EP31: The Human Intelligence and Provinciality

[Airy jazz music] Hello, it's a new day, and I woke up this morning with a thought. But as usual, this is not something that only started this morning or from yesterday. This is something that I have been so like circling, as always, and I thought that spontaneously that this is a right moment to bring it into this series of episodes of podcasts that we are doing here called Dots of Thoughts. I've been thinking about the condition of humanity in our present time, especially with everything that is going on today. On one hand, there's all of these wars and everything, and then there is all the pressure and proliferation of, you know, and regurgitation of content on social media. And then, most importantly, there is now the question of artificial intelligence and AI. And even recently, there was some in the news that there is this whole notion that AI is going to kill us all, and that has been very much amplified in the news lately. This is the atmosphere within which my thought has been brewing these past days. And the way I've been thinking about it is this. And again, this is not conclusive in any way. I just thought to bring it here so that we can use it for our thought experiment, which is largely what these podcast episodes that I'm making are. They are thought experiments. They are not conclusions. They are not stamping me as an authority over anything. I'm simply sharing thoughts that we can use as a material for reflection, as an object of reflection. So, if you're listening to this podcast, understand that there is no burden of acceptance of what I say or to think that I'm some sort of authority. It doesn't matter eventually what you make of what I say. It's simply my own reflection. Think of it as me reflecting something, and you joining this conversation is also you mirroring that in your own way. And of course, as we know, human beings, as with light, we project, we reflect, and we refract. You know, just the way light does when it encounters material or when it's having this encounter or contact with material, right? It projects onto a material, onto a form. It reflects or it refracts. And human beings do largely that, you know. We are projecting, reflecting each other, mirroring, and even moments of refractions as well. Now, you see, we've just scaled the first quarter of the 21st century. So we are like months into the second quarter of the 21st century. So soon the year will be over, and it will be just one year into the second quarter of the 21st century. And the way this century has played out so far seems to me to be a kind of a century of reckoning, where all of those moving parts resulting from the way we have shaped reality as human beings in the 20th, 19th, 18th, and even centuries before. The 21st century became the century of reckoning. But you understand also that 20th century, 19th century, and before were centuries of a strong indoctrination or reinforcement of the principle, or the very doctrine of separation as an organising principle, okay? We like to talk about modernity as that which is bringing human beings together and advancing the world. We also like to talk about modernity as a move away from those bestial tendencies of humanity: primitive, traditional. That is very much emphasised or underscored by colonialism, slavery, and all of that. And there's a reason why we think of it that way, so much that now when we speak about the post-colonial, we often think about what is outside modernity, right? And those who are involved in fleshing out post-colonial reflections of thinking are often seen as writing from the margin or from the shadow. They are not really considered to be very much part of the moving current of modernity. And that is a misconception in many ways, but there is a reason for that misconception. You see, there was a time when, you know, it was all about— we know that it was colonialism. Christopher Columbus, but we might even go all the way to Alexander the Great. Colonialism means that you think in terms of colonising and going to a place and taking over the place and conquering the place and taking over and projecting one's knowledge, one's way of being in the place. Not to necessarily go there to make contact and make encounter and also truly exchange, but with the intention to take over and to co-opt, pillage and make those people eventually subservient to your, to your way of being, your way of seeing reality. And so that's been the norm, and out of that, we created a reality whereby separation and division became the organising principle. And I say organising principle emphatically because it led to many of the inventions. It organised us. And many would say, well, you know, there's been all of these amazing inventions that came out of it. Look at science. Look at physics. All of that was playing out within this. And that's why I'm saying it became an organising principle, because we were able to understand reality as disparate things, as already divided. So a child who is born today eventually meets a world that is already divided. So the child learns, when the child comes in, as the child is growing, as a child is brought into school, the child learns from his environment, from his interactions, from his parents, from his society, that the world is already divided. So you see that this is a reality that we have eventually accepted and constantly strive to reinforce and conform to. You see, fast forward into the 21st century. We are at a place now where all the moving currents are bringing us not only intensively but extensively into each other. And this is not by mistake. This was driven by many of those same technological inventions, right? So think about the invention of cars, of trains, of even time, the concept of time, right? Albert Einstein came up with the relativity of time, but eventually— but essentially, what Albert Einstein was doing was to invent a certain matrix of measurement of time. Because we have to understand that before then, there was always a dissonance between time in one city as opposed to another city. And so it was a big issue in terms of travelling. For example, when a train leaves Paris and it's going to Vienna, there has to be a way to synchronise the time. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity played an important role in the synchronicity of time as we know it today. So even that time is an invention. We invented all of these things. Planes became faster and more robust and can take us further. We organised ourselves across airports, and we built more roads across borders. We invented television, radio, washing machine. Now, it is true that while all of those inventions was going on, certain political factions and societies and, you know, races were exploiting and deploying those inventions for their divisive, continuous divisive, colonial, racist aims. That's true, very much so. But at the same time, there was something that was also happening that was inevitable, which is that the world and people were coming together by the same technology. Many of us who grew up in Africa had, you know, television in our house, and we discovered the world through television. We discovered Hollywood. We discovered Chinese, Asian, you know, films, Indian films. Radio was everywhere. We listened to music. All of that was bringing us and preparing us for a world that we are going to be encountering each other beyond those very provincial pockets of provinciality. And I use this word very intentionally, provinciality, that we were raised, because it continues up until today. So what I have come to understand after I have travelled over 50 countries throughout this century, because I started my, my travel out of Nigeria for the first time in 2003, so three years into this century, and here we are in 2026. And since then, I've travelled the world. I have met people. I've been to virtually almost all continents of the world. And one thing has become clear to me is that each and every one of us, we are raised in our little pockets and enclaves of provinciality. Here in Germany, for instance, the child is raised to be German. In Nigeria, the child is raised to be Nigerian. In America, in Asia, everyone is raised in their own little pockets of provinciality. In other words, the child is not even being prepared for a world that the inventions that we are making are driving us into. The child is made to understand the world as divided. Meanwhile, the technology is pushing us towards the contrary, that we are actually connected. The pencil that a child is writing with is made by somebody in Asia, but a child does not know in any way, is not given any form, any inkling, or even given a sense to even reflect on that. That this pencil that the child is writing with didn't just fall from the sky, that it has passed through hands and has gotten. So the child learns ownership, agency, in this very truncated and provincial way. So the child will, will think of his or her world as a form of entitlement. The child will feel entitled. But when we really look at it properly, there is no entitlement. There is only interconnection. And one does not need to go so far as to really see how the thread connects. But the only reason why that isn't emphasised is simply this provinciality. But what I am saying is that the world that we live in is making that knowledge inevitable. And if it is inevitable, and yet we are not learning to be that way, what then will happen? What will take place is violence, continuous violence, because that violence comes from non-fact. And non-fact leads to confusion and a kind of ignorance and a kind of dissonance. And this dissonance is very important because, you see, when there is dissonance, there is no harmony, and there will be confusion. And confusion will lead to more and more violence. Now, the reason I say this is because today we have artificial intelligence, and we are going about saying that this thing will kill us. But I want to sort of like keep that argument on the side a little bit and come back to the human being, that is, the human intelligence. I say, what do we make of it, really? Where do we start with the human intelligence, given everything that I have said so far? Given the fact that if we really look at our lives and what we carry around as knowledge, we want to lay claim to that knowledge and say, this is what makes us who we are. Some of us even go as far as saying, this is what makes me better than this other person. And that is no different from someone who says, this is what makes me worse than this other person. We even go as far as doing that. And yet, in all my travels, I haven't seen real evidence, clear evidence, that says one person is better than the other based on what they know or what they have. I haven't seen any clear evidence, any undisputable evidence. They are all, again, projections. Projections that we deliberately create. But that projection is based on that