Affiliates, distant individuals, capitalism, science and technology, now merged as if they were a single instance, consolidate their supremacy on contemporary society, determining its course with the same brazenness and impersonality of an invisible hand. Modern barbarism or barbarism generated within the so-called civilized societies characterized by the use of technical modern means (industrialization of murder, mass extermination thanks to cutting edge scientific technologies), the impersonality of the massacre (whole populations - men and women, children and elderly - are "eliminated" with the lowest personal contact as possible between the decision maker and victims), the bureaucratic, administrative, effective, planned, "rational" management (in instrumental terms) of barbaric acts and the use of legitimating ideology of the modern type: biological, hygienic, scientific.

1. 1
CAPITALISM, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND BARBARISM
Fernando Alcoforado *
Calvary means martyrdom, suffering. An observer aware of what happens in the world
realizes the Calvary suffered by humanity throughout its history. Despite the
extraordinary scientific and technological advances that mankind has achieved, this
ordeal has been translating in the increasing of social exclusion of a large portion of the
world population share of the fruits of economic progress, increased crime and violence
among humans, in the curtailment political freedoms in many countries and the
escalation of international conflicts and terrorism.
It is unfortunate the situation reached by the humanity with its form of civilization,
where hunger kills every day millions of people worldwide, most children who do not
survive to adulthood for lack of food while others eat too much and are obese for errors
and overeating as they do their own parents. We live in a world of contrasts between
luxury and waste, material wealth and misery. It is unacceptable to live in a world
where, in the last 6000 years of human history, there have been only 292 years of
relative peace between peoples. Join all this, the disproportionate aggression that is
being processed against the natural environment that can threaten the survival of
humanity at the prospect of a catastrophic global climate change.
There were two major events in the history of mankind that brought much hope that the
man would start the construction of a world and a new man with the elimination of the
shackles of oppression in thought and constraints to the development process. The first
major event concerns the Enlightenment and the second, the birth of Modernity. With
the Enlightenment, it was expected to prevail tolerance, humanism and respect for
nature and assert the right to liberty and equality among men. With Modernity, society
would reach, in turn, uninterrupted progress for the benefit of mankind thanks to science
and technology.
It should be noted that the Enlightenment is the name given to the ideology that was
being developed and built by the bourgeoisie in Europe from the revolutionary struggles
of the late eighteenth century whose themes revolve around the Freedom, Progress and
Man. The Enlightenment was intended to correct inequalities in society and guarantee
the natural rights of the individual, such as freedom and the free ownership of assets.
The Enlightenment humanism of the eighteenth century have proposed that the human
being and his dignity was the center and the fundamental value of all sciences, thus
imposing also it was the paramount concern of all laws in every legal system.
The Enlightenment gave the slogan of the French Revolution (Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity) and fertilized to the extent that his followers were opposed to injustice,
religious intolerance and absolutism privileges. However, since the French Revolution
to the present time, the Enlightenment political promises were abandoned around the
world by adopting imperialist practices by bourgeoisie and the governments of the
major capitalist powers associated with them, triggering three World Wars (World War
1, World War 2 and the Cold War), the advent of Fascism and Nazism, carrying out
military interventions and support for coups d'etat in several countries of the capitalist
periphery.
The Enlightenment political theories have failed since the French Revolution, the
English Revolution and the American Revolution. This failure paved the way for the

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advent of Marxist ideology around the world that it intended to take a step forward from
the Enlightenment seeking an end to exploitation of man by man with the reduction of
economic inequalities between social classes and, in the future, its complete abolition.
The facts of history show that the Enlightenment theories that guided the bourgeois
revolutions in the eighteenth century and Marxist theories under which were held the
socialist revolutions in the twentieth century failed because they did not fulfill their
promises of historical achievement of human happiness.
Modernity was born in the eighteenth century with the Industrial Revolution meaning
an extraordinary intellectual effort of Enlightenment thinkers to develop science and
reason and discover the universal laws. Science has acquired a fundamental importance
to human progress through continuous technological innovations. The idea was to use
the accumulation of knowledge generated in search of human emancipation and the
enrichment of daily life. Modernity is also defined as a period identified with the belief
in progress and the ideals of the Enlightenment. However, what we observe is that the
expectations for the fruits of science were painfully interrupted by events that have
marked the modern society. Chief among them was undoubtedly the catastrophes of the
First and the Second World War. In fact science has contributed to the barbarism of two
world wars with the invention of powerful and destructive armaments. Science and
technology began to be used for good and for evil.
Add to this the fact that science has lost its value as a result of disillusionment with the
benefits associated with technology has brought to humanity. All this scientific
development culminated in the current era with a global ecological crisis that could
result in a catastrophic global climate change. In this sense one can doubt the real
benefits brought by scientific and technological progress. In his book A Dialética do
Esclarecimento (The Dialectic of Enlightenment) (Zahar Editora, 1985), Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, philosophers linked to the Frankfurt School, argue that
the supremacy of technique in Modernity also paved the way for political folly.
Scientific progress, which is trained technically to the elimination of poverty, brought,
however, their growth, which for both authors denounces as obsolete the reason for the
rational society preached by the Enlightenment.
Adorno and Horkheimer deconstruct the myth that the Enlightenment would bring
freedom to invest the men as gentlemen, the overcoming of domination, which was
replaced by reason of market capitalism. In turn, the control over nature was kept, but
worsened in the form of domination over men. And market capitalism became the prime
instance of this control mode. It is global and omnipresent, market capitalism with the
necessary technical, provided by science, to make men gears of his engine, nullifying
them through the economic principle of full competition. Market capitalism of
totalitarianism extinguished autonomous thinking and strengthens the uniformity and
unanimity in a mass society, amorphous as we experienced in the contemporary era in
the world.
Affiliates, distant individuals, capitalism, science and technology, now merged as if
they were a single instance, consolidate their supremacy on contemporary society,
determining its course with the same brazenness and impersonality of an invisible hand,
according Adorno and Horkheimer. Michael Lowy, sociologist and French-Brazilian
philosopher and director of research in social sciences CNRS- National Center for
Scientific Research in France, says that modern barbarism or "barbarism generated
within the so-called civilized societies" characterized by the use of technical modern

3. 3
means (industrialization of murder, mass extermination thanks to cutting edge scientific
technologies), the impersonality of the massacre (whole populations - men and women,
children and elderly - are "eliminated" with the lowest personal contact as possible
between the decision maker and victims), the bureaucratic, administrative, effective,
planned, "rational" management (in instrumental terms) of barbaric acts and the use of
legitimating ideology of the modern type: biological, hygienic, scientific [See Barbárie
e modernidade no século 20 (Barbarism and modernity in the twentieth century),
Michael Lowy, published in Brazil by the newspaper "Em Tempo"-
emtempo@ax.apc.org and originally in French, in the journal "Critique Communiste"
No. 157, hiver 2000)].
*Fernando Alcoforado, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor of Territorial
Planning and Regional Development from the University of Barcelona, a university professor and
consultant in strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is
the author of Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova
(Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São
Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado.
Universidade de Barcelona, http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e
Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX
e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of
the Economic and Social Development-The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Muller
Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe
Planetária (P&A Gráfica e Editora, Salvador, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e
combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011),
Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012) and
Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV,
Curitiba, 2015).