Everyone knows about the recent causes of the financial crisis overwhelming the banking casino; there are many competent analyses; some even name those responsible. I would be angry with myself if I were merely to repeat what the media are repeating every day.
I do not pretend to be an economist or a financial specialist. I simply think there is a gap between the numbers reached in the volatile stock market casinos and the weightier and slower reality of labor and goods; this gap, which is measurable in Euros and percentages, equals the immense distance that today separates the media-political spectacle from a new human condition. The numerical gap can help evaluate that distance. This is the aim of my book.
To measure both, I will go backwards in time and space as I did a few years ago, in my book Hominescence, where I tried to take stock of the new things that affected the West in the years following the Second World War, and more specifically during the 1960–70 decade. But first I must define my terms: how does one measure the newness of an event? It is proportional to the length of the preceding era concluded by the event. I will be returning to this point several times.
In the course of the twentieth century in countries similar to ours, the percentage of farmers and those whose profession was linked to plowing and pasture fell from more than half of the total population to 2 percent. This drop even became a collapse in the 1960s. And it still goes on. Even as it continues to be fed by the earth, Western humanity has abandoned it.
However, humanity has worked on the earth and lived off it since Neolithic times. This recent break can be considered an event going way beyond usual history because it ends a stretch of time that started in prehistory. We can say that in the twentieth century and especially in the years between 1960 and 1970, the Neolithic period came to an end.
Let me ask again: how can we estimate and measure the importance and novelty of an event? If indeed the measure is proportional to the length of the period it closes, then the sudden depletion of rural populations constitutes one of the most important and most unusual ruptures of the century. It ends an era that started ten thousand years ago. I will apply the same type of measurement to the other ruptures I will mention later.
At the same time, the proportion of humans living in cities goes from 3 percent in 1800 to 14 percent in 1900 and to over half in 2000. Demographers foresee that in 2030, this proportion will reach 70–75 percent. Already we see the emergence of gigantic megapolises around the globe.
What does our old history tell us about the importance of Babylon, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, London, or Washington? Doesn’t it celebrate the power of the minuscule minority that haunted those cities? Didn’t most humans live outside those places and hence outside that story? Apart from the wars in which they died, my ancestral farmers and sailors, even those close to my own generation, knew nothing of that history, except that it stole their children’s lives from mothers and from girls their young loves.
When the majority of humans move away from the land, relations to the world are changed. A high percentage among the generations that follow me has never seen a chick or straw, a yoke or a ploughshare, nor a cow or pig or brood. Not only have they never seen or heard a turkey or a duck, but they can no longer speak regional languages, whose sumptuous mosaic faded quickly with the collective murder of peasant infantrymen during the First World War and which later declined precipitously when local rural communities disappeared.
Sailors and aviators now follow GPS, not stars; even astronomers work on a screen. No one observes the sky to know what the weather is like, while everyone looks at the weather report on television. We believe in nature’s goodness and the tiger’s indulgence. And in fact this is how the old being-in-the-world of the philosophers survives. Or rather we should say, the being-in-the-apartment, going off to vacation in Arcadia, sometimes wearing shorts.
The ignorance of the world in which we humans remained so long endures today; unstable and fragile, the awakening world changes its status and becomes the third actor in politics, as we will see.
First move: everything becomes political—from the Greek polis, the city—and everyone is more and more a citizen. Almost no living soul lives or will live outside city walls. There are fewer beings-in-the-world. Who then will know the world as the rural people knew and practiced it? Who now thinks about the world?
Second move: precisely at this very moment, the world takes revenge and threatens humans. Nothing then can remain political in the traditional sense.
I will come back later to this dramatic reversal.
Let me now consider the new human environment created by transportation systems.
People’s mobility increased a thousandfold between 1800 and today. In air travel, for instance, it amounts to three thousand billion passenger kilometers in 2008. At least a third of humanity (2.3 billion) traveled by plane in 2006 and this increase continues. There is nothing comparable since the emergence of Homo sapiens.
Practiced for previous millennia, the parallel mobility of fruit and vegetables, wild and domestic animals, insects, arthropods, viruses and bacteria has increased in the same proportions. The distance traveled by merchandise before it reaches the supermarkets can be measured in thousands of kilometers.
In my La légende des anges1, I called “New City” an unexpected collectivity that has emerged in the last few decades. Invariant in its variations, it comprises and shuffles all cities through thousands of intercity webs, in which, for instance, the largest “restaurant” in the world belongs to the most important American airline. France becomes a city with the TGV as its subway system and the freeways as its streets.
All this movement exposes the human immune system to pandemics, to which we may no longer be able to respond some day.
