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Home , Collapsology, Prometheus

SLIDE 1: From to - Can we Re-enchant the Future?

Marie-Laure SALLES-DJELIC

SLIDE 2: Since 2000, a handful of Space Barons are dreaming to reach well beyond the Moon. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Beal, Paul Allen, Richard Branson and a few others are pouring billions of dollars and deploying enormous resources for this adventure. As the line-up of names shows, this space fever is highly concentrated in Silicon Valley. Space Barons are also Tech Barons, the Masters of our Algorithmic and world and strong believers in the powers of predictive technologies.

Elon Musk has gone quite far in laying out a plan for the colonization of Mars and the settlement there of a city of one million humans. When he is called upon to motivate such an expansive project, Musk hovers between two narratives – one dystopian, the other radically utopian and positive.

Musk is worried about the survival of human even more than about the state of our planet. He is convinced that we will not escape a radical nuclear war or something of the sort that will bring our species close to . So he proposes to solve that problem through technology – that’s what Tech Barons do, after all, they look at everything as problems to be solved through technology. SLIDE 3: Evgeny Morozov calls this the “folly of Technological Solutionism”.1

In 2018, here is how Elon Musk presented this:2

SLIDE 4: If there is a third world war we want to make sure there is enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages….

1 https://www.theguardian.com/global/2013/mar/20/save-everything-evgeny-morozov-review 2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war

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And the Moon he tells us is not far enough for comfort :

It is important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because in the event of a war it is more likely to survive than a moon base.

The idea of a is far from new. It is as old as the nuclear age and has inspired generations of Science-Fiction writers. SLIDE 5: In his Foundation Series, started in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov envisions space settlement as a way to anticipate the looming destruction of the Galactic Empire and a following dark age. The raison d’être of those settlements is to preserve science and civilization and become, in time, the cornerstones of reconstruction.

So Musk is not into radical invention. The most mean-spirited amongst us could even argue that he has not gone beyond his adolescent geek fascination for Science Fiction. But his very concrete and lavishly financed project could also be seen as a real challenge for apocalyptic Science-Fiction – Or when reality overcomes the wildest dreams of Science Fiction authors….

Beyond this scenario of doom, Musk at times is much more upbeat about the motives behind his Space projects. In his words –

SLIDE 6: ”The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we are a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we are not… You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about…. I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” Elon Musk, Making Life Multi-Planetary

The projection here is into a future where man through technology is in control, including of the last remaining frontiers. Elon Musk and his Space Baron / Tech Baron friends exemplify, in this respect, a particular vision of the Future that has deep ideological roots in the Enlightenment revolution. They project a Panglossian Utopia, an enchanted Future, where Humanity enhanced through Technology will understand and solve all problems, make correct

2 predictions, choose the “better” future and overcome all obstacles and impossibilities. Man, finally, will have become God.

SLIDE 7: The « We are doomed » and « We are God » narratives point to conflicting and contradictory . How could we have brought ourselves to the brink of doom if we are God? In principle those two narratives should exclude each other!! In fact, they seem to be the two sides of our binary mindset. For many centuries now, our world has been geared to making us think in ones or zeros, in black or white, in heaven or hell, in saved or doomed, in right or wrong, in love or hate, in man or woman, in me or you, even in nope or like on dating platforms.…. The digital age is only the latest stage in this binarization of everything – a hard wired one with a hugely performative impact on all and every single dimensions of our lives. But this performative architecture is, happily, not powerful enough to fully bring us and the world in line with predictive models. This then could explain the persistence of spectacular prediction failures in spite of the intensification of predictive technologies.

Still, it is not surprising in that context that when it comes to thinking about our future we would fall back onto such a binary opposition – opposing the scenario of Doom to the Scenario of God. SLIDE 8: For the scenario of Doom, there are multiple variants and for the sake of time I will rather attempt to outline a broad ideal type.. SLIDE 9: For the scenario of God, there is a clear center and I will turn my gaze to the Olympian hills of Silicon Valley and the liberal transhumanist narrative.

SLIDE 10: The rest of this talk will be structured in the following way.

1. I will start with a rapid brush exploration of those two scenarii in turn and their binary and divergent eschatologies. 2. Going beyond their striking differences and apparent opposition, I will show how they do in fact belong to the same meta-narrative symbolically associated with the mythological figure of Prometheus

3 3. In order to overcome this binary reduction of our Future and our profound inability to fathom an alternative, progressive and humanist Utopia, I will then take you again back to mythology to explore this time the figure of Dionysus. 4. Finally, I will try to show how Dionysus helps us project an alternative – gives us tools to move towards some degree of re-enchantment of our future in a manner that is radically different from the dreadful Enchanted Kingdom of the Transhumanist Singularity !

