The Call of the Tribe — Mario Vargas Llosa — Book review
Mario Vargas Llosa is a man of many talents. I first encountered him on an election poster in Lima, Peru. It was 1990, and he stood for President in a turbulent time, opposing the incumbent Alan Garcia and running against Alberto Fujimori. Peru was in the grip of hyperinflation; its national currency changed digits and names as fast as the money changers in plazas could cope with. When the Inti — the Quechuan word for the sun — was introduced in 1985, its value was equal to one thousand Sols. By the summer of 1990, a million Intis would buy a can of milk. In 1991, the ‘new’ sol was introduced. Peru was also the land shadowed by the Sendero Luminoso — Shining Path — Maoist terrorists — who had blanketed most of the country — at least as far as the UK Foreign Office travel recommendations went — as a no-go area. His novels had received international acclaim, and along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he had helped propel Latin American literature to the heights of literary popularity.
He wrote this collection of essays in 2018, in his 80s, and it looks back on his now ‘liberal’ political view. When he started in life, he was a Marxist, and a combination of dissatisfaction with Castro’s Cuba and a ‘re-appraisal of democracy’ helped by his readings of writers, including Albert Camus and George Orwell, steered him towards liberalism. ‘The Call of the Tribe’ pays homage to seven philosophers he admires greatly: Adam Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich August von Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin and Jean-Francois Revel.
The inclusion of Karl Popper piqued my interest in the book in the first place, picking up and putting down the fresh English translation several times before adding it somewhat reluctantly to my purchases in Blackwell’s in Oxford on the day before Christmas Eve. Karl Popper even gave the book the ‘tribe’ motif: he called the ‘spirit of the tribe’ the irrationality that nests in modern mankind, harkening back to more primitive days.
The book was timely for me in many respects. I was heading to Edinburgh, the hometown of Adam Smith, the father of liberalism. Smith (1723–1790) published The Wealth Of Nations in March 1776, when Scotland was in a period of enlightenment, ignited by David Hume. Vargas Llosa’s first essay is about Smith, and I stood under his statue on the Royal Mile, a short walk from Canongate Kirkyard, where he lived and was buried in 1790, seeking inspiration for a talk I was due to give the next day to a group of Edinburgh fund managers about the opportunities in emerging markets. The first essay provides a good background on moral philosophy and describes how Smith felt that international capitalism was the enemy of nationalism. In a post-Covid world we are seeing the rise of Nationalism (possibly as a reaction to the pandemic), and attempts to disentangle globalisation — the 70 year-old experiment — that has helped raised global GDP and the wealth of many nations. Smith also saw how the growth of cities entails the development of the middle class and the growth of civilisation. This was prophetic as in Smith’s day urbanisation levels were still low, less than 5% of people lived in cities, and it would only be 230 years later in 2007 when more than half of the world’s population lived in cities.
The second essay concerns Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), a liberal philosopher who defined a nation as “a suggestive project for a life in common”. He was critical of nationalism and saw the devastation brought to Spain by Franco. Ortega had a significant influence on Vargas Llosa, who enjoyed his writing immensely, praising ‘his dramatic silences, the sibilant lash of an unusual adjective, the labyrinthine sentence that suddenly closes, rounding out an argument with the rhetorical insolence of a matador’. Through the essay on Ortega, Vargas Llosa defines liberalism itself as ‘an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defence of freedom as a supreme value’ — powerful stuff, and a signpost for those trying to determine the label for their own political and economic leanings.
Politically speaking, Vargas Llosa cites three more of his essay subjects, Popper, Hayek, and Berlin, as the most influential on him. Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992) and Popper were both natives of Vienna, and Berlin was from Latvia.
Starting with Hayek, a contemporary and adversary of John Maynard Keynes, the author describes the development of the philosophical ideas that shaped his views and the context in which they were defined. Hayek’s challenge is that mercantilism — freedom to produce and trade goods — is worth nothing without a strong rule of law and an independent judiciary. Hayek’s enemy was constructivism — organising community centrally, imposing egalitarianism through ideology, culture or religion. In this, he opposes Marxists, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. He was imaginative and proposed an alternative system — a ‘demarchy’ — a legislative assembly, elected for fifteen-year terms by citizens of a country above 45 years old, to watch over fundamental rights, with a broader elected parliament looking after current affairs. Throughout the essays, we are challenged as to liberalism, and the essay on Hayek gives some boundary markers.
As mentioned above, the essay on Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994) was why I bought the book. Helped by his friends, Friedrich von Hayek and Ernest Gombrich, he was one of the lucky Austrian Jews that managed to escape the Nazi’ Anschluss and became a lecturer in New Zealand. Before leaving Austria, he published a seminal work — The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)- that repudiates induction and instead holds that a scientific truth must be a hypothesis that can pass the test of falsifiability — if not, it is pseudoscience. Vargas Llosa names Popper as the most influential thinker of our time, citing The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) as the most ‘stimulating and enriching work of political philosophy of the twentieth century’. Interestingly, Vargas Llosa details how Popper argued that democracy will not survive unless there are controls on television (in our time, social media) to reduce the unlimited power it wields in our society. This is surely in contradiction to liberalism and in support of constructivist theories — which his peer group rallies against.
Skipping through Raymond Aron (1905–1983), we end the book of essays on Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) and Jean-Francois Revel (1924–2006). Berlin expands on the Greek poet Archilochus and identifies two kinds of people: the Fox, who knows many things, and the Hedgehog, who knows only one big thing. He uses this as a filter for humankind. Berlin is a fox, alongside Shakespeare, Aristotle, Moliere, Goethe and James Joyce. The hedgehogs include Dante, Plato, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Proust. According to Berlin, some, like Tolstoy can have fox and hedgehog co-existing. Vargas Llosa closes the collections of essays with Revel, who he says is an Orwell or Camus for our times. Both of these authors were influential on Vargas Llosa. With the death of Ravel in 2006, he points to an intellectual vacuum (at least in France) and the loss of a great combatant for the faith of liberalism.
Vargas Llosa, the last surviving member of the Latin American literary phenomenon ‘el boom’, is reaching the end of his seven-decade literary career. In 2023, the 87-year-old said that after his latest book — I Give You My Silence — he will conclude with one last essay. His last will not be on liberalism but instead will be on Jean-Paul Sartre, who was his teacher in his youth. Marxism and Sartrean existentialism were the hallmarks of his political awakening as a teenager in Peru. He, like many others, had been ‘disappointed’ with Sartre, who thought the Gulags established under Stalin were a myth until Solzhenitsyn revealed them in their full, dark horror. So, returning to Sartre may be another twist in Vargas Llosa's beliefs. Maybe he is a fox and not a hedgehog.
I gave the book four stars.
