Last week I attended the presentation of “La España de Abel” (Abel’s Spain) in Madrid. The book is a curated collection of short essays celebrating the 40-year anniversary of Spain’s 1978 constitution.
I already knew a good number of the 40 contributors, so I had little doubt that the work would be worth a read. Quality was assured. Having said this, two things caught my eye as I flicked through the paper edition purchased. The first was that although the editors emphasised their great strides towards balancing the pool of contributors, taking into account gender and geographic criteria, the one area where they didn’t succeed was background.
As I scanned the two word bios of the long list of authors, I was surprised and a little disappointed to find just one profile outside the arts and social sciences: a neuroscientist. Only one in forty! Engineers, mathematicians, technologists, entrepreneurs, inventors, physicists? Zip.
I then remembered C. P. Snow’s essays from over half a century ago criticising the acute split of Western societies’ intellectual outlook into the sciences and humanities, and the negative consequences the split brings with it. If some of the most cultivated young(ish) thinkers in the country are still blind to that, it is only fair to admit that despite the many collective efforts to bridge that gap over the past decades –some with very personal involvement– we are still far from achieving the goal.
Connected to this it also bothered me a little to realise, by their own admission, that the editors had recruited contributors from their comfort zone, i.e. their social circles. As contributing author Laura Fàbregas mentioned and boldly tweeted about, true intellectuals cannot conform with inherited, undemanding self-selection criteria.
All of this was probably worth a comment, but not devoting a huge amount of mental bandwidth. There are simple mechanisms (looming hard deadlines, simultasking, weak incentives…) to explain deviations from the optimum when putting together a perfectly well intended book with these characteristics. And, let us not forget, the negatives do not outshine the many positives “La España de Abel” merits.
But then there was something else; something that I obsess with quite a lot, actually: criticism prevention. The atmosphere in the room during and after the presentation walked a dangerous path. From an intellectually honest vindication of the many things Spain has going for it as a country, to an unsettling, dangerous attitude whereby those who pose criticism, any, are somehow part of the problem. That old, disguised as new stance dictating that you should not focus or talk about the things you dislike, and should instead use that time and energy to highlight and disseminate those that you do like.
I have never believed shielding against criticism to be the solution to anything. And I honestly don’t think I ever will.
