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SLIDE 1: From Prometheus to Dionysus - Can we Re-enchant the Future?

Marie-Laure SALLES-DJELIC

SLIDE 2: Since 2000, a handful of Space Barons are dreaming to reach well beyond the Moon.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Beal, Paul Allen, Richard Branson and a few others are pouring

billions of dollars and deploying enormous resources for this adventure. As the line-up of

names shows, this space fever is highly concentrated in Silicon Valley. Space Barons are also

Tech Barons, the Masters of our Algorithmic and Artificial Intelligence world and strong

believers in the powers of predictive technologies.

Elon Musk has gone quite far in laying out a plan for the colonization of Mars and the

settlement there of a city of one million humans. When he is called upon to motivate such an

expansive project, Musk hovers between two narratives – one dystopian, the other radically

utopian and positive.

Musk is worried about the survival of human civilization even more than about the state of

our planet. He is convinced that we will not escape a radical nuclear war or something of the

sort that will bring our species close to extinction. So he proposes to solve that problem

through technology – that’s what Tech Barons do, after all, they look at everything as

problems to be solved through technology.

SLIDE 3: Evgeny Morozov calls this the “folly of Technological Solutionism”.1

In 2018, here is how Elon Musk presented this:2

SLIDE 4: If there is a third world war we want to make sure there is enough of a seed

of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the

dark ages….

1 https://www.theguardian.com/global/2013/mar/20/save-everything-evgeny-morozov-review 2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war

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And the Moon he tells us is not far enough for comfort :

It is important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because in the event of a war it is

more likely to survive than a moon base.

The idea of a nuclear winter is far from new. It is as old as the nuclear age and has inspired

generations of Science-Fiction writers.

SLIDE 5: In his Foundation Series, started in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov envisions space

settlement as a way to anticipate the looming destruction of the Galactic Empire and a

following dark age. The raison d’être of those settlements is to preserve science and

civilization and become, in time, the cornerstones of reconstruction.

So Musk is not into radical invention. The most mean-spirited amongst us could even argue

that he has not gone beyond his adolescent geek fascination for Science Fiction. But his very

concrete and lavishly financed project could also be seen as a real challenge for apocalyptic

Science-Fiction – Or when reality overcomes the wildest dreams of Science Fiction authors….

Beyond this scenario of doom, Musk at times is much more upbeat about the motives behind

his Space projects. In his words –

SLIDE 6: ”The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we are a spacefaring

civilization and a multi-planet species than if we are not… You want to wake up in the

morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring

civilization is all about…. I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there

and being among the stars.” Elon Musk, Making Life Multi-Planetary

The projection here is into a future where man through technology is in control, including of

the last remaining frontiers. Elon Musk and his Space Baron / Tech Baron friends exemplify, in

this respect, a particular vision of the Future that has deep ideological roots in the

Enlightenment revolution. They project a Panglossian Utopia, an enchanted Future, where

Humanity enhanced through Technology will understand and solve all problems, make correct

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predictions, choose the “better” future and overcome all obstacles and impossibilities. Man,

finally, will have become God.

SLIDE 7: The « We are doomed » and « We are God » narratives point to conflicting and

contradictory eschatologies. How could we have brought ourselves to the brink of doom if we

are God? In principle those two narratives should exclude each other!! In fact, they seem to

be the two sides of our binary mindset. For many centuries now, our world has been geared

to making us think in ones or zeros, in black or white, in heaven or hell, in saved or doomed,

in right or wrong, in love or hate, in man or woman, in me or you, even in nope or like on

dating platforms.…. The digital age is only the latest stage in this binarization of everything –

a hard wired one with a hugely performative impact on all and every single dimensions of our

lives. But this performative architecture is, happily, not powerful enough to fully bring us and

the world in line with predictive models. This then could explain the persistence of spectacular

prediction failures in spite of the intensification of predictive technologies.

Still, it is not surprising in that context that when it comes to thinking about our future we

would fall back onto such a binary opposition – opposing the scenario of Doom to the Scenario

of God.

SLIDE 8: For the scenario of Doom, there are multiple variants and for the sake of time I will

rather attempt to outline a broad ideal type..

SLIDE 9: For the scenario of God, there is a clear center and I will turn my gaze to the Olympian

hills of Silicon Valley and the liberal transhumanist narrative.

SLIDE 10: The rest of this talk will be structured in the following way.

1. I will start with a rapid brush exploration of those two scenarii in turn and their binary

and divergent eschatologies.

2. Going beyond their striking differences and apparent opposition, I will show how they

do in fact belong to the same meta-narrative symbolically associated with the

mythological figure of Prometheus

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3. In order to overcome this binary reduction of our Future and our profound inability to

fathom an alternative, progressive and humanist Utopia, I will then take you again back

to mythology to explore this time the figure of Dionysus.

4. Finally, I will try to show how Dionysus helps us project an alternative – gives us tools

to move towards some degree of re-enchantment of our future in a manner that is

radically different from the dreadful Enchanted Kingdom of the Transhumanist

Singularity !

