Fernando Alcoforado*
The world is facing in the contemporary era with several crises. With each passing day, these crises deepen in the economic, political, social and environmental areas, whether at national level or on a global scale. However, the greatest crisis experienced by humanity today is the intellectual crisis of thought that constitutes the main obstacle to overcoming other crises and to the construction of a new society centered on real economic, political, social and environmental progress. The intellectual crisis of thought in the contemporary era is what makes the world we live in chaotic, like a ship drifting towards disaster.
In the 18th century, several thinkers began to mobilize around the defense of ideas that guided the renewal of practices and institutions in force throughout Europe. Raising philosophical questions that thought about the condition and happiness of man, the Enlightenment movement systematically attacked everything that was considered contrary to the search for happiness, justice and social equality. The Enlightenment movement was based on the belief in the power of reason and progress, freedom of thought and political emancipation. The Enlightenment was a global, philosophical, political, social, economic and cultural movement, which advocated the use of reason as the best way to achieve freedom, autonomy and political emancipation. The 18th century Enlightenment used classical science values to forge a new worldview, based on the equality of all.
With the Enlightenment, we have an optimistic view of the world that would not be able to interrupt its progress to the extent that man had the full use of his rationality. Natural rights, respect for diversity of ideas and social justice should promote the improvement of the human condition. Offering these ideas, the Enlightenment motivated the bourgeois revolutions in France and throughout the world in the 18th century that brought the end of the Old Regime and the installation of liberal doctrines that prevailed in the world until the contemporary era.
The Enlightenment provided the motto of the French Revolution (Freedom, Equality and Fraternity) and fertilized it as its followers opposed injustices, religious intolerance and the privileges of absolutism. However, from the French Revolution to the present moment, the political promises of the Enlightenment have been abandoned around the world with the adoption of increasingly inhumane practices by governments and imperialists by the great capitalist powers, the triggering of 3 world wars (World War I, World War II and the Cold War), the advent of fascism, Nazism and neo-fascism, military interventions and coups d’état in several countries around the world.
Modernity was born with the 1st Industrial Revolution that occurred in 1876 in England, meaning an extraordinary intellectual effort by Enlightenment thinkers to develop science and reason and discover universal laws to be put at the service of humanity. With the Industrial Revolution, science and technology acquired a fundamental importance for human progress, through continuous technological innovations. The idea was to use the accumulation of knowledge generated in pursuit of human happiness and the enrichment of daily life.
Modernity is generally associated with the 2nd Industrial Revolution resulting from socioeconomic changes with the industrialization of England, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Japan, characterized especially by the development of new sources of energy (electricity and oil), the substitution of iron by steel and the emergence of new machines, tools and chemicals (such as plastic). Between 1909, when Henry Ford created the assembly line and opened series production, and the end of the 20th century, almost all industries were mechanized and automation was extended to all manufacturing sectors.
Modernity is identified with the belief in the progress and ideals of the Enlightenment. However, the evolution of Modernity was marked by events that negatively marked today’s society. The main one was undoubtedly the catastrophes of World War I and II. In fact, science and technology contributed to the barbarism of two world wars with the invention of powerful and destructive weapons. Science and technology came to be used on an unprecedented scale for both good and evil. All this scientific and technological development culminated in the current era with a global ecological crisis that could result in a catastrophic global climate change that could threaten the survival of humanity in the middle of the 21st century. In this sense, one can doubt the real benefits brought by scientific and technological progress with the advent of Modernity.
The Enlightenment’s political theses have failed since the English Revolution (1640), the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789). This failure paved the way for the advent of Marxist ideology around the world, which proposed to take a step forward in relation to the Enlightenment, seeking to end the exploitation of man-by-man by reducing economic inequalities between social classes and, in the future, its complete abolition with the implantation of communism. The facts of history show that the Enlightenment theses that guided the bourgeois revolutions in the 18th century and the Marxism on the basis of which the socialist revolutions were carried out in the 20th century failed because they did not fulfill their historic promises to achieve human happiness and the economic progress shared by all.
