Towards a post-European, post-enlightenment future

What futurists

think

TOWARDS A POST-EUROPEAN, POST-ENLIGHTENMENT FUTURE Susantha Goonatilake

I am interested well

in a range of interconnected

as conventional

‘information’

sciences

including

One set of these interconnected technology

rewrite

technology, deeply

the the

information,

which

also

yields

is handed

down

Through

advanced

these three information

lineages

entirely

world,

different

The other replenish intellectual

future

set of problems

Specifically,

that

Already

to

exhausted

through

‘knowbots’

and

in the

‘discovery

history.

of ‘artefactual’

device

to computing and cultural

information

technology

These changes

relate to cross-cultural

imply

an

knowledge

cultural project

elements

in

several

to core

for the future.

Scientific soon

epistemological

Revolution

Science’s

Telescope

therefore

(and social)

information

of the seemingly

and will

information

would

that

extra-European

rudders

the

Biotechnology

and

and experimentally.

Enlightenment

challenge.

automation

lineage,

biologically

raw data that it is likened

is extensive

as cultural

advanced

I am interested

17th-century,

They

in the future.

incorporate

like the Hubble

world.

of genetic

and

get merged

during

earth

from computing

lineages

in the questioning

came

of the

evolutionary

intellectually,

as the

the mid projects

out so much sought

including

two

would

First is a quantitative

or so since

as well

diachronically

in which

is seen

certainty

Enlightenment.

being

another

areas to give a set of meaningful

ontological

spewing

deal with

of biotechnology

of the future.

of the

biotechnology

need

I perceive

what

This exhaustion

humans.’

the

history

both biological

This adds itself on to the other

information.

technologies history

cultural

on and restructure

technology

systems.

the study of futures as

All these problems

arise from the emergence

3500-million-year-biological

Information

years

problems

to be the dominant

10,000-year-old

impinge

device.

that straddle

sciences.

systems.

and information would

problems

the social

output

and

be far beyond

the

every

ten

the capacity

of

Genome

from a fire hose’.*

laboratory, machines’-now

data

collection under

and into

has doubled

and the Human

to ‘drinking

gelled

Project are The solution

and

analysis,

research-which,

Among Dr Susantha Goonatilake’s books are Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World (London, Zed Press, 1984); CrippledMinds: an Exploration into Colonial Culture (New Delhi, Vikas Publishers, 1982); Evolution of Information: Lineages of Genes, Culture and Artefact(London, Pinter Publishers, and Delhi, PBS Publishers, 1992); Technological Independence: the Asian Experience (Tokyo, the United Nations University, 1993); and three forthcoming books, Technology Assessment (Geneva, UNCTAD, 1996); Merged Evolution: the Long Term implications of Information Technology and Biotechnology (New York, Gordon and Breach, 1996); and Mining Civilizational Know/edge (Indianapolis, IN, Indiana University Press, 1996). Dr Susantha Goonatilake is at the New School for Social Research, New York. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences. Susantha Coonatilake may be contacted at 50-62 47th St Woodside, New York, NY 11377, USA (Tel: +l 718 392 9441; fax: +l 212 906 6705).

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scouring

data

‘rediscovered’ the

terrains,

Enlightenment

databases, With

on the verge

now,

the different

molecular mechanics

world,

the

sciences

17th-century

and mechanical

phenomena

from those decreed

quantum

mathematization

physics.

has come

lost its foundational

have

of Diderot

in

is, because

of

Revolution’s

under

certainty.

its secrets has run its course,

Cartesian

And Bacon’s because

vision

tortured

of subject of

true

world

is still

and object

has come

knowledge

through

ever since Godel,

of science

nature’s

deal with

and ontological

in the relativistic

project

because,

Those who

both is and is not, just as it is a

dichotomy

post-Galileo

question,

C+c

of

Newtonian

assumes the reversibility

epistemological

a particle

Even

world

or of taxonomists.

engineering

Greeks.

world

can be left project.

