Fanon: Violence and the Search for Human Dignity

Part of the vocabulary of current discourses on inter-societal and inter-national, as well trans-societal and trans-national relations is the idea of interdependence. One finds it on the lips of almost everyone. The term, as used in some quarters, is employed to denote the absence of self-sufficiency. So, as we saw recently, the sudden decline in stock markets in China had reverberating repercussions throughout the world. Or, an escalation in a civil conflict in Nigeria sent oil prices soaring, globally, and the perceived dishonor visited on a religious symbol in Denmark and Germany elicited riotous uprising throughout the international system. Some use the term to designate certain kinds of reciprocal relationships. The term is also used in an ecological sense, touching not so much on the absence of something--self-sufficiency--but more so bespeaking the network of natural and artificial constitutions within which all phenomena appear to live and move and have their being. So, from those employing all three meanings just stated, one hears discussions concerning economics, public health, history, travel, tectonic plates, terrorism, wars, food, and carbon emissions. Fanon, who embraced all three of the meanings mentioned above, informs us that interdependence in economics, politics, ethics, or aesthetics (and/or the social institutions with which they are associated) encompasses the interdependence of psyches in the form of confrontations, threats, forbearances, negotiations, accommodations, control, and domination, as persons and groups of persons seek to influence the conduct and shape the social being of others. Today, global and sub-global interdependence is often neither based on reciprocity nor equality. Rather, what one generally finds in the multiplicities of continuing and new (sometimes, instantaneous) connections, is a system of non- reciprocal, imposed interdependence, where one's peace is another's subjugation, one's wealth another's poverty, one's enlightenment is another's ignorance, and where one's winning and thriving are another's losing and suffering. (1) This was the world in which Fanon found himself, with domination rationalized in every form, including fields of learning and culture--in novels, in plays, in music, in politics, psychology, history, philosophy, and in religion. Oppression, which he saw in all of human history, had a trajectory, however. That trajectory is, as he saw it, one of increasing human social consciousness and, thus, one that is against the indefinite extension of oppression. Aligning himself with this history/trajectory, he sought not only to inform that consciousness but also to see if he could thereby help human beings to co-create systems of human encounters that are non-oppressive, reciprocally beneficial, and mutually nurturing of human development. Such a co-created system could (and can) only be realized if human dignity is acknowledged and made operational. At the heart of human dignity is the concept of the spiritual and moral equality of all human beings; and with it, the right to self-willed and self-chosen, co-created modes of living and being. So, domination, he claimed, is contrary to that dignity, since domination has at the axis of its operation the moral and spiritual inequality of human beings, despite the rationalizations, previously mentioned, to the contrary. Associated with that "axis of operation" is a most damaging feature--one which facilitates and in most cases makes possible the very rationalizations referred to. That feature is indirect violence or what has come to be called "structural violence." The late Thomas Merton, who reflected and wrote eloquently about this type of violence, aptly captured Fanon when he (Merton) wrote about oppressive power that is so well established that it does not have to resort openly to the "method of the beast," because its laws and other institutions are already powerful enough. …