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La Lettre
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Transmitting is urgent
The cumulative nature of science prompts
us to adapt ourselves to the rapid increase
of knowledge. Long gone is the time when
Descartes used to advise the younger
generation – and rightly so at the time –
to free themselves from the dogma of
the ancients, rediscover knowledge by
themselves, taking a critical approach. As
testified by François-Xavier Bellamy in
Les
déshérités, ou l’urgence de transmettre
(Plon Ed., 2014), it is pointless today to
let anyone believe that one can rediscover
it all by oneself. Time is missing. In
the century of the Enlightenment, any
scientist could acquire and assimilate all
the scientific knowledge that had been
gathered at the time and what we now call
interdisciplinarity could easily germinating
in one brain. Things are quite different
today, as none of us would be able to embrace everything and everyone must restrict themselves to
acquiring one discipline. It is this segmentation of science, indeed, that we should connect in order to
make the best use of knowledge.
This is the way science progresses, its cumulative nature beating the rhythm of the irreversibility that drives
us. Such progress, however, does not exclude perverse results. Ignorance has always brought out beliefs
from the shadows to help overcome fears for what seems mysterious because not understood. Some
centuries ago, still, these ancestral fears were the same for all. But today, the knowledge that some have
enables them to create and produce objects that seem magical to others. The latter do not understand
how these work, or sometimes what their purpose is, and yet they use them. Such discrepancy between
a minority of people, who have acquired deep scientific knowledge, and the vast majority, who does not
make it their own, endangers the cohesion of our societies. It creates an expanding breach into which
charlatans, ideologists and impostors rush, using a pseudo-rational language to take advantage of those
for whom scientific knowledge remains an enigma. Like a spring that stretches and eventually breaks
if one does not watch out, the mass of new scientific knowledge cannot draw away from our societies.
Education and everyone’s involvement in reflecting on the use of such knowledge are more than ever of
prime importance. In his book
La pensée sauvage
(Plon Ed., 1962) – The Savage Mind, translated in 1966
by George Weidenfield and Nicholson Ltd, London –, Claude Lévi-Strauss invited us to let our two ways
of thinking coexist, scientific thinking and savage thinking – the former is more abstract and considers
the world from the outside, while the other is more concrete and considers it from the inside – because