Serres, M. (1987) "First Foundation - The Rocket" in Statues

THE ROCKET  First Foundation 

We remember having seen on television recently, at the same time as millions of viewers around the world, the rocket Challenger leave its take-off area at 11:39 on January 28, 1986, only to disintegrate 74 seconds later, incinerating the bodies of the seven crew members (including a 37-year-old teacher, a mother of two) who had settled in for the voyage into space. We were horrified. Europeans had, a few years earlier, witnessed in huge numbers the explosion of the Soviet supersonic plane at the Le Bourget air show, near Paris. 1 In the first case more than the second, the television rebroadcast the accident hundreds of times so that most of us would witness it, watch it again and again, and remember it.  Individually, we remember accidents of the same type happening to automobiles, buses or railway cars, and we remember charred bodies among the black and twisted structures, but we view these accidents alone or only in the company of a few witnesses or rescuers. We also remember the captivating power that attracts those nearby around these mass graves: passers-by congregate. Businesses based on the spectacle exploit that attraction; the television transforms the event into a rite and reproduces it in front of gigantic audiences.  We have no difficulty remembering these catastrophes, since the media give us tragedy severaltimes a day, covering the West with a veil of melancholy, without a crack. But who among us remembers Phalaris? During the sixth century before Christ, in Sicily, a tyrant from Agrigentum who bore that name had an enormous hollow bronze bull sculpted or assembled. It was erected in the center of the public square and brought to a cherry red by a fire after being filled with enemies. People came in droves to hear the bellowing of the beast.  On the other side of the sea, in Carthage, said enemies of the Agrigentines sometimes attended the worship of Baal, that multiple and fascinating god that the Jewish and Christian texts condemned under the names of Belphegor and Beelzebub, the god of the dung heap, the lord of the flies. The shoulders of his statue stood above the walls and fortifications; out in the countryside, it could be seen from very far away; to get it out of the temple, the walls had to be pulled down; it was hauled on runners and cylinders, a kind of rail was invented; the crowd was in a great crush before it, held back by trellis work that only the priests, scholars, or specialists, could get past so as to approach the colossus and look after it; seven tiered compartments opened in the god’s body: provisions were placed in one and in the other an ape, etc., only the last one remained open and empty; the celestial spaces, the heavens, the stars, the moon and the constellations were invoked, brought into relation with the multitude by way of that metal shell; it was offered splendidjewels, gold and diamonds first, it was excessively expensive; then a blazing fire was lit under the foundations of the colossus with aloe, laurel, cedar, and an oil flame; and the crowd shouted “glory be to space!” while the fire roared, filling the place with eddies of smoke that almost made the giant statue disappear in a cloud. The god’s arms, worked by chains from behind by means of subtle machinery, then swooped down on an enclosure where children had previously been left, children who were believed to be the first-born of the rich and noble families; one after the other, they were placed in the movable hand that by going back upright like an elevator threw them into the empty compartment prepared for them and by then close to the fusion, while the crowd cried: “They are not men but oxen. Oxen, oxen!” The victims disappeared like drops of water on a red-hot plate, multiplying the plumes of smoke that spread over the plain and the city in the direction of the stars.  This is pretty much how Flaubert describes the worship of Baal in Carthage under Hamilcar Barca during Hannibal’s youth in the thirteenth chapter of Salammbo. Do we remember the novel and the sacrifices to Moloch, we contemporaries, scientists or ignoramuses of space?  Assume a dictionary that allows the scene that happened that year at Cape Canaveral and the abominable rite to be translated. A column on the leftwould be read in one language and on the right in another. Just as much of a crowd, on one side as on the other, forms a great crush at the tragic spectacle and gapes with horror; the Ancients and the Moderns designate the heavens as the aim and target of their aspirations or projects, space and the stars; the undertaking is expensive, for the Carthaginians as for us, the nation almost bankrupts itself over it; both of them divide their group and carefully separate the common man or those watching from the specialists, shut away, specially clothed, designated as priests or technicians of the thing or its representation; here the blast-off, 2 there the gigantic pyre; here clouds of smoke twisting into coils, there eddies that hide or veil what is happening; two ingenious pieces of machinery; here death, over there and in the past death; the loss of fathers and mothers, the death of children; repetitions of the event, formerly like a rite returned at a prescribed time or in the case of a pressing danger, now like on the stage or at the cinema. The event, filmed, is shown and reshown as though to assuage an unsatiated hunger in us. They would also start it again a hundred times in the past: then they sacrificed animals, apes, or oxen, substituted for human children, and the crowd would cry with reason: “No, they are not men but oxen.” The animals served as symbols or signs, consequently it could be repeated without end. Likewise we reshow images, which certainly resemble the thing more than symbolsor substitutes. But the essential thing remains: this need to start again, rerun, repeat, re-present the rite, the tragedy in which the dead do not play at dying but truly die. This fascination endures from age to age. What stands, in the end, before the multitude or in the center of the gathering contains humans like a box, a Trojan Horse leaving at a gallop for the moon, a reddened bull charging into space, a vehicle pointed in a direction or a statue endowed with a meaning. 3 Immobile at first, the statue moves and leaves. But the idol and the rocket are tombs.

