COURSE ID : 1110

COURSE NAME : CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY

LECTURER : NAHDA SHEHADA

TITLE OF PAPER:

The Development Arrogance. Zidres Law and the Discourse of

Science

Elaborated by: Pablo A. Durn Chaparro.

2016
Introduction

In this essay I will elaborate an argument about the way the discourse of science is
produced and presented as the privileged vehicle for progress in a country. To
accomplish this, I will use as a case study the Zidres Law; a Colombian law approved
to develop the rural areas of the country. I divided the essay in five sections. In the
first one I explained what is the Zidres Law. In the second section The Hybris of the
Science I use the foucaultian power-knowledge theory to describe the scientific
discourse as one with a profound arrogance. In the third section The destructive side
of Science I appeal to the Critical Theory, for call the attention to analyze the
scientific discourse in a dialectical way. In the fourth section, Zidres and the
improductivity of Colombian peasants I applied the foucaultian and the critical
theories to analyze my case study. Finally, in the fifth section, I present my
conclusions calling up for an Ecology of Knowledge that allow us to achieve food
sovereignity without annihilating the peasants traditional ways of production.

1. What are the Zidres?

The Zidres law is an act that was issued in January 29 of this year in Colombia. Zidres
are the Zones of Interest for Economic and Social Development in Rural Areas. The
main purpose of these zones is to promote one type of rural development consistent
with the demand of international tendencies in the agriculture and with the
recommendations of organisms such as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (Claim of unconstitutionality against the law 1776
2016). This type of agriculture is based in the monoculture and in the industrialization
of the countryside, guided by a vision in which the only way to produce nourishment
in order to assure food security is mainly through large scale agriculture.

To achieve this main goal this law changes the regime of the wasteland (Baldos). The
Baldos in Colombia are those zones whose owner is the state. Before this law, this
type of land could only be delivered to the subjects of rural reforms, this means to the
landless peasants or peasants with insufficient land. With this law this Baldos can be
deliver to any natural or legal person in Colombia or worldwide.
Another important change this law introduces is related to the extension of the
hectares of baldos that can be adjudicate to someone. Before this law, this was
regulated by the Family Agricultural Unit (UAF). This UAF is the necessary amount
of hectares a subject of Rural Reform deserves in order to achieve a dignified life.
This number of hectares is defined taking into account a considerable number of
variables of economic, social and environmental type. With this new law, the number
of land someone in Colombia can receive in order to develop it in a big scale, has no
limit. It is infamous the case in which the multinational Cargill hoard 52576 hectares
through an illegal procedure, creating 36 shell companies for this purpose. With this
law, this land accumulation will not be any more illegal. It will be necessary for the
development of the rural areas. A law that in name of productivity allows big
enterprises to have land that should be designated to the poorest in one of the more
unequal countries of the world, where the land distribution has a Gini coefficient of
0.83 and nearly two-thirds of properties of small scale peasants lack a formal title
(Burgos 2016), deserves a careful analysis.

2. The Hybris of Science

In ancient Greece, it was thought that wanting to be like the gods, and attribute to our
human nature powers that exceed us was an act of profound arrogance. For the
Greeks, this desire, called hybris is the worst of the sins, because it supposes the
illusion of being able of exceed the proper limits of the mortal condition and become
like the gods (Castro-Gmez 2005: 18). Plato in the Phaedrus describe this lack of
moderation with a metaphor where a charioteer tries to control two winged horses,
one representing the spirited element and the other the appetive element. When
appetite drag us irrationally towards pleasure and rules in us, its rule is called excess
(hubris) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2016). Santiago Castro-Gmez, a
Colombian philosopher that works using a foucaultian historiographic methodology
recover this Greek concept to describe the superciliousness of the enlightment thought
of some intellectuals in former Colombia at the end of the eighteenth century and
early nineteenth century. Castro-Gmez describe these thinkers as having the
haughtiness of knowledge, pretending to be able to produce universal scientific
descriptions of the world with independence of his ethnic and cultural center of
observation (Castro-Gmez 2005: 80).
This hybris is particularly connected to the epistemic shift in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in which science turned its attention from the examination of the
physical processes within the natural world to the study of 'man' (Mills 2003: 68). In
this shift, scientists import to this study of man all the tares that tout that it is possible
to find an objective point to watch and analyzed the human nature without being
observed and analyzed.

The speech of Harry Truman in his inaugural address as president of the United States
on January 20, 1949 is one full of lordliness. Not only because he situates in such an
advanced position on the scale of progress, to talk with paternalism to the primitive
nations, but also because he situates himself in a position that is pretended to be
objective and universal and from there he emits scientific judgments of what is need
to be do in terms of technical developments for the poor countries to advance in the
mentioned scale. Harry Truman was blinded by technical knowledge as enlightenment
thinkers in Colombia were by scientific reason.

