Opinion – Candido Bracher: When we stop understanding the world

“When We Stop Understanding the World” is the title of a fascinating non-fiction novel by Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut.

In five independent episodes, in which real characters and real facts are enriched with the author’s imagination, the intricate connections between scientific creation, on the one hand, and beauty, madness and war, on the other hand are exposed. We are introduced to scientists who explored the limits of knowledge in their times, such as Einstein, Schwarzschild, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, among others, and we learn how destabilizing scientific discovery can be when it reveals facts that accentuate our inability to understand the world.

I read the book a few months ago, but in the last few days its title has come back to my mind over and over again. Certainly not because I wonder about how black holes work, or seek to understand the principles of quantum mechanics; I don’t venture that far. My present inability to understand the world is linked to facts much simpler and observable to the naked eye. That’s what bothers me the most.

I feel like Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by the genius Peter Sellers in the movie “Far Beyond the Garden”. He is a borderline person, who lived in complete seclusion until middle age, tending to the garden and having television as his only means of contact with the outside world. Forced to confront real life, when he is kicked out of the house by his late boss’s lawyers, he finds himself facing a gang of teenagers in an American suburb. Threatened with a switchblade, he pulls the television remote control out of his pocket and points it at the group, trying to change the scene.

I try the same, but my remote doesn’t work either.

I believe that it is natural for people, whether out of psychic necessity or on real grounds, for the development of an evolutionary conception of man and society. This belief is based on the well-known and ubiquitous image of “evolution”, showing the figures that range from ape to man who walks upright to the “frizes of time”, which we learn to do in primary school (“fundamental”, for the youngest), in which prehistory, slavery, feudal serfdom follow each other, passing through the discoveries, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, until they flow into the modern democracies of our days.

In our own lifetime, we have seen the shadows of the great wars of the last century, the arrival of man on the moon, the increasing integration of women and the awareness of minorities in general, and the technological advances that facilitate communication and the information. It is natural that we believe in progress and in a tendency to seek understanding, negotiated solutions and democratic balance, at least in our western world. As this belief suits us, we can even disregard elements that point in the opposite direction, considering them exceptional cases, exceptions that justify the rule.

But lately the exception has become the rule. We are part of a world that practically inertly watches the growing evidence of the tragic consequences of global warming. Faced with the increasingly accurate and uncontested predictions of science, we behave like the frog in the pot, attributing to the other the responsibility that belongs to everyone. As global understanding is very complicated, we pretend that the problem does not exist.

In the US, the unbelievable invasion of the Capitol is only less shocking than the predictions of the likely return of its promoter in the next presidential election. In recent weeks, three Supreme Court decisions nullifying the right to abortion, permitting the carrying of weapons in public and curtailing the US environmental agency give the impression that the designer has reversed the film of history.

In the Philippines, like a haunting from beyond the grave, the name of Ferdinand Marcos returns, a perfect caricature of the corrupt dictator. The newspapers tell us that his son’s election was supported by an intense series of fake news, proving once again Goebbels’ principle that a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

In Europe — which, after the Second World War, was built to give the world the beautiful examples of the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and the consolidation of the European Union, where respect for differences in language and culture is the strength of the block—, we are amazed to see the war of great proportions. At least in this case, it comforts us that, with the prospect of Sweden and Finland joining NATO and the invitation to Ukraine and Moldova to join the EU, Putin’s adventure seems to repeat the logic of Greek tragedies, such as that of Oedipus. , when the urge to escape the feared future ends up plunging the character into the abyss from which he wanted to escape. NATO will be stronger after the war, and Putin’s future is uncertain. But that will not bring back the thousands of victims of this anachronistic confrontation.

In Latin America, a sequence of elections polarized between apparently irreconcilable positions shows the deterioration of democracy in the subcontinent, instead of the consolidation that a few years ago seemed assured. The growing fragility of political parties and the dysfunctional effect of social networks make it difficult to form majorities that can guarantee the implementation of sustainable policies that lead to economic growth and social development.

In our Brazil, we have before us a presidential election in which the two candidates leading the polls are, to borrow Laurentino Gomes’ phrase, “on the one hand, a guy who flirts with the dictatorship, with his crude language. another, a left with the smell of mothballs”. There is still time to build an alternative that represents the ideals of union and concord.

Among all, the image that hurts the most is projected in my mind over and over again. On the Itaquaí River, surrounded by the Amazon rainforest, two men travel in a small speedboat, just before they are ambushed and murdered. In my eyes, they are defenders of the forest and its peoples, but I hear the last person responsible for security in the country say with disdain that they are embarking on an “unrecommended adventure”. I’m not sure I want to understand this world.