EARTH

9 Every
tomorrow
emerges from
culture

What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? To avoid having a restricted imagination of our near future, we need to incorporate an open, comprehensive and reflective vision of the broader context of the modern Western culture in which we live.

At its best, it depends on rationalizing the meaning of human experience, the expectation that systematic, continued and public reflection about everything that affects us can lead to broader horizons of the human condition than those we are all used to.

Science has been the main path for this systematic reflection since the 17th century. Since then, its information and proposals have sought the support of empirical experience based on a formal, universal rationality. This is relatively easy to do when it comes to the structure of the physical world and the functioning of the organic world – hence the rapid development of the technical-scientific system, i.e. the development of the physical and natural sciences dedicated to transforming the possibilities of knowledge and the human use of the world’s resources.

It is not so easy, however, when it comes to the specific conditions of the social experience of human life, tangled in the complexity of thoughts, emotions, values and history. The humanities have developed more recently than the hard sciences because they have faced very peculiar challenges: they must understand how the symbolic and pragmatic conditions of life are organized and processed, in that which escapes the direct determination of the physical and organic fundamentals of human beings. The very status of this relative autonomy of thought, language, will, action and feelings is a matter of debate, because – for many scientists – all this could only be a direct, linear outcome of the biological properties of the subjects (as the mechanists once thought about the phenomena of organic life). The humanities explore and analyze the ways these “emerging” properties manifest themselves and function, i.e. those that, although they depend on the existence of underlying material reality, present specific characteristics, function according to their own logic, and involve the intervention of cognition, imagination and will in the course of history. [1]

In doing so, the humanities must confront another enormous challenge: its scope of analysis is not found in distant things, through the lens of a magnifying glass, a telescope or a mass spectrometer, but rather it is embedded in the immediate life of the whole of humanity (including both lay people and researchers). In the humanities, we study phenomena such as the family and kinship, religion and rituals, artistic taste and scientific disposition, the ways of doing politics and playing sports, health care and warfare, forms of sexuality and violence, the experience of time and the organization of space. Regarding all this, each culture and each social group has its own conceptions and procedures, which are often very different from ours. [2]. It is by interpreting and comparing these forms of manifestation of exclusive human phenomena that we build sociological, anthropological, historical and psychological knowledge.

This knowledge is not easily convertible to technological apparatus and the construction of levers for the future. Its greatest strength and utility lie in the criticism to which it gives rise, by revealing how human projects are linked and how they are carried out, in contexts of hierarchy or power, dialogue or domination, harmony or predation, acceptance or exclusion.

In the context of a commitment to future plans, the role of the humanities should be more to promote general awareness of conditions that trigger this or that transformation in human life than to offer technical or practical solutions for these challenges. The violent climate change that is already affecting populations across the world will certainly accelerate in the near future, given that we have not changed the way we are using energy resources, nor moderated our economic development and production conditions. However, the technical and scientific tools to tackle this challenge already exist and would be at our disposal, if global political awareness and the willingness to undertake a radical economic restructuring were to seem viable. The crucial factors to confront this crisis are therefore typically human, and broader than formal rationality might expect: national narcissism, class greed, competition for power, consumerism and hedonism.

The profound alterations in the biodiversity around us are evolving in the same process of climate change. The weight of human activity in the contemporary biosphere’s evolution has even given rise to a proposal to define a new geological era: the Anthropocene. The disequilibrium caused by human action ranges from the extinct dodo bird to the hyper-contagious Ebola virus, exacerbated by contemporary technical and scientific power. What could counteract this? Only a change of values and a radical restructuring of the forms of human social reproduction could permit a less devastating tomorrow.

The characteristics of humanity’s new reproduction conditions include the population’s absolute growth and increasing longevity. It is clear that this phenomenon has so far depended on general technological and scientific developments, and above all those of biomedicine. However, it would not have reached its current proportions if it had not been pursued and promoted systematically by national policies since the 18th century, with the aim of expanding population size and quality of health – essential conditions for state prestige. [3]. At current levels, immense challenges present themselves, surpassing the vanities of political power: the capacity for food, housing and sanitation; the maintenance of viable long-term social security systems; and public security – among many other challenges very close to us.

