The Bio-logical Order of Human Dignity in Brazil
Vinicius Marinho for uniting corpo e alma in heady times
!["Afetocolagem: Desconstrução de Visualidades Negativas em Corpos Negros [Deconstruction of Negative Visualities in Black Bodies] (2019)," digital collage by Silvana Mendes](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5da9ca4316ddf940acff02af/1595738431909-KSJ2EEUW0BRBPT4MSMGB/Afetocolagem_Desconstruc%CC%A7a%CC%83o_de_Visualidades_Negativas_em_Corpos_Negros.jpg)
"Afetocolagem: Desconstrução de Visualidades Negativas em Corpos Negros [Deconstruction of Negative Visualities in Black Bodies] (2019)," digital collage by Silvana Mendes
1. ORDER
Brazilian children learn geometry with the national flag.
The green rectangle symbolizes our forests. The yellow diamond symbolizes our mineral reserves. Our clear sky is represented by a blue circle. The Southern Cross constellation hovers at the heart of Brazil’s celestial sphere, showing that Christ blesses our nature and people. A white banner divides the celestial sphere in two halves. White signifies peace. Against the white background, the banner proclaims “Ordem e Progresso.”
Children are taught to feel proud of Brazil, a naturally-endowed, blessed, peaceful, orderly, and progressive nation. They realize early on the country is anything but progressive and peaceful. Still, few Brazilians doubt the importance of order for the pursuit of peace and progress. Order is so important that it rifts the sky with a white banner flaunting above the Southern Cross.
Children learn quickly the importance of ordem in the Brazilian tradition, but not the true meaning of order.
2. HIERARCHY: “Brazil above everything, God above all.”
“Order” is a cultural value.
As such, order can be understood through its effects upon social life and institutions. During the pandemic, order has had a paradoxical function: It unites and divides. Brazilian people yearn for integration. But the fusing power of “ordem” has two side effects: 1) it supposes a fractured human being, and 2) it reinforces social hierarchies.
The Brazilian order unifies through the national identity. President Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s motto is “Brazil above everything, God above all.” This authoritarian program has inflicted much pain. The presidency irresponsibly summons the most socially vulnerable to sacrifice for the nation “above everything.” Discourses that mix moralism, denialism, and totalitarian symbols have induced the perception that the pandemic affects everyone equally. The virus is “mild,” so the talk goes, but it can—at worst—also infect the nation’s soul by paralyzing its frayed economy. Because nationalists believe that the market is the most valuable being, the president mobilizes the national spirit to protect the economy’s well being above public health. Unmindful of their costs, Brazil’s torchbearer of nationalism advocates a set of national “virtues”:
Tenacity: “Brazil can’t stop”; “Some will die. I’m sorry, but this is life. You can’t stop an automobile factory because people die on the road.”
Courage: “Don’t be a coward”; “The virus is real, but we must fight it as a man, not as a kid.”
Selflessness: “A nation like Brazil will be free only when a certain number of people become infected.”
Faith: “Brazilians must be studied. They don’t get sick”; “So what? I am the Messias [Bolsonaro’s middle name], but I can’t do miracles.”
Motorcade in protest against the social-distancing policies of state governments in Brazil, 2020. Photo: RodrikMartins
But a divided human being is a precondition for such national “virtuosity.”
Tenacity, courage, selflessness, and faith are virtues of the soul. The supposition is that any human body can integrate the national soul. As the former Ministry of Education Abraham Weintraub recently said, “I hate the term ‘indigenous peoples’…There is only one people…the ‘Brazilian people’…Let’s end this business of peoples and privileges.”
The body-soul division also works to arbitrate whose life is valuable. The human soul craves the recognition of its own worth. Human worth is recognizable through group membership in the stratified Brazilian society. The assumed “superiority” enjoyed by a group automatically transfers to its individual members. To identify as a member of a social group implies possessing the same value of the group as such.
But it is the human body—more than the soul—that denotes our social identities. The body communicates social identities through visible emblems of race and economic wealth. Skin color, physiognomy, accent, possessions, gender, and so on therefore become indexes of human dignity. Because they can distinguish the assumed value of a soul, these and other indexes form a “symbolism” of human dignity. So, Brazilians strive for dignity in the cultural arenas of race, gender, and class, where the body communicates more than its natural constitution. The body is believed to reflect spiritual integrity and/or dishonor of the soul.
