We are living in an open sea, caught up in a continuous wave, with no
fixed point and no instrument to measure distance and the direction of
travel. Nothing appears to be in its place any more, and a great deal
appears to have no place at all. The principles that have given
substance to the democratic ethos, the system of rules that has guided
the relationships of authority and the ways in which they are
legitimized, the shared values and their hierarchy, our behaviour and
our life styles, must be radically revised because they no longer seem
suited to our experience and understanding of a world in flux, a world
that has become both increasingly interconnected and prone to severe and
persistent crises.
We are living in the interregnum between what is no longer and what is
not yet. None of the political movements that helped undermine the old
world are ready to inherit it, and there is no new ideology, no
consistent vision, promising to give shape to new institutions for the
new world. It is like the Babylon referred to by Borges, the country of
randomness and uncertainty in which 'no decision is final; all branch
into others'. Out of the world that had promised us modernity, what Jean
Paul Sartre had summarized with sublime formula 'le choix que je suis'
('the choice that I am'), we inhabit that flattened, mobile and
dematerialized space, where as never before the principle of the
heterogenesis of purposes is sovereign.
This is Babel.