1. SLIDE 11: THE (NEW) GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHT

SLIDE 12: The “Garden of Earthly Delights” is the title of a Tryptich painting by the Dutch Master Hyeronimus Bosch. Art historians know little about what Bosch had really in mind when he painted that Tryptich, somewhere between 1490 and 1510. So we are relatively free to use the symbolism of that painting in the way we want, and I will do so, diverting it in a somewhat cavalier way to bring along my own points. If there are any purist art historians in the room, I beg for forgiveness….

SLIDE 13: Let us start with the central Panel as a symbolic representation of our Humanity on Earth today – what do we see? Enjoyment through consumption all around, a chaotic aggregation of individual or group monads with no links, no connections, no engagement to each other, a sense of mess, a disappearing nature and environment – totally overwhelmed, swallowed in fact by this mindless Anthropocene, and no visible sign of a capacity to mobilize, to harmonize, to pacify this Earthly Garden of Delights which is in fact in the process of turning to Hell… And the question, on all our minds (weirdly not on theirs it seems), is …. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

• SLIDE 14: The Scenario of Doom The first possible scenario is illustrated on the right hand side Panel…. The Scenario of Doom, when you cannot anymore mistake Hell for Heaven. SLIDE 14b: But even more powerfully may be, we can also follow that scenario in the external panels. We generally do not know about those panels or we forget them. In principle they

4 represent Earth at the creation, before the introduction of life, with God being this tiny and nevertheless overpowering figure at the upper left. SLIDE 14c: But I propose to also see it as a representation of the doomest of all doom scenarios – Earth at the end of human life, symbolically re-enclosing itself, forging a protective shield that excludes us, leaves us, Humanity, forever outside.

Today, there are many variants of this scenario, suggesting that doom could befall us from different directions. Our environment and its rapid degradation is one of those threats. SLIDE 15: The notion of the Anthropocene makes it plain, suggesting that we have entered an era where Humanity’s impact on earth, the environment and other living species has become highly significant and increasingly negative and destructive. Industrial production, transportation, technological density, demographic trends, our consumer society and high- energy and waste-generating ways of life all combine to bring about a major climate disruption and threaten the quality, resilience and survival of those natural resources and living beings that condition our own existence as a species. SLIDE 16: The latest IPCC Report – Global Warming of 1.5° - is gloomy, not least because the ‘slightly more optimist scenario’ of capping global warming at 1.5° is quite unlikely as it demands that in 2030 we would have reduced CO2 emissions globally by 45% from 2010 levels.3 Not clear how this could happen… Biodiversity in the meantime, is going steeply down. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published a report a few weeks ago to alert on the speed at which species are disappearing – one in eight species on our planet is under threat of extinction according to that report.4

SLIDE 17: deniers reply that those transformations have little to do with human action, and/or that we will find technological solutions anyway as for example through climate engineering, type large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system to counter climate change…, or even that we will adapt as a species through the of evolution. Still, evidence piles up and the voices of Doom become more convincing and more urgent. Weirdly enough, this urgency does not trigger action – at least not of the kind that

3 https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/sr15_headline_statements.pdf, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/summary-for-policy-makers/ 4 https://www.ipbes.net/news/ipbes-global-assessment-summary-policymakers-pdf

5 would be needed. In France, we have a name for the Scenario of Doom – Collapsology. And the French Guru of Collapsology, Pablo Servigne, who looks too much like Christ for comfort describes this current predicament in a striking way : SLIDE 18: “In the Universe of a turkey farm, all is well in the best of all worlds. The turkeys get regularly fed, it is warm. Turkeys live in a world of growth and plenty … Until the day before Christmas (or I guess Thanksgiving depending on which side of the Atlantic you sit on…)”

But doom could also take different paths. The option of a nuclear war, as Elon Musk dreads, can certainly not be excluded. The populist and authoritarian wave that transforms world and the irrationality of a number of those leaders are fertile grounds for such a possibility. Doom could also come through a major financial and ; experts are regularly warning of another crisis with dramatic consequences.5 Last but not least, social and moral disintegration could lead us all the way to the collapse of human civilization. Two main trends deserve to be mentioned. First, exacerbated inequalities and the drastic and structural dislocations they bring along – with ultimately the emergence and the extension on an unprecedented scale of a new kind of Lumpenproletariat, what Yuval Harari calls the “useless” class (Harari 2019). SLIDE 19: Even large numbers of bankers, lawyers and auditors, are becoming useless in a world where artificial intelligence is the new frontier. An expanding “useless class” with strong expectations and no future is a powder keg. Second, the anomie that stems from social isolation, loneliness and moral dissolution all symptomatic of a system defined by individual greed, utility maximization and consumption. Remember the programmatic statement of Margaret Thatcher in 1987 – “there is no society, only individuals” – it has become all but an accurate description of our contemporary world. The crisis of the Gilets Jaunes in France with contagion across Europe is highly revealing of the social fragilities of our societies. And the fear of social explosion in a country like the United States is one of the factors explaining the amazing boom in the industry of luxury bunkers: demand has grown more than 700% in 3 years. That’s where you want to invest!

