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The West is not blind, but it does not see
April 29, 2025
A world order, unipolar or multipolar, based on the same epistemic and ethical premises that have dominated since the 15th century, will do nothing to ensure the triumph of the principle of live and let live.
In cordial dialogue with Jeffrey D. Sachs
I've written several texts about the transitional society we find ourselves in. Whenever I do, I'm reminded of Gramsci's famous thought: neither the old has completely died nor the new has fully established itself; transition is an era of morbid phenomena (which some have translated as monsters). What's happening in the world makes me doubt that the concept of transition is still useful for characterizing our time. Increasingly convinced, I think that if we must resort to famous and succinct expressions of our condition, the best choice is Goya's 1799 etching, *The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters *. Instead of the metaphor of movement, the metaphor of condition.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I have shared Jeffrey Sachs's (JS) analysis, and we have even exchanged messages about our common ground. In a piece published on April 11 in OtherNews, entitled " Giving Birth to the New International Order ," JS uses the concept of transition to characterize our time: from a unipolar world dominated by the West since the 15th century (and, for the past hundred years, by the United States) to a multipolar world centered on Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His central proposal for ensuring this transition lies in the rise of India (which he compares favorably to China) and the geopolitical transformation of this rise into the reform of the UN Security Council by granting India permanent membership.
I don't disagree with JS's proposal, although it's problematic to praise India at the worst moment of its democratic life thanks to political Hinduism that turns 20% of the population (Muslims) into second-class citizens. I do, however, disagree with the importance JS gives to his proposal. His proposal is based on two unfortunately false premises: that the UN still exists with some effectiveness; and that a unipolar world order exists. Perhaps desperately, JS still believes in the international role of the UN. Is it possible to believe in the UN after the genocide in Gaza, which was broadcast live every day and around the world for over a year? Is it possible to believe in the UN after all the lies tolerated in the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Ukraine? Let us point out two tragic facts: all these lies were credibly exposed at the time they were made public, and those who exposed them suffered harsh consequences: silencing,
deportation, media and judicial persecution; all these lies were confirmed as such years later, often by the agencies that propagated them or by their mouthpieces, be it the New York Times or the Washington Post , and by the immense echo chamber they possess and relay to the hegemonic media around the world. No apologies were ever made to those who were right when it was forbidden to do so, nor were the peoples destroyed by acts of aggression based on lies compensated. Does anyone remember that Libya had one of the best public health services in the world?
The second premise is that a unipolar world order exists. I can't enter here into the debate about whether the world order was unipolar even in the days of the Soviet bloc. In any case, it existed for a time. For example, it existed when Narendra Modi was expelled from the United States in 2005 for human rights violations (the massacre of Islamists in Gujarat in 2002). But does it exist today, when a war criminal is applauded by the US Congress? Isn't it rather a case of global disorder that can be considered unipolar only because the country with the most power is the one causing the most disorder? Is it possible to believe what is said about China today if what was said about it just five years ago was true (although behind the scenes what is now surfacing had long been prepared)? Is it possible to believe in the solidity of the unipolar order based on the democracy/autocracy dichotomy when the "best friends" of the president of the most powerful democratic country are all autocrats? The playbook followed by the American political class for several years (especially since September 11, 2001) is based on the idea of imperial domination, not on the idea of world order. One need only read the " Project for a New American Century " or the " Wolfowitz Doctrine ," which makes it clear that the United States must act independently on the international stage whenever "collective action cannot be orchestrated." This is not a principle of order. It is a principle of disorder.
