso pobre, mas cativante, da extrema esquerda demonstram uma queda por cenários catastróficos. A importância das mudanças estruturais, assim como o lag existente, é um dos ensinamentos da experiência chilena dos anos 80, que, aparentemente, ainda continua sendo ignorada por nossos colegas diletantes apaixonados pela economia, mas sem tempo de aprender o essencial sobre ela.

Bleakonomics

Since the bank runs of the 1930s, federal protection of retail depositor institutions has been a hallmark of American capitalism. The Federal Reserve, in a sweeping extension, has now extended the privilege to gilt-edged investment firms.

Its flurry of interventions has prompted a double dose of unease. The central bank offered a lifeline to Wall Street investors who, seemingly, deserved a worse fate. And it arguably interrupted the cycle of boom, bust and renewal that leads to a durable recovery.

What is the true value of Bear Stearns? If the government-orchestrated takeover of Bear goes through as planned, we will never know. As with Bear, so with the billions of dollars of mortgage securities for which the central bank has suddenly become an eager customer. So, too, perhaps, with the nation’s stock of residential homes — the prices of which, instead of reverting to more realistic values, will get a boost from the Fed’s repeated rounds of interest rate-cutting.

Government interventions always bring disruptions, but when Washington meddles in financial markets, the potential for the sort of distortion that obscures proper incentives is especially large, due to our markets’ complexities. Even Robert Rubin, the Citigroup executive and former Treasury secretary, has admitted he had never heard of a type of contract responsible for major problems at Citi.

Bear is a far smaller company, and, it would seem, far simpler. But consider that as recently as three weeks ago, it was valued at $65 a share. Then, as it became clear that Bear faced the modern equivalent of a bank run,

JPMorgan Chase negotiated a merger with the figure of $10 a share in mind. Alas, at the 11th hour, Morgan’s bankers realized they couldn’t get a handle on what Bear owned — or owed — and got cold feet. Under heavy pressure from the Fed and the Treasury, a deal was struck at the price of a subway ride — $2 a share.

It is safe to say that neither Jamie Dimon, Morgan’s chief executive, nor Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman who pushed for the deal, know what Bear is really worth. For the record, Bear’s book value per share is $84. As Meredith Whitney, who follows Wall Street for Oppenheimer, remarked, “It’s hard to get a linear progression from 84 to 2.”

Capitalism isn’t supposed to work like this, and before the advent of modern finance, it usually didn’t. Market values fluctuate, but — in the absence of fraud — billion-dollar companies do not evaporate. Yet it’s worth noting that Lehman Brothers’ stock also fell by half and then recovered within a 24-hour span. Once, investors could get a read on financial firms’ assets and risks from their balance sheets; those days are history.

Firms now do much of their business off the balance sheet. The swashbuckling Bear Stearns was a party to $2.5 trillion — no typo — of a derivative instrument known as a credit default swap. Such swaps are off-the-books agreements with third parties to exchange sums of cash according to a motley assortment of other credit indicators. In truth, no outsider could understand what Bear (or Citi, or Lehman) was committed to. The thought that Bear’s counterparties (the firms on the other side of that $2.5 trillion) would call in their chits — and then cancel their trades with Lehman, perhaps with Merrill Lynch and so forth — sent Wall Street into panic mode. Had Bear collapsed, or so asserted a veteran employee, “it would have been the end: pandemonium and global meltdown.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps, after some bad weeks or months, Wall Street would have recovered. What is scary is the degree to which the Fed assimilated the alarmism on the Street: “These guys are so afraid of an economic cycle,” a hedge-fund manager remarked. And without public airing or debate, it stretched the implicit federal safety net under Wall Street.

To question intervention is not to dispute that markets need rules. But for nearly two decades, Washington has trimmed its regulatory sails. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, which once separated banks from securities firms, and the evolution of new instruments that circumvent disclosure rules have loosened the market’s moorings. Huge pools of capital have been permitted to operate virtually unregulated. Mortgages have been written to the flimsiest of credits. Swelling derivative books have made a mockery of disclosure.

The relaxation of oversight has implied an unholy bargain: let markets operate unfettered in good times, confident that the feds will come to the rescue in bad. In 1998, the Fed intervened to cushion the collapsing hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management; dot-com stocks immediately began their dubious ascent. Then, when the tech meltdown led to a recession and the Fed cut rates to 1 percent, adjustable-rate mortgages became as hot as the iPod. One rescue begets the next excess.

