* * *
Religion, whose rituals gather together all time, tying it down in their gravity to only a single point in time, lay in this rural past close to the social world, whose horizons lay mere generations backward and forward in time, but whose practices, bound up with the land and the seasons, were mainly associated with repetition. They were distinct from one another regarding the local and the universal, where that which applied to all, that which for example regulated the total population of the earth, existed beyond the reach of humans and was identified in terms of external forces, fate and destiny, so strong that not even the thought arose of their being controllable other than by prayer and sacrifice. In the face of drought, floods, cold, and epidemics, man was vulnerable, fragile, and helpless. The relationship between the local and the universal, between individual and whole, was one-sided in that these mighty and impersonal forces intervened in individual lives, whereas the individual could never encroach on the universal. The universal was religious, rather than social.
* * *
When science becomes the language by which man construes the material world, the religious stepping aside to apply only to the spiritual aspect of life, the relationship between the local and the universal becomes radically displaced and ensuing technological progress, which in such an astonishingly short space of time completely alters the circumstances of production and distribution, causes our populations to skyrocket compared to the demographic calm of preceding centuries and millennia. Whereas there were some 250 to 400 million people in the world in 1350, and between 465 and 545 million in 1650, that figure rose to between 835 and 915 million in 1800, between 1 billion 91 million and 1 billion 176 million in 1850, between 1 billion 530 million and 1 billion 608 million in 1900, to 2 billion 416 million in 1950, in the region of 4 billion in 1980, and now, in 2011, to some 6 billion people. We have indeed replenished the earth and subdued it as the account of the creation would have it, and have become as many as the sand upon the seashore and the stars of the heaven.
In a way, such a radical rise in population changes nothing. What it means is simply more of the same. More births and deaths, more mouths and more food, more clothing, more houses, closer together and spread over greater areas of land. Humanity advances in much the same way as a forest, for whose trees the number of other trees changes nothing. The local does not cease to exist as a concept even if connections extend from there into the global, such as when the global market came into being with the Industrial Revolution, when goods began to be produced in one place, to be transported from there out into the wide world, for as the sociologist Bruno Latour puts it in his book We Have Never Been Modern, by following the process step-by-step “one never crosses the mysterious lines that should divide the local from the global.” When does the train depart the local and pass into the global, Latour asks, and replies: never. All large organizations and associations comprise local units, armies are for instance organized in much the same way as armies were organized in Roman days, only multiplied, and the same is true of bureaucracy, the apparatus of state, the great commercial and international businesses. They comprise a single person with sweat blotches under his arms and his tie askew person in an office to the power of a thousand or hundreds of thousands. It is not the number in itself that has altered man’s circumstance, but our perception of that number.
* * *
In the 1680s an anatomy professor of Oxford University, Sir William Petty, wrote a book called Political Arithmetic in which he endeavored to understand or capture society on the basis of mathematical terms, in other words to quantify and measure the sphere of the human. He wished thereby to establish laws to govern what was human, much as Newton had established laws to govern nature. That there should exist an absolute order, a firm set of rules behind the world’s apparent chaos of variability and arbitrariness so exact and predictable they could be calculated and accounted for mathematically, was an irresistible thought in the seventeenth century and one that would moreover confirm the greatness of God; as if some hidden plan had existed all along, relating to the world the way a technical drawing related to an invention, in a system in which all fluctuation occurred according to a predetermined pattern where nothing could change and where all constituent parts worked together in a single glorious expression of the wholeness of the universe. Man, belonging to this universe, was a part of the same system, not only in the form of the individual human, with its blood and lungs, its brain and nerve paths, its muscles and tendons, which like cables enabled the arms to be raised and lowered, the legs to walk, but also as a mass, in the structures within which human beings lived, such as villages, cities, and states, where their numbers could be determined precisely, not just those who were living, but also those who died and those who were born – for in viewing such a whole one could see there were rules that governed it. The annual numbers of births and deaths, for instance, were not arbitrary; true, those numbers rose and fell, but they did so on the basis of parameters that could be identified and determined. The same was true of life expectancy.
But what drove society, what drove the people who lived in it, what decided their actions, made their bodies do one thing rather than another? Were there rules for such things that applied to everyone?