1. SLIDE 11: THE (NEW) GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHT SLIDE 12: The “Garden of Earthly Delights” is the title of a Tryptich painting by the Dutch

Master Hyeronimus Bosch. Art historians know little about what Bosch had really in mind

when he painted that Tryptich, somewhere between 1490 and 1510. So we are relatively free

to use the symbolism of that painting in the way we want, and I will do so, diverting it in a

somewhat cavalier way to bring along my own points. If there are any purist art historians in

the room, I beg for forgiveness….

SLIDE 13: Let us start with the central Panel as a symbolic representation of our Humanity on

Earth today – what do we see? Enjoyment through consumption all around, a chaotic

aggregation of individual or group monads with no links, no connections, no engagement to

each other, a sense of mess, a disappearing nature and environment – totally overwhelmed,

swallowed in fact by this mindless Anthropocene, and no visible sign of a capacity to mobilize,

to harmonize, to pacify this Earthly Garden of Delights which is in fact in the process of turning

to Hell… And the question, on all our minds (weirdly not on theirs it seems), is …. WHAT

HAPPENS NEXT.

• SLIDE 14: The Scenario of Doom

The first possible scenario is illustrated on the right hand side Panel…. The Scenario of Doom,

when you cannot anymore mistake Hell for Heaven.

SLIDE 14b: But even more powerfully may be, we can also follow that scenario in the external

panels. We generally do not know about those panels or we forget them. In principle they

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represent Earth at the creation, before the introduction of life, with God being this tiny and

nevertheless overpowering figure at the upper left.

SLIDE 14c: But I propose to also see it as a representation of the doomest of all doom scenarios

– Earth at the end of human life, symbolically re-enclosing itself, forging a protective shield

that excludes us, leaves us, Humanity, forever outside.

Today, there are many variants of this scenario, suggesting that doom could befall us from

different directions. Our environment and its rapid degradation is one of those threats.

SLIDE 15: The notion of the Anthropocene makes it plain, suggesting that we have entered an

era where Humanity’s impact on earth, the environment and other living species has become

highly significant and increasingly negative and destructive. Industrial production,

transportation, technological density, demographic trends, our consumer society and high-

energy and waste-generating ways of life all combine to bring about a major climate

disruption and threaten the quality, resilience and survival of those natural resources and

living beings that condition our own existence as a species.

SLIDE 16: The latest IPCC Report – Global Warming of 1.5° - is gloomy, not least because the

‘slightly more optimist scenario’ of capping global warming at 1.5° is quite unlikely as it

demands that in 2030 we would have reduced CO2 emissions globally by 45% from 2010

levels.3 Not clear how this could happen… Biodiversity in the meantime, is going steeply down.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

published a report a few weeks ago to alert on the speed at which species are disappearing –

one in eight species on our planet is under threat of extinction according to that report.4

SLIDE 17: Climate change deniers reply that those transformations have little to do with

human action, and/or that we will find technological solutions anyway as for example through

climate engineering, Frankenstein type large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system

to counter climate change…, or even that we will adapt as a species through the laws of

evolution. Still, evidence piles up and the voices of Doom become more convincing and more

urgent. Weirdly enough, this urgency does not trigger action – at least not of the kind that

3 https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/07/sr15_headline_statements.pdf, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/summary-for-policy-makers/ 4 https://www.ipbes.net/news/ipbes-global-assessment-summary-policymakers-pdf

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would be needed. In France, we have a name for the Scenario of Doom – Collapsology. And

the French Guru of Collapsology, Pablo Servigne, who looks too much like Jesus Christ for

comfort describes this current predicament in a striking way :

SLIDE 18: “In the Universe of a turkey farm, all is well in the best of all worlds. The

turkeys get regularly fed, it is warm. Turkeys live in a world of growth and plenty …

Until the day before Christmas (or I guess Thanksgiving depending on which side of the

Atlantic you sit on…)”

But doom could also take different paths. The option of a nuclear war, as Elon Musk dreads,

can certainly not be excluded. The populist and authoritarian wave that transforms world

politics and the irrationality of a number of those leaders are fertile grounds for such a

possibility. Doom could also come through a major financial and economic collapse; experts

are regularly warning of another crisis with dramatic consequences.5 Last but not least, social

and moral disintegration could lead us all the way to the collapse of human civilization. Two

main trends deserve to be mentioned. First, exacerbated inequalities and the drastic and

structural dislocations they bring along – with ultimately the emergence and the extension on

an unprecedented scale of a new kind of Lumpenproletariat, what Yuval Harari calls the

“useless” class (Harari 2019).

SLIDE 19: Even large numbers of bankers, lawyers and auditors, are becoming useless in a

world where artificial intelligence is the new frontier. An expanding “useless class” with strong

expectations and no future is a powder keg. Second, the anomie that stems from social

isolation, loneliness and moral dissolution all symptomatic of a system defined by individual

greed, utility maximization and consumption. Remember the programmatic statement of

Margaret Thatcher in 1987 – “there is no society, only individuals” – it has become all but an

accurate description of our contemporary world. The crisis of the Gilets Jaunes in France with

contagion across Europe is highly revealing of the social fragilities of our societies. And the

fear of social explosion in a country like the United States is one of the factors explaining the

amazing boom in the industry of luxury bunkers: demand has grown more than 700% in 3

years. That’s where you want to invest!

