3
P
rince
of
A
sturias
A
wards
1981-2014. S
peeches
Laureates. Excerpts
I take this to mean that, in today’s ceremony, rather than reflecting on literature and its particular
problems, as I could do, it would be more fitting to venture some thoughts, hardly comprehensive
and certainly very tentative, on the disarray in which culture and society find themselves mired
at this century’s end; this situation that sociologists have a knack for describing and that affects
us all; a situation whose origin no one fails to recognize as the radical and increasingly dizzying
technological revolution that has changed the systems and modes of human behaviour from top
to bottom, making any reference to the traditional values that were in effect not too long ago
unreliable, equivocal or vain.
Affronts and laments would be useless before such a situation, which some consider to be
intolerable, but which, like it or not, constitutes our current reality, from which it is impossible to
withdraw. Moving beyond the negative attitudes of grumbling criticism, we ought to recognize that
the fabulous progress provided by science to society, and undertaken by it, although it has shaken
up and plunged into disarray the course of culture that was relatively stable before, undoubtedly
furnishes us with an invaluable set of new resources whose availability promises the human race a
superior quality of life within a unified world, always on the condition that humanity itself is able
to sensibly and positively handle these formidable instruments that technological progress puts in
its grasp. Such potentialities are being used today —right before our eyes— as much for the benefit
of man and Nature as for their destruction. And in the immediate future, the direction that is set
for said use will depend on the proper organizational management of those who flip the switches
of power; all too clear is the danger of such formidable resources coming under the sway of insane
or criminal minds; or, simply, of their being manipulated by half-wits and clumsy hands. Any of
us who pays attention to everyday happenings on the international scene, who reads a newspaper
or watches a television news programme will realize that this terrific danger lurks around every
corner and is closer than ever.
The dilemma that we are faced with today is none other than this: either a giant-sized leap
toward the superior organization of shared existence on the planet or, otherwise, its catastrophic
sinking into chaos… This has to do with, let me insist, an open alternative, for the march of
history —at a remove from any brand of determinism— is guided by the union of diverse factors,
chance among them, but also to a certain degree by free human decisions. The condition of
Homo
sapiens
, insofar as the species has to some extent overcome the imperatives of the animal instinct,
leaves room, in effect, for reckoning and rational action in the search for good. And within the
social whole, this element of rationality is at the service of those personalities determined to find
solutions to the diverse problems raised nowadays by the challenges of technological progress,
with the intention of making it so that in the course of human coexistence constructive tendencies
predominate.
Francisco Ayala
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature
1998
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 23/10/1998.
