A momentum of humanity

Opening conference for the 2021-2022 academic year

Felwine Sarr

Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies

The idea of an “elevation of humanity” is a notion I borrow from Frantz Fanon. At the dawn of the decolonial period, Fanon urged the newly decolonised countries not to imitate Europe, but to be creative and raise humanity to another level.

This was a time of decolonisation, and the issues of political sovereignty and self-determination were of crucial importance to millions of human beings around the world. Taking humanity to another level was synonymous with freeing it from domination, racism, economic exploitation… but also with creativity in developing social, cultural, political and economic forms

What could “rising on a human level” mean today?

Over the past five centuries, Europe has played a decisive role in the evolution of the countries of Africa, Asia and the Americas (both North and South), as a hegemonic power, shaping to a greater or lesser extent the political, economic and cultural dynamics of these countries.

We could approach the question of current relations between the three continents by exploring the cultural potential of South-South relations, or/and the role that Europe continues to play, or China’s role as an emerging player in global dynamics. For me, the issues we face today are far more crucial. The challenge we face is to build a common world and inhabit our planet in a way that preserves life; to do this, a change in our imaginations, epistemologies and practices is necessary.

The present we live in is shaped by a multitude of dynamics that interact at different levels. We live in a world driven by internal, external, local and global dynamics: the globalisation of the neo-liberal economy, climate change, issues of human mobility, information and communication technologies. So it seems that the present we are living in, in various parts of this world, is in some ways strange. The crises and multiple dystopias we face on a global scale sometimes give us the impression that the world is a ship adrift.

Our postmodernity has become an era characterised by a future without promise – other than that of escaping the catastrophes it portends (ecological crises, growing insecurity, ethno-nationalism, racism, xenophobia, religious extremism, …). The only prospects that still seem viable are those of a technological future or a post-humanist era.

One of the major challenges facing humanity is the need to preserve the conditions of human life. Our hold (supported by technology) has become so strong, and the impact of human activities on the biotope so harmful, that it is not alarmist to consider that man, through some of his actions, is endangering the very idea of the future (futuricide). This one is now uncertain.

To rise on a human level, we must first confront the present and its challenges. Confronting the present means examining it in depth, shedding light on the mechanisms that shape the world as we live it today (economic, political, relational and global dynamics). It means making an effort to be lucid and clear, but also discovering the constructive potential of the present and putting it to work.

Human beings and societies must take ownership of their present and future and give them meaning. How can we invent a regime of historicity that promotes human flourishing without reviving the myth of progress? Is the concept of humanity still relevant? Our interaction with all beings is crucial, and the scope of humanity seems increasingly restrictive…

My talk will address some of these questions and suggest ways to reconnect, at a collective level, with the adventure of meaning.

Let me begin by describing a local situation taking place in Niodior, an island in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal. It’s a blessed place. Wild nature, fertile land, fish in the sea, beaches, coconuts, sunshine, no cars and no pollution on the islands. Since 2000, young boys from these islands have been convinced that the only way for them to make a success of their lives is to emigrate to Spain. They are fishermen (niominka), they know how to navigate the Atlantic Ocean and, most of the time, they arrive safely on the Spanish coast. They have left school, the millet fields and the football pitches behind them. In the village, the school population has fallen drastically year on year. The school is now 70% female. Out of a population of 8,500, 1,000 young boys have left the island over the last decade. No more hands to cultivate the fields, to fish, no more young boys to learn at the lycée. The economy and demography of the islands are in decline. These islands are considered rich because of their many resources (sea, fertile land, etc.) and people have been living fairly decently here for centuries. Globalisation, the standardisation of desires and lifestyles, a single imaginary of modernity, have convinced these young boys that the life they lead has no value. This is not a situation of poverty or insecurity. All this is played out mainly in the space of the imaginary.

The situation in Niodior is a metaphor for what can be seen in various places in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Millions of people have been made to understand in various ways that the life they lead has no value. They have been seduced by the desire for a way of life that over-exploits the planet’s resources and has a huge impact on the environment. I’m not talking here about the legitimate desire for security, freedom, well-being, discovery, travel and world experience that drives many people who migrate: but about the mimetic desire for a way of life that is considered modern, its power of attraction that pushes a significant proportion of African youth down the path of migration, with all the dangers we know about, and the fact that by doing so they leave behind spaces that they could energise with their work and creativity.

