quote for today

this quote continues from the book Conversations of Science, Culture, and Time, which is formulated as a conversation, or maybe a question/answer session, between Bruno LaTour (a well-regarded and challenging sociology prof in Paris) and Michel Serres (a famous and confusing French philosopher teaching at Stanford). I could just post the book summary on the back cover. I probably will in the next couple of days. But this quote is a keeper...and a long one--will break up into sections. Serres: "Since you ask, here is what preceded our current day. Submitting to irremediable laws, we have always lived in an unforgiving world. Wisdom--whether age-old, classical, Christian, secular, or even recent--helped us to bear our inevitable pains, which were produced by a necessity independent of us. "From our beginnings we had regulated our actions on the distinction between things that depended on us and things that in no way depended on us. "The local--the near, the neighboring, the adjoining, the next-door--sometimes depended on us; but the spatially distant, the distant future, the Earth, the universe, humanity, matter, life, all the global categories that philosophers theorize about, always eluded our influence." LaTour: "But we still inhabit this same world of "necessity." How can we escape from it?" Serres: "Does your sweet youth prevent you from seeing the recent change? "Suddenly, toward the middle of the century, at the end of WWII, we have the rise in power of all the mixed scientific disciplines--physics, biology, medicine, pharmacology--plus the whole set of technologies brought about by them. We are finally truly effective in the organization of work, in providing food, in matters of sexuality, of illness, in the hope of prolonging life--in short, in everyday life, intimate and collective. Further, we are finally the masters of space, of matter, and of life. All of this has pushed back the limits and almost eliminated what does not depend on us. We have found ways to lessen fatigue, to practically abolish need and pain, to avoid inevitable distress. So what remains irremediable? "Preserved, appeased, practically anesthetized, two or three generations of the West...have just lived like gods, in the happy and safe certitude that, henceforth, everything depended--if not immediately, at least in the short term--on their knowledge or their technical achievements. "While the old global necessity was collapsing, they devoted themselves, in security, to the intoxication of a growing consumerism that reached new heights of consumption, and they experienced the ensuing crisis in everyday morality, which had obviously become useless and incomprehensible. "...So here we are, masters even of things that used to hold us in subjection. Death itself is pushed back and old age is rejuvenated. Life's briefness, wept over or sung by the ancient sages, has been succeeded by calculations of its expectancy, which, for wealthy women in wealthy countries, exceeds 70 years. Our wisdom is shaken by the tearing down of those objective dependencies that were formerly irremediable and unforgiving." --Serres and LaTour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, 1990 (Eng. trans. 1995). pp. 169-170.