Coloniality, original sin, and progress

 While rather abstract and far-reaching, coloniality as a concept has historical predecessors within both western and non-western thought. There is something about how different human civilizations in different eras in their encounter with "others" along their borders were chauvinistic, violent, disruptive, and disastrously wasteful of human capital and human potential. The will to power of a particular civilization is experienced at its borders as the imposition of unjust and arbitrary punishments.

To myself as a thinker in 2024 examining and reading the works of decolonial philosophers, and looking at the ethical motivations held in common by these thinkers, I think that the terms "coloniality" and "coloniality of being" -the idea that the legacies of Euro-colonialism remain embedded in our consciousness after the end of formal colonialism- were an attempt to puncture liberal western triumphalism by analyzing western history with a repurposed theological concept of "original sin". This brief essay seeks to examine some of the contradictions of that move and the ideas generated by it.

The decolonial philosopher Anibal Quijano coined the concept of coloniality to analyze the postcolonial legacy of western European colonial expansion. As an idea, it sits uneasily between conservative and religious ideas of tradition and the secular idea of progress and universal history, a reflection of the educational background of its most active proponents who were all steeped in western theological and philosophical thought. The decolonial philosophers contribution to the western discourse of universal history took the form of a critique that is also a synthesis of religious and secular ideas. The emergence of the term "coloniality," and its resonance in secular spaces like the academic humanities, show the resilience of the religious idea of original sin, its transformation by a philosophical school of thought into a secular vision of progress, and the contradictions generated thereby.

With coloniality, original sin ceases being universal and becomes the turning back of claims to universalism into a form of negative particularity historically anchored in the last half millenia of human history. Let me "steel man" the critique they make. Whether one agrees with the decolonial scholars or not, it seems vital not to mistake western civilizational hubris and claims of progress for having really transcended essential human nature, notwithstanding the virtues of the refinements in rationality made by western thinkers. Artists of all kind have well portrayed certain types and dilemmas illustrating the folly and hubris of western man in the grip of his illusion of self-mastery through rationality and progress. It is vitally necessary to also recognize the fallenness and baseness of human motivations in the global expansions of peoples at the western end of the Eurasian peninsula since 1492, instead of merely celebrating them as an instantiation of universal human progress. European colonialism might be thought as the expression and legacy of human fallenness, a desire supercharged into a possibility by a punctuated acceleration in different kinds of technological and material progress of that world region.

If coloniality really does pervade our very being down to its core, this yields a rather pessimistic vision of the possibility of progress, more akin to a conservative religious view of humanity's baseness/fallenness/'at a loss'-ness. One way the decolonial philosophers reassert a positive and progressive worldview, or some kind of redemption from the prison of coloniality, is through the promise of undoing coloniality through decolonial thought. If our essential natures as humans globally are overwhelmingly shaped by western contexts and ideas mostly of recent provenance (last 500 years), then these can be undone by contesting and challenging these ideas.

Many critiques have been launched against these ideas, particularly the misguided focus on Descartes as the epistemological key to western thought. Here I want to note that the whole theory is beset by unresolved questions resulting from the uneasy merging of conservative and progressive ideals. Simplified from the often high-flowing rhetoric of the theorists, this contradiction is evident in the progressive vision of decolonial theory: that human redemption lies in (contradictorily) undoing the epistemic legacy of the last 500 years. Two questions emerge: about the desirability and the possibility of such an undoing.

First to possibility: I do not think the particular version of coloniality in decolonial theory, nor its proposed philosophical remedies are in the last instance plausible, not least because they exaggerate the influence of philosophers in changing the masses. It is simply not possible to undo the epistemic legacy of such a long period of history, no matter how many thought reforms one engages in. Moreover there is something more permanent in our nature that is older than 500 years. If one abandons a sort of modernist/recency bias, it is evident that large parts of our nature (perhaps more?) have been shaped by not only human-created ideologies pre-1500, but also (still poorly understood) pre-linguistic patterns of behavior as a species in interaction with our early environments. These influences shaped the very structure of our brain and body. Many of our most essential contradictions of conscious existence as humans are grounded in these dynamics which it is not possibly to disavow at the level of concept or epistemology.