5 https://foreignpolicy.com/gt-essay/is-the-world-prepared-for-the-next-financial-crisis- christine-lagarde-economy-recession/

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While the scenario of doom could thus take many forms, let me finish here on an even more depressing conclusion – this is not an either or story. The scenario of doom is likely to be one that combines many if not all those factors. We are facing a complex, wicked predicament –a falling domino is likely to impact the others immediately triggering a chain reaction. Forget our big data and unprecedented computing and so-called predictive capacities, we have no means of predicting either the chances of that happening and/or the nature and extent of its consequences for our species and civilization. We are well beyond measure, risk assessment and prevision here – we are in the realm of utter uncertainty as Frank Knight was already defining it in the 1920s.

• SLIDE 20: The Scenario of God So doom is a possible, likely may be, but unpredictable and fathomless Future for us. The other side of our contemporary binary mindset is the scenario of God. The scenario of God is heir to an old intellectual tradition. In his book, : The of a Dangerous Idea, David Livingstone traces the genealogy back to magicians and alchemists, with the enlightenment being an important turning point. The Scenario of God was then reformulated and moved from obscurity to light, from marginality to centrality if not dominance, from dangerous eccentricity if not heresy to the Age of Reason. The illuminati turned, as if through a magical wand, into the Enlightened.

In 1784, Kant famously proposed that the Enlightenment is SLIDE 21: Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage being man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another… Dare to Know!. ‘Have the courage to use your own reason’. That is the motto, Kant tells us, of the Enlightenment.6

Tutelage can be of many different kinds – Fathers, Kings, Priests, Professors… But the ultimate tutelage is to God. Our reason, according to Enlightenment thinkers, is a divine spark, expressing our godly nature. Daring to know, to use our reason, hence means that we should

6 http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/idehist-enlighten-kant02.htm

7 affirm that God is us, that we are God. Armed with our reason and its derivatives – Knowledge, Science and Technology – we can dare, understand, muster and obtain everything. In the process we become masters of other species, of earth and its resources, of our own destinies. Well, with a striking limit, that of the Great Mystery – our own deep-seated nature as aging, degenerating and dying beings.

In 2003, Nick Bostrom, the leader of the European branch of the World Transhumanist Association, defined Transhumanism as

SLIDE 22: The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical and psychological capacities.7

SLIDE 23: The Singularity University, which can be seen as one of the cathedrals of contemporary Transhumanism, defines itself as a “global learning and innovation community using exponential and accelerating technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges and build a better future for all”.8

The filiation is unmistakable. Contemporary transhumanism inscribes itself in direct continuity with the Enlightenment. Reason, Science, Technology and Progress frame its life philosophy. But transhumanism is Enlightenment on steroids as it takes a radical step, crossing some of the most troubling if not taboo frontiers – space as we saw above but even more disturbingly, human nature itself. Quoting Max More another well-known priest of that community:

SLIDE 24: Transhumanism goes well beyond Enlightenment Humanism in both means and ends. Humanism tends to rely exclusively on educational and cultural refinement to improve human nature whereas Transhumanists want to apply technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage. Transhumanists

7 https://nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf 8 https://su.org/about/

8 regard human nature not as an end in itself, not as perfect and not as having any claim on our allegiance. Rather it is just one point along an evolutionary pathway…. By thoughtfully, carefully, and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves, we can become something no longer accurately described as human – we can become posthuman (More 2013: 4).

It is in that ideological context that Google, Ray Kurzweil, Max More and many others’ efforts to “solve” the “aging” and “death” problems need to be understood. SLIDE 25: For Ray Kurzweil, co-founder and Chancellor of the Singularity University and Director of Engineering at Google, death is a , a “Great Robber” of ties, knowledge, opportunities. And at a large meeting of the Singularity University in 2012, Laura Deming, a young entrepreneur, one of Peter Thiel’s Fellows, who invests in life extension technologies electrified the room when she boldly asserted:

SLIDE 26: We have somehow come to view (death) as something normal, natural, and beautiful… to be celebrated… At least outside this room that seems to be the consensus… If we succeed, we will have turned the most awful paradigm that we know on its head. The inevitability of death.9

Transhumanists are not the first to promise eternity. Many religions do so. and the end of death has also been the ultimate quest of magicians and alchemists.