5 https://foreignpolicy.com/gt-essay/is-the-world-prepared-for-the-next-financial-crisis-christine-lagarde-economy-recession/

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While the scenario of doom could thus take many forms, let me finish here on an even more

depressing conclusion – this is not an either or story. The scenario of doom is likely to be one

that combines many if not all those factors. We are facing a complex, wicked predicament –a

falling domino is likely to impact the others immediately triggering a chain reaction. Forget

our big data and unprecedented computing and so-called predictive capacities, we have no

means of predicting either the chances of that happening and/or the nature and extent of its

consequences for our species and civilization. We are well beyond measure, risk assessment

and prevision here – we are in the realm of utter uncertainty as Frank Knight was already

defining it in the 1920s.

• SLIDE 20: The Scenario of God

So doom is a possible, likely may be, but unpredictable and fathomless Future for us. The other

side of our contemporary binary mindset is the scenario of God. The scenario of God is heir to

an old intellectual tradition. In his book, Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea,

David Livingstone traces the genealogy back to magicians and alchemists, with the

enlightenment being an important turning point. The Scenario of God was then reformulated

and moved from obscurity to light, from marginality to centrality if not dominance, from

dangerous eccentricity if not heresy to the Age of Reason. The illuminati turned, as if through

a magical wand, into the Enlightened.

In 1784, Kant famously proposed that the Enlightenment is

SLIDE 21: Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage being man’s inability

to make use of his understanding without direction from another… Dare to Know!.

‘Have the courage to use your own reason’. That is the motto, Kant tells us, of the

Enlightenment.6

Tutelage can be of many different kinds – Fathers, Kings, Priests, Professors… But the ultimate

tutelage is to God. Our reason, according to Enlightenment thinkers, is a divine spark,

expressing our godly nature. Daring to know, to use our reason, hence means that we should

6 http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/idehist-enlighten-kant02.htm

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affirm that God is us, that we are God. Armed with our reason and its derivatives – Knowledge,

Science and Technology – we can dare, understand, muster and obtain everything. In the

process we become masters of other species, of earth and its resources, of our own destinies.

Well, with a striking limit, that of the Great Mystery – our own deep-seated nature as aging,

degenerating and dying beings.

In 2003, Nick Bostrom, the leader of the European branch of the World Transhumanist

Association, defined Transhumanism as

SLIDE 22: The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and

desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason,

especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging

and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical and psychological capacities.7

SLIDE 23: The Singularity University, which can be seen as one of the cathedrals of

contemporary Transhumanism, defines itself as a “global learning and innovation community

using exponential and accelerating technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges and

build a better future for all”.8

The filiation is unmistakable. Contemporary transhumanism inscribes itself in direct continuity

with the Enlightenment. Reason, Science, Technology and Progress frame its life philosophy.

But transhumanism is Enlightenment on steroids as it takes a radical step, crossing some of

the most troubling if not taboo frontiers – space as we saw above but even more disturbingly,

human nature itself. Quoting Max More another well-known priest of that community:

SLIDE 24: Transhumanism goes well beyond Enlightenment Humanism in both means

and ends. Humanism tends to rely exclusively on educational and cultural refinement

to improve human nature whereas Transhumanists want to apply technology to

overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage. Transhumanists

7 https://nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf 8 https://su.org/about/

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regard human nature not as an end in itself, not as perfect and not as having any claim

on our allegiance. Rather it is just one point along an evolutionary pathway…. By

thoughtfully, carefully, and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves, we can

become something no longer accurately described as human – we can become

posthuman (More 2013: 4).

It is in that ideological context that Google, Ray Kurzweil, Max More and many others’ efforts

to “solve” the “aging” and “death” problems need to be understood.

SLIDE 25: For Ray Kurzweil, co-founder and Chancellor of the Singularity University and

Director of Engineering at Google, death is a tragedy, a “Great Robber” of ties, knowledge,

opportunities. And at a large meeting of the Singularity University in 2012, Laura Deming, a

young entrepreneur, one of Peter Thiel’s Fellows, who invests in life extension technologies

electrified the room when she boldly asserted:

SLIDE 26: We have somehow come to view (death) as something normal, natural, and

beautiful… to be celebrated… At least outside this room that seems to be the

consensus… If we succeed, we will have turned the most awful paradigm that we know

on its head. The inevitability of death.9

Transhumanists are not the first to promise eternity. Many religions do so. Immortality and

the end of death has also been the ultimate quest of magicians and alchemists.

SLIDE 27: The Lapis Philosophorum or Philosopher’s Stone was a legendary substance that

supposedly would turn anything into gold but would also be an elixir of immortality. Medieval

alchemists spent their life trying to discover it … to no avail.

SLIDE 28: So is Ray Kurzweil the Nicolas Flamel of our times, the alchemist that JK Rowling

used as a model for her Harry Potter series ?