End of the dictionary in the black box.  The translation of one column of the lexicon into the other meets with many invariants, crowd for crowd, fire for fire, deaths and observers, and terrifies us into the bargain, uneasy about taking up the same gestures today as long ago. But here’s what eases our minds: the difference from the idol to the vehicle separates the enterprise from the rite and the accident from the crime. We really go to the places that Antiquity only pretended to in dream; it designated the heavens, we traverse them.

Conversely, it perpetrated murder, intentional and real, whereas we’re undergoing a technical setback.

The situations cut across and oppose each other instead of resembling one another. We can, they dreamed; we know, they didn’t. The first lie on their part.  The second lie was the appalling lamentation that rose from the audience: no, they are not men, but oxen. The fathers and mothers, seeing the murder of their children, said that they didn’t know what they were doing, as though it proved more difficult to say than to do. Listen to the litany, probe its depths. No, no, we don’t know, we won’t say. A lie or an admission?  No, it’s not about human sacrifice, but merely an accident. We don’t hear that litany today. And yet why rerun those deaths on television so obligingly for everyone to assuage themselves or to eat their fill at their leisure? We don’t make any admissions. And what if we too did strange things without saying them?  I feel the shudder of anger experienced at the comparison of the two scenes, a comparison that makes a disturbing light come to us from so far away.

