SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
colonialism
How Can the Global South Fulfill the Promise of Bandung in the 21st Century?
To celebrate the spirit of Bandung is not simply to mark 70 years since the Asia-Africa Conference, but to affirm what being faithful to its principles and ideals means today.
May 08, 2025
The Bandung Conference in April 1955 has achieved the status of a mythical moment in the history of the Global South. There have been many accounts that have highlighted its downsides—among them, the underrepresentation of leaders from sub-Saharan Africa and the absence of anyone from Latin America, the way Cold War geopolitical rivalries found their way into the meeting, its legitimization of the nation state as the principal unit of interaction among the peoples of the postcolonial world to the detriment of other avenues of expressing and harnessing solidarity, and the disappointing aftermath exemplified by the India-China frontier war in the Himalayas in 1962.
Despite these undoubtedly important though arguably revisionist assertions, the “Bandung Moment” has achieved mythical status since, while its expression in the conference proceedings may have been less than perfect, the spirit of postcolonial unity among the rising peoples of the Global South pervaded the conference. Moreover, this spirit of Bandung has been a constant spur to many political actors to reproduce it in its imagined pristine form, leading to dissatisfaction with successive manifestations of Third World solidarity. To celebrate the spirit of Bandung is not simply to mark 70 years since the Asia-Africa Conference, but to affirm what being faithful to its principles and ideals means today.
It took determined resistance from the peoples of Vietnam, the Middle East, and other parts of the world to force the United States and its allies to learn the consequences of violating these principles, but it was at the cost of millions of lives in the Global South.
The Bandung document was primarily an anti-colonial document, and it is heartening to note that so many governments and peoples in the Global South have rallied behind the people of Palestine as they fight genocide and settler-colonialism in Gaza and the West Bank. The role of South Africa in lodging and pursuing the charge of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice, with the formal support of 31 other governments, is exemplary in this regard.
Bandung and Vietnam
April 2025 , the 70th anniversary of Bandung, is also the 50th anniversary of the reunification of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The celebrations over the last few days in Ho Chi Minh City brought back images of that decisive defeat of the American empire—the iconic photos of a tank of the People’s Army smashing through the gate of the presidential palace in Saigon and the frenzied evacuation by helicopter of collaborators from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy. In retrospect, the defeat in Vietnam was the decisive blow dealt to American arms in the last century, one from which it never really recovered. True, the empire appeared to have a second wind in 2001 and 2003, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, but that illusion was shattered with the panicked, shameful exit of the United States and its Afghan subordinates from Kabul in 2021, the images of which evoked the memories of the debacle in Saigon decades earlier.
The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were the dramatic bookends of the military debacle of the empire, which had massive repercussions both globally and in the imperial heartland. Bandung underlined as key principles “Respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” and “Non-intervention or non-interference into the internal affairs of another country.” It took determined resistance from the peoples of Vietnam, the Middle East, and other parts of the world to force the United States and its allies to learn the consequences of violating these principles, but it was at the cost of millions of lives in the Global South. And it is by no means certain that the era of aggressive Western interventionism has come to an end.
Ascent and Counterrevolution
The economic dimension of the struggle between the Global South and the Global North since Bandung might have been less dramatic, but it was no less consequential. And it was equally tortuous. Bandung was followed by the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, the formation of the Group of 77, and the establishment of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This upward arc in the struggle of the Global South for structural change in the global economy climaxed with the call for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974.
Then the counterrevolution began. Taking advantage of the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s, structural adjustment was foisted on the Global South via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, United Nations agencies like the U.N. Center for Transnational Corporations were either abolished or defanged, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) supplanted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and sidelined UNCTAD. The “jewel in the crown of multilateralism,” the WTO was meant to discipline the Global South not only with trade rules benefiting the Global North but also with anti-development regimes in intellectual property rights, investment, competition, and government procurement.
Will the BRICS or any other alternative multilateral system be able to avoid replicating the old order of power and hierarchy?
