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OCR
32 | Tue PhıLosorny or Eco-Porrrics 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