Around the 1950, the availability of penicillin and antibiotics made medicine more efficient, at least for major infectious illnesses like tuberculosis and syphilis. It seems reasonable to say that this efficient medicine only really appeared after the Second World War. Moreover, chemistry and pharmacy produced analgesics and anesthetics whose power, in statistical terms, erased the pain which used to accompany people’s lives and ruled their behaviors and morals on a daily basis. Now that we no longer live with this daily pain we call its former endurance the glorification of suffering, even though it promoted exercises that helped to tolerate life’s inevitable companion—at least to some extent. For example, canceling a curse that lasted since the emergence of Homo sapiens, generalized epidurals have recently changed the nature of childbirth, which has become less painful for women. Here is another example, a miracle actually: the eradication of smallpox by the World Health Organization in the ’70s. It cured not patients but an entire illness. A global organization eliminated a universal virus.
Just before the Second World War, René Leriche2 defined health as the silence of the organs—that is, if they were heard, they would voice the sound of pain. Today, everybody speaks of being in good shape or of well-being, which I for one define as the organs’ exquisite music. In other words, before the dates mentioned, pathology was so frequent as to be normal, at least in the West. Later, health became the norm.
As a result, the body is changing. After the 1950s, a different human organism emerged whose new features are not yet clear to us. I still speak statistically: less suffering, fewer incurable illnesses, and fewer traces of pain on one’s skin… Hidden in the past because it was dotted with scars and spots, the body is now presentable and undresses on the beach.
Even better, at least since Semmelweiss3 of blessed memory, we started to get control over maternal and infantile mortality and with Pincus4, sexuality, reproduction and birth. Hopefully, sexual equality may arrive some day in our still abominably chauvinist cultures. Until recently, our history books told the intolerable lie that the French had obtained universal suffrage even though only half the adults could vote.
The time of birth, the duration of illnesses or when pain reached a peak, did not depend on us; today they depend on us to some extent. We can even perhaps partly postpone the moment of death by abstaining from fatty foods and tobacco, taking ten available drugs and practicing two different kinds of daily exercises: the useful one for the body and the other kind that is indispensable to avoid precocious senility but nevertheless so rare, intellectual exercise.
To summarize: in a world that is more and more forgotten, in a dream nature, and a mobile environment rapidly becoming virtual, bodies emerge that have little in common with those of their fathers, however close in time.
The period terminated by these health-related events can no longer be measured in thousands of years, but reaches back to the emergence of Sapiens itself; it no longer just extends beyond history to prehistory, but almost reaches back to the hominization process. This is why I prefer the term “hominiscence” to hominization, to characterize a new phenomenon that is millions of years old.
At the same time and roughly for the above-mentioned reasons, and mainly because of the slowly generalized drop in infantile mortality, the number of humans went from two billion to six and soon seven billion, most often squeezed together in gigantic megapolises. Demographic growth in 1968–69 reached a peak never before attained by Homo Sapiens: 2 percent. It has been declining slightly since then.
The corollary, in rich countries only, is the increase in life expectancy that demographers today evaluate at the colossal number of three to six months per year. On average, French people in the countryside live beyond 85 years. We will soon live in the company of thousands of centenarians. Only a century ago, novels by George Sand or Balzac show women barely reaching the age of thirty.
Where are the days of yesteryear?
This re-composition of the human landscape should have profoundly transformed institutions and traditions such as the family, retirement, inheritance, succession, and transmission. Does a marriage where spouses pledge fidelity for five years resemble the one where the same promise extends to 60 years? Why, then, be surprised by the declining number of nuptials? The word may remain, but covers a different reality. The transmission of property sometimes skips two generations. Furthermore, in days gone by young men used to go to war, a flower in their gun, to give their country additional life expectancy. Today, would they as enthusiastically hasten to offer a few decades to a collectivity they consider disgusting and monstrous, or to generals seen as killers? Why, then, be surprised by a totally different sensibility towards war? Would we today build bronze or marble statues on our squares for assassins that are glorified by history according to the number of corpses they sent to mass graves during their lifetime?
Where are our heroes of yesteryear?
After the world and the body, let us look at our relationships. New technologies change our ties, our neighborhoods, our knowledge and how we acquire it. Connectivity replaces collectivity. The most ignorant among us now has fairly easy access to more knowledge that yesterday’s greatest scholar. This ease renders obsolete academic dissertations in history or philosophy where the scholar studiously copied all possible documentation on a given topic and displayed it to show his determined expertise. One click makes it all immediately accessible; one fraction of a second replaces ten years of research. We face a formidable deluge of details, information, observations, and data in general. As a result, together with a new concept of reason which is losing some of its abstraction, a new objective collective memory emerges, which tends to replace the subjective memory that is disappearing fast.
