Machine as the European Ideal
The architect Le Corbusier wrote that a
house is a machine of living. He also wanted to do away with
spontaneously arisen cities and highways replacing them with man-made
modern, functional and «geometrical» ones. More less at the same
time the Estonian linguist Johannes Aavik wrote that language is a
machine of communication, and must be re-engineered and remodelled
according to the needs of modern communication. The language of the
past that evolved at slow pace in village communities was not fit for
our times. Now we know better than our ancestors how a language
should look like.
Both these men were children of their
times. The beginning of the twentieth century gave birth to Italian
and Russian futurism with similar ideas, similar cult of technology,
of machines and similar rejection of the past they considered to have
been irrational and dark. But they were also children of their
culture, of the Western civilization. Formal rules that can be
written down and scrupulously observed are an integral part of this
civilization. The tendency of formalisation is present in this
culture from its beginnings. We can see its emergence already in
Pythagorean vision of the cosmos (and music) as a mathematical
construct, in the formalisation of logic by Aristotle, in the
development of astrology, and later, of the formalistic catholic
theology, but also of musical theory, of harmony and point counter
point. We can also mention the ideas of Raimundus Lullus as well as
Leibniz about the possibility to find a machine or a calculus
permitting us to find out all truthful expressions, i.e. to find the
hidden mathematical foundations, the real mathematical essence of
everything. The West took over and integrated some Near Eastern
legalistic and ideas that led to the rise of Roman law and the ideas
of the rule of law. In the West, law is often considered to be an
absolute, rule of law is an ideal of the West. Nowadays this rule of
law and rule of rules and regulations has reached an apotheosis in
the EU. The EU is designed to become a machine, a well-programmed
computer, running flawlessly. This is the ideal, and in the name of
this ideal both common sense and humanism are sometimes put aside.
The problem with such machinery is that
they never work flawlessly, nature is most probably not a calculus,
and all formulae, equations and theories describing it are
necessarily limited and uncomplete. This is most probably a corollary
of the famous Gödel theorem of incompleteness. In practice, the
impossibility of regulating all human activity with laws and rules,
the impossibility of a complete rule of law leads to increasing
problems and crises as we see now in Europe. These crises cannot
probably be overcome by more rules and regulations, more formal
steps. They need a critical reevaluation of the hidden philosophical
foundations of our policies, of our ideals.
I think that what we need is a
reappraisal of our belief in formalism, a step away from legalism
that has shaped our societies and our thinking for centuries, if not
thousands of years. We can perhaps find some inspiration from one
cradle of our civilization, from the Near East, namely from Judaism.
Judaism is very legalistic, the rabbis have worked out a tremendous
system of rules with their interpretations. But despite the
importance of rules, there is a metarule rending nul and void nearly
all the rules, stopping the halakhic machinery. It is the rule that
saving a life, a living soul is more important than observing any
rule. There are some exceptions, namely one is not permitted to save
one's life by denying God's existence or worshipping false gods. But
the fact is that there is something more important than laws and
rules, and this something is human life.
There is perhaps also something to
learn from the Chinese social system where the rule of law was not so
important than in the West. Traditionally, here the law was mostly
criminal law and the courts dealt with thieves, robbers and
murderers, not for example with financial disputes between
businessmen or other people. These were handled by families or
professional organizations, guilds. Thus there were fewer laws and
codices in traditional China than in Europe. Still, the Chinese
society was relatively much more stable than the western ones, what
is proven by the continuity of its culture and tradition. Confucius
was a contemporary of Plato. We don't know much about Plato's family
or descendants nor abpout the genealogy of other major figures of the
antique. In China, the direct descendants of Confucius are still
there, as well as the manor, the tomb and even the chariot of the
philosopher.
You cannot build a machine from fuzzy,
fluffy and fluid components. Details, wheels, levers,
switches of a machine must be made of
solid metal. When we want to see things social, moral or spiritual
functioning as machines, they too must have solid components. The
components of our European machinery are made of words and concepts.
What in practice is nearly the same as things called essences.
Essence is what makes a rose a rose, a human being a human being,
happiness happiness, etc. A deeply ingrained European belief is that
everything has an essence, and the way to find out essences of things
is to try to define them. Thus, the European machine is being
constructed, and this construction is a permanent process, of
well-defined words, concepts. This is true of science, of philosophy,
but also of jurisprudence and morals. Laws are written with words,
and to apply them we must find out the differences e.g. between
manslaughter and murder, theft and robbery. This is also happening in
politics: we are talking about democracy, human rights, freedom and
corruption as something clearly definable. And being accustomed to
such concepts we take for granted that such things, such essences as
democracy, freedom, egality, rights, etc. exist as clear-cut,
definable entities. They resemble measuring sticks, rules with clear
centimetre or inche lines drawn on them. And we use these rules to
measure and evaluate things, lifeless and living, ourselves and other
people. We tend to believe that we are able to measure their rights
and wrongs, to find out whether they are fit to function as
components of our economical, moral or spiritual machine. The basic
European religion, its first and foremost belief is the belief in
words, concepts and essences. This is a belief shared by nearly all
Western systems of thought, liberals and conservatives, religious
fundamentalists and communists, revolutionaries and
counter-revolutionaries. Thus it is perhaps important to keep in mind
that this belief is not shared at least by one Chinese school way of
looking at things, namely Taoism. The Taoists believe that most
important thoughts cannot be put into words. Who knows, doesn't
speak, who speaks, doesn't know as has said Laozi. And they have
found many common points with Buddhists who deny the existence of any
essences.
The Western tendency of formalization
has already created a situation where legislative acts must be
processed with special computer programmes, creating an ordered
database of normative acts, otherwise even a person reasonably
competent in law is lost. This computerized processing, comparing,
editing juridical texts can be compared to processing of medical
information. Computerization has here led to computerized
diagnostics. Sometimes a computer can here achieve better results
than a qualified doctor. Could in future juridical procedures be
computerized too, e.g. will computers take over litigations and pass
judgments and sentences? This possibility is, of course, a reductio
ad absurdum of the logic of development in the Western societies, and
probably will never become a reality. But the fact is that the
formalization of nearly everything, be it evaluation of science,
arts, personalities, etc, has reached an astonishing and troubling
level. I think that we need a return to humanism, to human
understanding, to human language that is very often non-formalistic,
«non-Aristotelian». And we need an authority who can change
legislation, override legal acts and court judgments. How such an
authority could be established and what should guarantee that this
authority cannot abuse its supreme powers? I don't know. Perhaps we
can learn something from the history, be it the history of various
monarchies, be it in Europe, Asia, Africa or America. I think that
here too, the Chinese example could be worth studying.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire