Depuis quelques décennies, l'unification économique de la planète se poursuivant, la question de savoir "ce qu'est l'humanité" se trouve soulevée avec de plus en plus d'insistance. Une réponse qui semble tomber sous le sens est que l'humanité... c'est l'espèce humaine.Or ce n'est pas évident: l'espèce est un long continuum génétique remontant à des millions d'années. Le seul fait que certains de ses membres se soient mis à parler ensemble depuis 70 000 ans les autorisent-ils à se réclamer pour autant de sa réalité universelle ? Pouvons-nous prétendre dans le seul instant évolutionnaire où nous naissons, vivons et mourrons, à déterminer une politique "du genre humain" ? Et si nous en prenons la très lourde responsabilité, remplaçant ainsi l'expérience naturelle, quelle sagesse peut-elle nous aider à conduire l'espèce en son nom collectif, et dans une perspective longtemps soutenable pour la vie et pour nous-mêmes ?In recent decades, with the economic unification of the planet going on, the question of "what is humanity" is being raised with more and more insistence. One answer that seems to make sense is that humanity ... is the human species.But this is not obvious: the species is a long genetic continuum dating back millions of years. Does the mere fact that some of its members have spoken together for 70,000 years allow them to claim as much of its universal reality? Can we claim in the only evolutionary moment when we are born, live and die, to determine a "human race" policy?And if we take this heavy responsibility, replacing the natural experience, what wisdom can help us to lead the species in its collective name, and in a long-lasting perspective for life and for ourselves?
About the Author: (wikipedia extract.) Denis Duclos (born 1947) is a French sociologist, Ph.D. and research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research. His main research field has been societal "great fears" for both scapegoat characters (like "serial killers") and collective actions viewed as generating disasters. He interprets these fears as "symptomatic" positions, formed in place of explicit political positions, when reasonable conversation is impossible . The subjects of fear rarely relate directly to a real problem at stake. For example, the serial killer, as a myth, represented the difficulty of finding a balance between legal system and individual freedom: both having the potential of turning into monstrosity. Another example: the fear of "mad cow" disease (due to industrial feeding of cattle) seemed to represent a fundamental issue: artificiality of our lifestyles and our interventions on life forms and their natural intermingling. The fear of climate change reflects the difficulty to pass from a world composed of human entities in conflict to a world where humanity acts "as one man." (..) In the background of these phenomena (..), Denis Duclos builts a theory of cultural fields, of their conversational structure (counterpoint to domination observed by Pierre Bourdieu). He considers the emergence of "positional" clusters which tend to directly organize themselves into a global conversation, gradually moving away from their traditional shells: religious, national, international and civilizational fields. For example, it appears (supported by surveys) that the European field is largely centered by the question of law (as an eventually quantifiable system of relations): The Anglo-Saxon position tends to equate law and society, while the "latin" response anchors the law in civic local conditions, whereas another position (German) is based on the necessary correspondence between law and a wide community spirit. This conversation is a special case of a pluralization of positions to be found at other levels, but also, ultimately, in the basic attitudes of all cultures (according to Claude Lévi-Strauss.) On the assumption that, in a sense (related to the fact that homo sapiens is speaking) there has potentially only ever been one human cultural field, Denis Duclos questions History as a confluence of separating and unifying trends. He raises the problem of the pluralistic frame which, in a "society-world", will supersede existing intermediate forms.