Current Issue: Volume 5, Issue 1 (2023)

Philipe Claudel - Guest Editor, Novelist and filmmaker Secretary General of the Goncourt Academy The Human Paradox

I am very honored to open your colloquim whose very rich theme, resonates strongly with current events, whether Lebanese or World events. But I wanted to perhaps introduce your reflections with a more general statement focused on humanity’s non-humanity.

When man began to practice agriculture ten thousand years ago, it is estimated that the world population was then about 5 million human beings. The progression of world demography has since not ceased to increase and, in particular, during the last 50 years: 200 million at the time of Jesus Christ, 1 billion around 1800, 2 billion in 1930, 3.8 billion in 1970, 7.6 billion today. And it is estimated that by 2050, the population of the African continent alone, today around 1.2 billion, will have doubled. Earth’s surface, on the other hand, has not expanded at all. In the old days, our ancestors living in small communities had only a tiny chance during their existence of coming across or seeing human beings who did not belong to their group. As nomads, they could cross immense distances without ever meeting any similar fellow, today it is the opposite that we experience: since, apart from geographically desolate zones, the human concentration on Earth is such that it is difficult, or even impossible, not to meet often, in a massive and routine way, our fellow men. The notable difference is also the natural environment, which 10 thousand years ago bore only negligeable traces linked to the presence and life of men. Today, it is considered that no place on the globe is not directly, or indirectly, affected by the impact of human life. We know that even environments, such as the deserts, the poles, the oceans, that we might think of as still virgin, are no longer so except in our dreams, as they have been affected by more or less massive pollution or by the consequences of the excessive use of fossil fuels. At the same time as the human population grew and as man multiplied the techniques that his intelligence allowed him to discover, his mark on his living environment, the Earth, became increasingly strong and increasingly damaging. Tens of thousands of plant and animal species have disappeared, ecosystems have been profoundly modified, wet zones have become arid, lakes and inland seas have disappeared, glacial surfaces have diminished, fertile lands have become sterile, islands have been submerged under water, forests have become wastelands.

If I were addressing children, I would tell them that our ancestor lived in a huge and luxurious apartment, whose condition was impeccable, and which he shared with someone of his kind. Today we are still housed in this same apartment, whose walls, floor, ceiling, furniture have been damaged, soiled, broken, irreversibly worn out, and that there are now thousands of us huddling in it, we suffocate more still in its unhealthy atmosphere that we helped produce. Since the end of the 18th century, we have entered what some scientists have agreed to call the Anthropocene, a new geological era during which the influence of man on the biosphere is such that it has become a major force capable of impacting the lithosphere. Only idiots, or perhaps a President of the United States, can still claim otherwise.

We are jeopardizing, through our lifestyles and global overpopulation, what is commonly called our common home. We know it and yet we do almost nothing to change our way of being and living. Why? Who are we to make the correct observation but do nothing to prepare for the damage? Who are we to think only of our present and ignore the future in which our children, their children and the next generations will live? Who are we in truth? So what is a man? The question seems so simple that we never think about it. We are men and that is enough for us. By dint of being, we have stopped questioning ourselves, and by dint of evidence, we no longer manage to consider ourselves. So let's make an effort.

Where to start? Dictionaries teach us that man belongs to the animal kingdom, he is a mammal with a high language, bipedal, endowed with grabbing hands, an articulate language, and a voluminous brain endowed with abstract thought and living in a very structured society. What distinguishes him from other animal species is the wearing of clothing, the mastery of fire, the domestication of many plant and animal species, his ability to adapt to the surrounding environment, the abundance and complexity of his technical and artistic achievements, the fact that he buries his dead, the aptitude of his cognitive system to abstraction, introspection, and spirituality. He is also distinguished from other animal species by the major transformations he enacts on ecosystems. He is sometimes referred to as the ultimate super-predator because he is capable of hunting any animal species, even animals that are themselves considered super-predators such as lion, killer whale, brown bear, who are however much more physically powerful than him.

What is striking in these definitions, it seems to me, is that it emphasizes a set of qualities, which are undeniable, but without ever alluding to the negative use that man can make of them. On the contrary, in the words and between the words and under an apparent neutrality, one perceives an intention which consists in persuading the reader that man is a creature who has gathered a set of gifts of which he could only make good use. The history of humanity is certainly a history of progress, but it is also a history of death, as man masters fire, paints frescoes on the walls of caves, invents the wheel, creates poetry, dance, architecture, erects pyramids, builds temples, sculpts, writes treatises on philosophy, discovers metal alloys, writes treatises on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, invents the pharmacopoeia, surgery.

