Let me go back to my earlier question: who will speak in the name of Biogea? Of course, those who know it and devote their lives to it.
I go back to the three functions. Will power today be detached from the old triad of priests, soldiers, and wealth creators? If so, who will replace the three aristocratic bodies that in turn or even in cahoots have managed the Indo-European era since Neolithic times? Since I do not clearly see the downhill side to the crevice, I cannot answer this question.
Let me venture another hypothesis that I grasp as little as the previous one. The beginning of my essay forgot to note that the six big upheavals mentioned above were, without exception, results of scientific research and its applications: agronomy, medicine, pharmacy, biochemistry, nuclear physics, the Life and Earth sciences…
Scientists have thus shown their power to transform the face of the world and humanity’s home. No one will deny that political or economic conditions were necessary to bring about these achievements, but the initial trigger is unquestionably due to inventors, followed of course by effects that rebound on their causes. Without their discoveries, there is no contemporary age.
Moreover, contrary to industrial and financial practices, only science intuits and concerns itself with the long term, since only the long term, and sometimes the very long term, can help us understand and anticipate the present. I hope my book shows this.
Can someone give me one single example of a crucial problem today, a program or future worry that does not concern knowledge? Can we develop any project without it? The only emerging countries that can extricate themselves from poverty are those that in the last twenty years have followed a bold policy of training, research, and education.
I ask again: who will speak in the name of Biogea? Scholars. I am not asking them to assume power which has been so neglected that anybody could snap it up today; they should speak in the name of things, in the language of the things themselves, to speak in the WAFEL. They should proclaim the common Good, against the Malfeasance of those who appropriated the former triad. They must define a new type of work oriented towards reconstruction and announce the laws of Biogea according to its own codes.
During the Enlightenment, they left Jupiter behind. Will they be able to break away from the military-industrial complex and cut all ties with those sectors of the economy that destroy the world and starve humanity? I will propose two scientific oaths from this new perspective.
Scholars, yes, but which scientists? The global scientific body has always had a center. From this dense and attractive place, from this germ or seed, knowledge is deployed in its totality and recruits technologies, politics, opinions, or ideologies, and even the favor of the masses. This dense place can be considered the cause of such arborescence or, conversely, the consequence of those concrete practices or abstract dreams, manual labor or ideologies. However, it is impossible to determine the direction of this influence, since here both cause and effect, as is often the case, are wound up in each other and magnify each other in the process. This cycle feeds off itself: the sciences condition the present time but are, in turn, conditioned by it.
In history, however, the center moves.
In the beginning, rigorous knowledge centered on what the Greeks called logos, which should not be translated—at least not here—by either discourse or word, but which originally means one of the two proportions a/b=b/c and their equality. Since those original times, we use this name, x-logy, for most of our hard or soft sciences: cosmology, biology … sociology.
What Latins translated as ratio, and we call reason, grouped geometric theorems, the most famous of which, by Thales, associated several sizes in the same form. We find among them formal arithmetic operations, the longest and most complex demonstrations, the first algebra, the construction of simple machines to alleviate human muscular effort, a few arguments concerning social or distributive justice and finally in St. John, the relation between man and Christ concerning the unity of God the Father and his Son. In short, measures, works, the law, the economy, and religion constitute the initial kernel.
Second act: from Galileo to Auguste Comte, mechanics becomes the unifying link. To echo Descartes, science describes figures and movements; Leibniz invents power, Pascal moments and couples, and both build the calculator. After Archimedes and d’Alembert, fluid mechanics flourishes. Newtonian astronomy is called celestial mechanics. The living is reduced to a mechanical animal.
This is where technologies are centered: the digging of canals, wind and water mills, ships adapting to the rolling waves, windlasses, cranes, various hoisting machines on the quays of harbors, all levers designed to multiply the muscular power of humans, oxen, and horses. Lagrange crowns this cycle with his Mécanique analytique1, and more contemporary times add general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The transition to the contemporary era occurs when in the middle of the mechanical period, the fire of the thermic motor arrives. To be sure, the so-called industrial revolution fires up molecules, but Carnot still thinks of these two sources in terms of fluid mechanics, while Fourier wants to become the Newton of heat. The pivotal knowledge of thermodynamics quickly becomes statistics and ends up turning into information theory.
Third act: from Mayer to Dirac, from Boltzmann to Watson, from the thermodynamic revolution to chemistry and electronics, just as in recent genetic engineering, the center of knowledge moves towards the large populations of elements, molecules, atoms, particles… Handed over to fire, every machine works on steam, oil, electricity, nuclear, or informational energy.
Three states: the mathematical logos; mechanical forces; the mathematics of large numbers, particle physics, and chemistry—in short, the return to elements.
Fourth phase: surrounding themselves with a new unifying center, the Life and Earth Sciences are now taking over. I do not yet see a name to embody them and rule as their master; there is no dominant male and so long live democratic equality!
