After the nations, building Earth

A propaganda-announcement from a television channel shows an interethnic group singing: “My homeland is the Earth.” Here, a state of consciousness is revealed, one that leaves behind the conventional idea of homeland and nation.

Indeed, we still live under the sign of nations, each asserting oneself, closing or opening frontiers, and fighting for one’s identity. Such phase, still running, belongs to another consciousness and historical era. Globalization is not only an economic phenomenon. It represents a political, cultural, ethical and spiritual datum: a new step in the history of planet Earth and Humanity.

A few thousand years ago, human species left Africa, from where we emerged in the evolutionary process (we are all Africans), and conquered all the terrestrial space building peoples, cities, and civilizations. Fernando de Magallanes, in three years (1519-1522) circumnavigated Earth and empirically proved that it is indeed rounded (not flat as an obtuse vision still claims). After the expansion, came the time for concentration, the return from the great exile. All the peoples are meeting in one place: planet Earth. Beyond nationalities and different ethnicities, we discovered that we form one species: human along other species of the great community of life.

With effort, we are still learning to live together embracing differences without letting them become inequalities. Respecting accumulated wealth by nations and ethnicities that reveal different ways of being human, we face a new challenge that never existed before building Earth as Common Home. Awareness is growing about Earth and Humanity having a common destiny. Xi Jinping, chief of State in China, said it clear: we have the task of building the “Community of the shared destiny for humanity.”

The success of this construction will bring us a world of peace, one of the most precious goods for everybody. Living in peace, oh, how much happiness! This peace is what is missing today. On the contrary, we live in lethal regional wars and total war moved against Gaia, living Earth, our Mother Earth, attacked in all its fronts, up to the point that it shows indignation through global warming and depletion of goods and services, without which life is in danger.

In this context, it is worth revisiting a philosopher, Immanuel Kant (+1804), one of the first ones to think about a World Republic (Weltrepublik), although he never had left his small city Königsberg in Germany. Such republic can only consolidate if it is able to install a “perennial peace.” His famous 1795 text is called exactly “For a perennial peace.” (Zum ewigen Frieden).

Perennial peace, according to him, is based on two pillars: universal citizenship and respect for human rights.

This citizenship is exercised, in the first place, by “general hospitality.” Precisely, because, he says, all humans have the right to be in it and visit its places and peoples that inhabit in it. Earth belongs by reasons of community to everybody.

Faced with politics pragmatist, generally less sensitive to the ethical sense in social relations, emphasizes: “world community is not a fantasy vision but rather a need imposed by perennial peace.” If we want a perennial peace, and not just a truce or a momentary pacification, we should live hospitality and respect rights.

Another pillar is the universal rights. These, as Kant used to say using a beautiful expression, are “the girl with God’s eyes” or “the most sacred that God put on earth.” Their respect makes for a peace and security community being born, one that puts a definite end to “the infamous fighting.”

The empire of rights and diffusion of planetary citizenship expressed by hospitality must create a culture of rights, in fact generating the “community of peoples.” This community of peoples, emphasizes Kant, can grow in its awareness that a right’s violation in one place is felt in every place, a statement that would be repeated afterwards on his own by Ernesto Che Guevara.

This ethical-political vision of Kant founded an unprecedented paradigm of globalization and peace. Peace results from the validity of right and cooperation juridically ordered and institutionalized between all States and peoples.

Different is the vision of another theoretician of the State and globalization, Thomas Hobbes (+1679). For him, peace is a negative concept; it means absence of war and the equilibrium of the intimidation between states and peoples. This vision founds the peace and globalization paradigm in which the power of the strongest is imposed onto the rest. This vision prevailed for centuries and has become powerful today through the singular USA president, Trump, who still dreams of only one world and only one empire, the American. United States decided to fight terrorism with State terrorism. It is the threatening return of the Leviathan-State, visceral enemy of any peace strategy. In this logic, there is no future for peace or humanity.

Today, we are facing this scenario: if for the madness of one ruler or for the Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, nuclear weapons arsenals were activated, it could be the end of our species. Et tunc erat finis. Will we have enough time and wisdom to change the logic of the system which was implanted centuries ago that loves more the accumulation of material goods than life? That will depend on us.

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