Enrique Krauze
Says More…
This week in Say More, PS talks with Enrique Krauze, a historian, essayist, publisher, and the editor of the cultural magazine Letras Libres.
Project Syndicate: The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, you wrote in July, showed that, through reason, “one can counter the ‘ultimate barbarism’ that comes with unchecked human passions.” In the wake of a US presidential election that embodied our “present era of fanaticisms,” what does Spinoza have to say to US leaders and civil society? What practical steps can be taken to reinvigorate core values defended by Spinoza, such as “science, a belief in objective facts, democratic civility,” and “tolerance”?
Enrique Krauze: We are living through a new chapter in an eternal story, as the theological and political hatreds that Spinoza suffered in his life and confronted in his work undergo a resurgence. The details are different: the issues shaping our lives and discourse have changed, and whereas clerics and monarchs used to be the ones stoking hatred, charismatic political figures like Donald Trump do so today. But the passions are the same. Now, as then, the mob gathers in the public square – nowadays on global social networks – to “lynch” their irreconcilable enemies.
This revival of intolerance brings Spinoza back to the fore. His treatises amount to a kind of secular bible of republican civility. But Spinoza had no illusions about the influence of his ideas on the masses. His intellectual amendment, as he would say, was destined for the enlightened minorities of his time, and for future eras – like ours.