SLIDE 27: The Lapis Philosophorum or Philosopher’s Stone was a legendary substance that supposedly would turn anything into gold but would also be an elixir of immortality. Medieval alchemists spent their life trying to discover it … to no avail. SLIDE 28: So is Ray Kurzweil the Nicolas Flamel of our times, the alchemist that JK Rowling used as a model for her Harry Potter series ? There are some major differences between the alchemists of yore and the Transhumanists of today – money, power, the inscription not against Science but within Science, legitimacy and centrality all on the side of Transhumanism. In medieval times, alchemists and sorcerers would

9 https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/22/3535518/singularity-rapture-of-the-nerds-gods-end-human-race

9 be burnt at the stake for heresy. Today’s community of transhumanists happens to overlap largely with the contemporary version of C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite. They have the financial means, the power and the legitimacy to invest billions into this modern version of the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. What is striking to me is how rarely we are making this parallel between alchemists and transhumanists. And how seriously they – and often we – are taking this contemporary version of an eternal human fantasy, immortality. They themselves are convinced that they will in the end be able to kill Death – and we are wondering deep inside whether they might not manage to do so in the end….

Reason, Science, Technology and Progress frame the life philosophy of Transhumanism. They also shape the promise of a paradoxical imagined future: if we see the inscription in the cycle of life and death as a defining feature of what being human is all about, then the transhumanist quest for progress ultimately implies the end of Humanity. Injected into this imagined future, we also find the strong influence of an extreme form of libertarianism – with here again some quirky paradoxes. There are clear elective affinities between the project of breaking through all scientific and human frontiers and boundaries – including the most taboo – and being as free as possible from any kind of intervention, in particular that of a State, likely to create obstacles and to slow down the process. SLIDE 29: In 1789, a key figure of early Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, wrote that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Well, the imagined future of Silicon Valley Transhumanists is a world without death or taxes! A Spencerian social Darwinian thread finally inscribes itself as a complement to enlightenment on steroids and libertarianism. SLIDE 30: You find this thread in Enlightenment Now, a 2018 book by Steven Pinker that has become bedtable reading in the Silicon Valley and beyond. Pinker, Professor of at Harvard University has significantly contributed to the polishing, smoothing out and hence renewal and mainstreamization of sociobiology. The Carnegies and other Robber Barons of yesterday loved Herbert Spencer’s notion that economic success was the mark of evolutionary superiority and should therefore be left free rein. Our contemporary semi-Gods like the modern version of that survival of the fittest idea just as much – an idea expressed in Pinker’s books and even more outrageously in Charles Murray’s and co-authors’ production. Ever since

10 1994 with the book The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray have been arguing that inequalities are natural since they reflect objective and innate IQ differences. SLIDE 31: Let us just mention that those authors are connected to – and are being rewarded in different ways by – the dense of neoliberal think tanks that has imposed its role as an architecture for influence across the world (Salles-Djelic and Mousavi 2020).

Again, we are talking here of social Darwinism on steroids – associated with a new and radically powerful eugenic project. In a libertarian, uninhibitedly inegalitarian world, technology will become a tool to enhance certain individuals and not others through, for example genetic manipulation. SLIDE 32: I argue here that this close interplay between technological utopianism, libertarianism and social Darwinism all on steroids is the perfect ground for new forms of authoritarianism – those that combine strong anti-democratic tendencies, ploutocratic elitism and free market rhetorics to justify private monopolies. If your vision of the world is that wealth reveals innate superiority and the capacity, through technology and its mastery, to bring along progress, then you naturally come to believe that democratic processes are illegitimate hurdles and obstacles, ultimately slowing down if not hampering this virtuous movement. And the kind of Progress we are talking about again is a Spencerian one. SLIDE 32: Quoting Steven Pinker, “Progress is not magic. Progress is not perfection. Progress is not a miracle. It doesn't mean that everyone is maximally happy. It doesn't mean that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time and always.”10 As a matter of fact, Progress of that kind could imply that things get much worse for a large majority of people – that might even be the price to pay for Progress, that might even be very good and necessary in evolutionary terms. Peter Thiel’s endorsement of Donald Trump does not appear to be so much of an anomaly in that context. It is worth here quoting an extract from his 2009 text, Education of a Libertarian: SLIDE 34: I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.” But I must confess that

10 https://www.wuwm.com/post/steven-pinker-can-numbers-show-us-progress-inevitable#stream/0

11 over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.11

And that logic is not a new one. In 1976 already, as he was then busy advising Pinochet’s government in Chile, Friedrich von Hayek was already claiming that “in modern times there have of course been many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under democracy”.12

Hence the Singularity projection, the dominant (if not the only) Utopia of our times is a very coherent mix with, however, a Frankenstein effect. The Enlightenment was in theory a liberating project for the benefit of Humanity. Enlightenment 3.0 – this mix of technological solutionism, libertarianism and social Darwinism all on steroids – logically implies in fact both the end of Humanity and the emergence of modern authoritarianism with a double edge, anti-democratic and neoliberal. This Future and its Frankenstein or Black Mirror effect is not a mere Utopia. It is, as we say in France, already en marche, and very much so!

