Freedom as Rupture and Justice

We know history to be real because of the very unescapable character of the present. As such, many have asserted that history itself is unescapable. History, necessarily a human phenomenon, is thus about how we’ve co-constructed ourselves. Even climate change, although framed in terms of a nature that is outside of us, is fundamentally about us. This is why it matters. So here is how I understand our dilemma: We lost our humanity when we dehumanised ourselves through the oppression, subjugation and violation of other humans. The quest to save the environment is not about saving that which makes us human, but rather, that which makes us living beings. I therefore see the climate change concerns as ‘next generation’ concerns about our survival, but not of fundamental importance to the meaning of our existence. To my mind, our existence is meaningless without resolution of the existential crisis. I use the word resolution tentatively because I don’t really intend to suggest that there can ever be finality to existentialism. However, I do think that there are key elements of this dilemma that must be overcome in order for us to make it beyond the dehumanised condition that typifies the era which gave birth to both climate change and unprecedented human suffering.






I therefore proceed in a manner of postulation. I can’t know definitively what’s required, but I have an idea: rupture with justice. Both are attempts at freeing the elements of ourselves and the elements in society that are both oppressive and oppressed. If we’re going to move beyond oppression and its dehumanising effects, then all that is oppressive requires the space to break free of itself. I think here of both grand systems of oppression: colonisation, genocides, sexism and everyday forms of oppression: consumption decisions that enslave labourers; insecurity and fear. Indeed, we need to break out of the grander forms of oppression more definitively and continue always to challenge that which masquerades as our constitution in its oppressiveness. But crucially, there is no way forward unless we allow the oppressor the opportunity of rupture- to truly confront their history and abandon that which defines their condition as an oppressor, fundamentally, the warped view of all others as inhuman.






Attendant to rupture, is justice. The oppressed and exploited, the victimised and violated, can only realise the truth of their own history and the validity of their experiences, through justice. In this way then, they are freed from thinking that their salvation will come as a function of beating the oppressor at his own game: dehumanising. There is no number of women that can be raped in civil wars to restore the sense of humanity that was denied by colonisers. Oppression can’t be returned, because rather than resulting in liberation, it oppresses further. Such is the nature of de-humanisation. And indeed, why do people fly planes through towers? My view is that it stems out of the desire to be recognised as human and therefore as historically valid beings. Justice is therefore a progressive way of restoring the humanity of the historically subjugated.






I say all this to argue that the fundamental collapse of development is owing to the failure to move the founding structures of human relations. For as long as we aren’t moving for a global dialogue in which the perpetrators see themselves as such and rather than signing philanthropic cheques, seek true rupture from the oppressive systems that continue to feed their disingenuous philanthropy, there will be no development. For as long as development is reduced to nominal technical acts that seek to move people out of income poverty then the justice that liberates people to realise themselves as human, will always elude us. Development, as Sen has already articulated, is freedom. Freedom for the oppressor will come as a function of rupture. Freedom for the oppressed will come as a function of justice.