If the comparison between the body, society, and clockwork, as made explicitly by both Descartes and Hobbes, seems almost brutally simplistic to our minds, the clock not being a particularly sophisticated machine to us, the mind-set it revealed – the foundation of medical science on the one hand, whereby the body is made up of functional parts that may be exchanged quite mechanically, and the foundations of statistics and societal planning on the other, by which all human activity may be measured and quantified, captured in numbers, providing significant background for political decision-making. The list of numericized phenomena in society is almost endless, and they are broken down in all sorts of ways so that currents within people may be read and either diverted in the case of their being undesirable, or reinforced in the case of their being desirable. One may also see connections between the various parts. These statistics have a cutoff point; it would be meaningless to compile statistics of the number of people within a family killed in traffic or who have died from cancer, for instance, since such occurrences cannot be understood as the expression of anything quantative, because while Johannes belonged to the segment of young men most likely to die in traffic, to his family he was not representative of anyone, he was Johannes, who picked his car keys up off the table in the hallway one afternoon only a month ago and never came back. Not even in a small society, in one of the many village communities that line the coast of northern Norway, for example, with their two or three hundred inhabitants, where everyone knows each other, would the viewpoint of statistics make sense; he was Johannes. But at some point statistics do become meaningful. This is the point at which the observer loses overview of the “we” and can no longer identify the individual within the mass; a teacher in a school of five hundred students knows all those in his class, but not all those in the school, and while in the first instance it is meaningless to compile statistics of what marks the students have been given, the teacher knowing perfectly well how each student has performed in the different subjects, in the second instance, that of student performance in the school as a whole, statistics would indeed be meaningful. The tipping point between the individual and the individual within the mass is the tipping point between the I and the we, though not the personal we, this one borders on another, greater we, which is impersonal, no longer represented by any name, but by a number, and which thereby approaches the “it.”
If we imagine humanity in terms of a scale, it would have to begin at one end with the impersonal, the materiality of the body, where in principle all parts are exchangeable, being the same for everyone, and where for that same reason the notion of the individual makes no sense – the human concept would thus proceed from the impersonal I, or the “it” of the I, shading in turn in
to the personal I, the personal we, and eventually the nonpersonal we, or the “it” of the we, humanity as a mass, the individual as a number.
The boundaries of both the I and the we in respect to the it are fluid and unclear, but nonetheless they are real, for in the it-zones humanity is characterized by sameness, predictability, and near-mathematical regularity, whereas in the I-zones and the we-zones it is quite differently free and individualized. The world of the inner “it” is that of biology, where thoughts are interactions between cells, emotions are chemical and electric impulses shooting through the nerve fibers, existing alongside all other bodily processes, which lie beyond their scope and cannot think or feel on their own, unless communication between the DNA spiral and the cell is a form of thinking at the most fundamental level of life, the one’s duplication in the other, but no matter what it is or what it is called, it takes place at such depths within us that we neither feel, sense, understand, nor see it other than as a result, which is to say that which is brought forth within us.
These systems are uniform, what applies to one, applies to all, and they are continuous in the sense of their being transmitted as copies down through the generations. Their process is mechanical, a kind of biological-material industry, immeasurably finely tuned of course, and yet material, for which reason it has always been just a matter of time before human industry and its mechanical technology became sufficiently finely tuned to be applied inward, to ourselves. Its tentative beginnings were sometime in the Middle Ages, proceeding with astonishing velocity when religion no longer accounted for nature and man could intervene and take matters into his own hands, familiarize himself with nature’s laws and principles, and its first practical results were crude Prometheus-like machines, monsters of iron and steel into which coal was shoveled, clouds of vapor and smoke billowing from their innards, but which were quickly refined and reduced in size until reaching such a level of sophistication as to be able to not only isolate our human cells and strings of DNA, mapping our entire microscopic genetic material, but also to intervene and modify it, altering and eventually manufacturing it too. These systems, which comprise the foundations of our self-awareness and our spirit, are biological and thereby mortal, and in them the I expires, which is not necessarily to say that I thereby am “it”: we may feel the heart to be ours, but if our heart should falter, it has been shown that we can insert a new one, from a dead person, and go on living. We are not our hearts, we are not our arm, all we need to do is chop it off and look at it there on the table, what could such a blood-drenched object possibly have to do with me? We are constrained by this darkness of flesh and brightness of eye, by the insensitive beating of this simple heart, by the air inhaled and exhaled by the dismal gray twins that are these lungs, we are unthinkable without them, yet they live within themselves and do not know us, for they know no one, and the muscles cannot tell if their twitching occurs in someone dead or someone alive.
