is a day of excitement and anxiety, that day the island of Goree, a symbol of the old slavery, may become the cradle of new freedoms.
The University of mutants is an act of faith. An act of faith in the future.
It is, at its birth, the imprint of the man who founded it: the poet Senghor, Negritude and the prophet of the high values it has created. Senghor the poet who has been dreaming about, symbiosis, Africa, the values of Negritude and those of Islam. The poet who, through a dazzling poetic enjambment, dreamed of extending the "fertile crescent" of the borders of China to the great river where for millennia the Black and White merging and to hear the only symphony in which the African sense of deep involvement and the community can bring blacks in the diaspora, those from West Africa with Greek and Christian blacks of Asia: the Dravidians of India.
This dream only imposes its rhythm on the whole life of President Senghor.
The University of mutants will be great if it is measuring the outrageousness of our time, already a beacon tags, at the extreme tip of Cape Verde, the path of the third millennium. For this
University of mutants is not intended to prepare students to meet the needs of even fake, even crazy, our growth companies blind. Its task is to call men to invent a future novel.
The stakes in this business is awesome.
Speaking frankly: the growth model defined by a quantitative increase in endless production and consumption, this growth pattern generated by the Faustian model of Western culture since the Renaissance, led today a worldwide suicide.
our economists, our politicians, our positivist futurists continue to hold the language of the first intoxication of industrialization, the eighteenth century, and enlightenment, that of Marx or that of liberal optimism as if the fundamental law of our world was law of progress, law that science and technology can ensure the happiness of man by satisfying their needs unlimited.
Already the Greek sophists, apply to individual life rules of conduct of imperialism Athens, gave our lives for this purpose: "To see the strongest possible desire and find ways to meet them." Our current Western societies, where growth is the hidden god, and advertising, Liturgy insane, are based on this perversion of "bad infinity", as Hegel said, the infinite purely quantitative, including live men who have forgotten that nothing can add to the true infinite.
But for over a century, all ideologies that attempt to justify this perversion are outdated: the fundamental law of our world is more the law of progress, but its opposite: the law of entropy.
In 1854, thirty years after the "Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire", Sadi Carnot, Clausius discovered, beyond the law of energy transformation, the second law of thermodynamics. It provides that each transformation has a deficit, which is led at the end of the cycle, to the least efficient forms of energy: heat, and this, in turn, degrades himself to a spreading consistency unsuitable for any further reactivation. He gave the measure of degradation of energy and things, the name of entropy, growth disorder and impotence, which is the exact opposite of the mechanistic notion of progress.
As long as the entropy remained only a physical law predicts the depletion of the sun in four billion years, and the death of our planet in a few million years, in terms of human history the entropy is negligible: we had forever, or almost, before us.
But when the power of our technology was such that the man became a geological factor, during the 60s, the anguish was born in the heart of the most lucid. The fundamental and fatal mistake of political economy was "as if" the world of men remained one of the mechanics of Laplace: a closed system powered by an inexhaustible source of energy.
Entropy, Law of History
It appeared that this level of power human, accelerating our growth model dizzily entropy, the entropy was not only a physical law, a law of the long history of things, but also an economic law, a law in the short history of men.One could quibble about when the deadlines set by the Club of Rome, but it was clear that growth in the next thirty years could not, on pain of death of the species have the same orientation or the same rate as the growth of the last thirty years.
When he realized that half of coal extracted from the origins of humanity had been extracted over the last thirty years, half the oil over the last decade, it was worse for uranium, and that even if we discovered all new workable deposits that were previously operated, the deadline would be postponed a few decades, a radically new problem arose: Do we have the right to squander a few years, the benefit of our single generation , capital stored in fossil fuels over millions of years in the bowels of the earth, and capital Newest forests stored for centuries?
For it is the forest as fossil fuels.
third of the existing trees in 1882, nearly two billion hectares of land were razed in 1952. Indiscriminate deforestation of the foothills of the Himalayas today creates devastating floods of Bangla Desh, as forms of culture inherited from colonialism generate droughts in the Sahel.
In the seventy years of modern agriculture has destroyed half of humus on more than one third of cultivated land. A billion and a half acres have been rendered unfit for cultivation. Despite the "green revolution", so profitable for large landowners, grain production per capita has fallen in the Third World, below the level of 1961-1965. Despite the growth and development of fleets of trawlers, the annual produce of the fishery has declined by 11% between 1970 and 1975.
However, our spaceship has 2 million years to reach the first million. 6,000 years of farming just to reach 250 million. A millennium and a half just to double that figure. Since industrialization, the pace is accelerating at breakneck speed: the first billion was reached in 1830. The second in 1930. The third in 1960. The fourth in 1978. How can we accommodate within twenty years, even by limiting births, two billion new human beings on our planet?
