Edgar Morin, Member of our Advisory Committee, published on 30 January 2024 an article* using the title of a book of Victor Serge that was published in 1939 when Hitler’s war was starting. This book described the midnight of the 20th century. Morin asks now: “Are we not in the midnight of the 21st century, obviously different from that of the last century?“

Morin refers to two wars being fought currently and one looming.

The first one is the war in Ukraine which has been “developing through arms deliveries and economic support between the United States, leading the European West, and Russia” and “continues and worsens in violence and hatred”.

The second one is the war in the Middle East showing “both the urgency, the necessity and at the same time the impossibility of a decolonization of what remains of Arab Palestine and the creation of a Palestinian state”, and “that the descendants of a people persecuted for centuries by the Christian and then racist West, can become both persecutors and the advanced bastion of this West itself in the Arab world.”

The third one seems to arise around the contested question of Taiwan.

In addition, Morin mentions the ecological degradation, the hegemony of uncontrolled profit, the deterioration of our civilisation through the growth of selfishness and the disappearance of traditional solidarities, the replacement of democracy by “neo-totalitarian” regimes, and the disunited United Nations, that add up to the increasing polycrisis. “The polycrisis that we are experiencing throughout the planet is an anthropological crisis; it is the crisis of humanity that cannot become Humanity.”

This paradoxical situation is part of a global paradox specific to humanity.

It is the paradox of scientific-technical progress that continues prodigiously in all areas, and it is this progress that is the cause of the worst regressions of our century. It is this progress that allowed the scientific organization of the Auschwitz extermination camp that caused more than a million deaths, it is this progress that allowed the design and manufacture of the most destructive weapons up to the first atomic bomb that caused 200,000 deaths. It is this progress that makes wars more and more deadly. It is this progress that, driven by the thirst for profit, created the ecological crisis of the planet.

Let us note what is difficult to conceive, that the progress of knowledge, by multiplying it and separating it by disciplinary barriers, has caused, linked to a domination of calculation in an increasingly technocratic world, a regression of knowledge incapable of conceiving the complexity of reality and in particular of human realities, which has caused a regression of thought that has become blind in the course of the history that is leading us. Which is accompanied by the return of dogmatism and fanaticism, a crisis of morality in the surge of hatred and idolatries.

However, according to his philosophy, Morin resumes: Given that we do not know whether it might be too late to improve the world situation, but also given that we know that the probable is not certain and the improbable and even the unexpected is always possible, this means that we must move on to resistance!

The first and fundamental resistance is the resistance of the mind. It requires resisting the intimidation of any lie presented as truth, the contagion of any collective intoxication, it requires never giving in to the delirium of the collective responsibility of a people or an ethnic group, it requires resisting hatred and contempt, it prescribes the concern to understand the complexity of problems and phenomena rather than giving in to a partial or one-sided vision. It requires the search and verification of information and the acceptance of uncertainties.

Morin proposes the preservation and creation of community oases, social and solidarity economy networks and associations dedicated to solidarity and the rejection of hatred. He says:

Resistance would prepare the younger generations to think and act for the forces of union of fraternity, life and love that we can conceive under the name of Eros against the forces of dislocation, disintegration, conflict and death that we can conceive under the names of Polemos and Thanatos.

We must know that in the universe Eros, Polemos and Thanatos are combined and fight each other. As Heraclitus would say: “Concord and discord are the father and mother of all things”. This is also true of life, this is true of human history, this is true for each one of us.

It is the union, within our beings, of the powers of Eros and those of the awakened and responsible spirit which will nourish our resistance to enslavement, ignominies and lies.

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*All quotes from https://collectifmalgretout.net/2024/01/30/sil-est-minuit-dans-le-siecle/ by Google Übersetzer