The difference between the “it” of the I and the “it” of the we is considerable. Whereas the former occurs in the material domain, the latter is relational, and while the former is therefore mortal, the latter is immortal in the sense that it lives on even when the individual dies. What they share is predictability and regularity, which in their different ways exclude the individual, and which in their different ways are associated with the extrahuman, characterized by the forces or phenomena that pervade great totalities, previously understood as powers, in the former instance those which give rise to life’s beginnings and life’s course, in the latter instance fate, by which it is steered.
* * *
When does here become there? asks Michel Serres. To which might be added, when do we become they? The notion of the local is geographic, but social too. The geographic sense, the space of the local, is defined by constraints. The walls of a city are such a constraint. The hedge around a house. And property rights attach people to place: room, house, farm, manor. Mine, yours, ours, theirs. Through the ages our world has been rural, consisting of small, bounded societies where all social structures were centered around the notion of the local, where people normally died in the same place they were born, rarely having ventured far from the area in which they lived their entire lives. In such a society, a German village in the fourteenth century for instance, knowledge was local too; since only a minority could read and write, that knowledge was transmitted orally and through practice, residing in the memory of the mind and the memory of the hands, bound up with the circumstances determined by its particular landscape, whether the occurrence of a certain type of rock in a quarry or a mine, the quality of the soil, or the types of trees in the forests. The idea that some kind of scientific industry could arise in one such place, a German village in the fourteenth century, or that some kind of machine, a combustion engine perhaps, a sewing machine or a microwave oven, could ever be made here is unthinkable, precisely because of the local nature of the circumstances and the shape they accorded all knowledge there. Constrained by the limitations of individual memory, the theory required would have been impossible to attain, each and every person would have had to start from scratch, on the basis of their own capabilities alone, and nearly all knowledge gained would be lost again when its host died. All text, all theory and philosophy was in such a world gathered in the hands of the few, all manuscripts were copied out by hand and existed only in very few locations, usually monasteries, and from the thirteenth century onward in the new universities of the major cities. From these environments came the alchemists, who like Paracelsus dabbled in this and that, and the itinerant Faust figure, whose knowledge was indeed systematic but bound to a community so narrow that all experimental endeavor was undertaken alone and without connection to other such endeavors, a circumstance that could hardly lead to anything but the repetition of each other’s errors.
The new has to be required or desired, it must afford clear-cut advantages, and when the impulse toward the new arises, communities must be found in which it may be developed and maintained. Within local boundaries the new would be extinguished like embers on a stone. The new is possible only in structures where the local is dissolved. In the case of knowledge, the great advance occurred in Germany in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press, which enabled the reproduction of any book or any treatise, as well as its dissemination into the world, and then everything no longer hinged on the one or the few. Knowledge could be accumulated in ways until then unknown, to the point where no single individual could ever acquire even a fraction of that circulating in his or her lifetime. A theory put forward in one place could be strengthened or invalidated in another, no longer was it a matter of having to start from scratch every time, and once a small number of principles concerning verifiability and universality, and thereby comparison, were established, this overarching system meant that inventions could be made that no individual would ever have been able to create on his own, the train for example, or the machine gun. Nature was released from religion, knowledge was released from the local, and once freed these forces blew like the wind through the domain of the human.
* * *
“All people” was no longer a religious concept, but biological and social. The realization of biological sameness, the body as materiality, consisting of calculable and thereby manipulable parts amenable to instrumental and gradually chemical intervention, was without issue, posing no threat to the old religious division between body and soul; on the contrary this seemed consolidated: the I belonged to the flesh, and if its life could be prolonged by someone cutting into the chest and cleansing the heart of calcium, then all the better for it. The realization of social sameness, man as mass, it too consisting of calculable and thereby manipulable parts, it too amenable to intervention, was however not without issue, since the threat it posed to the I concerned not moderation but extinction, and in a strange way set previously well-defined concepts such as worthiness and goodness in flux.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 80