by Agustin Martin Rodriguez
When our history comes to the end of life as we know it, we have to begin to imagine life as it could be. But here we are and still we dream the dreams that brought us to the end of life as we know it.
We are at the end of the world defined by our colonizers. The dream of building a better world through conquest and consumption, mass production and massive waste creation, is coming to a point where it is getting almost impossible to deny that this path we are on is a dead end, and yet we insist on charting our course of national development by the markers of prosperity and development laid by Western rationalities.
Ever since our hearts and minds were conquered by the West, we have always marked our progress as a people by how we fare in comparison with them, more specifically the US. Ironically, in the last couple of decades, the more progressive among our leaders have began to figure out ways to benchmark ourselves among the more successful of our neighbors who were able to emulate the West and realize Western style development. We send out teachers to Singapore, for instance, to be able to learn how to teach our children to do math and science better. We send our scholars to Western nations to learn their ways of scholarship, scientific inquiry, and their skills. We mark our wisdom by how much we are accepted by their journals and their conferences.
This desire to learn from and become like the past colonial masters is very understandable. For the last 400 years, we were taught that those who insisted on living according to their indigenous wisdom and lifeways, those who wished to live the good life as defined by their native rationalities, were deprived of the ability to flourish as human beings. This is always the story of indigenous communities: a community flourishes in simplicity according to their traditional lifeways, an alien population comes to own their land and their resources in order to commodify these and bring them into the world economic order of continuous and growing consumption, and before they realize that they are poor, they have been alienated from the material ground of their human flourishing. The natives always try to avoid usurpation by the alien invaders by moving to the hinterlands but the ever expanding consumption machine follows them wherever they go until they are enlisted themselves into the alien system because the land and waters from which they drew life freely is no longer theirs to draw from. They can no longer draw life from the land because their ways are made useless in the new systems, and, even if they do not want to live according to what is imposed, they have to in order to simply live.
Having been recruited into the dominant economic and political system but not fully educated as effective or equal players in it, they are exploited by traders and entrepreneurs, industrialists and men of power who own the system as their tool for self propagation. These natives became the marginalized of our country. Our nation and all colonized nations with “low” levels of scientific and technological development, in short all nations colonized by the West that were not oriented toward western means of development and growth, suffer the same fate as indigenous people. As marginalized nations, we began with low levels of development and technology because our ethos was simply oriented towards different conceptions of a good human life. If we were inclined to build empires of consumption and conquest, I am sure our civilizations would have found their own way into building war machines and industries of mass production. But we didn’t, but neither did we have the chance to discover the flourishing of our inclinations because the Western ways were imposed upon us. So here we are, the pauper nations condemned to dream the western dreaming just to survive. The hopeful ones among us still believe that if we can learn this game well we will be able to win at it and become as progressive as the rich nations. However, I am not so optimistic about this because the game has already been at play for so long according to a paradigm of play that favors the exploiters and crushes the exploited that the game has to change in order for it to be fruitful for us. And so we have to learn to stop benchmarking by their standards and to begin to rethink the meaning of development for the good of our selves.
By benchmarking our civilizations with theirs, we dig ourselves deeper into perdition. Ever since the West involved us in their economic systems and their systems of trade, we have always had to pay for their excesses. We are poor in the not-genuinely-developing-world, or what they used to call the Third World and what they now ironically call the developing world, because they involved us in an economic system that was set up to serve their interests according to their needs. In this way, they sucked us into a vortex of exploitation which in many imaginative ways rendered us inutile to realize our preferred life ways. They barred us from living life what we knew to be a good life and forced us to buy into their dream of development so that they could draw on our resources to our detriment, and then sell us back their products to our perdition. But that’s really not the worst thing the West has done to the victims of their exploitation. The terrible truth about this whole story of exploitation is that the whole time it was flourishing, we were always at the losing side, and now that it is collapsing, we are going to have to pay for its excesses.
Our time is facing the end of life and the world as they have made it. Climate change and the end of the age of petroleum signal that. Our environment is changing and becoming less hospitable if not harsher. Many of our homes will be swallowed by the sea, our populations will be displaced and much diminished, and food and water will be harder to come by. Those who will pay most for these changes are those who were exploited by the system that brought these changes about, i.e. the global poor. Much of what is known as the global south will starve, drown, thirst, or freeze because their already hand to mouth resources will not allow them to prepare for and creatively meet the coming challenges. And so, having been unwittingly complicit in building this system that made our world more dangerous for us, we will suffer the consequences of this complicity without really having enjoyed whatever good it brought.
And yet, we still benchmark our progress and development on the systems of the West that brought us to where we are. We still insist on measuring our accomplishments against their accomplishments knowing that these accomplishments were founded on systems of valuation that allowed for the blind exploitation of this world that was so good to us. Why, I wonder, after all that this model of development and growth has done for us, do we not look for other benchmarks of genuine civilization? Or why have we not looked at our selves as a possible benchmark for their civilizations?
When our history comes to the end of life as we know it, we have to begin to imagine life as it could be. But here we are and still we dream the dreams that brought us to the end of life as we know it.