It also happens that the same stone he uses to drive a stake into the ground can also allow him to smash the skull of the one with whom he has a disagreement. That the stake itself which served as pole for a basic tent, if he hardens its point with a flame, will more easily penetrate the body of his enemy; that a leather strap, cleverly designed, will send a projectile a great distance and may thus give him the opportunity to kill from afar. The solid sharpness of metals will allow him to choose, to imagine a number of effective objects, to cut his meat and his bread, but also, unfortunately to disembowel, slice, eviscerate, disembowel, amputate, decapitate. And then there will be gunpowder, guns, canons, more and more efficient and sophisticated weapons whose use will not be exclusively reserved for pheasant hunting. And finally, I want to talk about the past century, during which many of us grew up, and which witnessed a form of apotheosis in the industry of death and the major creations such as the gas Zyclon B or the atomic bomb, major creations among thousands whose effectiveness has unfortunately been tested on many battlefields and conflict zones. In summary, a man is a paradoxical creature gifted to improve his living conditions and to destroy them. He is capable of loving his fellow man, of helping him, of comforting him, of sharing his good with him. He is also capable of hating him, making him suffer, humiliating him, torturing him, exterminating him.

At the turn of the year 2000, like whipped by a kind of positive millenarianism, we could naively believe that the worst was behind us. This passage to a new millennium was like a bypassed barrier in the often bloody ledger of humanity. Yes, behind us, are the great industrial massacre of the First World War, behind us the barbarism of the Nazis, behind us the tens of millions of victims of Stalin, those just as numerous of Mao, Hiroshima, the Armenian, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, the wars of decolonization, the long war in Lebanon, the murderous explosion in the former Yugoslavia.

The twentieth century would be the century of a new world order, that of reason and understanding, of peace and widespread well-being. Unfortunately, we were very naive, but the illusion did not last. It dissipated in my opinion in two stages, on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the two Boeing 707s hijacked by the terrorists of the al Qaeda group, crashed into the "Twin Towers" of Manhattan, then into our world in 2008 when the bankruptcy of the big American banks precipitated many a world economy, in a deep recession, and exposed the absurdity of a system imagined by demented spirits, hastened by only the lure of gain and that no one had succeeded to control. Note that in both cases, the image that was often used and that prevailed to describe these catastrophes, whether real or imagined, was that of the fall, fall of towers, fall of bank shares, fall of systems. So we fell, Icarus or Rebel Angel, and since then, it seems to me, we have never stopped falling. But why do we fall? What rebellions are we responsible for? If not that directed against the marvelous and fruitful dimension of our own nature for the benefit of its other dimension, venal, easy, and secular.

Hundreds of millions of human beings, inhabited by the capitalist attitude and its ultra-liberalism avatar, haunted by the spirit of possession, woke up one morning exposed to the dysfunctions of a system that they had contributed to build. At the same time, terrorist acts undermine the fantasy of regained security; bodies, like boxed cataclysms, have destroyed that fantasy of the security of property, accentuated, it seems to me, the feeling of vulnerability which suddenly spread in the minds of men who had hitherto belonged to the privileged world of protected, mercantile, and consumerist West.

In the last one or two decades, with the collapse of the Iraqi and Syrian regimes, and even more in the last year with the invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russia, which marks the reappearance of war, real war on the European continent, fears have taken hold, growing in the minds of our contemporaries, and the observation of the progression of these fears of this miserable condition of man whose inner destitution seems to go hand in hand with the accelerated evolution of technologicaly. It is prime material for the novelist, but how to express these fears? I had personally investigated, through a novel in the form of a fantastic fable which had appeared in 2010, where I had tried to point out the absurdity of our contemporary condition which, through the mad organization of the world of work and that of service, confuses the human being, makes him a creature subjected to an almost physical experience of resistance of bodies and minds, pushing him towards suicide, as we have seen in many large national and international companies, in schools, in universities, carnages like that of Colombia in the United States and its avatars. Unfortunately, this happens quite often, they are in my eyes exogenous variants of suicide, perpetrated in places of learning, places of transmission of knowledge. Death, thus given thereby represents, symbolically and tragically, the rupture of the functioning of the system; we no longer transmit knowledge, we transmit death. Moreover, modern man is not content to create objects, he works simultaneously to destroy them. Producing today most often consists of predicting the obsolescence of what is produced, and in all large companies, alongside the production department, there is a cell of researchers whose job is to think about overtaking the product of the day and which is hypocritically referred to as perfecting. This means that each year, you are offered a new, better performing phone, or you are even prevented from repairing the one you have because it cannot be disassembled. Indeed, the world growing with us is always demanding something new...

