African Values As Catalyst for Humanizing Tecnological-Based Societies

AFRICAN VALUES AS CATALYST FOR HUMANIZING TECHNOLOGICALLY BASED SOCIETIES

A Paper By:

John Egbeazien Oshodi, Ph.D

The 10th Annual Africando: Trade and Investment Symposium: African Culture and Development

Florida International University - Kovens Conference Center Miami, Florida

September 21, 2007 AFRICAN VALUES AS CATALYST FOR HUMANIZING TECHNOLOGICALLY BASED SOCIETIES

The focal point of this paper is to look at our present global world, where the trust of existence is steadily being outlined with such technology as digital living, machine-like interventions, and data gathering and applications. The desire for technology-based living is significantly widespread throughout the Western Democracies but especially in the United

States of America.

On the whole, life and living experiences among many members of advanced societies like America are interacting and cooperating more with all sorts of machines (i.e., computers, cell phones, and cars) resulting in a digital-based culture, an electronic environment, and a steadily rising, machine-driven, human environment. Certainly, wealth and designed happiness among members of technologically advanced economies have greatly expanded and there is the constant need to re-adapt oneself to society’s changing machines in order to keep one’s personal wealth and designed happiness, which in turn, further increases one’s personal-social-interactive living around technology. The stress of living and constantly adapting to a mechanical, digital, and electronic neighborhood results in an overly pressured lifestyle, which also leads to a threshold with actual negative consequences relating to one’s inherent social, psychological, and other humanistic needs.

In a human environment where many of its members become conditioned to, dependent upon, and engage in the personalization of machines and technologies, that culture may become filled with humans at risk for interpersonal distance, a detached lifestyle, a non- cooperative attitude, social estrangement, explosive tendencies, and external conflict, as well as cultivated inequalities. The African community, especially in the continental sense, is

of 7 certainly in need of material and economic technologies to develop and meet the challenges of globalization or global demands, but what makes the Africans different (both Continental and

Diaspora Africans) from most Westerners with a Eurocentric background is the inherent value for communal, cultural, dynamic, and realistic living. Even in the face of global digital transformation and empowerment, the fundamental need to cherish closeness to other humans, to partake in community activities, and to sustain inner happiness go far deeper than technology and electronic living. There is the constant need to associate traditional and communal forces in order to shape the African individuality and thereby reduce solitary consciousness, interpersonal strain, and a disparate approach to one’s community.

Is Everything in Technology?

As our world becomes more and more materialistic in technological essentials, the positive outcomes of technology become clearer:

1. Vehicles that have fixed wings — airplanes.

2. Data and Communication network and exchange — the internet.

3. Machine that in seconds show how slow, fast or normal is one’s heart beat —

electrocardiogram (EKG or ECK)

4. Machine-like atomic energy — Atomic Bombs.

5. Mechanized healings through the intermixing of substances, properties, compounds

and energies — medications.

6. An object which contains the interaction of inert gas and a mental filament — a light

of 7 7. A visual device with all sorts of images, contents, and words transmitting through a

screen — television.

8. An ear and mount device to transmit words and sound between persons — telephone.

And so on and so forth.

So we could maintain that all human societies, especially humanity in the Euro-

America or Indo Western world, have advanced both in objects and things. With each discovery in technology and science, a nation and its people progress in physical realities, in material powers, and in its institutional surroundings. Each society has its own glory with scientific and technological movements. One time it was Africa through the Moorish scientists (for example) and now it is in Euro America significant through Asian/Asian –

American scientists (when they are not been ethnically targeted by way of reported racism in laboratories in America).

Speaking technologically, whether it was in the old Nubia, Ethiopia, India, or even in old Italy the discovery of various landmarks in science and technology were generally side by side with the rescue of the human collective, the rise of cultural unity, the promotion of multi- ethnic mix, as well as the safeguard of autonomies for individuals – Communities.

Technology and Science, in the African or Africentric sense, was not indifferent to humanistic – spiritualistic – communal relations. Human traditions in the sense of functionality and practices were not about scientific superiority, scientific ideologies, scientific suppression, scientific dogma, or extreme scientific competition, but about alternatives and comparisons in the survival, growth, and opportunity modes.

African traditions and values in mythological and scientific ways see objectivity in human equal rights, as well as equal rights to access and power.

of 7 African values reject human acts of rationalism in the sense of imposition, exclusiveness, separatism, fundamentalism, absolutism, and individualism, as well as isolationism and reductionism. African values in the scientific sense, over time, at different times and present day time, is not about racial quantification, definitional ethnicity, pathological formations, double relationships, blood purity and relational opposition. African values in scientific terms is not about residential segregation, selective humanism, functional sexism, religious imposition, sexual segmentation and knowledge imperialism. African

Values stand out as scientific outlets for trans-societal joy, personal morality, leveled gratification, mutual respect, non-solitary happiness, non-sexual degradation, anti-pure racial typology, ethnic universality, and harmonious living.

Technologically based societies like the United States of America, historically known for its extreme constructs of racial supremacy, individualistic definitions, separateness, controllability and the need for differentiation, in more recent times finds its world superimposed by a digital living environment. The American culture, whose history and nature are inherently erected on mechanistic materialism in line with the layouts of

Eurocentric Fathers like Thomas Hobbes (i.e., the human is nothing but a piece of machine with no Soul sensitivity) and Frances Bacon (i.e., differentiation and linear approach to reality), have further turned to technology (for the most part in search of the meaning of life and living).

This line of technological living is a task that has proven not only impossible but further complicating the road to natural joy; sustain happiness, love, relationship, belonging, and harmony. There is no doubt that technology in America has resulted in both intrinsic and

of 7 extrinsic experiences colored with designed happiness, a blended form of designed interaction, and artificially based imagery.

Implicit in all of these applied and guided technology living is a personal world of anxiety, irritability, frustration, desperation, fears, uncertainty, inner pain, undefined fate, substance attraction, impulsivity , laziness, accidents, despair, self destruction, and measured living. Advanced Western societies with their electronically operated neighborhoods and their steadily increasing interpersonally and litigiously conflicted environments could learn from the intercultural respect and the deeply-held African traditional and cultural approach, thereby paving the way for a more humanized life, a less mechanistic lifestyle, and communally based relationships. The humanization attempts away from overly technology driven interrelation could occur among Westerners without abandoning its spirit of technology, digital world view, or modernity. All in all, the spirit of African humanism, physically and spiritually, see technological and wholistic wellness as beneficial to humanity but in order to bring a sustained natural path to living, especially in technologically based society, the pursuit of survival of the whole through non-subordinating technologies is a must.

Smith (1992), commenting on American over attractiveness to technological oriented living stated, “It is now clear that in producing our works we are [not] protected . . . by the divine license of Bacon's God.” We are discovering that in many cases the artificial does, after all, differ from the natural, that synthetic artifacts do not always have the same consequence as their natural counterparts (p.221).

of 7 References

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Smith, L.D. (1992). On prediction and control: B.F. Skinner and the technological idea of science. American Psychologist, 47, 216-223.