The world is a single garden

To do?

This is not the first time we have heard this question.

However, today it is raised in a new way and with a new urgency.

Especially for the liberal forces of this continent, and the planet.

From this very moment we can foresee that, when looking back, the spring of the year 2022 will appear like the autumn of 1989, that is, as a turning point that sealed the end of a long-cherished illusion.

Back then, the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled a farewell to the state socialist illusion of leveling the gap between equality and justice through production using the means of central planning and perpetual deprivation of liberty.

Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the hollowing out of the liberal maxim of changing political values ​​through increased trade, just as does the daily terror in China, where the regime now subjects entire metropolises to the logic of the concentration camp that has been perfecting for decades with the minorities of the periphery.

The idea that the world's growing interconnectedness and mutual economic dependencies are inching us closer to the Kantian realm of ends and their eternal peace seems baseless.

What was regulatory hope now functions as negative rhetoric in day-to-day politics.

What remains after peering into the abyss, especially from a Central European perspective, is the shameful realization that the dependencies are as unmutual as the military force is balanced.

The diagnosis is grim.

In the 21st century, the continent of the Enlightenment is neither in a position to maintain its liberal way of life economically nor to defend it militarily, not to mention the irreversible ecological devastation brought about above all by the last 30 years of global consumption expansion. .

Consequently, precisely the younger generation of European politicians and politicians – from Emmanuel Macron to Annalena Baerbock, passing through Sanna Marin and Pedro Sánchez – can find themselves in a situation that bears an oppressive resemblance to that of Cándido, the protagonist of the satirical novel from the 18th century by Frenchman Voltaire.

Like Candide, who grew up comfortably sheltered in a princely palace, these exemplary young Europeans absorbed with their mother's milk the tale of the best of all possible continents of the post-war era.

The year of freedom, 1989, in which the invention of the internet also opened seemingly limitless new horizons, coincided with the formative time of his youth, cementing awareness of the possibility of a peaceful end to world history.

Now that they have seen enough of the world's miseries on their travels across the globe, and that the geopolitical earthquake of the invasion of Ukraine has finally awakened them from their dogmatic lethargy, the temptation arises to bet on their work by a defensive logic of lasting preserve and isolationist self-care.

Just like the character of Cándido who, deeply disappointed at the end of his trip around the world, hides behind the thick walls of a farm.

There, his old philosophy teacher Pangloss continues to sing the anthem of globalization at the table ("All events are necessarily concatenated in the best of all possible worlds... because if not, you wouldn't be here now eating candied lemon and pistachios" ), to which Cándido replies: “You say it well, but we have to cultivate our garden”.

First cultivate your own garden and protect it.

Helping oneself before helping others;

the cultivation of one's own before the abstract love of the strange;

the productive safeguard of the terroir before the exhausting solidarity without borders;

local responsibility ahead of fantasies of global leadership: all of these are actually highly understandable, even basic, insights in liberal thought.

A dashing organic farmer thus appears to the mind's eye as the contemporary beacon of the European Enlightenment, were it not for the fact that the image of the flourishing "garden", with its celebration of nature, alone makes any idea of ​​a focalization enduring in its own closed spheres of influence seems illusory.

This is so because our soils, increasingly dry and exhausted, need a chemical reinforcement.

And this comes above all from the nitrogenous fertilizers coming from the Ukraine, surely produced with a great expenditure of energy provided by Russian gas.

And also because precisely this man in contact with nature and rooted in the countryside, is the first to go to the barricades when the price of energy rises, in order, in his revolutionary fury, to question at the same time the intrinsic guiding values ​​and universal values ​​of freedom, equality and fraternity while wielding a fork.

With due understanding for the pent-up rage and recent fears, there is no place where this world, which will soon reach 10 billion people, can be farmed, pruned, or even locked behind a wall, without it ceasing to be worth living, to the extent of a garden.

From an enlightened perspective, in our 21st century it is precisely the ecological challenges that deprive any pretense of autarky, whether continental or civilizational, of a tomorrow in sight.

Similarly, any fantasy that the prosperity and values ​​of one's own country can be protected in the future with guns and walls alone is revealed as the parched ghost of past centuries.

The world will be a single garden, or it will not be.

In the conditions of this planet there is no viable national liberalism, not even continental.

Therefore, it will be up to the enlightened thinkers of the future, once again, to cultivate an attitude of hope that places itself plastically between Pangloss and Candide.

An attitude is needed that does not substitute faith in an all-powerful and benevolent God for the turmoil of a world-healing market left to itself, and that is not merely the product of deep disillusionment in the dreams of an amateur-style political gardener. of Candide.

It is rather a question of always turning, as the most agile and intelligent plants do, towards the forces of light, of deploying the senses in all directions.

In general, one must see oneself as part of a global network of life characterized by a special resistance precisely thanks to its internal diversity.

Although modern freedom remains a tender little plant, it has so far been able, with the necessary care, to undermine all walls and resist all attacks even in the darkest hours.

Wolfram Eilenberger

is a philosopher, author of

(Taurus).

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