Latin Empire

New Aesthetics will come from Hispanoamerica

Older synthetic cultures must give way to newer synthetic cultures – Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction

Western exhaustion is the great theme of our times. Stagnation in technological progress, except for the narrow cone of IT and AI. In the sphere of the political, it’s gerontocracy, or democracy trapped by the old electorate. In culture it’s sterility, or endless repetition. This essay will deal with the last aspect. I argue that cultural pessimism may soon be attributable to a lack of sufficient alertness. We should pay attention to Latin America.

The combination of economic growth, insulation from the cultural production of the Anglosphere, a wealth of literary traditions, and the basic aesthetic orientation - la douceur de vivre, as Kojève called it¹ - will result in an artistic bloom across Hispanoamerica.

In the last few years Latin America has seen electoral victories of pro-growth forces. The pink tide has retreated, and socialist ideas have lost their appeal: no one wants to become another Venezuela. Latin America is beating inequality mainly thanks to education and accelerating growth, not redistributive policies. The agenda of 'law and order' is gaining popularity and effectiveness, and if spread widely, could further normalize economic life. After a long era of 'malign neglect', as Elbridge Colby put it, America is reviving its interest in the Western Hemisphere. Redirecting its attention will mean, in the end, redirecting flows of investment and credit². American intentions to curtail Chinese gains will offer an opportunity for the countries with the wherewithal to become the geopolitical swing states of the Western Hemisphere³. The Western impulse to reindustrialize and the insatiable appetite of the Chinese manufacturing sector will drive up the prices of commodities. This need not be destabilizing for long-term development, as Chile and Colombia prove⁴. Growth has a future in Latin America.

The pro-growth coalitions across Latin America, if sustained, promise a trajectory toward an even brighter future. When it comes to cultural creativity, keep this in mind: “The overall story,” Tyler Cowen explains in Creative Destruction, “is one of poor societies that develop new styles, methods, and genres as they become richer.”

For Anglo readers the idea that economic growth can have a positive influence on artistic flourishing doesn’t seem contradictory. For continental intellectuals, on the other hand, art and economic growth are enemies. The latter contaminates the former. Wealth alters the intentions of most artists, exiles them into poverty, and turns society away from creative endeavors toward greed. The anti-capitalist reflex is part of being an artist in Europe.

The bohemian is, under further scrutiny, an anomaly. As Tyler Cowen observes in his underrated In Praise of Commercial Culture, Renaissance artists were first and foremost businessmen. Pick up Cellini's autobiography — money was his main motivation. The composers forming the canon of classical music didn't exist on some celestial plane, content with the pleasures of expression. As we read the letters of Mozart, Haydn, or Bach, we realize that remuneration was as important as the articulation of the artistic impulse⁵.

An art market narrowed to a small aristocratic elite of patrons means a narrowing of the range of possible art. How would the talent of Velázquez have developed if he weren't reduced to painting for King Philip? Consider: some catalogues count eighty-one portraits of the ruler alone. He had a patron, but not enough customers⁶, Cowen rightly points out. Decentralized financial support — a network of potential customers growing in step with society’s wealth — gives liberty to the artist by opening niches of taste.

Acceleration of growth can cause, or assist, accelerations of artistic experimentation. Take the example of Paris, where the expansion of art market stretched the range of possibilities: impressionism was followed by post-impressionism, nabism, fauvism, surrealism, abstraction and new incarnations of classicism.

The proliferation of new styles is, to a large degree, an effect of rising wealth. As William D. Grampp argued, when incomes rise the marginal satisfaction derived from the same goods declines. Customers seek novelty, putting a premium on what is different. While there are no iron laws of creative fertility across history, and economic growth isn’t a sufficient condition for artistic invention, it does seem to be a necessary one.

Great art flourishes in great cities, themselves creations of rising wealth. Across the history of art, creative blooms have happened in places where clusters of customers, distribution networks, and artists combined to leave their mark on culture. Cities in Latin America are getting better, safer, richer, and more impressive.

In the last boom of Hispanoamerican literature, Barcelona played the role of the node connecting the network of authors and customers. The importance of Carmen Balcells, the Catalan literary agent, can’t be overstated. While this coming cultural boom will be polycentric, this time Madrid will play a privileged role. Julián Marías — Ortega y Gasset’s favorite student — put forward a vision of Madrid not as a Spanish capital, but as a plaza mayor, the site where Latin Americans of every origin and nuance will meet. A place where the whole cultural zone from Tierra del Fuego to Caracas to Castile will admire, create, gossip, compete, buy, sell, learn, and debate. Madrid will become the center of a new cultural synthesis — what Paris was before the war.

