MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
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terbalance life's insufficiencies is a way of ensuring that people's sensibili–
ties do not become dulled. At the same time it sharpens up their critical
faculties, the discontent without which there is no social change or
movement, and which nothing awakens or spurs on so much as a rich
cultural life. Of course, the state shouldn't "direct" or even outline the
path of cultural activity, or provide any guidelines for it other than that
of being free and autonomous. Its function is to guarantee that culture is
diverse and manifold, open to all stirrings and provocations, since only if
it is exposed in this way to challenges and seductions does it remain
linked to current experience, and help people to live, create, desire.
Culture does not need to be protected since, when it exists authentically,
it protects itself better than any government could. But states do, in fact,
have the duty to give to all the means necessary to acquire and produce
it, namely education, and the minimal conditions of life adequate to
permit the enjoyment of it.
Intense cultural life is, moreover, one of the ways a liberal state can
counteract one of the congenital dangers of modern capitalist society: a
certain dehumanization, a materialism that isolates the individual, destroys
the family, fosters selfishness, loneliness, scepticism, snobbery, cynicism, and
other forms of spiritual vacuity. No modern industrial society has yet
been able to respond adequately to this challenge. In all of them, the
high standards of living and material progress within reach of most peo–
ple have weakened social solidarity (which, paradoxically, is generally
more intense in primitive countries). A proliferation of cults and rituals
of a demented irrationality have spawned, whose sole explanation seems
to be the unconscious need to replace in some way the sacred, the faith
whose loss we evidently cannot resign ourselves to. The drug subculture
- perhaps the most formidable modern assault on reason, renouncing
among itself and before the whole world the attribute of lucidity, the
backbone of the culture of freedom - seems to be one of these exacer–
bated and tortuous forms that manifest, in highly developed countries,
the immemorial appetite for transcendence and the absolute, in earlier
times appeased by magic, myth, and religion.
We who are fighting to make our countries more modern through
the only system that can bring prosperity without decreasing freedom
must learn a lesson from what we observe in the highly developed coun–
tries. We must respond imaginatively to the dangers facing any democ–
racy, by means of a policy, based on the same principle that forges mar–
ket economies and promotes liberal capitalism, of encouraging culture
and creativity in
all
its forms and boldness: artistic work, critical thought,
investigation and experiment, the intellectual. And, whatever our inti–
mate convictions might be on the subject of God, we must encourage
