by BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS
Both personally and collectively, the certainties of the present always carry with them the germ of future uncertainties. But there are moments or eras in which certainties are more pronounced and uncertainties more remote, and moments or eras in which the opposite occurs. What kind of certainty/uncertainty dialectic do contemporary societies find themselves in? As always, history helps us to understand, but it doesn’t prescribe anything for the simple reason that it never repeats itself. Certainties can be shaken by two types of uncertainty: upward uncertainties and downward uncertainties. The former are the challenges that can be overcome with a little more of the same kind of effort that gave rise to the certainties; the downward uncertainties are those that represent challenges which, from the outset, seem lost. But the most important thing about this classification is knowing which class or social group has certainties and benefits from them, and which class or social group has uncertainties and what kinds of consequences they have.
At the beginning of the last century, the European bourgeoisie, which at the time claimed to be the protagonists of the only civilized world, was full of certainties. Scientific and technological advances were dizzying. On the technological front, the two sides of the North Atlantic (Europe and Europe-out-of-place) were rivaling each other in the speed of inventions in the fields of aviation, motorized travel, radio, and cinema. In 1900, French trains were faster than English or German trains, at 59mph, 56.5mph, 50mph respectively. But the Americans outpaced them all: 67mph. Advances in science were equally exciting, even if many of them translated into new technologies. For example, in 1895, Wilhem R?ntgen discovered lightning with an immense penetrating capacity. Since no one knew what they were, R?ntgen called them x-rays. This was followed by the discoveries (sometimes rediscoveries) of radioactivity, the atomic structure of matter, alpha and beta rays, the theory of electrons and the theory of relativity. The absolute space of classical mechanics gave way to the impact of time and speed, the relationship between matter and electric charge, and the relationship between particles and fields. Rutherford described the atom as a miniature solar system and Niels Bohr sought a synthesis between atomic theory and quantum theory, an effort crowned in 1925 by Schr?dinger and Heisenberg and by the concept of entropy. For its part, mathematics, through George Cantor and his theory of sets, had entered a field that had previously been the exclusive preserve of theologians: infinity and the various types of infinity. But perhaps the most important certainty of the early 20th century was that biology would transform humanity in unprecedented ways in the centuries to come. Biology brought together physics, chemistry, psychology, sociology and even ethics and religion. The triumph of science extended to medicine and psychiatry. It was a world of certainties. There were uncertainties, but they were upward, in other words, challenges to be conquered only with more effort.
But this is only part of the story. After all, the First World War was looming. Two downward uncertainties (i.e. uncertainties difficult to conceive of as easy challenges to overcome) haunted the European bourgeoisie: the growing power of the working class as a social and political actor and the awakening of Asia, illustrated by the emergence of the power of Japan, “the yellow peril” of the time. The former was for the working class the first rising uncertainty in its history: the challenge that with a little more effort it could defeat the two pillars of bourgeois power: property and privilege. The bourgeoisie’s second downward uncertainty would eventually lead indirectly to war: the benign side of science and technology concealed the dark side of power struggles, imperial rivalries, living space, the propaganda of war as an exercise in purification and progress, the desperate search for raw materials, the savage destruction of nature and its faithful guardians. Was war the logical outcome of previous progress? And if so, was the previous progress real or illusory? Were there any alternatives? Why weren’t they tried?
The certainties of today
The certainties of today are heirs to those of the last century, except that over time they become more fragile and almost always closer to downward uncertainty. And the protagonists have also changed profoundly. Let’s look at the paradigmatic case.
Science and technology. Every society gets the science it deserves. The conflicts and contradictions in society are always reflected in science. At the beginning of the 20th century, largely due to the growing strength of the working class, the fundamental contradiction was between prosperity and productivity: either maximizing full humanity or maximizing wealth. Prosperity pointed to the distribution of benefits across all of humanity (even if humanity was confined to the North Atlantic). The distribution didn’t have to be egalitarian, but it had to be significant enough to avoid “the rebellion of the masses”. On the contrary, productivity was centered on the accumulation and concentration of wealth because, given the scarcity of resources, no one could get rich without causing the impoverishment of others.
The idea of prosperity dominated both economic theory and law. Far from having altruistic motives, the idea of prosperity was haunted by the fear of socialism. There was theorizing about “the moral obligation of the economy”, the “social function of property”, “the new natural law”, “the morality of competition”. Max Weber anguished over the problem of objectivity in the face of the contradictions he had learned from Marx (without saying so). The boldest ones spoke of solidarism, economic democracy, free association, social protection legislation, integral socialism and imperialism. All this scientific creativity was intended to manage the emerging contradictions, but it had little impact on political decisions, which were increasingly dominated by the idea of progress as productivity and the accumulation of wealth. As always, science and technology followed politics.
The certainties in scientific and technological progress are the same today, but the intellectual and political contradiction between prosperity and productivity has disappeared. To understand this disappearance, we need to answer the question: where are the protagonists of the benefit of certainties today, and the protagonists of the uncertainties they cause?
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