Neo-Medievalism and the New Latin

By Emile Wolfaardt

Medieval Latin (or Ecclesiastical Latin, as it is sometimes called), was the primary language of the church in Europe during the Dark Ages. The Bible and its laws and commands were all in Latin, as were the punishments to be meted out for those who breached its dictates. This left interpretation and application up to the proclivities of the clergy. Because the populace could not understand Latin, there was no accountability for those who wielded the Latin sword.

We may have outgrown the too-simplistic ideas of infanticidal nuns and the horror stories of medieval torture devices (for the most part, anyway). Yet the tragedy of the self-serving ecclesiastical economies, the gorgonising abuse of spiritual authority, the opprobrious intrusion of privacy, and disenfranchisement of the masses still cast a dark shadow of systemic exploitation and widespread corruption over that period. The few who birthed into the ranks of the bourgeois ruled with deleterious absolutism and no accountability. The middle class was all but absent, and the subjugated masses lived in abject poverty without regard or recourse. There was no pathway to restation themselves in life. It was effectively a two-class social stratification system that enslaved by keeping people economically disenfranchised and functionally dependent. Their beliefs were defined, their behavior was regulated, and their liberties were determined by those whose best interest was to keep them stationed where they were.

It is the position of this writer that there are some alarming perspectives and dangerous parallels to that abuse in our day and age that we need to be aware of.

There has been a gargantuan shift in the techno-world that is obfuscatious and ubiquitous. With the ushering in of the digital age, marketers realised that the more information they could glean from our choices and conduct, the better they could influence our thinking. They started analysing our purchasing history, listening to our conversations, tracking key words, identifying our interests. They learned that people who say or text the word ‘camping’ may be in the market for a tent, and that people who buy rifles, are part of a shooting club, and live in a particular area are more likely to affiliate with a certain party. They learned that there was no such thing as excess data – that all data is useful and could be manipulated for financial gain.

Where we find ourselves today is that the marketing world has ushered in a new economic model that sees human experiences as free raw material to be taken, manipulated, and traded at will, with or without the consent of the individual. Google's vision statement for 2022 is ‘to provide access to the world's information in one click’. Everything, from your heart rate read by your watch, your texts surveyed by your phone’s software, your words recorded by the myriad listening devices around you, your location identified by twenty apps on your phone, your GPS, your doorbell, and the security cameras around your home are garnering your data. And we even pay for these things. It is easier to find a route using a GPS than a map, and the convenience of a smart technology seems, at first glance anyway, like a reasonable exchange.

Our data is being harvested systematically, and sold for profit without our consent or remuneration. Our search history, buying practices, biometric data, contacts, location, sleeping habits, exercise routine, self-discipline, articles we pause our scrolling to peruse, even whether we use exclamation marks in our texts – the list continues almost endlessly – and a trillion other bits of data each day is recorded. Then it is analysed for behavioural patterns, organised to manipulate our choices, and sold to assist advertisers to prise the hard-earned dollars out of our hands. It is written in a language very few people can understand, imposed upon us without our understanding, and used for financial gain by those who do not have our best interest at heart. Our personal and private data is the traded for profit without our knowledge, consent, or benefit.

A new form of economic oppression has emerged, ruthlessly designed, implemented by the digital bourgeois, and built exclusively on harvesting our personal and private data – and we gladly exchanged it for the conveniences it offered. As a society, we have been gaslighted into accepting this new norm. We are fed the information they choose to feed us, are subject to their manipulation, and we are simply fodder for their profit machine. We are indeed in the oppressive age of Neo-Medievalism, and computer code is the new Latin.

It seems to have happened so quickly, permeated our lives so completely, and that without our knowledge or consent.

But it is not hopeless. As oppressive as the Dark Ages were, that period came to an end. Why? Because there were people who saw what was happening, vocalised and organised themselves around a healthier social model, and educated themselves around human rights, oppression, and accountable leadership. After all – look at us now. We were birthed out of that period by those who ushered in the Enlightenment and ultimately Modernity.

