The Sunday News
In A world guided by the blinding and deafening scramble and stampede for gain and mega profits, humane and humanist forms of thinking are ignored, suspended and looked at with disdain. In the media and in the academy worldwide, humanist scholars and public intellectuals are regarded as boring moralists or social evangelists who can be listened to, tolerated but really not taken seriously.
In 1975, Argentinean liberation theologian, historian and philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel coined and made famous the term “uncritical everydayness.” Philosophically, the term uncritical everydayness referred to how scholars suffered a philosophical slumber, where they were unable to see the degeneration of society to blind materialism, moral rot and social death. At the same time Enrique Dussel was bemoaning uncritical everydayness amongst scholars and society at large, other humanist thinkers such as the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire were emphasising the need in the world for “education for critical consciousness,” a kind of education that would equip students with critical tools of the mind that empowers them by ensuring that they understand how the world works, that would help them to unmask and surmount imperial and colonial domination.
Iconically, and even prophetically, at around the same time Dussel and Freire were writing a European white humanist thinker, a public intellectual who has sacrificed life and limb by speaking for the poor against Euro-American evil, Noam Chomsky predicted that at the rate at which American propaganda and “intentional ignorance” were being passed around in the world as wisdom, America and the world would soon be taken over not by sober and wise political thinkers but dangerous demagogues and fanatics that would drive the world to a nuclear powered World War III. The fanaticism, Americanist jingoism and hatred of other nationals that Donald Trump continues to exhibit do not only fulfil Noam Chomsky’s philosophical prophecy but goes on to show how far the world has sunk from humanism and humanist thinking to hatred and pure evil. By nature, capitalism as an economic system and neoliberalism as a political paradigm are inhuman forces that privilege power and profit ahead of life and humanness, left unchecked these forces can drive the planet to its death and humanity to extinction.
Collapse of theological reason
During the European Renaissance, politics and scholarship were guided by a belief in the supremacy of God and the divine over anything. In the Global South, indigenous societies treated nature as sacred, respected nature as Mother Nature that was sacred, some animals and plants were attributed as holy and were preserved. The natural environment and climate were given human qualities and respected. Reference to the planet as Mother Earth, nature itself as Mother Nature inculcated a belief and sensibility that nature was a living being and the earth an individual entity that needed to be honoured and respected.
Man consumed with modesty the fruits that nature provided. It is Euro-American capitalist greed to exploit nature and its riches, to master nature and not to be mastered by it that turned plant life, animal life and mineral resources of the earth into raw materials, the earth itself was reduced into a pile of natural resources to be extracted and exploited for mega profits. In this scramble and extractive spectacle, human life itself was rendered dispensable and disposable, people were enslaved, colonised and in good numbers exploited for forced or cheap labour. The godly and the divine were pushed into the background as science and scientific thinking became the new god. Man demanded evidence and scientific proof for everything to be believed and taken seriously. In the global academy, natural sciences and the social sciences as evidence and proof based disciplines and ways of knowing became the only way of looking at the world. In such a world, scientists like Charles Darwin and economic philosophers such as Adam Smith became the go to thinkers whose biologist and materialist thoughts were used to justify the exploitation of nature and human beings for profit. Theological reason, philosophy and other humane and humanising ideas were rendered old fashioned and considered boring occupations. Social scientists and natural scientists were relied upon in the academy and the media as the thinkers that drove progress and development in the world, social sciences and the natural sciences became the disciplines of profit in which states and nations invested. If they were not totally ignored, theology, philosophy and other humanities were co-opted and deployed as propaganda that was used to justify neoliberal thinking and capitalist power, the ultimate rule of man.
A throw away world
Biblically, Sodom and Gomorrah were cities of the world that became too developed and “civilised” for their own good, and began to be full of themselves, big headed and vainglorious. In Sodom and Gomorrah Man had so much to eat and so much to drink, life became too good to the extent of being mundane and boring, man started trying new things experimenting with bestiality, having sex with animals. Men had sex with other men. Sodom and Gomorrah were places and times of excess and lack of societal proportion and that led to their destruction. A throw away world is that world that lacks balance and proportion where everything that is done is done in excess, where bizarre and strange things begin to make sense. Human beings develop an appetite for miracles and wonders, for the otherworldly.
Religiously, charlatans and magicians arise and make money out of miracles and wonders. Preachers and “men of God” outdo each other in displaying wonders and miracles, generating mega profits and making fame. Politically, fanatics come up and claim to be messiahs that will deliver people and the entire world from poverty and suffering. The demagogues claim to be messiahs sent of God to save the world and are followed by the masses; they claim to be bringing greatness and power to humanity. On the other hand hatred and evil become the new religion, human life is cheapened. Prophetic charlatans in religion and political demagogues in politics are creatures of the same world, now and again they work together and feed on each other, each justifying the existence of the other and making the strange world make sense. A world that is guided by the drive for power and profit is the ideal world for the religious charlatan and the political fanatic and demagogue, it is a throw away world where the strangest things are given respectability.
The necessity of the Humanities
Represented by Donald Trump are economic and political leaders of the world that have lost what French philosopher Michel Foucault called “human technologies” or “technologies of the self.” A world without a humane compass and human sensibility is a cold and dry world that is deathly in form and in content. The natural sciences and the social sciences are ways of thinking and knowing that are evidently developing and progressing the world, they are the disciplines of power and profit that that world needs. The underside of these disciplines is the pathology of scientific determinism that goes with “uncritical everydayness” an inability to see the importance of the humane and of humanity in the scheme of life. Terrorist thinking, religious fanaticism, jingoism, xenophobia and racism are social developments that are symptomatic of a world that has lost its human technologies and is driven by the appetites for power and profits. It is philosophy, theology, history, literature and the arts as ways of examining and looking at the world that have the potential once again to propel the world to humanism. It is the humanities as a discipline that still hold the strong answers to the strong questions of hate and domination in the world; the humanities are in short the arts and the sciences of humanism and liberation. They might not be valorised in the universities anymore and humanist scholars might be the celebrities of the academy, but this present throw away world once again cries for the return to the critical humanities, the eyes of the world.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