Instead of the promised “development decades” heralded by the rhetoric of the United Nations, Africa and Latin America experienced lost decades in the 1980s and 1990s, and in 1997, a massive regional financial crisis instigated by Western speculative capital and austerity programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund ended the “Asian Economic Miracle.”
Although most governments submitted to IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs, some, like Argentina, Venezuela, and Thailand resisted successfully, backed by their citizens. But the main area of economic war between North and South was the WTO. A partnership between southern governments and international civil society frustrated the adoption of the so-called Seattle Round during the Third Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Seattle. Then during the Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun in 2003, developing country governments staged a dramatic walk out from which the WTO never recovered; indeed, it lost its usefulness as the North’s principal agency of global trade and economic liberalization.
Rise of China and the BRICS
It was the sense of common interest and working together to oppose northern initiatives at the WTO that formed the basis for the formation of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which gradually emerged as an alternative pole to the U.S.-dominated multilateral system in the second decade of the 21st century.
The anchor of the BRICS was China. A country that had beaten imperialism over five decades of struggle in the first half of the 20th century, the People’s Republic confidently entered into a devil’s bargain with the West: In return for offering cheap labor, it sought massive foreign investment and, most important, advanced technology. Western capital, seeking super profits by exploiting Chinese labor, agreed to the deal, but it was China that got the better end of the bargain, embarking on a crash industrialization process that made it the number one economy in the globe as of today (depending of course on which metric one uses). The Chinese ascent had major implications for the Global South. China not only provided massive resources for development, becoming, as one analyst put it, the “world’s largest development bank.” By reducing dependence on the Western-dominated financial agencies and Western creditors, it also provided policy space for Southern actors to make strategic choices.
The obverse of China’s super industrialization was deindustrialization in the United States and Europe, and coupled with the global financial crisis of 2008, this led to a deep crisis of U.S. hegemony, sparking the recent momentous developments, like U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against friends and foes alike; his attacks on traditional U.S. allies that he accused of taking advantage of the United States; his abandonment of the WTO and, indeed, of the whole U.S.-dominated multilateral system; and his ongoing retrenchment and refocusing of U.S. economic and military assets in the Western Hemisphere.
All these developments have contributed to the current fluid moment, where the balance in the struggle between the North and South is tipping toward the latter.
Rhetoric and Reality in the Global South Today
But living up to and promoting the spirit of Bandung involves more than tipping the geopolitical and geoeconomic balance toward the Global South. The very first principle of the Bandung Declaration urged “Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou En Lai played stellar roles in Bandung, but can it be said that the governments they represented have remained faithful to this principle? India today is ruled by a Hindu nationalist government that considers Muslims to be second-class citizens, the military regime in Egypt has engaged in egregious violations of human rights, and Beijing is carrying out the forcible cultural assimilation of the Uygurs. It is difficult to see how such acts by these governments and others that initiated the historic conference, like Burma where a military junta is engaged in genocide, and Sri Lanka with decades of a violent civil war, can be seen as consistent with this principle.
Indeed, most states of the Global South are dominated by elites that, whether via authoritarian or liberal democratic regimes, keep their people down. The levels of poverty and inequality are shocking. The gini coefficient for Brazil is 0.53, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world. The rate for China, 0.47, also reflects tremendous inequality, despite remarkable successes in poverty reduction. In South Africa, the gini coefficient is an astounding 0.63, and 55.5% of the people live under the poverty line. In India, incomes have been polarizing over the past three decades with a significant increase in bilionaires and other “high net worth” Individuals.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet.
The vast masses of people throughout the Global South, including Indigenous communities, workers, peasants, fisherfolk, nomadic communities, and women are economically disenfranchised, and in liberal democracies, such as the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa, and Kenya, their participation in democracy is often limited to casting votes in periodic, often meaningless, electoral exercises. South-South investment and cooperation models such as the Belt and Road Initiative and free trade agreements frequently entail the capture of land, forests, water, and marine areas, and extraction of natural wealth for the purposes of national development. Local populations—many of whom are Indigenous—are dispossessed of their livelihoods, territories, and ancestral domains with scant legal recourse and access to justice, invoking the specter of homegrown colonialism and counterrevolutions.