Reformation starts with being aware, with educating oneself, with speaking up, and with joining our voices with others. There is huge value to this digital age we have wholeheartedly embraced. However, instead of allowing it to oppress us, we must take back control of our data where we can. We must do what we need to, to maximise the opportunities it provides, join with those who see it for what it is, help others to retain their freedom, and be a part of the wave of people and organisations looking for integrity, openness, and redefinition in the process. The digital age with its AI potential is here to stay. This is good. Let’s be a part of building a system that serves the needs of the many, that benefits humanity as a whole, and that lifts us all to a better place.

Seeking Reformers

Torture by Kevin (DJ) Ahzee

Posted by Sifiso Mkhonto

Unity has a mixed reputation, in South Africa.  It was under apartheid that the motto ‘unity is strength’ became the tool of exclusion.  Yet even under our new constitutional democracy, with the motto ‘Working together we can do more’, unity became an illusion.

Today we find ourselves with different kinds of unity: political party unity, religious unity, and cultural unity. Yet rather than uniting us, these ‘unities’ exist in menacing tension, and instead of being united, we seem isolated. Furthermore, as the contours of these ‘unities’ have become more apparent, they have revealed parallel power structures in our society:

•  Political party unity has promoted ‘party first’, and cadre deployment.
•  Religious unity has served religious leaders, who have consorted with political power, and
•  Cultural unity has divided society through tribalism.

Over time, each of these unities has polarised us into captives and captors, and united us in bondage. Our ‘unities’ have become what I shall call ‘civilised oppression’. The dynamic is simple, on the surface of it. The major tool which is used to secure our captivity is patronage. Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organisation or individual bestows on another. It indicates the power to grant favours – but also, importantly, the need to seek them.

Underlying this dynamic, at both extremes, is the cancer we call greed. This greed then becomes institutionalised, and oppression, in the words of Iris Marion Young, becomes ‘embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules’. Chains and prison cells are a mere shadow of the chains and prison cells of mental oppression such as this. ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor,’ wrote the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, ‘is the mind of the oppressed.’

Since greed is embedded in each of us, and this greed has become institutionalised, we cannot eliminate the attendant oppression by getting rid of rulers or by promulgating new laws – because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. To make matters worse, in the words of the American social psychologist Morton Deutsch, ‘while specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression’. They, and we, are blind.

Contrast this now with the fact that we do, in fact, live in a constitutional democracy, with a bill of rights and the rule of law. People have lost the will and the desire to insist on law because they are cowed through the dynamics of patronage. Despondency has increased – or rather, our leaders have increased our despondency – as the dynamics of greed have gained the upper hand. Iris Marion Young describes our oppression ‘as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions that are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms’.

The cancer is within most of us. Now where do we look for restoration? Our greatest need is for Reformers who will press for merit systems, insist that lawmakers respect the law and find strategies to eliminate patronage. They will seek unity under one constitution, one bill of rights, one law. However, this cannot be done by Reformers who do not have the cure for the cancer. I believe that freedom will flourish, citizens will emancipate themselves from mental oppression, and patronage won’t be the big elephant in the room, as soon as we implement this cure.

It is time to turn our house into a home. Find a cure for the cancer. Seek knowledgeable and principled Reformers who won’t give society the cold shoulder when symptoms of the cancer are identified even in them. Now is the time to act on the diagnosis of the cancer, and take the medication that will cure us. Those who are controlled by the disease need to repent and find their way, instead of being sidetracked by patronage.

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Also by Sifiso Mkhonto: Breaking the Myth of Equality.

Have We Normalised Oppression?

Posted by Bohdana Kurylo

There are forms of oppression and domination, wrote Michel Foucault, which become invisible – the new normal. Have we normalised oppression today? Are we even aware of it any more?

In the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault drew his readers’ attention to the workings of power on the level of one’s sexuality and desire, as both an example and a metaphor of all power relations. He debunked the idea that sex is the locus of the truest form of the self. In fact, this idea turns out to be an invisible mechanism of control. As Foucault put it, it is ‘a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation’. In turn, the ‘stimulation’ cannot do without sex being regulated and monitored, to effectively manage the populace. Still, modern control would not be effective without control being exerted by individuals over themselves, however unknowingly. And the more self-governing our self becomes, the more relevant this becomes.

