“We are condemned to accept the need to experiment with the human, taking the risks that this entails” and “one mistake will carry the risk of leading the entire supertribe, finally unified, to disaster”.
At the end of 1973, Darcy Ribeiro, the famous Brazilian anthropologist and essayist whose birth will be 100 years old in 2022, suggested in his text entitled “Venutopias 2003”, that in order to produce the cultural equivalents of the new technological inventions, the human being would have to be dismantled. and reassembled. The new man will be a programmed man: so will our grandchildren’s grandchildren, abominable by our parameters, but perhaps stronger and more effective, freer and more creative. For the first time in history, man will not be the product of necessity, but the result of a project.
In the 1960s and 1970s, several Latin American thinkers were interested in the future and, in particular, in the impacts of technological advances on human life. Some did so in a register closely linked to planning, others with a more critical spirit.
We can mention the chapter of “Historia de Nuestra Idea del Mundo”, by José Gaos, entitled “Tecnoocracia y Cibernética”, which was part of a seminar given at El Colegio de México. We can also mention Oscar Varsavsky and his idea of a constructive and political futurology, linked to a national project. Or the Bariloche Model coordinated by Amílcar Herrera, who discussed with great lucidity the report Los límites del crescemiento, which was commissioned at the same time by the Club of Rome.
From another angle, let’s recall an essay like “Democracy y Autoritarismo en la Sociedad Moderna”, in which the late Gino Germani posed startling questions about the future of democracy. Issues that are extremely topical.
In this framework, Darcy Ribeiro’s numerous futurizations, in different registers and cultivating different accentuations, led us to overlook his attempts, to try to contextualize them, to interpret them. So we made a book entitled “The Futures of Darcy”, which is being published right now by Elefante publishing house.
Basically, we distinguish two Darcys. A more optimistic first, convinced of the imminence of the “necessary revolution”. A second less optimistic, more perplexed and crossed by uncertainties, worshiper of the “little utopia” in the short term and more skeptical in the long term.
The turning point can be located between the years 1972 and 1976, coinciding with several things that happened with it. From the coup in Chile and then in Peru to his illness and his return to Brazil. Interestingly, the displacement did not imply a massive dismantling of the previous points of view. From the study of ideas, Darcy’s work presents itself as an apt terrain to analyze asynchronisms, coexistences, tensions: an extraordinary exhibition of historically conditioned intellectual work, like all intellectual work, and with high theoretical value.
In 1972, Darcy coined an emphatic and shocking formula: “the abominable new man.” There he raises the question of how there can be lives worth living; the lack of a project for the rational management of history, perhaps man does not know what to do or what to fight for…
In his text “Venutopias 2003”, written shortly after the coup d’état that deposed Salvador Allende, that is, at the end of 1973, Darcy takes up these themes and suggests that it will be increasingly necessary to seek artificial means to produce balanced personalities.
There is also a substantive novelty in this 1973 text: that of proposing an aesthetic utopia for Venezuela inspired by the Makiritare Indians. With this, Darcy restores to Venezuelans the pastoral existence “to which we always aspire”, the “desire for beauty” and “access to wisdom”. It seems to us that this is the first time that this evaluation appears in his work. Thus, a new and fundamental component emerges that we can call, following it closely, “pastoral utopia”.
In our days, Darcy could be approached by a figure like Ailton Krenak. But he could also be approached, without a doubt, by all those thinkers who work on themes associated with transhumanism and posthumanism, considering it a horizon that is partly inevitable, partly abominable, partly promising.
In the last part of her 1984 essay “La civilización emergente”, entitled “Revoluciones culturales”, she addresses several of the challenges arising from the ongoing technological revolution: the green movement, the feminist movement, the pacifist movement. He relates to the feminist movement the “irremediable anachronism” of the basic constructions of personality and the basic organizers of human behavior: they can be mortally wounded, we are forced to remake them.
Again, we ask ourselves if we will be able to reinvent the human condition itself. On peace and war, Darcy argues that it is not just the prospect of terminal war that is a threat; the advent of a new, melancholy Pax Romana is also a threat.
It also highlights the inability of the world economy to implement general prosperity. This crazy, unbalanced and paranoid economy generates a huge army of surplus labor. The bonds of dependence are reinforced. Third World peoples yearn for a small, modest and unattainable utopia. His existence allows him to imagine a revolution of the poor. However, the author does not take long to recognize that, abandoning its fate, pauperism does not bring about social revolutions.
Once the revolutionary possibility has been ruled out, Darcy tackles another threat: the advent of an era of hunger and idiocy within the framework of an obsolete and hardened civilization. Against this backdrop, the lives of poor people will be a battle for very concrete ideals. A beautiful and arduous battle. Once again, he seems to have guessed very well.
Many of Darcy’s considerations, theoretical, prophetic and cathartic, may be related to very current elaborations that question the impact of new technologies on subjectivity, politics and culture. We think, for example, of Éric Sadin, Byung-Chul Han, Yuval Harari. It is no exaggeration to say that, in several of his predictions, Darcy was right or very close to being right. At least in the sense of locating, with surprising precision, most of the themes that, three or four decades later, define the agendas of the debate.
And perhaps the most impressive thing about Darcy is that, in the face of all these tensions, she never lost her incredible life force. All of his writings, even the darkest ones, exude a very special combination of wisdom, passion, enthusiasm and joie de vivre.
Sometimes, in a cathartic way, the Darcy returned, who projected Brazil and Latin America as the “New Tropical Rome”, that “new mestizo and tropical civilization” open to all races and cultures, located in the most beautiful and luminous province of Earth. It is all this complexity that we seek to bring to the debate with our book, in a context marked by the absence of alternatives and an obsession with the present.