old replay of the doctrine of separation, division as an organising principle. And then we come around and say we want peace. We want love. We want harmony. Each and every one of us hold this to be true, that we want happiness. And yet, the way we move around in the world is very contrary to everything that could actually lead to happiness. Unless the happiness, that sort of happiness, is the kind of happiness that when one has it for themselves, it does not pertain to his or her neighbour. What sort of happiness is that then? Is that happiness complete? Is it real? Is it not an illusion? What sort of happiness can be ascribed to one person and yet not to the other? Is that real happiness? Even if there is something to it, is it sustainable? Is that happiness sustainable in the world we live in? Is it not going to come around at some point and form coagulations of conflict, of animosity, between the poor and the rich, between the haves and the have-nots? Will it not come around sometime, some point, to form a coagulation, an ugly, sinister coagulation of animosity that will now completely undermine the same happiness? Some would now say, I would do everything in my power to make this happiness mine and mine alone, because that is also what ensures my security from this other person that I fear, from this other person that is about to attack me, from this stranger. The whole point of this reflection for me today is to put a finger on the very fact that even up until today, we are still primitive insofar as we continue to move in this mindset and reality that the world is separated and divided. Because it is no longer so. And by that, our technological inventions are even far ahead than us. And this is how human intelligence will become subordinate to artificial intelligence. You see where I'm going? Because the human intelligence will be stuck in its own provinciality. The education system has not been transformed or reformed or revolutionized. No, it is still the same. Today, as we speak here in Europe, there is a concerted effort, very deliberate, to omit that part of the European history that is ugly to them, that they would rather not open up to the child. So the child is raised and given this idea that, you know, their life is to have best side of both worlds. And that is entitlement, because that is actually not how the world is shaped. The world is divided. The world runs on the doctrine, or I would say the illusion, of separation. So, but a child is told that this is what you will learn so that you will get ahead in life. You have more access. You have more position. You have, you know, that's how the child has been raised, to prepare the child to be competitive, to be ahead of his or her peers. Work hard so that you can be more than your friend. But I have been looking at children, because I have kids. Right from the day they were born, none of those things really matter to them. They flow through life discovering, testing, experimenting, having contact and encounter with life. That is how children are. They have so much to teach the adult in terms of how to make contact with things, how to be tactile, how to really give all of one's entire being to something without having to know what one gets out of it in return. They eventually learn about reward, mostly from their parents, but also in their education system. They learn that they must do something for a particular reward. And the more they do it, the more they push themselves towards that, they get more of it. And always at the expense of someone else. That aspect can be sugar-coated and said it's simply you getting better and better. But the moment you tell a child that they are getting better, there must be somebody through whom or by whom that betterness is measured, who is worse. Because if you're going to be better, then someone is going to be worse. And I'm not saying there are no aspects of our reality where those sort of ways of measuring or comparing— I don't like to use those words, you know. I don't like to use comparing, you know. You want to compare two things, two separate brands of toothpaste, you can do so, you know. When you want to compare, measure grains of rice, you can, you can do so. There are contexts where those come in handy. But when it comes to the human intelligence, which is the subject of this reflection today, human intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence, because now we're talking about how artificial intelligence will kill us all. Now, when it comes to human intelligence, is the human being an object that needs to be measured that way, compared that way? As we do this, we are undermining the human intelligence, and it's not evolving anyway. And so that same human intelligence will turn around and unleash this thing called artificial intelligence, and eventually it will lag behind. So my thinking is, if the focus does not turn to human intelligence, that is to say, how we relate with each other. That our life is not to prove that we are connected. That is already a given. The question is, how can we evolve? How can we learn to be in a world where we are connected with each other in all our myriad differences? Because we were not raised to actually be in that kind of world that our technological inventions are bringing us into. Every one of us, regardless of where we were born, none of us were raised really to be in that world, for it to be normal for us to sort of like be familiar with the world, regardless