Reading in detail the rough draft of the extraordinary report above by Jose Luis Vethecourt, suddenly I get up from my desk and walk around my neighborhood. I find Nora, who is no older than forty, but looks like sixty, holding her last child in her arms; it is the eighth, from her fifth man, with whom she no longer lives. I say "Hello" to William, who asks for my blessing; he is seventeen years old, four fingers higher than a meter, with a baby face -- they called him the "flea." I go into Carmen's house where I am offered a cup of coffee. Domingo stops me on the street and asks me if I got him the job. Carlitos, sixteen years old, walks around; he just retired from first year high school because his divorced parents don't want to pay for his bus ride; besides his shoes are in bad shape, but there is no money to buy another pair. I go back to my desk.

At least in Venezuela there is a man who does not fit into Jose Luis's model. It is the man who lives at the margins, at the corner of the roads of technology, positive philosophy, group rationality and sectarian morality.

As in A Happy World by Aldous Huxley, there is a place for the "savage" where feelings still exist, for the human word, values and Christianity, if perhaps a little sui generis. Yet is it not precisely in his sui generis manner where the originality and possibly the hope of such a person lies?

The marginal -- I prefer to call them people.

MARGINAL CULTURE

This is better called a culture of resistance because in it many significant values subsist and resist being invaded, conquered or destroyed. In either case, he is at the margins, fortunately at the margins, from that senseless road toward total death that others blindly follow and also below marginalized in their narcissistic burial of everything human and productive about life.

I have been reading The Transparent Egg by Jacques Testart, who is the father of the French project called FIVETE, consisting in the in vitro fertilization and implantation of zygotes in the female uterus. The author confesses his terror with the prospects that these biological techniques unlock for the future. He writes:

I believe that the time has come to pause, the time for self-limitation by the researcher. The researcher is not the executor of every project that is derived from the logic of technology. . . . I, a researcher in assisted procreation, have decided to stop myself. It is not a question of research in order to do better what we now do, but, rather, research aimed at producing a radical change in the human person, in which procreative medicine is joined to predictive medicine. Let the fanatics of the artifice calm down. The researchers are many and I am fully conscious that in this matter I find myself alone. Restless men, those who at one time were called "humanists," and today are called "sentimentalists," question themselves. But let them do it quickly.

And he adds with anguish and valor:

One cannot continue applying the logic of research to what already gives indication of representing an enormous harm to humanity. I revindicate a logic of non-discovery, an ethics of non-research. Let us finish with the farce of thinking in terms of a neutral research, where only the applications are good or bad. Prove to me when a discovery has not been applied.

He ends the book with this affirmation: "The day will come in which the balance of the humanity which remains will be totally enclosed in the memory of man."¹

Certainly, as a result of the road taken by technological humanity, we may reach the point where man will be only a memory. This will happen if we allow the civilized to do away with the "savages."

Paul VI dared to say that development was the new name for peace; but not this development. John Paul II had to correct him twenty years later: progress has blinded even the more enlightened, but not those who have stayed farthest from its frontiers.

Paradoxically, history teaches us that liberty surges from the oppressed, authentic wisdom from the ignorant, from those negated as men.

Blessed are you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, but have revealed them to mere children (Luke 10:21).

I do not defend pain, hunger, oppression, injustice. But I want to point out clearly that it is not a matter of taking people to the highways of death, where death is cold and without hope, where hunger runs away from the body to the spirit, where oppression lives in man's interior as in his house and where injustice is so limitless that one can no longer perceive it because it surpasses perception. The point is that the true man who still lives in the outskirts attains human joy where pain is not without hope, satiety is shared, liberty is opened to love, and justice remains as a daily quality in human relations. The point is that man continue to live and not just become a memory.

It would seem that in the present civilization there is nothing human for which to look. But let us not be so pessimistic and radical; perhaps there are still some latent crumbs of humanity, conscious as Testart's "sentimentalists" who do not resign themselves to the disaster. Among the people, those who look find much: "Look and find" (Luke 11:9).

