quote for today

this should finish up the Serres quotes. i'll post the book summary later. _____ LaTour: "So, then, science and technology remove the distinction upon which morals are based?" Serres: "Their recent achievements [do], at any rate. The old adage changes and becomes: 'Everything depends or will depend on us, someday.' Better yet: 'Everything itself will depend on us; not just all things, but systems as such, and totalities.' So, what can we do? The answer: given enough time, anything, or almost, globally speaking, since our science and technology have discovered (and this is what's totally new) some of the paths that go from what's next door or neighboring, toward totality, from the local to the global. Certainly. "But even this is disturbing and suddenly turns back upon itself. So, again, what can we do? Answer: given enough time, anything, and in quantity, indeed, twice as much. But what about quality? We are capable of all the good in the world, certainly: feeding, caring, healing. But, diametrically, we are capable of blowing up the planet, disturbing its climate, choosing to give birth only to baby boys or baby girls, of creating in our laboratories deadly viruses that are transmissible at the will of the winds. We have become the tragic deciders of life or death, masters of the greatest aspects of our former dependence: Earth, life and matter, time and history, good and evil. We have encroached upon the theories of metaphysics. "...but our very mastery seems to excape our mastery. We have all things in hand, but we do not control our actions. Everything happens as though our powers escaped our powers--whose partial projects, sometimes good and often intentional, can backfire or unwittingly cause evil.... "Our conquests outstrip our deliberate intentions. Observe, in fact, the acceleration in the trajectories of our technological advances. No sooner is it announced that something is possible that it is in part achieved, propelled down the slope of competition, imitation, or interest. It is almost as quickly considered desirable, and by the next day it is necessary: people will go to court if they are deprived of it. The fabric of our history is woven today of these immediate passages from possibility to reality, from contingency to necessity. "...Yes, we will be able to choose the sex of our children; genetics, biochemistry, physics, and their related technologies give us the necessary power, but we will be obliged to administer this power, which for the moment seems to elude us, because it goes faster and farther than we are able to forsee or control, beyond our desires to redirect it, our will to decide about it, our freedom to manage it. We have resolved the Cartesian question: 'How can we dominate the world?' Will we know how to resolve the next one: 'How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?'" --Michel Serres with Bruno LaTour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, 1990 (Eng. trans. 1995). pp. 170-172.