The disequilibrium caused by human action ranges from the extinct dodo bird to the hyper-contagious Ebola virus, exacerbated by contemporary technical and scientific power. Only a change of values and a radical restructuring of the forms of human social reproduction could permit a less devastating tomorrow.


Technical and scientific advances have led to a notable acceleration in the conditions of coordination between different human organizations units, permitting an intensity of social exchanges (economic, informational and cultural) absolutely incompatible with those of the past. It does not occur to anyone to reduce the importance of the advent of digital and virtual communication, which has catapulted the possibilities of communication to exponential levels. However, nor does it occur to anyone to minimize the increase in the production of differences and confrontations that has accompanied the trajectory of planetary modernization. This tension between moving closer and moving further apart is well known among anthropologists, who described it as the principle of social organization of African and Melanesian tribal societies back in the 1930s. [4]. The challenge is to understand how this dynamic is processed in the contemporary world, in which the preeminence of the values of equality, dialogue and tolerance, which seemed to have been so widely recognized, is frequently denied. From the perspectives of politics, religion, race, and even popular art and culture, everything seems to conspire to produce confrontation and belligerence, while technical and rational conditions could make us wait for universal peace to prevail.

It is in this context of crucial challenges and uncertainties, which cannot be responded to through conventional scientific rationality, that the experience of the humanities could make some contribution – by pointing to the universal properties of the human condition, describing their culturally specific forms of presentation and suggesting which type of values could permit the enrichment of the conditions of human interaction in the coming decades. No magic solution or silver bullet is available for this, as the human experience does not change quickly, from water to wine. Everything in it depends on the original socialization of each generation and exchanges between successive generations, in a process that demands attention at every moment in the formation of each subject – he who is the grandchild and child of his ancestors, and the parent and grandparent of his descendants.

In a culture like ours, committed to individualistic and utilitarian values, it is ever more vital to ask: “How do we live together?” This question induces reflection about values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and solidarity – which are also, contradictorily, built in our culture.

In reflecting on the cultural conditions for constructing the future, there are three key categories, without which we cannot understand anything of human life: its variety, complexity and systematic nature. Cultural variety or diversity, (such as in forms of kinship and family), the complexity of relationships in which subjects are installed when they are born and the systematic nature of standards and processes in which these phenomena (which seem to us so private and singular) occur, are inseparable conditions from present or future social life. In our reflection, we can never overemphasize the value of human “interaction” (among people, and between people and their environments). In a culture like ours, committed to individualistic and utilitarian values, it is ever more vital to ask: “How do we live together?” This question induces reflection about values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and solidarity – which are also, contradictorily, built in our culture.[5]. Certainly, not all cultures share these values of ours, but if properly applied, they can give rise to peaceful coexistence, useful to all – even among the differences that will continue to proliferate.

In short, understanding how it is that we come to “live together” involves thinking about the variety, complexity and systematic nature of forms of human association (the principles of symbolic, economic and matrimonial exchange, establishing the state of humanity, for example), interaction (natural languages, and different communication forms and strategies) and symbolization (cultural integration, the sharing of values, technical-magical invention, and artistic creation). And this cannot permit us to forget the construction of forms of “detrimental coexistence”, the negative exchanges involved in conflict, violence, domination, and psychosocial suffering – phenomena as varied, complex and systematic as those of wellbeing (and much more frequent).

Nonetheless , it is only by addressing all of this – and many more things that our reason conceives and puts into practice thanks to social imagination – that the future to be designed may really be what we want (in other words, when we know a little more about how and why we want what we want). Based on systematic reflections about the emergence of tomorrow, the humanities may play a more significant role to make human will effective in the world. Our shared tomorrow depends on the values, feelings and cultural dispositions that make humanity, here and there, inherit, invent, distort, destroy or improve this or that instrument, resource, weapon, machine, gadget, idol, toy…

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