I am not proposing a mystification of the people; the seeds of death reside also there. But in the people the forces of life are better able to resist sudden attack. Hence, I propose going to the people, our Venezuelan Latin American people, our people marginalized from progress, to find there humanity, culture and the ethics that can respond positively to the challenge of the 21st century and beyond.

It is indispensable to dissect down to the marrow with the scalpel of criticism this culture and enslaved civilization; one must thank Jose Luis for the merciless lucidity with which he does this. But we have also to take into our hands the lantern of Diogenes and look for man wherever he may be found. Perhaps we will discover that the lantern is a miserable instrument because the object for which we are looking has such dimensions that only a powerful lamp can serve our purpose. Let us open the doors and windows to hope.

Still in our country an old Castilian romance is sung that may go back to the times when the frontier existed between Moors and Christians. A gentleman returns from the Moorish quarters where he went to see a tournament. On the way he finds a captive Christian girl, with whom he falls in love, but soon finds out that she is his sister. Upon reaching his house he exclaims:

Open the doors and windows

locks and grates.

I thought I was bringing a woman

and I bring my sister.

Let us look for a man, that we will bring a brother.

Julian Rodriguez is a professional philosopher and theologian who is quite familiar with our marginalized neighborhoods. He has written a beautiful book titled "From Latin America: Does God Exist?" In this it is not the existence of God that interests me, but his characterization of the Latin-American man, who for Julian Rodriguez is conscious of being inconclusive, unfinished, and the reverse of his creativity.

The reality of the people brings him to consciousness, a people that by means of one or another form of slavery moves toward liberation. The true understanding of what is happening in South America requires that one listen to the occurrences that make up our history. It requires, therefore, a significant capacity to understand the language and everyday gestures of what has been lived, often in the form of alienation, of what springs spontaneously, of what has not yet been categorized.²

With the ear -- the Biblical attitude of being opened to the total revelation of the other, and with the eye, the positivist posture of the observer who objectives and reifies the other while taking it over as a reality that inevitably stops being reality -- another can be heard without alienating him from the life of our people. In this way one knows integrally by dialogue and not by objectifying schematizations. In this way the author finds for himself the profundity of our man. "From the reality of the Latin American man of oppression and marginality arises his vigorous struggle for being something more than what he is and for not getting lost in the nonsense of nothingness. In the depths of oppression he breathes expectation, radical hope."³

This refers to an expectation that is not illusion or deception, but fundamentally hope, "waiting expectation," according to Rodriguez. Hope is the essential condition of what constitutes him as existence-in-situation. Radical hope, constitutive of man, takes him discover himself as project, as total aperture to the future: "It is to look for what is coming."⁴ Technological man, in order to name him in some way, is constituted as closed within himself, within his own self-narcissistic contemplation, with his artifacts which in turn are closed within themselves and perfect. In contrast, the common man is open, imperfect and inconclusive. From the existential position of one and the other, there emerge clearly divergent ethics.

From here onwards I will use for reference my own lived experience in a peripheral neighborhood of Caracas, a national micro-world wherein one can find Andinos and Orientals, Tuyanos and Barloventeños, Laneros and Deltanos from the Orinoco, Amazones and Zulianos, people from the coast and from the interior, from the plain and the mountains. So as not to miss any aspect of the Venezuelan popular reality which is also international, there also are Colombians, Peruvians, Ecuadorians and others.

AN ETHICS OF RELATION AND GIFT

In the relationships that come and go and in the gift that is given or denied, I discover the crucial, interdependent centers of the popular ethic. They define good and evil. This refers to authentic good and evil, and not to good or bad taste, to what is functional or nonfunctional. And it is good or bad because the relational acts and gift are supported in the free determination of each.

