"Every great growth actually brings with it enormous crumbling and decay: suffering, the symptoms of decay belong to eras that make enormous strides forward; every powerful or tremendous movement of humanity has created at the same time a nihilistic movement." So wrote Nietzsche. For Gramsci, on the other hand, "crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born" and that, in the space of crisis, "the most varied morbid phenomena occur." It is interesting to read the present with two thinkers so distant from each other in mind, yet perfectly aware, each for his own time, that we are experiencing an unpredictable acceleration of History.
For us, the era following globalization is above all an opportunity to experience a change for which the interpretative categories with which we have so far handled the world no longer seem to work. We are in fact experiencing a profound and abrupt transformation, while no one seems to have the right recipe for answering the big questions that, even before they become specific (economic models, sustainability, global population growth as opposed to a dramatic aging of the European continent, migration flows), interrogate our very being human in a dimension that seems to counterpose our very being human with a kind of domain of nonbeing: we are, in the words of Byung-chul Han, surrounded by non-things, we have social non-relationships on virtual platforms, we invest in non-money extracted in the non-miniere of the Internet, we feed on non-information that does not tell stories but are fragments of a story-telling oriented to the marketing of products or of politics itself, so we vote for non-party, for non-candidates whose fate is often to offer themselves, within a season, first as gifts of providence and finally as scapegoats.
From this, the temptation of an apocalyptic look at the fate of the West is certainly seductive, however much it fails to take into account the fact that perhaps the West itself, as the land of Sunset, is constitutively destined for continuous apocalypse. That indeed, paradoxically, this very being of the West as the Phoenix that reappears each time after the "last days of humanity," leads us rather to think that something is still missing from the reflection of these last few years for politics to be able to speak seriously to us again about our destiny.
My impression is that, in the meantime when "the old dies and the new cannot be born," there are two risks facing reflection that wants to translate into political action: on the one hand, giving in to nostalgia, to the vague wishful thinking of a return to worlds gone by (one example worth a thousand: the bitter awakening of the British after the dream of Brexit), and on the other hand, indulging in the typical narcissism of Western guilt that leads us straight into that night when all cows are black.
A dimension of ethical relativism, as stupid as it is self-defeating, whereby our self-hatred leads us to waver (another example worth a thousand) in the face of the havoc wrought by Tehran's bloody moral police crackdowns. Too busy looking at ourselves in the mirror of our own smug examinations of conscience, we no longer have the courage to say that, quite simply, a society that guarantees freedom of expression for all is superior to one that organizes a moral police to watch over the proper placement of the veil on women's heads.
While we therefore experience "suffering" and "symptoms of decadence" that "belong to eras that make huge strides forward," there are peoples who continue to look to Europe as a beacon of civilization, as a source of inspiration to wage a terrible struggle for emancipation from oppression. So our problem is that instead of proudly answering this call, we remain locked in the bathroom looking at ourselves in the mirror, like a beautiful insecure woman, while our lover waits for us on the street in the rain.
It would then suffice to change perspective for a moment and think about things for what they really are, beyond the intellectual posturing, beyond the philosophical amusement of prophecies of doom. It would suffice, perhaps, to understand that we certainly do not live in the best of all possible worlds, but one can be quite proud that everyone else is currently doing worse than we are, and that, therefore, ultimately our problem can no longer be the pessimism of reason, but, if anything, that of the will. In a word, the terrible drudgery of getting off our asses, and the knowledge that, in the meantime, giving ourselves so much effort to achieve so little is always and still much better than nothing.
Answer