The paradox of greatness — confronting the idea of progress PT.1
Seamlessly pandemic, climate change and geopolitical crisis. The Human World pursued since Modernity turned out to be a fatal spell
The unending war for greatness
Living “according to the right measure” the ancient Greek concept known as “katà métron” — namely a dam to our sinister desires, to the allure of our archaic ambition and expansion without any principle of realty, security guard paradigms and lebensraum questioned — today makes us ponder more than ever: Ukraine and Israel, wars of geometries; immigration, an endless post-colonial tragedy which moves biblical masses across borders; climate change, a revolution in terms of relationship. These challenges compel us to reassess our bond with History — the ultimate measure. Disquieting awakening and epistemic crisis. Limitless age, harbinger of format errors.
Despite numerous prophetic warnings over the past half-century regarding some scalability of human endeavours, such as the popular report from the Club di Roma on the “Limits to Growth” — first of many, many others — we have persisted, undaunted, in our pursuit of expansion. Hence, if there is something we precisely do not want to cede, that is apparently greatness. The greatness of our countries, of our ideas and of our technologies. In formula, of ourselves. For centuries, we have anchored our World — only human for human, in the foundations of its greatness. And we use it as the bedrock of power and authority. The principle has been clear: decisions, whether concerning everything and everybody, are entrusted to the greatest. The most powerful.
However, greatness, as today’s quintessential unit of measurement, appears less like a definitive, universal milestone and more like a heterogenesis. This sine-die race, sweetened as an infinite commercial expanse, has revealed to be really — echoing Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz’s maxim, an “unending war”: definitive proof of forces as a preliminary and decision-making state of affairs, much more than on politics. The latter is a juridic-philosophical tentative to soothe the first, continuous one. At present, we do not know what the world will be next. Only fatalistic hallucinations reach.
An inescapable running through the unknown
While it is clear that this humanization of greatness is creaking in its foundations, its anthropological trajectory in our growth story has also been inescapable. The quandary began when individuals aggregated into larger groups, marking what the German philosopher Sloterdijk synthesized as the transition to the “Axial Age.” From small communities to nations and from nations to empires. Orders of grandness. From the naked ape to the F35-jet exercise, all the math is obtorto collo transformed. These “changes of scale” are heralds of potential disasters. And, we add, the spring of lasting “globality” versus “universality” problem. Thus, humanity’s growth is the reckoning with greatness.
Since day one, we began to grapple with the “Ta megala” — ancient Greeks, once again, or “great issues”. Plato exhorted “pànta episphalé”: “All that is great is in the storm”. With the emergence of states and politics, humans left domestic concerns and moved towards larger formats. Settlement, agriculture, industry and globalization. Geopolitics and the unknown. Humanity is connected with a hierarchical structure: axiality, dimensions, scales. However, this sequence from a small-minded, rod-wielding individual to homo politicus and finally to homo metaphysicus — the latter serving as the linchpin, abandoned, of European thought, also gave rise to an actual turmoil of realities. Or, regardless of our dullness degree, our prejudices and our priorities, while we inhaled the opium of great civilization, we sowed the seeds of inequality, mistreatment and pollution anyway.
So, the declinable grand anthropocentrism gives way to another story that centres on Earth. To put it differently, the greatness of our species is nothing more than a tissue of reality if compared to the complexity of Earth’s tapestry. That tapestry is the only “global” for real, despite the “universal” principles we unfortunately try to use to reduce reality. Illusion of grandeur. Like a butterfly’s wing flap, we have seamlessly set wars, pandemics, and ecological crises in motion. As the myth of the Huns’ King once extolled: “There, where I have passed, the grass will never grow again.” Ultimately, lost in our relationship with things, enchanted by how we would like them to be rather than conceiving for what they irreducibly are, we face a dramatic trade-off: preserving our greatness or that of the Earth. GDP or systemic well-being.
Dreaming of the Earth’s greatness
In the 50s, Gunther Anders — another thorny German thinker devoted to the search for the man-technology relationship, had already removed the veil on our incapacity to fathom the intrinsic catastrophes of our choices. Decision-making docet. “Promethean shame”, he called it. We shape the future in a way that carries its own possibility or impossibility. So, the ontologic challenge of greatness, which has been conceived as a paradigm rooted in categorisation, sectarian knowledge, and the division between “subject” and “object,” “theory” and “practice” — modernist legacy, regularly in crisis with the World Wars, then the Cold one, the Middleast one and now the Asiatic one, nothing but the end of grand narratives — may now stand at a palingenesis: after centuries of 3D expansionism, built on universalism in stops and starts solipsistic, is time for the scaling back. The time to recover the measure, passing from “partition” to “union”. From “breaking” to “mending”. This revolution leans in the framework already proposed by the great philosopher Isaiah Berlin in its time, who underlined the significance of pluralism over relativistic oblivion. It acknowledges the non-existence of a singular “best” or “right” way to organise and manage relationships.
Now, this feverish pitching starkly contrasts with the ideals of peace, comfort, and rights that advanced societies like to isolate from the Earth’s complexity. In their pursuit of grandness, the diverse ways of existence result in today’s ecological crises and growing conflicts caused by global asymmetries. The competition between old “worldviews” is surpassed by “real worlds” in war to avoid perishing. Following Brandt’s line, the global “North” and “South”. In extrema ratio, the dominant utilitarian approach to pursue greatness tout court over one another has engendered the worst and counterproductive implications for its very continuation. That is the reality. Beyond human beings, designs of greatness that pour real blood and adversities. Here is the paradox: hegemony that rows against itself.
“We have dreamed the world”, wrote Borges in his brilliant Book of Sand; “We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false”. We have dreamed a World, in a single word, “continuous”. But it is not. We all are witnessing the contrary. From here, the pivotal question regarding the future is whether we can figure out a new practice of cohabitation. A new Nomos, able to measure the abyss of diversity. Able to recognize the differences, the distance, the people’s nature. “New”, which overtakes the rigid Schmittian categories considering the concrete entities’ requests. From ideas to Co2. No more separation is needed. This represents a true philosophy of “assembly” — Latourian foundational and longing notion. If we genuinely wish to dream of greatness, looking beyond the courtyards of our homes, therefore let us dream beyond the World. Let us dream of Earth’s greatness. With the caring of its interdependencies, its imbalances, relations and connections.
Few references:
It is intriguing that some fundamental references inspiring this reflection date back to the 1950s. A time that represents an epiphany concerning the Earth’s sustainability, which was threatened by the neoliberal idea of industrialisation, the subsequent endeavour for pacification driven by globalised capitalist production, and the geopolitical competition viewed solely from a securitarian perspective driven by nuclear weapons.
Anders, G.
- (1956) “The Outdatedness of Human Beings”, Vol 1,2
Berlin, I.
- (1958) “Two Concepts of Liberty”
- (1959) “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”
- (2014) “A Message to the Twenty-First Century”
Borges, J.L.
- (1975) “The book of sand”.
Foucault, M.
- (2003) “Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76”
Latour, B.
- (2005) “Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory”
- (1987) “Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society”
- (2018) “Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime”
Meadows D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers J., William W. Behrens III W.W.,
- (1972), “The limits to growth. A report for the club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind”.
- (2013) “Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update”.
Schmitt, C.
- (1950) “The Nomos of the Earth”.
Sloterdijk, P.
- (1999) “Globes. Spheres, Vol 2”.
- (1993) “Im selben Boot: Versuch über die Hyperpolitik”.
