Disordered World, page 18
History, being composed of an infinity of individual events, fits badly with generalisations. In order to find your way, you need a large bunch of keys; and if it is legitimate for a researcher to want to add the key he has forged himself, it is unwise to want to replace the whole bunch with a single key, a passkey which is supposed to open every door.
The twentieth century made abundant use of the key offered by Marx and we now know what excesses that was capable of leading to. Class struggle doesn’t explain everything, and neither does the clash of civilisations. Not least because the words themselves are ambiguous and deceptive. If everyone has a feeling of social belonging which brings about class solidarity and also certain class hatreds, the contours of this notion are fuzzy. At the time of the industrial revolution, it was reasonable to think that the emerging proletariat would become conscious of its identity, which would function as a distinct identity, as a ‘class’, and play a determining role in history until the end of time.
Could one say exactly the same of the new key provided by ‘the clash of civilisations’. If everyone has a feeling of religious or ethnic belonging which brings about certain feelings of solidarity towards a civilisation, as well as the hatreds that go along with it, the contours of this notion are no less fuzzy than those of class. Today the zeitgeist leads us to believe that civilisations are defined entities, more and more conscious of their uniqueness, and that they will play a determining role in human history.
There is of course an element of truth here. Who could deny that Western civilisation is not to be confused with Chinese or Arab-Muslim civilisation? But no civilisation is watertight, none is immutable, and today the borders are more porous than in the past.
For millennia, our civilisations have been coming into being, developing, changing; they have come into contact and opposition with each other, imitated each other, differentiated themselves, allowed themselves to be copied; then, slowly or abruptly, they disappear or merge with others. Roman civilisation joined that of Greece one day. Each of them retained its character, but they also achieved an original synthesis which became a major element in European civilisation. Then Christianity came along, born in quite a different civilisation — principally Jewish, with Egyptian, Mesopotamian and more general Levantine influences — and became in turn an essential constituent of Western civilisation. Then the so-called barbarian peoples arrived from Asia — the Franks, Alamans, Huns, Vandals, Goths, all the Germanic peoples, the Altaics and the Slavs — who mixed with the Latins and Celts to form the nations of Europe.
Arab-Muslim civilisation was shaped in the same way. When the Arab tribes, including that of my ancestors, left their barren desert peninsula, their civilisation was schooled by Persia, India, Egypt, Rome and Constantinople. Then from the borders of China the Turkic tribes arrived, whose leaders remained our sultans and caliphs until after the birth of my own father, before being overthrown by a modernist nationalist movement which wanted to anchor its people firmly to European civilisation.
I say this by way of a reminder of the obvious fact that our civilisations have always been composite, shifting and permeable. And to express my surprise that today, when civilisations are more intermingled than ever, we are told that they are mutually implacable and destined to stay that way.
And what of today, now that thousands of Chinese party workers are trained in California and thousands of Californians dream of moving to China? Now that we have to make an effort as we travel the world to remember whether we have woken up in Chicago, Shanghai, Dubai, Bergen or Kuala Lumpur? Now that we are being told, on the strength of some examples of puzzling behaviour, that civilisations will remain distinct and that clashes between them will always be the driving force of history?
If our civilisations feel the need to affirm their uniqueness so stridently, it is precisely because their uniqueness is becoming indistinct.
What we are witnessing today is the twilight of distinct civilisations, not their advent or apotheosis. They have had their day and the time has come to transcend them all: to capture their benefits and extend to the whole world the advantages of each, and to reduce their capacity for harm; to build a common civilisation little by little, based on two intangible and inseparable principles: the universality of essential values and the diversity of cultural expression.
To avoid any misunderstanding, let me add this: in my view, respecting a culture means encouraging the teaching of the language through which it is expressed, and promoting knowledge of its literature, theatre and cinema, and its other manifestations in art, architecture, craftsmanship, cuisine and so on. Conversely, being indulgent towards tyranny, oppression, intolerance or the caste system, or towards forced marriage, female genital mutilation, ‘honour’ crimes or the subjugation of women, towards incompetence, negligence, nepotism, widespread corruption, towards xenophobia or racism on the grounds that they emanate from a different culture, does not constitute respect in my view, but disguised contempt. It is the behaviour of apartheid, even if it is done with the best of intentions. I have said this already, but I am keen to repeat it in these final pages so that there is no ambiguity about what I believe cultural diversity is and is not.
I shall continue to use the broad term ‘civilisation’ in the singular and the plural. It seems perfectly legitimate to speak sometimes of human civilisations, and sometimes of human civilisation. Nations, ethnic groups, religions and empires all have their own particular courses. But the human race has its own adventure in which all of us, individuals and groups, are embarked.