It is true that Bear’s shareholders have suffered steep losses. But the Fed went much further than in previous episodes to calm the waters. Notably, it announced it would accept mortgage securities as collateral for loans — enlarging its role as lender of last resort. (Wall Street jesters had it that the Fed would also be accepting “cereal box-tops.”) Then the Fed extended a backstop line of credit to JPMorgan to tide Bear over; finally, it agreed to absorb the ugliest $30 billion of Bear’s assets.

Government rescues are as old as private enterprise itself, but we are well beyond the days of guaranteeing loans to stodgy manufacturers à la Chrysler and Lockheed. Those cases were contained; the borders of finance are more nebulous. However pure of motive, Bernanke & Co. are underwriting overleveraged markets whose linkages, even today, are dimly understood. The formula of laissez faire in advance and intervention in the aftermath has it exactly wrong. Better that the Fed, with Congress’s help if need be, ensures that regulators and markets have the tools to know what companies are worth before the trouble hits.

Roger Lowenstein, NYTimes, 30.03.08

Nova politica industrial

Política industrial é sempre um tema controverso. Para aqueles que não confiam no mercado ela é a salvação da lavoura. Outros, como é o meu caso, tem uma visão menos ingênua dos poderes milagrosos da intervenção estatal. Ela é, as vezes, necessária, já que o mercado esta longe de ser a maravilha idealizada pelos ideólogos do livre mercado. Contudo, é bom recordar que se há imperfeições de mercado, existem, também, imperfeições criadas pela intervenção estatal.

No caso da proposta de política industrial do atual governo há menos motivos para temores, já que ela sendo articulada por um dos melhores especialistas da área: Luciano Coutinho. O setor de saúde é realmente importante e estratégico e por isto merece uma atenção toda especial, o mesmo não parece ser o caso do setor de tecnologias de informação e comunicação. É necessário não repetir os erros do passado e retomar um processo de substituição que já cumpriu seu papel histórico no processo de industrialização brasileiro. Os ganhos deste processo foram importantes, mas é uma fase já superada, querer retomá-la , como regra geral de política industrial, um grande equivoco.

Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything

E.E.Cummings

Santo Agostinho

Jamais démentie au fil des siècles, avec les Lumières pour seule parenthèse, la passion pour saint Augustin aura inspiré les plus grands esprits : saint Thomas d'Aquin, Luther et Calvin (autour des questions de la foi, du péché originel, de la prédestination), les jansénistes qui accaparèrent sa pensée en la radicalisant, jusqu'à Chateaubriand que la lecture des Confessions laissa fort ému. Aujourd'hui, la figure du théologien s'estompe derrière celle du philosophe et de l'écrivain. Augustin est au coeur de nos préoccupations présentes. Ayant assuré le passage de l'Antiquité au christianisme, il apparaît comme le fondateur de l'homme occidental. L'expérience autobiographique des Confessions lui a permis d'occuper une place centrale dans notre manière d'envisager le monde, qu'il s'agisse de ses conceptions du temps, de la guerre ou de la sexualité. Par-delà les siècles, Augustin demeure notre contemporain.

Fonte: David Rabouin(Le Magazine Littéraire)

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augusto de campos(10984)

ver a versão com a formatação do autor em:
http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/07_03.htm

Desindustrialização

Os desenvolvimentistas adoram criar novas fantasmas. Um dos mais divertidos é a tese de desindustrialização. A indústria estaria sendo morta pelo crescimento das commodities : dado um estoque de capital limitado o crescimento de um setor, levaria, inevitavelmente a estagnação e depois a regressão do outro. A taxa de câmbio apreciada reforçaria este movimento.

Resta saber se o país passa por um processo de desindustrialização ou por um processo de mudanças estruturais. Acho a segunda hipótese mais interessante. A abertura e modernização da economia e a falta do espirito animal de alguns empresários parece ter condenado alguns segmentos da indústria a uma morte lenta. Este processo, no curto prazo, pode ser doloroso, mas no médio e longo prazo não implica em desindustrialização, mas em transformação quantitativa e qualitativa da indústria, que passaria a ser muito mais competitiva no mercado interno, inicialmente, e depois no mercado externo. Etiquetar este processo como sendo desindustrialização é no mínimo prematuro .