The epistemological

has a time direction.

by ancient

The

agenda

the epistemological

are in a logical,

wave and is not. The key ontological in

programmes

the dream

in the West

a hegemony.

thermodynamics

c, the speed of light and in the quantum unstuck

Scientific

do not constitute

hand,

relativistic

different

knowledge

begs the need to enlarge

used in most astronomy and

Further,

is not the same as that of evolutionists

On the other

quantum

Already

and Snell.4

all the available

This again

biologists

conclusions.3

of realization.

this automation,

to machines.

with

laws those of Ohm

to capture

partly

of time.

emerge

scientific

mathematics

as torturing

environment

has

nature to reveal

is under severe strain.

The social sciences So, a variety knowledge

of cultural, system.

Social sciences of Europe

as backward

‘the Asiatic

rise of capitalism production social

and even ontological in the social

arose after the Enlightenment

as a hegemonizing

non-Europeans category

epistemological

This is seen most vividly

mode

also

system.

are the world’s

which

in today’s

adjuncts

and lndology

equating

backward.

dynamos

jostle

For example,

and Weber’s

as similarly

economic

Sinology

this Eurocentricism.

of production’

saw Asia

and were ideological

Anthropology,

reflected

positions

sciences.

Yet,

requires

to the rise which

Marx’s

Protestantism

today’s

Asiatic

saw

residual with

the

modes

an urgent rethinking

of

for the

sciences.

Modernism

was

in

many

Enlightenment

project.

Its demise

the exhaustion

of the Enlightenment

Enlightenment

elements

become

ways

the

ultimate

and the emergence project imperative

intellectual

culmination

of post-modernism

of

the

are a reflection

of

on the terms and agendas set by itself. So extra for navigating

the future.

False images of my own reality I have come to these interests by confronting the false images of my own reality that colonial-derived disciplines such as anthropology and sociology gave me. I have realized that these disciplines histories cognitive

reflect

as much the reality

through which they have merged, structures of the world.

In tackling

these

problems

that come

‘out there’

which from

as well

as the particular

my own

existential

situation,

situatedness, I have sauntered through several intellectual searches--poetry, sociology and evolutionary theory. I tend to use Western formal approaches although intuitively

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some times or through

this my

is a legitimizing non-Westernside.

social

have left out a large part of the useful my own

engineering, when writing,

framework for conclusions I had come to More recently I have begun to shed this

What futurists think

and I have tried

Westernness largely

in the realm

the formal

technical

the future

while

I have,

which

Buddhist

literature

in Buddhist

being

conditioned accepted

a geotectonic

Renaissance, rolled

I believe lineages-the hitherto

biological

known,

information from

of these

trajectory

already

historical

tree

traversed,

in artefacts.

And in addition, yield

rise to hydrids,

and

‘monsters’

all

lineages

and

shift to Asia.

Two

the two histories

that the world

history. one

events.

forward

A new

history,

has

that

of

If one were to take a slice

histories,

in a definite

could

look

The look

back,

back

is that of our futures.

milieu.

to a

that of the But each

Each has potentialities

for

To this set of trees is added the new one of information

are the merging

us different

the

this shift will ease, and

are the evolutionary

on to this duo.

The look

the next 20

of Discovery,

and the Enlightenment

Invariably

human

of these

is located

Western

the geotectonic

with

to a set of future

is history.

constructed

futures as the trees unfold.

the long view

combined

and forward

without

fodder.

shape the world

trees of information,

of past events

legitimizing

to Asia within

Revolution

of decades.

been added

alone

shifting

intellectual

history

has recently

trajectory

different

natural

The rigour

studies

to the Voyages

and the cultural-constitute

namely,

artefacts,

one

to a couples

that I have described,

and rigorous.

flying

economy

comparable

the use of non-Western

I find that

on how one constructs

useful

of

These have been histories.

psyche.

the Industrial

that the forces that will

mergings

fear

of the global

Revolution,

into one and compressed

their

The

is occurring,

the Scientific

especially

is very

my Western-dominated

shift

in fact necessitate,

philosophy,

of our future

after seen scores of Western

observations.

still haunts

approaches.

lineages,

by the past, only

But with the centre of gravity years,

use non-Western

‘information’

however,

psychological

legitimization

to directly

of predicting

histories

of all these three histories.

and different

from the ethnocentricity

futures.

