By SAMUEL KILSZTAJN*
In the first half of the 20th century we believed in racial theories and Aryan supremacy; today we believe in the supremacy of Western thought. Anyone who does not think like a Westerner does not exist!
Rationalism can be considered the core of Western thought, in which “I think, therefore I am” took on its caricatured form. And rationalism became the foundation for the construction of the concepts of individuality, free will, freedom and democracy in Western thought, which claims to be universal.
In non-Western civilizations, on the other hand, the head is not severed, it is integrated into the body. I quote Gustav Jung's dialogue with the chief of the Taos Pueblo natives of New Mexico:
“Look,” said Ochwiay Biano, “how cruel white people look. They have thin lips, pointed noses, and their faces are furrowed with wrinkles and deformed. Their eyes have a fixed expression; they are always searching for something. What are they searching for? White people always want something, they are always restless, and they do not know rest. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them and we think they are crazy!”
I then asked him [Jung] why he thought all white people were crazy. He replied: “They say they think with their heads.”
– But of course! What do you think? – I asked in amazement.
“We thought here,” he said, indicating his heart.
Western rationalism uses abstraction, the decomposition of reality into universal (simple, decomposed) elements. In Sylvie and Bruno concluded, Lewis Carroll muses on the usefulness of “a map of a country to a scale of a mile by a mile!” In the same vein, Jorge Luis Borges, in his masterful short story of a single paragraph of 118 words and perfidious reference, On rigor in science, describes the fate of the useless “Map of the Empire, which was the size of the Empire and coincided precisely with it”.
However, rationalism has given rise to cognitive dissonance, which, ironically, is perhaps the best characterization of Western civilization. In Western thought, there are only individuals. However, within each individual there can also be inhabited by countless (dissonant) characters. The protagonists in Leo Tolstoy, after all their considerations, usually follow a course opposite to that of their deliberations.
I happen to have contact with Chinese thought because I am a therapist trained in herbal medicine and acupuncture. In my training, in order to be able to even minimally follow the classes, I had to hang my Western academic uniform at the entrance of the classroom, because there is a complete break in the paradigm between Western and Chinese thought. Western thought is based on the principle of causality (cause); and Chinese thought is based on the principle of chance (casual). Westerners do not rest until they find a good explanation for everything that passes through their hands. In medicine, when they do not find a feasible explanation, they immediately start using terms like syndrome, early, autoimmune, multiple, etc.
The Chinese, on the other hand, are content with observation, they bend over even the smallest, most insignificant and absurd detail, because they consider the organism to be a mysterious mosaic to be mapped. To my patients, I tell them that I do not believe in Chinese medicine, but that it works, it works.
Quantum physics and statistical physics are still far from contaminating Western thought. Meanwhile… rationalism drives us to justify all human behavior, the “justifiable” and the “unjustifiable,” for which we construct plausible narratives, verbiage. The European, with his rationalism, developed a cunning malice, which other credulous societies are unaware of. And, in the disputes over narratives, the European’s truth became his gift for deception. Words words words… You may be stepping on someone's neck while telling them you love them, “See, I'm telling you, I love you.”
You can burn at the stake those who refuse to bow to the One who turned the other cheek to those who struck him with the right; oppress and exterminate natives and aborigines to save your soul and theirs; set fire to the fleet of the ancient Chinese civilization arguing that you are defending free trade; invade Japan to modernize it. You can occupy the homes, villages, and cities of a native population, expel them from their land and build a heroic narrative while silencing the oppressed Palestinian people. You can promote a massacre in the Gaza Strip to defend Western civilization; after all, your army already has the name “defense” in its title, so there can be no doubt.
And because the Industrial Revolution led the Western world to dominate the planet, we believe that Western thought is not only universal, it is the ultimate expression of human thought. Anyone who does not think like a Westerner is subhuman. However, we must remember that the powerful German philosophy flourished in the same society as Nazism. In the first half of the 20th century, we believed in racial theories and Aryan supremacy; today we believe in the supremacy of Western thought. Anyone who does not think like a Westerner does not exist!
Western rationalism, in addition to giving rise to cognitive dissonance and narrative disputes, created, as a byproduct, or rather, as a waste product, libertarians, those who do not fit into the narrow confines of Western institutions, from the family to the state, including academic institutions. Everything must fit into institutions. For those who do not fit into ordinary institutions – the insane, the irreverent, the dissidents, the revolutionaries and the anarchists – specific institutions, asylums and prisons, were created.
Regarding anarchists, particularly before the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in the Soviet Union, anarchism was very significant worldwide. In the United States, the workers' movement, the left and the reds were not communists, they were anarchists. Anarchists were socialists, against any form of oppression, especially by the state; and antimilitarists by nature, against wars between nation states.
After the First World War, anarchists were severely repressed in all countries, including the Soviet Union. In 1919, the United States, fearing a worldwide revolution, deported its anarchist leaders, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were taken to Finland and escorted to the Russian border. American anarchists were evidently terrified of Bolshevik bureaucratic opportunism.
In the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the anarchist movement was crushed both by fascist forces, with direct intervention from Germany and Italy, and by communists supported by the Soviet Union, who considered the anarchists counter-revolutionaries. George Orwell reported on the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia. In Spain, George Orwell worked with the POUM, Workers' Party for Marxist Unification, with an anti-Stalinist orientation. The Soviet Union considered both anarchists and POUM militants to be counterrevolutionaries. Orwell was in the trenches of the POUM militia, facing the fascists; and in the trenches of Barcelona, facing the communists supported by the Soviet Union.
Finally, during the Cold War, capitalist states and Soviet communism took over the international scene, silencing the libertarian anarchist movement, which was driven into oblivion.
Socrates was condemned for corrupting the minds of the youth… and left peacefully for the unknown world. Baruch (Benedictus) de Spinoza, this anti-rationalist rationalist who used reason to transcend it, was heremized (excommunicated) from the Jewish religion and his work was included in the index of books prohibited by the Catholic Church. Michel Foucault explored the twists and turns of the universe of madness. And his controversial description of the 1978 Iranian uprising, against the modernization process promoted by the Shah's government, aligned with the West, scandalized the Western left.
In Tehran, he was surprised and reported on what he thought was the Iranians’ search for something like a political spirituality, an eschatological religious revolt. His critics interpreted his reports as if it were Michel Foucault himself (and not the Iranians) who was searching for a political spirituality, and then accused him of defending the paths that the Iranian revolution had actually taken.
Everything indicates that the current rise of the right in Western countries is a reaction to the crisis in the West, an agonizing attachment to its hegemony in check [https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/reacao/]. And Western thought, which claims to be universal, is doomed to have to confront the ancient forms of thought of Eastern cultures. What place do possible madmen, irreverent people, dissidents, revolutionaries and anarchists actually occupy in today's Eastern cultures? What place is reserved for libertarians in the future universal rearrangement?
* Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of From Scientific Socialism to Utopian Socialism [amz.run/7C8V].
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