Philologist, historian, writer, prominent member of the Generation of ’98, Ramón Menéndez Pidal was also an essential figure as the creator of the nation’s modern knowledge. «Always in emerging nations there are people who are at the same time historians and philologists who build the knowledge necessary to strengthen a certain national identity. And Menéndez Pidal fulfilled that role,” explains professor of Spanish Philology Jon Juaristi (Bilbao, 1951). To his liberal intellectual training and his contribution as a thinker to a kind of cultural regeneration that ended in failure with the war, the ABC columnist has dedicated the book ‘Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The last unitary liberal’ (FAES Foundation, Gota a Gota). —It stands out in the book that Menéndez Pidal, upon his return to Francoist Spain, was the first to propose an understanding between the two sides. —There were some important voices that already advocated for a kind of understanding, but they were in exile, like Indalecio Prieto. Menéndez Pidal does it from within, and that proposal prefigures what would later be the meeting of the two sides in the Transition. His prologue to ‘History of Spain’, in 1947, already contains the essential, that proposal of historical commitment.—What was the path he followed to get there?—It is curious because he seemed predestined to be an illiberal ultraconservative, let’s say. Faced with the weight of the Carlist tradition in his family, through his brother Juan and through Menéndez Pelayo, he learned about a type of Catholicism closer to liberalism. It was called at the time the Catholic Union, they were old traditionalists and old Carlists who opted for liberalism and restoration. They tried to participate in politics alongside the Conservative Party, but far from Carlism. He believed in liberalism and the thing about autonomies is beginning to alarm him, as is obvious. He was a bit pessimistic about the Spanish character. I thought that since ancient times the Spaniards had consolidated a kind of aloof character, unsupportive and very at odds with their neighbors.—Menéndez Pidal was alarmed when in the debate on Catalan autonomy they wanted to suppress the phrase ‘Spanish nation’.—But not only he. Unamuno and Ortega are also alarmed. It is common to these men of the fin de siècle generation. Autonomism and nationalism are still very much in the minority in the Spain of the Republic. They are identified not only with the right, but in the case of the Basques, with the extreme right. Menéndez Pidal should not be seen as an exceptional case.—Where has this figure of the intellectual gone these days?—Strictly speaking, an intellectual style still exists. That is, people who dedicate themselves to thinking, writing and publishing. What happens is that they don’t have the predicament they had at other times. In the world of social networks, of mass culture, the opinion of a film actor or a very famous soccer player reaches more people than that of an intellectual who writes for newspapers or is a university professor.—A Menéndez Was Pidal heard at the time?—Yes, he had a large audience, like Menéndez Pelayo and Ortega did. There was no such thing as the Americanization of Spanish culture in the interwar era. This promoted to the foreground a series of figures who had pretensions of ingenuity, but who were not intellectuals per se. At this time horizontality is almost absolute, opinions are no longer hierarchical, they are not previously valued. Everyone believes that they have the perfect right to make themselves heard and to have their opinion taken into account, no matter how stupid their opinion may be. The end result is a kind of chaos, there are no criteria to value some opinions more than others.—In the 1920s, and also in the republican years, Menéndez Pidal tried to promote a cultural reform. How did he do it?—This came from that kind of great cultural agitation that occurred in the era of the restoration around the Free Institution of Education. They all also start from the regenerationist projects of the end of the century, which try to overcome the general pessimism that had fallen on Spain, after the loss of the last colonies. There is a photograph that moves me very much, in which Menéndez Pidal, Azorín and Marañón appear in Paris in 1937. The three had to leave, because they could have been killed for being bourgeois intellectuals. They were not on the rebellious side yet. They are the remains of a liberal Spain that had been defeated by events; a kind of third Spain in which there were plenty. It was an intellectuality without space.—In today’s Spain would this enterprise be possible?—What causes me greater discomfort is the growing lack of importance of historical knowledge. Culture is increasingly a subject for university minorities, and this prevents the emergence of leading groups that have a certain intellectual entity. Just look at the politicians of any party right now.—We have a Minister of Culture determined to review history.—It’s barbaric, idiotic, he doesn’t even know what colonialism is. It just seems stupid to me. The decolonization of museums, the demasculinization of museums… what can start there would be absolutely terrible. If one wants to look in other people’s mirrors, one can do so in the United States: that kind of absolute cancellation of everything that was a common culture.—Are we moving towards that model?—It seems to me that there are trends that are beginning to do this. It is the model of scorched earth and cultural entropy. Calculating at this time the social percentage of people who defend these positions is a little difficult, but they are very vociferous.
#Jon #Juaristi #believes #heard #matter #stupid #opinion
