José Saramago – Let’s Return to Philosophy
When it comes to various attempts to fathom what the future holds for us, I think it would be better if we contemplate what tomorrow brings, the day that most of us can still assume we will experience alive. In fact, if in the distant year of 999 AD, a few wise men and numerous theologians gathered in some part of Europe, attempting to guess what the world would be like in a thousand years, I am certain that they would have been wrong in almost everything. However, there is one thing they undoubtedly would have been right about, and that is that there will be no significant difference between the bewildered human beings of today, who do not know and do not want to know where they are being led, and the frightened people of that era who believed that the end of the world was approaching. In comparison to that, much greater differences can be expected between the people living today and those who will be born just a hundred years from now, let alone a thousand. In other words: today, we have much more in common with those who lived a thousand years ago than with for those who will inherit this planet in just one hundred years… It could be said that the real end of the world is happening in today’s time, when it seems that the world that was born a thousand years ago is disappearing.
In the meantime, while the world ends or doesn’t end, while the Sun sets for the last time or everything remains as it is, why don’t we take a moment to focus on tomorrow, a day we can assume that most of us will still be lucky enough to experience? Instead of cheap proposals for the third millennium, which will most likely immediately turn them into dust as soon as it arrives, why don’t we rather work on implementing a few simple ideas and projects that are understandable to the majority of people? In the absence of better options, we could focus on the following:
a) do everything possible to ensure that social development starts from the bottom, meaning that the growing population, left at the bottom due to current development models, is brought to the forefront of prosperity;
b) create a new sense of duty connected with the realization of human rights;
c) live more modestly, like survivors after a disaster, because the goods, wealth, and fruits of this planet are not inexhaustible;
d) resolve the contradiction between the constant claims that we are getting closer to each other and the evidence from real life that supports the fact that we are becoming more and more isolated;
e) reduce the growing gap between those who know a lot and those who know little. I believe that our tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, the next century and the whole millennium will depend on the answers we give to questions like these.
Let us, therefore, return to philosophy.
José Saramago is a Portuguese writer, poet, playwright, and journalist, winner He won the notable literature awards in 1998 and the Camoes Award, the highest award for literature in the Portuguese language, in 1995.
He was born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga and grew up in Lisbon in a very poor family. He never finished college, but educated himself while simultaneously working various jobs, such as a mechanic, draughtsman, healthcare worker, translator, and journalist. It wasn’t until 1976 that he was able to dedicate himself solely to his literary work.
His first book, Land of Sin, was published in 1947, followed by others like the poetry collections Possible Poems and Allegedly Joy, as well as the prose works Handbook of Drawing and Calligraphy, Journey to Portugal, Memories of the Monastery, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, An Essay on Blindness, All the Names, The Cave, and many others.
He was highly critical of Portuguese and European political and religious hypocrisy, while emphasizing love as a means to improve human relationships. Therefore, he was often attacked, but also widely read. His works have been translated into around thirty languages.
He died in 2010 on the Canary Islands, in voluntary exile.