Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 7

‘Where and when exactly did the rain begin to beat us?’ is a philosophical question that is posed by Chinua Achebe (1989, 43) in his meditation on the African political and social condition. Achebe is one of the African thinkers who have demanded a return to historical sources and political genealogies and provenances in search of the time and place in which Africans lost their equality within the human family. Achebe ponders the ‘hopes and impediments’ that have defined attempts at understanding between the North and the South, and amongst people positioned differently within intersecting power relations.

Achebes' demand to know what happened to the common humanity of human beings reminds us of the unstable link between the human and the humane. How some humans use power to monopolise being human and expel others from the human family remains a haunting philosophical dilemma of inhumanity that has a long historical trajectory in the South and in the North. Socrates, a questioning mind, left the fourth century BCE with the haunting question of why everyone on earth seemed to believe in humanity ‘but not in the existence of humans’ (Plato 2010, 24). He was perplexed by the fact that everywhere, from religious pulpits to political podiums, beautiful things were being said about the love of humanity, and yet the majority of human beings were being oppressed everywhere. Multitudes were being thingified right in the centre of Athens, the city state celebrated as the cradle of reason and democracy, much as coloniality was born and bred right at the centre of what has been celebrated as liberty and progress.

In the same vein as Achebe (1989) pondering the beginnings of the dehumanisation of Africans, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1755] 2004, 1) in the eighteenth century agonised over the ‘origins of inequality’ among human beings, to the extent that he wished humans could have remained at the level of animals that show respect for life and mercy for the weak among themselves. Yearning for the ways of the animal kingdom was Rousseaus' way of condemning the evil done by humans to other humans. To compare the human to the animal, and to favour the animal, becomes an expression of the deepest philosophical indictment of the evil perpetrated by humans. Human success in the arts and the sciences, Rousseau opined, only served to conceal the truth that humans were worse than beasts in their cruel and evil practices.

Friedrich Nietzsche ([1906] 1968, 1) called ‘the will to power’ an insatiable and unreasonable appetite for profit, power and domination. Oppression begins with an appetite and a passion. What allows war to be celebrated as necessary and natural (Machiavelli [1532] 2009) is the desire to, by any means necessary, conquer and dominate the other. The era of the Enlightenment itself, storied as the death of God and the birth of reason that would liberate humans and brighten the world with progress, became an era of the false promise. Steve Martinot (2011), for instance, notes that the epoch of the same Enlightenment that set alight development and advancement in the West darkened the South with human suffering, disasters and pain. The year in which the conquest of the Americas was consolidated, 1492, when modernity is supposed to have begun to infiltrate the Global South, when the idea of the nation state was born, is the year that Enrique Dussel (1996, 1) describes as the beginning of ‘the invention’ and also ‘eclipse’ of the ‘inferior’ other by the conquering and ‘superior’ big Other on the planet. The conquered peoples of the New World were judged to have no souls and no religion, and they therefore became legitimate subjects of conquest, domination, enslavement and expulsion from their lands, from the world and from life itself. God and religion became political capital, a resource that was used to include some and exclude others from the human family. People were divided into the categories of the godly and the godless, and thus were they separated, and the weaker amongst them condemned.

The always already gendered (Kitch 2009; Oyěwùmí 1997; Trinh 1989) classification of human beings according to race began, and was spread as an accompaniment of modernity and coloniality to the regions of Latin America, Asia and Africa (Quijano 2000). From slavery in the Americas through colonialism in Africa to apartheid in South Africa, ‘race’ was used in political systems where darker-skinned people across the globe found themselves dehumanised (Magubane 2007). Defiantly defending ‘the souls of black folk’ in reaction to the gravity of the removal of black slaves from the human family on American plantations, and the enduring domination and marginalisation of African Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois ([1859] 1969, xi) identified ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century’ as ‘the problem of the colour line’, where humanity was tragically torn asunder between the black- and the white-skinned peoples. Some philosophers have noted that the ‘social contract’ governing and organising the present world system is in fact a ‘racial contract’ (Mills 1997, 1–3). According to Charles Mills, white supremacy is ‘the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today’, where ‘racism is itself a political system, a particular power structure of informal or formal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties’ (1997, 3). In other words, racism is the powerful but largely concealed governing system and logic of the present Euro-North American world system. Racist maps, borders, fences and boundaries that were constructed in the course of conquest still exist physically and metaphysically, governing imaginaries and political practices. Upsurges of xenophobia and attacks on refugees, immigrants, women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or questioning (LGBTIQ+) people are connected to colonial demarcations of who is human and who is not. The contract that governs the world is not the social contract of the bond, implicit in the all-encompassing expression ‘we the people’, that is imagined to have moved humans from their state of nature to become members of civil society and subjects of modern government. It is, instead, the bond of the humans who count and matter, the humans of consequence: ‘we the white people’, in Millss' telling observation (1997, 30).