To desirability: We ought to preserve the essential pessimism and sense of tragedy inherent in coloniality's critical analysis, which contains a form of wisdom linked to the older idea of "original sin", regardless if we accept the underlying history or cosmology behind that older idea. I cannot help but note that our understanding of human behavior patterns in the above areas have been advanced due to the influence of science; it is not desirable to,undo the western contribution to what is now an epistemic legacy of every human society. Human civilization cannot really afford to part with the material and technical tools of western science and the insights they have garnered into the self and the species. To imagine one can do so is the naive and dangerous side of a romanticism, the "anti-progress" dogma opposed to the dogmas of universalism and progress. There is more than a little elitism in the idea. Knowledge of self for the philosopher requires one to maintain an aloofness from either extreme. We do not need a rather neologistic terminological invention, coloniality, to remain aloof from the baseness and status games of western academia. I think the ideas of "original sin" or "creaturely fallenness" or just some basic recognition of human fallibility, baseness, and selfishness are all more vital concepts for philosophy and social change, than coloniality.

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Would a return to "indigenous religions" be a progressive move within US society?

 There are a number of people in the US who, discontented with their childhood religious indoctrination as well as the seeming soulless and anti-human character of our technocratic society, imagine if we only could remove Christianity conditioning of our consciousness, we could get back to some primordial pro-human reality in which indigenous spiritual tradition would provide a basis for new human flourishing, removing things like shame, guilt, and other “foreign” ideas.

Notably, a methodology for this recovery is rarely proposed or specified, so it typically takes a very idiosyncratic form and is often draped in a naive nostalgia, uninformed by history.

A scientific way to study the viability of such assertions would be to look at a contemporary society where rejection of Christianity and Islam in favor of some other religion are actually in ascendancy today and study the practical significance of such views. 

India is an ideal case study: the current government’s legitimacy rests on an assertive Hinduism, which is contrasted with foreign ideologies of Christianity and Islam. Elements within government and civil society assert that these foreign ideologies have had Indians in a mental chokehold for millennia and that only a return to a primordial idea of religious coexistence under Hinduism can revitalise society. Essentially the government is advocating a return to what Christians and Muslims would understand as neo-paganism, only this time with modern characteristics.

I really wish more critics of Christianity in the west, especially those in the wellness industry, would pay much closer attention to the practical consequences of the realization of the idea they cherish in Indian society. If they did, I think they would see there that an assertive and victorious non-monotheism has produced as dangerous a fundamentalist reaction as any monotheistic faith, complete with lynching, widespread religious persecution of minorities, and a thorough-going purity culture as virulent as anything produced in Christianity and Islam. One cannot really avoid the conclusion that the assertion and attempted implementation of Hinduism as the indigenous tradition of India has resulted in many of the worst dynamics present in Christian fundamentalism, and even the resurgence of several anti-human dynamics that Christianity as a belief system had attempted to eliminate or reform.

Unfortunately global dynamics militate against westerners developing a more critical understanding. The dynamic of muscular Hinduism in Indian society is obscured by the rebranding of Hinduism in the US as a tolerant New Age belief system, flattering the sensibilities of the many post-Christians and other lost souls who migrate to the wellness industry in search of meaning. Our New Age wellness advisors have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. But they are not the only ones misled. Put in terms familiar to decolonial scholars, modern Hinduism exemplifies the "coloniality of power", but absent any of the ideological geneaologies decolonial scholars impute to coloniality's origins. A similar geneaology of power's coloniality could be revealed in many to most non-western religions, suggesting in turn that decolonial scholars have fundamentally misread the historical situation, and that coloniality is not a historically specific situation but a perennial human dynamic inherent to our attempts to build social groups and create collective meaning. It might also be said to be an artifact of the development of consciousness in our species, inherent in our evolutionary descent from our nearest non-human ancestors.  This is something our decolonial scholars could profitably examine, if they were able to break from the romantic mental shackles imposed by the idea of 1492 and Descartes "cogito ergo sum" as epistemological ruptures producing the ideology of coloniality.

My personal belief is that most such projects of ideological “return”, not only Hinduism, are doomed to produce these types of dystopian outcomes. I believe the way is not to return to a past that only exists as an imaginary construct, but to look boldly forward and define the customs and values worth preserving from our various traditions and try to live by them. Tolerance will play a huge role here. However I will die on the hill that there is nothing inherently tolerant or utopian about pre-monotheistic traditions; their appeal to ex-Christians in the west says more about the psycho-dynamics of romanticism in our secular US society than it does about the practical consequences of reanimating the ethics of those belief systems. I think the decolonial turn is the academic version of these psycho-dynamics. We need a much more sophisticated approach.

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short note on the 'coloniality of power' thesis

The scholar Anibal Quijano defined "coloniality of power" as a new way of organizing reality produced by European colonial expansion from the late 1400s.