of where we go. To see someone who doesn't look like us and not be afraid, and the person not carry, the person's face not carry the image of what we are afraid of, or who we have been taught to be afraid of. Or conversely, who we have been taught to respect, to see as the one who is the superior, to see as the one who is the most beautiful, to see as the one who is the well-to-do, the sophisticated, and all whatnot. Both same. And yet, in everyday reality, what we see in everyday reality is that human beings come in different ways, different configurations, myriad ways of being. And it is important that in our time we begin to really look at that as very much— or rather, the investigation of that, the observation of that— as the very constituent of human intelligence. You know, when we talk about the organic, this is what we are speaking of. Life is organic. People come in different ways. People have different reasons and, and different ways, because they've come from different places, and they are coming slowly, closely into each other. But what is happening? The political systems are becoming more and more afraid. Here in Germany, the AfD faction has been elected, you know. And this is a faction that runs much of their political thesis on, and proposal on, you know, shutting off the border and saying we really want to emphasize that provinciality that is called Germany. Germany is a country that has always been at the crossroad, is at the centre of Europe by virtue of where, how it is positioned physically. It is a deliberate construction of violence to say you shut off the borders and there will be no crossing. But rather than sit and think, how do we learn how to be in difference, given that not only in Germany but the world, people are coming from different places and entering into each other, making contact and encounter. By the way, this encounter was what was missing in colonialism. There was contact, but there was no encounter. Encounter meaning that acknowledging that for every human being that is a living, moving entity is also at the same time producing knowledge, regardless of whether the knowledge pleases you or, you know, meets your fancy or not. That person is producing knowledge. And that when there's contact between two human beings, there has to be a space that allows for the acknowledgement of this fact, so that there will be encounter. So that we can see how this other human being have made knowledge. Knowledge that, when you really look at it, because we are still talking about how interconnected our reality is, goes all the way back, connects to other meaning, other places and people, and even goes all the way back in time. A place like Africa, for instance, where much of the knowledge was not really written down, it was carried in the language. How was it carried in the language? It is because the language became the means of animating this knowledge, transmitting it from generation to generation. So language is not simply something that one writes with or carries around as being knowledgeable. The language is used to live life, to animate life. And so when you see someone from Africa, the person carries thousands, centuries of knowledge in the language. But even in our time and the way the world is designed, there is no space for the true acknowledgement of all of that. However, the person carries a face. He's black. She's black. Oh, then there is already a preconceived notion, preconceived narrative of what the person is and who the person is, and also the limit of the person's knowledge. These are the things that will come around and undermine human intelligence, for which eventually artificial intelligence might then become dangerous. It is not artificial intelligence on its own. It is the provinciality, the primitivity of humanity that will bring about that harm. I have visited somewhere in India. I went to a temple, and someone said to me, this temple has been here since the seventh century. And that was marvellous. I was like, wow. But then, these days I think to myself: what is the point of me knowing that a temple has been in a place since seventh century if, on entering the temple, and the person presiding over that temple, or someone that I meet there, does not give me a sense that I, a stranger coming from somewhere far away, can also find this place to be my home? Not that I am made to feel at home. No, it is my home. It is a familiar world. Otherwise then, that whole narrative about the temple being there since seventh century is simply to continuously reinforce an identity that might then say that because you are not Indian, oh, you, you don't have a place here. But no. If you really look at how reality is, we are all connected to that place. Otherwise, why would I even be there at that point in time? Why would I have come there if I was never connected to that place in the first place? How could I have showed up in the places I've showed up if I was never connected there in the first place? And this does not mean that those who have not travelled, it does not apply. So these are the thoughts that I woke up with this morning. I invite you to enter into this thought experiment with me. There is a need for us to embark on that learning of how to be in difference and to channel all our creativity, but also our sensitivity, towards this, especially now that we are talking about the danger that might befall humanity with our latest invention. So that's about it for today. [Airy jazz music]