A time of few certainties

As always, science and technology followed politics

4 DECEMBER 2024, BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

Both personally and collectively, the certainties of the present always carry with them the germ of future uncertainties. But there are times or times when the certainties are more pronounced and the uncertainties more remote, and times or times when the opposite occurs.

In what dialectic of certainties/uncertainties do contemporary societies find themselves? As always, History helps us to understand, but it does not prescribe anything for the simple reason that it is never repeated.

Certainties can be shaken by two types of uncertainties: ascending uncertainties and descending uncertainties. The first are the challenges that can be overcome with a little more of the same kind of effort that gave rise to certainties; Descending uncertainties are those that represent challenges that seem lost from the beginning. But the most important thing about classification is to know which class or social group has certainties and benefits from them, and which class or social group has uncertainties and what consequences they have.

At the beginning of the last century, the European bourgeoisie, which then proclaimed itself the protagonist of the only civilized world, was full of certainties. Scientific and technological advances were dizzying. On the technological front, the two sides of the North Atlantic (Europe and Europe-out-of-place) rivaled each other in the speed of inventions in the fields of aviation, motorized travel, radio, and film. In 1900, French trains were faster than English or German trains, at 94 kilometers per hour, 90 kilometers per hour, and 50 kilometers per hour, respectively. But the Americans surpassed them all: 107 kilometers per hour.

Scientific advances were equally exciting, although many of them resulted in new technologies. For example, in 1895, Wilhelm Rӧntgen discovered lightning with an immense penetration capacity. Since it was not known what they were, he called them X-rays. Discoveries (sometimes rediscoveries) of radioactivity, the atomic structure of matter, alpha and beta rays, the theory of electrons and the theory of relativity followed. The absolute space of classical mechanics gave way to the impact of time and velocity, the relationship between matter and electric charge, and the relationship between particles and fields. Rutherford described the atom as a miniature solar system and Niels Bohr attempted to synthesize atomic theory and quantum theory, an effort crowned in 1925 by Schrӧdinger and Heisenberg and with the concept of entropy.

For its part, mathematics, through George Cantor and his set theory, had entered a field that until then had been exclusive to theologians: infinity and the different types of infinity. But perhaps the most important certainty of the early twentieth century was that biology would transform humanity in unprecedented ways in the centuries to come. Biology united physics, chemistry, psychology, sociology, and even ethics and religion. The triumph of science extended to medicine and psychiatry. It was a world of certainties. There were uncertainties, but they were ascending, that is, challenges that could only be conquered with more effort.

But this is only part of the story. After all, World War I was looming. Two descending uncertainties (i.e., challenges difficult to conceive of as easy to overcome) lurked for the European bourgeoisie: the growing power of the working class as a social and political actor and the awakening of Asia, illustrated by the emergence of power in Japan, the "yellow peril" of the time.

The first was for the working class the first rising uncertainty in its history: the challenge that with a little more effort it could defeat the two pillars of bourgeois power: property and privilege.

The second downward uncertainty of the bourgeoisie would end up indirectly leading to war: the benign side of science and technology hid the dark side of power struggles, imperial rivalries, living space, war propaganda as an exercise in purification and progress, the desperate search for raw materials, the savage destruction of nature and its faithful guardians. Was war the logical result of previous progress? And if so, was the previous progress real or illusory? Were there alternatives? Why weren't they tried?

Today's certainties

Today's certainties are heirs to those of the last century, except that with the passage of time they are more fragile and are almost always on the verge of downward uncertainty. And the protagonists have also changed profoundly. Let's analyze the paradigmatic case.

Science and technology. Every society has the science it deserves. The conflicts and contradictions of society are always reflected in science. In the early 20th century, due in large part to the growing strength of the working class, the fundamental contradiction was between prosperity and productivity: maximizing full humanity or maximizing wealth. Prosperity aimed at the distribution of benefits among all humanity (even if humanity was confined to the North Atlantic). The distribution did not have to be equal, but it was significant enough to prevent "the rebellion of the masses". On the contrary, productivity was focused on the accumulation and concentration of wealth because, given the scarcity of resources, no one could get rich without causing the impoverishment of others.

