Hispanism: Its Meaning and Origins

In February 2022, the second edition of my book "Hispanic America Versus the West" was published. It was first published in Spain back in 1996. Most of my friends don't even know about it. I added one final chapter to it, "Notes on the Beginning of Argentina's History".

The idea for the book came from two events: a) the 1984 lecture at the Palace of Versailles; Julien Freund, Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye and Pierre Vial, who came up with the title for this book; b) the correspondence with Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora about Hispanism.

Then in France we came to the conclusion that Hispanoamerica, unlike the Anglo-Saxon America, was an heir to the most authentic that the West could offer: "non-Western traditions were never canceled,"[1] and linguistic, creative and cultural freedom was promoted.

We argue that the Spanish heritage in America is not limited to monarchy and Catholicism, as thinkers such as de Maeztu or García Morente had stated before. Through the prism of Hispanism, the culture of the entire Mediterranean opens up. All the Spanish in us is both a medium and a matrix.

The common term "Latin American " has become politically correct and is used by the Church as well as by Freemasonry, Marxists, liberals, and progressives. This fictitious name detaches us from ourselves, and for good reason. After all, the first thing one loses in war is the semantic battle as one accepts the designations given by the enemy.

We tell you all this to convey that our discourse on America and the Spanish world did not begin at this conference, but forty years ago.

A few months ago (27/3/22) I read a report by the Spanish professor Carlos X. Bueno, who states that: "There could have been another world order that would have generalized values drawn from Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the Germanic-Christian concept of the individual. But this Spanish Empire had enemies everywhere. It is necessary to return to Hispanism, but not in a nostalgic way or as an "imperial dream" - but in the context of geopolitics.

A pole represented by the Spanish world and encompassing the southern cone of America - the entire Portuguese-Spanish continent - and the Iberian Peninsula (as well as Asia and Africa: the Philippines and Guinea respectively) could play an important role as a counterweight to existing poles: the Anglo-Saxon, in decline; the rising Chinese, Eurasian Russian, Arab, etc.

I would only change the tense of his verb, and instead of "would generalize," I would say "have generalized," because we have ultimately inherited these values. Moreover, the concept of identity is not of Germanic-Christian origin: it originated long ago and goes back at least to the time of Boecio, 480-524.

Hispanism can be understood in two ways: either as a vehicle or channel through which the peoples of the Mediterranean (Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Romania, etc.) who came to America express themselves, or as an oikumen, a vast territory inhabited by people who use the same "measures" in feeling, thinking and belief. Hispanism is different from German Kultur and French civilization, but it carries with it a broader vision of man, the world and its problems.

Viewing Hispanism as a carrier, first of all we look at millions of immigrants who came to America to find their way to progress. According to Greek philosophers, Hispanism is broadly understood as a transition from the worst to the best. Also, Hispanism was a carrier for the Indians, whose numerous languages absorbed hundreds of words from Spanish: cow, horse, sheep, etc.

Today the world, the UK, is trying to replace the Native American theory with the "first peoples" theory. However, we, Creoles, are also one of the first peoples of the region. Our difference from the Indians is that they have "belonging," while we have an "identity," for, as Bolivar said, we are different from both the Spanish and the Indians.

Hispanic Americans are featured with their understanding of progress, different from how it is grasped by Anglo-Americans. After the number of inventions skyrocketed due to a marriage between of science and engineering thus leading to more technologies, Anglo-Americans have created a myth that progress is inevitable, not realizing that progress works fine as an aspiration, but is not good as a basis for a worldview. If progress means going from worse to better, moving forward, which is a good thing per se, then who doesn't want progress? But progress is meaningless if you don't know where it is going, and dangerous if it is on the wrong track. Thus, if we emphasize comfort, which, according to Hegel, has no end, progress will always be unattainable. This technological progress ended with the two atomic bombings of Japan, killing thousands of innocent people. We know that evil, that lives in an innocent person, cannot be explained philosophically and that it arises from a distortion of the original motive.

