There really hasn't been much news over the last couple of days, at least not any you haven't already heard about somewhere else. What I thought I'd do is translate a couple of passages from The New Spaniards, a book by former Guardian reporter in Spain, John Hooper, that I think are very revealing about today's Spain.

The fact that Spain underwent a transition rather than a revolution or anything of the kind (after Franco's death) is another important reason why tolerance should have emerged as the supreme value in contemporary Spain. But it is also, I believe, one of the causes of something which goes beyond mere tolerance: a sort of ethical emptiness which is equally characteristic of today's Spain.

A survey in (Spanish newsmagazine) Cambio 16 carried out at the time of the (1991) Gulf crisis found that only 8 percent of Spaniards would give their life for their country; only 3 percent thought it worth dying for love or liberty; and a mere 2 percent would sacrifice themselves for an ideal. The results clearly astonished the magazine's proprietor, Juan Tomás de Salas, who wrote an impassioned editorial saying that it was time "Spaniards stop believing that our destiny on this planet is to enjoy, enjoy, enjoy and that our problems will be taken care of by others." As a description of the spirit of post-Franco Spain it could scarcely be bettered.

"Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy." Not at all an unsuitable motto for a nation which, according to a government survey conducted in the winter of 1989-90, had 138,200 bars--only slightly fewer than in the whole of the rest of the european Union. No other people I have ever encountered put as much effort as the Spanish into having a good time. whatever its political and economic problems, the country is an immensely entertaining place...Today's Spaniards do have a passion for life that matches their traditional fascination with death. Indeed, the two are almost certainly linked--thinking so much about death gives them a heightened appreciation of life. An explosion of carefree hedonism was doubtless inevitable after so many years of oppression under Francop. What seems to have delayed it was the lack of real economic growth between 1975 and 1985. But if you look back over Spain's recent past what you see is a pattern of civil war followed by military dictatorship, not unlike that which characterized seventeenth-century England. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that Restoration Spain should have much the same frivolous air as Restoration England. Almodóvar as Congreve? There are worse comparisons.

Yeah, there are, like for example comparing my ass with the Hubble Space Telescope. Come on, dude, you're stretching it a bit thin there, and that stuff about the Spaniards and their fascination with death is a load of wank perpetrated by people who actually take Ernest Hemingway seriously.However, Mr. Hooper is absolutely correct about Spain's tolerance, its fun-loving spirit, its sheer entertainment value--and its complete ethical confusion.

The virtual absence of ideology from Spanish politics is also one of the most evident signs of something commented on in an earlier chapter: a certain moral vacuousness. By that I do not mean to suggest that today's Spaniards are amoral. When the dividing line between good and bad is clear, they are capable of mounting demonstrations of support or protest that put the rest of Europe to shame. If some young girl disappears into the clutches of a child-molester, for example, you can expect that thousands--and I mean thousands--of people will turn out onto the streets of her hometown to support her relatives and demonstrate their outrage. Today's Spaniard usually has his or her heart in the right place.

It is when the choice is difficult, when the moral dilemma is unexpected or unfamiliar, that the gap becomes apparent. How do you reconcile the conflicting demands for higher pay and lower unemployment? To what extent do women have a "right to choose" over abortion? And what really could be done about Bosnia? It is on these sorts of issues that the quality of debate can be low, with opinion-formers frequently choosing to take refuge in platitudes and aphorisms.

It is a phenomenon often attributed to the waning influence of the Roman Catholic church. The theory does not rest on whether the values supplied by the church were right or wrong, but on the fact that they were virtually the only ones the Spaniards had. In Britain, France, and Germany, and in other societies with more than one religion, there is a tradition of choosing between different moral outlooks which goes back centuries. In Spain, that tradition barely exists. Pople have had little choice but to take their ethical bearings from the Roman Catholic church, the only decision open to them being whether to accept or reject what is taught.

The prevalence of instinctively Catholic attitudes is far greater than the Spanish themselves perhaps realize. Castilian is crammed with phrases drawn from Catholic practice and dogma...Take away the creed which is at the root of these ideas and you--or they--are left with little but common sense. Because of the absence of a rival to Catholicism in Spain, the step which might take a British Anglican into Catholicism, or a French Catholic into Humanism, can launch their Spanish counterpart into a sort of ethical void in which he or she has to rely on a largely instinctive sense of what is good and bad...the fact that Spaniards find themselves all of a sudden left to their own ethical devices may provide a further explanation for that super-permissive atmosphere which imbues the new Spain.

Mr Hooper is right about the super-permissive and tolerant atmosphere in Spain. Teenagers openly smoke dope in public squares. Hardcore porn is available in plain sight at the local newsstand. The drinking age is whether you're tall enough to put your money on the bar or not. There are more topless chicks--and grandmas--at the beach than there are fully clothed. You can, literally, party without stopping for a week if you want to (and don't have to go to work).

I think Hooper is at least partly right about Spaniards' moral confusion. Catholicism is pretty much dead here--I doubt more than ten percent of people in Barcelona actually go to church, and I doubt that more than a quarter actually believe in the Christian God, though it is certainly true that Spain is culturally very Catholic and that many Catholic attitudes have survived and will survive here. To a great degree among literate people, a sort of vulgar Marxism has replaced Catholicism as a framework for their ideas, with all the problems that implies. The great majority of the working- and middle-classes are, in addition, believers in a paternalistic State that guarantees their lives from the cradle to the grave; this attitude is at least partially a remnant of Francoism and partially caused by the fact that Spain was damned poor until 1960 and pretty poor until about 1985. The fact that Marxism and neo-Francoism--neither of which are too big on capitalism or independent thinking--have been stirred in with what's left of the Catholic tradition in Spain, which has also never been too big on capitalism or independent thinking, causes most Spaniards' ideology, if you can call it that, to be a mix of paternalism, Socialism, and what they call here "philias and phobias". Most Spaniards have a particular foreign country that they rather admire, and can be called Francophiles or Anglophiles or Germanophiles, and another which they rather dislike, which is generally capitalist, antipaternalist, freethinking, aclerical America. There are Americaphiles here, but they're not more than 10% of the population and they often admire America for the wrong reasons.

Another reason intellectual debate here in the Hispanosphere often seems to be of low quality is, frankly, because it is. Spanish has a lot of speakers, but not too many of those speakers are well-educated; let's say that there are about 50 million well-educated Spanish speakers. I imagine that there are at least 150 million educated English-speakers, and I also imagine that English is by a long way the world language with the greatest number of educated speakers. I submit that the more educated speakers a language has, the higher the average level of debate in that language will be. Spanish has no New Statesman or Spectator or New Republic or National Review--it really doesn't have a Time or Newsweek, either, much less an Economist--and it has no Internet presence or scientific / technological presence. Its newspapers pale in comparison with the Daily Telegraph or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. What European languages often have that we don't are thick, dull, semi-philosophical texts written by some professor somewhere that get published because no one else in that language produces anything to print. They think, since they have this highbrow crap that nobody reads, that this makes them respectable intellectuals. I'm afraid they're wrong.