The idea of prosperity dominated both economic theory and law. Far from having altruistic motives, the idea of prosperity was haunted by the fear of socialism. It theorized about "the moral obligation of the economy," the "social function of property," "the new natural law," "the morality of competition." Max Weber was anxious about the problem of objectivity in the face of the contradictions he had learned from Marx (without saying so). The boldest spoke of solidarism, economic democracy, free association, social protection legislation, integral socialism and imperialism. All this scientific creativity was intended to manage the emerging contradictions, but it had little impact on political decisions, which were increasingly dominated by the idea of progress as productivity and accumulation of wealth. As always, science and technology followed politics.

The certainties of scientific and technological progress are the same today, but the intellectual and political contradiction between prosperity and productivity has disappeared. To understand this disappearance, we must answer the question: where are the protagonists of the benefit of certainties and the protagonists of the uncertainties that they cause today?

One possible answer is that the two contradictory categories of the early twentieth century are now rooted deep within everyone's subjectivity. We are all bourgeois and we are all workers. We become a bourgeois-worker magma. We are paralyzed not knowing which identity to prefer. We are slaves to the few benefits that each identity provides us. Our indecision is the other side of the lack of alternatives: do we kill the bourgeois in us or do we kill the worker in us? The identitarianism that is now fashionable has some truth to it. It is a palliative for the disaster of major deprivation: prosperity with full humanity as opposed to productivity as an accumulation of wealth.

As long as the paralysis lasts, it is not possible to distinguish between utility, futility and harmfulness, either in scientific or technological progress (if there is any difference between the two). Hence the nature of the current uncertainties.

Current uncertainties

The uncertainties are descending for the vast majority of the bourgeois-workers' magma that the world (and not only the European one) has become. There are three uncertainties before which the bourgeois-worker magma looks with as much clairvoyance as impotence.

Will war come?

The specter of war looms inexorably. Magma does not think. The powerful machine of the ongoing war thinks so. In the words of the propagandists of this fatal machine, World War III will be far more devastating than the previous ones. Although this is known to all, there is no global peace movement, and anyone who sets out to organize one will be silenced or neutralized as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the magma is concerned with more pressing issues (hunger, unemployment, helplessness in the face of misfortune), or takes drugs with anxiolytics or antidepressants, or simply distracts itself with safaris to its own bestiality with the help of psychoanalysts who need to make a living.

Will democracy survive?

The bourgeois-workers' magma has forgotten for so long that neoliberal policy was a system of legalized corruption with the aim of transferring wealth from the poorest to the richest that it now appeals to the few politicians it deems honest without knowing that they only exist (when they exist) to legitimize the continuity of global systemic corruption. And he worries about the future of democracy, but votes for the extreme right that wants to eliminate it.

Will the human species become extinct?

This is the most radical downward uncertainty, given the period of ecological collapse we have already entered. And it is here that the bourgeois-worker magma most reveals its paralysis. After all, the greatest enemy of this strange reflexive species, which I have called bourgeois-worker magma, is itself when it refuses to reflect.

What to do?

Fortunately, not everyone is in this magma-world. Those who have managed or are managing to escape the magma are the protagonists of the growing uncertainties. They are the peoples, cultures, classes and groups that have suffered the most from modern capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal domination and that have been able to resist without renouncing the knowledge and ways of living together and being that their ancestors and comrades today have transmitted to them in their struggles and resistances. They learned Eurocentric science and technology, but they only took advantage of what was convenient for them and never stopped thinking that science, although valid knowledge, was not the only valid knowledge. On the basis of these ecologies of Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric knowledge, they resisted domination, discrimination, oblivion and even extermination. Taken together, they are what I call the epistemic global South. They are the South only because there is a North that has wanted to nortify them in order to mortify them better.

Are they enough for such a task? After all, it only took one person and one week to create the universe.

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