And we do not blame only the birth of the poorest, because 10 million Westerners consume and pollute more than would, at current levels, 4 billion of Indian farmers.
Truth minimum is this:
1) Our model of growth accelerates wildly entropy;
2) It is physically impossible to extend, even for the only West;
3) It is physically impossible to generalize to the whole world;
4) In a few years squandering the capital of energy materials and food products of our planet, we assassinate our grandchildren.
Can we reason with the cruel cynicism of political economy summarized by Keynes's quip: "In the long run we are all dead!" modern version of "After us the deluge" of a former despot.
We can not consider ourselves without reason, in the words of the Koran as "caliph of God on earth", that is to say energy officials, soil, air and water, and accounting for them either in financial terms but in terms of entropy, because in this sick world to have no purpose, the entropy never decreased not only the economy but all other aspects of social life.
At the political level, where no project emerges with a human face, the social disintegration manifests itself through violence, drugs, terrorism, kidnapping, fighting without limits or end. Men are rendered irresponsible by the delegation of power, massive propaganda and manipulation that broadcast television stereotyped patterns of behavior, the explosions only mean that men and women can no longer live in nations and states without a message without a face.
Entropy wins when the arts are no longer subject to the seizure of reality and its meaning.
Some painting has no other object than the act of painting, literature no other object than the act of writing. Philosophy in the act of knowing becomes the object of a philosophy without subject. She leaves her indifferent street because its problems only arise because they are improperly installed.
churches and schools respond only to questions that nobody arises.
is why universities and temples become deserts.
Not by a taste delight that I trace this gloomy picture.
This is not the picture of the end of the world.
But only the end of a convulsive historical cycle: the four centuries of Western hegemony
The end of an illusion
Again, this is not the end of the world 's is the end of an illusion: the illusion of hegemony Western cultural.I'm not saying these things inspired by the certainty lucid that exist now, is a constant challenge to entropy.
A challenge that can not be victorious.
- if we manage to establish new relationships with nature by spending the bulk of research on the use of virtually inexhaustible flow of solar energy, and by not creating more artificial needs and most criminal waste according to the requirements of market and non-human war;
- if we manage to establish a new relationship between man and the man who oscillate between individualism over jungle and a mound of totalitarianism, and return to report actual human community;
- if we manage to establish a new relationship with the divine who rediscovers the dimension of transcendence, the possibility of permanent break with the past and present, beyond the catastrophic drop in drifts and blind development of which man is absent. It
why we turn to you, to those who are conscious, writes Mr. Iba Der Thiam, Director of the "University of mutants, belonging to a continent whose contribution to the universal heritage is brilliant 'and he said "should be added to the substrate original values not only of Europe but of all Asian and American Civilization." Thus is posed the real problem of development, because development c' is history in the making.
The problem of growth is not only an economic problem and a political problem but a problem mainly religious and he has to challenge the meaning and purpose in our lives, the possibility of live differently, ie say to break an entire system of social relations and transcend it.
The greatest revolutions in history were not striking power, but emergence of a new reality is born outside the existing order: the world created by the disintegration of the slave society Rome was not born of the victory of the slaves. The world created by the disintegration of the feudal system was not born of the victory of the serfs, but outside the feudal system, a triumph that was neither that of serfs nor lords, but of a new force: that of the bourgeoisie. Today, beyond the sphere of struggle between workers and bosses, a new reality is emerging: a revolution that would be to substitute a proletarian dictatorship to a bourgeois dictatorship, by a dialectic that has never manifested in history would only perpetuate the purposes of the old system, in particular growth model, with all its disposals. The historical experience of the last half century has not checked too.
It is time to realize that a revolution is true for a company that a conversion is about a person: a change of purpose and meaning of life and history.
Otherwise there is no real transfer of rights, but simple transfer of power within a single system of alienation rights, excluding the highest values of the person, autonomy and creativity.
few weeks ago in Cairo, the Congress of the "World Federation of futures research," an Indian, citing the potential for endogenous development in the Third World, said ;: "Today it may be that the West has the least to say about the future of man." I firmly believe that our Indian brother is right.
Problems that we are facing now are global issues through dialogue among cultures and civilizations.
The problems that confront us now are problems that arise only in the changes several times thousands of men to solve them we can not think in myopic politicians, but men who, taking over In a political retreat millennia know rediscover the epic human crises around the mistletoe are ours.
