💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › ricardo-mella-the-bankruptcy-of-beliefs.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:41:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Bankruptcy of Beliefs Author: Ricardo Mella Date: 1902-03 Language: en Topics: translation, Spain, anarchism without adjectives Source: Retrieved on February 1st, 2017 from https://contrun.libertarian-labyrinth.org/ricardo-mella-the-bankruptcy-of-beliefs-and-the-rising-anarchism-1902-03/
To my brother J. Prat:
Faith has had its moment; it has also had its noisy bankruptcy. There is
nothing left standing at this hour but the lonely ruins of its altars.
Ask the learned people—or those who still wear the intellectual
loincloth—and if they wish to answer you conscientiously, they will tell
you that faith has died forever: political faith and religious faith,
and the scientific faith that has defrauded so many hopes.
When all the past was dead, gazes turned longingly toward the rising
sun. Then the sciences had their triumphal hymns. And it came to pass
that the multitude was given new idols, and now the eminent
representatives of the new beliefs preach right and left the sublime
virtues of the dogmatic scientist. The dangerous logorrhea of flattering
adjectives, and the never-ending chatter of the sham sages put us on the
path to what is rightly proclaimed the bankruptcy of science.
Actually, it is not science that is bankrupt in our day. There is no
science; there are sciences. There are no finished things; there are
things in perpetual formation. And what does not exist cannot break. If
it were still claimed that that which is in constant elaboration, that
which constitutes or will constitute the flow of knowledge goes bankrupt
in our time, it would only demonstrate that those who said it sought
something in the sciences what they cannot give us. It is not the human
task of investigating and knowing that fails; what fails, as faith
failed in the past, is the sciences.
The ease of creating without examination or mature deliberation, coupled
with the general poverty of culture, has resulted in theological faith
being succeeded by philosophical faith and later scientific faith. Thus,
religious and political fanatics are followed by the believers in a
multitude of “isms,” which, if fertilized by the greatest wealth of our
understanding, only confirm the atavistic tendencies of the human
spirit.
But what is the meaning of the clamoring that arises at every step in
the bosom of parties, schools and doctrines? What is this unceasing
battle between the catechumens of the same church? It means, simply,
that beliefs fail.
The enthusiasm of the neophyte, the healthy and crazy enthusiasm, forges
new doctrines and the doctrines forge new beliefs. It desires something
better, pursues the ideal, seeks noble and lofty employment of its
activities, and barely makes a slight examination, if it finds the note
that resonates harmoniously in our understanding and in our heart. It
believes. Belief then pulls us along completely, directs and governs our
entire existence, and absorbs all our faculties. In no other way could
chapels, like churches, small or large, rise powerfully everywhere.
Belief has its altars, its worship and its faithful, as faith had.
But there is a fateful, inevitable, hour of dreadful questioning. And
this luminous hour is one in which mature reflection asks itself the
reason for its beliefs and its ideological loves.
Then the ideal word, which was something like the nebula of a God on
whose altar we burned the incense of our enthusiasm, totters. Many
things crumble within us. We vacillate as a building whose foundations
are weakening. We are upset about party and opinion commitments, just as
if our own beliefs were to become unbearable. We believed in man, and we
no longer believe. We roundly affirmed the magical virtue of certain
ideas, and we do not dare to affirm it. We enjoyed the ardor of an
immediate positive regeneration, and we no longer enjoy it. We are
afraid of ourselves. What prodigious effort of will is required not to
fall into the most appalling emptiness of ideas and feelings!
There goes the crowd, drawn by the verbosity of those who carry nothing
inside and by the blindness of those who are full of great and
incontestable truths. There goes the multitude, lending with its
unconscious action, the appearance life to a corpse whose burial only
awaits the strong will of a genius intelligence, who will strip off the
blindfold of the new faith.
But the man who thinks, the man who meditates on his opinions and
actions in the silent solitude that leads him to the insufficiency of
beliefs, sketches the beginning of the great catastrophe, feels the
bankruptcy of everything that keeps humanity on a war footing and is
aware of the rebuilding of his spirit.
The noisy polemic of parties, the daily battles of selfishness,
bitterness, hatred and envy, of vanity and ambition, of the small and
great miseries that grip the social body from top to bottom, mean
nothing but that beliefs go bankrupt everywhere.
Soon, and perhaps even now, if we delved into the consciences of
believers, of all believers, we would find nothing but doubts and
questions. All men of good will soon confess their uncertainties. Only
the closed-minded belief will be affirmed by those who hope to gain some
profit, just as the priests of religions and the augurs of politics
continue to sing the praises of the faith that feeds them even after its
death.
So, then, is humanity is going to rush into the abyss of ultimate
negation, the negation of itself?
