HUMANIST MATERIALISM

HUMANIST MATERIALISM 

Although you are already doing so, pay attention to this copy of Diario16 that you have in your hands. Think of one exactly the same in everything as this one and with the same sequence of fine artistically ordered and humanized black marks forming words and giving ideas. Imagine the same text of Cela, Raúl del Pozo, Antonio Burgos, or Secondat; the same humour drawn masterfully by Gallego y Rey and identical pictures distributed throughout the paper booklet. Think about the same news in Spain or in the world, about culture, sports or economy; the same advertisements, the same small print of the theatre section or even the same blue of the sharp cornered triangle of the cover, the red of the 16th anniversary or the misprints that have been able to slip through in the preparation. 

Do not think about any one of the thousands of Diario 16 of today’s edition; do not think about an abstract copy but this concrete and specific one with its special creases, more or less folded on the edges of the different sheets, more or less stained with coffee, dust or nicotine, more or less used. Think of one only similar to this. 

Well then, the radical and fundamental difference between the one that you have patiently elaborated in your mind and this concrete and specific one, the one that I was trying to speak to you about, is the being. This one exists and the imagined one does not. This one exists, the imagined one only exists in your mind and because you live and exist. The concrete matter that this newspaper consists of has something that neither you nor I can give it. Man can transform matter but he cannot create it. Even for superior and spiritual tasks as art, investigation, speech or religion, we need material goods. 

However the accelerated progress of the experimental sciences and techniques in multiple fields during the last two centuries has engendered a proud sensation of limitless might in cultured or crude public opinion, which our rulers have also dangerously appropriated. With greater and greater real ignorance we have ended up believing unconsciously that from the simplest basic forces and primary energy to the most sophisticated that sustain our macro-technical civilization, everything is human creation. The excessive vanity of human might that exaggerated clumsily its possibilities, has given rise to the false belief in the disappearance of human limits and has modified the conscience that we have of ourselves. We have arrived at the proud, false and illegal appropriation of humanization power locked in nature. There is nothing more false and counterfeit than falling into that small-minded vanity. 

Throughout all the complex production processes we can transform products but we are absolutely incapable of creating them. We need products that are ready-made. Man finds that reality in natural resources which are indispensable to him. With our imagination, memory and especially with our best powers of intelligence and will, the most we have been able to do, and it is a lot, is to discover, and get to know those forces and energy that already existed in the nature of things. Those immense forces, that imposing energy, are always inherent in nature. We have done nothing more but discover them little by little and try, with our free will and wisdom, to put them at our service, to humanize them. 

When wanting to materialize and uniform the spirit, the dialectical Marxist did nothing more than to degrade and daub the wealth stamped on humanist materialism that is aware of the human vocation of created Nature and the spiritual greatness of one’s own personal vocation. The material reality maintains in its same being a hopeful humanization expectation that we have to activate. The indispensable materialization of thousands of spiritual flashes in this newspaper is a living testimony of that humanist materialism. 

It is best to always keep in mind that, however many speculative moves are carried out, only through something seemingly so material, animal and pleasant as fertile sex, are man and woman capable of launching a new original spirit into the world that will continue the eternal task of righting the wrongs and humanizing the mineral vegetable and animal world: the material world. 

JJ Franch Meneu