This shudder would make us go astray, if it led us to dismiss certain questions. Our intellectual traditions insist that every clarity be made over our mistakes, failings, failures, lies, accidents, even at the risk of making ourselves uncomfortable.  I’d prefer to bring intelligence into those two boxes full of men and ignition [mises à feu], blacker than those we place as black boxes in the vehicles whose reliability we want to assess. In other words, do our clear knowledge and effective technologies include dark patches of unexpected ignorance?  Will it be necessary to turn around the assertion made just now? Did the Ancients know things we don’t? When we compare our exact sciences to the vague knowledge dispensed by the dying humanities, we give the rational advantage without hesitation to the former over the latter, due to realism or effectiveness, certainly, but also because we have received this part of an old heritage. Enlightenment philosophy teaches that the irrational must be driven out: what do the hideous statue and its inhuman form of worship have to do with us?  But we have since learned to call anthropology what the Enlightenment cast out as madness or darkness, and we have also learned that exclusion brings us back to the sacred because the gesture of expulsion precisely characterizes sacrifice. By rejecting this form of worship and scene as barbarous, we risk behaving the way the Ancients did. Therefore let’s accept our anthropological past as such; ignoring it would make it return without our suspecting it.  Like the earth that carries us and the sky that contains us, we have inherited millions of years of formation and therefore remain archaic for more than nine-tenths of our depth, plunged up to our eyeballs in the tremendously long past of the wait for science. This tremendous old age holds us. The roots of our effective and clear reason sink into the same depths as the body of a newborn into the time of evolution or the dawn of this day into the cooled down furnace that baked our planet. We see thelight, the child, the idea; we’re blind to the roots, the foundation, the past: we don’t recognize Carthage in Cape Canaveral nor the god Baal in Challenger, in front of the same deaths. Nor the statue in the rocket, both metallic and hot, black boxes full of humans.  Like Carthage long ago, Chicago, Boston, Montreal, or Paris today know the tutelary gods whose colossal statues sleep half-lying—bearing their respective names and pointed in their direction—at the bottom of launch ramps in the Urals or Siberia. Likewise for Kiev, Leningrad, or Moscow in the underground silos of Nebraska or North Dakota. We all attend to our daily affairs, threatened, some say protected, by the power of these statues, ready for blast-off.  There is a history of science or of these technologies, certainly, and even several, but more profoundly there is an anthropology of them. The humanities teach this anthropology, without knowing it: when they speak of statues, they shed light on those of our museums or cemeteries, but also and above all on torpedoes and missiles.  What do we know? What don’t we know? Of what were the Ancients ignorant? Of what weren’t they ignorant? We know how to answer these questions; only a madman doesn’t see all that we’ve gained since then. But this cruel rite—a theater and representation so similar to ours, whatever repugnance that comparison may inspire in us—bearswitness to, yes, a technology. One opposes with reason the exact and the social sciences; one subordinates with reason technology to the former without ever suspecting that technologies exist that are to the social sciences what technology properly speaking is to the exact sciences. By means of the exact sciences, we, whether individual or collective, intervene in the world without suspecting that we intervene in the collective itself via the social sciences: unknowing actions no doubt, traditional technologies deprived of the social science that would found them.  We are only beginning to understand what cultures are useful for, what the stories told by the different literatures are useful for, what the dialects, the local accents, the ideas meditated on by philosophy, the wisdoms and moralities or the gestures prescribed by the liturgies are useful for: their finality is hidden from our eyes, which are so lucid for the external world and its laws. Groups produce themselves by means of their culture and language, which develop and preserve them; groups recognize themselves as existing through the existence of their gods or heroes, draw remedies from this to their specific ills and defend themselves patiently against death and disappearance. A group dies if its language fades, and declines like its art. Religions above all teach us how to manage the quantity of constant violence that is inherent to the whole to which we belong so that we won’t rush, impelled by that rage, to our selfdestruction. The life of the culture indexes quite well the vitality of the group that cultivates it. I sometimes fear that modernity is allowing that whose usefulness we no longer understand to die or even destroying it, meanwhile the violence that besieges us isn’t being controlled.  The preceding sentences make it clear that we do not understand the finality of cultures or social technologies because we do not know what “we” means. Who knows when we say: we know? Who decides when we decide? A single person? Everyone? A majority? An active and dynamic minority? The crowd, opinion? A few representatives? All of that, no doubt, at the same time or successively. The subject that acts and the object on which social technologies intervene remain outside our control.

These questions remain as black as during the time of the Carthaginians, who believed—did they believe it?—that the death of children without speech in the at first black and then brought to a luminous red belly of the god Baal would change their destiny or treat their ills. Who knows or doesn’t know, who says and believes when we say: we don’t know? Connections more than individuals no doubt, a network of links or interactions, a force field, an interlacing better than a partition of elements. Is our incomprehension connected to this shifting complex?  We have, in any case, inherited from a fabulous past social technologies, rites, myths, tales whose gestures and words pass from generation to generation viathe symbol’s memory while its function is forgotten.