Bresser Pereira

Um dos doyen dos desenvolvimentistas, reputado membro da esquerda católica, e meu querido e generoso ex-professor e ex-orientador, afirma em artigo na Folha que “ No Brasil, o grande desafio continua a ser o binômio taxa de câmbio apreciada-taxa de juros alta”. Ele, também, está preocupado com um provável déficit na conta corrente e com as reservas, que ele considera frágeis.

Ele é sempre um otimista apaixonado pelo Brasil, mas acho que anda muito pessimista. É um exagero considerar as reservas frágeis e uma recaída neo-mercantilista a avaliação em relação a conta corrente.

A taxa de câmbio está apreciada? É difícil responder, mas sou um daqueles que acredita que ela é determinada pelas forças do mercado. A taxa de juros é mais complicada, mas não me parece ser possível discuti-la sem incluir, também, o sistema de metas inflacionárias. Neste modelo a variável chave é a taxa de juros e a taxa de câmbio é, necessariamente, determinada pelo mercado. Qual seria a alternativa? Um modelo com taxa de câmbio como meta? E o risco de um ataque especulativo?

A classe operária vai ao paraiso

“Adorado por seus superiores por ser um trabalhador extremamente dedicado e odiado pelo mesmo motivo por seus colegas de trabalho. Lulu vive entregue aos sonhos de consumo da classe média, alienado em meio aos movimentos de protesto de sua classe, até que um acontecimento põe em xeque suas opiniões.” Esta é a sinopse do filme italiano “ A classe operária vai ao paraíso, um clássico do cinema politico , de 1971. Pensei neste filme ao ler as noticias na Folha sobre o consumo das classes de baixa renda e ao recordar a surpresa de alguns colegas, ótimos economistas, com os bons números da economia brasileira. Para usar uma expressão antiga: a ficha ainda não caiu. Há quem insiste em ver o Brasil como um país subdesenvolvido, outros, em esperar pelo dia da Revolução para solucionar os nossos problemas sociais. Enquanto isto o padrão de consumo se altera e as classes C, D e E, finalmente, tem acesso a produtos, antes restritos as classes A e B.

Os números são surpreendentes: “sozinha a classe C é responsável por 30% do consumo. Há cinco anos a participação das três classes sociais era de 48%”(FSP,24.03.08). Hoje corresponde a 85%. Contudo, “apesar das potencialidades, as grandes empresas resistem à baixa renda. André Torreta, diretor de A Ponte, empresa que faz pesquisa de mercado na baixa renda, considera que o preconceito é a maior barreira”(FSP, 24.03.08). A boa noticia é que uma multinacional, Nestle, crucificada, varias vezes pela esquerda chic, já reconhece o potencial deste mercado e contratou 3 diretores que moravam em favelas para ensinar o cotidiano dessas comunidades. A reportagem, aparentemente, não ouviu a opinião de nenhum empresário brasileiro, o que é no minímo curioso. Seriam eles membros da turma do preconceito?

Elementar, meu caro Watson, o pobre é o culpado.

Ah! o consumidor de baixa renda, personagem que não recebeu a dotação normal de racionalidade econômica, esta sempre pronto a criar problemas aos formuladores da política econômica. É o mordomo dos planos econômicos: sempre culpado. Há períodos em que consomem carne bovina em excesso , outros em que tem a audácia de comprar carro a ser pago em um longo prazo: 7 anos. Loucura total, murmura o economista desenvolvimentista com o que concorda, muito a contragosto, seu colega monetarista. Política de crédito defende o primeiro, a monetária é mais eficaz argumenta o segundo. O pobre consumidor observa tudo atônito. Mas o que fazer com os bens que não serão comprados pelo consumidor de baixa renda? Exportar é a solução e como sempre se repete, em situações semelhantes, é necessário criar incentivos. Naturalmente, a conta será paga pelo contribuinte. Em silêncio os dois, desenvolvimentista e monetarista, sonham com um mundo onde o consumidor de baixa renda conhece o seu lugar e somente de o seu ar de graça em período eleitoral.