We can no longer possible to confine ourselves to the narrow horizon of politics and economy since the European Renaissance, with its rationalism infirm, claiming to reduce all reality to the concept, with their individualism reducing everything to the extent of our solitude and ignoring more and more specifically human dimension, ie say divine, transcendence and love. Relive the adventure
human
Reliving the human adventure in its fullness, the first hope in the last agony is aware of two mutations of the decisive manThe mutation first hope: that the transition from nomadic life to farming and urbanization, which already allows a small number of no longer shackled by the immediate needs and focus on culture, reflection on the objections, only decisive in human evolution.
Mutation today that the latest fear is the same size for the first time in human history man has the technical power, with the only existing nuclear weapons stockpiles in the world, to destroy dozens of times every trace of life on earth. The Epic Human begun in the Africa, mother of races, in Tanganyika, there are two or three million years, may be terminated.
Surpassing the perspective of four centuries of Western history, it appears that far from opposing, politics and faith, prophecy and politics have always been closely linked in large historical changes.
history poses problems. is much truth of historical materialism.
The prophets bring the answers , and this is the reality of spirit.
The story poses problems, such as the transition from nomadic life to farming and urbanization. The answer is provided by the last prophet, the borders of Iran and Afghanistan s student voice of Zarathustra. With him, for the first time, this historical drama of the struggle of "good tiller of the land of men" against the number robber takes the cosmic dimension of the struggle of good against evil.
Nietzsche does not make a mistake, he writes: "Zarathustra you're like me one of these beings predestined underlying values for millennia. " Zarathustra was for him the prophet of the end times in a Western world dedicated to the will to power by Beyond Good and Evil.
history posed fundamental problems at the crossroads of the Fertile Crescent, Palestine crushed between two great powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia, where the Jews were exiled in turn. Then rose the voice of their prophets to respond to the drama of history by tracing the path to a people's man towards a truly human future, is to say, and this was the desecration of the power of kings with Amos, as with Moses and the Exodus, as with Isaiah during the Babylonian exile. Binding woes of a people to the faults of men, they make the man, beyond all the failures, have full responsibility for its history and the victory of the future.
History also posed a major problem, that of resistance of man to all that is external to him, when beyond the policy responses of the zealots, or withdrawal from the world of the monks of Qumran Jesus Nazareth unveiled in their principle and fought, until they die, the totalitarianism of Jewish priests claiming to dictate policy to the name of religious law, and the totalitarian rule over the Roman religion claiming on behalf of the political power of an emperor which it demanded the worship of one God. The lifting
prophetic of Jesus of Nazareth announced, against totalitarianism double Jewish and Roman, the kingdom, both as a leaven of the inner life and transcendent as referred to the common future, and renewing the life and history.
to Prophet of Islam History also posed problems: those of Saudi idolatrous and divided, and for his successors, those of a Sassanid empire disintegrated by local rebels, a fragmented Byzantine Empire, for his heresies, a Spain delivered to the decline of the Visigoth kings, to bishops and feudal lords greedy looters. Then the Prophet got up. He took over from the religion of Abraham, based on the absolute gift of self to the divine will relay Moses unifying the law of God and the world, the relay of Jesus "the seal of holiness' , beyond all theological subtleties. And Islam swept like a cyclone pollinator, the China Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, the heir of the great civilizations, India to Iran and Greece. He opened the future by a prodigious flowering of science, mysticism and art, giving the man intended, writes Ibn Arabi, the "Sheikh el akbar" and " make his own life rather than a manifestation of the divine. "
teach Islam to Dante and "True Love" Ruzbehan with Shiraz, that "it is in the book of human love that decrypts the divine love."
He will learn all men to be one single whole policy of the highest mystical, as in the example gave Abd El Kader and El Hadj Omar.
This line allows several thousand years to consider the role of the University of 'mutants and its training Goree.
Ending fatal dualisms
This is not an institution modeled on the western academic separating centuries of political science and of prophecy and faith.Apart from this pathetic interlude of world history that begins with the European Renaissance, that is to say, with the simultaneous rise of capitalism and colonialism, in all cultures in all continents, and in all centuries, mystical and political prophecy and social change are one.
When politics and science forget or deny the transcendent dimension of man, his invincible power back on his destiny, then we know only too well what happens to politics and faith.
Politics and economy become technocratic, that is to say they arise over the question of "why" those purposes, but only that of "How "is to say means.
They become scientism. Scientism is the superstition that, separating the science of wisdom, means from ends, result of knowledge not a virtue the service of mastery and control and the achievement of itself but a power serving the will to power towards nature and towards other men. It is no coincidence that this internal combustion engine, the cannon, which boomed for the first time at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, is the ancestor of all modern engines, and if nuclear power is tod hui are ancestors of the Hiroshima bomb.
Faith, in turn, becomes a fundamentalist is to say linked to a past culture and outdated, detached from modern life and incapable of meeting its problems.
Churches would need mystic they have only clergy and dogma.