2. SLIDE 35: PROMETHEUS 3.0 The scenario of Doom and the scenario of God hence appear at first sight to be in radical opposition to each other. I suggest that, in reality, they belong to the same meta-narrative, a meta-narrative which I symbolically associate with the mythological figure of Prometheus.

Prometheus was a Titan, the race of Gods that preceded the Olympians. Prometheus in Greek means “forethought” and Prometheus had a brother, , whose name means “afterthought”. SLIDE 36: The two brothers were charged by the Olympians to share attributes between living creatures. Epimetheus, with his characteristic impulsivity and limited foresight, bestowed strength and swiftness to some, dangerous claws and fur to others. But when time came to provide humans with attributes, nothing was left. Prometheus had to intervene. He stole fire

11 https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian 12 Hayek (1976). , Legislation and Liberty.

12 from to bring it to Humanity to ensure not only its survival but in fact also its control and dominance over nature and other species.

The symbol is clear. Prometheus is the agent through which we, human beings, are endowed with a divine spark and some degree of godliness. Fire is a symbol for reason, our divine spark – the attribute that connects us to God, makes us an-thropos in the etymological sense of the term, those who turn, look upwards (hence towards the gods). The step from “being connected to”, “looking towards God”, to feeling a sense of godliness is not a major one. Fire is also a symbol for the derivatives of this divine spark – technology, knowledge and science as tools that allow us to improve our lot, to thread a path to Progress. SLIDE 37: A painting from 1907 by Jean Delville shows Prometheus in action, I would say in majesty and potency. Prometheus triumphant carrying the torch of Progress on behalf and for Humanity, away from obscurity and towards the promise of a better, more luminous future. You will note the muscularity, the hypertrophied masculinity of this Prometheus triumphant – who is both himself and the symbolic representation of a godly man on his way to Progress. The transhumanist turn calls upon us to accept this side of our nature – the better among us are and should become even more triumphant avatars of Prometheus using for that all forms of enhancements made possible by technology. Needless to say that the Tech and transhumanist barons are by self-definition amongst this group of super humans called upon to push even further this symbiosis with divinity up to the ultimate point of immortality. They are the avant garde of: SLIDE 38: a generation of top performers (that) are seeking to shift their state of mind as a way of unlocking their true potential, using altered states to radically accelerate performance and massively improve their lives SLIDE 39: This book and a few others tell us about the emergence a generation of Prometheus 3.0, Prometheus on steroids…

But there is another side to the story of Prometheus. For what he has done, stealing fire from God and giving it to Humanity, Prometheus gets punished. Zeus is outraged by this act of defiance, of hubris. SLIDE 40: So Prometheus will be chained to a rock in the mountains, in eternal punishment. Everyday an eagle eats his and because Prometheus is eternal, his liver gets

13 regenerated every night, only to be eaten up the next day. Every day the sun is scorching him, every night the cold is freezing him. and chained is a warning – there is a price to pay for hubris, for man pretending to be what he is not and cannot be, God. And the price is an hefty one. The scenario of God leads, in just like today it seems, to the scenario of Doom, directly, naturally, without surprise. The nature of the punishment reflects and reveals the nature of the offence. SLIDE 41: Where a triumphant Prometheus walks fast and confidently, Prometheus bound is condemned to utter, complete immobility. Where triumphant Prometheus projects himself towards an infinite linear progress, Prometheus bound is condemned to the circularity of eternal suffering. Where triumphant Prometheus affirms himself as being in total control – of nature and of other species in particular – Prometheus bound is subjected to the complete control of nature (the sun, the cold, the barren rock) and of other species (symbolically represented here by the Eagle).

It is interesting to push that image further, closer to our contemporary predicament. A Prometheus humanity will end up being scorched by a violent sun – that’s indeed what climate change is promising us. We will be chained and doomed on a barren rock – here again an apt image for earth being depleted at a fast rate of its biodiversity. Where triumphant Prometheus is muscular, strong, masculine, Prometheus bound is weak, moaning, emasculated. Where Prometheus triumphant affirms and craves immortality, Prometheus bound suffers precisely because and through this immortality. In one of his beautiful science fiction books, Le Grand Secret, translated in English as The Immortals, the French author René Barjavel brilliantly captures the dramatic predicament of immortality. SLIDE 42: “Life without death makes life impossible”, Barjavel tells us. Because life without death “will multiply, blossom explode… and will invade and devastate everything”…. “The virus of immortality increases without any measure the time of all lives but reduces space to an hollowed rock”…. The rock of eternal punishment for a modern Prometheus.

So the scenario of God needs to end in a Scenario of Doom. And the two are not in contradiction but in a dialectical relationship. The of Prometheus, at least as told in the text of , Prometheus Bound, even suggests a synthesis to this dialectical relationship. Prometheus after a very long period of time will be delivered by , another semi-god.