DISCURSO DO SANTO PADRE BENTO XVI PARA O ENCONTRO NA UNIVERSIDADE DE ROMA "LA SAPIENZA"

O texto que o Papa Bento XVI teria lido durante a visita à Universidade de Roma "La Sapienza", prevista para o dia 17 de Janeiro, depois anulada em 15 de Janeiro de 2008:

Magnífico Reitor
Excelentíssimas Autoridades políticas e civis
Ilustres professores e pessoal técnico-administrativo,
Queridos jovens estudantes

É para mim motivo de profunda alegria encontrar-me com a comunidade da "Sapienza Universidade de Roma", por ocasião da inauguração do ano académico. Há séculos que esta Universidade marca o caminho e a vida da cidade de Roma, fazendo frutificar as melhores energias intelectuais em cada campo do saber. Depois da fundação querida pelo Papa Bonifácio VIII, a instituição, quer no período em que dependia directamente da Autoridade eclesiástica, quer sucessivamente, quando o Studium Urbis se desenvolveu como instituição do Estado Italiano, a vossa comunidade académica manteve um grande nível científico e cultural, que a coloca entre as mais prestigiosas universidades do mundo. Desde sempre, a Igreja de Roma tem olhado com simpatia e admiração para este centro universitário, reconhecendo o seu empenho, por vezes árduo e cansativo, de investigação e de formação das novas gerações. Nestes últimos anos, não faltaram momentos significativos de colaboração e diálogo. Apraz-me recordar, de modo particular, o Encontro Mundial dos Reitores, por ocasião do Jubileu das Universidades, que viu a vossa comunidade ocupar-se não apenas do acolhimento e da organização, mas também e sobretudo da proposta profética e complexa que era a elaboração de um "novo humanismo para o terceiro milénio".
Nesta circunstância, começo por expressar a minha gratidão pelo convite que me foi dirigido para falar à vossa universidade. Com esta perspectiva em mente, pus-me antes de tudo esta pergunta: O que é que pode e deve dizer um Papa numa ocasião como esta? Na minha prelecção em Ratisbona, falei certamente como Papa mas fi-lo sobretudo enquanto ex-professor daquela minha universidade, procurando unir lembranças e actualidade. Mas, à universidade "Sapienza", a antiga universidade de Roma, fui convidado a vir precisamente como Bispo de Roma e, por isso, devo falar enquanto tal. Sem dúvida, outrora a "Sapienza" era a universidade do Papa, mas hoje é uma universidade laica com aquela autonomia que, na base do seu próprio conceito constituinte, sempre fez parte da natureza da universidade, que deve estar vinculada exclusivamente à autoridade da verdade. Na sua liberdade de autoridades políticas e eclesiásticas, a universidade encontra a sua função particular, nomeadamente na sociedade moderna, que tem necessidade de uma instituição deste género.
Volto à minha pergunta inicial: O que é que pode e deve dizer o Papa no encontro com a universidade da sua cidade? Reflectindo sobre esta questão, pareceu-me que a mesma incluísse outras duas, cujo esclarecimento por si mesmo havia de levar à resposta. Com efeito, é necessário interrogar-se: Qual é a natureza e a missão do Papado? E ainda: Qual é a natureza e a missão da universidade? Não quero aqui demorar-vos, a vós e a mim, com prolongadas indagações sobre a natureza do Papado. Uma breve menção é suficiente. O Papa é primariamente Bispo de Roma e como tal, em virtude da sucessão do Apóstolo Pedro, detém uma responsabilidade episcopal por toda a Igreja Católica. A palavra "bispo" - episkopos, cujo significado imediato é o de "sentinela", já no Novo Testamento se fundiu com o conceito bíblico de Pastor: é alguém que olha o conjunto de um ponto de observação mais elevado, cuidando do recto caminho e da coesão da totalidade. Neste sentido, tal designação da sua missão aponta antes de mais para o interior da comunidade crente. O Bispo o Pastor é o homem que tem cuidado desta comunidade; é aquele que a conserva unida, mantendo-a no caminho para Deus, que foi indicado, segundo a fé cristã, por Jesus e não somente indicado: Ele mesmo é, para nós, o caminho. Mas, esta comunidade da qual o Bispo se ocupa seja ela grande ou pequena vive no mundo; as suas condições, o seu caminho, o seu exemplo e a sua palavra influem, inevitavelmente, sobre o resto da comunidade humana inteira. Quanto maior ela for, mais a sua condição salutar ou então uma eventual degradação se repercute no conjunto da humanidade. Salta hoje aos nossos olhos, com grande clareza, como as condições das religiões e como a situação da Igreja as suas crises e as suas renovações influem no conjunto da humanidade. Assim o Papa, precisamente como Pastor da sua comunidade, foi-se tornando cada vez mais também uma voz da razão ética da humanidade.
