The world gives the impression of being subjected to an incessant swell which prohibits any vision of the future
Humanity in search of spirituality
In Iran and China, two dictatorial regimes are forced to give in (a little) because of the anger of the people who took to the streets. In Russia, the autocrat Putin continues to send his opponents to the Gulag. But in the United States, the Trumpist camp, which had hoped for a landslide victory over Biden’s Democrats, suffered a crushing defeat. The world thus gives the impression of being subjected to an incessant swell which prohibits any vision of the future.
The conjunctions of evils
In the fourteenthe century, the West suddenly felt cursed. In addition to the Hundred Years’ War which ravaged the cities and the countryside, the Plague had entered the game. It is estimated that a third to a half of Europe perishes from this pandemic. From this sinister winter was born a civilizational spring: the Renaissance. Because a century later, in Mainz, a man Johannes Gutemberg developed the printing process. From then on, major events followed one another: printing of the Bible in large numbers, interpretation of the sacred text by “ordinary mortals”, birth of the reform, appearance of the Enlightenment, etc. etc
No period resembles another and yet the mechanisms of renewal seem surprisingly identical. What about today ? For half a century, human consumption has multiplied causing the sixth extinction with an agonizing question at the key: will the human species be part of it? Disasters have followed one another without any divine intervention, but rather a cascade of causes and effects. And we are only at the beginning. The next challenge for humanity will be the exponential increase in intra- and extra-continental migratory waves.
However, to date, no government has found a way to stop such transhumance, which originates in hunger, poverty and war, the three evils that our ancestors experienced in the 14th century.e century. Nature, on the other hand, knows means of regulation that civilization forbids: disease, predation, self-regulation of births.
Unhappiness-generating progress
And this is indeed the great question of our millennium: what is this technical progress which, according to the Enlightenment, was to bring happiness and wisdom and which certainly brings improvements in terms of health and longevity, but ultimately produces hatred, selfishness and conflict without forgetting the destruction of nature? The mirages of the 19th centurye century that were those of capitalism and socialism must be completely reviewed. If humanity does not change course by noting the failure of the industrial revolution, it will plunge year after year into a nightmare from which it will not be able to escape.
Once again, what will we do when countless hordes of miserable people from elsewhere come knocking at our door? Do we dare admit to ourselves that it is we Westerners who have generated this systemic disorder? It is not a question of indulging in this grotesque exercise of repentance, but of considering the problem in all its reality and of seeking the appropriate remedies. From now on, it is no longer possible to speak of unequivocal and marked progress as the thinkers of the last millennium have done.
A need and a desire for spirituality
Since the fall of the USSR and paradoxically the almost total abandonment of the communist ideal — paradoxical because it is difficult to assert that this dictatorship represented Karl Marx’s dream — religions have generally taken over to the worst. Here Islam, there Protestant evangelicalism, there the fanaticism of radical Judaism, the massacres in the name of Buddhism or even the calls for the murder of Russian orthodoxy… There is no longer a continent which is spared from the wars of Religion.
And yet, under this darkness a truth emerges: man flounders in consumerism and materialism while in him the mystery of transcendence remains. The individual needs to be in agreement with himself to believe in a mission which connects him, in the positive, to nature. This is the great challenge of our century: to reinfuse people with the spirit of this nature from which we come and which is both our matrix and our raison d’être. We belong to it entirely, spiritually and yet we persist in disfiguring it. She gave us life and we devour her from within. Spinoza claimed that God was nature. Let us relearn to respect it, to love it and perhaps we will manage to love ourselves and thus love the Living.
GXC