Does the Unthinkable Happen?

Dominant Scientism Has Naturalized Human Nature, Capitalism, and Colonialism

The image is a well-known illustration from the Codex Durán depicting the Massacre in the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, also known as the Toxcatl Massacre, which occurred on 22 May 1520. The event was a pivotal turning point in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. (1867)

Modern history is replete with events so extraordinary, aberrant, revolting, and surprising that one feels like exclaiming: how is this possible!? Normally, this exclamation, as a generalized phenomenon, does not arise at the moment such events take place, but years or centuries later: how was this possible!? The astonishment is such that, often, what has happened exceeds not only the limits of what is possible, but also the limits of what is thinkable: how does the unthinkable happen or how has it happened?

When the great art historian E. H. Gomrich set out to write (in six weeks) the book A Little History of the World for Young Readers (Eine Kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser), published in Vienna in 1935, his aim was to teach history to young people. The book was a huge success and was subsequently updated several times. One of the leitmotifs of the narrative is precisely to show young people how things that seem beyond the realm of the possible, or even beyond the realm of the thinkable, often happen in history. And the strangest thing is that such events are only known many years later.

For example, during World War II, neither Gomrich (who had emigrated to England in 1936 and worked for the BBC) nor the vast majority of Germans or Europeans knew or could imagine the horror of the crimes being committed against the Jews (the Holocaust). There are many other examples. How could anyone imagine that devout Christians (whether Portuguese, Spanish, or Mayflower pilgrims) could have engaged in the horrific extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries? And who would have known what was happening at the time it was happening? Of course, there were very eloquent contemporary testimonies, such as that of Bartolomé de las Casas, but his voice was an exception and little heard. Who could have imagined, and how many Belgians knew, that the highly civilized King Leopold II organized the extermination of 50 to 75% of the population of the Congo in just over two decades (1885-1908)?

Today, everything seems different in terms of knowledge, but not in terms of the occurrence of what is considered impossible or even unthinkable. Due to the revolution in information and communication technologies, today we know in real time what is happening in the world. And what happens often leads us to exclaim: is it possible? Is it thinkable? Genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, and Palestine; proposals to buy countries (Greenland); capture by foreign powers of presidents in full exercise of their functions in sovereign countries (Venezuela); invasion and occupation of far away foreign countries for the security of the citizens of the invading country (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan); war criminals convicted by international courts traveling freely in the airspace of countries that are signatories to international treaties and institutions (Netanyahu, Putin); fragmentation of countries as a strategy for domination (Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia); the return of piracy on the high seas.

This list raises three questions. Why does what seems impossible or even unthinkable happen? Will we know everything that is happening, even though it is considered impossible or unthinkable? The fact that we can know that what seems impossible or unthinkable does happen—is it relevant?

Why the unthinkable happens

The unthinkable happens because in each historical period a dominant idea of human nature is created that does not allow us to conceive, let alone prevent, the unthinkable, aberrant, or catastrophic from happening, precisely because what happens is not considered aberrant or catastrophic. Since the 17th century, modern Eurocentric society has developed the idea that it is typical of human nature to strive for the positive and irreversible evolution of society. This idea was called progress. But progress has a cost because there is no progress without struggle. This idea is as present in Malthus as in Darwin and Marx. The struggle and cost of progress mean that it is not possible to realize the ideals of progress without committing actions that contradict those ideals.

In order for this contradiction not to be politically visible, it is essential to dehumanize the social groups that lose out in this struggle and suffer the corresponding costs. Constructed in this way, the idea of progress has nothing to do with the well-being of populations. Only those populations that have the power to impose costs without suffering them are considered worthy of well-being. These populations may be increasingly in the minority, but this in no way affects the idea of progress. In fact, the more selective progress is, the more progress there will be. Today’s billionaires are the best illustration of this. The idea of progress cannot contemplate the idea of regression. Only the groups that lose in the struggle and suffer the costs can question progress. When the empire looks in the mirror, it never sees its own decline.

If we look, for example, at the discourse of the current representative of maximum progress in maximum decline, Donald Trump, it is easy to conclude that the dichotomy that guides his thinking (if thinking is the same as speaking) is not that of friend/enemy, nor even that of citizen/foreigner. It is the human/subhuman dichotomy. Anyone who disagrees with him, no matter how friend or citizen they may be, immediately falls into the subhuman category.

The unthinkable happens because those who have the power to make it happen also have the power to ensure that it is not considered unthinkable. The unthinkable happens abruptly, but it is always slowly generated and prepared. Its gestation has several components.

The first component is ideological work, which has a strong semiotic component. This involves, for example, eliminating certain words and replacing them with others that neutralize their political or ethical charge and naturalize the new normal. Thus, capitalism is replaced by market economy. Labor flexibility has an ideological charge opposite to job precariousness, yet they mean the same thing in the lives of workers. Another ideological procedure has the opposite meaning: magnifying or demonizing the target in order to justify an extreme reaction: the fall of the dollar turned into an apocalypse; the hostile politician turned into a dictator or terrorist so that the friendly politician appears to be the opposite without ceasing to be a dictator or terrorist; repeatedly using the expression “unprecedented” to magnify repeatedly committed aggressions.