Where are our learned scholars of yesteryear?
What will become of our pedagogy of yesteryear?
Moreover, we no longer inhabit the same space since we no longer refer to landmarks in terms of distance. Our old address, decorated with a street number and the mention of some geographic division, showed that we were living in the old Euclidian or, rather, Cartesian space. The same term “address”, derived from royal laws, allowed tax collectors and policemen to go to people’s home if taxes were not paid, military service not performed, or when offenses or crimes were committed. Cell phone codes and the “adèle”—the superb cell phone code of our Québécois friends—no longer refer to networks of distance; their encoding suggests we now inhabit neighboring spaces. New technologies do not lessen remote distances but transport houses into an entirely different topological space. All neighbors now, we no longer live in the same home as our fathers.
Where is our habitat of yesteryear?
What has also changed is the influence of topics that would have been considered unimportant or even vulgar before. Two summers ago, a Walloon citizen and ordinary housewife, Mrs Huard, had more visits on the Web than the votes obtained in all the campaigns by the politician asked to form the government. A young genius of one of Montpellier’s suburbs, Rémi Gaillard, makes quick, funny videos and his site gets 400 million visits, a world-scale number. He invested only 4000 Euros and made little or no profit. Here are two people, a man and a woman, whom I respect very much and who teach respect for any passer-by in the street. Indeed, I prefer their quasi-anonymity to the glory of those who want to rise above everyone else with their weapons and physical, intellectual, financial, or media violence. I like those swallows who finally announce a Spring of democracy, that ideal of which we have only known counterfeits since the lies of aristocratic Greece.
Where are the politicians and stars of yesteryear?
I chose to have my analysis go back half the century separating us from the Second World War because it marks another major date in the hominization process. It is the first conflict where, according to experts, humans succeeded in killing more fellow humans than were killed by all the microbes and bacteria encountered in and spread by the preceding confrontation. For the first time, reason, science, and technology went beyond the deadly laws of life. War for the sake of war prevailed over the struggle for life. The Bomb beat Darwin.
Before, whenever the male Homo sapiens indulged in the carnivore pleasure of killing each other, a battle used to bring together weapons and armies, but also rats, fleas, and viruses that killed far more than sabers and blows, or even machine guns. Although it was rightly considered one of the most atrocious mass killings of all times, the First World War provoked fewer deaths than the so-called Spanish flu, whose victims may have numbered a 100 million, according to the latest estimates. The Second World War marks the moment of reversal: in terms of thanatocracy, we now do better than nature! What an atrocious model for domination! Yes, at that moment humans became more dangerous for humans than the world.
The Manhattan Project led to the A-bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I have called the first world-object, that is, an object one of whose dimensions is compatible with one of the physical dimensions of the world. Other world-objects have since then seen the light: satellites, the Web, nuclear waste and nanotechnologies. The Cold War continued the process and some nations, overtly or covertly, acquired the H-bomb.
The equilibrium of global power changes into a situation that is difficult to analyze. Most paradoxically, it is not certain that the stronger, or even the strongest, will remain master for long. An example: even while spending over one trillion dollars, the indisputable superpower has been unable to win a war against one of the weakest countries of the planet. This is a strange crisis of power.
Where are the lords of yesteryear?
Let us summarize the list. The last few decades have seen the radical transformation of our relations to the world and nature, of the body and its suffering, the environment, the mobility of humans and things, life expectancy, control over reproduction or sometimes death, global demography, virtual space, the nature of relationships in collectivities, and knowledge and power.
In one area at least, we are able to compare historical developments. The computer age offers new means of storing, managing, sending, and receiving information. Before this, printing in the fifteenth century AD and writing in the BC era had achieved analogous results. Those two achievements transformed the law, cities, government, commerce, science, pedagogy, and religion, and represent concrete evidence that soft technologies have far greater influence on society compared to hard technologies with their overvalued consequences. Mathematics is born with writing and modern science with printing. Similarly, coins replace barter and then bank notes replace coins. And so on, from monotheistic religions of the Holy Book and Scriptures, born in the Fertile Crescent, and the Reformation during the Renaissance. Such a spectrum of changes affects almost all institutions; it twice threw light on recent history and is doing so again today. We witness partial local crises that are due to new technologies and that touch all the areas I have just enumerated.
