Page 31 [31]
What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 29
remained unspoken and the store of expressions of the past century —
enlightened, romantic, liberal — continue to be employed to justify the
operation. The magician’s apprentice continued his concoctions in the belief
that he was the Faustian man.
Paul Valery noticed already in the thirties that the problem, so to
speak, with our era is that not even our future is what it once was. Yet
around him the various scientific, artistic and political avant-gardes
were practically luxuriating in the frenzied rush of the realisation of the
promised future.
Ignoring the original architecture, we incorporated what remained
of the program of the Enlightenment, then its ruins, into the concrete
foundations of the late modern welfare state, a framework which has
proved to be rigid and fragile, rather than enduring.
Time, however, moved inexorably on with us — backwards. It is as
though Late Moderns were starting to resemble Early Moderns. If we
ourselves were not, everyone in their own way, incurably nineteenth¬
century, we might see that after two or three hundred frantic years of
experimentation we have left the historical world (let us not even talk
about nature) roughly in its pre-Enlightenment state.
In the last few years, as a suddenly emerging pandemic ran rampant
across the Earth, life stopped and we, avoiding our fellow human beings
as a deadly threat, cowered in our homes as we followed the news of the
spread of the disease. We had the opportunity to think of the meaning
of the victory over nature. What victory? Our vulnerability to nature is
more oppressive and obvious today than it was before the Industrial
Revolution.
The population catastrophe is washing away the marks of the
conquest of European civilisation like a sea. The West is pressed back
within its own borders and settles in for defence, probably too late. The
victims of world poverty, the ecological catastrophe and the population
explosion are pouring towards Europe en masse. ‘The new migration,
just like the previous ones, spells the end of an era of civilisation.
‘The life and death struggle for the insufficient means of survival
distances the continents from each other again and turns them against
one another. The cosmopolitans, internationalists and globalists
pontificating about a united humanity are drowned out by the noise of
gunfire. Expanding empires threaten one another; rules and diplomats
parcel out the world.
The importance of the concept of nations, which once united civil
society, is undermined by the new means and institutions of