Let us not think like the old believers, who cry before the idol that
collapses. Humanity will do nothing but break one more link of the chain
that imprisons it. The noise matters little. Anyone who does not feel
the courage to calmly witness the collapse, will do well to retire.
There is always charity for the invalids.
We believed that ideas had the sovereign virtue of regenerating us, and
now we find ourselves with ideas that do not carry within themselves
elements of purity, justification and truthfulness, and cannot borrow
them from any ideal. Under the passing influence of a virgin enthusiasm,
we seem renewed, but at last the environment regains its empire.
Humanity is not made up of heroes and geniuses, and so even the purest
sink, at last, into the filth of all the petty passions. The time when
beliefs are broken is also the time when all the fraudsters are known.
Are we in an iron ring? Beyond all the hecatombs life springs anew. If
things do not change according to our particular theses, if they do not
occur as we expect them to occur, this does not give in to the negation
of the reality of realities. Outside of our pretensions as believers,
the modification persists, the continuous change is accomplished and
everything evolves: means, men and things. How? In what direction? Ah!
That is precisely what is left at the mercy of the unconsciousness of
the multitudes; that is what, in the end, is decided by an element alien
to the work of the understanding and the sciences: force.
After all the propaganda, all the lessons, all the progress, humanity
does not have, it does not wish to have any creed but violence. Right?
Is this wrong?
And it is force that we accept the things as they are and that,
accepting them, our spirit does not weaken. At a critical moment, when
everything collapses in us and around us; when we grasp that we are
neither better nor worse than others; when we are convinced that the
future is not contained in any formulas that are still dear to us, that
the species will never conform to the mold of a given form of
association, whether it may be called; when we finally assure ourselves
that we have done nothing more than forge new chains, gilded with
beloved names,—in that decisive moment we must break up all the rubbish
of belief, that we cut all the fastenings and we revive personal
independence more confidently than ever.
If a vigorous individuality is stirred within us, we will not morally
die at the hands of the intellectual vacuum. For man, there is always a
categorical affirmation, the “becoming,” the beyond that is constantly
reflected and after which it is, however, necessary to run. Let’s run
faster when the bankruptcy of beliefs is done.
What does it matter that the goal will eternally move away from us? Men
who fight, even in this belief, are those who are needed; not those who
find elements of personal enrichment in everything; not those who make
of the interests of the party pennant connections for the satisfaction
of their ambitions; not those who, positioned to monopolize for their
own advantage, monopolize even feelings and ideas.
Even among men of healthier aspirations, selfishness, vanity, foolish
petulance, and low ambition take center stage. Even in the parties of
more generous ideas there is the leaven of slavery and exploitation.
Even in the circle of the noblest ideals, charlatanism and vanity teem;
fanaticism, soon intransigence toward the friend, sooner cowardice
toward the enemy; fatuity that that rises up swaggering, shielded by the
general ignorance. Everywhere, weeds sprout and grow. Let’s not live
delusions.
Shall we allow ourselves to be crushed by the grief of all the atavisms
that revive, with sonorous names, in us and around us?
Standing firm, firmer than ever, looking beyond any formula whatsoever,
will reveal the true fighter, the revolutionary yesterday, today and
tomorrow. Without a hero’s daring, it is necessary to pass undaunted
through the flames that consume the bulk of time, to take a risk among
the creaking timbers, the roofs that sink, the walls that collapse. And
when there is nothing left but ashes, rubble, shapeless debris that will
have crushed the weeds, nothing will not be left for those who come
after but one simple work: to sweep the floor of the lifeless obstacles.
If the collapse of faith has allowed the growth of belief in the fertile
field of the human being, and if belief, in turn, falters and bows
withered to the earth, we sing the bankruptcy of belief, because it is a
new step on the path of individual freedom.
If there are ideas, however advanced, that have bound us in the stocks
of doctrinarism, let us smash them. A supreme ideality for the mind, a
welcome satisfaction for the spirit disdainful of human pettiness, a
powerful force for creative activity, putting thought into the future
and the heart into the common welfare, will always remain standing, even
after the bankruptcy of all beliefs.
At the moment, even if the mind is frightened, even if all the
pigeonholes rebel, in many minds something stirs that is
incomprehensible to the dying world: beyond ANARCHY there is also a sun
that is born, as in the succession of time there is no sunset without
sunrise.
Sources:
La bancarrota de las creencias, by Ricardo Mella, «La Revista Blanca»,
107, Madrid, December 1, 1902.
El Anarquismo naciente was published as a continuation of La bancarrota
de las creencias, in a pamphlet published in Valencia, in 1903, by
Ediciones El Corsario.
[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]