The people attribute liberty and hence quasi-absolute responsibility to each person without accepting cultural, social or psychological conditioning that may otherwise limit or suppress such accountability. Only when pathology is evident, or ignorance demonstrable, will an excuse be accepted. Though a drunk excuses himself as not knowing what he is doing, this is not accepted as true, for it is observed colorfully that there are some things that even a drunk will not eat. In this sense good and evil acquire an elemental, primary rigidity, non-nuanced by personal reflection concerning the complexity of the human act. Certainly, there is in such a conception misunderstanding, but not one disconnected from compassion, as I will soon show. Neither is the liberty of each person to do good or evil limited by considerations of age. A child of only a few months may be chastised: "Don't be fooled, he knows what he is doing." To say that someone is immature because his actions do not correspond to his age is understood as an indication that such a person wants to continue enjoying the delights of youth that are no longer legitimate for him. Reprimand and punishment are always directed to a free being who acts from a fully personal decision.

In spite of the rigidity and simplicity with which good and evil are understood, for the common man no one is truly evil. Every human being has an intimate depth of goodness that calls for compassion. Evil attracts and one succumbs, but he is not "bad." He is responsible for his evil; but evil does not constitute his real self. There is in this view a Christian-Catholic understanding of sinful man conceived as regenerable in his root, different from the Protestant concept of a nature corrupted by original sin. The hope of our people has roots in the cultural soil of their religious tradition. Compassion then is not complicity in evil; rather, it is unconditional acceptance of the profound being of the other based on the indestructible hope in renewal. Beyond one's evil, there is a person, his or her son or daughter, brother or sister, a friend, or simply one's neighbor, that is, one's being-in-relation-to-another, that makes one worthy of a gift.

Compassion is but one of the multiple forms of communicative solidarity reserved for the dark moments of existence. Thus, although this may be surprising in a people characterized as profoundly dependent, compassion emerges from an autonomous ethics sustained by freedom, i.e., the ability of one to give or deny his or her gift in a personal decision. It is not an heteronomous ethics for which good and evil are imposed from the outside on the constitutive passivity of the human subject, an ethics of impurity and purification.

Life in the slums is a constant praxis in relation to other people. I dare say that it is practically an inevitable function of the space, of the architecture. The hardships of farm life encourage one to leave. From the ample spaces of his fields and the dispersion of towns, the country habitants move into the limitation of the suburban world. Contact with nature is substituted by human contact. Their marginality frees them from being dominated by the artifacts of civilization, which still are used by man and not the opposite.

In this context of permanent human living, an ethics centered on the person and not on things or institutions is maintained and reproduced. Neither is this ethics based on money; in effect it is not possible to speak of an ethics of saving. The marginalized continue to believe on Providence. With all the possible shadows, economic insecurity and lack of foresight, they maintain themselves open, giving of themselves and receiving others within the framework of an insecurity perceived as normal, and which safeguards one from the temptations of an enclosed egoism.

The good continues to have primacy over interests -- the good being, among other things, sharing. This sharing does not solve anything definitively in the majority of cases, nor does it assure one of a future. But then value is understood in terms of the present, in what is communicated and lived moment by moment. Relation and gift are always actual.

One shares and experiences joy without provisions. Friday or Saturday night one festively participates in a beer bash. It does not matter who pays: one who does not have any money participates equally because he who has shares without calculating costs.

One shares also when a need or occasion to help presents itself; it is not necessary that the need be urgent. The expression, "A plate of food is denied to no one" is an indisputable norm. Help is directed at an immediate and concrete need. It does not matter if the need is prolonged in a constantly renewed immediacy; help would always be renewed in temporal permanence. Hence in the slums there are no abandoned children. When someone loses his or her home and becomes an orphan or is abandoned, there is always a family that makes room for the needy child. No one thinks that by receiving a child they are doing a heroic or meritorious action. This enters into the ethics of gift and relation with the naturalness of an action that is performed for the simple reason that there is a person in need. No computations are made for the future. Benefits derived from the work which may be performed by those under one's care are not taken into consideration, nor are problems or budgets considered. In equality with the other children, the new member of the family will remain there as long as he needs to be or until he wishes to leave. His freedom is in no way conditioned by the gift, which is totally gratuitous.

