The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
It is one of the principal paradoxes of western philosophy, history and science that the Enlightenment that was supposed to bring light to the world actually gave birth to a lot of blood and darkness that continue to cover the planet.
And today I am not simply pondering on the colonial and imperial ideas that were produced by Enlightenment thinkers and political actors but the dystopian world system and harm to nature that western wisdom and science has brought.
The so-called age of reason has led to so much unreason that has produced the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ themselves, namely war, poverty, disease and the ecological crisis (led by rapid climate change) that threaten to end the world or terminate life on earth.
The future of life on earth and that of the earth itself has never before been so much in doubt as it is in the present.
The present is that time when we are supposed to be harvesting the ripe fruits of the Fourth Industrial Age, an age of advancement, civilisation, modernity and the glory of Man over nature which the Enlightenment promised.
Utopia vs Distopia
In the place of that achievement we have pandemics, a simmering nuclear Third World War, populations of refugees, and deepening poverty and social inequalities.
The world as we know it has never been darker.
The paradisal Utopia that the Enlightenment promised remains a dream that has turned into a nightmare as Dystopia itself envelopes the world and threatens human, animal, and plant life in the universe.
With flooding, extreme heat and cold, and polluted air around us, we can confirm that the natural elements themselves, the very forces of life, in shape of water, air and the soil have turned hostile and are being rendered inhabitable.
Our vaunted philosophy and science, technology and innovation, that the Enlightenment is supposed to have gifted us with seem insufficient to save us.
Our being human and the rational amongst all the other animals seems to have reached its limits and probably taken us back to the so-called dark ages where we may look down or up for some deity or divinity to save us, the dark ages being the times where Enlightenment claims to have delivered us from in the very first place.
The Enlightenment Man as a master of the universe and conqueror of Nature might have come to, not only the limit, but the actual end of his wisdom and science, power.
I make the present remarks as a way of foregrounding my observation of the collapse of philosophical and scientific thinking that has led to the present war between Russia and Ukraine that looks set to escalate to a major world war that will combine with disease, growing poverty, climate change and the refugee crisis to make the world a real dark and bloody place, if it would remain a world at all.
The powers of the world that have the might of mind, money and diplomatic muscle to stop the escalation of the war, using human rationality that separates us from animals, do not only seem unwilling but actually appear unable to do anything to stop the war.
It is no exaggeration that our very world system is beginning to look like a thing possessed of and driven by a toxic death-drive, making the world look like an object in a hurry to end.
Dystopia in modernity
One of the assumptions of the Enlightenment is the indisputable rationality of Man.
In the world of rational men and women what rules, in the words of Immanuel Kant, one of the key Enlightenment philosophers, is the “public use of reason” where human beings have freed themselves from immaturity and primitive barbarism.
In the world of rational and reasonable men, the land of the free that westerners claim, dialogue, diplomacy and democracy are the modes of rule and conflict resolution.
It is in the Global South, places that encompass Asia, Africa and Latin America that are described by westerners as backward, lacking in democracy and given to civil wars, coups, genocides and other primitive modes of violence.
When violence breaks out in the West it is treated as an exception and an anomaly and not a reflection of the character of the civilisation.
When it breaks out in Africa it is understood as a reflection of the African political tradition and character that is backward and lacking in democracy and civilisation.
But Western thinking is predominantly dark and violent thinking whose darkness and violence was displayed first in colonial invasions of other parts of the world, sponsoring of civil wars in the Global South, engineering of coups of regime change and participation in proxy wars.
Thanks to violent western thinking, philosophy and science, the New World Order, an Enlightenment World, that we have always been promised is turning out to be a New World Disorder, a dystopia where the end of the world itself can be visualised not just imagined.
Nuclear weapons, an ecological crisis (mainly caused by industrial pollution), refugee crisis, disease and other man-made disasters make the dystopia that define the present world that is shaped by the violence and darkness of western thought. Western thought is, in character colonial and violent thought that is largely incapable of ‘public use of reason’ and actually delivers darkness and blood in the place of the vaunted light of the Enlightenment.
The West as modern, civilised, just, free and democratic is an artefact of propaganda not reality.
The same propaganda that said colonialism was a civilising mission when it was conquest, domination and exploitation.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Foxwood House in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa. Contact: [email protected].
