(based on a talk by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira)
Zanzibar
We should seek the universality of things, not just limit ourselves to the immediate thing at hand. If we do not form an idea of the entirety, of the universality, with all its hierarchical values, we will not be able to insert what we know into any broader order of things. We will not function well. We will not even know how to function well in any larger order of things.
“His First Birthday” Painting by Frederik Morgan
For example, as a child, I felt a certain interest for the Sultanate of Zanzibar. I had a collection of stamps from Zanzibar that lead me to imagine what that sultanate was like. I imagined a Sultan inside a micro-fairyland. That is what made it interesting. If you told me that there had been an earthquake and it killed 300 thousand people from various countries, I would be sad, as we all would. But if you told me that the earthquake had annihilated the island of Zanzibar, and the Sultanate was no more, my personal reaction would be very much stronger. Why? Because 300 thousand people from various countries is not a whole. The sultanate forms a whole, complete with its own characteristic features. If that whole were to disappear, it would be the disappearance of something more than the collection of individuals that comprised it.
Port Dauphine Bois de Boulogne, Painting by Joaquín Pallarés Allustante
This notion of the whole is very much reflected in organic society. We see it first in the family. Then we see it in the town or city; then in the region; in the nation; and the nation as part of the world. Each maintains its characteristics. Yet there is a collection of characteristics that form a whole, while respecting the individual characteristics of its constituent parts. They are small universes fitted into larger universes. These in turn are part of even larger universes, and lastly a universe that is a sort of absolute or total universe, which is a closed and sovereign nation.
President Emile Loubet welcoming Tsar Nicolas II and the Empress Alexandra. Painting by Albert Pierre Dawant
I perceived in this something very ordered and organic, without which one cannot imagine well-constructed forms of government or other forms of social organization.
