The Dangers of a Single Story — Part III
Breaking free from the epistemological trap of a Eurocentric understanding of the world
Conformist action is the routinized, reproductive, repetitive practice which reduces realism to what exists and just because it exists. ~ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide
I wrote about the dangers of being entrapped by a single monomyth in Part II of this series of articles. In Part I, I wrote about the failure of organizations to re-imagine a different future ensnared as they are by the current monomyth. By pushing a hegemonic narrative of Eurocentric and Western epistemology as a part of the global colonial and imperial project, the ‘one-world vision’ tried to diminish and demolish the heterogenous pluriversality of this planet. The diversity and messiness of life were sought to be controlled, explained away, or suppressed.
Uniformity, conformity, standardization, productization, and objectification were all highly desired matrices imposed for better control. Duality was the norm with Western knowledge system being the true one. This monomyth arose from a reductionist and linear mindset characterized by five denials: 1) denial of nature, 2) denial of any limits, 3) denial of other worldviews, epistemologies, and ontologies, 4) denial of the humanity of all, and 5) denial of our indelible interconnectedness with all of Life. This Eurocentric epistemology drew an abyssal line between the real and the non-existent.
The division is such that “the other side of the line” vanishes as reality becomes non-existent, and is indeed produced as non-existent. Non-existent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as non-existent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. ~Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Armed with this reductionist and blinkered worldview, linear logic with an emphasis on the ‘rational,’ and Newtonian science, Western hegemony strove to make their narrative appear as the universal truth delinked from any particular belief, value systems, or way of life. This hypothetical universality was then imposed on the rest of the planet eliminating other forms of knowing, being, doing, relating, and living. Therefore, it is important to understand that social justice and cognitive justice go hand-in-hand.
This deliberate ‘epistemicide,’ (a term coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos) has led to irreparable loss of knowledge through exclusion, silencing, and deliberate distortion and misrepresentation of all epistemologies — especially those of the Global South — that were in contradiction to the dominant myth being propagated. Under the garb of this monomyth lurked the abyssal line — and beyond that line lay the colonial territories. These colonial territories became the “source of resources” in the form of cheap and vulnerable labour, natural abundance, and captive markets. Along with epistemicide, the global South* faced another form of erasure by being rendered unheard, unseen, and unacknowledged expect as a resource base for the global North. The global capitalism thrives on this invisible force.
Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system’. The term epistemicide was coined by Santos (2014) and stems from the concept of epistemic or cognitive injustice, i.e., the failure to recognise different ways of knowing that do not conform to the dominant Western discourse. ~ What is epistemicide and why does it matter?
Life and ways of living in the world exceeds by far the Western understanding of the world. As long as we continue to see the world through the restricted and constricted lenses of only Western understanding and knowledge systems, we will continue to miss out on a vast amount of knowledge, ways of seeing, and living that have existed for thousands of years. Our planetary future and global civilizational trajectory lie in being able to sense and learn from an emergent future that is beyond the realms of Western, Eurocentric epistemologies and interests.
Now, to impose a single narrative on an essentially diverse and pluriversal planet requires the use of explicit and implicit force — from the might of the military to the wiles of the merchants and the missionaries. This monomyth was further dressed up in the garb of progress and development, and the bringing of enlightenment to the hapless savages residing in the far-flung corners of the globe. Thus, armed with misplaced righteousness and zeal as well as greed and lust for power, the white man sought to conquer the planet, categorize and objectify it, and turn everything into resources to be fed at the altar of the myth of economic growth and development.
This is being continued in the form of neo-colonialism by the form of hegemonic globalization in practice today. This deliberately mis-managed ‘globalization’ has sought to further the interests of the G7 — specifically of the financial and corporate sectors and the Special Interest Groups — at the expense of the planet and all sentient beings.
Armed with rules and regulations, policies and politicians, and enforced by bodies like the IMF and the World Bank, this globalization has wreaked havoc across the planet with its desire for endless growth, creation of phantom wealth by Wall Street at the cost of real planetary wellbeing, the Washington Consensus deliberately imposed on developing countries further plunging them into crises with its fetishes for liberalization and market fundamentalism. And it hasn’t worked.
Since 1980, the global economy has grown by 380%, but the number of people living in poverty on less than $5 (£3.20) a day has increased by more than 1.1 billion. That’s 17 times the population of Britain. So much for the trickle-down effect. ~Jason Hickel, Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries, 2015
After almost five centuries of this rampage, the planet is striking back — in the form of floods, fires and furies. The planetary collapse is no longer a future possibility; the most vulnerable are the most at-risk even as the delusional billionaires hide in their ivory towers and dream of colonizing some other planet having rendered this one uninhabitable. Climate crises is not only affecting the most vulnerable and marginalized, it is exacerbating the loss of languages already at risk of extinction.
“Many small linguistic communities are on islands and coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise.” … “The Pacific, including the Philippines, India and Indonesia, has a lot of linguistic diversity. Some languages only have a few hundred speakers,” says Anouschka Foltz, an associate professor in English Linguistics at the University of Graz, in Austria.
This is truly the time for a civilizational shakeup — where the monomyth running the show has passed its use-by date. Its obsolescence and irrelevance make it a danger; it’s time to re-imagine the civilizational narrative(s).
