Times of Crisis by Serres Michel;

Author:Serres, Michel; [Serres, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623567033
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2019-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

What the world is saying, or the third revolution on earth

At the start of the classical age a legal debate, Galileo’s trial, signaled the first tensions between scholars and society: it was still the same game with two players. Let me briefly look back at this history. In his work, Galileo formulated an algebraic language to talk about an event in the world. The Church tradition had a very different language: religious, mythical, theological, whatever. Even though there was a condemnation, it did not lead to a man’s death. Fascinated by the spectacle of a contradictory and pathetic debate, history and ideology remember the fight but forget its object: the fall of a thing. Nobody in those days judged Galileo for having observed or understood this. At stake was whether the divine or algebraic language could provide explanations. Again, a game with two players.

On the contrary, among the Greeks in Antiquity, whose wisdom we habitually celebrate, numerous trials announced and preceded Galileo’s. Many of those who were already called physicists before Socrates were condemned on the explicit charge of dealing with affairs of the world and hence abandoning those of the city. Sometimes the death penalty was imposed. It was not a question of confronting two different discourses but of condemning the very act of observation. Your head is always up in the air, towards the stars; falling in the well, you become ridiculous, even in the eyes of women. You are not doing your duty as a citizen and you neglect the civic morality of engagement! Death to the uncommitted!

Although they were the founders of science, the Greeks made the world into the mute site of forgetfulness and treason, the suburb of banishment. So it remains. Indeed, most of those international colloquia I attend ask me to speak about the relations between the sciences and society; in other words, about current relations between certain humans and others who engage in a thousand different types of discourse; in other words, to deal with the affairs of the city. Yes, commitment, but not to the world, which remains the third excluded party.

We regress from the lenient age of Galileo when two discourses at least spoke about things, to an Antiquity that was cruel to humans and expelled the world from the game.

The hard sciences at least deal with the world’s affairs while society deals with society. To please worthy people, I could indulge in a few well-known and widely repeated variations on the spectacle game of science and society. I could talk again about the tense relations between scholars and the military; about the conflicts between biologists or doctors and jurists or religious people; denounce creationism; deplore the absence of scientific chronicles in the media; mention again the need for ethics committees; cry about Chernobyl; repeat the rumors circulating among the public about electrical waves; quote those mowing down GMOs (Genetically Modified Organism); condemn Monsanto and their criminal strategies for laying their hands on species and their reproduction; evoke the misery

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