In our growth-orîented
societies, Galbraith once said, everything is done as if St. Peter asks the
dead, upon meeting them in heaven just before sending them off either to hell
or to paradise, just this question: what have you done on earth to increase the
"gross national product"?
Indeed, the ideology
of "growth" implies more than just a culture - a downright religion.
Growth in the
quantitative sense, such as the one wrongly employed as a criterion of
development by practically all international bodies, consists of producing
increasingly more and faster, no matter what: the useful, the useless, the
harmful, even the deadly (like armaments).
If it is true that
our life, both individual and collective, has no other purpose, then it is
bereft of meaning. The culture of despair is thenceforth an intellectual
by-product of this conception of growth.
It is significant
that the highest suicide record for adolescents is held by the wealthiest
countries, the most "developed" ones: the United States and Sweden,
for example.
People die in the
Third World for lack of means, and in the western countries for lack of ends.
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WHAT IS THE
UNDERLYING CAUSE OF THIS SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY 0F THE WEST ?
Five centuries after
the so-called "Renaissance" began-meaning the simultaneous birth in
sixteenth century Europe of both capitalism and colonialism- we are in the
midst of the abandonment of faith
in absolute values; abandonment expressed:
- in the sciences
through positivism.
- in social life
through individualism.
a/ Positivism is the
complete denial of transcendence and absolute values. It is the reduction of
"reason's" role to a search for connections between phenomena by
means of facts and laws.
b/ Individualism is
founded on the same denial, the same reductions and the same pretensions. It is
the illusion according to which each individual is the center and measure of everything.
Within this vision we
find ourselves in a jungle where the will to power, the will to gratification,
the will to individual, group or national growth confront each other with ever
more powerful technical and scientific means.
The result: the
climax. And then, as Marx wrote, "something which no one had wanted."
A crisis, a war. A Europe not knowing what to do with its meats, the butter in its
immense
refrigerators; and a
Third World condemned to hunger.
Reason's task is to
pose and to resolve problems in ord…to allow men to create a future with a
human face.
Today it does not
play this role. Why?
Because what we’ve
taken the habit of calling "reason" is "positivistic"
reason. That is, infirm reason. Torn
away from its essential dimension, it no longer poses the question of ends, but
only that of means.
A human epic lasting millions
of years may founder today. We have for the first time in history the technical
means to destroy all life, if plenary reason cannot assign to them other ends.
Along this path
science degenerates into scientism, technique into technocracy, and politics
into machiave11ism.
Scientism is a form
of superstition or, rather, a tota1itarian fundamentalism founded on this
postulate, that “science” can
resolve all problems. Whatever it cannot measure,
experiment with or
predict, does not exist. This reductionist positivism excludes life's deepest
dimensions: love, artistic creation, faith.
Technocracy is that
form of sleepwalking which is technique for technique's sake, never posing the
question of ends. It is founded on this postulate, that all which is technically
possible is desirable and necessary. This "reason" engenders the
worst
unreason, including
nuclear arms and "star wars". It is a religion of means.
Machiavellism is the
animal aspect of a policy defined in terms of a technique for gaining access to
power, not a reflection over the proper ends of human community and the
subsequent
implementation of a means to achieve those ends.
The major problem
before us today is one of priorities, of ends, of values, of meaning; of
reflection not only over the possibility and the methods of the sciences and of
techniques, but above all over their goals. What objectives must scientific research
adopt in order to serve man's fulfilment rather than his destruction ?
Hence, the critique
of knowledge will gain real sense not only if it can bind science to wisdom,
but also wisdom to faith; for neither science in its search for causes, nor
wisdom in its search for ends, can arrive at the first cause or final end.
Faith begins where
reason ends. Not before. Not until full or plenary reason, searching at the
same time for causes and ends, has utilized all its powers.
In complete freedom,
this movement allows reason to become conscious of its limits and of its postulates.
Faith is hence no
longer what contradicts or restrains reason but, on the contrary, what prevents
it from becoming locked within itself through "self-sufficiency",
which militates
against
transcendence. Faith is reason with no bounds.
To exit both jungle
and "balance of terror," the only possibility of salvation for man
therefore is to recover-against this reigning positivism and individualism both
faith
in transcendence
(which is contrary to positivistic "selfsufficiency" ) and faith in
community (which is contrary to individualism).