 I understand the impulse behind it, it is a potent metaphor, and it does offer a few useful insights, but I differ from the decolonial theorists in that I do not consider 'coloniality of power' to have much coherence as a concept, much less to be the sin qua non of 'modernity'. The way it is phrased and used, it is as if violent coercion was invented in 1492, as if before that time, humans were acting and being in ways that eschewed civilizing projects, violent conquest, and permanent antagonism. You have to ignore large swaths of earlier history in order to sustain this idealistic view. Moreover it would seem to also commit one to the view that this mode of power has not fundamentally changed since that time, and that we are still living in it. I find that view a-historical. 

In the end, I find the idea of coloniality of power extremely Eurocentric, as if somehow Europe invented a new way to be powerful in the colonial Americas that was distinct from the absolute mess humans had been making of that endeavor since the dawn of complex societies.

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Zombie Faith and Our Global Crisis

You hear a lot in religious studies about the 'return' of religion, how people, contrary to secular modernist predictions, didn't abandon faith, but returned to it, revived it. Of course, I agree, but many types of faith were revived, in many different religions. I've been studying some of these expressions, and I think we need to talk about one type of faith that has made a 'comeback' today in global religious communities of all kinds.

I put 'comeback' in scare quotes, because, in spite of its hyper-emphasis on fidelity to tradition, this isn't the same faith of the believer of old, in which a person's conviction made them into a better person with other people of all kinds, and gave them hope that the world in which they were oppressed was not the only world. This was faith as vital life force, faith as the 'substance of things hoped for'. This new faith is more like Gage, from Pet Semetary, a sort of undead changeling. It is zombie faith.

This new zombie faith is methodologically nationalist in orientation, characterized by ressentiment, filled with huffy irritation, envy and a sense of victimhood. Zombie faith is always petulantly demanding that one cannot claim they are a person of said faith unless x x and x characteristics are met. It is anxious about its own dissolution, and about what is perceives as its declining relevance. It muses violently at those who reject it. It snarls at information and critical evidence as 'harmful' to faith. It demarcates a strong line between a faithful self and a non-faithful other, and then sees knowledge emanating from the non-faithful as threatening. It identifies itself as the only and supreme epistemological foundation. It identifies itself completely with what public morality should be. Zombie believers sometimes debate about permissibility and the boundaries of faith in ways that personally have always terrified me, as if they were the admissions committee to the pearly gates themselves.

Zombie faith is extremely self-conscious about some of the more obviously bizarre 'unseen' things it is required to believe to maintain its faith, and will defend them as essential to faith. Yet this self-consciousness stems from the knowledge that it insists on the belief in unseen things foundationally, while rejecting out of hand naturalistic conclusions that have been the subject of decades of detailed study and evidence compilation. Like nationalism, this denial of the 'other' is not rational, but rooted in fear and anxiety. In its more reflective moments, zombie faith is uneasy about the many low information suppositions that make up its intellectual apparatus, while regarding things which methodological naturalism has high information answers for (biological evolution, for instance), as conspiracies to take one away from belief.

Zombie faith will try to make that information liability into a strength, by turning to post-modernist individualism, specifically the idea that no one has a right to challenge my fundamental conception of what I believe or what I use to arrive at that belief. ("You don't know me!") Another strategy used to cover the information deficit is to insist that people of zombie faith have a unique insight, a sixth sense, that others just don't have the ability to get, because they're blinded by scientism or arrogance. Zombie faith may also give itself the imprimatur of intellectual respectability by turning heavily to scholastic theology, preferring to have intellectual conversations with the dead, who they can exalt as an obviously superior type to the 'atheist' philosopher of today. In this way they can avoid having to confront the epistemic revolutions of the modern age. Zombie faith will tell itself that the reason people are critical of its faith is that they have insufficient grounding in these sources they use.

Today's zombie faith has absorbed some of the worst qualities of nationalism, and yet, like nationalism, it still offers an invaluable succor to the average person on the street. In the absence of the old faith, the people turn to zombie faith, as a sugar lover would turn to stevia, because it appears to offers a 'sweetness', a certitude and ethical orientation that ordinary modern life, with its runaway global political corruption, its hierarchies of extreme wealth and poverty, and its degradation and destruction of the earth, is unable to.

None of this should be read as an attack on the ethical dispositions of compassion and care which faith (yes, even zombie faith) can provide. Nor should it be read as a vindication of today's scientific consensus. The challenge for critical decolonial thinkers on the ground today, when engaging with religion, is to engage the psychological need many people have for this zombie style of faith, to cultivate a sense of wonder and mystery that draws on the old faiths, and to use the high-information contexts of empirical observation that come to us from detailed naturalistic study of the world to fuel the urgently needed and revolutionary changes required to address the current climate crisis, among other urgent issues in global civil society.

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