These legacies come to us from so far away that they’ve lost much of their effectiveness, which explains no doubt why we no longer feel them to be useful. A law of diminishing returns reduces them.  And we went around saying: of what use are the humanities, cultures, or religions? Answer: they’re useful for not dying; they’ve been useful up to now for keeping us alive. “But our ancestors drank the water of this well, and they’re dead.” Certainly, but precisely we remember our ancestors, we who are living and still present. The humanities, cultures, or religions served to save us, not us individually, which remains a matter of hope and faith, but us collectively in the fact of history. 4 Let’s understand here the word “immortality,” which has a well-known religious sense, but also a historical sense. From generation to generation, the continuum of human time has held over centuries of centuries without rupture or break. We readily believe that this succession is given, through nature or life; we discover that it must be built. Cultures and religions are useful for the construction of that sequence, for the pursuit of time, for the collective immortality of the groups that, through cultures and religions, create their time, for their continued creation, for the production of their history or for their own reproduction in that history. It’s not for nothing that we call our languages “maternal”: they engender us like mothers; they engendered our mothers. Religionsand cultures can be defined as the technologies of this time of engendering centuries by means of the centuries.  If death threatens all of us individually today just as much as yesterday or tomorrow, it hangs now over our respective groups, but above all over us, in the global sense of all humanity. Death abruptly passes from the member to the set. Modernity is defined by the face to face, which seems new, with that major maximal—risk that rose with the sun the morning of Hiroshima. This danger, which we ourselves made, in return makes us understand that we trail this collective immortality behind us like the tail of a comet from generation to generation, this continued creation, both so fragile. Certain religions therefore claim with reason, at least in the above sense of the cement that makes history, that immortality is merited and prepared. For having forgotten this immortality, we put it in danger of being interrupted. This forgetting has resulted in the opposition of the effective technologies and those of society and culture. The former construct the world, the latter construct time. On their own, the latter without the former tend to abandon real things; isolated, the former without the latter push to use up or close duration. Yet neither our collective life nor our history nor the future constitutes simple givens any more than the world does. They must be worked, invented, continuously created, promoted, and maintained, with all our industry. Before the industrial revolutions,humanity only knew those industries that worked to perpetuate traditions or better, to secrete time, from whose compost the different traditions appeared.  The industrial technologies based on the exact sciences date on the contrary from an era so recent that their formidable efficiency in the inert or living world enchants us; we’re coming out of such a series of victories that nothing will shake our confidence: where better could we truly place it? Yet we all experience at some time that a law such as the law of diminishing returns imposes more information and energy on us, more capital or sophisticated means, more hiring, for progressively reduced results. Even if we change production channels, the same constraints await us. The benefit requires a growing debt; a certain balance has its price. We had thought that knowledge was free and our interventions innocent; we’re learning to settle our bills and in which currency.  Furthermore, the rise in power of research and development in the advanced countries, the refined technifying of daily life give birth to new collectives, tied to rational work, that in turn experience the usual problems of every society. When the scientific city grows, it increasingly resembles the city itself. All of a sudden, the most modern is in short-circuit with the brute primitive. Rivalries, hierarchy, violence, kinglets, and servants are the same from the tribe to the academy, from the jungle to the laboratory.Formerly, we readily opposed science and society, the specialists or technicians thus being able to shift the heavy blame onto the ignorant politicians who were maneuvering the uneducated and stupid masses with irrational shoves. This true schema is changing these days in which the politics of science is going to replace politics itself. Our future depends more and more on research; tomorrow we will become only what our scientists make of us. The sciences and technologies are taking the place of the motor of history and the economy. Our destiny lies for the first time in our reason. Engineers and scientists still have a tendency to consider themselves as part of a minority, whereas they’ve already conquered the third spot at least in a new world where they share power with the media and the administration, three powers without counter-powers. Administration holds the performative power of language, the media possess its seduction, science keeps its truth-value, and technology the monopoly on effectiveness.  Here we find again the primitive and anthropology, as though we had never calculated, proven or experimented. Our final social victory brings us back to Carthage; that’s how we pay for it.  Let’s get back to the accident and its meaning: the massive count that has been repeated regularly from year to year for several decades gives the idea of a law rather than of an accident, that is to say, of chance. In France, we admit to a little more than tenthousand deaths on the roads per year and several times that of injured people, gravely or lightly. We erase from our map one town every twelve months, or at least we tolerate it. Accidents or implacable law? And, in this case, what kind of law? Physical or human? Why, to whom or to what do we have to settle such a debt? What is signified by this so-called social tolerance to this amputation or sacrifice?  The calculation of probabilities, summing up a crowd of unforeseeable local cases, attains a relatively predictable global set. Statistical laws go from the punctual accident to complete regularity: they let us know en bloc what we don’t know in detail. So the victims fall under the blow of accidents and laws, of chance and necessity, of blindness and knowledge, of a strange relation of the local and the global, of the single case to the large number. 5  Now the Carthaginians or others, contemporaries of this forgotten Antiquity that engaged in sacrifices, drew their victims most often by chance, choosing without choosing the first comer to the junction of several roads, which assumes a single draw from a large number of possible cases, or by making oxen turn around the altar until the circling stops and designates one of them, just as the wheel of a lottery would have done. The term “victim,” of the same origin as “vicar” or “vicarious,” which signifies “replacement,” or “substitute,” or “representative,” as one says vice-president, seems to admit that if it isn’t this one, it’ll be the other—it doesn’t matter. Yetthe same rite returned year after year. Athens, for example, would erase fifty boys and fifty girls from its free families every twelve months so as to deliver them up to the bull in Crete’s famed labyrinth. I’m pulling up from oblivion the buried root of the calculation of probabilities, about which only its history is known. It’s known that this calculation started during the Age of Reason with pensions and life insurance, which were made possible by the publication of mortality lists. All of a sudden civil history is connected to the anthropology of religion.