Bandung, as noted earlier, institutionalized the nation state as the principal vehicle for cross-border relationships among countries. Had global movements like the Pan-African movement, the women’s movement, the labor movement, and the peasant movement been represented at the 1955 conference, the cross-border solidarities institutionalized in the post-Bandung world could perhaps have counteracted and mitigated, via lateral pressure, elite control of national governments. Those advocating for the self-determination of peoples, and for the redistribution of resources, opportunities, and wealth within national boundaries, would perhaps not have been demonized and persecuted as subversives and threats to national interests.
During this current moment of global transition, as the old Western-dominated multilateral system falls into irreversible decay, the new multipolar word will need new multilateral institutions. The challenge, especially for the big powers of the Global South, is not to create a replica of the old Western-dominated system, where the dominant powers merely used the U.N., WTO, and Bretton Woods institutions to indirectly impose their will and preferences on the vast majority of countries. Will the BRICS or any other alternative multilateral system be able to avoid replicating the old order of power and hierarchy? To be honest, the current political-economic regimes in the most powerful countries in the Global South do not inspire confidence.
Bandung and the Continuing Specter of Capitalism
At the time of the Bandung Conference, the political economy of the globe was more diverse. There was the communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. There was China, with its push to move from national democracy to socialism. There were the neutralist states like India that were seeking a third way between communism and capitalism. With decades of neoliberal transformation of both the Global North and the Global South, that diversity has vanished. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet. The dynamic centers of global capitalism may have moved, over the last 500 years, from the Mediterranean to Holland to Britain to the United States and now to the Asia Pacific, but capitalism continues to both penetrate the farthest reaches of the globe and deepen its entrenchment in areas it has subjugated. Capitalism continually melts all that is solid into thin air, to use an image from a famous manifesto, creating inequalities both within and among societies, and exacerbating, indeed threatening to render terminal, the relationship between the planet and the human community.
Can we fulfill the aspirations of Bandung without bringing forth a post-capitalist system of economic, social, and political relations? A system where people in all their diversity and strengths can participate and benefit equally, free from the violence of bigotry, racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism, and from the slavery to endless growth that is destroying the planet? That is the question, or rather that is the challenge, and the “unfinished business” of Bandung. The 10 principles that form the basis of the Bandung spirit are reflected in international human rights law but have been cynically manipulated to serve particular geopolitical, geoeconomic, racialized, and gendered interests. Being faithful to the spirit of Bandung in our era therefore, requires us to go beyond the limits of Bandung. The Bandung Spirit continues to signify ideals of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, peace, justice, self-determination, and solidarity—ideals that were shaped by the peoples of Asia and Africa at the forefront of struggles for liberation from colonialism and resistance to imperialism, who gave their lives for liberty. Despite the achievement of independence from colonial occupation—with significant exceptions like Palestine, West Papua, and Kanaky—struggles of rural and urban working classes for freedom from capitalist exploitation and extractivism, and from fascist alliances between capital and authoritarian states continue.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” declares a character in a famous novel. The world might seem to be on the cusp of a new era, with its promise of a new global order, but the Global South still has to awaken from the nightmare of the last 500 years. It is not coincidental that the birth of capitalism also saw the beginning of the colonial subjugation of the Global South. Only with the coming of a postcapitalist global order will the nightmare truly end.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Greenland Will Never Be for Sale
My brief but deep immersion into Inughuit culture leaves me profoundly hopeful—believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland.
May 06, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump, casting a covetous eye on Greenland, has my attention. I have a history in that place, so little known to Americans in general, having spent the entire year of 1964 at Thule Air Force Base, now Pitufik Space Station, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The road I’ve traveled since has me deeply concerned about Trump in every respect—believing that everything he represents and wants is contrary to the best interests of our country, the world, and mankind altogether, excepting perhaps oligarchs.
