Once a month, The duty challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a notable thinker.
Around 16 billion human feet now tread the surface of our planet. In the past, our curiosity and intelligence combined with our hands, which began by grabbing tree branches and grabbing fruit, and which today are capable of playing Chopin, making bread, caress our loved one, but also capable of brandishing a weapon and collecting our tears.
After about three billion years of evolution of life on Earth, this “success”, from an evolutionary point of view, now shows us that it is not necessarily synonymous with planetary harmony.
Borrowing from the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, founded, among others, by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, it is today more than relevant to use its primary vocation: to update the forms possibilities of human emancipation, while analyzing the negative effects of the progression of capitalism and instrumental reason.
Accompanied by modern successors of this school of thought, such as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, for example, let us see how the world is affected by the weight of its human population in a context where the consumer society of rich and emerging countries wants to make this world totally, and at all times, accessible.
Control
In our historical desire to control our environment, we have dominated nature and possessed its resources. We have erected monuments to our glory through gods and kings.
We cultivated the land wherever we could. We domesticated the animals we wanted for work or for their meat. We did it with humans, also for work, but often to serve as soldiers in the conquest or defense of territories.
We crisscrossed the planet on asphalt strips, the sky by plane, the sea by boat and space by rocket. We have, up to the current pinnacle of modernity, with the conquest of cyberspace, made the world hyperavailable.
The economic axis of human dominance was expressed by making the planet usable at will for the exploitation of its resources, an economic mode in constant growth for the profit of companies and for the consumerist satisfaction of hyperconsumers and buyers of “negative externalities” that we have become.
With oil, we have unknowingly opened a Pandora’s box and made available what has been buried for millions of years. We have created immense areas for its extraction and to serve an industrial activity intended for an increasingly energy-intensive and GHG-emitting lifestyle, with the consequences that we now know.
In this regard, in this consumer society of ours, it took an axis of political dominance to make a middle class “consenting” (Noam Chomsky), while reducing the status of the individual/citizen who makes it up in producer/consumer, this new “one-dimensional” human (Herbert Marcuse). For the latter, we have made the world accessible like never before in the history of humanity. We show him objects in abundance, coming from everywhere.
We have globalized agriculture and made fruits and vegetables from distant countries accessible. We have developed cultural products in abundance and cities to contain them. We also offered him plane trips so that the countries he saw on the globe of his childhood were accessible to him in a few hours, to make him, too often, this new geolocated, Instagrammed traveler and collector of places that we found in travel advertisements.
Attention economy
This homo domesticus (James C. Scott) therefore required an axis of sociological dominance to maintain it in the previous axes: advertising took care of this task with the success that we know. It was necessary to include people in a spiral of desires and dissatisfactions by pushing them into the conformism required by the partnership between capitalism and democracy.
Today we are reaching the heights of efficiency of a new “attention economy” (Byung-Chul Han) with television and social networks by creating a “hyperspectator” (Gilles Lipovetsky, Jean Serroy), excited by advertising and entertainment.
The hyperavailability of the world translates, for the consumer, into a gargantuan array of “experiential” possibilities as well as objects, physical and cultural, with the smartphone as the icing on the cake.
Things become more complex in the psychological axis of this dominance: a majority of humans, as well as the rest of the living and non-living world, have been objectified for their availability in an economic and utilitarian context.
In our relationship with others and with nature, religion had already paved the way for this vision of the world: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish, over the birds of the air and on every animal that moves on the Earth (Genesis). »
Disenchantment
Furthermore, a certain historical humanism placed us at the center of the Universe as the only beings to possess a soul or subjectivity, giving us all the rights and thus allowing us to consider the world as our property, our playground , our sandbox, our large-area resource centers, our lands, to plant flags there, as we did on the Moon and soon on other planets.
But we ultimately and fundamentally need, as sentient and intelligent beings, meaning, beauty, fulfillment and love. All these things, which forces which far exceed us, make us hyperavailable with one hand, are taken away from us with the other, because in this endless and unbridled availability hide negative externalities: harm done to humans and to the nature we exploit.
“We ultimately destroy nature by its reduction to something always available” (Hartmut Rosa) when, deep down, it is nature which is able to provide us with meaning and wonder, through our contemplation, through our appreciation of its beauty and the links that unite us to this fabulous nature.
Accessibility to everything, whether physically or mentally, takes away from us the scarcity, slowness, silence, unpredictability and the value of unavailability which allow a “resonance” (Hartmut Rosa) between the world and oneself. This globalized civilizational state, where the hand of man has set foot everywhere, which claims to enrich us with “experiences” at will, ultimately impoverishes us through disenchantment and ends up making us miserable. junkies” who always want more.
Fatigue
But this loss of meaning, this life in withdrawal and this overflow also make us become “tired humans” (Byung-Chul Han) and disappointed by the injunctions of enjoyment, possession and performance constantly proposed, if not imposed, by the overconsumption society.
Indeed, all this gives us neither meaning, nor happiness, nor fulfillment. By destroying the nature of the world to access its endless and unbridled availability, the human being atrophies, alienates his own nature and, finally, pulls into his own boat.
This way of doing things, of possessing everything, of dominating everything, has sown the seeds of envy, these geneses of war, from one tribe to another, from one nation to another, from one neighbor to the other. It pushes us to want everything we want, even what belongs to others, instead of learning to want what we have.
But at a time when even the poorest among us are called upon to confuse their dreams with advertising messages, we will have to consider a more sober, even more ecological, way of life, and once again use our intelligence to harmonize our human reality with the planetary reality. We will also have to fully use this great human power which is to create beauty, as well as our ability to see, and want to see this natural beauty of our world, and be amazed by it. Our planet, Earth, is a rare gem in the galactic neighborhood.
It is up to us to become fully aware of this and to honor this precious rarity, by attempting to cultivate a healthy and viable availability of the world, and the happiness of living there in harmony with the rest of what makes it up.
To suggest a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected].