A dinosaur on the shore

There are some persistent collective ideas in the history of humankind. Many of them are built-in with different myths; whose, in turn, are shaped by a variety of archetypes that according with his most prominent analyst, Carl Gustav Jung, are the imprints of human's ancient formation of mind. One, stubborn, die-hard and pervasive is the God hypothesis. Of course, ancient ages shaped to posterity the key elements of God's myth with a battery of elements such as his metaphysical character, his necessity and his will; the affirmation of a willingness universal power. Modernity changes this perspective and either denied or modified the conception of God. There is either no God at all, or there is a special form of him, radically diverse from the ancient one. The last alternative begins with an important shift: from “he” to “it”. Clearly, speaking of God is not speaking of some person. On the contrary, is to speak of something essentially different from an individual person. Nowadays, under the sciences’' influence there is a widespread comprehension of God as a universal principle of order, a fluctuation between order and chaos, the essence of the Nature’s framework through time.

In these terms emerges the Theory of Evolution with its several ramifications. Such theory tells the epic of the natural world into ages with its unthinkable extended time, its paradoxical biological formations that swings between the hazard and the necessity of the existence of each being alive in the world’s history. As The Theory of Evolution establishes that “Evolution rhymes, patterns recur”, (as Richard Dawkins, says in his work The Ancestor’s Tale, no matter how carefully he takes this assertion), it informs a mythical history of Being. Let’s be clear: evolution is a myth because it’s a way to shape the world and our experience of it in terms of full sense, as polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski established in his classic essay The Presence of Myth, and this involves a set of assumptions that are beyond empirical scope and verification, spawning in consequence a form of metaphysics that shapes the entire universe of the theory. Of course, in this time we don’t have a better way to explain the cosmic and natural development of our planet and its creatures. Even more: that is the only way to explain it.

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

That’s why it’s not rare that in a brilliant contemporary theogony such as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, there is an affirmation of this modern conception of God. In the bombastic and beautiful sequence of Genesis, among the formation of Milky Way, the start of the Sun and the birth of Earth itself, we see the powerful image of a wounded dinosaur on the shore of a primitive beach. With its hyperrealistic craftsmanship, Malick’s dinosaur makes clear the film's point of view on God: the great chain of Being full of life, interactions, dynamics and movement across time and space but without intentional purpose. A pervasive but blind God. Sometimes this vision is called “pantheism”.

On the foundations of the ancient Earth belief, scientific humankind has built a large and prolific system of theories and securities about the meaning of life. And there’s nothing better to face the world as it shows us: as an endless symphony of objects and the relationships between them. It’s proper and fair that we accept all this as a precise description of reality, a matter of fact about us and our planet. But we must have in mind its mythical core in the sense of American philosopher W.V.O. Quine: 

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries −not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. (The quote is taken from his essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.)

Dinosaurs, like Homer gods, are the substance of our metaphysics, the way we set up our scientific image of God, no matter how aporetic this may sound. That’s the game of reason across the ages, the way we make a stand for our actions and our way of living in the planet; the way, in sum, that we create our universe, our reality and our gods.

El espacio vacío de la política contemporánea

La política contemporánea es el arte de  la gestión de la entropía. Es decir, la administración de las estructuras estatales en constante desgaste. El manejo del Estado en medio de una crisis global de sus cimientos. Puestos a  prueba de manera brutal por una serie de factores acuciantes, lo mismo estandarizados que anómalos, los fundamentos del Estado nación contemporáneo viven hoy un periodo de crisis a nivel mundial, debido a tres dinámicas perniciosas principales: 1) pérdida de legitimidad ciudadana ante crecientes incapacidades funcionales (inseguridad, falta de servicios, desempleo, etc.); 2) descapitalización como consecuencia de 1), creando un círculo vicioso; 3) incapacidad administrativa y política para solventar 1) y 2).

En este contexto, el problema más vistoso sin duda es el tercero. En palabras del filósofo alemán Peter Sloterdijk, “...el hecho de que los políticos en activo estén tan raramente a la altura de los nuevos retos −intelectualmente no lo están casi nunca, moralmente a veces, pragmáticamente más mal que bien− produce en parte un descontento masivo, y cada vez más agudizado, con la clase política... Esta impresión ya sería lo suficientemente crítica, pero además ocurre que a los políticos, y cada vez con mayor frecuencia, se les sorprende -en Buenos Aires y en Roma tanto como en Bonn, Múnich o Kiel- en fraude, abuso de poder e imprecisiones” (véase su ensayo En el mismo barco, pp., 70-71).

Frivolidad, corrupción, incapacidad en Roma como en Toluca

Esta cuestión de hecho, que es ya parte del modo de vida de nuestra civilización, en la que los representantes del pueblo forman camarillas cínicas que simulan velar por el bien común, pero que en realidad únicamente persiguen fines personales, la mayoría de las veces mezquinos, como el enriquecimiento ilícito, la posesión de bienes y los líos de faldas, es particularmente grave en los países del Tercer Mundo, puesto que en ellos la vida institucional es débil, la legalidad es incipiente y la rendición de cuentas prácticamente inexistente. Por ello prevalece la amplia sensación pública de que “todos los partidos son iguales” y de que “no hay a cuál irle” cuando se presentan los candidatos de los diversos niveles para ser votados por la ciudadanía.