One of the main characteristics of the advent of Western modernity lay in the promise of a future marked by progress in all areas of social life. In this regime of historicity, the future was characterised by the promise of greater well-being. Despite undeniable progress in terms of public freedoms, technological advances and the modernisation of social life, the conviction that the course of human history is one of continuous progress has gradually collapsed. The crises and dystopias that have accompanied the reign of instrumental reason have finally shaken belief in a better future.

They have also led, in the West, to a conception of time characterised by an overvaluation of the present, which historian François Hartog describes as “presentism“.

Presentism consists in giving excessive importance to the temporal modality of the present, which relegates the past and the future to second place in the experience of the density of time. Postmodernity is characterised by an excess of presentism. After the failure of narratives that promised the advent of a new era (communism, socialism, etc.), a proclaimed end to all utopias seems to characterise our era.

The question before us is what utopia can be constructed or reactivated. And perhaps even more than utopias, it is undoubtedly a change of episteme, in the sense in which Foucault understands it, that is required, or a critical reflection on the episteme of modernity (reason, order and progress) and its consequences.

For the societies of the South (Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America), considered to be lagging behind the normal course of world history, this question of the present and the future is posed somewhat differently. They are constantly being offered promises of economic development, democracy and modernity to come, or to be won. Such retroactive teleology reduces them to mere societal mimicry and reinforces the myth of a linear course of history and progress.

For African nations, it is crucial to reflect on their destiny (their present and their future) – drawing on their mythological universes, their history, their cultural references and their symbolic resources. It is not a question of withdrawing into a singular identity or advocating an imaginary purity. History shows that the dynamics and temporalities of societies are linked to others at different scales: global, transnational, regional and local, all of which interpenetrate. We need to reinvent our world by drawing on existing dynamic cultural resources and drawing vital elements from them. No future can be built without a foundation. Every society (culture or civilisation) perpetuates a cultural matrix, while transforming it, as the world changes.

It is therefore impossible to envisage a single history for all human societies. We need to free ourselves from linear and progressive conceptions of history, and from a narrative that condemns all the other peoples of the world to follow the path of Euro-American societies or simply reproduce it. If culture is a modality of the production of being, then we must admit the multiplicity of collective modes of being and societal forms of life, the plurality of histories as well as the possibility of several worlds within the world (as Jérôme Baschet mentions)

For Africans, in order to face the present and meet its challenges, it is necessary to reinvent economic, political and social forms, and to give birth to a new imagined community. But while recognising the coexistence of a plurality of worlds and historical trajectories, our task is to inhabit the world and make it liveable for all peoples and all beings. This could be the main objective of a renewal of humanity

A new way of inhabiting the world consists in basing it on the establishment of quality relationships between nations, actors, individuals and nature. Changing the episteme based on a mechanistic order, which claims to be the master and owner of nature, as well as the regime of beliefs and categories, rooted in a mythological universe of domination, control and exploitation, is one of the most difficult tasks facing us in our time.

Changing representations of progress, redefining the values around which the technical order (the economy) is organised and anchoring them in social ends that we have collectively chosen, this is one of our main tasks.

I wish here to engage in a discussion with Gilroy based on his book *Black Atlantic*.

In *The Black Atlantic*, Gilroy asked whether modern rationality legitimised the servitudes of the slave system (which it had helped to put in place) or subverted them. If we observe the current predominance of instrumental reason and its pitfalls, it is not certain that modern reason has engaged in self-questioning and self-criticism

The Black Atlantic is a critical theory of modernity that aims to challenge a reified conception of identities. Gilroy shows that black cultural productions are transformed by experiences of exile and displacement. The Atlantic, as a maritime universe, is a space of circulation that is not reduced to the commodification of goods and bodies, but also refers to the movement of translation of ideas, cultural and political practices. In modern Europe, the notion of culture is based on a fundamentally racialised axiology. Gilroy critiques a cultural axiology that produces an image of (black) Others whose subtext is identity and nationality.

