Against the Robots

As the year draws to a close, we often only glance at it briefly. It's best not to dwell on it too much. You never know how many things you've forced yourself to bury might resurface, like those impromptu, rude, and irritating pop-up windows on the internet. A helpful exercise is to concentrate intensely to extract the important events; the events that will allow you to understand why they mattered so much; how they proved decisive. It's also important not to lose sight of when each event occurred.

Man's vision rarely extends beyond the end of his nose. At best, he can appreciate its length. But life is history. Written and yet to be written. How can we explain that man has such a limited vision of his life? Because of the limits imposed by life, one might say. Pride also plays a prominent role. Man believes he knows. Because he believes he knows, he envisions the perspective of a path by looking at the end of that path. He thinks he has accomplished what he does not know. Forgetting, and therefore remembering, this humanity forces us to reconnect with Original Sin, an extraordinary factor in understanding human life; a tool for all time. Man's weakness, the very heart of his humanity, embodied, felt, and exuded by Original Sin, provides man's true strength when he feels wronged by this concept. Man believes he sees his weakness in his strength. His strength is his weakness. Human weakness could, should, become our "augmented reality," like the term used in computing for a product that, in addition to offering a basic function, provides related services depending on the date or your location. Augmented reality isn't a magical concept, as its name might suggest; it's more like a scaled-down version of life, applied to machines. Life and technology have always been intertwined since the dawn of time—what is cunning if not a technique? And the scales on which life and technology rest have constantly shifted according to the weight each one claims for itself. Life consists of pure life—called nature—and technology. Or is that what we're being led to believe? Indeed, 2011 was marked by a profound and long-standing dispute between culture and nature, a dispute that shows no sign of ending. This time, it takes the form of textbooks and a theory: gender theory. In 2011, a "vital" question was indeed at the heart of discussions, which in itself is somewhat invigorating. With gender theory, an essential question was revisited: what in life is a product of nature and what is a product of culture? In other words: can we separate nature from the technical aspects of our lives (technology being what is not natural, and thus encompassing education, instruction, civilization, etc., indiscriminately). The question is, what remains of human greatness when we have discarded even just the three examples I mentioned in the previous sentence? Gender theory is a technique. A technique that seeks to uncover humanity and strip it of its technological trappings. Like a snake biting its own tail. Like an ideology. Gender theory offers interesting insights when it focuses on studying immigrant populations integrating into a new country. In particular, there are quite enlightening studies on Native American women's societies in North America. There are also fascinating studies concerning the cultural conditioning applied to indigenous or immigrant populations by dominant civilizations. These studies will certainly provide a valuable and fertile ground for other researchers or writers who will build upon them as the foundations of their work. But the fact that these studies lead to the belief that everything is corrupted by culture demonstrates once again, if proof were needed, that humankind far too easily believes itself to be all-powerful and permissible. Researchers overlook a crucial criterion: the soul. It is neither nature nor culture that creates civilizations, but the soul. The combination of nature and culture, or rather, the alchemy of nature and culture. I use the term alchemy because the element of the unknown is so significant that it is in no way a recipe. A being is neither a man nor a woman, says gender theory, and that's not wrong. A being is the alchemy of nature and culture that intertwine, nourish each other, become entangled, and become so subtle that it is impossible to say which is which. Therein lies the essence of life, summed up in a terribly fashionable word: organic. Therefore, alive. A being is neither a man nor a woman because it is incredibly more. It is that which completely eludes us. We understand that pointing out humanity's weakness here is not to diminish or belittle it, but to embrace it in all its splendor, in its entirety, if indeed that is possible since it is made in the image of God, and this must never be forgotten. So many studies of humankind, without even realizing it, remove humanity from their research. Intoxicated by technical discoveries that will not stand the test of time. If we want to define life, and therefore humanity, we must say that we are as weak in resisting the temptation of evil as we are capable of reaching "supernatural" heights. This vast difference could be considered inevitable if humanity did not possess an immeasurable power: free will. Free to choose the path we take, we can decide what is good for us. We can make mistakes. We can regret them. We can blame ourselves. We can feel guilty. We can hate ourselves. We can forgive ourselves. We can recover. We can rise again. We can live again. We can start over. We can succeed… We can live. Oh, this life, which we could talk about endlessly without ever beginning to define it! Researchers, whoever they may be, are too fond of defining it within a technical framework; it's so reassuring. Almost the entire philosophy of this blog (and of course of Bernanos's book, "France Against the Robots") is thus contained within this struggle between the technical framework and life, life that never ceases to shatter science. There is an age-old battle at play here.

In 2011, there was a great deal of wrongdoing against life. As always since the dawn of humanity. Nothing particularly unusual. Centuries have seen humankind destroy itself, exterminate itself, try to stifle life for good. But life is reborn the following season. Shaken sometimes, often groggy, breathless, feverish, always curious. Life will always elude all theories of that kind, because theories are life seen under a microscope. And life isn't something you look at, it's something you… live. In 2011, there was wrongdoing against life, but there was life too. Wrongdoing against life is part of the "human condition," as someone once said. In 2011, there was life through death as well. There are deaths I've discussed on this blog. Of people I knew or didn't know. Always important people. The dead we speak of or mourn, whether we knew them personally or not, are always companions on our journey. After a certain age, "midway through life's journey," as Dante said, deaths write history, which shrinks. I haven't spoken of Montserrat Figueras and Vladimir Dimitrijevic, whom I will miss. Dimitri will always be there, present in the DNA of "L'âge d'Homme" (The Age of Man). And I will continue to be intoxicated by the voice of Montserrat Figueras as long as I have breath. I cannot truly measure Montserrat Figueras's contribution to my life. If I hadn't known her, I wouldn't be dead, but if I hadn't known her, I wouldn't be the same. Nature and culture? With Dimitri, over a weekend, I discovered Serbia, the Belgrade nights, Dobritsa Tchossitch, a certain heterodoxy from within… An indelible memory. So much life.

What is the end of a year if not the revelation that nothing changes? And doesn't this revelation rest above all on the observation that life continues to flow between all living parts like blood in its bodily continuum? And for the Catholic, life is infinitely stronger since it continues to live even through the dead in the communion of saints.

But as surprising as it may seem, if I take a brief look back at the past year, two memories come to mind. From 2011, I remember the death of Steve Jobs, a mixed-race man who was abandoned (mixed-race people are often abandoned) who was born into a world that didn't recognize him, that didn't want him, and that he would go on to define through calligraphy, guided by his intuition. In 2011, I remember "Tree of Life," the vibrant filmed poem that defines two paths in life: the path of nature and the path of grace. Nature and culture, you say?

P.S. With this article, I am launching a new category: "Theory of Life." In response to gender theory, the ideology of life.