is fragile. Martha Nussbaum, in her study of Plato, Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, stresses this fragility.
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Greek thinkers relentlessly explored the vulnerability of the good human life to fortune – the extent to
which our power of being is threatened and altered by conditions that are at best only partly under our
control.
We are always subject to destruction. Human life may be accidental, or it may be planned, but it is
contingent. We are not a necessary part of being. Humans can be destroyed by an asteroid or we can
destroy ourselves with weapons of mass destruction. Because of our powers of natality, we can transform
ourselves beyond recognition. Genetic research alone insures this exhilarating and frightening capacity.
Hannah Arendt captures the uncanny power of humans to remake themselves in her comments on space
exploration and other technological advances.
The future of man whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a
hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has
been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange,
as it were, for something he made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to
accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to
destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new
scientific knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific
means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the
decision of professional scientist or professional politicians.
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Arendt is correct that these questions are political in every sense of the word. They are also anti-political.
Politics seeks to order our lives through visions of right order. For the kind of technocratic politics Arendt
responds to, the best response may be a politics of resistance and transgression.
The aim is to fight the various manifestations of power, including Foucaultian anti-humanism, that
discount humanity. And the aim is to make humanity an oasis of ordered disorder in a desert of dry
political ordering. Jacque Ellul captures what is stake quite well. If we succumb to the technicians’ dream
of a perfectly ordered polity organized like a well-oiled machine:
The future is clear enough under such conditions. The political illusion, which is
transitory in nature, will dissolve into ashes, and what will be left will be an organization
of objects run by objects.
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That is a future worth resisting.
120
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
121
Arendt, The Human Condition, 2-3.
122
Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, (New York: Vintage, 1972), 238; The Technological Society (New
York: Knopf, 1964).
Convention