Death strikes randomly in these lists just as in those of Athens. The ancient sacrificial victims thus fell at the same time under the blow of the law, a law returning regularly every year, and the blow of crossroad accidents—since the children who were roasted in the belly of Baal came from the traffic circle where everyday life had brought them among the crowd, suddenly taken there as the first comers fell, as I was saying, under the blow of blind social necessity and chance, of knowledge and blindness, of a strange relation of the local and the global or of one case to the large number.  Likewise, when Christ in the Gospel addressed sharply the group that was ready to stone the adulterous woman in these terms—“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her”—he made a clear allusion to that indispensable custom that no one was supposed to know who the first thrower was so that each might think that he had cast hisstone after the victim’s death and that he might therefore take no responsibility for this crime. In the same way, in every firing squad, each person can think that he benefited from the blank round.

Therefore no one sins; no one throws the first stone. Chance, one more time, mixes with law, ignorance with knowledge, and the local gets lost or is hidden in the global. Certain things happen without cause and without assassin. It’s raining stones, and the subject of the intransitive verb is transformed into a law of physical nature. 6  If such was not the case, one fine day would come when the group would turn against he who had cast the first stone, put suddenly in the place of the adulterous woman. And the same schema would be repeated right up until the last person. At the limit, the risk of the extinction of the group can be seen to dawn, an extinction slowed or prevented by this social technology. Such technology therefore prepares the way for what I have called collective immortality.  The parallel is striking: and what if Antiquity had truly known something that we’ve forgotten, something that concerns the relations of the local and the global? Of what I have called “we”?  I no longer belong to the generation of enthusiastic positivists who believed that the lights of science and the performances of technology were by themselves going to save the world from darkness, disease andpoverty, accidents, war, and death, provided that everything outside of rational intervention be eradicated. Nor do I belong to the more recent generation who only sees misfortune and destruction in every scientific advancement. Those who cry victory and those who shout scandal speak with excessive voices. Like every battle or every division between two exclusive principles, this conflict won’t produce anything but its reproduction.

For my generation, whose consciousness opened with Hiroshima, the same word means triumph and defeat, confidence and prudence, redoubled lucidity.

