Читать книгу Ways of Being Alive - Baptiste Morizot - Страница 11

Part of what modernity calls ‘progress’ describes four centuries of devices that relieve us from having to pay attention to alterities, to other life forms, or to ecosystems.

The conceptual character we are targeting here is someone we could call the ‘average modern’ (we all are to a certain extent this kind of person in the cultural area which claims to be modern).

Let’s observe a typical colonial phenomenon, since this is often where the strangeness of your ‘average modern’ is best revealed. For a Western colonist, when he arrives in the jungles of Africa or the monsoon rice fields of Asia, civilizing the area where he settles traditionally means making it possible to live there in complete ignorance of its non-human cohabitants. It means suppressing, controlling and channelling the wild animals, insects, rains and floods. Being at home is being able to live without paying attention. However, for the natives, it’s the complete opposite: being at home implies a vibratory vigilance, an attention to the interweaving of other life forms which enrich existence, even if it is necessary to compose with them – which is often demanding, sometimes complicated. Coming to an agreement is a costly business in diplomacy between humans, and it is the same with other living beings.

Many of the techniques and representations of the modern world serve this purpose, and that is their function: to dispense with attention, that is to say to be able to operate everywhere, in any place, despite one’s ignorance, quite carelessly, i.e. without knowing a place and its inhabitants. It’s a disconnection from what in the living world around us calls for a generous openness, an interweaving with pollinators, plants, ecological dynamics and climates. It’s a practical metaphysics, whose secret but powerful function is interchangeability: everything must be interchangeable, all places, all techniques, all practices, all skills, all beings, honey bees, apple varieties and wheat strains. It’s a matter of being at home everywhere, homogenizing the conditions of existence so you don’t need to know the ethology of others and the ecology of a place, in other words the habits and customs of the peoples of living beings who inhabit and constitute it. In this way, the ‘average modern’ can devote himself to what is ‘essential’ in his own eyes: the relationships between fellow human beings – relationships of power, accumulation, prestige, love and family, against the backdrop of an inanimate setting made up of the ten million other species which just happen to be our relatives.

This is a highly ambiguous phenomenon, because on certain points it has produced comfortable and beneficial effects. We can’t dumbly and radically preach the opposite, in order to move from triumphant modernity to contrite anti-modernity. But we need to draw the right distinctions: there are beings to whom we must learn to pay attention anew. For currently, the comfort of modernity is being reversed: by dint of no longer paying attention to the living world, to other species, to environments, to the ecological dynamics that weave everyone together, we are creating from scratch a mute and absurd cosmos which is very uncomfortable to live in, on an existential, individual and collective scale. Above all, however, we are generating global warming and a biodiversity crisis that concretely threaten the Earth’s capacity to provide human beings with habitable conditions.

The paradox, therefore, is that to a certain degree there is a perceptible comfort in the modern art of freeing ourselves from the attention demanded by the environment and those who inhabit it, but as soon as it exceeds a certain threshold or takes a certain form, it becomes worse than uncomfortable: it makes the world uninhabitable. The problem then becomes: what is this threshold and what are these forms, precisely, seriously speaking? How can we intelligently inherit modernity, drawing the right distinctions in our historical legacies between the emancipations to be cherished and protected, and toxic missteps? This is one of the great questions of our century. It is our compass for navigating a firm course through the swell between two Manichean positions: on the one hand, anti-modern outbursts that condemn all ‘modernity’ en bloc, as an idea that has gone wrong, while we still enjoy its products; on the other, hypermodern attitudes that want us to accelerate down the same path of progress, which, as we now know, means heading straight towards the worst of outcomes by defending an odious doctrine of TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’), making it possible not to reflect on, campaign against, or question what is toxic in our heritage.