Tag: colonialism

The Dark Side of Modernity

Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.

For a word being thrown around so casually these days, one may wonder what exactly modernity means. It’s certainly everything we might initially assume it is. But let’s tease that apart. It’s been defined as a historical period that could have started as far back as Medieval times. Sometimes it’s regarded as the light arising from the Enlightenment, or even beginning sometime in the 19th century with the industrial revolution.

The most inclusive definition associates modernity with a number of historical developments: nations, languages, industrialization, mercantilism, capitalism, urbanization, mass literacy, mass media, representative government and mainly also a shift from traditional culture, meaning a proliferation of things we do when we’re not entirely focused on survival, and systems of knowledge, to the triumph of rationalism and scientific materialism. One may include a number of positive aspects to modernity such as secular culture, evolutionary thinking, developments in psychology, medicine, philosophy and emancipation. But especially now, we can’t avoid also associating environmental devastation with modernity, which is now undermining the very stability of culture and modernity itself.

A formal definition of modernity, according to Walter Mignolo’s substantial body of work on the subject, should begin with the Renaissance, coinciding with the intention of Western Europe to embark on the imperial project which had several faces and which was rationalized as bringing civilization to the New World, saving the world for Christianity and which then evolved into what we now call capitalism.

However we paint it, Modernity is synonymous with colonialism and thus, racism is inherent to it. Could the modern world look as it does today with the current economic regimes as if no imperial intentions had ever existed, no massive transport of black bodies from Africa to North and South America, no East India Company, no appropriation of native lands, forced and unpaid labor, the imposition of governance and financial obligations? I think not.

Thus, hidden behind the rhetoric of modernity, economic practices dispensed with human lives, and knowledge justified racism and the inferiority of human lives that were naturally considered dispensable.

—The Darker Side of Western Modenity

Dark bodies weren’t granted full humanity. And white bodies rationalized their moral responsibility as social systems, spiritual practices or bodies of knowledge were systematically destroyed. We continue to feel the effects of the colonial mentality 500 years later not only through globalization and neoliberal economics but through the definition of development itself and the division of the world into so-called developed and less developed cultures. The term ‘Third World’ was a French invention.

Colonialism did not advance solely as a mercantile or as an imperial military adventure. It was a religious and cultural force propagated through the cracking of indigenous linguistic code, the imposition of new languages, geographical mapping, religious indoctrination, economic subjugation, wiping out cultural memory, arbitrarily defining territories according to political or economic expediency, destroying centuries of cultural wealth, appropriating land and vast material wealth, creating a domestic class of proxy colonialists who benefited directly from the economic subjugation of their brethren and generating entrenched bureaucracies to sustain the inertia of political systems primarily serving colonial interests.

Colonialism emerged from and as what we know as western civilization, ultimately defining modernity in terms of politics, economics, religion and culture. The imperial project was to extend the definitions of civilization, language, philosophy, politics and economics to the colonized world. That initially included Latin America and Africa, extending into the Islamic world and South Asia. The definition of development itself was determined by the western colonial enterprise and persists to this day as defined by Wall street, the IMF & the World Bank. It’s primary purveyors are government agencies and diplomacy, clearing the way for multinational corporations backed, in case additional persuasion becomes necessary, by military might. Even as the overt manifestations of European imperialism dissolved in the mid-20th century, the American imperial project in the Western Hemisphere over the past 150 years is well known

Perhaps the greatest impact of colonialism was to control knowledge and especially the definition of knowledge. The definition of knowledge codifies the essential power relations between races, genders and cultures and became encoded in languages, beginning with Spanish, Portuguese, German and French, all rooted in Latin, extending more recently in English. Since knowledge and its definition is held primarily in western hands over the past few centuries, the way we think about problems and their solutions also arises from within that codification.

In that respect, the rhetoric of modernity is a pernicious monoculture of ideas to the extent that now modernity has become hostile to culture. Like the cannibalistic psychosis of Wetiko, it creeps into all aspects of life in the form of social media, advertising, mainstream political discourse. Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.

We are also in the midst of an uprising over who gets to set the terms of discourse, who gets to define and preserve the codification of white innocence, superiority and patriarchal economic hegemony into the political and economic rhetoric set forth over the centuries of the colonial enterprise. The latest skirmish in this ongoing war is about the 1619 Project, which, by unearthing real history and bringing its unsavory truths to the forefront of modern awareness, lays bare the principle that white privilege only lives by keeping its own past buried.