The second component consists of selective information in order to make people believe that the tip of the iceberg is the whole iceberg. This was done in the field of atomic energy, leading to the unthinkable bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It will be done with artificial intelligence.

The third component consists of replacing human tragedies with statistics. Human life is a quality, while a number of lives or deaths is a quantity. But in this case, the key is to have the power not to let quantity be converted into a new quality (Hegel). After World War II, the Jews, in collaboration with all the democrats of the world, managed to convert quantity into a new quality: the six million dead became the Holocaust. On the contrary, the Palestinian people may be eliminated without the Palestinians and the democrats of the world having the power to transform the thousands of children intentionally murdered into a policy of extermination.

Finally, the fourth component consists of progressively lowering expectations of peace, democratic coexistence, or well-being until it becomes irrelevant to dispense with them. When citizens are only free to be miserable, we are faced with the misery of freedom.

We can conclude that the unthinkable is only unthinkable for the general population that is confronted with its abrupt occurrence. But it was gradually thought out and that is why it happens.

Why we don’t know everything

In each historical period, the dominant political-cultural context imposes limits on what is determined to be human nature. In our time, the dominant context is scientism. From ethology to biology, from psychology to neuroscience, it is contemporary science that determines what human nature is, its potentialities and its limits. What science does not see is not seen. As in the current context science determines what human nature is, it becomes impossible to think about the context that makes this science possible, and not another. Kropotkin was right when he said: “Yes, without doubt, we must base our social theory on biological theory, but then let us look again at biological theory.” Now, while in the biology of the biologist Darwin there was struggle and competition, in the biology of the biologist Kropotkin there was cooperation and solidarity.

With this in mind, many monstrosities may be in the making or already happening without our knowledge and very close to us, in the laboratories of our universities and large companies. Familiar monsters look very much like normality.

Inspired on Montaigne’s essay On liars I suggest that concealment tends to be greater when three concepts are confused: truth, untruth, and lie. Truth is, in fact, the search for truth. There are many paths, but the goal is one, even if it is never achieved. Untruth is falsehood or high improbability that is uttered thinking it is true. The political and financial context in which science is produced today means that untruth often occurs. On the contrary, a lie is falsehood that is said knowing that it is not true. Lies are outside the realm of scientism, but the promiscuity of scientism with politics means that it resorts to lies and makes them pass credibly for truth or untruth.

This is why, when listening to certain politicians, an informed citizen thinks of a piece of advice from St. Augustine that Montaigne quotes in his ninth essay (on liars): “we are better off in the company of a dog we know than in the company of a man whose language we do not understand.”

Why thinking the unthinkable is irrelevant today

Scientism is based on a central idea: science is neither political nor ethical. The applications of science may have political or ethical implications, but science itself does not. For scientism, there are only two categories of thought: the thought and the not yet thought. The unthinkable is irrelevant. All this because science can only answer questions formulated scientifically. However, the category of the unthinkable, like that of spirituality, happiness, or transcendence, cannot be formulated scientifically. Therefore, like spirituality, happiness, or transcendence, the unthinkable does not exist as a question.

If we look at reality from a political or ethical perspective, we see that the unthinkable I have been talking about so far—the extremely aberrant, repugnant, catastrophic event—is only one of the unthinkables. In fact, there are two types of unthinkables: the positive and the negative. The first triggers hope and the second triggers fear. They seem to be mutually exclusive, but one cannot exist without the other. The negative unthinkable is what has occupied me in this text. The positive unthinkable is that of an ideal society or an ideally fulfilled individual life where the problems that society and individuals face today are overcome without new and serious ones taking their place. In the context of Eurocentric modernity, the positive unthinkable is utopia. The idea of realistic utopia is a contradictio in adjecto.

The context of current scientism makes it impossible to imagine the positive unthinkable. Kropotkin lost the battle. I don’t know if he lost the war. Politically, culturally, and ethically, it has become impossible to imagine an alternative society where the negative unthinkables of our time (both those known to the public and those unknown) could not happen. Dominant scientism has naturalized human nature as it has naturalized capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

The problem is that the impossibility of the positive unthinkable naturalizes the negative unthinkable, concealing its negativity. It is the ever-new and ever-old normality. Fighting against it becomes impossible and utopian precisely because the possibility of realistic utopias is… utopian.

This is not a matter of historical fatality. Rather, it is a specific context that Antonio Gramsci called interregnum: the old world in which the most unthinkable horrors are increasingly frequent and “natural” has not yet died completely, while the new world of solidarity, peace, and justice among human beings and between them and nature has not yet been fully born. It is a tragic context in which freedom is confused with necessity and in which the risk of a fatal destiny lies in believing that hidden and invincible forces will forever control our lives. We lack gravediggers for the old and midwives for the new.