The president of the republic on Thursday viewed the idea that democracy and freedom can be irreversible as “illusory and dangerous” and defended that “broadening horizons” on screens cannot lead to censorship or “cancellations”.
“The idea that freedom and pluralism are irreversible and that democracy is irreversible is a real problem, it is an illusory idea that can be dangerous. It’s an everyday construct, even if we think it’s acquired, it’s not acquired,” he said. the head of state.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa spoke at the conclusion of the Book 2.0 conference “The Future of Reading”, promoted by the Portuguese Association of Publishers and Booksellers (APEL).
In a speech of about 30 minutes, the President of the Republic stated that “books express, and always express, even in the time of the Inquisition and other Inquisitions” the diversity of societies.
“We are diverse, which is why bigotry is unbearable; the phobia of what is not what we think or what we fight is unbearable,” he defended, noting that “societies are starting to close – if and the more they close, the more under the weight of those who even definitively close them down.” want to close”.
Speaking of a ‘screen culture’, which has existed for ‘a few decades’, the head of state said that, based on what is known about this reality so far, ‘it suggests that diversity can be not just a sociological representation, but a space of freedom and freedom in divergence”.
“I hope and hope that, at a time when book culture and film culture converge, this broadening of horizons will not entail narrowing, erasures, censorship, exclusions, cancellations. Subtly imposing new inquisitions or new intolerances,” he warned .
Marcelo pointed out that “with the extraordinary possibilities that opened up, a closing dynamic emerged”, which he called “the intolerance of the tolerant, as if the sensitivity of the majority of the present moment were the only one enjoying freedom of movement”.
“What seems to be the last word in terms of the flow of thought at any given time may not be, and not forever, and we must have that humility to what in the culture of fencing, even by the logic of that culture, tends to forcefully transform what is diverse into homogeneous, and it must be diverse and it is essential that it be diverse,” he defended.
The President of the Republic emphasized that “one cannot renounce what is one of the greatest cultural, political and civilizational riches, namely the diversity resulting from freedom, which is desired as widely as possible, and from the pluralism that this entails. brings”.
Speaking at the ceremony that took place in the former Picadeiro Real in Lisbon, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa expressed his concern about the “problems, limitations, the difficulties involved in publishing, publishing newspapers, magazines, books, faces of this moment”, stating that there are “economic, financial and social constraints that weigh on the freedom, diversity, on the self-determination of who edits, who writes and who publishes”.
The head of state considered that “it is not positive if it is economic and financial, because it means that it leaves in the hands of the very few the power, in many different ways, to determine the freedom of others, because they have access to platforms, because they have the economic power to distribute, because they have capabilities that are difficult to regulate or regulate despite existing rules”.
“This is a serious problem for all of us who view freedom, pluralism and democracy as increasingly demanding and necessary, not ultimately more conditioned,” he defended.
And he referred to that “this applies to currents of opinion, to views of closure that emerge from time to time in some open societies, and increasingly, to social sectors that are lagging behind, to the sense that the inequalities are so great, so great, so great, that they create a struggle that ultimately questions the openness of society.”
“Some call inorganic currents, others populist, others whatever, but their appeal in times of successive economic, financial and social crises, of wars, which are a little bit all over the world, some closer, others at a distance, and wars of thoughts and hidden intolerances, this is a problem that certainly worries those who publish books, but also those who want the constant possibility of an active voice in the construction of the future,” he said.
As for the future of books, the President of the Republic stated that while the “screen culture” is an “enduring existence”, it does not mean “the end of the printed book”.
Source: DN