White patriarchy has had the floor for 500 years and now the plantation systems are breaking down everywhere. There are popular movements with a different idea rising in virtually every culture now fighting for survival and presenting a rising threat to the owners and guards of the prison without walls and the prisons with walls. Repression and authoritarianism are the last remaining tools of control. Witness the right-wing backlash against Bolivia’s Evo Moralies, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and the rise of Bolsonaro and the jailing of Lulo De Silva in Brazil, not to mention the increasingly desperate and increasingly lawless measures by the white minority in America to retain minority rule.

What was taken centuries ago cannot be recovered. Inasmuch as we identify with and join the shifting communities of rebellion, art, theater, feminism, resurgent indigenous voices, economic cooperation, the recovery of ancient wisdom, we become fugitives from the plantation to construct a new economy. As decoloniality and the critique of modernity becomes more elaborate and encompassing, it is increasingly clear that we will no longer accept the structures of domination on any level of human activity and relationships, most particularly in regard to the natural world.

The signs of backlash are everywhere. Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure by the University of North Carolina School of Journalism. Republicans voting en bloc against a Black women becoming Director of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The refusal of Big Pharma to support generic vaccines being distributed to less affluent countries. The sudden reversal of the NFL to now regard the claims of neurological damage by black former players as equal to those of white players. How much more systemic can you get? These are actions and perspectives which all arise from and reveal the vestiges of the racist colonial mindset.

Reciprocity

True reciprocity, or what we could call emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins, directions or destinations.

Reciprocity is a word we could use for the rhizomatic nature of life, or perhaps paradoxically, the social mechanics of earth. We are undeniably entangled in perpetual subliminal conversations and exchange with each other and the natural world. Reciprocity expresses our interdependence, whether conscious or not. The limits of that reciprocal relationship likely extend beyond any rational definition we might rely on. We can see ourselves in a new light, not as a single central species mastering life, but as just one species (the youngest species) sharing a vast web of life. We are learning this the hard way. 

Reciprocity, or what might well be called emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins or destinations. Much as we might wish to, or to be tied to the habit of gazing into a rainforest noticing only the layered canopy, the explosion of color, the cacophony of voices or the humidity, we cannot see the whole unless we also notice what is underfoot, buried in the rotting vegetation, the decomposing bodies, the leaf molds, the micro-organisms, the mycelium, the death amidst all that life. In fact, the death is giving rise to life. Without these, there is no rainforest, no reciprocity. Some relationships are visible, some invisible. Everything we are and all we do is part of that entanglement. 

In a culture that teaches and so efficiently reinforces separation for so long, we as individuals are reduced to atomized centers of resources to be mined and harvested. We have reached a point at which even our autonomy of thought and action are under threat. It is critical to disengage from the machine of Progress to discover and enact a new way of living closer to the reality of our place in the web of life. We are being called upon by unparalleled change to engage all our faculties, our vision and intuition, the ears and eyes, the sensations we have forgotten to notice and the capacities we use to listen for foreign and fugitive guidance to recover or discover for the first time the basis of our relations with each other and the more-then-human world.

We have to search our histories, poking around in the ashes, into the sources of imagery, before memory, before place, before blood, before nations, to the tribal, to the bones of our original values, to the individual cells of community where life is incubated and regenerated, where our relationships were not things to cultivate, where we watched each other grow and participated in the lives and transitions of everyone we knew. Somewhere in our past, even if only in our genetic memory, we have all known deprivation, displacement and domination. All is embedded in the epigenetics of the human story. More recently we have come to know the soulless commodification of fellow human beings. We have moved beyond some or all of these to be where we are and to carry that knowing with us. That is the common legacy of our time. 

The lifestyle I enjoy was built on the contributions of a billion partners, both human and non-human. For 200 years, capitalism has depended on the establishment of unequal relationships, hierarchies of privilege among all those partners. The unraveling we see around us is the legacy of that inequality, including the racism perpetuating them. We have all become complicit along the way, with colonialism and slavery, with those hierarchies of privilege, with entitlement and subjugation. We are the benefactors of exploitation and violence and we live in a nation built upon that violence and which continues to thrive on the suffering of others every day. 

The bill is coming due. I have a deep grief, emptiness and sickening feeling as I ponder all of this. But feeling guilty is also a perversion, an inversion of victimhood. It can be immobilizing, but it’s time to put it away and name and claim a different way.