The sociology of absences: the dream of reason
Despite all JS's foresight, his analysis and proposals produce two absences, two realities that, although they exist, are presented as nonexistent and as such can no longer contribute to any diagnosis or solution. The
nonexistence of such realities is not the result of an act of will on the part of the analyst. It stems from the epistemological presuppositions of analysis. It stems from the dream of reason. The problem of the West lies not so much in the state to which it has led the world, but in the epistemicide it has wrought throughout its historical trajectory—that is, in the knowledge and experiences of the world it has actively destroyed to impose its domination and neutralize any resistance. This destruction has not only been of bodies and ways of life. It has also been the destruction of knowledge, wisdom, and ethics, of ways of coexistence between people and nations, of cultures of relationship with nature, with the living and the dead, with time and space. This multifaceted destruction has produced a specific form of blindness: looking without seeing, explaining without understanding, observing without knowing that one cannot observe without being observed. Among many others, I distinguish two absences: the different/useless beyond friend/enemy; living and letting live beyond order and disorder.
The different and the useless
Colonialism and capitalism are the twin forms of modern domination. Both are based on hierarchical logics: superior/inferior, owner/non-owner. In both cases, the first category determines the second. The inferior is inferior only in light of the interests of the superior; they may be superior in light of many other criteria, but this is irrelevant to the superior; the owner defines what has value (material or immaterial) and who owns it; the non-owner may possess many things that have no value to the owner and are therefore irrelevant or nonexistent. Both logics are intertwined, although they reveal different faces of domination. To be superior without having valuable goods is a contradiction, an oxymoron. These two logics have created two dichotomous types of dominant social relations: the useful and the harmful; the friend and the enemy. The first type was well theorized by Jeremy Bentham, the second by Carl Schmitt.
Western colonial capitalist thought has systematically trained human beings to ignore the importance of the different and the useless because they don't fit into either hierarchical logic. Therefore, it has ignored them or
relegated them to a surplus and harmless realm: art. It has given them the aura of the unnecessary.
Live and let live
The two aforementioned hierarchical logics of colonialism and capitalism have conditioned life and death since the 15th century. Since the life that deserved to be protected was that of the superiors and the owners, and since the vast majority of the world's population was neither, the modern era was dominated by the experience of death and even the spectacle of death. Death fell not only on inferior and non-owner human beings, but on all living beings: nature in general. The death of rivers, mountains, and jungles where the superiors could accumulate their ownership of precious natural resources was theologically, ethically, scientifically, and, above all, economically justified. This is how we have arrived at the moment of ecological collapse in which we find ourselves. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is but the most recent and atrocious episode in a long history of ethnosocial-natural cleansing of human, subhuman, and nonhuman beings.
A world order, unipolar or multipolar, based on the same epistemic and ethical premises that have dominated since the 15th century, will do nothing to ensure the triumph of the principle of live and let live.
Conclusion
The transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world is neither good nor bad in itself. The real alternative lies in expanding the spaces of difference and uselessness as civilizing values: difference as diversity, uselessness as other-usefulness. The real alternative lies in valuing the value of life, a value that can only be respected by living and letting live.
After five centuries of cultural, epistemic, and ethical indoctrination, I have serious doubts that Western thought can conceive of or lead the creation of a multipolar world. It will never know how to be one inter pares . Moreover, the values of difference and uselessness, of live and let live, are much more present in the original thought of the regions of the world in which JS places some hope—Asia, Africa, and Latin America—than in the
dominant thought of the Western world. This fact in itself is no guarantee, since after five centuries of global domination, Western thought is insidiously present above all in the elites of the countries in these regions, the elites who will most likely be the ones to formulate the new (old) multipolar world. That is why, for me, the exploited and oppressed classes of these regions are the ones who can do the most to combat multi-century epistemicide. They will do so to the extent that they draw on their multicentury experience. That experience has always oscillated between war and revolution. Today, as we sleepwalk toward a Third World War (if we aren't already in it), perhaps we should revisit the concepts of revolution and liberation in new terms. Only then will reason awaken from the slumber to which capitalism and colonialism have condemned it.
(Re-published with the author's permission from Diario 16+ )
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About the author
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a sociologist and retired professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal). He is also a distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). He has coined and developed in numerous publications some of the most influential concepts in recent sociological thought, such as "the decolonization of knowledge" and "the epistemologies of the South."
