Modern Brazil

I went to MASP, the museum of modern art in São Paulo, this week, and there was one part of the permanent exhibition that stuck in my mind. It was the part on myths and heroes, with paintings by some of the classic renaissance artists and their descendants.

What stuck with me was the blurb at the beginning of the collection, which explained with a matter-of-fact tone that modernism - which apparently is the nuclear explosion in whose apocalyptic aftermath we all live - essentially killed the idea of the hero. Rejecting the idea that had prevailed for centuries (millennia?) that there actually existed men with perfect character and unfailing courage, whose lives we were supposed to imitate, modernism exposed these heroes as simply human: full of the decay, depravity, and imperfections so characteristic of our race.

What this made me realize is that this is one of the fundamental differences between the industrialized world and Brazil. In Brazil, heroes are still going strong, and so are villains, and actually much of the mindset which modernism so ferociously eradicated in the northern hemisphere remains deeply rooted in all levels of society here.

In short, Brazil essentially exists today in a pre-modern state. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Now let me be clear. I'm not saying that Brazilians are stone-age neanderthals or that this country is somehow inferior to its more industrially developed counterparts. Not at all. What I'm really talking about here is the difference in mindset and worldview between these cultures. What I'm talking about here is a psychological difference, and not a question of who is better and who is worse.

Let me explain.

In the United States (actually I should say cosmopolitan U.S.), we are totally steeped in the principles of modernism. From the very earliest of ages, we are taught its principles in school, in church, on TV, in the movies, and in print media like the incontrovertible pillars of reality that we believe them to be, right alongside the Law of Gravity and how to tie one's shoes.

What are these principles? That our success is our own responsibility, that there is a clear relationship between work and reward, that we have to be constantly improving ourself in every way, that we need to impose order on a disordered world, that we need to maximize our efficiency in order to compete, that we require a minimum level of material comfort to be happy, that things like the corporate ladder and the military-industrial complex and campaign finance and laissez-faire are permanent facts of our existence, completely out of our control.

Now most of you were probably offended by that list. Most of those things to us norteamericanos are seen as self-evident, beyond questioning. I'm not even saying those things are necessarily wrong, just that they don't give the full picture.

In Brazil they have preserved some of the best ideas from the age that came before industrialism, before we expected to spend a good portion of our lives in factories and later offices. Ideas like the sacredness of family (what a concept!), an appreciation for the so-called "finer things in life," the art of actually relaxing, a sense of tolerance for the inefficient, the weak, and the uncompetitive. These are things that the "modern mind" forgot about a long time ago.

In short, traveling to Brazil for me is like stepping into the past. Some things are romantic and quaint, remnants of a past age when things were simpler and more pure. Other things are repugnant, remnants of the same age when things were harsher and more intolerant. Either way though, it is a new perspective, which is always a good thing, regardless of your age.