By Deepa Majumdar
The encounter between the “west” and the “non-west” should be characterized, not so much as a clash of values, religions or civilizations, as the roaring collision of old, contemplative, often deeply aesthetic, musical, and wisdom-laden cultures … what the “west” itself once was and still is, deep down … with the efficiency and effrontery of western science and technology. Today, the dark skinned shepherd tending his sheep on a far flung hillside, beseeching the gods for rain, is forced to encounter, not so much the modern western person, with whom he may share an atomized and simple individuality – but the Cyber Spirit of the “west” – that latest of new universalisms spawned by western civilization. Likewise, the dark skinned street hawker in the colorful market square, crying out his wares in multi-keyed tones, haggling ferociously … is forced to encounter the sober precision, fairness and mechanized “honesty” of a ubiquitous Cyber Market.
Indeed, it is this data-driven Cyber Spirit that orders the soul with instrumental values, reducing it to a febrile pragmatism. In its negative aspect, this spirit of puerile logic bequeaths a trite utilitarianism that comes with the risk of a dangerous consequentialist ethics and a death of contemplation. In 2003, I heard the bizarre argument that the Iraq war was morally good if it succeeded – it was evil if it failed!
Yet, the excellent and accurate pragmatism of the very same Cyber Spirit can serve also as a titan of logic that sublimates the passions and ushers new forms of hidden contemplation. We, who are children of technology, may think in naive logical terms, yet the very same machine that we think we master, in turn masters our souls, by demanding of us a certain momentary serenity, a concentrated mind, and a practice of instrumental values, which, in the good soul, blossom into moral values.
Since the advent of “nine eleven” we have witnessed, not so much a clash of civilizations, as a clash between two forms of evil – on the one hand, a pre-technological, pre-modern, contemplative moral evil, demanding a malevolent discipline of spirit that bequeaths upon its agents the old fashioned ability to terrify through a fearsome personal presence, vis-à-vis a heavy handed, rational, overtly technological evil that diffuses free-will in a swarm of gadgets, distancing human agency from its grisly impacts on reality. The technical primitiveness of the first pre-modern evil mocks the technological leviathan of mechanized warfare. As if compensating for its lack of technical power, it demands more from the soul of its agent, through the chilling discipline that produces in the unruffled suicide bomber, a mind-numbing and sinister coolness. Conversely, as if cocksure of its limitless technical power, hi-tech armed forces require of their human agents, mainly a rigorous, technical training, demanding at best, reasonable forms of heroism. In this encounter of an evil David with an evil Goliath, old fashioned virtues of war, like personal courage and chivalry, sound quaint and meaningless.
Yet, beneath the roar of mechanized sounds and the ease of switches, there stirs the free-will of man. Notwithstanding gross differences in their scale of impact, the scimitar and the precision bomber are equalized by the hatred in the hearts of their wielders. All weapons aside, when human agents on either side cease to be heroic, ethical defenders of principles and lives, becoming instead, brutal thugs thirsting for blood, the hatred in the human heart equalizes in a sordid equality, enemies who may be morally unmatched, as also the weapons they wield, which are technically unmatched. The west’s unseen enemy, using primitive weapons – and all weapons are morally primitive – has mocked the seeming candor of the west’s technological might and its puerile faith in this might. Before such mockery, the “west” must relinquish, not technology per se, but its blind reliance on technology, acknowledging, instead, the totalizing power of hatred.
(The writer is Associate Professor, Philosophy, Purdue University North Central, USA)