Redeemers by Enrique Krauze

would choose to descend in his later middle years. Despite his interest in non-Western cultural trends, for instance, he remains squarely within the Christian (and specifically Catholic) tradition, with no doubts about its cultural and moral superiority. On Buddhism, he recommends incorporating in his project “a reference to Buddhist morality, which is like an annunciation of Christian morality,” an assumption that Vasconcelos, with his fluent English, could already have seen refuted in studies already available on southern (Theravada) Buddhism or even within the somewhat Westernized semi-religion of Theosophy. As for Shakespeare, the picture is a little more complicated. The notion of the absolute literary supremacy of Shakespeare has always been a position less acceptable to Latin cultures than to those strongly influenced by England (most Italian thought, for instance, ranks Dante Alighieri far above Shakespeare in literary skill and useful wisdom). Raised in a culture very committed to primary colors of feeling and morality (though capable of considerable rhetorical overkill), Spaniards and Latin Americans may often be daunted, even bewildered by Shakespeare’s profusion of themes, characters, and language (his archaisms, of course, require a bit of study even for educated English-speakers). But in José Vasconcelos, this hesitation before Shakespeare suggests an instinctual rejection (which will become much stronger) of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and its affection for complexity and humor, its implicit democratic view of humanity, even in aristocratic England and of course much more clearly in post-revolutionary America.
    And most important, the arrogance of his literary decisions (and the personal authoritarianism of his leadership, even as Rector of the University) reflects an enormously inflated sense of self that, despite his very great intellectual and artistic gifts, easily could lead him into errors of action and judgment. In the same way Plotinus distorts Plato, so Vasconcelos’s Plotinus is a truncated Plotinus, with a magnification of the aesthetic—which most mattered to him and occupies only a portion of the Enneads —and lip service to the rest. And ultimately derived from Plotinus’s revered Plato, a much more equivocal and in part sinister figure than the teacher Socrates begins to emerge as the daimon—Heraclitus’s “presiding spirit” too easily translated as “fate”—ruling over Vasconcelos’s character: the “philosopher king” of Plato’s Republic .
    Meanwhile, the massive educational adventure continued. He included in his project of publication many “books on the social question that help the oppressed, and that will be chosen by a technical committee along with books of practical application on the arts and industries.” Vasconcelos wanted education to be the job of “crusaders,” of “fervent apostles” filled with the “zeal for charity” and “evangelical ardor.” A campaign against illiteracy began and young intellectuals strode into the slums. Cosío Villegas was one of these “apostles”:
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    And we began to teach them to read and it was a spectacle to see the poet Carlos Pellicer arrive, Sunday after Sunday, in some neighborhood of some poor barrio , plant himself in the middle of the main square and begin to loudly clap his hands, after shouting as loud as he could for the people to come out, and when he had gotten all of them out of their hiding places, men, women and children, he would begin his litany: the dawn of the new Mexico is already in sight, which we all have to build, but more than anyone, them, the poor, the true support of every society . . . and then the alphabet, the reading of a good piece of prose, and in the end verses, an unequivocal demonstration of what could be done with a language that one knew and loved. Carlos never had an audience