The Contemplation of Order
Ordem e progresso. Order and progress. To my knowledge, the Brazilian national flag is the only one that displays the motto of a philosophical school, or, rather, a philosophical church. The flag’s designer, Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, belonged to the Positivist Church of Brazil, an offshoot of Auguste Comte’s religion of humanity, which had found fertile ground in South America. The dyad “order-progress” is the core of the bourgeois worldview, and, in many ways, Comtean positivism was the philosophy of the triumphant bourgeoisie in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