The gratuitousness of the gift necessarily conspires against an ethics of efficiency and production, and, thereby, of a systematic and regulated rhythm of automotive efficiency. It is not a matter of what may be foreseen or can be programmed, but precisely what cannot be foreseen, what is due to the surprising decisions of the one who gives the gift and communicates of him or herself.

A trend today in social psychology, that originated in rural areas but developed with great interest in one of our classical universities, has shown that the Venezuelan man is motivated not by the need for gain, but by the need for affiliation and power. Researchers have succeeded in refuting the positivist motivational scheme of human behavior and its attempt to explain the reason for our underdevelopment. In a study I have also amply criticized the ideological suppositions on which such research is based.⁵ Here I would only like to point out different motivational schemes that obey distinct ethical systems: one, a partisan ethics of development and efficiency; the other, a universal ethics of gift and relation.

The apparently insuperable failure of the Venezuelan left can be explained, in large measure, as a result of a fundamental error of focus, a species of original sin that continues unredeemed because no one is willing to do penance. Though those on the left have liberated themselves from many dogmatic theories of the past, they continue to maintain a notion of man that derives directly or indirectly from Marx, namely, that labor is constitutive of man. Following the classical orientations, our left has thereby centered its efforts in the labor sector, although this has not responded. There is here a basic error. It has not occurred to the well-intentioned revolutionaries that the common Venezuelan man is not a homo faber but a homo convivialis. His realization is not in working, but in fellowship, in sharing daily living. The privileged position of popular solidarity is therefore not the factory, but the neighborhood. The popularity of neighborhood organizations -- so numerous, varied and original in the last years -- bears this out.

Our people do not organize themselves according to explicit and well-programmed projects, but in relations of community wherein spontaneous short-term and concrete projects arise. Our revolutionaries despair before this alleged incapacity for planning simply because they do not see that they move within an ethical conception of life which is radically at odds with that followed by the people. Ironically, in the final analysis the ethics of the left is not substantially different from bourgeois ethics, it so much abhorres.

Community living is thus the natural space for relations and the giving of oneself as gift; it is the ground of solidarity. Community fellowship is, to a certain degree, constituted hierarchically in the order of importance and value. The first in this order is the family, which is still extensive although who knows for how long. The popular Venezuelan family, predominately matriarchal, is a microcosm of extremely complex relations whose nexus I have proposed to unravel in an ambitious research project hardly initiated.⁶ The provisional conclusions cannot be articulated here. Nonetheless, it seems indisputable that the family microcosm has an energetic-affective nucleus, a vortex in which all bonds are linked. The center to which I refer is the mother, or, possibly, maternity, not understood as an abstract concept but as an actuating concrete reality. As energizing and bonding nucleus of community relations, the mother provides a particular model of solidarity and communicative affectivity.

From an ethical viewpoint the relations with mother come to some degree to be the paradigmatic model from which one learns of good and evil. Thus the popular Venezuelan ethics acquires maternal qualities that differentiate it from other ethics qualified by the father. This explains a good deal of the ethical lights and shadows. For example, there is a certain maternal softness that characterizes the ethical practice in our people, a certain avoidance of disciplinary action in both personal and social matters.

The mother, immediate fountain of ethics, is transcendent. In the community and representational world of Venezuela, the mother is not a concrete woman who happens also to be mother, but a mother and nothing else. Her maternity makes her transcendent; it constitutes her. She is a universal concretized in history in this woman. One learns in this way, beyond local contexts, a transcendent ethics easily connected with God -- a very maternal God, to be sure.

