More Storms Than Good Hope

In his book The Causes of Portuguese Backwardness, economist Nuno Palma advances several genuinely compelling ideas about our ancient country. This narrow strip of land planted along the seashore, on the outermost periphery of Europe, became the center of the world in the fifteenth century, when the Atlantic, until then an apparently boundless expanse, began to be traversed by Portuguese caravels and great sailing ships, as did the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The world was ours. Its riches, however, were not. We never possessed much of a talent for commerce, and the spices of India were shipped off to Flanders for a pittance.

In those days, whenever the king needed money, he summoned the Cortes, a precious institution in which the clergy, the nobility, and the common people were granted a voice. Nor did the monarch invariably prevail: on occasion, he was even compelled to lower taxes. In Portugal, the Cortes functioned as a parliament, a forum in which royal authority encountered the necessary resistance of the governed.

But toward the end of the seventeenth century, money began to pour into Portugal. Vast quantities of it. Gold. Gold from Brazil. King João V filled the nation’s coffers, and almost overnight the average Portuguese enjoyed a standard of living considerably superior to that of a Frenchman, and higher still than that of a Spaniard. Churches and palaces glittered with gold; liquidity was abundant. Yet prosperity carried within it the seeds of decline. As wealth multiplied, Portuguese goods became increasingly expensive, while imports surged because foreign products could be purchased more cheaply than those manufactured at home. The factories, which had only recently begun to flourish, gradually closed their doors, and much of the population returned to the fields. Portugal lived upon Brazilian gold and purchased its necessities abroad.

More disastrous still were the political consequences. The king, no longer obliged to ask the country for money, simply ceased summoning the Cortes. Thus emerged a parliamentary void in Portugal stretching from 1700 to 1822, almost perfectly coinciding with the age of Portuguese absolutism. Poverty eventually returned, not because of the earthquake of 1755, nor because of the French invasions, but because the gold of Brazil began to disappear. Rather than using that extraordinary fortune to construct a future, Portugal squandered it, like the foolish owner of the goose that laid the golden eggs, dissipating the treasure that history had so unexpectedly placed in its hands.

And there was worse to come. The “worst politician in our history,” the Marquis of Pombal, committed the supreme folly of expelling the Jesuits from Portugal, leaving some twenty thousand students without instruction and depriving the country of education, science, and the arts. The consequences were profound, setting Portugal considerably further behind the rest of Europe. Here lies the crux of the matter: education has been Portugal’s great and enduring affliction. We remain among Europe’s stragglers because of the systematic neglect of learning perpetuated over far too many generations. Even in the nineteenth century, three out of every four Portuguese could neither read nor write. Antero de Quental had already confronted this calamity in his reflections on the causes of the decadence of the peninsular peoples.

A renewed commitment to education arrived only with the Estado Novo, a fact that must be acknowledged, although the effort remained woefully inadequate. It was during that period that illiteracy began to be confronted in earnest.

Portugal would eventually find itself wealthy once more. And abundantly so. This time, the money came from Europe. Yet the country repeated the very same mistakes. It invested in a great many things, but far too little in education. And today we are paying the price for decades of insufficient investment. Other nations, particularly in Eastern Europe, once poorer than ourselves, joined the European Union later, received less financial assistance, and have already surpassed us in their economic and social circumstances. A seemingly inescapable national fate.

Meanwhile, the shock waves now reverberating across Europe, and which have already reached Portugal, belong to that same historical continuum. We should not contemplate them with superficial judgments. Some look upon the protest encampments and burning rubbish bins and see nothing more than a rabble of extremists seizing an opportunity to do what they know best: destroy everything in their path. Others are exhilarated by the courageous struggle of young people who have finally lifted their eyes from their mobile phones and begun to unsettle the comfortable and the prosperous. But the reality runs far deeper than either interpretation.

Today, scarcely any young person possesses even the remotest prospect of purchasing a home under the conditions their parents enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago. The consequences for hope itself are devastating. And this is only one symptom, one example, one metaphor for the condition of our youth, increasingly condemned to the desolate geography of hopelessness, to a future darkened before it has even begun, to a tunnel at the far end of darkness, their tomorrows ravaged by the interests of powerful giants determined to control both their purses and their consciences.

History has already taught us what we persistently refuse to learn: when the young awaken, it is time for the rest of us to begin trembling.

José Júlio Rocha is a Catholic Priest living on Terceira Island who writes a regular op-ed for the newspaper Diário Insular.