Porém, aqui levanta-se imediatamente uma objecção, ou seja, que o Papa, de facto, não falaria verdadeiramente com base na razão ética, mas tiraria as suas conclusões da fé e, por isso, não poderia pretender a validade das mesmas para quantos não partilham desta fé. Havemos ainda de voltar a este tema, deixando-o por agora porque se levanta aqui a questão absolutamente fundamental: O que é a razão? Como pode uma afirmação sobretudo uma norma moral demonstrar-se "razoável"? Aqui gostaria, brevemente apenas, de relevar que John Rawls, embora negando às doutrinas religiosas compreensivas o carácter da razão "pública", todavia vê na sua razão "não pública" pelo menos uma razão que não poderia, em nome de uma racionalidade secularizadamente insensível, ser simplesmente desconhecida por aqueles que a defendem. Para além do mais, ele vê um critério desta razoabilidade no facto de tais doutrinas derivarem de uma tradição responsável e motivada, tendo sido durante um longo período desenvolvidas argumentações suficientemente boas em defesa da respectiva doutrina. Nesta afirmação, parece-me importante o reconhecimento de que a experiência e a demonstração ao longo das gerações a base histórica da sabedoria humana constituem também um sinal da sua razoabilidade e do seu significado duradouro. Diante duma razão não histórica que procura autoconstruir-se somente numa racionalidade não histórica, a sabedoria da humanidade como tal a sabedoria das grandes tradições religiosas deve ser valorizada como realidade que não se pode impunemente lançar para o cesto da história das ideias.
Voltemos à pergunta inicial. O Papa fala como representante de uma comunidade crente, na qual, durante os séculos da sua existência, amadureceu uma determinada sabedoria da vida; fala como representante de uma comunidade que guarda em si um tesouro de conhecimento e de experiência ética, que se revela importante para toda a humanidade: neste sentido, fala como representante de uma razão ética.
Mas agora devemos interrogar-nos: O que é a universidade? Qual é a sua missão? É uma questão colossal, à qual mais uma vez me é possível tentar responder, em estilo quase telegráfico, com algumas observações. Penso que se possa afirmar que a verdadeira e íntima origem da universidade esteja na sede de conhecimento, que é própria do homem. Este quer saber o que é tudo aquilo que o circunda. Quer a verdade. Neste sentido, podemos ver o questionar-se de Sócrates como o impulso do qual nasceu a universidade ocidental. Penso, por exemplo para mencionar somente um texto na disputa com Eutifrone, que diante de Sócrates defende a religião mítica e a sua devoção. A isto, Sócrates contrapõe a pergunta: "Tu acreditas que entre os deuses exista realmente uma guerra recíproca e terríveis inimizades e combates... Teremos nós, Eutifrone, de afirmar que tudo isto é verdade?" (6 b-c). Nesta pergunta, aparentemente pouco devota mas que, em Sócrates, derivava de uma religiosidade mais profunda e mais pura, ou seja, da busca do Deus verdadeiramente divino , os cristãos dos primeiros séculos reconheceram-se a si mesmos e ao seu caminho. Acolheram a sua fé não de forma positivista, ou como a via de fuga de desejos não realizados; compreenderam-na como uma diluição da neblina da religião mitológica para deixar espaço à descoberta daquele Deus que é Razão criadora e, ao mesmo tempo, Razão-Amor. Por isso, o interrogar-se da razão sobre o Deus maior e também sobre a verdadeira natureza e o autêntico sentido do ser humano era, para eles, não uma forma problemática de falta de religiosidade, mas fazia parte da essência do seu modo de ser religiosos. Por conseguinte, eles não tinham necessidade de diluir ou abandonar o questionar-se socrático, mas podiam, aliás deviam, acolhê-lo e reconhecer como parte da sua própria identidade a árdua busca da razão para alcançar o conhecimento da verdade inteira. Assim podia, aliás devia, no âmbito da fé cristã, no mundo cristão, nascer a universidade.