At Thule I was responsible for overseeing the maintenance of our air-to-air missiles and for supervising the loading of those missiles on board our F-102 fighter jets in the event of declared hostilities with our great “bugaboo,” the Soviet Union.
Many years later, after volunteering for and spending a year in Vietnam, I became a full-fledged “peacenik,” an adjunct professor of peace studies at the University of Maine, angry and in despair about this country’s militarism and particularly agitated about our vast empire of military bases on foreign lands. My experiences in Greenland and Vietnam were surely foundational to my conversion. I had become well-aware of the wide-spread, anti-base movement and sympathetic with the neighbors of these bases who, so often, experienced profound environmental degradation, noise pollution, and violence.
Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on “60 Minutes”: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!”
The heartless displacement of the Inughuit people of Thule, done without forenotice to enable the construction of a military base in 1951, 13 years prior to my assignment there, offers a good case in point. The place they called Uummannaq had been their home for centuries, and was the sacred burial grounds of their ancestors. In May of 1953, 300 men, women, and children, having been given four days to vacate their modest sod homes, set off by dogsled for a place called Qaanaaq, 150 kilometers across the icecap. No promised houses awaited them, and they were forced to live through the cold, wet summer in the tents they’d been given. They were denied the right to return to or hunt in their ancestral homelands.
I’d also learned that in 1968, a B52 had crashed on the icecap while attempting to make an emergency landing at Thule, spreading radioactive debris across the land. Four nuclear weapons were on board; one, never to be recovered.
This history and my developing curiosity about the real stories behind our military empire inspired my quest to visit Qaanaaq, a trip I was able to realize in 2008. That journey, and the people I met, provide the basis for my perspectives on Trump’s covetous ambitions.
The Principals
Aqqaluk Lynge: Former member of the Greenland Parliament, former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (1995-2002), member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, honorary doctorate in humane letters—Dartmouth College (2012), and uthor ofThe Right to Return: 50 Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland.
I had the good fortune to meet and to interview Mr Lynge, who at the time was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. He enabled my subsequent meetings with Qaanaaq people who had been among those evicted.
Uusaqqak Qujaukitsoq: Hunter, fisherman, and leader of the so-called Hingitaq 53, the group of nearly 500 Inughuits who launched legal proceedings against Denmark seeking their right to return. Uusaqqak had been a 12-year-old boy, living at Uummannaq, at the time of the eviction.
Tautianguaq Simigaq: Simigaq, a hunter, had been one of 13 Inuit who worked on the B52 crash site, 11 of whom had died by the time of my visit. He was among several hunters who reported seeing deformed walrus, seals, and foxes in the area of the crash in the years since.
It is no exaggeration that my visit with the people I met in Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, the northernmost year-round inhabited settlement in Greenland, remain in my soul all these years later. Uusaqqak and his wife, Inger, invited me into their modest home and, though their English was limited, we spent many comfortable hours together, he sharing his life story to include the trauma of the dislocation, hunting and fishing, and education in Copenhagen. His travels had taken him far and wide. As a representative of the Inughuit people he had proudly once met Nelson Mandela. Their 30-year-old son, Magssanguaq, a virtual renaissance man, spoke English and Danish, and was a teacher, a musician, a poet, and an accomplished photographer. He had a keen sense of the injustices his people had suffered as victims of colonialism and would become my interpreter and guide.
Mags and I devoted much of our time in Qaanaaq to visiting and interviewing elders who had been victims of the displacement. Those sessions were, without exception, emotional in the telling and the listening.
My immersion into Inughuit culture, a deep one during my brief visit, but a lasting one of reflection, leaves me profoundly hopeful—believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland. I was made mindful of Syracuse University Scholar Philip Arnold’s The Urgency of Indigenous Values, in which he argues that the very future of the world is dependent upon the ascendency of “green values” of Indigenous populations everywhere, as opposed to the “raider” values of our dominant culture. The history of the Inughuits who had lived on their sacred lands at Uummannaq for centuries is known by all Greenlanders, 89% of whom are of Inuit descent. I would assert that Trump represents, even personifies, “raider” values, and is seen that way by a large majority of all people of Greenland.