For the Hispanic, progress has always been a goal, not an inspiration. It has been an ideal, not an idea, and this is the way it moved to America. All of humanity's great achievements stem not from progress and are not made for the future, but for the essentials: be it fame, homeland, family well-being, and more.

The pursuit of progress defines progress for the representative of the Spanish world, yet his actions are not guided by the myth of progress.

This brings us to a deeper and more important aspect of progress. "From the point of view of spirituality, progress is valid only when it proceeds intensely or 'in depth,' not in a linear or horizontal manner. "The 'depth' of progress shows to us the degree of existential interiorization of the subject. And therein lies the deep meaning of progress: as a more intensive interiorization of truths that we can access or, rather, that we reject. The process of interiorization has stages that contain each other and are in a hierarchical relationship similar to that of heaven."[2]

This is why we can assert that in the spiritual life, whether its mystical or intellectual component, he who does not move forward moves backward.

The great Spanish philosopher Manuel García Morente offered the Christian knight as the archetype of the Hispanic male.[3] And this really was the case. But "this theory of archetypes has two shortcomings. First, it lacks scientific precision: we can overload the theory with a listing of the virtues of the Christian knight, as García Morente did, or the vices that Argentine liberals assign to the gaucho. Secondly, it is always bound and defined by a temporal moment and a place in the history of the people [4]. Its relevance is being erased. So the typical features of the Hispanic people lie elsewhere.

Hispanism, as "belonging to the Spanish," has manifested itself in history in a variety of forms and will manifest itself in many others that we cannot yet deduce. Hispanism has always emphasized the hierarchical aspect of life, beings and functions. It is a hierarchy that denotes the need of the inferior in the superior, not the other way around, as the liberal bourgeois world postulates. Don Quixote once said: "What a good vassal I would be if I had a good master!" Hierarchy is projected into a general view of the world, and narrow-minded specialists lose sight of the big picture. Hierarchies are based on absolute, not subjective values. They arise from primary consciousness, the axis of the modern world.

Thus, the need of the inferior for the superior, the vision of the whole and the objectivity of values are expressions of the hierarchical sense of being in the Spanish world.

The second feature we find in " preferring oneself to others " and, as a consequence, in the absence of fear of losing one's identity.

Self preference is not selfishness, but an existential capacity that allows one not to fear mixing with others. This ability was exhibited by the Spanish and Portuguese who originally came to America, as well as by the millions of immigrants who arrived later.

We have studied this capacity from the standpoint of the hermeneutics of dissent and offer it as a method of dissent: "Every method is a way to get somewhere. Dissent as a method comes no longer from describing a phenomenon, but from phenomenology, from "preferring ourselves. It proceeds from the act of evaluation as a decisive exposure of methodological neutrality, the first great lie of scientific objectivism, whether it is dictated by dialectical materialism or technocratic scientism[5].  It breaks with the progressivism of Marxism, for which all negation carries with it a gradual and permanent overcoming. But dissent is not omniscient, it can say "I don't know," and so, as a method of popular thought, can deny the relevance of something without denying its existence.

Preference is formed on the basis of a given situation, historical, political, economic, cultural loci. In our case, South America or the Great Homeland (esp. "la Patria Grande" - the concept of a Latin American community). It requires disagreement, directional thinking, which, as rightly expressed in the popular philosophy of liberation of Kusch, Casalla, etc., and not in the Marxist philosophy of liberation of Dussel, Cerutti and others, representing a European philosophical branch transplanted to America.

Here the foreshadowing of the foundation is the principle "here Rhodes, here leap," stated in Hegel's early writings on the philosophy of law. One can truly understand "dissent" if one views it in terms of "abstract universality": e.g., humanity, human rights, equality, etc. On the whole, it deserves the distrust and criticism of the Left, which sees dissent as a dangerous deviation of reactionary populists." [6]

The third and last of the features  is the presence of a common enemy, such as the Anglo-Saxons.