However, we have no equivalent model to evaluate the effects of agricultural or bodily mutations, nor for ruptures that concern relations to the world and other humans. Let me emphasize again that the importance of an event can be measured by the length of the era it concludes. Here, changes stop or end periods that are as long as the one separating us from the Neolithic, or even from our own emergence—in other words, tens of thousands or even millions of years. I clearly see the uphill side of the crevice but I am not sure I see the downhill slope as clearly. Have women and men ever changed more since they emerged? This is why I used the new term of “hominiscence.” What happens when such decisive changes occur? When one examines each of the different components of these changes separately, it is easy to see why crises have emerged in the production and circulation of agricultural products, in education, the University, in short in the transmission of knowledge and its traditions, the army, war itself and terrorism, hospitals, the law, social relations, cities, and religions… In other words, it is not enough to talk about the recent financial disaster, whose loudly proclaimed importance derives from the fact that money and the economy have seized all power, the media and governments. It would be better to accept the fact that all our institutions clearly and globally are experiencing a crisis going far beyond the scope of normal history.
Tell us now that this is not a crisis!
The decade I spoke about experienced three almost imperceptible wrinkles on the smooth surface of history. Between 1960 and 1965, peasant revolutions broke out in France, from Brittany to the Aveyron, Alsace and the Pyrénées, which left about ten people dead, a rare occurrence today. Between 1960 and 1962 the Vatican II Council took place in Rome; its aggiornamento worried—or rather, threw off balance—the largest world religion, the Catholic Church. Finally, in 1968, student movements spread all over the planet while the atomic bomb became nuclear.
I believe those three events represented a tectonic plate; they reacted to the changes of hominiscence listed above. Few analyses recognized their importance, since everybody thinks in economic or political terms. Nevertheless they affected what were our ancient and deep-seated traditions and cultures: the realms of religion, culture, and scholarship, and the military—that is, the social classes once outlined by Georges Dumézil: priests and clerics, warriors, and producers. I will come back to this triad that for thousands of years had shared power in the Indo-European era.
Strangely and dangerously, in spite of those major transformations, our institutions, whether political, religious, military, health-related, financial, entrepreneurial, or other, continued as if nothing were happening.
These institutions were conceived, invented, and organized for a humanity of fewer than a billion souls, including an immense majority of peasants tied to the land and scattered over rural spaces, manual workers whose bodies were rarely cared for and even less medicated, and whose life expectancy was 30 years. They were subjected to daily pain, had zero comforts and survived famine and illnesses with difficulty, facing a nature experienced as cruel. Nevertheless, economic and political theories and social systems continued to manage humans and a world that no longer had anything to do with these millenary times which suddenly ended in less than half a century. We will pay for this blindness.
In other words, the gap between the real situation of nature and society as it changed and is still changing today, was continually growing in the last 50 years, creating new bodies, a new relation to the world, and different neighborhood relations. In other words, this is a gap between a new reality and organizations created at a time when humanity lived very differently. Another way to measure it is the distance between the rich countries and the others, which in my La Légende des anges, I compare to the differences our Greek and Roman ancestors established between mortals and the gods.
Nothing is riskier than living in this gap. It strangely resembles the tension between two tectonic plates, which silently prepares an upheaval whose intensity will be proportional to the length of the wait.
As a result, still dominant but suddenly outdated institutions, like erstwhile dinosaurs, take refuge by drugging themselves with spectacles. Yes, there is bread, the economy, purchasing power, unemployment…, bread, yes, but especially games to forget the bread, television and radio games, sports matches, even electoral games. Distressed, we witness the permanent distribution of spectacle drugs of all kinds. The West is a drug addict.
Are we coming out at the other side of this tectonic plate of un-consciousness? I foresee upheavals that are at least analogous to those ending an entire era, as for example in Antiquity when numerous cultures disappeared. Again, I have trouble seeing the downhill slope of the crevice outlined here, but it will probably resemble an unexpected rearrangement of the consequences of these transformations. Undoubtedly the easily visible, scattered pieces discussed in the above list will form a new and unpredictable global design.
In the meantime, what we observe allows us to measure the depth and extent of the crisis; it not only touches the financial markets, work and industry, but the whole of society and all of humanity. At stake here, beyond any history, is the essential relation of humans to the world.
I have promised a second look backward in time and another wider view in space.
In Indo-European societies at least, social and political institutions developed on a terrain that had first been divided into three domains, regimes or functions: religion, the army, economic production and trade. Recently, in numerous works where he described the triad in several cultures, languages and latitudes, Georges Dumézil showed its long-term stability in myths, symbols, customs, and behaviors. His clear and thorough exposition, often representing the triad with the Roman gods Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinius, convinced me long ago. The division between the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate still endured at the eve of the French Revolution.
