The Curriculum and the Territory

I still read the newspapers. I still turn on the television. I still walk around the city. And I see Houllebecq everywhere. In the mechanical kindness of today's solitude, silent yet gnawing. In the absence of commitment, that bond that once bound us to one another. In voluntary sterility; in omnipresent pornography. For thirty years, Houllebecq has been telling us the inexcusable. And for thirty years, he has been accurate. While he lays bare what remains of Europe's bowels, Europe—Portugal, us—is demonstrating that it anticipated the present.

And our present, my brothers, is excessive: here we are, once again, talking about sex education. The controversy is the Citizenship and Development subject. And the outcry, well, the outcry is brutal. It's always revealing when the liberal—who spends his life saying that the conservative only thinks about sex—is the first to dramatize the topic: "repression!", "regression!", "great concern!", and, of course, "far-right" (yikes!).

They appear from everywhere. From the Order of Psychologists, which whenever it hears the word "sex" pricks up its ears and comes to catechize. It's part of it. In a faithless society, the psychologist occupies the role of spiritual authority.

Although the topic is school curricula, the problem, friends, is not didactic, but metaphysical. Because it's not about deleting words or rearranging topics: it's about the underlying idea of man. All education conveys a moral worldview, even when it pretends not to. Therefore, the supposed neutrality of sex education is an ideological fiction.

A worldview infiltrates itself this way: it's glued to the discourse until it sounds natural. Scruton saw this clearly: the problem isn't "teaching badly," it's teaching error as truth. I'm less elegant: You don't reform the unreformable. You close the subject.

Sex education is a cynicism machine. It talks about bodies as if they were geography subjects: location, usefulness, performance. It's a program of moral disintegration that severs the bond between desire, responsibility, and family. It is, in short, the name coined to designate a preparatory phase for pornography. Period.

Of course, these ideas of mine are seen as outdated. Because they are. But that's not what makes them dangerous. What makes them dangerous is their moral force. That's why, when Rosa Monteiro—former Secretary of State for Citizenship and Equality and one of the authors of the National Strategy for Citizenship Education, currently in practice—says that "The government has a major problem with sexuality and wants to send the matter back to the confessional," she does so with the malignity of suggesting that anyone who sees the world differently from her suffers from pathology or repression. Thus, in just three short words, she reduces anyone who thinks differently to a kind of fossil of Catholicism. In contemporary debates, anyone who dares to think differently is forced to justify their own creation before being able to defend a single idea.

Some try to base the current model on the March 1984 law, which enshrined the right to sex education and family planning. But that law contained no identity doctrines, no coded language, no cultural impositions. To speak of 1984 as if it were the root of all this is to abuse history. That law was intended to protect, not to impose. It is also countered with the cliché: "it's not an ideological issue, it's a civilizational issue," as if civilization were neutral, as if an idea of civilization didn't already contain a vision of humankind, of freedom, of the body, of desire. And then the numbers of teenage pregnancies are invoked as if they were conclusive proof of the pedagogical urgency. The paradox screams: those who promote early exposure, immediate pleasure, and the breaking of taboos are the ones who present voluntary sterility as a life project. It is a very particular progress that is measured not by fruits, but by the lack thereof. Yes, I'm talking about children.

But there are those who don't accept it. There's a family in Famalicão, surnamed Mesquita Guimarães. Their position is uncomfortable for everyone because it reveals what almost no one wants to say out loud: "This doesn't belong to you." When everyone didn't even know what to say. Or what they could say. They keep saying it; now with special relevance, precisely because the government isn't left-wing.

They're like the righteous of the Old Testament. People who endure; in time, but beyond it. Houllebecq has characters like these and grants them a singular benevolence. Sometimes, amid the suffocating nihilism of his plots, one breathes a candor, a small faith in people like these. People ignored, ridiculed, small miracles. Minimal miracles.

Manuel Fúria is a musician and lives in Lisbon. Manuel Barbosa de Matos is his real name.

The texts in this section reflect the authors' personal opinions. They do not represent VISÃO nor reflect its editorial position.