And this questioning of this work of cultural axiology requires the production of what he calls intermediate concepts (creolisation, diasporas, syncretism). These concepts make it possible to account for a movement or mobility that is not determined (produced) by a centralised pole. Monitoring the continuity of this axiology in our time and working towards its transformation is one of our collective tasks.

If we consider Europe not as a geographical entity, but as a symbolic entity, based on its own awareness of the role it plays in the world, it seems to me that Europe has not yet decided to profoundly modify its modes of relationship with the countries of the so-called Global South ; In particular, by consciously renouncing a position of hegemonic power and committing itself to building a common world. Extractivism, asymmetrical economic relations, autism and the militarisation of its borders are just a few examples of its contemporary way of relating to Others (mainly non-Europeans). Relations between Europe and the South are still marked by imbalances and asymmetries, even if we are living in a post-colonial period.

South-South relations have always existed in many areas, particularly in the cultural field. They could be deepened in many respects. The nations of the South have everything to gain by learning from each other’s experiences and, in so doing, broadening the range of solutions and resources on which to draw to meet their challenges…

I am interested in Gilroy’s thinking on the ethics of antiphony, which heralds and prefigures new social relations that are not structured by domination. One of our missions is to create new shared imaginaries.

We can think of the music archive as an archetype of Black Atlantic culture, a place for cultural encounters. We can highlight music, and the arts in general, as manifestations of the creolisation of cultures, which is absolutely true. Encounters between human groups, whatever the circumstances (violent or peaceful), most often enrich the spirit and soul of man in retrospect.

The point I am making is that as we examine the outcomes of these relationships and describe their complexity, we must continue to question the evolutionary nature of the relationship.

The notion of relationship is at the heart of the construction of life and society. This world we create is the fruit of multiple relationships that are articulated at different levels (nano, micro, macro), involve various actors and generate multiple interactions within a dynamic and open system. To be is above all to be in a relationship. Society, nations, the world, becoming a human being, are all the result of relationships.

We are going through a crisis of relationships. Most of the time, we don’t see relationships as a space for mutual fruitfulness, enrichment or fulfilment, but as a war zone, a battlefield where everyone seeks to appropriate, plunder and accumulate resources (material and symbolic). So-called international relations (economic, political and social) are based on the principle of war, conquest and the defence of private and exclusive interests.

A new way of understanding the world may be rooted in the creation of quality relationships, as a new paradigm. A successful civilisation is one that establishes quality relationships between its components. This could be a path of elevation for humanity. It is possible to build a relational economy that is a source of well-being for a greater number of people. This is already the case in nature, as well as in various areas of our social life where the cooperative process outweighs the competitive process and makes it possible to sustain life.

To move humanity forward, the utopia we can build or revive is that of considering the world as a space we share, in a spirit of co-ownership between beings. Building not just a human society on a global scale, but a society of beings that recognises all its members by broadening the notion of community to include foreigners, animal species, the plant world, ancestors, the Earth (Alma Mater); as well as those not yet born (idea of transgenerational responsibility, rights of future generations…). This broader notion of society requires us to rethink the notion of self, otherness, feelings and stories of belonging. To this end, we need to broaden the vision of politics and rethink the way we experience the world.

To achieve a qualitative civilisation that embraces all beings. Working towards a psychology that leads us to experience the world from a non-destructive perspective. To this end, we need to thoroughly renew our imaginary relationships with the beings and entities with which we live. Coexist with (living) nature, respecting its cycles and rhythms. To see nature not just as a resource that we exploit, but as the place that shelters us and gives us life, as well as an infinite library from which we can learn. From aeroplanes to submarines, many technological advances are the result of biomimicry: a precise and detailed observation of the mechanisms at work in nature. Our process of humanisation is unfinished; improving the quality of the relationships we forge is a next step that can be seen as a drive towards greater humanity…

The planet’s resources, as well as its cognitive and cultural capital, constitute a common good derived from the human experience as a whole. The simple fact of being human should enable us to access and benefit from this common heritage. The thinking behind the idea of a universal minimum income is based on this principle. Every human being should have access to resources that guarantee their dignity, simply by virtue of belonging to humanity.