We are at the end of the world defined by our colonizers. The dream of building a better world through conquest and consumption, mass production and massive waste creation, is coming to a point where it is getting almost impossible to deny that this path we are on is a dead end, and yet we insist on charting our course of national development by the markers of prosperity and development laid by Western rationalities.
Ever since our hearts and minds were conquered by the West, we have always marked our progress as a people by how we fare in comparison with them, more specifically the US. Ironically, in the last couple of decades, the more progressive among our leaders have began to figure out ways to benchmark ourselves among the more successful of our neighbors who were able to emulate the West and realize Western style development. We send out teachers to Singapore, for instance, to be able to learn how to teach our children to do math and science better. We send our scholars to Western nations to learn their ways of scholarship, scientific inquiry, and their skills. We mark our wisdom by how much we are accepted by their journals and their conferences.
This desire to learn from and become like the past colonial masters is very understandable. For the last 400 years, we were taught that those who insisted on living according to their indigenous wisdom and lifeways, those who wished to live the good life as defined by their native rationalities, were deprived of the ability to flourish as human beings. This is always the story of indigenous communities: a community flourishes in simplicity according to their traditional lifeways, an alien population comes to own their land and their resources in order to commodify these and bring them into the world economic order of continuous and growing consumption, and before they realize that they are poor, they have been alienated from the material ground of their human flourishing. The natives always try to avoid usurpation by the alien invaders by moving to the hinterlands but the ever expanding consumption machine follows them wherever they go until they are enlisted themselves into the alien system because the land and waters from which they drew life freely is no longer theirs to draw from. They can no longer draw life from the land because their ways are made useless in the new systems, and, even if they do not want to live according to what is imposed, they have to in order to simply live.
Having been recruited into the dominant economic and political system but not fully educated as effective or equal players in it, they are exploited by traders and entrepreneurs, industrialists and men of power who own the system as their tool for self propagation. These natives became the marginalized of our country. Our nation and all colonized nations with “low” levels of scientific and technological development, in short all nations colonized by the West that were not oriented toward western means of development and growth, suffer the same fate as indigenous people. As marginalized nations, we began with low levels of development and technology because our ethos was simply oriented towards different conceptions of a good human life. If we were inclined to build empires of consumption and conquest, I am sure our civilizations would have found their own way into building war machines and industries of mass production. But we didn’t, but neither did we have the chance to discover the flourishing of our inclinations because the Western ways were imposed upon us. So here we are, the pauper nations condemned to dream the western dreaming just to survive. The hopeful ones among us still believe that if we can learn this game well we will be able to win at it and become as progressive as the rich nations. However, I am not so optimistic about this because the game has already been at play for so long according to a paradigm of play that favors the exploiters and crushes the exploited that the game has to change in order for it to be fruitful for us. And so we have to learn to stop benchmarking by their standards and to begin to rethink the meaning of development for the good of our selves.
By benchmarking our civilizations with theirs, we dig ourselves deeper into perdition. Ever since the West involved us in their economic systems and their systems of trade, we have always had to pay for their excesses. We are poor in the not-genuinely-developing-world, or what they used to call the Third World and what they now ironically call the developing world, because they involved us in an economic system that was set up to serve their interests according to their needs. In this way, they sucked us into a vortex of exploitation which in many imaginative ways rendered us inutile to realize our preferred life ways. They barred us from living life what we knew to be a good life and forced us to buy into their dream of development so that they could draw on our resources to our detriment, and then sell us back their products to our perdition. But that’s really not the worst thing the West has done to the victims of their exploitation. The terrible truth about this whole story of exploitation is that the whole time it was flourishing, we were always at the losing side, and now that it is collapsing, we are going to have to pay for its excesses.
Our time is facing the end of life and the world as they have made it. Climate change and the end of the age of petroleum signal that. Our environment is changing and becoming less hospitable if not harsher. Many of our homes will be swallowed by the sea, our populations will be displaced and much diminished, and food and water will be harder to come by. Those who will pay most for these changes are those who were exploited by the system that brought these changes about, i.e. the global poor. Much of what is known as the global south will starve, drown, thirst, or freeze because their already hand to mouth resources will not allow them to prepare for and creatively meet the coming challenges. And so, having been unwittingly complicit in building this system that made our world more dangerous for us, we will suffer the consequences of this complicity without really having enjoyed whatever good it brought.
And yet, we still benchmark our progress and development on the systems of the West that brought us to where we are. We still insist on measuring our accomplishments against their accomplishments knowing that these accomplishments were founded on systems of valuation that allowed for the blind exploitation of this world that was so good to us. Why, I wonder, after all that this model of development and growth has done for us, do we not look for other benchmarks of genuine civilization? Or why have we not looked at our selves as a possible benchmark for their civilizations?
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Brilliant! Well, the end of days is still a contention on a scientific front, but nonetheless I applaud the insight and heart with which this piece of reflection was crafted.
ReplyDeleteYes! It is time to rethink our society and live according to our own ideas of a good life.