There are some major differences between the alchemists of yore and the Transhumanists of

today – money, power, the inscription not against Science but within Science, legitimacy and

centrality all on the side of Transhumanism. In medieval times, alchemists and sorcerers would

9 https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/22/3535518/singularity-rapture-of-the-nerds-gods-end-human-race

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be burnt at the stake for heresy. Today’s community of transhumanists happens to overlap

largely with the contemporary version of C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite. They have the financial

means, the power and the legitimacy to invest billions into this modern version of the quest

for the Philosopher’s Stone. What is striking to me is how rarely we are making this parallel

between alchemists and transhumanists. And how seriously they – and often we – are taking

this contemporary version of an eternal human fantasy, immortality. They themselves are

convinced that they will in the end be able to kill Death – and we are wondering deep inside

whether they might not manage to do so in the end….

Reason, Science, Technology and Progress frame the life philosophy of Transhumanism. They

also shape the promise of a paradoxical imagined future: if we see the inscription in the cycle

of life and death as a defining feature of what being human is all about, then the

transhumanist quest for progress ultimately implies the end of Humanity. Injected into this

imagined future, we also find the strong influence of an extreme form of libertarianism – with

here again some quirky paradoxes. There are clear elective affinities between the project of

breaking through all scientific and human frontiers and boundaries – including the most taboo

– and being as free as possible from any kind of intervention, in particular that of a State, likely

to create obstacles and to slow down the process.

SLIDE 29: In 1789, a key figure of early Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, wrote that “in this

world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Well, the imagined future of

Silicon Valley Transhumanists is a world without death or taxes!

A Spencerian social Darwinian thread finally inscribes itself as a complement to enlightenment

on steroids and libertarianism.

SLIDE 30: You find this thread in Enlightenment Now, a 2018 book by Steven Pinker that has

become bedtable reading in the Silicon Valley and beyond. Pinker, Professor of Psychology at

Harvard University has significantly contributed to the polishing, smoothing out and hence

renewal and mainstreamization of sociobiology. The Carnegies and other Robber Barons of

yesterday loved Herbert Spencer’s notion that economic success was the mark of evolutionary

superiority and should therefore be left free rein. Our contemporary semi-Gods like the

modern version of that survival of the fittest idea just as much – an idea expressed in Pinker’s

books and even more outrageously in Charles Murray’s and co-authors’ production. Ever since

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1994 with the book The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray have been arguing that inequalities

are natural since they reflect objective and innate IQ differences.

SLIDE 31: Let us just mention that those authors are connected to – and are being rewarded

in different ways by – the dense ecology of neoliberal think tanks that has imposed its role as

an architecture for influence across the world (Salles-Djelic and Mousavi 2020).

Again, we are talking here of social Darwinism on steroids – associated with a new and

radically powerful eugenic project. In a libertarian, uninhibitedly inegalitarian world,

technology will become a tool to enhance certain individuals and not others through, for

example genetic manipulation.

SLIDE 32: I argue here that this close interplay between technological utopianism,

libertarianism and social Darwinism all on steroids is the perfect ground for new forms of

authoritarianism – those that combine strong anti-democratic tendencies, ploutocratic elitism

and free market rhetorics to justify private monopolies. If your vision of the world is that

wealth reveals innate superiority and the capacity, through technology and its mastery, to

bring along progress, then you naturally come to believe that democratic processes are

illegitimate hurdles and obstacles, ultimately slowing down if not hampering this virtuous

movement. And the kind of Progress we are talking about again is a Spencerian one.

SLIDE 32: Quoting Steven Pinker, “Progress is not magic. Progress is not perfection. Progress

is not a miracle. It doesn't mean that everyone is maximally happy. It doesn't mean that

everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time and always.”10 As a matter of

fact, Progress of that kind could imply that things get much worse for a large majority of

people – that might even be the price to pay for Progress, that might even be very good and

necessary in evolutionary terms. Peter Thiel’s endorsement of Donald Trump does not appear

to be so much of an anomaly in that context. It is worth here quoting an extract from his 2009

text, Education of a Libertarian:

SLIDE 34: I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human

freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes,

totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every

individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.” But I must confess that

10 https://www.wuwm.com/post/steven-pinker-can-numbers-show-us-progress-inevitable#stream/0

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over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve

these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are

compatible.11

And that logic is not a new one. In 1976 already, as he was then busy advising Pinochet’s

government in Chile, Friedrich von Hayek was already claiming that “in modern times there

have of course been many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal

liberty was safer than under democracy”.12

Hence the Singularity projection, the dominant (if not the only) Utopia of our times is a very

coherent mix with, however, a Frankenstein effect. The Enlightenment was in theory a

liberating project for the benefit of Humanity. Enlightenment 3.0 – this mix of technological

solutionism, libertarianism and social Darwinism all on steroids – logically implies in fact both

the end of Humanity and the emergence of modern authoritarianism with a double edge,

anti-democratic and neoliberal. This Future and its Frankenstein or Black Mirror effect is not

a mere Utopia. It is, as we say in France, already en marche, and very much so!

2. SLIDE 35: PROMETHEUS 3.0

The scenario of Doom and the scenario of God hence appear at first sight to be in radical

opposition to each other. I suggest that, in reality, they belong to the same meta-narrative, a

meta-narrative which I symbolically associate with the mythological figure of Prometheus.

Prometheus was a Titan, the race of Gods that preceded the Olympians. Prometheus in Greek

means “forethought” and Prometheus had a brother, Epimetheus, whose name means

“afterthought”.

SLIDE 36: The two brothers were charged by the Olympians to share attributes between living

creatures. Epimetheus, with his characteristic impulsivity and limited foresight, bestowed

strength and swiftness to some, dangerous claws and fur to others. But when time came to

provide humans with attributes, nothing was left. Prometheus had to intervene. He stole fire

11 https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian 12 Hayek (1976). Law, Legislation and Liberty.

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from Zeus to bring it to Humanity to ensure not only its survival but in fact also its control and

dominance over nature and other species.

The symbol is clear. Prometheus is the agent through which we, human beings, are endowed

with a divine spark and some degree of godliness. Fire is a symbol for reason, our divine spark

– the attribute that connects us to God, makes us an-thropos in the etymological sense of the

term, those who turn, look upwards (hence towards the gods). The step from “being

connected to”, “looking towards God”, to feeling a sense of godliness is not a major one. Fire

is also a symbol for the derivatives of this divine spark – technology, knowledge and science

as tools that allow us to improve our lot, to thread a path to Progress.

SLIDE 37: A painting from 1907 by Jean Delville shows Prometheus in action, I would say in

majesty and potency. Prometheus triumphant carrying the torch of Progress on behalf and for

Humanity, away from obscurity and towards the promise of a better, more luminous future.

You will note the muscularity, the hypertrophied masculinity of this Prometheus triumphant

– who is both himself and the symbolic representation of a godly man on his way to Progress.

The transhumanist turn calls upon us to accept this side of our nature – the better among us

are and should become even more triumphant avatars of Prometheus using for that all forms

of enhancements made possible by technology. Needless to say that the Tech and

transhumanist barons are by self-definition amongst this group of super humans called upon

to push even further this symbiosis with divinity up to the ultimate point of immortality. They

are the avant garde of:

SLIDE 38: a generation of top performers (that) are seeking to shift their state of mind as a

way of unlocking their true potential, using altered states to radically accelerate performance

and massively improve their lives

SLIDE 39: This book and a few others tell us about the emergence a generation of Prometheus

3.0, Prometheus on steroids…

But there is another side to the story of Prometheus. For what he has done, stealing fire from

God and giving it to Humanity, Prometheus gets punished. Zeus is outraged by this act of

defiance, of hubris.

SLIDE 40: So Prometheus will be chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains, in eternal

punishment. Everyday an eagle eats his liver and because Prometheus is eternal, his liver gets

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regenerated every night, only to be eaten up the next day. Every day the sun is scorching him,

every night the cold is freezing him. Prometheus bound and chained is a warning – there is a

price to pay for hubris, for man pretending to be what he is not and cannot be, God. And the

price is an hefty one. The scenario of God leads, in Greek mythology just like today it seems,

to the scenario of Doom, directly, naturally, without surprise. The nature of the punishment

reflects and reveals the nature of the offence.

SLIDE 41: Where a triumphant Prometheus walks fast and confidently, Prometheus bound is

condemned to utter, complete immobility. Where triumphant Prometheus projects himself

towards an infinite linear progress, Prometheus bound is condemned to the circularity of

eternal suffering. Where triumphant Prometheus affirms himself as being in total control – of

nature and of other species in particular – Prometheus bound is subjected to the complete

control of nature (the sun, the cold, the barren rock) and of other species (symbolically

represented here by the Eagle).

It is interesting to push that image further, closer to our contemporary predicament. A

Prometheus humanity will end up being scorched by a violent sun – that’s indeed what climate

change is promising us. We will be chained and doomed on a barren rock – here again an apt

image for earth being depleted at a fast rate of its biodiversity. Where triumphant Prometheus

is muscular, strong, masculine, Prometheus bound is weak, moaning, emasculated. Where

Prometheus triumphant affirms and craves immortality, Prometheus bound suffers precisely

because and through this immortality. In one of his beautiful science fiction books, Le Grand

Secret, translated in English as The Immortals, the French author René Barjavel brilliantly

captures the dramatic predicament of immortality.

SLIDE 42: “Life without death makes life impossible”, Barjavel tells us. Because life without

death “will multiply, blossom explode… and will invade and devastate everything”…. “The

virus of immortality increases without any measure the time of all lives but reduces space to

an hollowed rock”…. The rock of eternal punishment for a modern Prometheus.

So the scenario of God needs to end in a Scenario of Doom. And the two are not in

contradiction but in a dialectical relationship. The myth of Prometheus, at least as told in the

text of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, even suggests a synthesis to this dialectical relationship.

Prometheus after a very long period of time will be delivered by Hercules, another semi-god.

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We don’t really know what happens then to Prometheus except that he will have to carry

forever the shackles reminding him of his hubris and of the price he had to pay for it.

Can we extend this optimism to our own fate, the fate of Humanity ? Arguably, the idea that

we will at some point come back from our Mars Colony (or from wherever) to reinvest earth

and reinject the seeds of human civilization is a parallel scenario. Our Space Barons do believe

that even though we might have to go through a doom scenario, Humanity as Prometheus 3.0

will in the end be delivered and come back in full triumph. There is not even mention, in this

modern mythology, of the shackles on our wrists and of the duty of memory they symbolize.

3. SLIDE 43: DIONYSUS – THE DISRUPTER

But this ultimate happy ending is extremely uncertain. And even if we are ready to believe in

it then we also need to believe in the destructive scenario of doom that logically has to

precede it. Is there no alternative? Do we necessarily have to run the full course of our

Promethean hubris – which dialectically will bring about a scenario of doom and imply, at best,

a long period of confinement to the rock of our punishment before we might rise again from

the ashes like a human Phoenix? Or can we still branch off into a radically different direction?

The rest of my talk will be a plea for us to envision such an alternative. And to make my case,

I will turn again to mythology, to explore this time the figure of Dionysus – the disrupter, the

crazy God, the one we rarely take seriously.

In many ways, Dionysus is a mysterious God, including with respect to his origins. He is

sometimes described as a foreign God, coming from Asia and imposing his “foreign logic” into

the Greek Pantheon. But that simple story does not hold. Dionysus was born from a passionate

love story between Zeus and the human Princess Sémélé. So, like Prometheus he is a semi-

God.

SLIDE 44: Sémélé dies while still pregnant as she has asked her divine lover the impossible –

to show himself in his godly form and omnipotence. Zeus saves the fetus and to protect it

from the anger of his jealous wife, Hera, he hides it in his own thigh.

SLIDE 45: Hence, Dionysus is born twice. First, from a human mother who dies from hubris –

wanting to see divine power, which as a human she was not allowed to see. Second, he is

born from the thigh of Zeus – he is the only one we can really use that expression for. After

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this second birth, Dionysus is sent to Asia to protect him from the jealousy of Hera. When he

comes to Greece later on, it is therefore a home-coming, a return. Dionysus hence is not a

“foreign God” and what he represents and the message he carries should be seen as

endogenous and indigenous to the Greek tradition; even though this undeniably confronts our

glossy and glorious representation of an Apollonian-Promethean civilization.

SLIDE 46: When Greek sculpture epitomizes surreal and oniric beauty, the Dionysian tragedy

inscribes gorgonic truth, the one we should not look into the eye, at the core of Greek art.

Against the linearity of an Apollonian-Promethean world, Dionysus stands for eternal return

and cyclicality. Against the immortality of the Olympian god, Dionysus epitomizes the

necessary cycle of life and death – he dies every year to be reborn. Against Anthropos, that

being who is looking upwards to the Gods, Dionysus reminds us that we are humans – coming

from and returning to earth (humus). Against the rational projection of an Apollonian-

Promethean world, Dionysus values the creative energy of irrationality, of raw emotions, of

craziness, of inebriation and euphoria, intoxication and exhilaration – understood here in their

symbolic sense. Against the Apollonian-Promethean sense of a “chosen species”, of Anthropos

being superior and legitimately in control, Dionysus imposes our inscription within and tight

interdependence with what we call today a complex biotope. Against the male element,

Dionysus brings forward the female. Against order and the stability of social structure and

inequalities, Dionysus imposes regular episodes of disorder and carnival-type social inversion.

Against culture and civilization, Dionysus claims the vital role of our savage nature – the raw

against the cooked, sex against marriage. Against prediction, plan and homogeneity, Dionysus

carries curiosity, differences, the unexpected, the unplanned – which are in fact conditions of

our freedom. Against the dimension of time, Dionysus is the God of space, the God who

bridges multiples spaces – life and death are in that sense spaces that Dionysus connects.

Against the individual, Dionysus affirms the collective, the social, a collective that is

inseparable from nature and a broad ecological system.

What is important to understand and remember is that Dionysus had its full place and role in

the Greek Pantheon and in Greek culture. Dionysus, Maria Daraki tells us “owns the ancient,

the savage soul of Greece”. Between the “logic of the Logos” she goes on and the logic of

Dionysus there have been confrontations but then also negotiation and hybridization; these

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two worldviews, civilizations, or “forms of intelligence” as she calls them came to converse

with each other and to affirm themselves by and through their radical difference:

SLIDE 47: The “Greek Logos” has not only fought against the old cyclical worldview. It

has also allowed it a space for its own contradiction….It is precisely because of this

hybridization that the Greek culture was what it was. If Greece had only allowed for a

Logos mindset it would have been a horrendous, Manichean universe…. If it was

otherwise, this was precisely thanks to the fusion between two logical modes – one

linear and exclusive that conforms to the needs of the polity and one revealing a savage

Greece that was thinking of the world in circles and had developed another logic,

circular and inclusive… It is thanks to this combination of line and circle that Greece

has affirmed its specific culture – with its constant refusal of closure. Dionysus imposes

alterity at the heart of Greek culture (Daraki, 1985: 230).

SLIDE 48: In The Power of Myths, in 1988, Joseph Campbell comments – and laments – the

fact that our civilization has broken this compromise, this dialectical balance.:

Modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea of nature as a divinity because it

would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature. How can you cut down

trees and uproot the land and turn the rivers into real estate without killing God? …

But if you think of yourself as coming out of the earth (remember Humus, humans…)

rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the

Earth, we are the consciousness of the Earth. We are GAIA’s principle (Campbell and

Moyers, 1988: 32).

Campbell then mobilizes an interesting anecdote. In 1852, the US Federal Government

inquired from Chief Seattle, a Suquamish Chief, about buying the tribal lands for all those

immigrants arriving in the United States. His answer was very simple:

SLIDE 49: The President of the US sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how

can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the

freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water how can we buy them? .. Will you

teach your children what we have taught our children? That the Earth is our mother?

This we know: the earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the Earth.

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A Dionysian logic, undoubtedly! What do we learn from this exploration of Dionysus and of a

Dionysian mindset? We learn that Dionysus is not the crazy and drunk disrupter that we

generally associate with Bacchus. Or if he is, he is so in a positive and necessary way – in a

manner that ensures balance and resilience, that sets limits to the hubris of Logos and its

dramatic consequences, that ridicules it in a healthy way. We learn that Humanity has known

the importance of this balance for its own resilience and survival for a very long time. And that

we,

SLIDE 50: “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity that imagines it

has attained a level of civilization never before achieved”, to use the words of Max Weber,

have forgotten it or have been pretending that we could exempt ourselves from it.

4. SLIDE 51: RE-ENCHANTING OUR FUTURE – A MANIFESTO FOR INCLUSIVE AND

SUSTAINABLE PROSPERITY

So we need to bring back the spirit of Dionysus at the heart of our Pantheon. For that, I will

argue now, we have to reinvest our world through a completely reinvented “software” that

has to be embodied and crystallized within our institutional and organizational systems. My

proposition will be articulated in three main points:

SLIDE 52:

1) The “new software”, the vision for a progressive Future is already quite clear and

discernible. We need to collaborate and combine our efforts to bring it to the fore in

a more explicit manner.

2) The project of then imposing this progressive software is ambitious but not

impossible if we see it as a collective institutional and cultural change project.

3) Concretely this implies that social scientists need to accept their activist role and

have to coordinate their actions . We cannot simply keep reading the world and

lamenting its state, we have to take an active part in changing it. This is more than

urgent, it is an imperative!

SLIDE 53:

1) The New Software

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In 2014, Marc Fleurbaey, Professor at Princeton, approached a few of us to launch the

International Panel for Social Progress. The creation of the IPSP was motivated by the lack of

collective effort, in public debates around the world, to define the direction that the social

contract should take in this crucial period. A bottom-up initiative mobilizing close to 300

scholars from around the world, the IPSP published its Report – Rethinking Societies for the

21st Century – in the Fall of 2018 and a small subset from the Steering Committee wrote a

short Manifesto for Social Progress that is now being translated in different languages.

SLIDE 54: Contributors to the IPSP question if not reject the old-fashioned linear Promethean

view of Progress but we nevertheless decided to save the notion and appropriate it through

its profound reinvention. We decided to claim the “Progress” banner because we wanted to

assert clearly that when studying the long term evolution of societies, it is worthwhile and

important to be guided by normative principles, by a progressive and still realist Utopia, to

use the words of Rutger Bregman. And we felt that the notion of Progress had been captured

in an unacceptable way and unduly twisted away from its “progressive” meaning. So, we

wanted to claim and re-appropriate it. By the way, these kinds of conceptual shifts can be

found all around – liberalism, democracy, market, competition are all words that have a

progressive potential but have today mostly been corrupted.

Progress as we understand it is about a better life for Humanity – which naturally implies as I

argued above, in a Dionysian logic, a profound respect for Humus, the Earth, the planet to

which we “belong” and on which our welfare as well as that of other species entirely depend.

SLIDE 55: Hence, there is no or rather there should not be any Progress that is not Social,

Human and Environmental. But there can be, if we mobilize our Logos under the tight control

of this Dionysian principle, a real Progress in that sense because our Logos allows us indeed

to develop and deploy amazing tools, which if framed in a proper way, can indeed serve this

Progress objective.

SLIDE 56: Concretely, what this re-orientation of Progress amounts to is a process of trans-

valuation. Dionysus’s arrival into our Pantheon completely disrupts our current hierarchy of

gods or rather brings it back where it should be. Our Promethean hubris has led us to the

strange predicament where we, humans, but also Nature and other species, have become

resources and variables of adjustment at the service of economic, financial and technological

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growth. And indeed, we talk about Natural and Human resources. Let us start by banning

those words from our vocabularies – you’ll see that this is not a small feat indeed and could

be just in and of itself highly performative. Dionysus tells us instead that technology and the

eco-nomy (which by the way has the same roots as eco-logy, managing our house, oikos)

should be at the service of our deep Humanity which coincides with the well-being of Oikos,

our natural house.