É necessário dar mais um passo. O homem quer conhecer; quer a verdade. Esta é primariamente algo que diz respeito ao ver, ao compreender, à theoría, como a denomina a tradição grega. Mas, a verdade nunca é apenas teórica. Agostinho, ao estabelecer uma correlação entre as Bem-Aventuranças do Sermão da Montanha e os dons do Espírito mencionados no capítulo 11 de Isaías, notou uma reciprocidade entre "scientia" e "tristitia": o simples saber disse deixa-nos tristes. E realmente quem se limita a ver e apreender tudo aquilo que acontece no mundo, acaba por ficar triste. Mas, verdade significa mais do que saber: o conhecimento da verdade tem como finalidade o conhecimento do bem. Este é também o sentido do questionar-se socrático: Qual é o bem que nos torna verdadeiros? A verdade torna-nos bons, e a bondade é verdadeira: tal é o optimismo que vive na fé cristã, porque a esta foi concedida a visão do Logos, da Razão criadora que, na encarnação de Deus, se revelou conjuntamente como o Bem, como a própria Bondade.
Na teologia medieval, houve uma disputa profunda sobre a relação entre teoria e prática, sobre a justa relação entre conhecer e agir uma disputa que não cabe aqui desenvolver. Com efeito, a universidade medieval com as suas quatro Faculdades apresenta esta correlação. Comecemos pela Faculdade que, segundo a compreensão da época, era a quarta: a de Medicina. Não obstante fosse considerada mais como "arte" do que como ciência, todavia a sua inserção no cosmos da universitas significava claramente que estava colocada no âmbito da racionalidade, que a arte de curar se encontrava sob a guia da razão, subtraindo-se ao âmbito da magia. Curar é uma missão que exige sempre mais do que a simples razão, mas por isso mesmo precisa da conexão entre saber e poder, tem necessidade de pertencer ao campo da ratio. Inevitavelmente levanta-se a questão da relação entre prática e teoria, entre conhecimento e agir, na Faculdade de Jurisprudência. Trata-se de atribuir a justa forma à liberdade humana, que é sempre liberdade na comunhão recíproca: o direito é o pressuposto da liberdade, e não o seu antagonista. Mas aqui levanta-se a questão: Como se individualizam os critérios de justiça que tornam possível uma liberdade vivida em conjunto e favorecem o ser bom do homem? Nesta altura, impõe-se dar um salto ao presente: É a questão do modo como se pode encontrar uma normativa jurídica que constitua um ordenamento da liberdade, da dignidade humana e dos direitos do homem. É a questão que nos ocupa hoje nos processos democráticos de formação da opinião e que, ao mesmo tempo, nos angustia porque problemática para o porvir da humanidade. Na minha opinião, Jürgen Habermas exprime um vasto consenso do pensamento contemporâneo, quando afirma que a legitimidade de uma carta constitucional, como pressuposto da legalidade, derivaria de duas fontes: da participação política igualitária de todos os cidadãos e da forma razoável como são resolvidos os contrastes políticos. A propósito da referida "forma razoável", observa ele que a mesma não pode ser somente uma luta por maiorias aritméticas, mas há-de caracterizar-se como um "processo de argumentação sensível à verdade" (wahrheitssensibles Argumentationsverfahren). É uma afirmação correcta, mas muito difícil de transformar em prática política. Os representantes daquele público "processo de argumentação" são predominantemente como sabemos os partidos enquanto responsáveis pela formação da vontade política. Com efeito, estes terão infalivelmente em vista sobretudo a consecução de maiorias e, por conseguinte, olharão de maneira quase inevitável pelos interesses que prometem satisfazer; mas, tais interesses muitas vezes são particulares e não favorecem verdadeiramente a comunidade. A sensibilidade pela verdade acaba incessantemente subjugada à sensibilidade pelos interesses. Julgo significativo o facto de que Habermas fale da sensibilidade pela verdade como de um elemento necessário no processo de argumentação política, voltando assim a inserir o conceito de verdade no debate filosófico e político.
