Chronicle Editor
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has been presented by its celebrants as a moment of arrival and achievement. Cautious about this have been those scholars of the Global South that have understood that all industrial revolutions of previous eras have come with a darker and more colonial side to them. For instance, the amazing invention of the steam engine was connected to the siphoning of raw materials from the colonies to the metropole, even as it was a formidable human achievement. There are general observations such as that while engineering and physical science produced great machines, they also produced guns, bombs and weapons of mass destruction that, otherwise, should not have been found in a modern and civilised epoch that is the claim to fame of the Euro-American establishment that has dominated the present world. What decolonial scholars name the “underside of modernity” or the “darker side” of modernity is exactly those parts and sides of the modern world that became colonial, imperial and violent.
There are sides to every technical and industrial invention. Technological inventions may not be evil in their essence, it only depends in whose hands they are and for what purpose they are deployed. It is a dramatic but telling illustration that the same guns that were used to consolidate the conquest of the natives became the same guns that were used to fight for liberation in the Global South. At the end of the day, then, a gun is as good and as bad as in whose hands it is and what it is being used for, conquest or liberation. The war in Ukraine has shown us how technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution can be deployed for the destruction of human bodies, infrastructure, and depositing toxins into the air, the land and water in what contributes to the rapid pollution and destruction of the ecosphere. It is a stubborn paradox therefore, that countries that have claimed championship of modernity, civilisation, democracy, peace and advancement are presently fuelling the fires of war. We all remember well that one of the justifications of colonialism by the colonisers was that they intended, in the name of God, to bring peace to the warring tribes of Africa that were finishing each other with spears, arrows, and other primitive weapons. It was the “white man’s burden” to protect “African barbarians” from each other by imposing peace, civilisation and modernity on them. The military events in Ukraine, presently, may convince an African that the Euro-American establishment probably needs to have peace imposed upon it for the good of humanity. Indeed, the war and the rate at which human beings are being killed with monstrous weapons and buildings being demolished suggests some barbarism in high places.
Philosophers and prophets in the world system
Laughing at how wrong Francis Fukuyama was when he “prophesied” the global victory of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and Euro-American rule when the Soviet Union collapsed is now an intellectual occupation in some circles. What was called the “end of history” became the “end of Fukuyama” as Edward Said joked in one lecture. Fukuyama, a self-proclaimed neoconservative Americanist screamed from on top of the highest roof that ideological differences and conflicts had come to an end in a world that was all going to be Western, Eurocentric, and American-centric in perpetuity. A paradise had arrived. History as we all by now know did not only put Fukuyama and his thesis on trial but also crucified him. Neo-conservative triumphalism was proven wrong by history and stopped in its tracks.
It might the occupational hazard of the intellectuals, especially public intellectuals, that one day they may prophesy or philosophise in the wrong direction and be put on trial and be crucified. There was a going joke in journalism and media schools that the mistakes of lawyers in court go to jail as prisoners, those of doctors in hospitals go to the cemetery as dead bodies and those of journalists and scholars get published for all to see in books, periodicals, journals and newspapers. As a scholar Fukuyama had his mistake published for all of us to see.
Not only Fukuyama has suffered exposition as wrong. Not only the neo-cons get crucified on the cross of publicity. Even public intellectuals whose vocation is social justice get beguiled by history and make wrongful claims. Last week I stumbled on a little book by one of my favourite Italian philosophers and theorists, the inimitable Umberto Eco, titled: Five Moral Pieces (2001). In one of the five essays, Reflections on War, Eco makes the observation that in the modern world, a globalised world, war has become impossible. In our times, Eco opines, “There is a more radical way of thinking about war: In merely formal terms, by reflecting on conditions of possibility,” because “the conclusion being that you cannot make war because the existence of a society based on instant information, rapid transport, and continuous intercontinental migration, allied to the nature of the new technologies of war, has made war impossible and irrational.” While Fukuyama clearly spoke out of Euro-American triumphalism, Umberto speaks from the aspiration and optimism about world peace and social justice. He was tempted to believe that globalisation and technologisation, modernisation, would make the world a peaceful place where war was unnecessary, irrational and impossible. What we can see is that both some of the best celebrants of Euro-American modernity and leading critiques of Empire have been wrong about the present world. Fukuyama on the right and Umberto on the left find themselves in one basket as having misread modernity.
Darkness, hate, war and blood
We might after all have expected too much, like Eco, that a modernity that produced slavery, colonialism and imperialism would abolish war. The barbarism of modernity and evil of Empire can be read and understood from monstrous weapons, the sacrificing of soldiers, destruction of buildings, pollution of land, water, air and the entire ecosphere. Here is a vaunted modern humanity eating itself up with monstrous violence and neglecting dialogue and communication that are supposed to be the tools of reason and rationality. There is real trouble in paradise here. One wonders if the Fourth Industrial Revolution will not be the last revolution that ate the revolutionaries and swallowed itself, ultimately.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contact: [email protected].
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