14 We don’t really know what happens then to Prometheus except that he will have to carry forever the shackles reminding him of his hubris and of the price he had to pay for it. Can we extend this optimism to our own fate, the fate of Humanity ? Arguably, the idea that we will at some point come back from our Mars Colony (or from wherever) to reinvest earth and reinject the seeds of human civilization is a parallel scenario. Our Space Barons do believe that even though we might have to go through a doom scenario, Humanity as Prometheus 3.0 will in the end be delivered and come back in full triumph. There is not even mention, in this modern mythology, of the shackles on our wrists and of the duty of memory they symbolize.

3. SLIDE 43: DIONYSUS – THE DISRUPTER But this ultimate happy ending is extremely uncertain. And even if we are ready to believe in it then we also need to believe in the destructive scenario of doom that logically has to precede it. Is there no alternative? Do we necessarily have to run the full course of our Promethean hubris – which dialectically will bring about a scenario of doom and imply, at best, a long period of confinement to the rock of our punishment before we might rise again from the ashes like a human Phoenix? Or can we still branch off into a radically different direction? The rest of my talk will be a plea for us to envision such an alternative. And to make my case, I will turn again to mythology, to explore this time the figure of Dionysus – the disrupter, the crazy God, the one we rarely take seriously.

In many ways, Dionysus is a mysterious God, including with respect to his origins. He is sometimes described as a foreign God, coming from and imposing his “foreign logic” into the Greek Pantheon. But that simple story does not hold. Dionysus was born from a passionate love story between Zeus and the human Princess Sémélé. So, like Prometheus he is a semi- God. SLIDE 44: Sémélé dies while still pregnant as she has asked her divine lover the impossible – to show himself in his godly form and omnipotence. Zeus saves the fetus and to protect it from the anger of his jealous wife, , he hides it in his own thigh. SLIDE 45: Hence, Dionysus is born twice. First, from a human mother who dies from hubris – wanting to see divine power, which as a human she was not allowed to see. Second, he is born from the thigh of Zeus – he is the only one we can really use that expression for. After

15 this second birth, Dionysus is sent to Asia to protect him from the jealousy of Hera. When he comes to Greece later on, it is therefore a home-coming, a return. Dionysus hence is not a “foreign God” and what he represents and the message he carries should be seen as endogenous and indigenous to the Greek tradition; even though this undeniably confronts our glossy and glorious representation of an Apollonian-Promethean civilization.

SLIDE 46: When Greek sculpture epitomizes surreal and oniric beauty, the Dionysian tragedy inscribes gorgonic truth, the one we should not look into the eye, at the core of Greek art. Against the linearity of an Apollonian-Promethean world, Dionysus stands for eternal return and cyclicality. Against the immortality of the Olympian god, Dionysus epitomizes the necessary cycle of life and death – he dies every year to be reborn. Against Anthropos, that being who is looking upwards to the Gods, Dionysus reminds us that we are humans – coming from and returning to earth (humus). Against the rational projection of an Apollonian- Promethean world, Dionysus values the creative energy of irrationality, of raw emotions, of craziness, of inebriation and euphoria, intoxication and exhilaration – understood here in their symbolic sense. Against the Apollonian-Promethean sense of a “chosen species”, of Anthropos being superior and legitimately in control, Dionysus imposes our inscription within and tight interdependence with what we call today a complex biotope. Against the male element, Dionysus brings forward the female. Against order and the stability of social structure and inequalities, Dionysus imposes regular episodes of disorder and carnival-type social inversion. Against culture and civilization, Dionysus claims the vital role of our savage nature – the raw against the cooked, sex against marriage. Against prediction, plan and homogeneity, Dionysus carries curiosity, differences, the unexpected, the unplanned – which are in fact conditions of our freedom. Against the dimension of time, Dionysus is the God of space, the God who bridges multiples spaces – life and death are in that sense spaces that Dionysus connects. Against the individual, Dionysus affirms the collective, the social, a collective that is inseparable from nature and a broad ecological system.

What is important to understand and remember is that Dionysus had its full place and role in the Greek Pantheon and in Greek culture. Dionysus, Maria Daraki tells us “owns the ancient, the savage soul of Greece”. Between the “logic of the ” she goes on and the logic of Dionysus there have been confrontations but then also negotiation and hybridization; these

16 two worldviews, , or “forms of intelligence” as she calls them came to converse with each other and to affirm themselves by and through their radical difference: SLIDE 47: The “Greek Logos” has not only fought against the old cyclical worldview. It has also allowed it a space for its own contradiction….It is precisely because of this hybridization that the Greek culture was what it was. If Greece had only allowed for a Logos mindset it would have been a horrendous, Manichean universe…. If it was otherwise, this was precisely thanks to the fusion between two logical modes – one linear and exclusive that conforms to the needs of the polity and one revealing a savage Greece that was thinking of the world in circles and had developed another logic, circular and inclusive… It is thanks to this combination of line and circle that Greece has affirmed its specific culture – with its constant refusal of closure. Dionysus imposes alterity at the heart of Greek culture (Daraki, 1985: 230).

SLIDE 48: In The Power of , in 1988, comments – and laments – the fact that our civilization has broken this compromise, this dialectical balance.: Modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea of nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature. How can you cut down trees and uproot the land and turn the rivers into real estate without killing God? … But if you think of yourself as coming out of the earth (remember Humus, humans…) rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the Earth, we are the consciousness of the Earth. We are ’s principle (Campbell and Moyers, 1988: 32).

Campbell then mobilizes an interesting anecdote. In 1852, the US Federal Government inquired from Chief Seattle, a Suquamish Chief, about buying the tribal lands for all those immigrants arriving in the United States. His answer was very simple: SLIDE 49: The President of the US sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water how can we buy them? .. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the Earth is our mother? This we know: the earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the Earth.

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A Dionysian logic, undoubtedly! What do we learn from this exploration of Dionysus and of a Dionysian mindset? We learn that Dionysus is not the crazy and drunk disrupter that we generally associate with Bacchus. Or if he is, he is so in a positive and necessary way – in a manner that ensures balance and resilience, that sets limits to the hubris of Logos and its dramatic consequences, that ridicules it in a healthy way. We learn that Humanity has known the importance of this balance for its own resilience and survival for a very long time. And that we, SLIDE 50: “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity that imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved”, to use the words of Max Weber, have forgotten it or have been pretending that we could exempt ourselves from it.

4. SLIDE 51: RE-ENCHANTING OUR FUTURE – A MANIFESTO FOR INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE PROSPERITY So we need to bring back the spirit of Dionysus at the heart of our Pantheon. For that, I will argue now, we have to reinvest our world through a completely reinvented “software” that has to be embodied and crystallized within our institutional and organizational systems. My proposition will be articulated in three main points: SLIDE 52: 1) The “new software”, the vision for a progressive Future is already quite clear and discernible. We need to collaborate and combine our efforts to bring it to the fore in a more explicit manner. 2) The project of then imposing this progressive software is ambitious but not impossible if we see it as a collective institutional and cultural change project. 3) Concretely this implies that social scientists need to accept their activist role and have to coordinate their actions . We cannot simply keep reading the world and lamenting its state, we have to take an active part in changing it. This is more than urgent, it is an imperative!

SLIDE 53: 1) The New Software

18 In 2014, Marc Fleurbaey, Professor at Princeton, approached a few of us to launch the International Panel for Social Progress. The creation of the IPSP was motivated by the lack of collective effort, in public debates around the world, to define the direction that the social contract should take in this crucial period. A bottom-up initiative mobilizing close to 300 scholars from around the world, the IPSP published its Report – Rethinking Societies for the 21st Century – in the Fall of 2018 and a small subset from the Steering Committee wrote a short Manifesto for Social Progress that is now being translated in different languages. SLIDE 54: Contributors to the IPSP question if not reject the old-fashioned linear Promethean view of Progress but we nevertheless decided to save the notion and appropriate it through its profound reinvention. We decided to claim the “Progress” banner because we wanted to assert clearly that when studying the long term evolution of societies, it is worthwhile and important to be guided by normative principles, by a progressive and still realist Utopia, to use the words of Rutger Bregman. And we felt that the notion of Progress had been captured in an unacceptable way and unduly twisted away from its “progressive” meaning. So, we wanted to claim and re-appropriate it. By the way, these kinds of conceptual shifts can be found all around – liberalism, democracy, market, competition are all words that have a progressive potential but have today mostly been corrupted.

Progress as we understand it is about a better life for Humanity – which naturally implies as I argued above, in a Dionysian logic, a profound respect for Humus, the Earth, the planet to which we “belong” and on which our welfare as well as that of other species entirely depend. SLIDE 55: Hence, there is no or rather there should not be any Progress that is not Social, Human and Environmental. But there can be, if we mobilize our Logos under the tight control of this Dionysian principle, a real Progress in that sense because our Logos allows us indeed to develop and deploy amazing tools, which if framed in a proper way, can indeed serve this Progress objective.

SLIDE 56: Concretely, what this re-orientation of Progress amounts to is a process of trans- valuation. Dionysus’s arrival into our Pantheon completely disrupts our current hierarchy of gods or rather brings it back where it should be. Our Promethean hubris has led us to the strange predicament where we, humans, but also Nature and other species, have become resources and variables of adjustment at the service of economic, financial and technological

19 growth. And indeed, we talk about Natural and Human resources. Let us start by banning those words from our vocabularies – you’ll see that this is not a small feat indeed and could be just in and of itself highly performative. Dionysus tells us instead that technology and the eco-nomy (which by the way has the same roots as eco-logy, managing our house, oikos) should be at the service of our deep Humanity which coincides with the well-being of Oikos, our natural house.