As such, there is a clear difference between the repressive methods used by the Soviet state to regulate society and the self-discipline of the modern sexually ‘liberated’ generation. The latter has willingly measured and categorised itself through all-encompassing examination and normalisation through beauty standards, nudity and endless discourses on sex. A confessing animal, modern man has made, perhaps, the most intimate part of his self available for mass surveillance. The force of surveillance has significantly increased with the rise of social media, the efficacy of which is not inferior to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: its prisoners are close, yet in isolation from each other; perfectly visible for the watchers, yet unable to see them. In short, the soul is governed by aligning new norms with individual desires and pleasures.

Nevertheless, it is questionable whether such control necessarily has negative implications, as in the case of conventional forms of oppression and domination. It is indeed a hybrid power that does not oppose one’s wishes, but in fact creates them. On the surface of it, Foucault himself seems to take a neutral stance in relation to the new style of governance, rejecting the idea that society can exist without power relations. However, his emphasis on the effects of normalisation on the individual – which ‘attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise’ – reveals a negative attitude. It seems that Foucault confronted the issue of modern governance because of his urge to go beyond the existing perceptions of the self. Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘will to power’ – an ‘attempt to overcome, to bring to oneself, to incorporate’ – may well explain it. It is precisely this ‘instinct for freedom’ that would lead Foucault’s subject to want to become a master in playing these games of power with the strongest possible protection against the abuse of power.

At this point, the connection between freedom and ethics unfolds. Foucault pronounced the nature of freedom to be ethical in itself: ‘Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics’. Yet, he wondered whether it makes sense to say ‘let’s liberate our sexuality’, for the problem of freedom is much more ethical than the rhetoric about desires and pleasures. Thus, it is important, once again to debunk the myth that sexual liberation – or any liberation – is equal to freedom. Indeed, is liberation only about genitals and not about conscience, dignity and self-reflection? Freedom is impossible without self-reflection and the ‘care of the self’. Hence, as ‘taking care of oneself requires knowing oneself’, freedom from imposed knowledge and control becomes a major argument for resistance against modern power.

A bigger question, however, is whether resistance is possible – and here, Foucault led his readers into the labyrinth of philosophical paradoxes. The problem is that the relationship between the self and power is mutually determining. Paradoxically, as the self has essentially become the locus of power today, humans face the challenge of resisting themselves. As a result, the individual is constituted both through the practices of subjection and liberation. Although a fully autonomous self is impossible, those who dare to follow their instinct for freedom inevitably have to overcome these paradoxes on the path of the never-ending process of self-cultivation. As an option, Foucault proposed shaping individual subjectivity through the force of creativity, virtually transforming everyone’s life into a work of art. Metaphorically, ‘why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?’

The questions remain: Who exercises power? Who makes decisions for me? Foucault referred to the notion of ‘governmentality’ to describe modern political reason. Its main characteristic is societies in which governance follows the principle of ‘enterprise’, in which the self is self-sustainable and self-governing, ensuring higher productivity. This is a world in which discipline and control have been internalised by the individuals themselves.

Picture Post No.12: Critical Eyes

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Alice Seeley Harris, missionary, photographer and campaigner with a group of Congolese children, early 1900s.  Photo credit Anti-Slavery International

A group of Congolese children and Mrs. Seeley Harris all pose in a pyramid geometry and look towards us. In doing so, their bodies seem to animate a question and hand a voice to us. Perhaps this is why this photograph obviously from another age moves beyond being material evidence to become an inexorable happening. Our voices still try to formulate that question today.

These children embody the rich properties hidden into the soil they inhabit. The presence of the white woman accentuates this intuition being dressed in the middle of the children, as if ‘their clothes’ lay underneath the earth. What for these children is not essential, others might think of as indispensable.

The relation between these children and Mrs. Harris is critical. We might end up striving for the same cause but this is already a movement upon effects. When violence is related to law, justice cannot be achieved within a law preserved by violence. These children represent an entire population that got identified as a working force. Violently estranged from their culture, is it still possible to see out of one’s own eyes?

With more then a century in the middle between them and us, we are left with a riddle:

A century conceals more truth than a day, though every day carries with it a millennium of falsehoods.

Who are we then, today?