We could envisage global management of issues related to the basic needs of life: education, health, food. It is technically possible. The latest wave of globalisation has given rise to transnational players who are already operating on a transnational scale, but mainly in the interests of the private sector. Many human activities, as well as the circulation of information, goods and services, are now deterritorialised. Health and climate risks, as well as most societal issues, are also transnational; yet we continue to consider and manage them within the framework of the nation state. The treatment of political and legal issues in our time is out of step with our reality.

We face a challenge in perspective and scale. How do we apprehend and analyse social dynamics at the right scale?

Every social, political, historical and economic order is supported and reproduced by an epistemological order. This governs our understanding of the world and subjectivities. It is essential to change the paradigms and epistemological order on which we base our behaviour. In order to imagine and build a different present and future.

It is possible to create a global citizenship that is additional to our national citizenship and that guarantees the fundamental rights of every human being. Migrants could benefit from this global citizenship. Humanity is both one and plural, and politics is the art of managing this plurality. Life can only flourish within the human community if it is recognised and accepted by it. recognition, and its corollaries benevolence and reciprocity, can be guaranteed by this global citizenship

To experience the world is to see oneself as belonging to a space that is larger than one’s ethnic group, nation, the continent where one was born, those with the same eye colour as oneself or the same level of wealth. It means fully immersing oneself in the histories and cultures of humanity, its geographies, taking on its many faces and becoming the custodian of the legacies of its plural cultures. To achieve this, we need to work on our language and get rid of the private appropriation of spaces, places and our common heritage that takes place in our everyday language. We need to produce a lexicon of the common world, in order to escape the fragmented version of the world we live in.

How do we deal with the violence of our world? Dreaming of a space free of conflict is undoubtedly an angelic vision of human relations. But we can, as humanity, improve the mechanisms for managing these conflicts. We generate too much unnecessary and unproductive violence in our social relations. This violence is linked to the large-scale production of conditions of human indignity; to our collective psyche, deeply structured by the idea of violent competition; to our conception of punitive, non-transitional justice; to the low value we place on the moral and physical integrity of others; to our disidentification with others; to an addiction to violence and the form of desensitisation it engenders; to its fermentation and effervescence in our everyday language. To distance ourselves from the various forms of violence, we need to understand its complex roots, to sterilise its soil (where possible…), but also to confront it firmly, when it dons the garb of destructive nihilism

Growing up on a human level also means asking: by my actions, what kind of world am I contributing to? Has my action reproduced conditions of injustice, domination and devastation, or has it helped to make this world more prosperous, open and liveable?

Human flourishing is also about meeting one of the ontological challenges we have associated with the notion of feeling human

The ontological challenges.

The ontological challenge relates to the desire of human beings (at least some of them) to escape the natural conditions of human life. The temptation to create and recreate themselves, and to transcend the limits of their biological condition, is becoming ever more pressing in the most technologically advanced part of the world. In short, a desire for the mutation of the species, towards a hybrid humanity, a biotechnical assembly serving as a support and a place from which to experience life: a Man-Machine as the embodied form of an augmented humanity

Technology thus passes from the status of a tool for mediating between matter and spirit to that of an eschatology. This accompanies the project of artificialising life, as well as the desire to escape its natural (biological) conditions and effect an ontological mutation.

This project of technological eschatology (augmented human, transhumanism) opens the way to potential new meanings of what it means to be human and alive. The ancient dreams of human immortality and omnipotence, as well as that of escaping from our vulnerable condition, are echoed here. This augmented human, by integrating prostheses into his body, would free himself from the constraints associated with the limits of the body and the brain. The possibilities of extending the body, of decorporation, as well as the broadening of its faculties of perception, will ensure that the body is no longer the only seat of human consciousness. The virtual will become one of the possible supports of existence and its deployment. For the defenders of the mutation of the human species, it is a question of deconditioning the human condition, by increasing and broadening our faculties of action, perception and knowledge.