Depending on time and place, power was assumed in turn by a handful of priests or clerks in the name of some equivalent of Jupiter, by military chiefs, fanatics of Mars, and by plutocrats, followers of Quirinius or at least his invisible hand. We have known few other aristocracies; we have always obeyed rare and selective masters. We lived through the millenary age of theocracies; then the feudalism of the Middle Ages; and finally the modernity of the economy. Wearing ten masks, including a democratic one, a handful of people reigned: priests, warriors, the wealthy, and even experts in the ferocious and flabby science called Administration.
Except for a few theocracies scattered on the map, dangerous like terminal illnesses, the reign of Jupiter vanished around the Age of Enlightenment, at least in the West. Today we only lament its fatal diseases or deadly remains. I hope that our atrocious twentieth century, with its various forms of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and the thermonuclear bomb, has seen the end of the martial reign, since superpowers no longer know how to win a supposedly easy war over the weak and small.
From reading a thousand history books, we also naively believe that the past behavior of the Roman people continuously clamoring for panem et circenses, bread and games, was a result of their decadence—or at least its manifestation. Not at all: it was the cause. To believe that a society can solely live on bread and games, the economy, spectacles, consumption, banks, and television, as we do today, is such a fundamental misunderstanding of any collectivity’s real functioning, that this exclusive and erroneous choice will simply hurl it to its demise, as we saw in ancient Rome. It would be like saying, for instance, that an organism only needs to see and eat; it would soon die because it could not breathe, move, or drink. I am not saying the economy is marginal; it remains central—but to believe that, embellished by the cosmetic aura of democracy, it is the only power will lead us to extinction.
Let me hazard a daring hypothesis here with implications I am, of course, unable to explain. What if the present crisis in turn sounded the end of the economy’s exclusive reign? After Jupiter and Mars, will Quirinius leave his throne? Will he die for having directed and arranged an exploitation of the world fatal to himself? For organizing work that mainly exhausts him? For having divided humans into classes leading to his own overthrow? Would not his downfall be due to the all-too-human fact that a war conducted with a technique protecting the lives on one side, will always be lost against a weak but numerous force that does not count its losses in lives? In other words, to the fact that the demography of the poor will prevail over thermonuclear power but that this victory could also signal the end of the planet?
Is our ancient economic relation to the world coming to an end? Briefly stated, the unlimited potential of research, progress, or rational and technological exploitation was and is still aimed at a finite whole of concrete, inert, or living objects. To use an image, here humanity’s infinity faces the world’s finitude. Let us remember we believed the contrary; we believed in our weakness and in the overwhelming power of nature, humanity’s finitude and hence the world’s infinity. We thought that our whole history consisted in courageously and ceaselessly struggling against powers that were always stronger and greater than ours. The image is reversed: we now know that our reason, our research, our desires and will, our history and our power, even our consumption are infinite and that the nature confronting us is finite. A process longer than history, for we believed it to be infinite, is overturned and has hit the barrier of the world whose asymptote undoubtedly constitutes the downstream slope of the crisis. Clearly we are facing a non plus ultra necessitating at least a bypass—or, better yet, new ways. This is the beginning of an era called anthropocenic, where humans will have to make very different moves from those made by past strategies.
I return to my earlier assessment. Whether we are dealing with agriculture and the new relation to nature, transportation and mobile things and humans, public health, life expectancy and demographic growth, space, the new home of neighborhoods developed by new technologies, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, the world remains today the common asymptote and global reference of all these processes. This common asymptote is well known since we have begun to evaluate its global numbers and capacities. Everything was going toward what we thought was the world’s infinity, but everything will come from what it has become, a finite barrier. Our history caused our problems but will also create possible solutions, which I will outline. They concern walls, barriers, homes, survival conditions… which history does not usually mention.
Facing a new type of necessity, a hominiscent is emerging whose numbers, bodies, strength, circulation, relations with others, science, and capacity to intervene transform both his nature and nature itself, as well as his profound relations to things and his own humanity. Today he has at his disposal tools or machines whose dimension or dimensions are equal to one of the world’s dimensions. Whether they be weapons of mass destruction or mass construction, global techniques in space, duration, volume, speed, nanotechnologies for small things, the hominescent rises to the level of the world.
It is therefore urgent to reconsider the respective status of those two active subjects and the respective roles of this couple that have so far been considered as aggressive or polemical opposites.
1 Michel Serres, La légende des anges, Flammarion, 1993.
2 René Leriche, 1879-1955, was a famous French surgeon.
3 Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis, Hungarian physician, 1818–65, pioneer of antiseptic procedures.
4 Gregory Goodwin Pincus, 1903–67, American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.