The Epiphany of the Other 1
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 03.1
The eclipse of identity
Everything looks ready, from the perspective of human evolution, for our creative potential to wake up and realize something extraordinary in concurrence with the current crisis of western civilization. If humanity is to survive, our fate will be quite different from the one foretold in the golden age of modernity. On the surface, the entire geopolitical chess game is still in the hands of the western elite, that in the last centuries acquired the privilege of setting the world’s priorities and choose the most convenient agenda to follow. Even the World Wars were really only European wars. And yet there’s a growing feeling that the West — if it wants to overcome the mortal contradictions it carries within — must rethink its old self-centered paradigm and start, as hoped by Einstein, to act as a member of the human family, allowing the disintegration of its traditional identity to open up unexpected paths of development.
The sense of the modern crisis, writes Emmanuel Levinas, is
“the overcoming of the self that requires the epiphany of the Other”,
in other words it’s the re-emergence of all those alternative human forms that so far have been repressed and discarded as archaeological garbage.
At present, it’s almost like if a gap has formed between subject and object, between the mental schemes that still imply the hegemonic function of western civilization and the practical reality, that day by day forces us to pervert the universality of those values and use them as a cover for our governments’ imperialistic agendas. Bridging that gap requires the West to renovate its subjectivity, leaving it free to interact and mix with different human cultures that for too long have been silenced by the grand monologue of civilization and reduced to object of domination or scholarly research.
In 1961, at the beginning of the decolonization phase, Jean Paul Sartre would write, in his famous preface to Franz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth: “Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two billion inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives… The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite… After a short stay in the West they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers… From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ‘… thenon! … therhood!’ It was the golden age”. “What has happened then? It simply is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us”. “For we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out”.
The moral indignation that renders his pages so turgid compels Sartre to forecast hurried conclusions. The triumph of the Algerian revolution, with everything it meant to the French progressist intellectuals, made him think that the rooting out of the settler inside us was a process already underway everywhere in Europe. Thirty years later, we can contend that wasn’t the case. The settler keeps inhabiting the European subconscious, even if the whole western conscience is pervaded with symptoms of dissolution. To cause them, though, isn’t a moral crisis, but rather the emergence of major socio-economic challenges whose effect is akin to that suggested by Sartre. Let see those processes in detail.
Decline of modern myths
This last phase of civilization, the industrial age, was able to achieve and diffuse a new standard of life characterized by a staggering level of consumption and thus by an equally high entropic ratio.
The West today is a huge dissipating structure absorbing live energy from every corner of the planet only to return it degraded.
The dream of the industrial pioneers, to raise all the world population to civilized values and material abundance, revealed to be illusory and this realization brings fresh evidence to what stated by T. Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population:
“He who is born in this world without means of survival has no rights to be supported: in fact he is useless to this world. In the great dinner table of Nature there’s no place for him. Nature orders him to leave, and executes its order without delay”.
We are witness, after 200 years, that this ruthless execution is still happening. Only today we are not so sure, tablemates or victims, that to give and execute the order is really Nature any more.
We have entered, as such, in a profound contradiction: on one side, following the ethical assumption to which the same West educated us,
a way of life appears legitimate only if it can be virtually shared by everybody on Earth;
on the other,
it’s scientifically proven that our western way of life cannot be shared by everyone since the planet doesn’t hold enough energy resources.
The crowd of those excluded from the ‘banquet of the nations’ is pressing behind the closed door, and there’s who manages to sneak in the magnificent dining room, arousing irritation and dismay between the guests. The clear conscience is over for good, and opulence cannot last without crime. Western man knows today what its fathers didn’t know:
the freedom of the human peoples and the permanence of our current lifestyle cannot coexist.
But there’s another critical challenge emerging unexpectedly from the last current stages of the industrial era. More and more jobs that once required skilled human labor are now being performed by A.I. machines, and consequently the global need for workers is dropping steadily and could reach soon, according to some authoritative projections, a mere 20% of the human population. The technological advances in the fields of Nano-engineering and automation will compel mankind to rediscover and focus on the existential time, that share of everyone’s life that had been marginalized by the modern obsession for business.
The myth of homo faber is declining thanks to its own technological achievements,
leaving space for a lifestyle not very different from those preserved by the pre-modern cultures around the world.
That the essence of humankind would realize itself through labor was the dogma of the industrial civilization, and that dogma today is being falsified within its own practice.
Along this structural processes we must list another one, that involves directly the heart of the western culture: the failure of its effort to extend its particular collective memory to the whole of humanity. As we are going to see in detail, the final aim of the colonialist design consisted in eradicating the native memories of the subjugated populations and replacing it with the West’s historical narrative. The negroes of the French colonies would learn to repeat, in the schools established by the settlers: “Our forefathers, the Gaels..”, right as, according to the 1835 education plan launched in India by Sir Thomas Macaulay, in a matter of a few generations, the Indian people should have been distinguishable from the British only by the color of their skin. Exactly as it happened to Gandhi, who became in London a lawyer as sophisticated as an English dandy: for the brown color of his skin he was brutally kicked out of a train directed to Pretoria, in May 1893. In that moment he experienced his Damascus’ conversion; he chose to be Other, reclaiming his Hindu heritage and exhibiting it proudly to the British.
The rise of the submerged memories is by now a planetary phenomenon.
Even within that area where modern mythologies were developed, the human tribes breathe, as hills at the end of a glaciation, and each one of them claims, often with anachronistic naivete, to narrate itself its own story. The mythos, untied from the logos to which it had been strapped, returns to the ethnic multitudes along with a new urge to self-determination, right at the time when tribal identities have become obsolete and the space for life has become one to be shared by every human. Hence the present anthropological chaos, that smashes the false unification erected under the sign of Babel.
It’s not yet certain that this apocalyptic shattering of the old illusions is to have positive consequences for the future of mankind. For example, behind the fact that in Rome, next to Michelangelo’s dome (emblem of the catholic dream of theocratic unity), is going to tower a muslim minaret lies a disturbing ambiguity: is it really necessary that in the city of the future should coexist, one beside the other, the signs of the ancient segregations?
Couldn’t it have come the time foretold two thousand years back by a man from Nazareth and a woman from Samaria, the time when humanity will praise God not in the temples of Jerusalem or Garizim, but rather in spirit and truth?
It’s understandable that our memory, finally free from the old inhibitions, wishes now to recover and display one next to the other its many documents, it’s fair that everyone may see with its own eyes how many are the paths that humanity, united yet different, has traveled to reach this threshold.
But “maybe it came the time to inaugurate a new era and to become aware that ‘history’ – those last 6000 years of human existence with its relative ups and downs – has come to an end”.
At the dawn of the new era, beyond the critical afterthought on our past and the recovery of the treasures it can offer to our conscience, is there, I’m asking, the chance for a collective, creative effort able to give us new answers and face the new challenges together?
