Vetoing men’s books at Fuvest is institutional stupidity – 12/16/2023 – Antonio Prata

The phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” has always bothered me. I thought: great, mistakes happen, but bad intentions should fill Beelzebub’s grills, ovens, cauldrons and airfryers, right? Emphasizing good intentions in misfortune seemed to me like a cynical stance, dismissing any unsuccessful attempt to improve the world. A safe passage to scoundrels. After all, who can deny that a mistaken attempt to do good is better than a deliberate attitude to do evil?

In view of some recent actions by the left and their enormous side effects, however, I have seen the popular saying from another angle: it is more difficult to fight against well-intentioned stupidity than against an imbecile who wants to “pass the crowd”. The mistaken “in favor of good” can cause great evil, protected by the impenetrable armor of virtue.

That’s how I feel about Fuvest’s decision to exclude male authors from the literature test in its next editions. Since the idea is born from the virtuous ambition to fight against machismo, all criticism of it is immediately seen as sexist. And already knowing that this is how I will be accused, I opine: no contribution to the anti-macho struggle will come from depriving teenagers of reading Machado, Drummond, Rosa.

The world is sexist. Sexism, excluding half of the world’s population from access to study and debate in the public sphere, has meant that the greatest works in literature, arts and sciences in recent millennia have come from men. This is not an opinion, it is a fact. The women were oppressed and silent. To think that for every Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, for every Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, for every Machado, Graciliano or Rosa, there are equivalent female works hidden until today, which will emerge when male works are excluded, is to deny the existence and effectiveness of machismo.

It is evident that there were, in ancient Greece, during the Enlightenment or in the 19th century, in Brazil, women who were as capable or more capable than these guys. But the patriarchal structure did not allow them to study, have the chance to speak out or publish. The result is that the Western canon is primarily masculine.

In the last hundred years, black people, women, native peoples and other excluded actors have entered the debate who, reading our canon against the grain, have helped to reveal how much the white, masculine and Eurocentric vision has shaped our history. This only enriches knowledge. The introduction of African, Amerindian and Asian cosmogonies and cosmologies enhances the culture. It is essential to include more voices of women, people of color and other “minorities” in the conversation. But no one in their right mind is going to throw out the theory of relativity because Einstein was a white, straight, cis, German man – at least, that’s what I thought, until this Fuvest mess, of excluding male authors from their literary list. .

Affirmative action is a great legacy of the struggles for civil rights, from the United States to the world. It is urgent to give anyone the opportunity to benefit from all the knowledge produced by humanity. It is urgent to include in this knowledge all the voices that have been silenced until now. But it is bizarre to reduce this knowledge by silencing the voices that produced it. It’s the anti-quota. Institutional burrism. The fact that Newton is a white, straight, cis man does not change the law of gravity in any way. The fundamental decolonial struggle will not make the apples fall upwards.

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