To the happy few

Há mitos que são recorrentes na História, ou no debate público; em parte por conveniência ideológica, mas também por razões psicológicas, pela vontade de embelezar um episódio, ou de descobrir um paradoxo. É a fragilidade humana que levou Somerset Maugham a exagerar a nudez de Sophie, e que originou o ditado: “Quem conta um conto, acrescenta um ponto”. Pensei nisto a propósito da ideia da chegada de Hitler ao poder por meios democráticos, como às vezes se ouve. Há outro ditado que diz que uma mentira, para ser credível, tem de trazer consigo qualquer coisa de verdade, e é certo que os Nazis tinham tido bons resultados eleitorais (cerca de 30% do Reichstag, se não me engano) e que tinham uma base popular considerável. Por outro lado, Hitler dispunha de um exército pessoal, foi designado chanceler por motivos estratégicos e usou esse poder para perseguir os Comunistas, principais rivais nas eleições. Por isso Churchill escreveu:

Thus, and thus only, did Hitler obtain by hook and crook a majority vote from the German people. Under the ordinary processes of civilised Parliamentary government, so large a minority would have had great influence and due consideration in the State. But in the new Nazi Germany minorities were now to learn that they had no rights.

— Winston Churchill, in Second World War

Esta diferença foi importante no desenrolar da guerra, como Jean Monnet mencionou nas suas memórias:

On vit, dès lors, les États-Unis réaliser, sous l’impulsion d’hommes issus du New Deal et des chefs d’enterprises libéraux, la mobilisation totale de leur économie, résultat que les dictatures ne purent jamais atteindre. Ce paradoxe a été relevé par le grand planificateur de l’effort de guerre nazi, Albert Speer: « Un des aspects les plus surprenants de cette guerre, écrivit-il dans ses Mémoires, est que Hitler ait voulu épargner à son propre peuple les épreuves que Churchill et Roosevelt imposèrent au leur sans hesiter. » Speer explique que le régime nazi craignait un revirement du consensus populaire.

— Jean Monnet, in Mémoires

Stalin even suggested to me on one occasion later on that if the British were afraid he would be willing to send round three or four Russian Army Corps to do the job.

— Winston Churchill, in Second World War

Feynman é um mestre a fazer analogias para ilustrar conceitos científicos. Gostei deste parágrafo:

Discovering the laws of physics is like trying to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We have all these different pieces, and today they are proliferating rapidly. Many of them are lying about and cannot be fitted with the other ones. How do we know that they belong together? How do we know that they are really all part of one as yet incomplete picture? We are not sure, and it worries us to some extent, but we get encouragement from the common characteristics of several pieces. They all show blue sky, or they are all made out of the same kind of wood.

— Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law

As discussões actuais sobre modelos de Segurança Social parecem uma brincadeira de crianças, comparadas com isto:

Students of the Oxford Union (…) passed their ever-shameful resolution, “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”. It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations. Little did the foolish boys who passed the resolution dream that they were destined quite soon to conquer or fall in the ensuing war, and prove themselves the finest generation ever bred in Britain. Less excuse can be found for their elders, who had no chance of self-redemption in action.

— Winston Churchill, in Second World War

Cabe sempre às novas gerações herdar os erros do passado, mas algumas pagam com sangue, e muito rapidamente.

Sabia que a gravidade é um fenómeno sem mecanismo conhecido, apesar da hipótese dos gravitões, e nunca tinha visto um modelo plausível que explicasse o que acontece na realidade. Recentemente li um texto de Feynman que me deixou maravilhado:

Suppose that in the world everywhere there are a lot of particles, flying through us at very high speed. They come equally in all directions – just shooting by – and once in a while they hit us in a bombardment. We, and the sun, are practically transparent for them, practically but not completely, and some of them hit. (…) If the sun were not there, particles would be bombarding the earth from all sides, giving little impulses by the rattle, bang, bang of the few that hit. This will not shake the earth in any particular direction, because there are as many coming from one side as from the other, from top as from bottom. However, when the sun is there the particles which are coming from that direction are partially absorbed by the sun, because some of them hit the sun and do not go through. Therefore the number coming from the sun’s direction towards the earth is less than the number coming from the other sides, because they meet an obstacle, the sun. It is easy to see that the farther the sun is away, of all the possible directions in which particles can come, a smaller proportion of the particles are being taken out. The sun will appear smaller – in fact inversely as the square of the distance. Therefore there will be an impulse on the earth towards the sun that varies inversely as the square of the distance.

— Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law

Feynman apressa-se a explicar que esta hipótese está errada (e mesmo se não estivesse, tais partículas seriam desconhecidas, como os gravitões), mas achei esta elegância e simplicidade fantásticas. Um pessimista poderia citar Huxley – “The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” – mas prefiro pensar que estes caminhos errados não são becos sem saída, e sim linhas de força que sustentam a teoria verdadeira. Talvez seja isto que simultaneamente une e separa a ciência e a arte. A arte é uma idealização falsa – deliberadamente falsa – da realidade, porque subordina a verdade à estética. A ciência faz o inverso, e no entanto também consegue ser bela; tem a integritas, a consonantia, a claritas, e acrescenta-lhes a gravitas.

Un jour, Ollenhauer me parlait du voyage qu’il venait de faire dans l’Asie du Sud-Est et du tragique sous-développement qu’il y avait constaté. Ma réaction fut de lui demander quelle forme d’aide nos pays riches pouvaient apporter ensemble à ces régions deshéritées. « Non, me dit-il, ce n’est pas une aide qu’ils demandent. Ils veulent être acceptés. » Cet homme digne avait compris la dignité de tous les hommes. Et la signification profonde de l’esprit communautaire.

— Jean Monnet, in Memoires