Mas, então, torna-se inevitável a pergunta de Pilatos: O que é a verdade? E como a reconhecemos? Se para isso se remete para a "razão pública", como faz Rawls, segue-se necessariamente a questão: O que é razoável? Como é que uma razão se demonstra verdadeira? De qualquer maneira, sobre esta base torna-se evidente que, na busca do direito da liberdade, da verdade da justa convivência, devem ser ouvidas outras instâncias diversas dos partidos e grupos de interesse, sem com isto querer minimamente contestar a importância destes. Voltamos assim à estrutura da universidade medieval. Ao lado da Faculdade de Jurisprudência, havia as Faculdades de Filosofia e de Teologia, às quais estava confiada a investigação sobre o ser homem na sua totalidade e, consequentemente, a missão de conservar viva a sensibilidade pela verdade. Poder-se-ia mesmo afirmar que o sentido permanente e autêntico das duas Faculdades é este: serem guardiães da sensibilidade pela verdade, não permitirem que o homem seja afastado da busca da verdade. Mas como é que elas podem corresponder a esta missão? Trata-se aqui de uma questão pela qual é necessário lutar incessantemente sem nunca estar posta e resolvida de maneira definitiva. Estando assim as coisas, nem sequer eu posso oferecer propriamente uma resposta, mas simplesmente um convite para continuarem a caminhar com esta interrogação a caminhar com os grandes que, ao longo de toda a história, lutaram e procuraram com as suas respostas e com a sua inquietude pela verdade, que remete continuamente para além de cada uma das respostas individuais.
Teologia e filosofia formam nisto um par de gémeos peculiar, não podendo nenhuma das duas desligar-se totalmente da outra e, todavia, cada uma deve conservar a própria tarefa e identidade. É mérito histórico de S. Tomás de Aquino face às diferentes respostas dos Padres, em virtude do seu contexto histórico ter evidenciado a autonomia da filosofia e, juntamente com ela, o direito e a responsabilidade própria da razão de se interrogar com base nas suas forças. Diferenciando-se das filosofias neoplatónicas, onde religião e filosofia se encontravam inseparavelmente entrelaçadas, os Padres tinham apresentado a fé cristã como a verdadeira filosofia, ressaltando ainda que esta fé corresponde às exigências da razão na sua busca da verdade; que a fé é o "sim" à verdade, comparativamente às religiões míticas que se tinham tornado uma simples rotina. Sucessivamente, porém, na época do nascimento da universidade, no Ocidente já não existiam aquelas religiões mas somente o cristianismo, e assim era necessário ressaltar novamente a responsabilidade própria da razão, de modo que não fosse absorvida pela fé. S. Tomás interveio num momento privilegiado: pela primeira vez, os escritos filosóficos de Aristóteles tornaram-se acessíveis na sua integridade; estavam presentes as filosofias hebraicas e árabes enquanto específicas apropriações e prolongamentos da filosofia grega. Assim o cristianismo, num novo diálogo com a razão dos outros que ia encontrando, teve que lutar em favor da sua própria razoabilidade. Designada "Faculdade dos Artistas", a Faculdade de Filosofia, que até então tinha sido somente propedêutica à teologia, tornou-se agora uma verdadeira e própria Faculdade, um parceiro autónomo da teologia e da fé nela reflectida. Não é possível aqui demorarmo-nos sobre o fascinante confronto que daí resultou. Diria que a ideia de S. Tomás acerca da relação entre filosofia e teologia poderia ser expressa pela fórmula encontrada pelo Concílio de Calcedónia para a cristologia: filosofia e teologia devem relacionar-se entre si "sem confusão e sem separação". "Sem confusão" significa que cada uma delas deve conservar a própria identidade. A filosofia deve permanecer verdadeiramente uma busca da razão na própria liberdade e na própria responsabilidade; deve ver os seus limites e, precisamente deste modo, também a sua grandeza e vastidão. A teologia deve continuar a beber num tesouro de conhecimento que não foi inventado por ela, que sempre a supera e que, não podendo jamais ser totalmente esgotado mediante a reflexão, por isso mesmo leva o pensamento a começar sempre de novo. Mas, a par do dado "sem confusão", vigora também o dado "sem separação": a filosofia não recomeça cada vez do ponto zero do sujeito individual que pensa, mas vive no grande diálogo