Metaphysic Storm

After explaining to my friend Sparkbaby, that I’m either crazy or a human agency is interacting with me covertly, she stated that the reason I think that it can’t be the supernatural is because of my western-logic biases. She sent me an excerpt from “Monocultures of the Mind” By Vandana Shiva, which posits that the scientific label is used to suppress and exterminate alternative knowledges.

Here is the excerpt:

IN ARGENTINA, when the dominant political system faces dissent, it responds by making the dissidents disappear. The ‘desparacidos’ or the disappeared dissidents share the fate of local knowledge systems throughout the world, which have been conquered through the politics of disappearance, not the politics of debate and dialogue.

The disappearance of local knowledge through its interaction with the dominant western knowledge takes place at many levels, through many steps. First, local knowledge is made to disappear by simply not seeing it, by negating its very existence. This is very easy in the distant gaze of the globalising dominant system. The western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. However, the dominant system is also a local system, with its social basis in a particular culture, class and gender. It is not universal in an epistemological sense. It is merely the globalised version of a very local and parochial tradition. Emerging from a dominating and colonizing culture, modern knowledge systems are themselves colonizing.

The knowledge and power nexus is inherent in the dominant system because, as a conceptual framework, it is associated with a set of values based on power which emerged with the rise of commercial capitalism. It generates inequalities and domination by the way such knowledge is generated and structured, the way it is legitimized and alternatives are delegitimized, and by the way in which such knowledge transforms nature and society. Power is also built into the perspective which views the dominant system not as a globalised local tradition, but as a universal tradition, inherently superior to local systems. However, the dominant system is also the product of a particular culture.

As Harding observes:
We can now discern the effects of these cultural markings in the discrepancies between the methods of knowing and the interpretations of the world provided by the creators of modern western culture and those characteristics of the rest of us. Western culture’s favorite beliefs mirror in sometimes clear and sometimes distorting ways not the world as it is or as we might want it to be, but the social projects of their historically identifiable creators. The universal/local dichotomy is misplaced when applied to the western and indigenous traditions of knowledge, because the western is a local tradition which has been spread world wide through intellectual colonization. Continue Reading »