The wisdom of long-ago-understood language to be the best and worst of things; thus spoke the fabulous Aesop. 7 Today’s languages are for better or for worse formed by science and technology. 8 The term “pharmacy” in the ancient Greek language signified poison and remedy at the same time. Who doesn’t know now that we kill and heal with the same drugs? The same word designated the victims excluded from the group or immolated in human sacrifices: the tragic scene of Baal would in those times have received the name “pharmaceutical.” A same operator can at same time turn bad or good: we can improve collective life or abruptly do away with it by means of the same energies. The same unstable function becomes reversed, either unpredictably or beyond a certain threshold; the usefulness found here becomes harmful there, describing here a physical area, drawing there a socialspace. My generation inhabits the center of the beam where it’s unsure if the balance arm is climbing or collapsing. That’s the way it is.  Each of us keeps a calm soul because the benefits he can derive through his work are sometimes paid for, if they’re paid for, by digging a deficit somewhere else, and so far from his niche that he doesn’t see it.

For the same and converse reason, he’ll be able to worry about the actions of another interacting unforeseeably on his own niche.  The oldest of our religious traditions considered knowledge to be guilty; we had thought it to be innocent; here it’s simply but globally responsible. For scientists, progress costs nothing; for their adversaries, it’s no longer profitable; we catch a glimpse, for our part, of delicate and metastable equilibria, an iron law that demands payment. But to understand it well, we must count debts and profits globally by broadening our horizons beyond our respective areas of specialization, a given technical advance possibly having a social or cultural cost. I dream that the point where equilibrium is decided or not is no different from the place where the exact sciences flow into the social sciences, where the technologies in the ordinary sense mix with the social technologies. Again the word “pharmacy”: how many chemical poisons pass for social cures; how many social poisons come from chemical cures?  I’ve used the adjective “global” twice: therein lies the question. Never in the course of history have weexperienced such an urgent need for a sort of sum: an assessment or holistic strategy, linking our local interventions, an economy in the etymological sense of unitary world, a general economy taking into account needs, means, acts, risks and feedback; 9 never has the urgency of an unprecedented theoretical and practical effort pressed upon us like this, less a science of sciences in the traditional sense by which we would theoretically grasp the totality of our theories, a project that flees from us like an asymptote, and more a polytechnic of practices integrating our interventions into a body so as to master their connections. 10 We control our punctual enterprises, blind to their relations: we have neither a science nor a technology of interactions.

We have conquered our efficiency through specialization, hence our inability with the sum.

Another reason for the unforeseen equilibria that can transform a profit into a deficit.  This project of integration seems insane, yet the computer age makes it possible. Moreover the history and culture behind us had formerly and yesteryear given it several names. It is said that the word “religion,” for example, has its origin in this meaning of “connection” or “relation” which is our problem today. What did it link? We don’t know. How? Blindly, no doubt: the human and the divine, man and the world, individuals among themselves, parts and the whole; in short, the word’s root designates at the same time a theory and practice of links andcommunications, whose name can vary from Hermes to prayer and from works to love. Religion had community or communion as its object, that network of interactions that runs into globality. It lacked local efficacy and aimed for totality. Symmetrically, we master narrowly specialized and local technologies, and we fail in holistic projects. 11 I would say the same for politics, so ill-defined that we don’t know what we’re doing nor what we’re saying when we debate politics or engage in it. It tries to grasp the unnoticed connections between members and subsets and tie them together into a whole that we don’t always understand. Everything happens as though the most anciently known and practiced social technologies tried with their means to resolve precisely the questions that we now consider to be the most urgent, as though these technologies gave themselves a holistic target, whereas the modern, precise, exact, narrowly specialized technologies have punctual or specific aims. The junction of the hard and social sciences brings back the problem of the local and the global.  There, at the difficult to conceptualize crossroads where the hard and social sciences meet, each one carrying its shadow or associated ignorance with it, we scientists or technicians discover again, in an unforeseeable manner, religious problems, no longer in the content of the concepts and their meaning God, eternity, spirit, belief, or faith—but in the floating outlines of the connections between ouracts. We know nothing about the links or bonds that gave their name to religions; 12 we’re ignorant of the relations between our positive interventions. We only know the concrete by small points; we manufacture a lacunary world. 13 Yet our worries and the deontology to be sought pass through these absent connections.

