The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

THE CLOSED SOCIETY AND WORLD 3

At the dawn of human history there were no individuals, only the tribe, the closed society. The sovereign individual freed from this collective body that jealously closed in on itself in order to defend itself from wild animals, lightning bolts, evil spirits, and innumerable other fears of the primitive world, is a late creation of humanity. It takes shape with the appearance of the critical spirit—with the discovery that the world and life are problems that can and must be solved—that is, with the development of rationalism and the right to exercise this rationalism independent of religious and political authorities.

According to Karl Popper’s theory, outlined in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), this frontier moment in civilization—the passage from a closed to an open society—begins in Greece with the pre-Socratics—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes—and achieved decisive momentum with Pericles and Socrates. The theory has also sparked much controversy, but, names and dates aside, the substantive part of his argument remains persuasive: that at some point, by accident or as a result of a complex process, for certain people knowledge stopped being magical and superstitious, a body of sacred beliefs protected by taboo, and a critical spirit emerged that subjected religious truths—the only ones acceptable until then—to rational analysis and to comparison with practical experience. This transition, which occurred at the same time as trade broke up the isolation of the tribe, would lead to a prodigious flowering of science, arts, and technology, of human creativity in general, and also the birth of the singular, decollectivized individual and the foundations of a culture of freedom. For better or worse, since there is no way to prove that this move has brought us happiness, the detribalization of intellectual life would from then on gain pace and propel certain societies toward systematic development in every sphere. The beginning of an era of rationality and of critical thinking—of scientific truths—meant that, at that moment in history, it would be “world 3,” in Popper’s terms, that would have a decisive influence on social development.

Within the almost infinite series of nomenclatures and classifications that the wise and the fools have proposed to describe reality, Sir Karl Popper’s is the most transparent: “world 1” is the world of natural and material objects; “world 2” is the world of private mental or psychological states; and “world 3” contains the products of the human mind. The difference between “world 2” and “world 3” is that the former encompasses the private subjectivity of every individual, their nontransferable ideas, images, sensations, and feelings, while the products of “world 3,” although they stem from individual subjective experiences, have become public: scientific theories, legal institutions, ethical principles, characters in novels, philosophy, art, poetry, in short, our entire cultural heritage.

It is not fanciful to suppose that the most primitive state of civilization that regulates existence is “world 1.” This world was organized on the basis of brute force and the rigors of nature—a lightning bolt, a drought, a lion’s claws—which people were powerless to influence.

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