SLIDE 57: So we do know what a progressive Utopia should be – a world that would orient and mobilize our massive capacities towards human flourishing and dignity in full respect of environmental cycles of regeneration. What this implies is to modify our compass – from growth to prosperity (a prosperity that can only be sustainable and inclusive), from exclusion to inclusion, from competition to collaboration, from individualism and loneliness to empowering collectives, from waste to recycling, from having to being, from consumption to life, from destroying nature to nurturing its regeneration, from a monetary to a well-being definition of value, from a financial to positive impact definition of success. The recipe is clear – and it is a recipe with a heavy dose of Dionysian ingredients. This recipe is proposed across the board by a multiplicity of actors – the progressive Utopia we lay out in the Manifesto is in that sense not very original.

SLIDE 58: 2) How do we impose it? The project of then imposing this progressive utopia is ambitious but not impossible if we see this as a collective institutional change project. There is a need for coordination and for the formalization of this Utopia into a realist alternative software – which implies a profound redefinition of all dimensions of our compass. SLIDE 59: The SDGs is a good start at the global level – pointing to a broad definition of Prosperity for Humanity at large. SLIDE 60: Then, we need to finally take the turn that has been discussed for too long of getting rid of GDP as our national compass and replacing it by multi-dimensional progress indexes. We know about the Gross National Happiness index of the Bhutan, this small country between India and China. We know less that in 2011, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution : “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to Development”, urging member nations to follow

20 the example of Bhutan and measure happiness and well-being. The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, with Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi rendered its report in 2009 to then French President Sarkozy. The objective was to propose an alternative compass to GDP that would be better at nudging countries towards social progress. Nothing much happened since. The OCDE took the project over and published last fall the results of the Commission Stiglitz 2 – Beyond GDP: Measuring what Counts for Economic and Social Performance. We are still waiting… New Zealand just implemented a well-being budget. The tools are ready. Why don’t we move?

SLIDE 61: Work also needs to be done at the level of companies. And here again work has started and we should now radically accelerate it. The equivalent to beyond GDP at that level is “beyond shareholder value maximization”. We need to finally bring down the artificial and destructive power of the shareholder ideology that has been carried and institutionalized very successfully since the 1970s by a well-coordinated coalition of actors – intellectuals, think tanks, corporations and managers, business schools, mainstream departments, international organizations etc… And we need to impose in its stead a multi-dimensional compass that will integrate, internalize the price of externalities (both environmental and social) – which will nudge companies towards their absolute reduction if they want to be able to still make profits. Here again this is complex but not impossible. We need to create and strengthen our coalition of the willing and to exert the right kinds of pressures at the right places of institutional leverage.

SLIDE 62: Finally, we also need to redefine the compass of individual success. And that should start at the very beginning, in families and kindergardens and be followed through at all stages of our education systems. What is success, what is a successful life? How do we define and measure it? Over the past forty years an uninhibited culture of greed has made the answer to that question quite simple. Success is measured in dollars (or Euros). And the more dollars, the more success. This kind of definition of success at the individual level is a potent mechanism to wealth accumulation on an unprecedented scale and drives the current trend towards crazy and unacceptable degrees of inequality. Let us start by institutionalizing a redefinition of what success is, of what individual value creation is all about – making it a more

21 collective, purposeful and positively impactful one. In reality the generation of our children are and will be striving for that. Let us help them institutionalize such a powerful reorientation. SLIDE 63: 3) Academic Activism I would like to end with a reflexive note on what that implies, on what in a sense it imposes on us individually and collectively. We need to find our path back towards activism. Naturally, we have the role and responsibility to critically describe the dynamics of the world in which we live. And I would even add that we, collectively, are pretty good at that. When we bring our minds together, across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, as we did with the International Panel for Social Progress, we Social Scientists have indeed a deep understanding of the dynamics of our contemporary world. But that is not enough anymore. In his Riverside Church Speech of April 1967, one year before he died, talked about the “Urgency of Now”. Here is what he said: SLIDE 64: We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there “is” such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

Those words are possibly even more true today. In fact urgency has turned into imperative. We need to go beyond critical descriptions towards outlining new realist and progressive utopias. But we need also to organize collectively to do our part in the necessary process of institutional transformation that should bring about a better balance between Promethean and Dionysian logics. As a collective, we study the dynamics of institutional transformation. We know about the power of ideas when it combines with organizational architectures for diffusion and institutionalization. We have seen how this combination has brought about, has performed the neoliberal economic, political and social world in which we live today. We should divert the mechanisms and processes that were used to construct our current iron cage to weaken it on the one hand and to propose on the other hand an alternative that will be more conducive to human well-being and happiness. This is certainly not an easy task – but we can surf on the energy wave carried by the young generations. We have a responsibility to try at least. I cannot see how we can escape it! THANK YOU!

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