It is only if we believe in this common adventure that we can make sense of our own specific journeys. And it is only if we believe that cultures possess equal dignity that we have the right to evaluate and even judge them, in accordance of course with values which are part of our common destiny and which are above all our civilisations, traditions and beliefs. For there is nothing more sacred than respect for human beings, the preservation of their physical and moral integrity, the preservation of their capacity to think and express themselves; and also the preservation of the planet on which they stand.
If we want this fascinating adventure to continue, we have to go beyond our tribal idea of civilisations and religions, free the former from the iron grip of ethnicity, rid the latter of the identity-based poison which distorts and corrupts them and turns them away from their spiritual and ethical vocation.
In this century, we shall have to choose between two visions of the future.
In the first, humanity is divided into global tribes which fight and detest one another but, as a result of globalisation, feed more every day on the same bland cultural broth.
In the second, humanity is aware of its common destiny and as a result is united around the same essential values, but continues to develop more than ever the richest, most diverse expressions of culture, preserving all its languages, artistic traditions, crafts, sensibility, memory, knowledge and so on.
On the one hand, then, we have several ‘civilisations’ which clash, but which imitate each other culturally and become homogeneous, and on the other a single human civilisation, but one which displays an infinite diversity.
To follow the first of these courses, all we need do is continue to drift along lazily, buffeted by shocks, as we do today. Choosing the second course will require a life-saving step change on our part. Are we up to it?
Chapter 10
On this subject as on others, I am perpetually torn between extreme worry and hope. At times, I tell myself that in its darkest hours humanity always knows how to find the resources necessary to extricate itself, even at the cost of very heavy sacrifices. And at others, I tell myself it would be irresponsible always to expect a miracle.
My belief at the moment is that the paths to a solution are undeniably diminishing but that they are not yet closed off. What needs to be promoted is not despair but urgency. That is indeed the sole reason for this book’s existence, from its first page to its last. To say that it is late, but not too late. To point out that it would be suicidal and criminal not to mobilise all our energies to prevent collapse and decline. To suggest that we can still take action, but that we must be bold and imaginative rather than weak-willed, timorous and conventional; that we must dare to overturn our usual thought patterns and ways of behaving, upset our imaginary certainties and rebuild our scale of priorities.
Of all the threats awaiting us in this century, the most perceptible today, as well as the best-studied and documented, is climate change. There is every reason to believe that in the decades ahead it will provoke cataclysmic disturbances whose extent we are not yet able to measure. Sea levels may rise by several metres, engulfing many coastal cities and other maritime zones inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. Because of the disappearance of glaciers and changes to rainfall patterns, major rivers could dry up, condemning entire countries to desertification. One can imagine the tragedies — massive displacements of people, deadly struggles — which could result from such a trend.
This development does not belong to a vague and distant future. We already know that it will dramatically affect the existence of our children and grandchildren; it is probable that the generations born in the second half of the twentieth century will still have time, I dare say, to suffer from it themselves.
I am a sceptic by temperament. When I hear alarm bells, I bridle, take myself to one side, and try to ascertain calmly whether we are being manipulated. We have often been told that apocalyptic disasters are coming, only to find a few months or even weeks later that they have vanished, thank God, leaving no trace. Will it not be just the same with climate change? Were we not told just a few decades ago that the world was in fact heading for a new ice age? Writers and film-makers seized upon this theme with varying degrees of success.
So when I started hearing warnings about a global warming rather than cooling, the news naturally aroused my curiosity without greatly diminishing my scepticism.
When scientific studies became more numerous and insistent and when their results began to agree, I wanted to learn more.
Lacking a scientific education worthy of the name, I had first to plunge into the most elementary books in order to understand what was being said and to understand the much-discussed ‘greenhouse effect’, how it works and why it has been causing so much concern for some time. To understand what the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere means, and what its causes and consequences could be. To understand also why there is such fear about the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melting, but less about the melting of the Arctic Ocean, which it is now possible to cross in a boat from one side to the other during the summer months for the first time in millennia.
Am I going to say that at the end of my investigation I can verify that this phenomenon is serious and that it constitutes a threat to human civilisation? That is indeed the deep conviction I came to; but — and I say this in all sincerity — my judgement in this matter does not count for very much. In matters of science, the opinion of a layperson such as me does not merit being taken into consideration. To use a term which keeps coming up in my analysis, I have no intellectual legitimacy in this field. However, as a man who cares about the well-being of those who are dear to him, as a responsible citizen, worried by the excesses of the human adventure, and as a writer who is attentive to the debates which animate his contemporaries, I cannot shrug and make do with the conclusion that only the future will tell us whether we have been too alarmist or too disbelieving, too pusillanimous, and that we will find out in thirty years who was right and who was wrong.
Waiting for the judgement of the future means running a terrible risk. If it is true that in thirty years the damage caused by climate change has become irreparable, and if it is true that planet earth will already have gone out of control, that it will function erratically and ultimately uncontrollably, it would be absurd, suicidal and even criminal to wait for the future’s verdict.