I have recently read that Trump is bringing Columbus Day “back from the ashes.” Hmmm! How might that play with Indigenous people?
Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on “60 Minutes”: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!”
Watch it. They’re not words of casual sentiment.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Mad, Mad Cosmic-Politics of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk
The billionaire oligarchs have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world and now they want others to join them.
May 03, 2025
What do powerful tech-nerds such as William MacAskill (the Oxford Professor), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Land, and Elizier Yudkowski—among innumerable others—share across their minor differences? Well, according to Adam Becker in his fascinating and timely new book More Everything Forever, they share a commitment to ever more rapid capitalist growth managed by tech billionaires and exported to other planets. To these folks, current dislocations such as global climate wreckage, huge economic inequalities, the dangers of nuclear holocaust, the powers of a wealthy oligopoly, fascist movements, and the earthly legacies of racism and colonialism do not set the center of attention. These are second-order concerns (at best) to be resolved or left behind in a future dominated by the interminable expansion of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, space travel, human brain uploads to computers, and colonization of distant planets.
These tech-bros, centered in Silicon Valley, form a constellation of either impossibly rich or extremely well-funded and self-certain “visionaries” of a Brave New World. They manufacture an endless supply of acronyms which, I think, helps to push numerous problems in their assumptions and ambitions into the rearview mirror as they press ahead. No worries about the massive new energy outputs that will be required by AI and cryptocurrency. Nevermind that the massive wealth generated and ever more sublime technologies created will either eventually resolve those problems on earth or allow "humanity" to escape them through new extra-terrestrial "colonization."
The AI Disalignment Ruse
Consider an initial example. Elizier Yudkowski, an apparent dissident in this constellation, seems to think that a hi-roller, tech world is the only agenda worth pursuing, but he also worries that advanced AI systems could well turn against humanity. He calls this the "alignment problem" in a way that reminds one of sci-fi stories such as Star Wars and Bladerunner. By keeping our eyes focused on the future danger of AI systems escaping control, in a world otherwise governed by techno-rationality, Yudkowski—intentionally or not—supports an existential shell game. You focus on that existential issue in the future and ignore or downplay the problems that hi-tech capitalism has created for the present and near future. Accelerate the pace of production and mastery over the earth now and then resolve the one (fictive?) problem it produces later. This is a temporal magnification of Donald Trump's everyday politics of deflection and diversion; it helps to explain how Trump and Musk found each other—even if that alliance may not hold much longer.
The Bezos/Musk Extra-Terrestrial Schemes
Let's turn now to the even more expansive distractions fueled by the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk space agendas. Bezos, talking about energy limits on earth: "We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to us...Stasis would be really bad, I think ...But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans...That's the world I want my great-grand children's great-grand children to live in."
If accelerated growth and hyper inequality are not to be overturned now in the name of justice and planetary resilience, the only answer, apparently, is massive space exploration and new planetary occupations. For the options are only "stasis" or eternally accelerated growth overseen by multi-billionaire overlords. Keep your eyes on the space bauble shining from the future to distract attention from the present.
And Musk's interim plan for settlement on Mars? "We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets."
Again, no need to eliminate unprecedented multibillionaire fortunes, no hesitation about his own rigid mode of reasoning, no real case for planetary resilience now, no apparent concern for the devastating lives currently lived by so many humans, no care about the lives of other species. Rather, continue the same old course by accelerating its pace and expanding its range rapidly to other planets. Hence, the heavily state-subsidized Space X program which has already crashed twice. And the super-self confidence of those who call themselves "effective altruists." These are the men who either control inordinate wealth or, like William MacAskill in What We Owe The Future, have institutional access to it because they play by the rules of the hi-tech billionaires. They insist on being the ones who determine what altruism means and how it operates.
