Lucien BONNET
SEE: "Bill A Ri And There Was Light!"
in www.contact-canadahaiti.ca
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WESTERN UNIVERSALISM
“Color cannot be understood except in relation to the person who perceives it,” physicist Pierre Demers wrote in the Foreword to this book. He clearly confirms the relevance of this essay. First of all, in fact, we thought it would be useful to consider the civilizational (politico-religious) attitude of the West toward the Blacks, before pointing out the deficiencies of present-day science, which is predominantly Western, in its perception of the Black Universe.
The Western political attitude toward the Blacks has for many centuries been determined by the perverse ruler-servant, master-slave, exploiter-exploited relationship. In order to normalize its policy of enslaving Blacks, Judeo-Christian civilization went so far as to use Christianity to legitimize what today we generally call “crimes against humanity”, such as the racist slavery peculiar to the West. That situation was facilitated by the fact that the monotheistic religion, which had originally been universalist, soon limited its horizons to the boundaries of the Western world, while the other peoples — which it thought it had attracted — seemed to find themselves there in spite of themselves. Some might wonder whether the abandonment by the West of Christian universalism does not explain that inability of Judeo-Christian civilization to adopt a universalist attitude, not only in the political but also in the scientific realm.
As a matter of fact, present-day science, dominated for a few centuries by the West, can hardly claim to be “universal”, since it is so deeply affected by the Westerners who perceive it. These people have — as we all know — lost any authentically universalist dimension. Did they not, by using and misusing the Bible, attempt to prove the superiority of Western Whites over Blacks and other colored peoples, limiting there too the vast universalist horizons of science to the very boundaries of the West? Everything seems to indicate that science is no longer universal; it is “Western”, with all the consequences that implies for humanity and, in particular, for the Black world.
In other words, the Western approach, the Western way of thinking, is far from being scientific, neutral and objective; it is subjective and distorting. Such subjectivity and distortion manifest themselves still more obviously, as we have seen, in the realm of colors, and more specifically when dealing with the concept of “black”. One must therefore bring into play the social sciences — history, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, political science, etc.— to understand that Western handicap. Indeed, as soon as it has to deal with “black”, Western reasoning vacillates, making room for the irrational and its array of fantasies....
Lucien BONNET
Cancer