This new configuration offers significant prospects for restorative and regenerative medicine, and is seen by proponents of transhumanism as a qualitative leap forward. A new way of being alive now consists of questioning our umbilical link with the rest of living things, or increasing our capacity to produce negentropy through the artificial.

We can ask ourselves: is this process of artificialising living conditions a necessity, or the expression of an existential and identity crisis that we are going through? Even more than who we are, the question is who do we want to become as a species? Should we preserve life as it has been given to us, or accelerate its mutations, paving the way for a new post-modern human condition? The enterprise of modifying living things, of genetically altering their organisms, including attempts on the human genome, is part of the latter logic.

But this desire to free ourselves from the natural (biological) conditions of human life comes up against a dead end. Our very survival depends on our biotope. The project to artificialise living conditions is, to date, unable to provide us with the resources necessary for our existence on Earth.

On 29 July 2021, humanity exhausted all the resources the Earth could produce in one year. From that day on, the ecological footprint exceeded the planet’s biocapacity for the year 2021. In order to continue feeding, transporting and heating ourselves until 2022, we are overexploiting ecosystems and their capacity to regenerate. Today, our consumption exceeds available resources by 70%, and we would need 1.7 planets to cover our needs. Our lives are therefore fundamentally linked to the resources we draw from this planet. We are not yet capable of doing without the resources of our biotope. To continue to destroy the living organism that shelters us is not only to commit ecocide, but also to prepare for futuricide.

A question arises: how do we link the augmented human to the enterprise of repairing the living, as well as to the project of restoring the links that founded us and nourish us? How do we articulate this imaginary mutation with a vision that is equal to the dizzying possibilities it offers, on the one hand; and avoid, on the other hand, that these, by their excess, precipitate us towards ruin, if no new wisdom comes to guide them.

The flourishing of humanity is also linked to the question of the meaning of life. The question of the meaning of life and the scale at which we envisage it also arises.

In a reflection on how to live a good life in a difficult world, Judith Butler points out that we cannot conceive of human bodies without recalling the environments, machines and complex systems of social interdependence on which they rest and all of which together constitute the conditions of possibility for their existence and survival. Satisfying the requirements that enable the body to subsist is a prerequisite for life, but to be liveable, life must be much more than mere survival. We need to go beyond the question of the survival of the body and its fundamental needs to look at the capacity to lead one’s life. Judith Butler points out that it is possible to survive without being able to live one’s life. This concern dovetails with those of Amartya Sen and Martha Nusbaum in their reflections on the capacities and possibility of leading a life that one has chosen and whose meaning and scale of values one has determined.

For Butler, thinking about a viable life is not about positing a single ideal of the good life, nor is it about discovering what being human is or ought to be, but about drawing the consequences of the fact that, as a human animal, our existence depends on both human and non-human support systems. We live within social organisations of life, biopolitical regimes that dispose of our lives, often neglecting them or sometimes attempting to deny them. We cannot survive without these social forms of life. It is also necessary to undertake a critique of biopolitics, understood as all the powers that organise our lives, particularly when these make them precarious.

The complex relationships that constitute bodily life should lead us not only to reflect on the human ideal, but also to confront this complex set of relationships without which we do not exist (Donna Haraway). My own life, my social life, extends further because it is articulated with those of other living beings. Leading a good life also means seeing our ontologies as relational.

There is therefore an urgent need to rethink the ethical and philosophical foundations, as well as the imaginary, of our relationship with living things. We need to understand and become aware of the fact that our condition (as living human beings) is intrinsically linked to that of living things, and to the interactions we have with them. To do this, we need to put ourselves back at the heart of living things and move away from a logic of destruction. Our ontology is fundamentally relational. We need to cooperate with communities of living beings by establishing mutual relationships with them, based on reciprocity, care and repair. Caring for and repairing living things is necessary for us, because by doing so we repair and preserve ourselves.

It’s about collectively freeing ourselves from the myth of our self-sufficiency as well as the fantasy of our ability to create ourselves. It’s about freeing ourselves from the desire to escape from the relationship of debt and dependence that life imposes on us, and from the idea that we are the ones who give life to ourselves. The arts and myths have largely explored the limits of this delusion of power and desire for absolute autonomy.

