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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 wellintentioned 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.
