“O deplorable earth !” cried Voltaire after the earthquake that devastated Lisbon’s city on All Saints’ Day in 1755. “Elements, animals, humans, everything is at war. It must be admitted, evil is on earth“.
What attitude should enlightened men adopt, then, if not to set about the task of transforming the world in order to introduce into it the good of which, it was totally lacking ?
German philosopher Robert Spaemann summaries : “The ever-increasing control of nature, the struggle against nature, has been the guiding idea in Europe for the last three centuries. As Mother Nature proved to be a bad mother, it was to Mother Technology that humans turned for help and security. Technological system, of which mobile phone is the contemporary symbol and more particularly the “SELFIE” today, has come to play, for each of us, a comparable role to that of the mother with her little child: nurturer, protector, dispenser of all good things… But if we were to begin to look at ourselves and not only through the image of the “Selfie”, should we not learn again to be human and build a new world that links technology and life by putting a little bit our ego aside.