In the 2000s, Black and Indigenous people advanced the historical contestation of the symbolism of human dignity. For the first time, being Black or/and Indigenous did not automatically signify being inferior. Human dignity ceased to be a privilege of the elite and middle class, who had always (and falsely) perceived themselves as "European Brazilians.” Between 2003 and 2014, Brazil achieved some degree of social inclusion through consumerism. A national agreement dodged the free-market orthodoxy and generated basic economic power for the marginalized. The addition of 40 million new consumers to a thriving economy eclipsed poverty and malnutrition, minimized unemployment, and pleased the market. Economic inclusion enlarged Brazil’s middle class from 15% to roughly one-third of the population.
But economic inclusion demands racial justice. Market inclusion only works if the poor and colored can hope they will sometime partake of the same benefits enjoyed by the middle class—no one aspires to being “included,” only to remain in the lower ranks of a “diverse” collective.
Escadaria Selarón mosaic in Rio de Janeiro, created 1990–2013 by Chilean-born artist Jorge Selarón as his "tribute to the Brazilian people".
Inclusion in a hierarchical order is simply a diverse form of injustice.
The democratization of social ascension necessitated a transformation in the cultural symbols of dignity. Brazil established university placement quotas for Black Brazilians (federal law 12.711), the inclusion of Black history in high-school curricula (federal law 11.645), and the distribution of a monthly allowance for 14 million families living in poverty, 75% of whom self-identified as colored.
But progress for some can generate resentment from others. The middle class and the elite resented. Resentment soon spawned outbursts for the restoration of “ordem.” Since the 2016 coup d’état against president Dilma Roussef, the resented classes have resuscitated the idea of ordem for the purpose of refuting social equality. They salvage ordem in two ways. One, they pursue an orthodox neoliberal agenda. Two, they link blackness, indigenousness, and poverty to “corruption.” The neoliberal-nationalist-racist-“anti-corruption” alliance has gone as far as advocating for the return of the USA-supported military dictatorship.
The resented classes mobilized, for instance, an “anti-corruption” crusade against the authors and recipients of social programs. In 2016, Brazilians elected ”indignação” (indignity) as the word of the year; in 2017, it was ”corrupção” (corruption). Circadian headline news on the spectacular criminal trials of the “Car Wash” operation (Operação Lava Jato) worked to convince the nation of the need to restore ordem. But the order that Operation Car Wash and anti-corruption sentiment sought to restore also worked to revive the old racial, economic, and gender emblems.
As the anti-corruption sentiment feeds Operation Car Wash, it has washed away the political accomplishments of women, and of Black and Indigenous people. The anti-corruption crusade deposed the first woman president of Brazil. Then, it helped elect a president who is proudly machista, racist, and homophobic, and who moves aggressively to open up Indigenous lands for commercial enterprises. Bolsonaro awarded the leader of Operation Car Wash, former federal justice Sergio Moro, with the position of Ministry of Justice. This “anti-corruption” government has threatened to arrest Supreme Court justices and interfered in criminal investigations against Bolsonaro’s family members. It uses “anti-corruption” as a rhetorical tool in the restoration of an order according to which human souls are praised or humiliated based on the social meanings attached to specific bodies.
The current pandemic reveals even further how corporeal signs communicate the value of the soul.
The authoritarian class continues to recoup the body-soul hierarchy in a genocidal way by denying the biological aspect of Black and Indigenous human dignity. COVID-19 policies prioritize the wealthy, who live in predominantly “white” neighborhoods. Most black Brazilians cannot practice social distancing, work or study remotely, and easily access ICUs. They strive in the informal market, with face-to-face jobs, such as food delivery, ridesharing, sales, and cleaning. They commute in crammed buses and live in densely populated communities where social distancing is impossible. Four times more people have died in the predominantly black neighborhoods of São Paulo. Native peoples face worse conditions. The people Weintraub calls ‘privileged’ report an increase in territorial invasions by miners, farmers, and woodcutters. Indigenous peoples’ immune systems are as defenseless against coronavirus as are their lands against encroachment. The lack of nearby hospitals aggravates the situation. Despite a few important initiatives by some governmental agencies, new COVID-19 cases continue to soar.
The order of Brazil is in its founding myth (see Marilena Chauí): that Indigenous, African, and European peoples united to form a peaceful and orderly nation. Although that has never happened, the myth does disclose an ideal. As the former Ministry of Culture Gilberto Gil says, the spiritual aspiration of Brazil is to unite by acknowledging the priceless contribution of the African and Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, the nationalist order divides this aspirational unity by determining who has the right to breathe.
The nationalist order is decimating Brazil.
View of Cristo Redentor from Santa Marta Favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2015. Photo: Julyane Galvão
3. THE BIO-LOGICAL ORDER OF HUMAN DIGNITY
The problem of ordem confronts us with important questions:
What are the grounds of human dignity?
Are there transcendental truths about human dignity?
Or, instead, does the acknowledgement of universal and equal human worth belong exclusively to the domain of history?