The blackest of our ignorances, set off by the brilliance of our knowledge, doesn’t reside in the precisely delimited black boxes but runs through the networks that connect them, whose paths we haven’t explored.  The evil runs. Do we remember that a few centuries ago the metaphysicians named a knot of arguments that were laid out in the same terms as the problem of evil? Of what use are suffering, death, disease, and most of all maliciousness or crime? The answer consisted in calculating the sum. With the whole thus evaluated, God, infinitely good, created the best of all possible worlds. Here the question of the mysterious links of the part to the whole has returned, but from the other shore: can a local good added to another local good produce an evil? Might a useful and effective intervention have harmful repercussions? How does a gift, as our language says, turn into injury? 14 The two additions come to the same whether starting from evil or starting from good deeds. Does the torture of a single person buy back global good? Does the abominable death of a few children really save the menaced Carthage from extinction? By what unfathomable mystery (I hesitateto translate here) do we tolerate so many deaths for the sake of progress or the happiness of the greatest number? Let’s look, with open eyes, at the black box: the same reasoning and the same relationship to the global, well described by the theologians or philosophers during the Age of Reason, are used to justify our present inability to reduce or eradicate the number of our deaths as are used to found archaic societies on human sacrifice.

Hasn’t evil evolved at all? Do our scientific societies remain primitive in their most recognized achievements? Are they still founded on human sacrifice? Comparing the two scenes, in Carthage and Cape Canaveral, do they resemble each other rigorously?  An ineradicable radical evil: the Carthaginians thought that they couldn’t avert their sacrifices and the murder of their children in the same way that we demonstrate, by the calculation of probabilities, our inevitable errors or accidents. They didn’t want this and turned their backs to it while pretending to be unaware of the ignominy; acting and thinking like them, we name this pretense the threshold of tolerance of a society to its own setbacks.

Everything happens as though neither they nor we could eradicate this radical evil, this root that’s as deep as our origin, as though we were born with this violence that never leaves us. Collective death haunts us as much as individual death, and runs through the bonds that tie us to one another, through thenumerous and black links that cross and connect our interventions.  Should an observer from another world listen to or see for the first time what we call by antiphrasis the news or informations, 15 he couldn’t help but think that our universal culture, ravaged by wars and terror, was based on nothing other than human sacrifice.

Three similar debts paid for three systems: the small ancient city of Carthage, the global communications network, or the connected set of our technical interventions; for three types of interconnections.  Classical philosophy described them under the optative term of “harmony,” an ineffective, abstract, pious vow. The most modern religion spoke of them under the message of “love”; it didn’t approach the problem poorly since the relation of love already concerns the local and the global, the near, the next man, the neighbor and the most infinite All; 16 it attempted, by means of this vicinal and integral recommendation, to resolve that radical and primitive misfortune, that hatred that we’ve dragged with us since the dawn, a hatred that it quite rightly calls original sin, ceaselessly found in every group of any size and in action as soon as it acquires any breadth.  Can the sciences and technologies that we master locally, through an uncommon effort to integrate their punctual acts and for a wholly new progress, one that has nonetheless been much sought after since the beginning of time and that would constitute the best of our culture since it wouldthwart the violence that we end up believing to be ineradicable, can they, as I was saying, now reformulate in their effective and precise language and manipulate through their own forces those links that our fathers had baptized with love so as to fight against the evil that was transmitting through their channel?  A strange reunion that no one would have believed to be so near at hand. Attentive to these interactions, the new culture will not only reconcile the exact and the social sciences but also the most advanced rational knowledge with ethics and religious anxiety. Our recent memories are tied to a long anamnesis.