The Life and Earth Sciences (LESC) speak Biogea’s own language. Today they reinvent and unite a multidisciplinary federation possibly leading to a fascinating new kind of education that would give rise to a different society. Let us invent another word for politics and become LESC-ites rather than citizens. Under the pressure of the world, a single generic culture would become humanity’s. Biogea includes the world and humans, both the subjects and objects of science, and expresses their common concerns before the WAFEL in a common language. Even more, better relations with the World would improve our mutual relations.
Shifting four times, the attractor center recruits all the sciences from near or far to become interdisciplinary; it exports its concepts, dynamics and tone to all other disciplines but also creates techniques and industries, public opinion and ideologies. Probably this center will also be the effect of these effects in a feedback loop, but it does not matter since everything depends cyclically on this center and its surroundings. Its density is important to me.
The life and earth sciences of Biogea are clearly so much at the new center of gravity of knowledge that today this center refers more to all knowledge than to a particular type of knowledge; less to the single epistemology of the sciences than to cognition as such and to acts of cognition in general. The sciences show us that the world conditions our approaches to the world.
To understand this, let us start again with the Middle Ages, which invented the separation between the knowing subject that is our active selves and the objects of the world, which are neutral and passive. The mastery over things was already embryonic in this asymmetrical coupling, whose format suddenly changed the West’s destiny with fearsome efficiency. The notion of abstraction itself changed, since mathematics were no longer considered the ideal; instead we extracted and abstracted ourselves from the world. The whole world turned around us, efficient and narcissistic little suns.
As all things became knowable and sometimes known, always reduced and always at a distance, they became our property. With the Renaissance, Western culture, the mother of this asymmetrical coupling and hence of the corresponding technologies and associated political ideologies, moved vertically in an advance called progress. We ceased seeing ourselves as some things in the world among others. As our practical and thinking lives became exceptional in dispensing the laws of nature, they became different from the other existing beings subject to those laws, that is to say, to our laws. We became the Subject-Sun Kings of objects.
The asymmetry of this coupling brings an end to the immense advantage, distance and discrepancy which are now turning into a disaster. We are incurring the vengeance of the things of the world, the air, the sea, the climate, and species, which are less passive than we thought, less objective than we wished, and less servile than we dreamed of. Unstable as it is, the situation threatens to be reversed. The former slave could quickly become the master’s master, which could lead to another very dangerous game with two players.
Therefore we must right away effect a new un-coupling, as taught by the life and earth sciences. The latter tell us that since we are beings linked to the Earth, our lives remain conditioned or even determined by the laws of the Earth and of life.
Our royalty is tottering. We must share it. Will we become democrats? I believe that even the language of our ancient reason, which was once supreme, is tottering as it confronts the multiple and scattered voices of the things of the world. Will we become realistic? I foresee the popularity of a kind of knowledge that is closer to us, more concrete, more physical and also more modest. Will expertise finally be shared?
How can the ancient asymmetrical, very hard coupling be dismantled? By the second evidence that those very sciences reveal to us: the things of the Earth and life, coded like us, know how to receive, transmit, store, and manage information. I mention these four operations that I have already cited several times because nothing seems more important today. We must meditate on their soft character which is specific to all things in the world without exception, and that includes us. This quadruple achievement neither glorifies us as subjects nor designates us as objects. Just as we communicate, understand, speak, write, and read, inert things transmit, receive, store, and manage information. We are now equal. The old asymmetrical and parasitical separation of subject and object no longer exists: every subject becomes object and every object subject.
All knowledge changes as do practices, labor, and behaviors.
The underlying morality also changes. At least in the West, we are used to considering the Other as a rival, an adversary, or even an enemy. We said that Hell consisted of the Others. That dialectic dominated our ideologies, our daily conduct and our ways of knowing. Ethnology and those sciences that can finally be called “human” have gradually taught us that the Other, who speaks another language or lives according to different mores, such as the Inuit or Aborigines, is more similar to us than dissimilar. Even better, that those very differences enrich us.
However, we have stuck with the old ideology, exclusively centered on existing humanity as conceived theoretically. As for the Other that has no human language, by which I mean Biogea, the totality of the inert and the living, we consider it as an object at best, and at the worst as an enemy, indeed as the Other, absolutely speaking. Conqueror or conquered: we do not know who will win, except that we know already we will lose even if we win.
What would happen if after ethnology’s marvels, the hard sciences taught us in turn that we live, exchange and speak like those Others, according to the four rules frequently cited here? What a surprise! Would they in turn become human sciences of a sort?
Better balanced, more symmetrical, the new coupling of knowledge would then depend on an ethics recognized by the Life and Earth Sciences (LESC) that would be far stronger and denser than in the other disciplines.
To destroy, kill, and exploit are no longer possible, because this will definitively end up destroying us. To sign a natural contract seems less of a legal obligation today than an obvious reality to be met within and through the new center of knowledge.
