I wouldn’t have joined the Peace March if the first move hadn’t come from Henry Pease, an adversary who, as an intellectual and as a politician, seemed to me to be a respectable person. There are many ways of defining what is respectable. As far as I am concerned, the intellectual or the politician who says what he believes, does what he says, and does not use ideas and words as a mere device to further his ambition deserves respect.
Respectable intellectuals in this sense do not abound in my country. I say this with sadness, but I know what I’m talking about. The subject kept me awake nights for years, until one day I thought I understood why signs of moral dishonesty seemed greater among people in my profession than among Peruvians with other vocations. And why so many of them had contributed so effectively to Peru’s political and cultural decadence. Before that, I had racked my brains trying to fathom why, among our intellectuals and above all the progressive-minded ones — the immense majority — there was such an abundance of rapscallions, scoundrels, impostors, con men. Why they could live so brazenly in a state of ethical schizophrenia, frequently belying by their actions in private what they promoted with such conviction in their writings and in their public conduct.
Anyone reading the manifestos, articles, and essays of these blustering anti-imperialists, anyone attending their classes or lectures, would have thought that hating the United States had become their apostolic mission. But almost all of them had applied for, received, and often literally lived on fellowships, aid funds, travel grants, special commissions, and assignments given them by U.S. foundations, and spent semesters and even entire academic years in the “entrails of the monster” (José Martí’s expression), fed by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, et cetera, et cetera. All of them frantically pulled strings and many of them succeeded, it is certain, in grafting themselves as professors onto those universities of the country which they had taught their students, disciples, and readers to detest as the party responsible for all the calamities suffered by Peru. How to explain this masochism of the intellectual species? Why this eager race of so many of them toward the country whose insanities they spent their lives denouncing, denunciations thanks to which they had built, in large part, their academic careers and acquired their petty prestige as sociologists, literary critics, political scientists, ethnologists, anthropologists, economists, archaeologists or poets, journalists, and novelists?
Some full-blown flowers, chosen at random. Julio Ortega began his career as an “intellectual” working at a salaried job for the Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (the Congress for Cultural Freedom) in Lima in the 1960s, just at the time when it came out that this institution was receiving funds from the CIA, a revelation which led many writers who were there in good faith to withdraw from the Congress (he was not among their number). After that, he was avoided like the plague by progressives. With the advent of the revolutionary and socialist military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, he became a revolutionary and a socialist, thereby nailing down another salaried job. In the cultural supplement of one of the daily papers taken over by the dictatorship—Correo—of which he was named editor-in-chief, he devoted himself for several years to railing, in a “structuralist” jargon that combined intellectual ignorance with political baseness in symmetrical proportions, against those who did not accept as articles of faith the deportations, imprisonments, expropriations, censorship, and chicanery of Velasco-style socialism and to proposing, for instance, that diplomats who spoke up against the revolution be slapped in the face. When the dictator he was serving fell, because of an internal conspiracy by his own followers, many intellectuals were fired. Where did this pen pusher flee to earn his living? To the Cuba of his ideological affections? To North Korea? To Moscow? No. To Texas. To the university at Austin, for the time being, and when he was obliged to leave it, for the more tolerant Brown University, where, I suppose, he still is today, carrying on his battle in favor of an anti-imperialist revolution waged with tanks and drawn sabers. From there he sent articles during the election campaign to a Peruvian newspaper that fit him like a glove—La República—advising his far-distant compatriots not to waste this opportunity to vote for the “socialist choice.”
Another case, demonstrating the same baroque morality. Dr. Antonio Cornejo Polar, a literary critic and a “socialist Catholic,” as he was pleased to define himself — a way of reaching heaven without depriving himself of certain advantages of hell — had made himself a university career in that bastion of radicalism and of Sendero Luminoso sympathizers, San Marcos, which he managed to become rector of through the sole merits that, in his day and unfortunately even today, permit a candidate for the post to rise that high: his political ones. His “politically correct” progressivist line earned him the necessary votes, including those of the recalcitrant Maoists.
On March 18, 1987, in a talk in the United States, I spoke of the crisis in the national universities in Latin America and of how politicization and extremism had caused their academic levels to collapse and in some cases — such as that of my alma mater — had turned them into something that today scarcely deserved the name of university. In the predictable drumfire of protests that this caused in Peru, one of the most inflamed was that of the “socialist Catholic,” who, around that time, had withdrawn from the rectorate, maintaining that the problems of the university had placed him in the highly unusual condition of a pre-heart attack victim. Indignant, my critic asked himself how someone could attack the Peruvian popular and revolutionary university from the Metropolitan Club in New York.* Up to that point everything appeared to be logically consistent. To my vast surprise, very shortly thereafter, the faculty advisory committee of a university of the imperialist monster asked me for a report on the intellectual competence of the person in question, a candidate for a lectureship in its Spanish department (a position which, naturally, he obtained). He is still there today, I presume, a living example of how one progresses in academic life by making the proper political choices at the proper moment.
I could mention a hundred other cases, all of them variants of this practice: create for yourself a public persona, convictions, ideas, and values for professional convenience, and at the same time, by your private conduct, belie them. The result of such inauthenticity is, in intellectual life, the devaluation of discourse, the triumph of clichés and empty rhetoric, of the dead language of slogans and platitudes over ideas and creativity. It is not by accident that, in the last thirty or forty years, Peru has produced almost nothing in the domain of thought worth remembering, while on the other hand it has built up a gigantic garbage dump of socialist, Marxist, and populist blather that has no contact with the reality of Peruvian problems.
In the realm of politics, the consequences have been even worse because those who had made a modus vivendi out of duplicity and ideological double-dealing won almost total control of the cultural life of Peru. And they produced almost everything that Peruvians studied or read, the ideological sustenance of the country, all that might satisfy the curiosity or appease the concerns of the young generations. Everything was in their hands: the universities and state schools and many private ones; the research institutes and centers; the magazines, the cultural supplements and publications, and, of course, the classroom textbooks. With their lack of culture and their contempt for any intellectual activity, the conservative sectors, which up until the 1940s or 1950s still had cultural hegemony over the country — with that brilliant generation of historians such as Raúl Porras Barrenechea and Jorge Basadre or philosophers such as Mariano Iberico and Honorio Delgado — had lost the battle sometime before and had not produced either individual talents or a concerted action capable of opposing the advance of the leftist intellectuals, who, once General Velasco took over as dictator, monopolized cultural life.