da sabedoria histórica, que ela, crítica e ao mesmo tempo docilmente, acolhe e desenvolve sempre de novo; mas também não deve fechar-se diante daquilo que as religiões e, de modo particular, a fé cristã receberam e transmitiram à humanidade como indicação do caminho. Várias coisas, ditas por teólogos ao longo da história ou mesmo traduzidas na prática pelas autoridades eclesiais, foram demonstradas como falsas pela história, e hoje confundem-nos. Mas, simultaneamente, é verdade que a história dos santos, a história do humanismo desenvolvido sobre a base da fé cristã demonstra a verdade desta fé no seu núcleo essencial, tornando-a desta forma também um paradigma para a razão pública. Sem dúvida, muito do que dizem a teologia e a fé só pode ser assumido no âmbito da fé e, portanto, não pode apresentar-se como exigência para aqueles a quem esta fé permanece inacessível. Ao mesmo tempo, porém, resta verdadeiro que a mensagem da fé cristã nunca é somente uma "comprehensive religious doctrine", no sentido de Rawls, mas uma força purificadora para a própria razão, que a ajuda a ser cada vez mais ela mesma. Com base na sua origem, a mensagem cristã deveria ser sempre um encorajamento à verdade e, consequentemente, uma força contra a pressão do poder e dos interesses.
Pois bem, até agora falei somente da universidade medieval, procurando contudo deixar transparecer a natureza permanente da universidade e da sua missão. Nos tempos modernos, abriram-se novas dimensões do saber, que, na universidade, são valorizadas sobretudo em dois grandes âmbitos: em primeiro lugar, nas ciências naturais, que se desenvolveram com fundamento na conexão de experiência com a pressuposta racionalidade da matéria; em segundo lugar, nas ciências históricas e humanistas, nas quais o homem, perscrutando o espelho da sua história e esclarecendo as dimensões da sua natureza, procura compreender-se melhor a si mesmo. Neste desenvolvimento, abriu-se à humanidade não apenas uma medida imensa de saber e poder; mas aumentaram também o conhecimento e o reconhecimento dos direitos e da dignidade do homem, e disto podemos apenas sentir-nos gratos. No entanto, o caminho do homem jamais pode dizer-se completo, e o perigo de cair na desumanidade nunca está esconjurado de todo: como se vê no panorama da história actual! O perigo do mundo ocidental para falar somente dele é que o homem hoje, precisamente à vista da grandeza do seu saber e do seu poder, desista diante da questão da verdade; significando isto ao mesmo tempo que, no fim de contas, a razão cede face à pressão dos interesses e à atracção da utilidade, obrigada a reconhecê-la como critério derradeiro. Dito do ponto de vista da estrutura da universidade: existe o perigo de que a filosofia, deixando de se sentir à altura da sua autêntica missão, se degrade em positivismo; que a teologia, com a sua mensagem dirigida à razão, seja confinada na esfera privada de um grupo mais ou menos numeroso. Mas, se a razão ciosa da sua presumida pureza se torna surda à grande mensagem que lhe chega da fé cristã e da sua sabedoria, seca como uma árvore cujas raízes já não chegam às águas que lhes dão vida. Perde a coragem pela verdade; e deste modo não fica maior, mas menor. Aplicado à nossa cultura europeia, isto significa: se ela quiser autoconstruir-se unicamente com base no círculo das suas próprias argumentações e naquilo que de momento a convence e preocupada com a sua laicidade se separa das raízes de que vive, então não se torna mais razoável nem mais pura, mas desagrega-se e fragmenta-se.
Assim, volto ao ponto de partida. O que é que o Papa tem a fazer ou a dizer na universidade? Seguramente, não deve procurar impor de modo autoritário aos outros a fé, a qual pode ser dada somente em liberdade. Para além do seu ministério de Pastor na Igreja e com base na natureza intrínseca deste ministério pastoral, é sua missão manter desperta a sensibilidade pela verdade; convidar sempre de novo a razão a pôr-se à procura da verdade, do bem, de Deus e, neste caminho, estimulá-la a entrever as luzes úteis que foram surgindo ao longo da história da fé cristã e, assim, sentir Jesus Cristo como a Luz que ilumina a história e ajuda a encontrar o caminho rumo ao futuro.
Vaticano, 17 de Janeiro de 2008.
BENEDICTUS XVI