Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

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.