In bacteria lies our spiritual salvation

News Mondays - Léa Farine

Two seemingly innocuous pieces of news caught my attention this week. According to the first, published on Monday on the RTS Info website, the WHO has identified «a list of 12 families of bacteria against which it considers it urgent to develop new antibiotics, due to the risks posed by their resistance to current treatments.» From the same source, we also learn, this time on Thursday, that «bacterial fossils nearly four billion years old», i.e. 300 million years older than those we already know, have been found in Quebec.

These discoveries don't change the world, not even scientifically. They are not hot topics. But they are nonetheless relevant, or should be, in that they enable us to take a holistic view of our environment as an ecosystem. We tend, and rightly so, to look at what's close to us, in space, in time, in form. We see what is easy to see. But bacteria are invisible. Yet, even as I write, they are alive and duplicating themselves, in my stomach, on my skin, on my computer keyboard, all around me.

They were present on earth even before the logical possibility of human existence. They will always be present, here or elsewhere, when the human species becomes extinct, an extinction that could be caused by one or other bacteriological epidemic. They are necessary to the overall balance of the world we inhabit, much more necessary than we are, in fact, for while most bacteria don't need other living organisms to survive, other living organisms do need them.

In bacteria lies our spiritual salvation. Modern man faces a complex metaphysical revolution. Traditional religions have totally failed to bring about a humanity that is both free and happy. Materialism too, almost even more insidiously, has led us to believe in the possibility of purely practical happiness. However, the state of our knowledge is so advanced that we now have the ability to apprehend the world as a global system, and to think of our own individuality and our individuality as a species within that system. In a way, we are no longer anything: neither the cherished creation of a superior god, nor an animal so separate from the others that it can indefinitely multiply and exhaust the resources at its disposal without fearing for its own survival.

Yet, at the same time, we are everything. We know that bacteria and an infinite number of other species survive because of us, and that we live because of bacteria and an infinite number of other species. There is no separation. Without the system to which it belongs, the human being simply does not exist, nor does any form of individual existence. So why fear death? We cannot disappear, except in isolation. Life, on the other hand, does not disappear. In an infinite universe, it is eternal. It exists, always, at some point in time, here or elsewhere. It's a miracle. The very existence of life in an organism as simple as a bacterium is already a miracle. The fact that, after our death, we can feed other forms of life, such as scavenging insects, is a miracle.

There's no such thing as insignificant information. On the contrary, I believe that the challenge for our generation is to learn to see as widely as possible, to think in terms of systems or wholes, to break free from the straitjacket of the notion of the individual. It's not a question of levelling out differences, but rather of understanding the extent to which the overall balance of a world made up of distinct forms of life and thought is necessary for the fullest possible existence of its component parts, and vice versa. We now have the means to do this, thanks to the state of our knowledge, thanks to the circulation of knowledge. More and more, we are coming closer to each other and, intellectually, to our environment.

From now on, there's no need to find our salvation in false idols or in a frantic search for pleasure through consumerism. It's simply there, all around us, in this world that is less and less alien to us, and which we can therefore love for what it is: a unity to which we contribute, and within which we have no more and no less than our rightful place, just like the tiniest bacteria.

Write to the author : leafarine@gmail.com

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