The Hispanic heritage lies in the fact that Hispanics, as well as those of Mediterranean culture who came to these lands, have been involved in civil wars for independence. The great Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova listed 700 military invasions and more than 4,000 Anglo-Saxon invasions in the history of Hispan America, from the Battle of San Juan de Ulúa in 1567/68 in Mexico to Grenada in '83, Panama in 1989 and Haiti in 2004.

This consistent and continuous struggle has shaped a certain notion of the enemy of the people, the hostis. It is the one who persecutes me and disgusts me. It is the one who prevents me from developing in accordance with my own principles and values. In a word, it is he who does not allow me to live for myself.

From our point of view, decade after decade, century after century, these struggles and these events boil down to the search for the Great Homeland, the Great Space of the Oikumene.

The term "oikumene" (Greek "oikoumenh) is the present participle of the verb "οἰκέω," which means "to live in one's own house and encapsulates the idea of "a large part of the inhabited earth. The oikum for the Romans meant their Empire, for the Greeks Hellas, and for Christians until the Late Middle Ages it was the Christian world[7]. These oikoumens, each in its own time, coincided with the boundaries of what was thought to be the world.

The idea of the oikumene is certainly related to the idea of humanism, but it is understood as "a living form that develops in the territory of a people and is preserved throughout historical changes. [8]. Classical Greco-Roman humanism seeks the realization of man's being through his formation as a person. The reference to the people in the quotation epitomizes the ancient humanism that the greatest of the Latin poets, Virgil, reinforces when he advises thinking in terms of the "genius of place. This concept combines the concepts of climate, soil, and landscape.

The attachment to the land survives in the humanism of Spanism, but is mired in enlightened humanism, on slightly modified versions of which liberal, social-democratic regimes and the UN currently exist in the world.

We start at the wrong end by raising the question of creating mega-regions--the European Union, the Union of South America--as a forced response to the "One World" project launched by President Bush  in 1991. It boiled down to the idea of creating a "region or a large area" whose integration is needed more economically and politically than culturally.

In this case we are forced to return to the notion of an oikumen, in order to understand, at least in part, what is happening to us and what can happen.

The modern project, which relied on such strong ideas as progress, egalitarianism, liberal democracy, free market, subjectivism, rationalism, domination of technology, etc., is abandoned. And therefore the idea of the world as a universe is disappearing.

We realize with some surprise that the world is no longer unified; that is, it does not have the unified version and vision that was characteristic of the New Age and expressed through Enlightenment rationalism, now the world is rather a multiverse. That is, the world consists of many versions and visions, whose number is equal to the number of existing cultural oikoumens.

Thus, the world is culturally pluralistic, a heterogeneous multiverse. The plural nature of the world consists in the existence or coexistence of different oikoumens.

Roughly speaking, we can identify some of them: European, Anglo-American, Arab, Indian, Slavic, Ibero-American, and East Chinese. No doubt another type of classification could be sought, for they were introduced for didactic purposes and to simplify understanding, and that is where they end. As in all classifications, what happens here is the same as in the famous song to the rhythm of the chakarere: "Home more, home less, well, exactly my little town. So, reality is described in approximate terms, although in essence it is more complex than these descriptions, and it cannot be limited.

These oikoumens sometimes correspond to a particular region, for example, the Ibero-American continent coincides with, and even surpasses, the megaregion that encompasses Mercosur and Unasur, since it also encompasses Central America and part of North America. Similar is the case with the European oikoumene, mutatis mutandi. But it should be noted that in both cases there is territorial continuity.

Otherwise, the oikoumens do not correspond to one region but affect several: for example, the Anglo-American oikoumene includes part of Europe with England, part of America with the United States, Canada, Jamaica, Guyana, Belize, part of Oceania with Australia, New Zealand, etc., part of Asia with Americanized space such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and even Japan.

Other oikoumens encompass many countries, some of them quite scattered, as in the case of the Arab oikoumene. The opposite is true in India, where the oikumene is limited to a single country.