Assuming that human value derives from a transcendental purpose and is acknowledged historically, these questions invite theological consideration on how the divine is present to humanity. Traditionally, human dignity is thought to dwell in the soul, either by virtue of our being created in the image of God or by our capacity to make moral judgments. Brazil’s elites, however, have manipulated the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and Kant to inculcate the superiority of the soul and the servitude of the body. In this way, the body-soul hierarchy easily becomes a social hierarchy. Then, human worth becomes price; human life is relativized.
Brazilian theology suggests, instead, that human dignity is at once biological and spiritual. It is biological because our dignity is corporeal before being spiritual.
José Comblin, for instance, thinks that
“uma defesa do valor e dignidade de uma pessoa requer uma defesa do valor e dignidade do corpo…A dignidade do ser humano é a dignidade do corpo.”
“a defense of the value and dignity of a person requires a defense of the value and dignity of the body...The dignity of the human being is the dignity of the body.”
Marcelo Barros tells us that
“[n]as comunidades afro há uma ética de respeito às pessoas e de cuidado com a dignidade do corpo... todo o trabalho de luta pela dignidade e liberdade da população negra tem de valorizar o corpo. A própria espiritualidade tem de resgatar o corpo, afirmar sua dignidade e beleza...”
“[i]n Afro communities, there is an ethics of respect for people and care for the dignity of the body...all the work of fighting for the dignity and freedom of the black population must value the body. Spirituality itself must rescue the body, affirm its dignity and beauty…”
Jung Mo Sung writes that
“os pobres clamam…porque os seus corpos em necessidade clamam por suas vidas e dignidade.”
“the poor cry out… because their bodies in need cry out for their lives and dignity.”
According to Leonardo Boff, the spirit is biological because Jesus’s divinity is in his humanity:
“O Deus que em e por Jesus se re-vela é humano. E o homem que em e por Jesus emerge é divino…Tão profunda é a unidade de Deus e do homem em Jesus, que a humanidade deve poder ser encontrada em sua divindade e a divindade em sua humanidade.”
“The God who reveals himself in and through Jesus is human. And the man who emerges in and through Jesus is divine ... So profound is the unity of God and man in Jesus, that humanity must be able to be found in its divinity and the divinity in its humanity.”
"The divinity of Jesus,” Boff writes, “is not to be sought outside his humanity. It was precisely within this humanity that God’s self-revelation was made manifest…It was this humanity of Jesus that was God praesens."
Human life, in fact, is biologically conditioned, so the natural comes before the spiritual (1 Cor. 15:46). To say so is not to invert the soul-body hierarchy. The natural comes “before” because: 1) the body is the spirit living on earth, and 2) the spirit is the bodily human seeking to become (more) divine. Because humans cannot understand the spirit apart from nature, we say that nature comes before the spirit.
Today, images of Christ the Redeemer can remind us that the human spirit lives by the rules of the Earth.
Images of the body of Christ can crystalize faith claims about what is divine in our humanity and what is human in the divine. Positive images of Christ can suggest that all people have the same dignity because all human beings live according to the same natural principles that surpass the human powers. If humans actually enjoy some dignity, this dignity “arises within nature, not against it” (see Mary Midgley).
But the body of Christ can also reveal the absence of human dignity.
Two recent events come to mind.
Left: A Black Jesus displayed by the Mangueira Samba Community during Carnaval of 2020. Photo: Viviane Medina/Riotur
Right: Mass in the sanctuary of Christ the Redeemer in honor of the 211 years of the Military Police, May 2020. Photo: Carlos Magno
During Carnaval of 2020, the Mangueira samba community showed a Black Jesus and insisted that he has a “Black face, Indigenous blood, and a woman’s body.” Carnaval is the holiest ritual of Brazilian culture. Mangueira’s predominantly poor and Black community sambaed while singing about a Christ who is “like us”—in other words, “Christ’s dignity is like ours.” Two months later, Christ the Redeemer was illuminated in blue during a mass for the commemoration of the 211 years of Rio’s police. Notably, Rio’s police is the world’s deadliest. It murders an average of five people a day, 78% of whom are poor and Black.
The blue Christ looming above—and policing—a Black and Indigenous nation is too disembodied and distant to understand that Black and Indigenous lives matter, and to demand a more just and universal grounds for human dignity.
Any reflection on the divine Mystery is subject to the limitations of being a bodily creature, as ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara teaches us. Human creatureliness leaves us with a limited control over our destiny and a vague idea about our origins. No one knows how life started and, even less so, how it may end. Still, the faith that God “was made flesh” in order to live humanly among us invites our generation to reflect more widely on the source, meaning, and scope of human dignity.
Life is too vast for narrow dualisms.