Revolutions would need prophets and they did that politicians and parties.
Science would need wisdom to assign an end, they are only based on positivism and scientism.
When faith down superstitions began to swarm:
Some preach a return to faith, not by love but by fear of God's people.
Others adhere to a party to delegate their power of choice to an officer or an elected official.
Still others want to be convinced that science and the computer can answer all their problems for failing to ask questions no.
While Latin America, Asia, Africa imitate the West, if its import growth models and models of revolution, they are lost. And the West with them. Create
mutants, rather it is to stop these deadly dualisms. It is unifying in one turn politics, economy, culture and faith, culture and faith dominating and controlling the economy and politics as a reflection on the purposes must dominate and control the organization of resources. Create
mutants is fighting both to changes inside and outside, the man and the structures Robespierre sought to change men like Gandhi.
St. Francis of Assisi opens the prospect of a mutation, as Mao Tse-tung. The
mutants are men who are already in them a world yet unborn. A whole world. Exterior and interior: The policy and that of faith. Men who carry within them Robespierre and Gandhi, St. Francis of Assisi and Mao Tse-tung.
We will tax does one of utopia? Is it a utopia to think that we can live differently? So everything that is great in history would be utopia, because it is of magnitude as the undeniable desire to live differently.
Our company would be crazy if the seeds of new world outcrops already on the ground.
Every branch of our project is rooted in this land alive.
Millions of men today among the holders of the future, seek to develop and live a new relationship between man and nature, between man and man, between man and the divine, and this is only possible through dialogue with cultures, wisdoms, religions who designed and lived these reports.
therefore be expressed here, and always by the same people that they have formed, all the wisdom and all the prophets, the wisdom of hindouïme, Buddhism and Tao, and prophecies of Zoroaster, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These
wisdom and prophecies teach us all that I am not an individual, an atom, a speck of dust separated from others by a blank and buffeted by gusts of air, but I'm a wave without borders, inhabited by all the other waves of the ocean and its tides, for all attractions and gravitations worlds. We came here to make all aware, from the certainty that the other man, that's what I miss to be fully human.
Require a second cultural world
Millions of men today in the Third World, take inventory of their resources and needs to demand a new world economic order and a new cultural world. The Conference of African Ministers responsible for the implementation of science and technology development (the "CASTAFRICA"), meeting in Dakar in 1974, proclaimed: "Science and technology are, for Africa, a means to development and liberation. They also contain risk: they can convey lifestyles and thought dangerous to the African personality ... The technology must be harnessed to serve Africa, not Africa indiscriminately subjected to techniques imported and sold dearly for their only financial profitability in the short term. "After noting that technology choice engages the whole future of a society, and can lead to a real "political pollution", ministers have refused the tragic dilemma in which some would confine them: either you sink material if you do not agree to "modernize" or you will lose your soul if you do.
One can never say enough about the evil of this false dilemma: it is to confuse modernization with westernization and confusion make this a fatal law.
The enumeration by African ministers, techniques fruitful for Africa, points the way to avoid this confusion. They insisted on including the different uses of energy Solar and wind generating units in small autonomous all-terrain vehicles, use of local materials, from construction to the pharmacopoeia and protein production from African plants, freeze, teaching techniques applicable to home.
Within two days of work tomorrow and after tomorrow, I suggest that our inspiration from this method, we developed to send to prospective students, a detailed questionnaire asking each to So, if his own country, a similar list of needs and resources, and its forward thinking on technology projects, economic and cultural.
So there will not be in the University of dualism mutant, killer initiatives, teachers and taught. Everyone will participate fully in the direction in which the Big Three Negritude: Senghor, Cesaire and Damas, call us all for years: the big challenge of giving and receiving.
In the same spirit in our conference preparatory perhaps we can complete this task by inviting students to consider future on the African community not by some sort of nostalgia, but with a willingness to look how it can thrive in Africa and globally, overcoming individualism and totalitarianism, to learn the African contribution to the art of living differently.
I finally wish, on behalf of our "International Institute for Dialogue among Civilizations", the creation of this "University of mutants" is only the first, it an example the creation of other mutants in several universities around the world, and are linked together to share their experiences and pool their hopes?
If we achieve these goals together, then the island of Goree, who straightens his bow today at the breath of trade winds, is not only the Acropolis of blackness, but one of the landmarks of world who give a face to the hope of all mankind.
Ethiopiques # 17
journal Socialist Black African culture
January 1979
- University of mutants was created in 1979 by Senghor an idea of Garaudy. She has organized numerous sessions on development for officials of government organizations. Unfortunately, lack of funds, she had to close its doors in 2005. I would very much like the oak and that we can organize sessions on the relationship between cultures. Luke Collès
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