The affirmation of:
 |
| En Iran en 1985 |
a/ transcendence is:
(1) The certainty
that God is one:
"...if there
were other gods beside God," says the Qur'an, "there would be
chaos." (21:22) And He has no common measure with any human reality.
(2) Our feeling of
dependence and "submission" to this One God and to His laws. This
submission to God alone relativizes all powers, all that one may have and all
that one may know.
(3) Faith in absolute
values transcending our moralisms and our logic. Abraham exemplified this faith
to the highest degree.
Only in this manner
can the polytheisms of the contemporary world be vanquished. Because our world,
not in its professions of faith but, in its most general practice, is
polytheist: it has posited money, nation, power, science, sex as absolute values.
The primary task is to fight these false gods which have surreptitious1y
entered in to inhabit our night.
(b) Community is the opposite of
individualism. Within the perspective of community everyone is conscious of
being personally responsible for all others.
Humanity is one
because God, its Creator, is One. All men have the same origin and are created
for the same end.
Recognizing
transcendence and community in the submission to the will of God is the common
denominator of all religions. In all of them the presence of God in man is faith’s first
certainty: my own center is not within myself but in the other and in God.
"You are
that," say the Vedas of India, whose sacred books teach the human
"me" to take cognizance of its identity with the soul of the world.
"God created man
in his own image," says the Jewish Torah.
"The Kingdom of
God is inside you," announces the Gospel.
"I breathed into
man of my Spirit," says God in the Qur'an.
Without this
certainty about the presence of God in man, of the transcendent dimension of
man, all community is condemned to disintegrate and to die.
This act of faith, on
the contrary, is the progenitor of all genuine community and all genuine
humanity:
If God is in me, who
can force chains upon me ?
If God is in you, I
love you because I discover in you his presence.
If God is in every
man, how can I accept the indignities and the injustices of the world ?
How can I fail to see
that every work in the service of all is an act of worship, and that he alone
is a man of faith who serves all beings ?
Having lost this
transcendent dimension of man, society can only disintegrate , whether
capitalist or socialist.
What we call peace is
no longer then anything but a "balance of terror," although
non-violence or peace does not consist only of the absence of war. It is above
all justice: that is, a social order which can create for every child, every
woman and every man, the economie, social, political and cultural conditions
which would allow him to fully develop all the human riches he carries within
him.
This is the goal.
How can we realize it
?
* * *
To all those who
would consider us as utopian, we may fearlessly respond thus: the worst utopia
today is the status quo.
For we haven't the
choice. Either we continue to act in much the same way as in the past -- and we
are heading for planetary suicide or else we reaffirm transcendence and
community, and
through this break with the past open a path to the future.
The great, historic stirrings
of the century have all expressed a fundamental reconsideration of the culture
of the West, of its positivism and of its individualism - be it the Chinese
cultural revolution or that of Iran.
It is significant
that all these awakenings have come from the non-western world, from Asia to
Africa to Latin America.
These great
awakenings in the Third World have been marked by a rejection of the cultural
ethnocentrism of the West and the form it has imposed on the Christian faith.
At the 1977 Conference
of Christian theologians of Black Africa, presided by Archbishop of Abidjan
Rev.Yago, Father Eboussi Boulega alluded to a "Copernican Revolution"
in African
theology. "Africa,
"he said, "has arrived at the novel idea of revolving around itself,
of being for itself."
Father Jean Marc Ela
recalled that the universalism of Christianity is no longer evident, inasmuch
as the Judeo-Mediterranean culture which has thus far carried it appears to be
a culture like other
cultures. . . Catholic is not synonymous with Roman."
This will to decolonize
faith and to relativize western culture in order to save the universal value of
Christianity is forcefully expressed in the book of a Jesuit from Cameroon, Father
Hegba, called « Emancipation
d'eglises sous tutelle” ("Emancipation
of Churches Under Guardianship").
"Christianity is
not a western religion but an oriental religion monopolized by the West, which
stamped the indelible seal of its philosophy, of its law, of its culture and
presented it henceforth in this manner to other peoples of the world. It is in
turn up to us to stamp our indelible seal onto this same religion, without
elevating any longer to the rank of divine revelation Aristotelian-Thomistic
philosophy, Germanic or Anglo-
Saxon Protestant
thought, or Gaulish, Greco-Roman, Lusitanian, Spanish, German ways and customs
"christianized" if not sacralized by Europe."