In this way the family is the first domain in which an ethics of community and transcendence subsists. From the family irradiates an ethical worldview that affects all the social spaces which are permeated by a species of family inspiration, whether for communication or rejection. If the group of friends, the work team or the social organization does not manage to reproduce in some way the relational family model, be it symbolically or concretely, it will find serious difficulties in subsisting and functioning.

There is here an important limitation that education ought to consider. It is difficult for the Venezuelan man to transfer this ethics of relation and gift to large groups, to broad systems of solidarity. Thus, he finds it difficult to give himself to a cause, to become part of a social movement, to enter into a complex system of relations. This is not easily lived as a good, nor is its negative as evil.

A person acquires meaning when he is available. It does not matter then that he even be a stranger. Juan has various children. Two of his daughters wait for a jeep to take them to Petare. The driver in order to avoid another vehicle coming in the opposite direction crashes against the railing. He himself takes them to the hospital and is arrested. When Juan finds out, he immediately goes to the hospital where his is informed that the driver has been detained. When he learns that his daughters are being taken care of, he goes to the detention site. Upon finding out that the driver is a father who has no other means of providing for his family than his work, Juan immediately goes into action. The victim becomes the principal advocate for the perpetrator. This case can be generalized.

Community cohesion reflects a call to responsibility for the other with whom it is easy to identify oneself, even in the most adverse circumstances. A first aggressive reaction may be followed by mutual help. When this does not happen it is probably more from fear of rejection than from resentment.

Put in general terms, we can affirm as a principle that life acquires sense insofar as it is related or dedicated to others as equal persons. This should not be understood in merely positive terms of assistance and generosity; it is valid also when egoism and negativity are at work.

The value of solidarity and social disapproval for its contrary is dominant. Every action that signifies preoccupation for the other is always appreciated, from taking a sick person to the hospital, to finding a placement for a child in a school, to collaborating in the construction of a stairwell. The fulfillment of this principle of solidarity is above all else. Self-sacrifice is easily secured. One is willing to leave aside what is important to one in order to collaborate with whomever is in need. And one takes risks with the aim of solving an actual problem, leaving the future to Providence.

Reciprocally, each person counts on others. In this way one's own progress or that of one's family is never an individual matter; one always counts on others. No one establishes nor improves a ranch with his own strength. To look for work, find a placement or resolve a political problem, one goes to one's family, godparents, friends, neighbors or influential friends of one's friends. Complex networks are formed based on family relations, not on interests. The same attitude that surfaces and is nourished by a general ethics of relation, is extended to institutions of government. People expect government to help. While much criticized by those who move in another conception of ethics, for the common man this is most logical and natural. The popularity of our democratic governments is a function, in great part, of the tacit acceptance of the values of the people; values that are not, in turn, exempt from deviations and vices.

The world of relations, whose energetic nucleus is the life of the family, as has been said, produces solidarities with what we can still call evil. Rarely are any charges pressed against another; no one even accuses another. In the slums everything is known, but police investigations will not manage to get any information. Here it is not a question of complicity, but of solidarity with one's neighbors. Sometimes the solidarities cross, as in the example of an unfaithful couple. In this case a conflict is resolved in favor of the one who is closest. Gossiping also follows this line of preferential proximity. If the offender is closet to one, say a neighbor, then there is silence; if it be the victim, he or she receives this same treatment.

The delinquent also obeys this ethics of proximate relation. He does not, for instance, commit his crimes in the slums; he neither mugs his neighbors nor strangers within his own neighborhood. The delinquent will act in other neighborhoods, but not in his own; if he does, he will be ostracized by his neighbors.

Sharing the gift of self in communication takes place not merely with regard to material things, but also and perhaps above all with regard to the person through personal gifts of affection, conversation, joy or sadness. This includes the phenomenon of visiting for the simple reason of visiting, of seeing each other or of "telling jokes," where one shares laughs or simply time.

