Chronicle Editor
Cetshwayo Mabhena
The daily activities of human beings have immense ethical and ecological consequences that we do not immediately take account of. The Dutch philosopher, Floris Van Den Berg, for instance, has taken it for a vocation to remind humanity of the ethical and ecological consequences of some otherwise normal and easy daily activities of men and women.
Things like driving cars, eating meat, flying to holiday destinations, wearing cotton shirts, eating strawberries, acquiring hardwood furniture, eating fish and using plastic bags are highlighted by Berg as otherwise ordinary activities that are loaded with catastrophic ethical ecological consequences. Human habits and lifestyles, some of them simple and mundane, have massive effects on the lives of humans themselves, animals, plants and nature at large. Reading Berg’s book of 2013: Philosophy for a better world, leaves the reader with a gloomy impression that almost all human activities, habits and tendencies cannot really pass the strict ethical test.
Perhaps Socrates meant that when he opined that “an unexamined life is not worth living.” We human beings really do not have the philosophical or even scientific habit to examine the ecological and ethical consequences of what we do and how we live our short lives in the planet. In a good world we should all be examining our habits, tendencies and lifestyles to measure their ethical and ecological acceptability and correctness. In the Socratic scheme of things, therefore, we largely live unexamined lives that are philosophically and scientifically not worth living. For ages, the nerds, some philosophers and scientists, and some prophets of different kinds, have appointed themselves spokespersons for ethics and justice that remind humanity of the dangers of our daily habits, lifestyles and tendencies.
A political philosopher would add that economic and political tendencies and lifestyles of human beings have ethical and other consequences that have led to poverty, civil wars, genocides, holocausts and other catastrophes. It is thanks to unethical, unjust and evil human thoughts and activities that the world has been punctuated by colonialism, slavery, imperialism, wars of conquest, massacres and genocides.
The vocation of the philosopher
Floris Van Den Berg is clear that the job of philosophers is searching for blind spots in our knowledge, and to fashion new epistemological methods that can deliver new knowledges. It is the philosopher’s job to unmask ethical blind spots in our daily thoughts and activities, thus “philosophers are explorers in the realm of ideas.” Describing his philosophy that troubled Athens and led to his crucifixion Socrates claimed to be the gadfly that stings the lazy horse that society is to some enlightened awareness and activity. That is the philosopher as a teacher, an activist, a protester and a prophet of a kind.
Drinking from the works of liberal philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and Johns Stuart Mill, Berg dreams of a world where there is more happiness for most people and less suffering for all. Taking it beyond the anthropocene, that tendency of human beings to think only for themselves and ignore animals and plants, Berg fantasises of a day when animals, plants and other natural subjects and objects will enjoy rights, dignity and justice under the sun.
Reading from the Global South, that is Africa, Asia and Latin America, one may observe that nature has long been respected and honoured as a mother and even a spiritual entity that is sacred and venerable. It is enslavers, colonisers, imperialists and other conquerors from Europe that used capitalism and its extractivism to reduce nature to exploitable resources. Africans and other people of the Global South enjoyed much conviviality and symbiosis with nature before the conquerors came. The capitalist reduction of nature from a being to a resource is what has led to the greedy and evil exploitation of lands, trees, seas and the air. And nature has evidently angrily fought back with violent climate change, floods, earthquakes, landslides, heat and cold that are threatening to make the planet inhabitable for humans. No doubt, even these pandemics and pestilences, where micro-organisms have waged war on humanity may be connected to the way human beings have polluted and corrupted nature and its order of things.
Alert scientists and philosophers have found it to be their job to remind world powers of their complicity, through political and economic activities, in the destruction and disturbance of nature.
Decolonial philosophers and scientists, in the Global South and the Global North, have never tired of pointing out how slavery, colonialism, imperialism powered by the toxic ideologies of racism and capitalism have done much damage to humanity and the planet. Besides the ecological consequences of human behaviour that Berg highlights, decolonial philosophers point out the political and economic effects of conquest that have been unethical, unjust and evil. Coloniality defines exactly the way conquest and its resultant regimes of slavery, colonialism and imperialism still have unjust and unethical consequences that haunt humanity and the world today.
Re-evaluating values: examining our lives
Much like the scientists that conduct experiments to make new discoveries and inventions, philosophers conduct some “thought experiments” and abstractions to unmask new truths and wisdoms. Counter-intuition and questioning of norms are the true refuge of the philosopher. By taking the risk of thinking philosophers end up with observations, arguments and conclusions about life that were not thought of or imaginable before. It is in that way that philosophy has been understood to be the undying and untiring search for the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Decolonial philosophy goes further to demand that philosophy not only be the love of wisdom but also the courage of wisdom that seeks the true, the beautiful, the good and also the ethical and the just and powerful. Beauty and truth alone will not undo the evils of slavery, colonialism and imperialism that still haunt the Global South today.
In saying “dare think for yourself” and advocating for the “public use of reason” Immanuel Kant might have been asking for the examination of public life and the re-evaluation of human values for a better world that Berg and others are demanding today. While western philosophers of the Enlightenment celebrated the dawning of light and liberation from superstition and darkness, decolonial philosophers are questioning western and colonial enlightenment itself that led to the enslavement, colonisation and domination of the Global South by western empire builders, capitalist merchants and imperialist missionaries. If western enlightenment wanted human independence from darkness and superstition, decolonial enlightenment demands human liberation from coloniality and the darkness and bloodiness that have been caused by conquest and its regimes of knowledge, power and being.
Decoloniality and its philosophers are questioning both the questions and the answers of western philosophy that have been complicit in the crimes against humanity and the earth in shape of slavery, colonialism and imperialism.
Good Society and Good Life?
For centuries philosophers have fussed about a good life in a good society. Karl Marx, a philosopher himself, laughed about how philosophers have only described the world when the task is to change it. A good society that is not only described but has been positively changed has a political and economic order that is owned by the people. The rules of that society put human life and nature first in the scheme of things. The means that are used to make those rules are means that are respectful of truth, ethics and justice. A good society respects the past, values the present and yearns for better futures. The good society is opposed to the condition and experiences described by Leon Trotsky where “human beings are the manure on the fields of the future.” Truth, ethics, justice and liberation are the monumental foundations of a good society and the good life that it comes with.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
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