These mergings

in

In the short run, they give

of each branch

of a tree.

Buddhist reality As a realist view

the

in the

Buddhist

coming

world

culture-artefacts-‘borgs’, deconstructing derived

from Christian

creation

be frightened

seeing,

say, a boa constrictor.

without

much

monster

the same realism

to and

that one uses in psyche,

of a soul (and hence a self) to be saved,

like Terminator

But it would

not evoke

would

cross my path,

I of

the same way that I feel disgusted in me the existential

So in that sense, I am prepared jungles.

tend

image that haunts the Western

in much

information

I therefore

culture-genetic-‘borgs’

I believe

‘I’ should

in

angst that would

for the coming

ecology

be able to navigate

these

of the information

in the

difficulty.

So my vision world.

with

and disgusted,

fundamentalist.

and hybrid

new words,

myths and a notion

me. If a Frankenstein

would

of multiple

two

in a selfhood.

hybrids-cyborgs,

of self. The Frankenstein

course

arise in a creation

I do not believe

information

to coin

the notion

does not bother

sense,

of

for the next 30 years is an increasing

This shuffling

will

give rise to new lineages,

shuffling

to new histories.

Or seeing the system

the other way round, new futures, new evolutionary trajectories. Information uptakes from all three lineages including cultural inputs from outside the European trajectory will feed these

new

dense

undergrowths

of information.

navigating a jungle. The navigating tools-our futurologies-will be those that will be partly environments.

Some will

be existing

formal

Navigating

this will

laws of the natural fed by our physical, systems of knowledge,

be very

much

like

and socal science, our biological and cultural say from the physical

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What futurists think

and social

sciences.

Enlightenment

But

in the event of dead-ends,

project and its reflection

as in the exhaustion

of the

in the bankruptcy of today’s social sciences, new

navigation tools have to be devised possibly

using extra European inputs.

My futures studies then devolves into the primaeval one of making sense of the world around me. I am here a hunter-gatherer

collecting

one means. In fact futures studies themselves

navigating tools. I am not wedded to

become a basket case of knowing the future

when my Laws of Motion of physics or those of the social sciences no longer allow me to see beyond a partial smudge. So my futurologies laws in my other disciplines. redefining existing

blend into the use or search for relevant

It is not a separate exercise.

conceptual categories are found wanting.

I by myself

these new laws except to make out some blurred outlines. of history

This

search also blends into

a future that is being carved out in a post-European,

reel themselves

out,

we will

generations of men, women, organisms

will

global world,

where

not be able to define

But, as the new global lineages

see new formulations

coming forth

by fresh

and artefacts.

Notes and references DJ de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (London, Macmillan, 1963); Science Foundation Course Team, Science and Society, Science Foundation Course Units 33-34 (Milton Keynes, The Open University Press, 1971). Mitchel W Waldrop, ‘Learning to drink from a fire hose’, Science, 248, 11 May 1990, pages 674-675. Ibid. PW Langley, ‘Rediscovering physics with BACON 3’, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 6, 1977, pages 505-507.

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF EUTOPIA: TOWARDS A LATIN AMERICAN RECONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES OF THE FUTURE Maria de Los Angeles Guido

I am a native Costa Rican. I emigrated to California and finished high school at Chula Vista High School. I received my baccalaureate from the University of Maryland in Government Maria de Los Angeles Guido is Assistant Professor of Government, Bentley College, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02154, USA (Tel: +l 617 891 2652; fax: +l 617 891 3410; e-mail: [email protected]). Also at PO Box 11448-l 000, San Jose, Costa Rica.

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