Are Civilizations Mortal? – When space contracts and time runs out….

“We now know” sighed Valery one day, “that civilizations also are mortal.” It was a difficult blow for the Occidental psyche, already shaken by Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God.  Must those who were no longer confident in a passing world also have to abandon our hope in the eternity of transcendental reason—the arrogant faith of the Enlightenment philosophers? Fernand Braudel tried to reassure us, as we reassure infants in speaking to them of a long life followed by a long sleep: “One thing that the historian of civilizations can say, better than anything else,” he assured us, “is that civilizations are realities of very long duration. They are not ‘mortal’ on the scale of our individual life especially, in spite of the too-famous phrase of Paul Valery. I want to say that mortal accidents, which do exist and can shake civilizations by their roots, hit them far less frequently than we think. In most cases, they just rouse us from slumber.” But children grow up and the anguish has resurfaced in double strength with the particularly painful awareness that (1) the supremacy of the Occidental civilization of reason has been lost ineluctably, (2) that locally adaptive cultures are rapidly becoming extinct, and especially (3) of the probable death of humanity in the medium term due to its inability to reasonably manage its resources and master its techniques. The remaining hope, if there is one, is displaced to the notion of an ecology of knowledges, of a single, global civilization. The essential values of such are beginning to reveal themselves but are so foreign to us that they put into question the species stability of “homo sapiens”.