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of others. Wealth is the plenty of sensual delights, which power is
capable of ensuring. The senseless prodigality, the ostentatious and
joyless sensuality — noblesse oblige. (This situation would be familiar to
the courtiers of the Early Modern period.)
Finally, the favourite and most sacred idea of the poets and
philosophers of the nineteenth century, freedom, cannot avoid its fate
either. The scientific organisation of society gives it short shrift in true
seventeenth century fashion — more geometrico — when it restricts the
freedom of the individual to the maintenance and useful operation of
the biological machinery conditionally placed at its disposal. However,
even in this area it “rationalises” its free choices: from the moment of
its conception until its death the individual is supplied by science with
the information and experiences desirable from the perspective of
optimal adaptation.
‘The meeting of Calculating Lust and Anti-life Science in the service
of corrupt power — yet this description does not fit the society of
consumers the most. The three main agents of the Modern Period first
appear together in the courts of the absolute monarchs of the 16-17"
centuries. Maybe we never even left this cold, violent, deceptive and
disappointed world.
3. The process of globalisation
The golden age of the Ancient Civilisation that developed in the
Mediterranean basin can be connected to a few small Greek city states;
its terminal stage and fall to the united and huge Roman Empire. From
the Middle Ages onwards, Western civilisation found itself in several
stages: this time too, the intellectual and social rebirth took place within
the conditions of political fragmentation, within well-defined areas
(Italy, the Low Countries, etc.). Enlightened civil society was to build
upon these local achievements on both sides of the Atlantic. Its
triumphal patterns spread across the world in the twentieth century.
The end result of this historical process was again a unification
unprecedentedly broad and deep compared to its antecedents. The new
empire is not organised around a single centre of power, but the
community of knowledge and communicative systems, the oneness of
the productive and destructive technologies brings the peoples — this
time all the peoples of the Earth — into a union stronger than all
previous ones. Except that the more forceful the necessity of unified