The type of thought that considers that it is possible to produce judgments about what
is in the reality from an objective and universal point of view fails in recognize that
all the human knowledge is a situated one. Michel Foucault awakens us from this
deep sleep in which we dont recognize the knowledge as historically produced, by
saying that there is not even one individual thinker that can develop ideas and
knowledge from a stable basis (Foucault 1977: 153). For Foucault (Mills 2003: 70)
power/knowledge is a force that determines what can be known and what is true in a
particular time where the historical transformations and the historical struggles let this
emerge as a fact. Speeches as that of Truman helps to create a Power/knowledge
regime where it is possible to name others as miserable, primitives and handicapped.

3. The destructive side of Science

Critical Theory is recognized as one that is always putting in tension the two sides of
history. The Frankfurt School thinkers did this in relation to modernity by presenting
it not only as a positive force that lead us to progress, but also as a negative force
bound up with dehumanization, destruction of the environment, technology out of
control and totalitarian political development (Kellner 1989: 4). Walter Benjamin, a
German critical theorist in his essay titled Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian
shows us the necessity to think dialectically in relation to science and technology:

Technology, however, is obviously not a pure scientific fact. It is at the

same time a historical fact () Positivism was only able to see the
progress of natural science in the development of technology, but
failed to recognize the concomitant retrogression of society () They
misunderstood the destructive side of this development because they
were alienated from the destructive side of dialectics. (Benjamin 1975:
34).

When Harry Truman speaks about the imponderable resources in the technical
knowledge that could relieve the suffering of the primitive people that need to be
develop, as the positivists criticized by Benjamin, he is taking science per se and
failing to recognize the historicity of his asseveration. He, as a president of the United
States, can speak about the vigorous use of technology because of the material and
historical conditions that allow him to speak in that way. And not only that, Truman
also failed to recognize that technical knowledge not only has a positive side, but also
a negative and destructive one.

4. Zidres and the improductivity of Colombian peasants

Days after celebrating the Zidres law, the colombian president Juan Manuel Santos
told an audience in Washington the following: We have half of Colombia still to
conquer, in a way, like you conquered the West here in the United States in the 18th
century, we have to conquer half of Colombia. We are one of the few countries who
can produce more food, a lot more food, in the world (Burgos 2016). One may ask to
president Santos which are the tools and the means he will use in this venture of
conquer that half of Colombia he speaks about.

With any doubt one of the main tools this president and the class he represents will
use in his crusade to conquer the countryside is the Zidres law. One of the main
arguments that the ones who are defending this act are using is related to productivity.
They say that this law changes the obsolete way of understanding rural development
through the adjudication of land to small-scale peasants, to an approach that
introduces a new way of understanding the problem of food production. In this sense,
this law privileges a view of the peasants and the familiar agriculture as an
improductive model, although it was recognized by the Food and Agriculture
Organization that this type of farming is nowadays feeding the world (FAO 2014: 4).
As in the Foucault Power-Knowledge framework presented previously what matters is
not the facts, but the representation we create about them. The representation of the
peasants as being lazy or improductive is a man-made cultural and political fact that
situates the agroindustry always in a relative upper hand (Said 1993: 134).

To promote productivity this law focuses in technology. In the Colombians Zidres

Act 1776 we can read that the services of technical assistance and technology
transference will be oriented to facilitate the access of the rural producers to the
knowledge and to the application of the most appropriate techniques in order to
improve the productivity and the rentability of the production. But, as we see in the
Frankfurt School critique to modernity and in the Walter Benjamins quote,
technology is an historical fact, and if we understand it in this way we must be at least
doubtful when technology is presented as the vehicle to increase productivity.

5. Conclusion: towards an ecology of knowledge in the countryside

It is true that in the Zidres law a representation of the peasant as improductive have
been implanted to justify the government intervention promoting the agroindustry. It
is also true that this intervention is based in the use of technology to develop the rural
areas. Nevertheless, it is also true that after many years of remoteness and lack of
institutional opportunities the peasants of Colombia need to adjust their practices to
the new requirements of the global and national context. The discussion is not about if
it is important or not to produce food in Colombia. The discussion here is about how
can we do this and assuming which costs.

The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos could be useful in the construction on a

comprehensive way of thinking in alternatives to this Zidres law that not only can take
into account the peasant knowledge, but also that positive side of the technical
knowledge we have available in Colombia. It is important to develop an ecology of
knowledge (Santos 2007: xlv) of the production of food, in such a way that peasants
are not condemned to a survival economy, and that the neccesity to improve their
productivity can be achieved in an equilibrated relation with nature and with a justice
perspective between the actors involved.
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