For the last five decades, there have been voices of warning — from Rachel Carson and Donnella Meadows to the Chipko movement (Hindi: chipko andolan, lit. ‘[tree] hugging movement’), a forest conservation movement in India originating in 1973 at the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand. Voices that contradicted the dominant narrative went unheeded. After ignoring decades of climate science and indigenous wisdom, we have arrived at the cusp of a planetary and civilizational collapse — lured by a narrative that objectifies every aspect of life and sees the planet as an endless source of free resources to be turned into GDP. This narrative glorifies turning a thriving, wondrous, and living planet into dead matter — all in the name of profit. Needless to say, supported by propaganda and political power, this narrative has been allowed to grow, take root, and flourish at the very cost of Life itself.
Decolonizing the imagination from the clutches of this monomyth requires countering the self-proclaimed superiority and universalization of Western cosmology. Pluriversality is aimed at shifting our beliefs and perspectives about the world. It is an entanglement of several cosmologies and epistemologies that coexist.
The Western universalism can cohabit the pluriverse of meaning as one of many cosmologies. In a regenerative world, the universal will necessarily always be pluriversal. Pluriverses and multiverses are thus always dialogical and pluri-logical. There is no single master plan of a global design; it is inevitably an interwoven and interlinked tapestry of worldviews and epistemologies that come together in service of Life. This is perhaps what Joanna Macy meant when she wrote about the Great Turning being a shift from the Industrial-Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Civilization.
To re-member and co-create the latter, it is absolutely essential to accept the decolonial vision of a pluriversal planet where the edges and the margins flow into the center. To be precise, there is no center. It is a vast network of living and thriving ebb and flow of intermingling and interconnected narratives and cosmologies shaping life. It is neither a dogma nor an ‘ism’. It fetishizes neither the market nor profit. It rises above the readymade labels of the old reductionist narrative and seeks to embrace all of life. It is neither precise nor perfect nor does it seek to be. It is a constant movement without clear boundaries and edges. The only aim of these interconnected narratives are to co-exist
The narratives are waiting in the edges. We can sense and hear them by widening our peripheral vision and staying still. These emerging narratives contradict the foundations of the old story — the intense separation, the infinite growth and the lust for unlimited control. These three characteristics formed an unholy nexus draining the planet of its lifeblood to keep this narrative of growth and development alive. Atomized individuals schooled from a very tender age to see others as enemies fighting for the same scarce resources — education, healthcare, jobs, homes, etc., were putty in the hands of the politicians. Thus, the narrative kept on feeding fear and despair in various forms keeping societies polarized, fragmented, and turbulent, always looking for a scapegoat — immigrants, refugees, minorities, homeless, vagrants… just anyone as long as the myth could be sustained.
The emerging narratives celebrate our indelible interconnectedness and interdependencies realizing that counter-hegemonic globalization demand community, cooperation, and co-creation. It consists of the vast set of networks, initiatives, organizations, and movements that fight against the economic, social, political, and cultural exclusion generated by the most recent incarnation of global capitalism, known as neoliberal globalization (Santos, 2006b, 2006c).
It is evident that the current narrative no longer helps to make sense of a crumbling, fragmented, and polarized world. Primarily because of its failure to see and sense the world through lenses other than through its rational, scientific, and linear apparatuses. The narrative currently expounded is more interested in knowing about and explaining rather than knowing with, understanding, facilitating, sharing and walking alongside. Hence, its monumental failure as evinced by a planet near collapse in every sense of the term.
Oral, tribal, indigenous forms of knowing and relating have been relegated to the other side of the abyssal line. “On the other side of the line, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific enquiry. … The other side of the line comprises a vast set of discarded experiences, made invisible both as agencies and as agents, and with no fixed territorial location.” ~Beyond Abyssal Thinking.
Post-abyssal thinking can thus be summarized as learning from the South through an epistemology of the South. It confronts the monoculture of modern science with the ecology of knowledges. It is an ecology because it is based on the recognition of the plurality of heterogeneous knowledges (one of them being modern science) and on the sustained and dynamic interconnections between them without compromising their autonomy. The ecology of knowledges is founded on the idea that knowledge is inter-knowledge.
Imagine the richness of possibilities when the voices arising from beyond the margins, from this side of the abyssal line — the voices of the indigenous peoples, the tribals, the adivasis whose knowledge systems have never made it to the canonical order. They have been facing systemic and systematic epistemicide* where their ways of knowing, learning, being, and doing and have not only been suppressed but rendered invisible by complete removal from all references.
It is a coming together and a falling apart simultaneously. It embodies and emulates life and not the metaphor of the machine that so characterized the old story. It asks of us only one thing, that we go ‘beyond ourselves’ to become who we truly are. The old narrative seeks to box us, label us, restrain and constrain us. It abhors imagination because in imagination lies the seeds of new possible futures. Hence, it is all the more critical that we break free of the entrapment of the old narrative and collectively reimagine our futures.
Just Beyond Yourself
Just beyond
yourself.
It’s where
you need
to be.
Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.
There is a road
always beckoning.
When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.
Note:
Global South is not a geographical location but a metaphorical identity that enfolds the unseen and the unheard, the disowned and the disavowed, the delegitimized, invisibilized, and demonized billions. Global South exists in the peripheries, ghettoes, slums, and margins everywhere. They exist in the shape of refugees, migrants, the homeless, the uprooted, the vagrants. They also exist in their own homelands — they are those whose land has been expropriated in the name of progress and development. They are the tribals, the adivasis, the indigenous people. They are the keepers of the wild and stewards of vanishing languages.
Website: Pluriversal Planet
LinkedIn: Sahana Chattopadhyay — Scribe to an emergent era
Linktree: Sahana2802