Father Ossana drew
certain conclusions from the declaration of Rev. Zoa, Bishop of Yaoundeh .
"We are the legitimate heirs of traditional African religion, "he
said, "The value of traditional African religion, which has prepared
African man, as much as any
other, to the advent
of Jesus Christ, may be likened to that of the Old Testament."
Within this
perspective, thanks to the relativization of rationalism of the Greco-Roman mold,
which has not ceased to impoverish itself since the Renaissance to the point of
positivism all the
while claiming to be alone possible, the theologies of hope and the theologies
of liberation are today recovering the message - always present- of Joachim of
Flora and Thomas Munzer, and allowing for a rethinking of Marxism itself.
Nothing is more
absurd, for instance, than to define Marxism as either economic or historical
determinism. Before such interpretations, Marx used to say: "If this is
Marxism, I, Marx, am not a Marxist."
If indeed determinism
is sovereign, if we are "puppets placed on stage by structures," what
is the purpose then of preaching revolution ? Revolution is possible only
insofar as man is capable of breaking away from his determinisms.
Transcendence, not determinism, is the postulate
necessary for all revolutionary thought.
In Latin America and
Africa this revival erupted after Medellin in 1968 with the development of
"base communities", as reflected in Don Fragoso's experience in Evangile et revolution sociale ("Gospel
and Social Révolution")
and the Liberation Theology of Father
Guttierez — born in the human soil of these communities in 1971; like the Jesus Christ Liberator of Father Boff in
1972 and The Spiral of Violence of
Dom Helder in 1970.
This movement of base
communities and liberation theology is exemplary, as much for its methodology
as for its critique, the prospects it opens for political and social creation, for faith or militant theology.
From the viewpoint of
method we are provided with an example of the enormous, and necessary, inversion of theological reflection. Instead
of claiming to deduce from the texts of the Gospel - or of the Qur'an — either
a "policy drawn from Holy Scripture" in the manner of Bossuet or a
"social doctrine", one proceeds through induction in order to decipher the meaning of that light which emanates
from God's will. Induction's point of
departure is the real
historical situation lived by those for whom being poor means being nothing. As
Jean Marc Ela of Cameroon says: "the damned of the earth force another
reading of the Gospel" - just as they do of the Qur'an.
This reading
"from below" renders more original, liberating the message of God by
reaching back beyond traditional readings "from above"- meaning those
of the powerful along with the traditions that give them comfort by attaching
them to a past more meant to be preserved than constructed.
This method has made
possible a new, critical perspective
on the world. For example, Don Helder Camara's denunication of the hypocrisy which regards as
"violent" revolutionary
violence, but feigns not to see the structural violence of injustices which engender
it in the first place, or the repressive
violence bent on stifling the struggle against the original violence.
In this
"Liberation Theology", Father Gustavo Guttierez links liberation, as
it were, to three inseparable levels: 1/political liberation, 2// the liberation of man in the course of history,
and 3//liberation from sin.
The very principle of
liberation is recapitulated in this manner by Don Fragoso in "Gospel and
Social Revolution." "The struggle for justice," he says,
"is also the struggle for the
Kingdom of God."
This indissoluble link
between man's liberation from all forms of oppression and exploitation and the
liberating call of the Kingdom of God is no longer today a matter of choice,
but of survival.
As strange as it may
appear to our so-called "realists", deaf and blind as they are to
reality, the future battle will be won in the minds and hearts of men.
Rebirth in every
single life - the true "renaissance" of our age - can only be the
fruit of this conversion to the creative life, this "rising" of a generation
of men resolved to
climb out of the
trough of a veiled obscurity of given "facts", as disgorged by the
sensible and "rational"; a generation of men no longer believing that
the real is reducible to the so-called "given facts" of the senses or
to immutable, technocratic reason, but resolved to live in poetry through the cooperative
life of the creative imagination. And this with respect to actions performed in
every sphere, anywhere from culture to politics, from the economy to faith.
But this is nothing
less than a declaration of war against the "computanthropoid". That
is, those who believe that thought is a function of the brain and who liken the
human brain to a computer, forgetting that what is proper for man is to pose ultimate
questions, above all those which pertain to "why" and to ends.
These late heirs of
the scientistic clericalism of the 19th century merely replaced
Laplace's mechanism with cybernetics.
The technocratic
computanthropoid who never queries about final ends places the powers of a
giant-those procured from the atom or through gene manipulation - in the
service of the
impulses of an animal
whose instincts have been perverted. The computanthropoid is the latest avatar
of pithecanthropine man.
