Oldal 31 [31]
OCR
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 nineteenthcentury, 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