Sufferings and calamities that humans have encountered in the world have not come along expected and linear paths. The religious and racially defined human inequalities that eventually became political and economic inequalities led to a worldwide human struggle for power and domination. What Hannah Arendt (1968) called ‘the origins of totalitarianism’ privileged domination and hegemony in absolutist terms. Violent and absolutist forms of power and the appetite for domination produced both the Nazism that led to the Holocaust – the mass persecution and slaughter of Jews and others in Hitlers' Germany – and the Zionism that has seen Israel develop policies of apartheid enacted against Palestinians. The victims of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, within a few decades of the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, had morphed into the oppressors and managers of the debility (Puar 2017) of the Arabs and Muslims in Palestine, in a historical and political paradox that Mamdani (2001) has described as the scenario in which victims of power and domination systematically become oppressors and killers of others. There are, it seems, no permanent oppressors and permanent oppressed. Frantz Fanon (1963) noted how the ambition of the oppressed, the colonised and dominated may become the spirited drive to be an oppressor and a coloniser. Liberation movements of the Global South, after the decolonisation of their countries, became the new colonisers and oppressors of the people. The difference between a Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and an Ian Smith in Rhodesia became a difference of skin colour only, because of the way in which the supposed liberator reproduced the uses of power of the coloniser. At its most successful and powerful, coloniality, as an assault on the human, reproduces itself through the victims and turns them into its practitioners, defenders and multipliers.

The crooked, unstable and uncertain line of persecution of the human can be concealed even under the many representations and discourses of decolonisation, the struggle for human rights and liberation. Much in the same ways that slavery, colonialism, apartheid and imperialism came enveloped in promises of civilisation, modernisation, development and democratisation, forms of human domination, violence and oppression may be dressed in the languages of human rights, decolonisation and liberation. The very vocabularies and grammars of the fight for human rights may conceal assaults and negations of human rights. Those that have claimed God and championship of the human have betrayed humanity to the extent that Carl Schmitt (1996, 3), himself a Nazi ideologue, could warn that ‘whoever speaks for the human wants to cheat’, by using a grand narrative and ideal to conceal criminal tendencies such as the love of power and tyranny. Many years after Schmitt wrote in 1932, the observation can be made that inside the very institutions and organisations that claim to represent the human and human rights, human beings are negated and violated. In spite of the bold Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (UN 1948), the human itself has not been universalised, and rights and freedoms have not been equally distributed. The historical paradox is that this declaration took place at a time when the rights of the colonised and of those who were to live under apartheid in Africa were still being trampled upon by these same champions of the rights of Man. This has compelled Walter Mignolo (2009, 7) to ask the question ‘who speaks for the human in human rights?’ Speaking from what is often constructed as the worlds' most mature democracy, the USA, Donald Trump frequently scares the world with expressions of bigotry towards and hate for those who have been produced as foreigners, refugees, migrants and blacks from Africa, a continent of countries that he has referred to as ‘shitholes’. The metaphor of shit signifies how the weakened are easily made abject, contemptible, waste matter.

White supremacism and heteropatriachy have contributed to a scramble for belonging to the human race that has excluded people on more grounds of difference than skin colour alone. Giorgio Agamben (2005, 26) describes a powerful ‘anthropological machine’ by means of which those in powerful and dominant social and political positions process, give and take humanness from others. It is a hierarchising social technology that distributes humanness by classifying and declassifying people according to markers such as race, culture, sexuality, religion, age, ability of body and even geographic location and origins. In her concept of the ‘Kyriarchy’, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (2001) has helpfully coined a word for the interacting, interlocking systems of domination and subordination that inform the modern world. As a pyramidal system, the Kyriarchy includes not only sexism, racism and heteronormativity, but also, among other things, militarism and anthropocentrism. The vaunted human has endangered the climate and sparked an ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of the human species, the animal kingdom, plant life, water and air. The trouble of the human is therefore not only an internal human ‘family’ matter, but also an external ecological crisis that has disturbed and provoked nature, making the world a dangerous place for the human and for other life forms.