I think Michel Serres is the finest philosophical mind in France today, and like every good philosopher, he can also turn his thoughts to current affairs. I’m making shameless use here, apart from a few comments of my own, of a wonderful article of his, published recently in Le Monde, where he recalls things that relate to the children of my younger readers, and for us older people, to our grandchildren.
For a start, these children or grandchildren have never seen a pig, a cow, or a hen, though I remember an American survey thirty years ago showed that most children in New York thought that milk, which they saw packaged in supermarkets, was a manufactured product, like Coca-Cola. These new human beings are no longer used to living in nature. They know only the city, and when they go on vacation they stay in “non-places,” where a holiday resort looks very much like the Singapore airport, and shows them a stylized and manicured nature that is completely artificial. This is one of the greatest anthropological revolutions since the Neolithic Age. These children live in a superpopulated world, their life expectancy is now close to eighty, and, due to the longevity of their parents and grandparents, if they inherit anything, they’ll no longer be thirty but verging on old age.
European children haven’t known war for over sixty years; with the benefit of medical advances they haven’t suffered like previous generations; their parents are older than ours and most of them are divorced; they go to schools where they sit side by side with children of a different color, religion, or customs—and, asks Serres, how much longer can they continue to sing “La Marseillaise,” which refers to the “impure blood” of foreigners? What literary works can they still enjoy, as they haven’t known rural life, grape harvests, invasions, monuments to the dead, banners riddled with enemy gunshots, the urgent need for morale?
They have been educated by media fashioned by adults in which the length of a visual image has been reduced to seven seconds, and the time to answer questions reduced to fifteen seconds, and where nevertheless things are seen that are no longer seen in everyday life—blood-soaked corpses, destruction, devastation: “By the age of twelve, adults have already forced them to see twenty thousand killings.” They learn from advertising peppered with abbreviations and foreign words that cause the native language to lose its meaning, the school is no longer a place of learning, and these children, now computer literate, live much of their lives in the virtual world. Writing with just the index finger rather than with the whole hand “no longer stimulates the same neurons or the same cortical areas,” and they are forever multitasking. We adults live in a discernible and measurable space, and they live in an unreal space where proximity and distance no longer make any difference.
I won’t discuss Serres’s reflections on the possibility of managing the new requirements of education. His scenario, in any event, gives us the picture of a period that is comparable, in terms of its upheavals, to the invention of writing and, many centuries later, of printing. Except that today’s new technologies are changing at great speed, and “at the same time the body is metamorphosing, birth and death are changing, and so too are suffering and treatment, jobs, space, habitat, being-in-the-world.” Why weren’t we prepared for this transformation? Serres concludes that perhaps it’s the fault of philosophers, whose job it is to predict changes in knowledge and practice, but they haven’t done enough because, “having been involved in everyday politics, they haven’t felt the arrival of contemporaneity.” I don’t know that Serres is entirely right, but there’s truth in what he says.
2011