Our discomfort stems in part from the fact that we are given ever new tools in our hands, whose operating instruction require a great deal of energy and much more intelligence than I have... In fact, without realizing it, we have become hamsters, these little creatures, which are enclosed in a wheel whose speed always increases, without their ever being able to slow it down, and we try in vain to get out of it at great wasted effort; it is man himself who made it. The speed that I refer to, is one of the most important of our divinities, we cannot suffer any more waiting, nor to answer to a telephone message... The information must be delivered to us as soon as it is collected. The world gathers news channels. We want everything, right away. We have really become capricious children, and immediacy is our requirement. Moreover, our relationship with time, time of desire, time of reason, time of dreams, political time, social time, intimate time, has changed. The goal is to dominate time, especially the time of life expectancy that governs our lives...

To live and to reflect is to wait, to give the moment its relative importance and to place it in a perspective and retreat that allow to gauge it. But today, we no longer measure the event, we relay it, in the same way that we no longer measure the world, we shrink it in its distances. We have gone in a few centuries from the geography of great discoveries, to that of planetary contractions produced by the speed of the movement of information. Man, in all this, struggles to find his place, his measure and his happiness. So who am I in this recomposed world submitting computer transactions measured in nanoseconds? And where am I? The progression of the achieved exchanges, material goods and immaterial data, have made me even smaller, making me a perpetual homeless person, no longer able to withstand the slightest empty minute.

If you allow me, I could read into the absolutely invasive practice of selfies the conjuration, in a form that is only playful in appearance, of this anguish of being nothing, and which could be nothing anywhere. By photographing myself, alone or with others, I accredit my existence in the time and place of the shot. I certify this existence with the help of integrated witnesses, and as soon as the photograph is taken, I distribute it on networks that are only socials in name, because they do not create any society, except maybe a number of groups, whose morphing composition, cemented by primary codes, hyper reactive and hypo reflexive, creating a hierarchy of beings according to elementary criteria: likes, dislikes, number of friends, number of followers, number of views , the number of likes etc. Thanks to the selfie, I forget for a moment my loneliness and my nothingness : I see myself, therefore I am.

So we went from the “I think therefore I am” of Descartes or the famous cogito, to “I see myself therefore I am”. I give myself to be seen therefore I exist. To find myself, I multiply the shots throughout the day, shots that I share and that I convince myself that my existence has indeed taken place, and that it is made up of a number of moments that photography mediates and attempts to elevate to the rank of essential and generating moments. The world’s egoistical practice could pass for a remedy to the worry that torment us, it is in fact just fate. The Other that i seek simultaneously to seduce and who attest that I am important to him, is the same one who is augmenting my anguish, as we have not stopped considering the Other as menace in recent years. Promulgating the supremacy of our way of life and our culture, our values, our products, we are all astonished to realize that those we have sold our model to are demanding a taste of it. There is a hypocrisy, a savage one even, in imposing consumer society on the entire planet and to throw migrants in the sea while we accept that they dream of our products, that most of the time, these new slaves make them, but not that come to participate in the system and in the exploits. The selfish practice of the world could make believe that it is a remedy for the worry that torments us, it is in fact only a determination. The other that I am trying to seduce at the same time or who testifies that I am important in his eyes, is the same one who increases in anxiety, because for several years we have not stopped considering the other as a threat. Promulgating the supremacy of our way of life and our culture, our values, our products, we are all surprised to see that those to whom we have sold our model claim to taste it. There is even a fierce hypocrisy in wanting to impose consumerist civilization on the entire planet and in throwing migrants into the sea, whom we accept dreaming of our products that most of the time, new slaves, they manufacture, but not that they come to participate in the system and the exploits.

This concern, linked to a geodemographic composition of the world, is not without foundation. In a few decades, the earth will host nearly 10 billion human beings. Wouldn't it be necessary today to think of tomorrow's recomposed humanity, returning by the fact of the conflicts which can unfortunately only take place if a small part of humanity continues to monopolize, as it does currently, most of the planet's wealth and life-sustaining spaces. This would suppose on the part of the current rulers, a sense of the future which, alas, many do not demonstrate. They devote more energy and money to maintaining the power they have conquered, rather than on planning for the common good.

Today, there is no longer really a statesman, we are arriving in democratic countries at the end of a democratic process which leads to transforming the most idealistic into a professional politician who lives relatively little from his fees. The repeated sexual and financial scandals that have tainted the political class or the world ruling class at the highest level for the past few years are only the dirty scum of an in-depth transformation of the mission of who represent us. There again, the dictatorship of time, immediacy, the reign of the image, and of what is very improperly called communication, the desire to please at all costs, enslavement in the service of money, the absence major project, lack of courage, fear, falling in the polls, corruption, dishonesty of a crushing weight more or less depending on the country, but all this is real. The most terrible and most disturbing thing is to think that we have the leaders we deserve and that nothing happens by chance, they are in our image.

In the chaotic history of humanity, we see a civilization that took about a thousand years to build, half as long to self-destruct and disappear. Haunted by our grandiose past, we think badly about our present and turn our backs on a possible future. Old people we prefer to live within our walls, hoping that they will be thick enough and protective, we harp on clinging to our privileges which were however abolished more than two centuries ago. We confuse the shelter and the coffin, we are fragile creatures susceptible to dread. What worries us challenges us. We had Gods but they died. Men are mortal, and the Gods and religions that accompany them are mortal too. Two thousand years seems to be their lifespan, which isn't too bad compared to ours. Two thousand years or a little more, then that would be eternity, the polytheism of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece. Two thousand years. The religions that still exist today, exist a little and much less than before, Judaism, Christianity are experiencing a rapid decline in many continents where, however, Islam, another religion of the Book, seems to be in better shape; but Islam is younger, quite simply much younger, and we can perhaps also say that Islam will die in a few centuries. Without God, man is left to himself, to his dual nature. Let me be clear, I do not regret a lost world dominated by religion, religion which was often, as we know, the effective ally of certain authoritarian powers, when it was not itself the stake of interminable wars or the motivation for barbaric acts.

But I think hopelessly of a power that can validate the actions of man or blame him for a possible life after death, of a set of moral rules that serve to codify his life and his relationships with others. Man despairs more easily, especially as he has taken to rethink his nature and its limits, and having noticed much progress in medicine in particular. This has permitted a considerable life expectancy during the last century ; man then began to think of his immortality. Research units of some large companies are working in this direction; what seemed like the realm of science fiction a few decades ago, seems attainable today. A few thousand years ago, man experimented with trepanation and fracture reduction with makeshift instruments and techniques, imagining that one day he could remove a lung, a liver, an arm, a uterus , a heart from a donor and graft it onto or into another man to save him. So today man can rebuild himself or can replace many defective parts to keep him alive. We can modify his physical appearance, the features of his face, the shape of his breasts, the galp of his buttocks. We can also make him change sex, and we can now register in the law; some countries have already made a third sex, so why not extend its life to 120 years or 150 years, 200 years 300 years, and not also create a fourth sex, even neutral, which would be a kind of hermaphroditism. Nothing truly irrational in this, science will undoubtedly allow it in the near future, the question is: for what benefit? For example, to live as long as possible, why? For who ? For our personal happiness or for that of others? To further clutter the planet or to work to heal it? To multiply maddeningly the number of creatures in relative physical form but suffering from senile dementia? Do we want a world that will be mostly a world of nascent ghosts with functional bodies but destroyed brains? I exaggerate but we can ask ourselves the question and above all not forget that to live is to risk and it is to risk everything. To be a man, in my opinion, is to accept this risk and not deny it or hope to eliminate it.

If today I wanted to make people understand the paradox of our nature and the anxiety that is ours in these present times, it is not in the hope that they will disappear or to further panic human beings, but to know its meaning. The brevity of our existence gives rise to its intensity and anxiety to hope. If man accepts his end more, he would doubtless give to his life the plenitude which is not to be sought in a dream of immortality; and if he reflected on the roots of his discomfort in living his present, he would find the keys to begin to dissipate it. In any case, he would become deeply human again, however tempted he had ever been. I will end this brief presentation with a paradox: after all the negative things I have been able to say about man, after this balance sheet which may seem terrible, I must at least affirm my hope: I believe in man, I believe in him deeply, I certainly believe in him as I said that he can destroy but he also knows how to rebuild. There are times in the history of peoples, in the history of nations, of humanity when peoples, nations, humanity have been admirable, when they have known and been able to find the ferments of a new dream, new air. I said that the situations were deadly, but from their exhausted bodies new generations are born, and that's what we have to keep human, that's what we have to hope for. Man is indeed this weak reed of which Pascal spoke, of which La Fontaine spoke in his fables, he collides but rarely succumbs and as Pascal reminded us, man is perhaps "a reed but he is a thinking reed" and it is from this thought that his future and his reconstruction can obviously be born.