The great conquest that the contemporary era has made on the human spirit is the discovery of the certainty of our uncertainties, of the uncertain destiny not only of each individual, but of all humanity.
This advance relieves, a few millennia away, the spirit of Epicurus and provides the answer to his anguished question: what does man's freedom mean in the determined world of atoms? It refers to the beautiful uncertainty of free man, torn from the determinism of nature and science. However, today's science is no longer identified with certainty; the fundamental laws express possibilities and no longer certainties. (1) . The order of the world, a pretentious relic of the divine Perfection, is overthrown; the dialectical relationship between order and disorder is substituted for it.
Our conception of the world has been profoundly changed: we know that everything that is, comes only from chaos; that survival is conquered by struggling against destructive forces. The universe was built by disintegration, the planets were made by explosions of suns and collisions of stars. Life was born, in a corner of space, in a whirlwind of molecules, according to laws that are more random than necessary. This uncertainty at the beginning of our life - a miracle, an inevitable or perfectly fortuitous event - inevitably lacerates its meaning. The branches and forks of evolution involve more probability than certainty, a history of extinctions, disappearances, rebirths and mutations. The adventure of the suns, like that of mankind, is made up of battles and pain, struggles to constantly regenerate, to preserve the fragile and uncertain balance.
Scientific uncertainty thus joins historical uncertainty. What remains of the Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian and Roman empires that had seemed so eternal? Human history is made up of immense regressions and dazzling progressions, creative accidents and terrible destruction. Civilizations, like men, are disappearing.
The laws of history do not exist; there are certainly economic or social determinisms, but they can be swept away and collapse like overripe fruit.
The future cannot be remotely controlled by historical progress, which is only a decoy. Who expected the outbreak of the First World War, the barbarity of the death camps, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Empire? Who could be certain that airliners would be smashed on a September morning on the symbol of American power or that China would be in the early light of the 21st century the first country to buy small red cars...from Ferrari? Or that the President of the United States might one day be a black man?
The iterative time of traditional societies has long been lost; the time of modern societies is not the time of Progress but of the unexpected. Unfathomable uncertainties that the multiple sensors of the hyper-informational society make us appear even more chaotic, unpredictable, mysterious or frightening. The fragility of the world, of human beings and their history appears live, in its cruelty and crudeness; populations decimated by the ravages of man and by the wrath of nature teach us at every informational crossroads the absolute uncertainty of world events, the relativity of paradises turned into hell and the powerlessness of humans to control the chaos they themselves unleash.
Why not enjoy unlimited reading of UP'? Subscribe from €1.90 per week.