For a new ecology of links.

An instrumental relationship with nature, inherited from the mechanistic cosmology of Western modernity, has led us to overexploit the resources of the biotope and endanger the conditions for the reproduction of life on Earth. This relationship has its roots in a concept that places humanity at the centre of the living order, in a cosmology of separation and in the transformation of the rest of the living world into objects subjected, by instrumental reason, to our exclusive ends. Social, economic and environmental disarticulation is one of the major challenges of the contemporary world and, to remedy it, we need to answer the following questions:

How can we establish new relationships with the Earth, the living and the non-human?

How to develop economic models that meet the needs of existing communities while preserving life?

How can we redefine, repair and re-establish the social, political and connections between all living things that a negative link economy has severely damaged?

To meet the challenges posed by our technoscientific civilisation (disconnection, climate disruption, ongoing ecocide, risk of futuricide), we need to rethink and reinvent the cosmologies and cosmovisions that underpin and structure our relationship with living things, our place within this order, and the relationships we have with its various modalities. This leads us to envisage ontologies of links and cosmologies that produce forms of life that preserve the balance of the living, the quality of social cooperation and that of the links that enrich it.

The aim is to rethink the ethical and philosophical foundations as well as the imaginaries of our relationship with living beings, by reconstructing relational ontologies. In Africa, Latin America, the Amazon, Oceania and pre-modern Europe, human groups have inherited cosmologies and cosmovisions that established relationships between humans and non-humans based on the unity of the living. These cosmologies establish a continuum between what exists and make no clear distinction between humans, plants and animals. There is no clear separation between nature and culture (Descola). What’s more, reflective consciousness, intentionality, sociality and emotional life are not exclusive to humans. Collectives of humans, animals and plants share the attributes of mortality, social life, reciprocity and knowledge. Interactions with communities of living beings are certainly conceived under the sign of utility and necessity, but also of affinity, cooperation and interdependence. Because of the metamorphic capacity of living things, the boundaries between existing collectives are porous, as are their ontological categorisations.

In Yanomami cosmology, for example, animality and its discontinuities emerge from an original humanity that condensed the attributes of these two orders. What’s more, humans do not come from a previous animality, of which they would constitute the summit and of which they would be condemned to become the masters and possessors (Bruce Albert, Davi Kopenawa). This is the opposite of modern, Western naturalistic evolutionism. Humans humbly constitute only one of the many existing peoples who inhabit the vast world of the forest-land and form for each other a cosmopolitan and interlocutory landscape. In these cosmovisions, there is no denial of co-humanity. The hierarchies of the living postulated by Western mechanistic cosmology are overturned and thus imply other relationships.

These cosmologies postulate a link of continuity between individual and social bodies and ecosystems, which implies that damage to the environment affects social ties, and vice versa. Questions relating to social, political and environmental ties thus require to be thought through jointly; and these cosmologies constitute important imaginary, symbolic and political resources that make it possible to envisage a new relational ontology.

To conclude.

To be alive is also to give meaning. The question of preserving life and making it sustainable is just as important as that of the goals we set ourselves. What would we have done with this increased and preserved vitality? To what end? More than a teleology, we need to build a teleonomy that inscribes the adventure of life in chosen directions. What might these mean? Life is never limited to the categories we apply to it, nor to the fatalities to which we can assign it. It is an inexhaustible source of possibilities, because of the plasticity of reality. The long history of life can be seen as an infinite source of potential. Many forms of life and existence are possible. We only experience a particular modality of life, the fabric of which is more diverse. To stay alive by enriching life with meaning, but also by exploring other modalities that our biology allows us. But life is neither inexhaustible nor self-sufficient. Approach it with the ethics of the traveller who stops at a caravanserai and that of the host who makes the house more habitable than he found it.

Giving life all its vitality, sowing the seeds of life and growth in everything around us, sharing life, making it grow, spreading it, nourishing it, wearing out and disappearing, leaving the scene having always given more than we have received.