The year of the 'Zeitenwende'

It makes no sense to remind the reader of all the ills experienced in this year that we have just left behind.

Not even putting them one behind the other would fit in a column.

I'll keep two, and you choose which worries you more.

The first is the empirical confirmation that climate change is serious.

There is no longer a way to keep the almost daily weather anomalies from the news.

The second is the breaking of the nuclear taboo, something directly connected to Putin's war and whose consequences we are still far from fully appreciating.

Before these two phenomena, everything else pales.

What interests me to underline, because I don't know if we have become fully aware of it, is how the sum of both has placed us in an unprecedented situation, even though it has been brewing for decades.

I am referring to the twist that this represents with respect to our traditional enlightened optimism, that every future was necessarily going to be better because we had left behind the great threats and technological changes would propel us towards new heights of progress.

To put it pedantically, they have changed our chronotope, the way we saw ourselves in the movement of history.

The first alarm came with the virus, which now threatens to sprout again from China;

the second, with the war in Ukraine.

War and epidemics, the traditional scourges of humanity along with hunger.

We have (almost) overcome the latter, but the others survive.

Many other advances that we took for granted, such as democracy itself, are in decline.

What now prevails is the policy of the lesser evil, trying to avoid the worst.

We no longer aspire, for example, to more and better democracy, but rather to not lose it, so that it does not degenerate into illiberalism.

So with almost everything.

The State itself has once again emphasized its role as the body in charge of guaranteeing security, protecting us from the new social need derived from inflation or the energy crisis, and is forced to rearm to face the war challenge.

All this is proof that we are more vulnerable.

For not introducing global warming into the equation, whose effective combat is now weakened by the new circumstances.

And I don't continue developing it because I don't want to embitter the entry into the new year.

In a recent interview in

, Angela Merkel pointed out that "crises are perhaps the normal state of human life."

Undoubtedly.

Even more so at times of the Z

, the word of the year.

We are in the middle of a transition phase towards another era, in a temporary caesura loaded with uncertainties.

But that doesn't mean we can't overcome the sheer number of problems on the horizon.

It is enough to face them with realism and a resilient will, anticipate the future with the intention of conquering it, not limiting ourselves to waiting for it on the defensive.

As John Lennon would say, “there are no problems, only solutions”.

Let's look for them.

Happy New Year!

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber