Since 1999, the City of Menton has been organizing the THINKING OUR TIME Colloquiums.
These colloquiums are centered around several public conferences-debates, held every Saturday in October (on the 2nd, 9th, 16th, and 23rd) at 2:30 PM at the Palais de l’Europe in Menton. They allow for an in-depth exploration of various current topics by addressing several themes: Meetings on Origins, Science and Conscience, The City of Men, and What Philosophy for Our Time?
Each conference-debate gathers an audience of 700 people who come to listen to the different speakers.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2010
MEETINGS ON ORIGINS: “ORIGINS OF MAN ACCORDING TO THE GREAT RELIGIONS”
Rémy BERGERET, O.P., Prior at the Dominican convent in Montpellier
Dalil BOUBAKEUR, Rector of the Muslim Institute of the Paris Mosque
Jean-François COLOSIMO, Professor at the Saint-Serge Institute of Theology, Director of the National Book Center
Roland POUPIN, Pastor of the French Reformed Church
Henry de LUMLEY, Prehistorian, Director of the Institute of Human Paleontology
Evelyne TEBEKA, Journalist at Radio Chalom
The search for the mystery of origins is embedded in all the world’s cultures.
Astonished and intrigued by the beauty of nature, its complexity, the regular return of seasons, the infinite spaces, the starry sky, Humankind has always sought an explanation for the origin of everything existing and has wished to have a coherent vision of the Universe. Thus, all religions, in their stories and sacred books, have transmitted a narrative of the creation of the sky and Earth, plants and animals, and Man. Life, being, in their permanence and changes, have always sparked questions and attempts at explanations. But no sacred book is a work of natural sciences. It uses symbolic language to explain the why and not to scientifically describe the how. A Jew, a Catholic, an Orthodox, a Protestant, and a Muslim will successively present the symbolic narratives told by the sacred texts.
Moreover, the work of paleontologists and prehistorians allows for the reconstruction of the major stages of Humankind’s morphological and cultural evolution since the acquisition of the bipedal stance 7 million years ago: the invention of the tool and the appearance of articulated language 2.5 million years ago, the emergence of the sense of harmony about 1.5 million years ago with the first bifaces, the domestication of fire and the birth of cultural identities 400,000 years ago, the first rudiments of symbolic thought 300,000 years ago, the birth of metaphysical anxiety 100,000 years ago with the first burials, the explosion of symbolic thought 35,000 years ago with adornments, parietal and portable art, music, the first food-producing peoples, herders, and cultivators, in the seventh millennium BCE, and the invention of the first writings at the end of the fourth millennium allowing messages to be transmitted through space and time, with today’s Internet and multimedia.
So many great cultural leaps have punctuated the History of Humankind. Science answers the how but not the why.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010
SCIENCE AND CONSCIENCE: “SMILE, YOU ARE BEING WATCHED!”
Nicolas ARPAGIAN, Editor-in-chief of the journal Prospective Stratégique, Training Coordinator at the National Institute for Advanced Studies in Security and Justice (INHESJ)
Alex Türk, President of the CNIL (National Commission on Informatics and Liberties)
Henri OBERDORFF, Professor of Public Law, Editorial Board Member of the Revue du Droit Public
“Big Brother is watching you!” — this warning imagined by George Orwell in the novel 1984 — might it apply to our contemporary society? Identification and surveillance measures of individuals using increasingly sophisticated techniques are multiplying in our democracies.
In France, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberties (CNIL) has condemned the establishment of a “surveillance society.” The processes aimed at ensuring citizen security and combating terrorism provoke mixed reactions, torn between enthusiasm for technological advancements and concern over potential overreach.
What forms do these new control devices take today? The first field of action is surveillance in public spaces. The number of cameras in the streets shows the growth of video surveillance in France. Geolocation, with a mobile equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) or with an RFID chip (Radio Frequency Identification), is rapidly expanding. Finally, biometrics — the automated identification of an individual based on their physiological characteristics — heralds numerous applications. The second field concerns the increasing number of files used for health or security.
The 2010 LOPPSI 2 law (Guidance and Programming Law for Internal Security Performance) provides for the cross-referencing of various police files.
The STIC (System for Processing Recorded Offenses) or the EDVIGE file (Exploration and Development of General Information), abandoned in 2008, have successively been criticized.
Internet control is the third major issue: every user leaves traces unwittingly, and the Secretary of State for Prospective and Digital Economy Development wishes to guarantee a “right to digital oblivion.” But this raises the problem of internet governance at the global level and applicable law. What is the effectiveness of these devices in relation to citizen protection? What guarantees in our democracies can be provided to balance freedom and security? Are we experiencing the beginnings of a society where individuals would be perpetually monitored? A society that would challenge the respect for privacy and fundamental freedoms? What are the political, social, economic, legal, and philosophical stakes of identifying and monitoring people on an international scale? As Aldous Huxley anticipated, welcome to the “brave new world”?
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010
THE CITY OF MEN: “9 BILLION PEOPLE IN 2050, AND ME, AND ME, AND ME…”
Sylvie BRUNEL, Geographer, Economist, Professor at Paris IV – Sorbonne
Gérard-François DUMONT, Rector, Geographer, Demographer, Professor at Paris IV – Sorbonne, Institute of Geography, President of the Population & Future association
Jean-Hervé LORENZI, Member of the Council of Economic Analysis, Professor of Economics at the University Paris Dauphine, President of the Circle of Economists
Today we are 6.8 billion people sharing the Earth. In forty years, we will be much more: 9 billion in 2050, a median figure agreed upon by experts. The planet will have to house, feed, provide air, potable water, energy, space, and jobs for these inhabitants. Can it manage? Could it break?
According to the UN, “sustainable modes of consumption and production can only be achieved and maintained if the world population does not exceed an ecologically viable number.” The bulk of demographic growth is concentrated in the most disadvantaged regions, like Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Should births in these countries be reduced with a proactive birth control policy?
Can the Earth feed 9 billion people? The answer is yes today, as global agricultural production is largely surplus. Hunger is linked to a problem not of production but of resource distribution. Western countries have indeed far exceeded the daily caloric consumption threshold. Therefore, this consumption should be reduced to allow the other half of the globe to eat.
Where will we live in 2050? In 2008, the number of city dwellers surpassed for the first time the number of rural dwellers globally. It won’t be the current megacities absorbing these populations, but cities that are today of medium size that will explode, especially in Asia and America. Significant risks of destabilization are to be expected: riots, insecurity, food and health crises, multiplication of slums, emigration…
Demographic explosion will certainly impact ecological footprint. It would be responsible for climate change: according to the United Nations Population Fund, “braking demographic growth would contribute to reducing greenhouse gases.” If the 9 billion people expected in 2050 aspire to our Western lifestyle, will the planet be livable? Shouldn’t we adopt new behaviors? Isn’t the path of hyper-consumption proving to be a dead-end trajectory? What political problems will arise from the inequalities between populations? Finally, the last challenge posed by galloping demographics is population aging: by 2050, more numerous, and especially more aged?
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2010
WHAT PHILOSOPHY FOR OUR TIME?: “ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL MAN”
Jean DANIEL, Founder, Editorialist, Co-chair of the editorial committee of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur
Jean-Yves GUERIN, Professor, Director of the Ecole Doctorale of French and Comparative Literature at Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle
Jean-François MATTÉI, Philosopher, Emeritus Professor at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of Aix-en-Provence, member of the University Institute of France
Fifty years after his death on January 4, 1960, Albert Camus remains an exceptional figure in the French literary scene. Although the President of the Republic considered at the end of 2009 the transfer of the writer’s remains to the Panthéon, popular enthusiasm for the man and his work persists today. According to his daughter Catherine Camus, the writer “wanted to speak for those who have no voice or those who are oppressed.”
From the working-class neighborhoods of Algiers to the Nobel Prize in Literature received in 1957, Albert Camus developed in his work a humanist thought based on the awareness of the absurdity of the human condition. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human appeal and the unreasonable silence of the world” (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942): two forces oppose each other, the human appeal to know its reason for being and the absence of response from the world in which it finds itself. For Camus, the absurd should not be resolved. Suicide, a solution to silence this human appeal, is therefore excluded. The absurd generates energy. It is the starting point of the revolt: accepting the absurdity of what surrounds us as a necessary step, but not as a dead end. This provokes a revolt that can become fruitful.
Camus thus envisions revolt as a response to the absurd. If the absurd man deprives himself of eternal life — Camus refuting religions —
he gains in freedom of action. “What is a rebel man? A man who says no. But if he refuses, he does not give up: it is also a man who says yes, from his first movement.” (The Rebel, 1951): revolt is thus a movement, it leads to action and gives meaning to the world and existence. Camus justifies the writing of the rebel man: “I would not have written The Rebel if, in the 1940s, I had not faced men whose system I could not explain and whose actions I did not understand. To put it briefly, I could not understand how men could torture others without stopping to look at them.” What are the means of revolt? Camus sets a condition to the revolt of man: its own limit. His thought is humanist: revolt is not against everyone and everything; it extirpates man from solitude as it is collective, it is the “adventure of all.”
The rebel man is finally the search for moderation, a form of wisdom that Camus calls “the thought of noon.” This “thought of noon,” an image that comes to him from Nietzsche, is the sense of measure and respect for limits, in the name of this unalterable part of the human in man.
AROUND THE COLLOQUIUMS
Book space
Various publications by the speakers as well as reference works on the themes of the colloquiums will be available for sale during the conferences-debates.
The book stand will allow the public to meet the speakers directly, who will sign their works at the end of the debates.
A competition in middle and high schools
As every year, a competition for middle and high school students in Menton was organized by the City within the framework of the “Thinking Our Time” colloquiums.
The best essays will be awarded, and the top students in each category will travel to Paris for a visit to the National Assembly.