The computanthropoid
is never as dangerous as when he talks about the future and when seeking to
tamper with it through education and the media.
It is important to
fight him so the twentieth century will not end in an apocalypse.
Prospecting is not
"predicting" a pre-existing future similar to America, which existed
before Christopher Columbus had arrived there. The future cannot be discovered,
but invented.
This means that the
object of prospecting is not to extrapolate from the present and the past in
order to describe "what will happen", without taking into account
both the creative initiatives of man and the unqualified future yet to emerge therefrom.
The object of prospection is to deploy in advance the possible consequences of
this or that decision. The essential problem is to avail ourselves
of the entire range of possible futures, depending on the nature of our
involvement.
This is the exact
opposite of positivistic "futurology" done in the manner of the
Hermann Kahns, Daniel Bells and Alvin Toffler. What I mean by positivistic is a
conception of the
world without man,
one which is content with (largely technologica1) extrapolations on the basis
of the present and the past without distancing itself with respect to the established
order. It thus postulates, without saying as much, the perpetuity of the
dominant system. It "foresees" no changes save in terms of
quantitative growth within the current model. This false, non-human future is
but the perpetuation of the present on a much larger scale.
Such a positivistic
"futurology" in fact leads to preventive war against the future. It
is a project for the coIonialization of the future by the present and the past,
aiming to perpetuate the present system merely by helping it avoid the most
awesome consequences of its gigantism. It does this without imagining for one
instant that men may decide to break away in radical fashion from the drift
toward planetary suicide.
From this same dehumanized
conception of man have arisen public surveys. They are not a means of informing
public opinion, but of manipulating it.
This same deleterious
postulate inspires the subhuman "pedagogy" where the test (christened
"knowledge control") consists of the student marking off from among
several choices the "correct" answer to a problem. By its very
nature, this system precludes both offering a different formulation of the question
and providing an original response to it. It is really "forgetting"
what is specifically human in man: to pose new questions and to supply original
answers.
When used to dull
people's intelligence, television takes over by conceiving along the same
principles its own "game" and by posing an absurd question: "Can
the computer replace man ?"
Of course. Every time
man's questions must be answered. But man alone poses the human questions as to
the "why", the goal and the meaning.
This is why
"strategists", from the Vietnam war to the revolution in Iran, have
erred invariably in all their computer prognostications. "Faith"
cannot be fed into electronic
circuitry !
This acknowledgement
of the role of faith in politics and in the construction of the future in no
way implies a kind of coalition of the world against humanism which, rejecting
all religion, proclaims itself atheistic. What is important is not what a man
says of his faith but what that faith makes of him.
We can therefore
respond to the challenge of our times and build together:
- new models of growth: no longer chaotic
economic growth, but the growth of man and of the spirit which God has breathed
into him;
- new cultural models bringing culture
closer to its real mission: that is, reflecting on the meaning and ends of life
and inventing a future with a human face;
- new models of
communication where the press, radio and television no longer give priority to the sensational or criminal, to
violence and sex as if these perversions and
their exploitation constitute the essential chacacteristics
of man today. Playing not a
disintegrative role in relation to man but, on the contrary,
one which favours his fulfilment, these media would disseminate information
with the aim of stimulating the creative effort of everyone - that is, anything
in the process of being born or developed, all which rarely appears in our
newspapers and on our screens, but which lives among millions of men and women
who are building real history through sacrifice, love, imagination, search and
beauty.
So we shall be pillars in the creation of a new world
order built on new foundations, no longer those of positivism, individualism or
despair, but transcendence and community.
Roger Garaudy
Welt und Wirklichkeit im Wandel
der Zeit
Hannover / Hanovre
21 - 27 Mai 1988
Meaning of Life
and Dialogue of Culture
Roger Garaudy
Copyright: Stiftung Niedersachsen
Redemanuskript. Es gilt das gesprochene Wort.
This
text is available in French language in a long version (PDF) :
« PDF FILE SENS DE LA VIE ET DIALOGUE DES CULTURES ». Ask it to me with the contact form (left column of the
blog).
Ce
texte peut vous être envoyé sur demande dans une version un peu plus longue et
en français. Utilisez le formulaire de contact en précisant : « FICHIER
PDF SENS DE LA VIE ET DIALOGUE DES CULTURES ».