SLIDE 57: So we do know what a progressive Utopia should be – a world that would orient and

mobilize our massive capacities towards human flourishing and dignity in full respect of

environmental cycles of regeneration. What this implies is to modify our compass – from

growth to prosperity (a prosperity that can only be sustainable and inclusive), from exclusion

to inclusion, from competition to collaboration, from individualism and loneliness to

empowering collectives, from waste to recycling, from having to being, from consumption to

life, from destroying nature to nurturing its regeneration, from a monetary to a well-being

definition of value, from a financial to positive impact definition of success. The recipe is clear

– and it is a recipe with a heavy dose of Dionysian ingredients. This recipe is proposed across

the board by a multiplicity of actors – the progressive Utopia we lay out in the Manifesto is in

that sense not very original.

SLIDE 58:

2) How do we impose it?

The project of then imposing this progressive utopia is ambitious but not impossible if we see

this as a collective institutional change project. There is a need for coordination and for the

formalization of this Utopia into a realist alternative software – which implies a profound

redefinition of all dimensions of our compass.

SLIDE 59: The SDGs is a good start at the global level – pointing to a broad definition of

Prosperity for Humanity at large.

SLIDE 60: Then, we need to finally take the turn that has been discussed for too long of getting

rid of GDP as our national compass and replacing it by multi-dimensional progress indexes.

We know about the Gross National Happiness index of the Bhutan, this small country between

India and China. We know less that in 2011, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution :

“Happiness: towards a holistic approach to Development”, urging member nations to follow

21

the example of Bhutan and measure happiness and well-being. The Commission on the

Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, with Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen

and Jean-Paul Fitoussi rendered its report in 2009 to then French President Sarkozy. The

objective was to propose an alternative compass to GDP that would be better at nudging

countries towards social progress. Nothing much happened since. The OCDE took the project

over and published last fall the results of the Commission Stiglitz 2 – Beyond GDP: Measuring

what Counts for Economic and Social Performance. We are still waiting… New Zealand just

implemented a well-being budget. The tools are ready. Why don’t we move?

SLIDE 61: Work also needs to be done at the level of companies. And here again work has

started and we should now radically accelerate it. The equivalent to beyond GDP at that level

is “beyond shareholder value maximization”. We need to finally bring down the artificial and

destructive power of the shareholder ideology that has been carried and institutionalized very

successfully since the 1970s by a well-coordinated coalition of actors – intellectuals, think

tanks, corporations and managers, business schools, mainstream economics departments,

international organizations etc… And we need to impose in its stead a multi-dimensional

compass that will integrate, internalize the price of externalities (both environmental and

social) – which will nudge companies towards their absolute reduction if they want to be able

to still make profits. Here again this is complex but not impossible. We need to create and

strengthen our coalition of the willing and to exert the right kinds of pressures at the right

places of institutional leverage.

SLIDE 62: Finally, we also need to redefine the compass of individual success. And that should

start at the very beginning, in families and kindergardens and be followed through at all stages

of our education systems. What is success, what is a successful life? How do we define and

measure it? Over the past forty years an uninhibited culture of greed has made the answer to

that question quite simple. Success is measured in dollars (or Euros). And the more dollars,

the more success. This kind of definition of success at the individual level is a potent

mechanism to wealth accumulation on an unprecedented scale and drives the current trend

towards crazy and unacceptable degrees of inequality. Let us start by institutionalizing a

redefinition of what success is, of what individual value creation is all about – making it a more

22

collective, purposeful and positively impactful one. In reality the generation of our children

are and will be striving for that. Let us help them institutionalize such a powerful reorientation.

SLIDE 63:

3) Academic Activism

I would like to end with a reflexive note on what that implies, on what in a sense it imposes

on us individually and collectively. We need to find our path back towards activism. Naturally,

we have the role and responsibility to critically describe the dynamics of the world in which

we live. And I would even add that we, collectively, are pretty good at that. When we bring

our minds together, across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, as we did with the

International Panel for Social Progress, we Social Scientists have indeed a deep understanding

of the dynamics of our contemporary world. But that is not enough anymore. In his Riverside

Church Speech of April 1967, one year before he died, Martin Luther talked about the

“Urgency of Now”. Here is what he said:

SLIDE 64: We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted

with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there

“is” such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a

time for vigorous and positive action.

Those words are possibly even more true today. In fact urgency has turned into imperative.

We need to go beyond critical descriptions towards outlining new realist and progressive

utopias. But we need also to organize collectively to do our part in the necessary process of

institutional transformation that should bring about a better balance between Promethean

and Dionysian logics. As a collective, we study the dynamics of institutional transformation.

We know about the power of ideas when it combines with organizational architectures for

diffusion and institutionalization. We have seen how this combination has brought about, has

performed the neoliberal economic, political and social world in which we live today. We

should divert the mechanisms and processes that were used to construct our current iron cage

to weaken it on the one hand and to propose on the other hand an alternative that will be

more conducive to human well-being and happiness. This is certainly not an easy task – but

we can surf on the energy wave carried by the young generations. We have a responsibility to

try at least. I cannot see how we can escape it!

THANK YOU!

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