So what should we do? Act before we are certain that the threat is real? Act even if we were to discover in thirty years that the Cassandras were wrong? My answer — though I admit it is paradoxical — is yes, we must act, and even if we have remaining doubts, we must behave as if we do not.
This attitude may seem irrational. But for once I would own up to it without a hint of hesitation. Not based on my deep conviction, which, though informed, concerns no one but myself. Nor simply because an overwhelming majority of scientists are convinced of the reality of global warming, and that its causes are linked to human activity, and also that this change poses a deadly threat to the future of the planet and its inhabitants. This near-unanimous consensus cannot be disregarded and I of course take it into account, but it does not constitute the last word in my view. The majority is not always right, and scientists have been wrong before. However, I believe that we ought to heed them in matters of climate change and as a consequence we must act, even before we are certain they are right.
To clarify my position, I shall formulate a wager, inspired by the one devised in the past and in a quite different context by the incomparable Blaise Pascal. With, however, a difference of scale: the result of Pascal’s wager could only be checked in the afterlife, whereas it will be possible to check our wager here on earth relatively soon, since the vast majority of those who currently inhabit our planet will still be alive.
I shall therefore consider the two principal reactions to climate change — the inadequate and then the adequate one — and try to imagine the consequences each of them would entail.
The first hypothesis is that no major step change occurs. Some countries make efforts to limit their greenhouse gas emissions; others react more half-heartedly with no more than cosmetic measures, so as to avoid appearing to be bottom of the class. Still others do nothing at all, for fear of harming their economic activity or upsetting their consumption patterns, and therefore continue to pollute quite happily. As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere keeps rising.
On this reckoning, where will the world be in thirty years? If we believe the majority of scientists, as well as the United Nations and all the international organisations which keep sounding the alarm, we will be on the brink of apocalypse, because we will have passed the point at which we can prevent our planet from running totally out of control. Without going into too much detail, I shall limit myself to signalling two pieces of evaluation data which strike me as particularly worrying.
The first is that the rise in the planet’s temperature, which is a consequence of the greenhouse effect, will cause the evaporation of water from the oceans, which in turn will increase the greenhouse effect. In other words, we could enter a vicious circle of warming which will no longer be dependent on anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but will accelerate by itself and become virtually impossible to stop. When do we risk reaching this tipping point? Opinions vary, but some think that it could kick in as early as the first quarter of this century. What is certain is that the longer we take to react, the more painful and costly the efforts we shall have to make.
The second piece of data, which points in the same direction, is that dramatic climate events may happen very suddenly, much more so than is currently thought. By way of example, it is thought today that the last swing from a glacial to a temperate period, which took place around 11,500 years ago, happened not by a slow process over centuries or millennia, but suddenly, in no more than a decade. Moreover, numerous scientists who have been studying climate-related phenomena for decades have been constantly surprised by the rapidity of changes, which often go far beyond the forecasts of what was thought plausible. All of which means that we must not imagine that everything we are talking about will not have consequences before the end of this century or into the following ones. We really cannot tell, and it would be wise to start preparing immediately for the worst-case scenario.
In thirty years — I am sticking to this figure so as to remain within the framework of a period which is meaningful in terms of a human lifespan, and which allows my generation still to speak of ‘us’ — we may not have witnessed all the changes which loom on the horizon, but we will already have had some devastating examples. And more seriously, the whole of humanity will have to endure a state of emergency for decades and the imposition of heavy sacrifices which will be difficult to bear without even the assurance that we can still prevent our descent into the abyss.
What if the majority were wrong? What if the future vindicated the dissenting minority which rejects the cataclysmic forecasts, mocks their alarmism and questions any link between our gas emissions and global warming; and which sometimes does not even believe in the reality of global warming, reckoning rather that we are witnessing natural temperature cycles which oscillate down then up, then down again, for all sorts of reasons which depend much more on the sun’s activity than humans’?
Once again, I am not qualified to refute these arguments and I want to suppose here that they could turn out to be true. If that is the case, we could not but rejoice. Many people would have to eat their hats with whatever grace they can muster: scientists, political leaders, international officials and everyone who believed them and relayed their fears — including me, if I am still around.
And now for the second hypothesis: humanity takes action. Benefiting from the political changes in the US, we see a major step change. Draconian measures are taken to reduce significantly fossil fuel consumption and carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. The rate of global warming slows, sea levels do not rise and no major drama linked to climate change takes place.
At this prospect, I imagine a debate between two scientists thirty years from now. One belongs to the majority consensus and supports the view that it was thanks to this step change that humanity escaped a global catastrophe which would have threatened its survival. The other belongs to the dissenting minority and continues stubbornly to insist that the dangers were grossly exaggerated and even simply an illusion. It is unlikely there would be agreement between them. Since the ‘patient’ is still alive, how can it be conclusively shown that he was in mortal danger? The two doctors by his bedside could debate indefinitely.
