Some questions about “the female path”

Galo Martínez de la Pera continues his solitary reflection on community, the building of Basque citizenship and culture, feminism, the future of humanity and humanism. He does so with density and brilliance. He has just published Emearen bidea supergizakiaren aroan (“The Female Path in the Age of the Superman”) (Alberdania 2022), written in an excellent style: deep and agile, rich in sparkle, and meticulously woven from start to finish.

The author is well aware of the direction today’s world is taking and the grave dangers surrounding it. He sounds the alarm bells on the terrible wounds that humanity and all peoples are experiencing, peoples weakened and deprived of their being, human beings weakened and deprived of their dignity, and on the even more desolate future hanging over us. His efforts are to be welcomed, and I concur with him on the essentials. But, among the insights, I also find perplexities. I will be addressing five main issues that have occurred to me:

1. Is Nietzsche’s superman inhuman? The term superman brings us back to Nietzsche, a brilliant, prophetic thinker. It was 150 years ago that in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra he foretold the coming of the superman. As the human spirit makes its way towards its full being, he says, it goes through three metamorphoses: it becomes first a camel, then a lion, then a child. The burdened, submissive camel must become a free lion: show its sharp teeth, shake off the burdens imposed on it by oppressive powers, Christianity and other religions, especially. Say NO, be free. Now, in order to access its full power, the strong lion must become an innocent, creative child that plays. Say YES to your full potential, be a child.

Child! However, Galo Martínez uses the word superman as a symbol of the desire for capricious, nihilistic, unlimited power. Hitler would be its embodiment. Or Stalin. Any dictator. And in this 21st century more specifically, that is what that transhuman species would be and which, thanks to biotechnology and info-technology, would like to create Facebook, Amazon, Google…, an inhuman machine that would turn the human being into a god, a transhuman being that would conquer disease and death forever, a cruel absolute dictator who, endowed with consciousness and merciless freedom, will subjugate this normal humanity which suffers from disease and death. Aldous Huxley’s nightmare. The suicide of the human being and, ultimately, everyone’s downfall.

I fully agree that the creation of this dark monster is the gravest danger facing humanity. But I wonder: Does the superman that Galo Martínez understands in the most negative sense have anything to do with that of Nietzsche? Not in my opinion. Indeed, Nietzsche proclaimed the superman in the most positive sense, as the highest potentiality with which the human race is endowed: consciousness in communion, supportive freedom, happy goodness. A child superman.

2. Harari, the prophet of the inhuman superman? I find the attacks that Galo Martínez unleashes against the young Israeli historian and thinker Yuval Noah Harari even more unfair. He accuses him of “legitimising and justifying Nazism”, of wanting to destroy democracy and human rights. “It is clear,” he says, “that Harari’s superman has totalitarianism under his arm”.

I have carefully read more than 1,500 pages by Harari, and what is clear to me is that Galo Martínez has failed to understand the Israeli writer. Because the latter does not defend the all-powerful technological superman Homo deus. He limits himself to describing the immortal, totalitarian monster (robot or cyborg) that economic and military elites can create; and he warns us of the greatest challenge of the 21st century, of the grave danger that the most apocalyptic disaster could occur: that the monster we are feeding will turn the majority of human beings into a useless mass… Reading Galo Martínez leaves me stupefied.

3. Are Science and doctors the servants of the superman? The COVID-19 pandemic, he says, has also allowed “health totalitarianism” to be applied using the weapon of fear. And “the answer to all our fears has a name: vaccine”. All this is “subordinated to the profits of financial capitalism”. The accusations he levels against those who have been the heroes of the pandemic, the health workers, strike me as particularly harsh. “Most doctors are almost unanimously in favour of this totalitarian strategy.” As “healthcare army and police”, they form “a network of repression” together with “the healthcare army and the police”. My memory takes me back to the thousands upon thousands of doctors, nurses and all health workers who risked or gave their lives to save ours. May they all forgive us.

4. Cultural revolution without politics? I share the “negative politics” that Galo Martínez proposes, namely the rejection of the politics of the superman and the authoritarian State that underpins the politics. I agree that we must stage a cultural revolution, thus rediscovering the original vital sources of language, recovering the soul and use of language, breathing the spirit of myths, rites, festivals, music and land. But what I find more than debatable is the opposition between cultural revolution and political revolution, and the assertion that “the revolution is located outside the political sphere” or that “the true community cannot be constituted through politics”. Galo, how do you want to bring about the “negative politics” you advocate without practising some kind of positive politics? How is one to enable a broader human consciousness, sensitivity, closeness, compassion, adult childhood, etc., without promoting more humane institutions (political, whether we like it or not), without organising scientific research, education, health services or transport? It is essential to say NO; it is also essential to say YES.

5. Where do men end up on the female path? To make progress, Galo Martínez proposes “the female path”. Here, too, I agree with what I think I understand: that we need gender equality, the community of vulnerable, mortal, flesh-and-blood human beings, the revolution of compassion. But I am confused by some assertions. For example, that “life in itself is female”, that “the priority of femaleness must be recognised”, that “only the feminist movement occupies the original place in the revolution”, or that it positions attention, festivity, music, dance, compassion, the child’s smile or the logic of life, as well as “the fiesta of the Basques” on the female path. Only on the female path? Why not on the male path as well?

So will one have to choose between submission to the male and submission to the female? Will the path have to be either male or female?  No, but rather female and male, all sexual orientations and gender identities, companions on the path, without subordination or borders, because the path of each one is also the path of everyone else. Because no one, nothing, exists without the other, without all the others. In all the atoms of the world, the positive pole of the proton and the negative pole of the electron complement each other, and both give rise to the creative dance of the universe.

Aizarna, Basque Country. 12 September, 2022

(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)