Esto es básicamente cierto y existe ahí un nudo gordiano social que parece irresoluble. Parece que hay un destino ineludible en la alta ineficiencia de la clase política profesional. Sobre esto se han dilucidado diversas causas endógenas, como las redes de complicidades, los montos millonarios desregulados que maneja el sistema político, la insuficiencia institucional y el deficiente ordenamiento constitucional del ejercicio público. Por no hablar, claro está, de la avasallante presencia de la economía criminal y su poder de penetración y cooptación de los políticos. Todo lo antedicho es una realidad llana y simple cuya resolución no se vislumbra en el horizonte. No obstante, Sloterdijk va más más allá. Afirma: “Probablemente el generalizado menear la cabeza en alusión a las deficiencias del personal político oculta un descontento global que aún no ha tomado forma: apostaría directamente a que se trata de los estados aurorales de una toma de conciencia de alcance mundial sobre insuficiencias antropológicas” (ibíd., pp., 71-72).

Cuando observamos los solazamientos masivos en la impunidad cotidiana, de baja intensidad pero omnipresente, la total carencia de sentido cívico en los adultos y de respeto por los demás en jóvenes y niños, la apatía política, la negligencia social, la incapacidad para preocuparse y ocuparse de la vida en comunidad en todas sus facetas (de las juntas vecinales al resguardo de la vida democrática), aunado a graves lagunas educativas, formativas e informativas en el grueso de la población del Tercer Mundo (y también de otras partes del mundo), queda claro que no tanto se tiene a los políticos que nos merecemos, sino a los que podemos. Entonces, la crisis es estructural y es uno de los retos mayores de nuestra generación. La pregunta queda de esta manera abierta: ¿por dónde comenzar?

Este texto apareció originalmente en mi columna Politik para Raztudio Media:  http://raztudio.com/politik-columna-manuel-guillen/

 

The new ride of the World Vigilante

In a recent binational meeting in Mexico City, United States’ Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said that like they did with Osama Bin Laden last year, her country special forces eventually would find Mexico’s ultimate narco, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán. “And you know what happened to Osama Bin Laden”, she added. Her asseveration was a real statement about our time's geopolitical trend. With the most prominent army in the world, a worldwide spying net, directed by skilled agencies with long-life experience in the matter, a cutting edge technology both in weaponry and in information gathering and a pervasive set of financial, cultural and political interests in the entire planet, America is a die-hard empire. Since the beginning of the nineties, America has reached its most precious sci-fi dreams in weaponry, as the Army showed worldwide in ‘91 Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nowadays, there is a world of drones, photographer satellites and intelligent rockets operated overseas working day and night on the America’s side.

SEALs in action

In these terms, the operation to bring down Osama Bin Laden was the perfect symbol of the American present times. The entire strategy revealed clearer than ever the new dimension of America’s role in the flat, fast and furious postmodern world: the trend to become a smooth but powerful global vigilante. Not because it had been history’s first time that American special forces make an intervention like that (on the contrary, its known that such practices are common in recent history of US unipolar dominance), but because it settled a crucial turn in their global leadership against the outlaws. We are perceiving a slight but unremitting gliding from straight intervention to surgical extraction or even elimination of the empire enemies. In the near future, major strikes could be done by the use of robotics, and the extensive use of drones in Iraq points in that direction. Meanwhile, key figures of terrorism, organized crime and violent radicals along the world would be retired SEALs’ style. (SEALs, of course, was the unit on charge to erase Bin Laden from the face of Earth.)

In his marvelous report on the hunt and final death of Osama Bin Laden, “Getting Bin Laden”, published in The New Yorker last august, American journalist Nicholas Schmidle, tells in detail the key moments of the military operation to kill public enemy number one. (The text is available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle.) Reading it we get the intelligence to see the kind of efficiency that US Special Forces have in order to survey, find and attack the enemy. There are the prominent results of decades of military leadership in the planet. That is the product of the sum of programs, methods, systems, human training and R&D in war technology to the service of American justice. 

CIA Headquarters

For sure, there’s a number of ethical problems in this kind of justice but for now it’s the best we have in the world. Let’s be clear in this point: United States is an empire and acts like that, period. In consequence, its actions must be seen as the result of its national interests around the world. But at the same time, there’s a righteous sense of pragmatic ethics that the rest of the world (or, at least, the rest of the Western world) can no more than accept with enthusiasm. It’s the realm of the so called community values or national values; that is, the set of presuppositions that we have to assume as essential in order to set up an ethic discourse against alternative ways of thought. American philosopher Richard Rorty worked a lot in this path: in this side of the world, there is no other way to establish right or wrong in national and international affairs than thinking democracy, human rights and free speech as the essentials of our ethical and political practice.

So, this is the actual crossroad of American power: turn itself into a democratic vigilante, no matter how paradoxical this may sound. Maybe that is a good way to move forward its immense fire power and bureaucracy of war. For sure, it would be a right strategy to face its financial decline by cutting the overwhelming expends that traditional wars involve. But at the same time those are good news for the rest of the world: we would have a very efficient crime cleaner on our side.