The man is the man’s wolf

Gilberto Dupas warns of the dehumanization of technology

Carlos Haag

To define the pettiness of Richard Wagner, Nietzsche used the image of “human, all too human”. Today, you have to rethink the diatribe as a new virtue: human is never too much, and modern times, of conquests and scientific and technological progress, have blunted man’s sensitivity, to the point of his leaving behind the prioritization of what is his best (and worst) characteristic: precisely his humanity. “Despite all the enchantment of the conquests that show themselves to us as being possible for the new century, the concerns with the grave possible consequences of the directions under way are still at the stage of dialectic negotiation”, writes Gilberto Dupas in his most recent books, O mito do progresso [The Myth of Progress], an erudite and fascinating warning traverse about the uncritical enthusiasm that we still have of the Baconian view of the conquest of nature. “Knowledge is power”, Bacon would say, indicating that science had unlimited conditions for generating positive alternative for men to be able to improve their personal universe and their social condition. But can it be that we are thinking correctly? “Otherwise, it seems clear that we can take a big step in the direction of a civilizational scenario that may mean a rupture of humanity with its responsibilities of self-survival as a culture and a species”, Dupas observes. For him, the progress of the discourse of the elites, of neoliberalism, is no more than a myth renewed by an ideological apparatus that wants to convince us that history has a sure destination, and always a better one. Those who think that the author is a retrograde opposed to science are mistaken. The dilemma of progress does not ask for a paralyzation of science and of technology, merely a new model for dealing with these conquests, so that they serve the common good, and not a few, the market. For this, Dupas “merely” asks for vigilant and critical citizens, not fascinated consumers. A task that seem a hard one, but involves the most objective of sieves: schools and their teachers, who have to educate, and not just inform. Without that, we are condemned to an ethical vacuum, a society in the hands of the rules of the market, in which values are economic. In this world, human is all too human, and the value of life generally and the well-being of all are secondary, before the pleasure of consumption, of the direct absorption of all the scientific conquests, be they a new pair of trainers or transgenics. Everything is valid if it is economically viable. Dupas wishes for the return of macroethics, of an ethics of responsibility, along the lines of the German thinker Hans Jonas, in which the present has to be thought out at the same time that one looks to the future, to construct a healthy universe for all. “Act in a way that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on Earth; in a way that your action does not jeopardize the future possibility of such a life”, observes Jonas, echoed in the fine study by Dupas, a close-grained and well-written little book on what awaits us if we are not capable of exercising out criticism.