I recently encountered a theory put forward by an American professor of medicine, who writes that the proliferation of the human race can be likened to a cancer on the planet. The rigor and technical precision of his demonstration are impressive. My own incompetence does not allow me to offer anything more than a simplified version.
At the beginning of the Quaternary period in Africa, he explains, stem cells originating in a line of land vertebrates, and more specifically in primates, produced humanoid tissues. Healthy so long as they remained where they were, they became a malignancy in the Near East through dermic contact with richer and more diversified foodstuffs. They then became out-and-out tumors following the absorption of plant and animal tissues obtained through domestication.
These malignant cells migrated in the form of agricultural micro-satellites into submucous regions of southern Europe and Asia. Metastases developed in the Near East itself, appearing as thick “urbanoid” patches that displayed numerous lithic inclusions followed by cuprous and ferrous inclusions.
Long confined to the eastern hemisphere, these aggregate tumors triggered the malignancy, perhaps already latent, of similar cells in the western hemisphere. That phenomenon, known by the name “Columbian progression,” produced Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon clones through cellular recombinations.
As it worsened, the disease manifested itself as a generalized feverish state and acute respiratory distress prompted by cultural factors: the inhalation of oil distillates, a diminution of the overall quantity of oxygen, the formation of cavities in the forest lungs. The preterminal phase was indicated by elevated levels of toxic metabolites in the blood, abnormal rates of foreign chemical bodies coming from organic insecticides and from oil slicks on the surface of the oceans, and embolisms of metallic and plastic materials. A declining vascularization caused the necrosis of tumor growths, primarily those dating back several centuries, with a cell count surpassing six billion. Their urban nuclei burst from within and collapsed, leaving only endotoxic and sterile cysts behind them.
1Such would be the diagnosis and prognosis that a physician from beyond earth might make of our planet, perceived globally as an ecosystem. But even if the preceding portrait were viewed only as an ingenious metaphor, it would be rich in lessons: namely, that the same language can describe, and in detail, living phenomena belonging either to individual or to collective history.
We thereby gain a better understanding of the two existing types of explanation. One moves backward from the consequent to the antecedent and seeks to determine the cause or series of causes from which the phenomenon results. The other follows an approach that is transversal in some sense: it sees the phenomenon to be explained as the transposition of a model that, on another level, possesses the same structure and the same properties. It therefore constitutes a sufficient reason for the first phenomenon. The problem of the origin of language provides another, no less revealing example of such relationships.
Research under way for the last fifty years or so proves that certain properties of articulate language are not beyond the reach of a few species of primates. Nevertheless, human language is distinguished from all messages emitted by animals in their natural environment. What is proper to articulate language is, first, the power of the imagination and of creativity; and second, the ability to deal with abstractions and with objects and facts distant in space and time. Finally and above all, the absolutely original character of human language consists in its dual articulation: a first level is composed of purely distinctive units that, at a second level, combine to form significant units consisting of words and sentences.
We do not know what organic preconditions may have led to that universal cerebral capacity in our species. In the absence of a biological theory of the origin of language, the refusal in the past on the part of the Société Linguistique de Paris to allow any debate on the theme remains valid. We have no means of knowing how human language was gradually able to develop from animal communication. The difference between them is one of nature, not of degree. In fact, the problem has always appeared so insoluble that the ancients—and even a few moderns—made human language a divine institution.
The discovery of the genetic code rendered these speculations obsolete. It revealed that, at a level very remote from human language but underlying it (since it too is a manifestation of life), a model consistent with articulate language exists. The verbal code and the genetic code—and they alone—operate by means of a finite number of discrete units, meaningless as phonemes, that combine to produce minimal signifying units comparable to words. These words form sentences that even have punctuation marks, and a syntax governs these molecular messages. That is not all: as in human language, the words of the genetic code can change meaning as a function of the context. And though the role of learning in the acquisition of language must not be underestimated, the aptitude of human beings to master linguistic structures in their early years must necessarily stem from instructions coded in their germ cells. The question of genetic inheritance arises as soon as the foundation of human language is at issue. The isomorphism observed between the structure of the genetic code and the structure underlying all the verbal codes of human languages goes far beyond mere metaphor. It invites us to conceive of that universal architectonics as a molecular inheritance of
Homo sapiens (and already of
Homo erectus, if not even
Homo habilis, in whom, it seems, the cerebral gyri on which the use of language depends were already present). Linguistic structures would thus be modeled on the structural principles of communication as it functions at the molecular level. In the same way, the proliferation of the human race, transposed to the cellular level, appeared to us to be modeled on the nosography of cancer.