The language of the easy sciences, mathematics, expresses and explains facts about which we have little or sometimes no information, where the apex of abstraction is identified as zero. Mathematics’ daughter or sister, computer science, describes facts where massive information is overabundant. I have already spoken of the overflow of details everywhere. The new center also heralds the emergence of what I would like to call the difficult sciences. The old ones were easy because they dealt with objects that had previously been minutely cut up, defined, and localized, and then examined in controllable models in the laboratory. Those sciences were rational at little cost. On the contrary, the new ones are difficult because they enter into the reality of the links that unite things and the sciences that talk among themselves about things. In other words, about everything that is caused and causing, coded and coding. To be sure, they are difficult and yet accessible because they are detailed, concrete, close to us, and can easily be popularized.
Under the influence of this new center, all sciences more or less begin to look like ecology, the inextricably difficult discipline that unites all the living, us included, all that knows and is known, with all the inert conditions of their common lives and the various types of knowledge that deal with them, from the most abstract mathematics to the most detailed observations. Ecology does not dissect anything: it associates, allies, and federates. It enters into details and outlines landscapes whose maps are so realistic that they mirror what they depict. More generally, the sciences today describe in detail the world’s landscapes.
I have an impertinent concern: how many so-called political ecologists know anything about real ecology? Smiling, I propose to organize short training sessions where, crouching on the grass, they would learn.
As they radiate, the life and earth sciences catch up with the human sciences and renew them. The cognitive sciences, among others, also benefit.
We have finally reached the end of our argument: how can we today think about politics, the law, and the economy or even construct a sociology without referring to our immersion in the elements and the lives of Biogea? Where formerly the old North-West passage connected the hard to the soft sciences, today they overlap. The humanities and social sciences become a kind of subsection of the life and earth sciences and vice versa. We live in Biogea and the politics of that country now overlaps with ours and vice versa.
Individually or collectively, Homo sapiens cannot know or be known without this preliminary immersion in life’s conditions where bio-geography turns out to be more decisive than history’s outdated models. Sapiens can no longer remain outside Biogea, which in turn cannot be reduced to a model without humans.
The DNA of our most beautiful female is no different from the genes of the one woman whose secret and sovereign coloring became the model for porcelain. Conversely, Sapiens intervenes and puts in a great deal of effort everywhere in Biogea, both locally and globally. The crossed loops of the new interdisciplinarity envelop all humans who, in turn, envelop it.
I promised to end by formulating two oaths. The first one is quite old, prompted by ethical concerns; the second one is new and results from the preceding.
The reasons for the ancient one are as follows: no ethical rule could or should forbid beforehand the free exercise of collective research into the truth. When such a moral recommendation intervenes after new inventions, innovations or accomplishments, it becomes ipso facto null and void. How, then, can we have a moral law that functions before, during and after research?
Analogous questions were once asked by a good-willed Greek doctor, Hippocrates. In his time, only medicine was responsible for human life or death, and it became more efficient as the organism was better understood. Neither the physicist, nor the chemist, nor a fortiori the mathematician or astronomer, who were all devoted to truthful explanations or experiments, posed similar questions. However, from Hiroshima to surrogate mothers, from Seveso and Chernobyl to nanotechnologies, everyone is asking them today. Ethics entered medicine more than two millennia ago. In the last six decades, it is invading little by little all our sciences in different ways.
From era to era, all doctors take the Hippocratic oath at the end of their studies. It is a unique proof that a moral code and an incipient legal standard can be maintained throughout ancient or future generations. Today we need to rewrite a general oath for all the sciences, since all scholars are facing the creative responsibilities we have mentioned. As the oath is to be taken before any practical involvement, and thus emerges from each scholar’s own conscience, it avoids all the delays mentioned above. Everyone may take it or not, according to his or her free will. Here it is:
In what depends on me I swear: to insure that my knowledge, my inventions and their possible applications not serve the cause of violence, destruction or death, the increase of poverty or ignorance, enslavement or inequality, but to devote them on the contrary to further equality between humans, to their survival, their betterment and their freedom.
The confrontation between knowledge and ethics is another decisive historic break. Philosophy must meditate more intensively on those very unexpected conflicts between science and the law, between the common good and the truth.
Let us return to the triad. Religion managed humans; pretending to defend them, the army governed them and often enslaved them; finally the economy began to rule their lives, often implacably. Those three bodies are useful if they do not take up all the space and stay in their place. Their exclusive dominance is ending.
What replaces them today? It is the democracy of easily accessible knowledge and pedagogy. Only knowledge can speak in the name of humans today, which is what the three earlier bodies did; however, it should also speak in the name of the things of the world, which is something no one can or knows how to do today. This new achievement has become essential to the double survival of the world and humans.
For scholars to speak in the name of Biogea requires that they first take an oath whose terms must free them from any allegiance to the three traditional classes. To become credible they must, as secular people, swear they will not serve any military or economic interest. Only at this price can they speak in the name of Biogea at the WAFEL.
1 Lagrange, Mécanique analytique, first published in 1788.