Does humanity need a genuine awakening, one carrying within it hope, renewal, and a rising from the ashes of hatred and the legacy of enmity?
If we cast an eye over the world and its history, it appears at first glance that the banner of war and violence, of repression and injustice, and of moral dissolution besides, is the one that prevails.
Today the tears shed in the twentieth century, with two world wars that claimed tens of millions of victims, do not appear to have paved the way for this spirit, and hope has become the longing wait for the good sower, in the phrase of the celebrated French poet Charles Péguy.
Sadly, the world's present features suggest a sealed darkness, shattered dreams, and endings for the historical human consciousness- a world with no shared human project worthy of humanity's dignity as the middle of the twenty-first century approaches, where a global enslavement of many forms prevails, returning humanity to the age of the law of the jungle.
Have the predictions of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes about man been realized, about how he turns into a wolf to his fellow man?
When international law is absent, and individualism and self-love drive each person by way of his own interests and his own strength, human life appears brutish and short and full of fear, and wars necessarily follow, as people's relations with one another come to resemble the relation of the predatory wolf to its prey.
Three decades and more ago, the American journalist and geopolitical analyst Robert Kaplan gave us his provocative article "The Coming Anarchy" in The Atlantic Monthly. That was in 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the West was considered the absolute victor.
Kaplan set before our eyes a map of a divided world, in which he foresaw the emergence of an antagonistic human duality: a developed, technologically stable world surrounded by walls and security barriers, against a developing world living in chaos, poverty, and continuous civil wars.
Fifteen years after Kaplan's article, the French writer of Lebanese origin Amin Maalouf gave us his masterpiece Disordered World, which he would follow with his vision in The Wreck of Civilizations.
In the first he insists that a debased modernity and an unhallowed selfishness wallowing in the mire of absolute self-interest will lead the world to perdition.
In the second he portrays the condition of human beings in our own day as sailors in a single boat, half of them rowing eastward and the other half pulling their oars westward, with the result that they will never reach the shore of safety when the storm comes.
Day after day, the "worship of the golden calf" proves useless. Indeed, making money and the scramble for wealth the measure of every claim to respect and the basis of every authority and every hierarchy tears the fabric of human society apart- which is exactly what we see happening now.
Rescuing the world from the pit of perdition requires a new culture whose aim is to build together, on foundations of agreement about facts. This can be achieved only through a culture of encounter, a readiness to think well of the other, and the restoration of kindness among human beings.
Our world appears to need paths of peace that lead to the healing of wounds rather than the deepening of hostility, which calls for caravans of peacemakers ready to begin the work of healing and of coming together.
In these days, as we stand on the threshold of fears of a wide conflict breaking out between Russia and NATO that may yet turn into a world war, we must remember what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant stressed in 1786, in his essay Conjectural Beginning of Human History: that the greatest evil afflicting civilized peoples arises from war- not in the sense of present or past war, but in the sense of the perpetual preparation for war to come.
Hence the pressing need for an architecture of global peace, one that allows nations to coexist and peoples to meet while preserving their particular identities, and at the same time without those identities becoming a point of departure for conflict and turning into deadly identities. A peace that gathers the many in a shared search for higher and nobler values from which everyone benefits, across the world and its continents, and on into outer space- which, the narrator tells us, has become a playing field for armament, and that is another story.
Our world ought to unite to face the dangers, especially now that it has become a single globalized family needing an international generosity of spirit with room for everyone, and creative partnerships that build rather than demolish, that reconcile rather than divide.
A humanity closed in on itself, by land and sea, in corridors and straits, is a wretched, defeated humanity. And there are stirring moments in the annals of history where it is not right to ask who won and who lost, who holds power and who lacks it; the deeper question becomes whether human beings can go on living together on the surface of the blue planet.
The arteries of human civilization need new, pure blood to restore to the human spirit its new spring.