Let us now consider a third problem, that of the origin of life in society, which philosophers since antiquity have never ceased to ponder. The difficulty is the same as that regarding the origin of language: between the absence and the presence of articulate language, the division is so sharp that all efforts to identify intermediate forms are futile. And yet forms of that transition exist, provided we seek them at deeper levels: the cellular level for demographic expansion, the molecular level for language, and the cellular again for sociability.
The transition from solitary life to life in society is directly observable and scientifically explicable in one species of terrestrial amoebae. These single-celled creatures lead an independent existence without any contact with their congeners, so long as the food available is sufficient. But if a food shortage should arise, the amoebae begin to secrete a substance that attracts them to one another. They form a mass and turn into an organism of a new type with diversified functions. In this social phase, they move as a body toward warmer and more humid zones where food is plentiful, after which the society disintegrates, the individuals disperse, and each resumes its separate life.
What is remarkable about these observations is that the substance produced by the amoebae, by means of which they attract one another and form into a multicellular social creature, is none other than a well-known chemical substance, cyclical adenosine monophosphate, which governs the communication between the cells of multicellular beings (like ourselves) and thus makes each individual body an enormous society. And that same substance is secreted by the bacteria that the amoebae feed on: the amoebae find the bacteria by perceiving the chemical. In other words, the substance that attracts predators to their prey is the same one that attracts predators to one another and forms them into a society.
At that humble level of cellular life, the contradiction encountered by Hobbes, and before him by Bacon—and by so many philosophers in their wake—thus finds its solution. They sought to resolve the antinomy between two maxims held to be equally true: that man is a wolf to man and that man is also a god to man, homo homini lupus, homo homini deus. The antinomy disappears as soon as it is acknowledged that the difference between the two states is only a matter of degree.
Terrestrial amoebae, taken as models, lead us to conceive of social life as a state in which individuals attract one another just enough to bring them closer together but not so much that, pressures having mounted, they would end up destroying one another or even devouring one another. Sociability thus appears as the lower limit, the benign modality so to speak, of aggressiveness. The daily life of human societies—our own is no exception—and the major crises they go through, would provide many arguments in support of that interpretation.
The three examples I have chosen place the problems of origin in a completely different light than is usually shed on them. These problems remain insoluble so long as one aspires to go back to the causes since in prior states certain essential properties of the phenomenon we would like to explain are always missing. The obstructed horizon is cleared and the question of genesis ceases to arise when we discover somewhere another entity on which the one we are seeking to understand is patterned. We no longer have to wonder how it came to be since it was already there.
That perspective is not new. Medieval thinkers had a notion of it, and it can be found in the eighteenth century in Vico’s theory of
corsi e ricorsi, according to which every period of human history replicates the model of a period corresponding to it in a previous cycle. These periods are in a relation of formal homology. The parallelism between the ancients and the moderns, which Vico takes as an example, proves that the entire history of human societies repeats eternally certain typical situations. Is that not what our three examples—if we give them some credit—also illustrate? In terms of the collectivity, demographic expansion appeared to us to be a
ricorso of cancerous growth, the linguistic code a
ricorso of the genetic code, and the sociability of multi-cellular creatures a
ricorso of sociability visible at the unicellular level.
No doubt Vico restricted his theory to the history of human societies as it unfolded over time. But for him, beyond the empirical data, it was primarily the means to achieve “an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations.”
2 Granted, his project initially relied on a distinction between the world of nature—known to God alone, since he made it—and the human or civic world made by human beings, which they can therefore know. Nevertheless, that curvature of human history, which obliges it to turn back perpetually on itself, is an effect, affirms Vico, of the will of divine providence. When, through the theory of
corsi e ricorsi human beings become aware of that law to which their history is subject, a corner of the veil is lifted. Through the back door, so to speak, they have access to that will and are able to recognize it at work on a much vaster stage, in this case the one constituted by all the living phenomena of which human history is a part.
Hence, the theory of corsi e ricorsi, sometimes considered an inconsequential oddity in Vico’s body of work, may in fact have considerable import. If, in fact, human beings’ consciousness of their own history reveals that divine providence acts by always reusing the same models, finite in number, it becomes possible to extrapolate from the particular will of providence vis-à-vis human beings to its general will. Although the state of science in Vico’s time did not yet allow him to move in that direction, his theory opens a path to knowledge leading from the structure of thought to the structure of reality.