Читать книгу The Contributory Revolution - Pierre Giorgini - Страница 15

Thus, I believe that because of the general crisis of meaning which we are experiencing, a learning mechanism consubstantial with the living world is engaged. Will it be powerful enough and fast enough to stem a scenario of even gradual general collapse, or at least limit its disastrous impact? This debate is crucial, because faced with a general rise in theories of global collapse, we see that several attitudes are emerging. The first, most extreme, is to prepare to survive individually or in small communities in a context of general chaos. These are the survivalists, with the most extreme among them going so far as to arm themselves heavily in order to resist potential “barbarian” invasions.

Another attitude consists of trying to amplify and accelerate, in a technoscientific effort without limits, based on a form of techno-worship, a radical technical response to the ecological and climatic challenges, problems arising moreover largely through the technosciences themselves. But in this scenario, the solution would make the problem worse. Some are geo-engineering projects such as the dispersion of diamond powder in the atmosphere; others involve the transformation of humans into post-humans adapted to radically degraded or modified living conditions (temperature, drought, polluted atmosphere, etc.), the implementation of palliative solutions to the rise in sea levels, gigantic dykes, and to the shortages of drinking water by means of the desalination of sea water, overpopulation by means of the “culture” of artificial proteins, etc. I have largely challenged this approach in La tentation d’Eugénie (Giorgini 2017).

Voices are also being raised, in part against optimistic environmentalists or at least those who still believe that a reversal of the trend is possible, as they are accused of slowing down the development of preventive solutions to limit the inevitable impacts.

Don’t be alarmed: it’s a catastrophe! Too late! By suggesting that we can still correct the trajectory of our industrial civilization, the alarmist approach is 40 years behind the game. From now on, only “catastrophism” and the search for the least evil still make sense¹.

Yet to expect the imminent end of the humanized world as inevitable is to organize it somewhere in our consciences. Worse still, promoting the hypothesis as a lever for one’s own success as an author or pseudo-scientist here and now is a crime committed in the name of so-called clear thinking yet subject to incompleteness, to uncertainty, possible change of direction, possible positive chaos. So we must warn about such a hypothesis while also counting on the strength of the living world, and on the genius of Men so often tested in the past; in a word, believe in Man, love Man and life. “All the analyses and studies tell us that what we want to do is impossible. As a result, we only have one thing left to do: to do it.”²