The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
It all began with the enchantments of Enlightenment philosophers and scientists with the idea of using science and art to conquer and domesticate nature for the good of Man.
Since then, philosophical and artistic imagination worked alongside scientific invention to try and build a world where Man deploys ideas and technology to rule and command over the land, the air, plants, animals, water and all nature. My previous article was a short and rather simplistic attempt at troubling the topic on how post-modernism, post-colonialism and post-politics as philosophical ideas have produced a post-truth world that allows leaders such as Donald Trump to thrive and enjoy power and popularity. In the present article I deposit the view that a post-human world, which is a capitalist and colonial monstrosity is upon us, and liberation philosophy must generate ideas of the re-humanisation of a world that is being conquered and occupied by technology and post-human philosophical and political ideas and practices.
In the attempt to achieve dominion over all nature using philosophy and science, it seems, Man has set afoot a monstrosity that will first conquer and then dominate and eliminate him from the surface of the earth. I am not here talking about how industrial fumes and chemical waste are polluting and destroying nature and the planet. I am not, as much, referring to how the nuclear bomb, that genius invention of Man, will eventually lead to the end of the human world. The end of the world through chemical pollution and the atomic bomb is not all but part of the post-human challenge that Man, as in humankind, presently faces in this troubled and also troubling world.
The enchanting utopia
Through medical science Man has been able to improve health and elongate the life of some human beings, especially those in societies that benefited from and were not victims of slavery and colonialism. It is anticipated that in the very near future Man might be able to use science and technology to live longer if not forever.
Through engineering science Man has twisted and turned natural objects into magical machines and built heavenly infrastructures that were previously beyond the human imagination. The robotic age has seen robots taking over almost all human activities that are possible. We presently live in a computerised universe of all possibilities.
Future wars will be fought through the unmanned drone as human beings fast become those masters that delegate technology to achieve most of their wishes. In the communication sphere, gadgets have truly become what Herbert Marshall McLuhan called the “extensions of man.” Through cell phones and the internet technologies distance has been destroyed as human beings in different times and places of the earth can have a real time conversation anytime.
Yes, in some privileged parts of the present world a man can buy a female life size doll that becomes his wife of justice. These days female persons can buy toys and gadgets that in every sphere that matters can replace Man. Technology and the science behind it has colonised, that is invaded and occupied, even the human intimate economy that has become a captured economy. This started with otherwise understandable efforts by human beings to enlarge some organs and shrink some as per desire but is has morphed into a monstrosity where technologies, not just tablets and chemicals, have taken over marital beds. Men and women are competing with electrical gadgets and digital objects for the provision of intimate pleasures and joys.
Prosthetic limbs were a welcome development that mediated the problem of disability and impairment in the world. The mechanical and digital robots are no longer assisting but are now substituting and eliminating Man. Millions of people the world over are losing jobs and their dignity of labour to machines. Through genetic engineering, human beings that are more of machines than they are people are now with us. Science fiction has suddenly become science fact as programmed human being are now not only a possibility but a presence.
The art and science of doing myself
The posthuman world is, according to Ken Wilber as “narcissist nihilist world.” Human beings only love themselves and for the love of the self they will do anything, even destroy the world. Self-love and love for the self have become more than simple individualism but true nihilism. The self-confessed prophet of modern Eurocentricism, Slavoj Zizek, is not only disgusted by that we now have coffee without caffeine and beer without alcohol. Zizek is also horrified by the growing culture of self-dating, doing myself, in the West.
A man or a woman can now date himself or herself and have a thriving romantic affair with the self. This involves sole candle lit dinners and steamy bedroom sessions with none but the self. Soon, Zizek fears, people will officially wed and marry themselves. Auto-eroticism is upon us.
Soon and biblically, a man or a woman will now be able to live mother and father to be with the self in blissful matrimony. Science and technology now allow women and men to depend on the self for intimate and erotic fulfilment, and yes, still make babies with machines. Zizek laments technologism. The most technologised country in the world is South Korea where everyone is gadgeted and networked, and that is where the highest suicide rate of young people is recorded.
Human beings are emotional and psychic animals that need humanity before technologism. What Zizek does not note is that the world of beer without alcohol and coffee without caffeine is world of humans without humanity, and humanity without human values.
Recovering the human
The postmodern and post truth world as postcolonial realities lead essentially to the posthuman and nihilist world. Elimination of the truth in the post-truth world eventually leads to elimination of human values with the human beings that carry those values because values do not walk on their own legs, they are carried and embodied by humans.
All desires for the conquest and domination of nature by Man, desires that have included the conquest and domination of other human beings by others, appear to be not only colonial but also nihilist and leading to the end of Man. Science and technology need to be decolonised so that they are in the just and fair service of Man.
The desire to use science and technology for conquest and supremacy is a paradoxical desire that eats the one who desires eventually. The attempt to use knowledge and technology for the mastery and domination of nature and other human beings appears not to be a sustainable desire as it is essentially not only post-human but also anti-Man in the world.
Philosophy and science should be in the fair and just service of Man or else they will be taken over by the spirit and practice of nihilism that will end Man and the world at the same time. Any knowledge and invention that gets used for trickery, conquest and domination of the one by the other and of nature itself is a kind of futile nihilism.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founder member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria: [email protected]
