Times of crisis

Of my numerous appearances on the Jô Soares Program, always with the intention of promoting the release of my albums, I vividly remember one of the first times I was there (I couldn't say for sure if it was the first or second interview), when the unforgettable Jô asked me: what do you think of whales? Had he asked me today, the answer would be completely different.

In 2009, Michel Serres, in the midst of the great financial crisis that the world was going through (at that time, our country seemed immune to such things), wrote a short text entitled "Time of Crisis - what the financial crisis brought to light and how to reinvent our lives and the future". Serres debuted in books with a masterpiece: "Leibniz's System and its Mathematical Models".

But Serres observed a discrepancy between the casino of the stock market and, on the other hand, the reality of work and possessions. And this accounting discrepancy, according to the author, could contribute to assessing a second observed discrepancy: on one side, the media-political spectacle; and on the other, the new human condition.

Serres lists six major events that occurred between the 60s and 70s, which revealed a change in the world's configuration (the word "event" understood as a strong novelty, proportional to the duration of the previous era, which is concluded by such an event). And the first of these refers to agriculture. Between those years, the Neolithic period came to an end: in countries similar to France, that is, in the first world, agrarian populations fell from 50% of the total to 2%. Simultaneously, demographic studies indicate that if, in the 2000s, 50% of the world's population lived in large cities, by 2030 this number will increase to 75%. And this is the first shock: the way of thinking about the world is completely transformed, shifting to the perspective of cities. Everything becomes political, from the Greek polis, city. Considering the opposition between world and city, the second shock is the world taking revenge and threatening humanity – when nothing is political anymore.

The second major event occurs in transportation, with the impressive increase in mobility among people. Between 1800 and 2010, this mobility increased 1000 times, and in air transport, in 2008, the mark of 3 trillion passenger-kilometers was reached. In 2006, one-third of humanity traveled by plane. This increase in mobility via transportation changes a process that had persisted since the emergence of Homo sapiens, hence its strength. But it suffers a counter-offensive: these movements expose the human immune system to pandemics to which we may one day no longer know how to respond.

The third major event concerns health. After the Second World War, with the advent of penicillin, antibiotics, analgesics, and anesthetics, pain, or rather the way humans related to it, disappeared. This fact changes a perspective that has existed for thousands of years, extending beyond history towards prehistory. All advances in medicine, including those impacting clinical examinations, have led doctors to a technological intermediation that has distanced them from examining the world, which is increasingly ignored. In the past, life encouraged us to engage in exercises that allowed us to endure pain, that inevitable companion throughout life. Escaping it through the pharmaceutical industry becomes a new way of distancing oneself from the world. And this will face a counter-offensive.

The fourth event is demographic, due to medical developments themselves: with the decline in infant mortality and the increase in life expectancy (in rich countries it reaches 3 to 6 months per year), population growth peaked in 68-69, reaching 6 billion inhabitants, and tending towards the 7 billion mark. This new change, which transforms a perspective that had persisted since prehistory, provokes changes in concepts such as marriage and war itself: when life expectancy is low, swearing eternal allegiance and giving one's life to the homeland is no big deal, quite the contrary, it is a source of pride. Perhaps then we can understand these changes in concept as a kind of revenge of the world. After all, one of the aristocratic forces, military force, is called into question.

The fifth event is connections, which will interfere with knowledge, space, and the field of influence.

In relation to knowledge, unlike university theses in history or philosophy, where the scholar would painstakingly repeat all possible documentation on a given subject, displaying it to demonstrate their unwavering expertise, a single click is enough to display all the documentation. This results in a deluge of details that contradicts abstract reason.

In relation to space, it is no longer a Euclidean or Cartesian space, where the address was understood as a reference to distance, which was derived from law and the king: the policeman would appear at a domicile in the case of a crime, or non-payment of taxes, or for absence from military service. Connections (cell phone codes are an example) have produced neighborhood space – space becomes topological in nature: distances are not reduced, but houses are transported to a different space.

Finally, there's the issue of influence, which is no longer necessarily linked to positions of social hierarchy – a star, a politician, a renowned writer. An internet video produced by an anonymous person can have more views than the combined votes of a particular renowned politician in all their elections. It's not difficult to understand the criticism that journalists, media stars, and writers level at blogs and social networks. It is precisely because of the change brought about by these connections, even giving rise to the vengeance of the world, that it will be labeled as hate speech, Nazism, if not legally prosecuted by narcissistic stars.

The sixth and final event listed by Serres concerns conflicts. The atomic bomb becomes the first world-object, since one of its dimensions is compatible with one of the physical dimensions of the world. If, before the Second World War, the Spanish flu surpassed all other conflicts in terms of the number of deaths, from that moment on the process is reversed and we become more capable than nature: men have become more dangerous to men than the world. This victory of reason, science, and technology, however, presents a strange crisis, which can be understood as the revenge of the world: the superpower, ever richer, ever stronger militarily, has not yet managed to win a war against one of the weakest countries on the planet. This strange crisis of power perhaps indicates the end of the exclusive reign of the economy: this, by having separated human beings into social classes, means that war, conducted based on a technique that protects the lives that activate it, can be lost in the face of a numerous weakness that does not count its losses in lives. In other words, the demographics of the impoverished may prevail over thermonuclear power, even if that victory could also lead to the end of the planet.

Serres actually underlines the crisis of institutions, which, since Indo-European times, alternated between religion, the army, and the economy—these three great aristocracies. If in the Age of Enlightenment the religious aristocracy was experiencing its end, after the carnage of the Second World War it was the military aristocracy that suffered its decline, to the point of being unable to win a war considered easy to win against weak and small opponents. The third collapse of institutions, which we are currently experiencing, is the politics of bread and circuses (banks and television), which led Ancient Rome to decadence. It is when institutions, so outdated, take refuge in the drug of spectacle.

The solution would lie in abandoning the old politics based on dialectics (world vs. men; science vs. society; biologists vs. jurists; scientists vs. the military), which, incidentally, underpins the logic of the spectacle: "Who will win?" - a question posed by the drug addict, intoxicated by the spectacle, in the face of the expectation of a result that everyone knows in advance: the winner is always the richest. To the Hegelian philosophy of the conflict between master and slave, Serres contrasts a painting by Goya, discussed in his book "The Natural Contract": "With each blow struck, the combatants sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand. Knees, thighs, hips, shoulders... and the mouth, gagged by a pear of anguish, will try, full of sand, to cry for help... Naturally, neither of them will be able to save themselves from the rigid density of sinking."

The inclusion of this third element (Hegel, detached from the world, forgets to mention where the conflict unfolds), which Serres calls Biogeia, the world of elements and living beings, an inclusive world in which humans depend on the things of the world and these on humans, will be the characteristic of the Anthropocene era. Here, soft techniques predominate, acts on an informational scale, which, in other eras, fostered the revolution of writing and printing: instead of nuclear bombs, traces, marks, signs, codes, meaning – a set of knowledge, technologies, and practices related more to sharing than to the will to power, in fact fostering the revolution of behaviors, institutions, and Power.

Universal access to data and free intervention, participating in decisions, suggest a kind of equality that the aristocracy will always resist. What underpins power is possessing non-interactive and asymmetrical information – it is the retention of information that is at the base of hierarchy. The gap between the stock market and the real economy is the same gap between the media-driven political circus and the evolutionary state of people and society: a gap that expresses the great crisis of the world, which is precisely the non-recognition of contemporary reality and its ruptures – this will have been the greatest betrayal of intellectuals.