THE NEW WORLD OF THE GOTHIC FOX
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dwindling capital.
It
expanded in that period precisely because it was no
real threat. Things that are living off their capital, these fading aristo–
cratic phenomena, are welcome at any dinner party, because they are
seeking energy only in order to keep going for a few years longer and
are a threat to no other guest.
This was true of the English civilization as it expanded in the eigh–
teenth and nineteenth centuries. Its powers were acquired in a fit of ab–
sentmindedness. It was not regarded as a threat but rather as an embodi–
ment of interesting solutions to the problems of the modern world, not
the least being the common law itself The English culture which briefly
spread across the world was almost, in our own century, replaced by its
most degenerate offshoot, American popular culture - itself made possi–
ble by the easy-goingness of the English way of life which allows every
form of bad taste to flourish according to its own desires. This culture of
bad taste has now become universal: indeed the loss of the distinction
between good and bad taste is perhaps the ruling characteristic of the
modern world - that and the continuing belief in the validity of legal
solutions to social problems. I think we can say that Veliz is right that
those two things are the enduring legacy of England, and it is right to
compare them with the Hellenization of the Mediterranean in the third,
fourth and fifth centuries.
In conclusion, my remarks have been meant as both an expression of
my broad agreement with Veliz's thesis and of certain qualms about the
exuberant metaphors which are conscripted along the way.
Peter Berger:
Thank you very much.
Ricardo Arias Calderon:
Claudio Veliz's book on culture and econ–
omy in English and Spanish America is an erudite, superbly written, po–
etic, intellectually challenging, at moments brilliant book. At the same
time it is an ironic, caricatural, oddly manichean book, with a
hypothesis, or better still, with a metaphor run wild.
In developing what he calls "a single working hypothesis about the
character of the society and the economy of the two great transplanted
cultures of the New World," Veliz is really attempting to explain the
perceived failure of the Latin American social and especially economic
system in contrast to the perceived success of the social and economic
system of the United States. The contrast has been an intellectual as well
as a political challenge for the greater part of this century and remains so
today, even though lately it has taken a different, less pessimistic turn - as
Latin American countries attempt, with some degree of positive results,
to find their way democratically into the emerging globalized economy.