Counter Modes of Wisdom
There are several ways to counter the mad, mad cosmic visions of Bezos and Musk. Becker concentrates on the underlying terror of death that helps to fuel their visions, as well as the absence of care for others that fuels these late-adolescent modes of reasoning. There are, for instance, very few women, Native Americans or other minorities in this hi-tech bros club. Moreover, there are uncanny affinities and parallels between this vision of the future and the views of heaven and a second coming advanced by evangelicals. The evangelicals promise a second coming and eternal life after death; the hi-tech boys promise computer brain uploads to retain consciousness for centuries. Thus, it is not all that hard to switch from one to the other. That underlying affinity is also why it was rather easy to forge a white evangelical/neoliberal assemblage in the States during the 1980s, one that has been morphing toward fascism today as its effectiveness has faltered and its demands have escalated.
I respect Becker's responses to this madness and will merely amplify and adjust them here. The tech-bros accounts of brains as human computer systems that can be uploaded to human-manufactured computers is, well, an adolescent dream parading as science. Our brains are intimately connected to our bodies and cannot function without them. The gut-brain relays recently studied by neuroscientists, to take merely one instance, help to explain how our thought-oriented responses to the world are infused with affective prompts and emotional priorities. Don't try to "upload" your brain.
The simple, detached model of reasoning the tech bros embrace, treated as rationality itself by these cosmic dreamers, reflects distortions in their own modes of thought rather than sophisticated images of thinking and reasoning. Their oft-stated contempt for the humanities and the academy exposes and enacts that distorted image, as they join Donald Trump in trying to reshape the academy to reflect such cruel models of thinking, feeling, and reasoning.
Moreover, extended life on Mars is next to impossible—another flashy image to project onto the cosmos in an extension of old shell games. Besides, Mars settlement would be a horror story even if it were populated by humans who carried their bodies with them to its "colonization." Bracket for now the problems of the poisonous soil there, no stable supply of oxygen, material breakdowns, and internal wars or conflicts. Where, in this world far, far away, would be moonlight walks, mountain hikes, ocean views, and body surfing? What about traveling to another country? What about humanistic schools and universities, designed to educate the mind and body together? What about those essential ties to chimps, birds, elephants, horses, dogs, trees, fertile soil, platypuses, and cats that so enliven and educate human life?
The point is clear. The "long-termists," as they sometimes call themselves in contrast to those of us supposedly mired here on the earth, have either continued to buy an untenable adolescent boy's vision or have quietly outgrown it and now deploy it as a series of shiny baubles to deflect us from their callousness about the present and absence of wisdom about the future. For wisdom is neither a technique nor an algorithm. It involves mixing care for this world into an appreciation of how many things we do not know about it. Don't forget how Elon Musk has already displayed his willingness to participate in Big Lies, as he wreaks havoc on governmental programs for the poor, elderly, and sick—anything irrelevant to his immediate manufacturing interests. He recently insisted, for instance, that those who publicly protest the DOGE destruction rampage have been paid by its opponents to do so, projecting back onto them the cynical salesman approach he has adopted to sell Tesla and Space X and to entrance young men to vote for Trump in the most recent presidential election.
Entangled Humanists and the Academy
It is time for entangled humanists in the Academy—those who respect embodied human beings and other species as they explore and demand new modes of resilience today—to take on these hi-tech bros more directly and actively, as Adam Becker has started to do. We can, for instance, expose the fallacies in their space dreams as we undercut their child-like images of reason. We can expose the space subsidies they demand and receive, as they pretend to purge waste from the "deep state."
For the high-tech bros do not only distract and deflect too many from the dangers of today and the irrationalities their incredible wealth allows them to enact. They also seek to destroy the liberal arts academy—an essential institution that educates the youth, helps all of us better to discern dangers in such mad dreams, and helps us to forge wise responses to them.
They have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world; now they want a larger cadre to join them. We must not allow them to succeed.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular