Tuesday 21 October 2014
I would like to write about the third document in this weeks reading, which is an excerpt from La raza cosmica by Jose Vasconcelos in 1925. This document was about three stages of social progress: The first being of material and war, the second of intellect and politics, and the third of spirituality and aesthetics. He argues that societies naturally flow through this step by step progression to a society of fantasy and feeling. He claims that his society at the time is on the cusp of the third stage. To my understanding, he argues that the reasoning for a society to be stuck in the lower stages is due to arranged marriages where people have no choice but to stay in a relationship with someone they do not love, for political reasons. In the second stage, people put too much trust in intellect and in turn limit the nation and individuals' actions. he suggests that this lack of freedom for "taste" is what breeds ugliness in people, and that ugliness causes inferiority rather than race. So, if people are given the freedom of choice in their partners, other's wouldn't be offended by inter-racial marriage since eventually, do to an evolution of selection, they would both be beautiful people (like a goddess and god) and it wouldn't matter to them. I couldn't help but ask myself "am i reading this correctly?"(please correct me if i am not!). Vasconcelos first disagrees with eugenics saying that they are 'based on incomplete and false data", but his own theory seems just as superficial. I will acknowledge that perhaps he is not speaking of physical beauty but of love, which emanates beauty. According the the textbook like Dario, Vasconcelos was addressing the United States in particular, accusing their racist norms belonging to a lower social stage, and compares Latin America's more accepting attitude towards racial mixing to be a trait which will send them into the next social stage. Also, like in Dario's poem ' To Roosevelt', Vasconcelos speaks of a godliness which they possess that is unreachable to the US. To me, this document expresses his pride of his nation, and a certainty for success.
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I definitely agree with you that it is difficult to know exactly what Vasconcelos means when he talks about "ugliness" and "beauty". When I first read it, I thought that since he was talking about creating a superior "cosmic" race, it was his own theory of eugenics in which he aims at achieving a race built on the instinct of aesthetic beauty as opposed to being bound by the rules of racial divide and hierarchy. When he says this I assumed he meant physical, outer beauty..especially since he says something along the lines of: ugly people will not procreate and eventually die out, because they are ugly. But now that I think more about it I agree with your reading more then my own because as a whole I see that his ideas do focus a lot on things of intrinsic value rather than something external like outer beauty. So perhaps when he says that ugly people will not procreate, he means that people who are ugly on the inside will die out because no one will be forced to marry them based on skin color or other things. Definitely a really interesting read, but it is just hard for me to tell if this is his real intention or not.
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