Recently, Fernando Caballero argued in a clever book that Madrid is becoming a city-state. The capital is demonized by many as a neoliberal hell. In reality, it is the most dynamic city in otherwise stagnant Europe. Caballero asks: what if the future of Madrid is Latin America? What if the future of Latin America is Madrid?

If we take a wider look at the cultural zones of our times, the most dominant and active of them all is still the Anglosphere. China is punching well below its weight. European culture has become sterile and underwhelming, with rare exceptions from the periphery that do not change the overall picture.

There is a certain frantic variant of materialist mentality present in both American and Chinese societies. Dan Wang described it aptly in his Breakneck. This type of mindset is, of course, present in Latin America as well. However, it hasn’t become a dominant trait. Chinese and American societies produce high living standards and material comfort, but, as Kojève explained, Latin countries cherish douceur de vivre, the culture of leisure, that privileged source of art⁷. This cultural propensity — this basic aesthetic attitude toward life — paired with increasing wealth, will unlock new sources of artistic creativity.

Juan Roura-Parella argued that the North American drive toward utility and future-orientation is the opposite of the Latin American sensibility, concentrated on the present and cherishing the value of creative leisure. José Gaos, a Spanish thinker exiled in Mexico, explains in his El pensamiento hispanoamericano that the Hispanoamerican life of ideas has a pronounced aesthetic character; even the choice of its form of expression is a testament to this. Essays, lectures, and conversations are preferred to the dry style of a treatise. The beauty of the language is often sought after as much as the quality of the ideas it articulates. Not only that, Gaos reminds us: the aesthetic dimension can become the core of philosophical systems, as with the Mexican Vasconcelos or the Peruvian Deustua.

Keep in mind: the Hispanoamerican creative impulse is less constrained than in the Anglosphere or Europe. It isn’t warped by the guilt and bitterness of Western psychodramas or the obsession over historical sins. “No metaphysical frustration dominates us,” as the Argentine Victor Massuh put it. As another ambitious thinker with the temperament of a prophet, the Argentine Ricardo Rojas, observed a hundred years ago: Latin America isn’t overwhelmed by old categories and bankrupt notions. Classicism, romanticism, realism, symbolism, postmodernism, and deconstruction, like plants from a different climate, wither and degenerate in Latin American soil.

There are many ways in which this cultural bloom and its spread can be arrested. The purely cultural barrier was defined by Carlos Leáñez Aristimuño as the love of the small and safe. Rojas warned against apartismo, or the attitude of isolating oneself in self-perceived superiority (a tendency he saw as particular to Argentina). Aside from a lack of ambition and narcissism, a sudden distortion of the growth trajectory could halt the ascent of the Hispano-American cultural zone.

The main takeaway is this: those without access to the Hispanic cultural zone will fall easily for cultural pessimism. Learn Spanish, master the contexts, travel to Latin America, visit Madrid — not doing these things will be the biggest tax on your cultural awareness in the decades to come. Cultural pessimism is a choice. More often than not, a question of sampling.

1. He applied it to the Mediterranean countries, but this attitude is common in Latin America as well.

2. For now this isn’t the case. Take the example of Panama – the Chinese influence over the Canal was removed, but since the pressure and retaliation from Beijing is only mounting. Yet Washington has offered no compensation or support.

3. Consider this paper, where Chinese tariffs on American goods created positive impact on Brazilian labor market. A study of effects of the trade war between China and the U.S. on other Latin American countries is urgently needed and would clarify how those states should shape their trade attitudes and dealings with both superpowers.

4. Both countries resisted – by different means – the temptations of ‘macroeconomic populism’.

5. Romantic assumptions prevent us from taking in this thought. The sober image of Chopin from Gottfried Benn’s poem is inadmissible in Poland, for example.

6. Cowen brings up another example: Haydn. His Sturm und Drang period was cut short, because the prince asked him to abandon this path.

7. Check his "Esquisse d'une doctrine de la politique française" for a description of the general attitude toward life shared across pays Latins.