The West Is Not Blind, but It Cannot See

In cordial dialog with Jeffrey D. Sachs

I have written several texts about the transitional society we are in. Whenever I do, Gramsci’s famous thought comes to mind: neither the old has totally died nor the new has totally asserted itself; transition is a time of morbid phenomena (which some have translated as monsters). What is happening in the world makes me doubt that the concept of transition is still useful to characterize our time. With increasing conviction, I think that if we have to resort to famous and succinct manifestations of our condition, the best choice is that of Goya’s 1799 aquatint, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters). Instead of the metaphor of movement, the metaphor of condition.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I have agreed with Jeffrey Sachs’ (JS) analysis and we have even exchanged messages about our convergences. In a text published on April 11 in OtherNews, entitled “Giving Birth to the New International Order”, JS uses the concept of transition to characterize our times: from a unipolar world dominated by the West since the 15th century (in the last hundred years, by the USA) to a multipolar world centered on Asia, Africa and Latin America. His central proposal to ensure this transition lies in the rise of India (which he compares favorably to China) and the geopolitical conversion of this rise into the reform of the Security Council of the UN granting permanent membership to India.

I don’t disagree with JS’s proposal, although it is problematic to praise India at the worst moment of its democratic life thanks to the political Hinduism that turns more than 20% of the population (Muslims) into second-class citizens. I disagree, however, with the importance JS attaches to his proposal. His proposal is based on two premises that are unfortunately false: that the UN still exists with some effectiveness; and that there is a unipolar world order. Perhaps desperately, JS continues to believe in the international role of the UN. Is it possible to believe in the UN after the Gaza genocide that was broadcast live every day and to the whole world for more than a year? Is it possible to believe in the UN after all the lies tolerated in the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine? Let’s note two tragic facts: all these lies were credibly denounced at the time they were published, and those who denounced them suffered harsh consequences: silencing, deportation, media and judicial persecution; all these lies were confirmed as such years later, often by the agencies that propagated them or by their spokespeople, be they the New York Times or the Washington Post and the huge echo chamber that they possess which transmits to the hegemonic media around the world. No one has ever apologized to those who were right when it was forbidden to be right, nor have the peoples destroyed by acts of aggression based on lies been compensated. Does anyone remember that Libya had one of the best public health services in the world?

The second premise is that there is a unipolar world order. I can’t go into the debate here about whether the world order was unipolar even at the time of the Soviet Bloc. In any case, it did exist for a while. For example, it existed when in 2005 Narendra Modi was banned from the US for human rights violations (the massacre of Islamists in Gujarat in 2002). But does it exist today, when a war criminal is given a standing ovation by the US Congress? Isn’t it rather a world disorder that can be considered unipolar only because the country with the most power is the one that causes the most disorder? Is it possible to believe what is being said about China today if what was being said about it only five years ago was true (even if what is now emerging on the surface was being prepared for a long time behind the scenes)? Is it possible to believe in the solidity of the unipolar order based on the democracy/autocracy dichotomy when the “best friends” of the president of the most powerful democratic country are all autocrats? For some years now (especially since 9/11), the American political class has been guided by the idea of imperial domination and not by the idea of world order. Just read the Project for the New American Century or the Wolfowitz Doctrine where it becomes clear that the US must act independently on the international stage whenever “collective action cannot be orchestrated”. This is not a principle of order. It is a principle of disorder.

The sociology of absences: the sleep of reason

For all JS’s clairvoyance, his analysis and proposals produce two absences, two realities which, although they exist, are produced as non-existent and as such can no longer contribute to any diagnosis or solution. The non-existence of such realities is not the result of an act of will on the part of the analyst. It stems from the epistemological presuppositions of analysis. It stems from the sleep of reason. The West’s problem lies not so much in the state to which it has led the world, but in the epistemicide it has caused along its historical path, in other words, in the knowledge and experiences of the world that it has actively destroyed in order to impose its domination and neutralize any resistance. This destruction was not just of bodies and ways of life. It was also the destruction of knowledge, wisdom and ethics, of ways of living together of people and nations, of cultures of relationship with nature, with the living and the dead, with time and space. This multifaceted destruction has produced a specific form of blindness that consists of looking without seeing, explaining without understanding, observing without knowing that you can’t observe without being observed. I distinguish, among many others, two absences: the different/useless beyond the friend/enemy; living and letting live beyond order and disorder.

The different and the useless

Colonialism and capitalism are the twin forms of modern domination. Both are based on hierarchical logics: superior/inferior, owner/non-owner. In both cases, the first category determines the second. The inferior is only inferior in the light of the interests of the superior; he can be superior in the light of many other criteria, but this is irrelevant to the superior; the owner defines what has value (material or immaterial) and who owns it; the non-owner can own a lot of things that have no value to the owner and are therefore irrelevant or non-existent. The two logics are intertwined, although they reveal different faces of domination. Being superior without having valuable property is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. These two logics have created two dichotomous types of dominant social relations: the useful and the harmful; the friend and the enemy. The first type was well theorized by Jeremy Bentham, the second by Carl Schmitt.

Western colonial capitalist thinking has systematically de-trained human beings to recognize the importance of the different and the useless because they don’t fit into either of the two hierarchical logics. For this reason, it has either ignored them or relegated them to a surplus and non-threatening area: art. It gave them the aura of the unnecessary.

Living and letting live

The two hierarchical logics of colonialism and capitalism mentioned above have conditioned life and death since the 15th century. Since the life worth protecting was that of superiors and owners, and since the overwhelming majority of the world’s population was neither, the modern era was dominated by the experience of death and even by the spectacle of death. Death was not only for inferior, non-owning human beings, but also for all living beings, for nature in general. The death of rivers, mountains and jungles where the superior could accumulate their ownership of precious natural resources was theologically, ethically, scientifically and, above all, economically justified. This is how we arrived at the time of ecological collapse in which we find ourselves. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is just the latest heinous episode in a long history of ethno-social-natural cleansing of human beings, sub-human beings, and non-human beings.

A world order, unipolar or multipolar, based on the same epistemic and ethical premises that have dominated since the 15th century will do nothing to make the principle of live and let live triumph.

Conclusion

The transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world is not in itself good or bad. The real alternative is to expand the spaces of difference and uselessness as civilizational values: difference as diversity, uselessness as usefulness-otherwise. The real alternative lies in valuing the value of life, a value that can only be respected by living and letting live.

After five centuries of cultural, epistemic and ethical indoctrination, I have serious doubts that Western thought can conceive of or play a leading role in the creation of a multipolar world. It will never know how to be one among peers. Furthermore, the values of what is different and what is useless, of living and letting live, are much more present in the thinking that originates in the regions of the world where JS has some hope – Asia, Africa, and Latin America – than in the dominant thinking of the Western world. This fact in itself is no guarantee, since, after five centuries of global domination, Western thinking is insidiously present above all in the elites of the countries in these regions, the elites who will most likely be the ones to formulate the new (old) multipolar world. That’s why, for me, the exploited and oppressed classes of these regions are the ones who can do the most to combat the multisecular epistemicide. They will do so to the extent that they draw on their multisecular experience. This experience has always oscillated between war and revolution. Today, when we are sleepwalking towards a Third World War (if we are not already in it), perhaps we should revisit the concepts of revolution and liberation in new terms. Only then will reason wake up from the slumber to which capitalism and colonialism have condemned it.

Source: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-west-is-not-blind-but-it-cannot-see/