Oikumens delineate not only the spatial boundaries of an environment suitable for collective life, but also the world of values shared by its inhabitants. And in this sense, the Latin American or Ibero-American oikoumene is an example of a commonality of religion, language, law and customs.

The theory described above is extremely relevant today. It argues that pluralism should emerge not only in cultural isikumas, but also in the states that make them up. Since we do not share this theory, we ask ourselves: how should we look at this question?

We take the opposite position and argue that pluralism should not exist within states, as Dalmacio Negro Pavón likes to say, but between cultural isocumens. The danger of ecumenical pluralism in a state or nation is noted by the famous liberal political scientist Giovanni Sartori, who states that "the unification of many cultures in one territory is dangerous. Thus, those who are not ready to integrate should not enter the country. Because immigration, which is not followed by integration, entails the death of pluralism and democracy.[9] .

And it is the oikoumens that create the true diversity of the world, shaping it out of shared values, language, beliefs, experiences and institutions.

Thus, cultural pluralism should be understood as intercultural, in which each identity is placed in line with the others, but on the basis of their differences. This is the principle of the coexistence of communities or, rather, of their harmony.

It is a mistake to equate cultural pluralism with multiculturalism; cultural relativism simultaneously leads to the exclusion of other cultures to avoid their denaturalization, or, even worse, to the fact that a community is valued only for its minority membership and not for its merits or value as such. This is a serious mistake made today by cultural anthropologists and multiculturalists (aka progressivists).[10]

When, in the name of this multiculturalism, which, as we have seen, is sectarian and exclusive relativism, one oikoumena intrudes into another, it leads to the denaturalization of the latter. Thus, the "Americanization" of the European oikoumene, the "imbecilization" of the Ibero-American oikoumene, the "terrorization" of the Arab oikoumene, etc., are encouraged. The invading oikoumene may erroneously assume that a transfer of meanings is taking place - even if not all Europeans become like Americans, not all Ibero-Americans become stupid, and not all Arabs become terrorists.

The transfer of meaning and the interference of one oikoumene in the life of another, which the Anglo-North American oikoumene is currently pursuing, carries the greatest risk because it signals to us the emergence of an ecumenical totalitarianism in which one oikoumene imposes itself on the others. Under its domination, the world would lose its richness and diversity, its exceptional cosmic beauty, turning into a uniform, homogeneous "ball".

[1] Aubenque, Pierre: Le probleme d´etre chez Aristote, Puf, Paris, 1977, p. 13

[2] Buela, Alberto: Epítome de Metapolítica, Ed.Cees, Buenos Aires, 2022, стр. 117       

[3] García Morente, Manuel: La idea de Hispanidad, Ed. Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942

[4] Buela, Alberto: Hispanoamérica contra Occidente, Ed. Cees, Buenos Aires, 2021, p.52. Primera edición, Ed. Barbarroja, Madrid, 1996, стр.56

[5] Cfr. Fayerabend, Paul: Contra el método, E. Hyspamérica, Buenos Aires, 1984

[6] Buela, Alberto: Teoría del Disenso, Ed. Fices, Barcelona, 2016, стр. 32

[7] The term "oikumene" is also used in geography to denote an environment suitable for collective living. And since it means "middle," it has even been decided to change its grammatical gender to masculine in Spanish: "el ecúmene".

[8] Jaeger, W: Paideia, México, FCE, 1946, стр.11.

[9] Sartori, Giovanni: Pluralismo, multiculturalismo e inmigración en el periódico Il Giorno, 15/9/2001.

[10] Multiculturalism is based on two stages in the development of cultural anthropology: a) the emergence of the cultural relativism of Franz Boas (1858-1942), a precursor to American anthropology, who argues that it is impossible to speak of superior or inferior cultures; b) decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, in which former "objects" of American conquest and imperialism in Africa and Asia are turned into "subjects" studying their own reality.