We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and wewant to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies.
That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where.
The Israelites were lucky: they wandered for only 40 years in the desert.
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Europe produced modernity—and for a long time, Europe was the master and possessor of modernity, putting it to the almost exclusive service of its own power.
- But this transformative project was inherently destined for humanity as a whole. Today, Bacon and Descartes rule in Shanghai and Bangalore at least as much as in London and Paris.
- Europe finds itself militarily, politically, and spiritually disarmed in a world that it has armed with the means of modern civilization.
- Soon it will be wholly incapable of defending itself.
- It has already been incapable of speaking up for itself for a long time, since it confuses itself with a humanity on the path to pacification and unification.
- By renouncing the political form that was its own and by which it had attempted, with some success, to resolve the European problem, Europe has deprived itself of the means of association in which its life had found the richest meaning, diffracted in a multiplicity of national languages that rivaled one another in strength and in grace.
What will come next?
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