Celebration has its stellar moments, whether of joy, sadness or religious experience. It is time outside of the clock; it is symbolic, mythical time pertaining to another dimension of reality. The feast lasts until exhaustion or alcohol overcomes its participants. In this festive environment personal, human relations dominate above all and acquire a state of almost total purity. The same may be said of a wake, which the less affected members convert into a feast while those who truly share in the grief comfort with their presence the one who grieves. What is valuable is the gift of presence, not its efficacy. In religious celebration in the slums, there are no problems of time. The priest there does not have to worry about the length of the religious services; no one leaves as a result of fatigue or boredom. Communion with transcendence is a communication of gifts not limited by any other conditions. There is a great capacity for celebration and for living humanly what they celebrate. That is, they live with warmth and fraternally from the most profound depths of their being. That is why life can be supported; nothing is unsupportable.

This is very evident in suffering. To say that the people are fatalistic because they apparently do not revolt against suffering shows a lack of understanding. Leaving aside the fact that their daily experience constantly confirms that rebellion is counter-productive, people embrace suffering as an intrinsic component of existence. It is a reality that makes sense, just as much as joy makes sense. For this reason they do not despair, nor do they depend on evasive mechanisms to alleviate suffering. At least for the majority of cases alcohol is not used as a means to forget, but above all for enjoyment in the company of others. When pain presents itself no one frees himself from it, but accepts it and shares with others.

Sacrifice is connected with suffering. With regard to the reality of sacrifice there is not a penitential attitude; the concept of penitence as reparation for sins or bad actions seems even quite foreign to the popular mentality. Sin or evil is forgiven and that is it. At most one is asked not to repeat it; but if it is forgiven, one does not ask for something in return. In fact, this is what a mother does with her children. It is possible that one is not forgiven, but in this case neither does penance have any meaning. When on Holy Wednesday someone dresses in the garb of the Nazarene and walks on his knees before an image, it is not a penitent, but someone who gives of himself as a gift to whoever has asked for this sacrifice. One fulfills a promise, not pays for a sin.

Suffering has meaning as relation and gift both when one fulfills a promise and when it becomes necessary in human interchange. The fact that something costs does not impede one's obligation to perform it when it is an inevitable condition of the relation.

Thusfar I have given preference to aspects we consider positive in our popular culture. Consequently, it could seem that I am presenting an idyllic picture of the marginalized world. This is not my intention. In the slums there is good and evil, ethics is opposed and followed as in any other environment. Ethical principles are both observed and transgressed; both obedience and transgression enter into the same general and transcendent paradigm.

What remains is to analyze the place in this framework of distinct areas pertaining to morality: sexuality, economics, work, etc. The limits of this paper and of my own expertise do not allow for a consideration of these areas. However, there is a need to analyze and reflect on these areas about which so much is said without due seriousness.

I have concentrated on highlighting the contours of popular ethics insofar as it represents a divergence from the ethics promulgated by the civilization of progress and development, which is an ethics of death and domination.

Interested minds concerned with the survival of humanity in the 21st century and beyond need not despair; not all is lost. Some of our brothers and sisters still conserve and live ethical values that we also love, but they do not thematize them. We can drink from their fountain of life and draw strength for their struggle.

Not in pessimism, but in anguished preoccupation, we must recognize that they are there -- but we must ask for how long?

1. Jacques Testart, L'Oeuf Transparent (Flammarion, 1986).

2. Julian Rodriguez, "From Latin America: Does God exist?" (Caracas: Editorial Salesiana, 1987).

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Alejandro Moreno, "Cómo somos los Venezolanos? Crítica de una visión ideologizada," Anthropos, n. 13-2 (Caracas, 1986).

6. Two initial works have been published: "El Vínculo Afectivo con las Figuras Parentales a través de una historia de vida," Anthropos, n. 14-1 (Caracas); "El Vínculo Afectivo a travé del Lenguaje Cotidiano," Boletín AVEPSO, v. 10, n. 2, August 1987.