Oldal 22 [22]
20 | Tue Puitosopuy or Eco-Pouitics
as the ecological crisis and the experience of the new Great Migration
ready to sweep Europe away.
Let us rather say that mortality applies only to the development of
closed, local civilisations in the past and that with us something quite
new has started, because we are not merely one finite civilisation among
many, but rather the collective future of humanity. As we will see, it is
precisely this conviction that filled our immediate predecessors, the
humanist thinkers of the twentieth century (and its imperialist
politicians) with a confidence that not even the horrors of two world
wars could shake. Otherwise, how could Julian Huxley, a well¬
intentioned scientist, have written the following lines in 1946, one year
after Hiroshima and the death camps in his famous text UNESCO: Its
Purpose and Philosophy? “The more united man’s tradition becomes, the more
rapid will be the possibility of progress: several separate or competing or even
mutually hostile pools of tradition cannot possibly be so efficient as a single
pool common to all mankind...the best and only certain way of securing this
will be through political unification.”
In any case, the above statement is based on a factual error. The
greatest periods of cultural development, as is common knowledge, are
connected to great empires that seclude themselves from their
neighbours (China, Egypt), the closed, privileged world of city states
engaged in a life and death struggle with their neighbours (Hellas,
European Middle Ages) or small religious communities living in the
knowledge of their chosen status (Old Testament Jewry, Early
Christianity), which were held together by a thorough knowledge of
their common tradition and where the successive generations had
decades to perfect their habits, ideas and procedures. The historian of
ideas, Leo Strauss, is undoubtedly closer to the truth: “Wan cannot reach
his perfection except in society or, more precisely, in civil society. Civil society,
or the city as the classics conceived of it, is a closed society and is, in addition,
what today would be called a “small society.” ... A society meant to make man’s
perfection possible must be kept together by mutual trust, and trust presupposes
acquaintance. ... An open or all-comprehensive society will exist on a lower
level of humanity than a closed society, which, through generations, has made
a supreme effort toward human perfection. The prospects for the existence of
a good society are therefore greater if there is a multitude of independent
societies than if there is only one independent society. If the society in which
2 Julien Huxley: UNESCO — Its Purpose and Its Philosophy. The Preparatory Comission
of the UN Educational, Social and Cultural Organization, 1946, p.11.