The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, the failure of economic development in Cuba and North Korea and China’s abandonment of socialism based on the Soviet model, with the adoption of a hybrid economy of state capitalism, demonstrate the infeasibility of the Soviet socialist model. In order to evolve towards a communist society defended by Marx, it is necessary to pass through an intermediate stage of mixed economy along the lines of social democracy in Scandinavian countries. The communism advocated by Marx can only be built when there is a Social Welfare State in each country and the world reaches economic, social and political integration with the existence of a world government that ensures the ordering of the global economy to avoid chaos current, the ordering in international relations to avoid wars and to ensure world peace and the ordering of the global environment to avoid the degradation of nature.
The failure of the Enlightenment and Marxism in achieving the progress of humanity and achieving happiness for human beings paved the way for the advent of Postmodernity which represents a cultural reaction to the loss of confidence in the universal potential of the Enlightenment and Marxist project of society . Postmodernity therefore means a reaction to what is modern. In Post-Modernity, the world built of durable objects was replaced by that of available products and designed for immediate obsolescence and disposal. Post-Modernity can be characterized as a reaction to culture to the way in which the ideals of Modernity have historically developed, associated with the loss of optimism and confidence in the universal potential of the Enlightenment and Marxist project. It is also configured as a rejection of the attempt to colonize by science and technology from other spheres of man’s life.
In the contemporary era, reason and science also went into a deep crisis with the defeat of the paradigms of Enlightenment and Marxism in the second half of the twentieth century, which were replaced by the new paradigm of Post-Modernity, which, according to its ideologists, does not exist truths. After realizing that all previous systems were wrong, postmodernism came to the tragic conclusion that nothing can be known. Postmodernists don’t believe in reason. For postmodernists, even science would be just one of several ways of knowing reality, with nothing to do with the truth.
Postmodern thinking is convergent with the nihilism of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the Nazi Germany philosopher, who in his work, The Will to Power (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2011), stated that the solution to the crisis was in rejection of reason and the return of the prophets, who should, not through reason, but through determination, found new values that would guide people and build new civilizations. If Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic thinking prevails, humanity will inevitably move towards the economic, political, social and environmental disaster that could threaten its survival. The great challenge for men and women of thought in the contemporary era is to reinvent the Enlightenment adjusted to the current times so that it can indicate the paths that humanity will have to take in order to build a better world.
It is concluded, from the above, that the disappearance in today’s world of the last reserves of critical rationality advocated by the Enlightenment and Marxism paved the way for Post-Modernity, which represents a huge threat to the progress of humanity. In view of this fact, it is an immense challenge for contemporary thinkers to establish new paradigms and new values of rational behavior to be formulated for human society in the current era in order to defeat the nefarious political and ideological influence of Post-Modernity. Contemporary thinkers need to mobilize themselves in the reinvention of a new Enlightenment project, as the thinkers of the 18th century did, aiming at building a new world that brings to an end the ordeal of humanity.
We need a new Enlightenment for the 21st century. At the heart of the new thinking must be the protection of all forms of life and the planet. The only humanly relevant progress is what actually contributes to the well-being of all human beings and the preservation of nature that the automatisms of economic growth are not enough to ensure. Progress, in this sense, should not be seen as a spontaneous donation of the technique, but an intentional construction by which men decide what should be produced, how and for whom, avoiding the social and ecological costs of wild industrialization as much as possible. This progress cannot depend either on isolated business decisions, as advocated by neo-liberal ideologues, nor on the bureaucratic guidelines of a centralizing state, as it is defended by socialist ideologues along the Soviet lines, but on impulses emanating from society itself.
The 21st century Enlightenment maintains its faith in science, but knows that it needs to be controlled socially and that scientific and technological research must obey the ends and values established based on social consensus, so that it does not become a blind force on service of war and domination. Human rights doctrine assumes its most valuable banner, without ignoring that in most of humanity only profound social and political reforms can ensure its effective enjoyment. It fights illegitimate power, aware that it is located not only in the tyrannical state, but also in society, in which it has become invisible and total, molecular and diffuse, imprisoning the individual in its meshes as surely as in the days of the absolute monarchy. Fight without barracks for freedom and against oppression of any kind. Build a new world order that is able to organize not only the relations between men on the face of the Earth, but also their relations with nature. Develop a planetary social contract that enables economic and social development and the rational use of nature’s resources for the benefit of all humanity.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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