By LEONARDO BOFF*
The real danger of future US President Donald Trump's mantra: “Make America Great Again” (MEGA) or the aphorism “America first”, but which is thought of as: “America only”
Our ancestors (hominids) burst into the process of evolution about 7-8 million years ago. The current homo sapiens, The bearer of reflexive consciousness, intelligence, capacity for love and language, from which we descend, appeared only 200 thousand years ago. Before that, he lived in Africa for several million years. It was there that our basic anthropological structures that constitute our humanity were developed. That is why we are all African in some way.
Then began the great dispersion across the vast world until it occupied all the terrestrial spaces. Now began the great journey back to where everyone would meet in the same Common Home, planet Earth. A new phase of humanity and the Earth was inaugurated, the planetary phase that others call globalization. It was only in 1521, when Fernão de Magalhães and his sailors made the circumnavigation of the sea, that it entered the collective consciousness that the Earth is round and that it could be reached from anywhere.
The powers of the time, Portugal and Spain, began their occupation/invasion of Africa, Abya Yala and parts of Asia. These were the first steps towards “planetization”.
This globalization has been growing and is now presented in many forms. There is talk of economic-tyrannosauric globalization, human-social globalization and ecozoic-spiritual globalization. The predominant one is the economic-financial globalization, which I would call the dinosaur phase, because it takes shape in a voracious way that makes us think of dinosaurs, as it oppresses human beings and devours nature.
In fact, it is about the Westernization of the world, its values such as democracy, human rights, science and technology and also its defects such as the will to dominate, its belligerent spirit, its individualism (Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World, Voices).
Human beings have never lived alone. The German thinker Norbert Elias saw sociability in “subsistence units” (The process of civilization) whose function was to guarantee the group from existential risks and at the same time impose control over violence, both internal to the group and against external groups. Solidarity in coexistence and control of violence are the basis of any society and civilization.
These “subsistence units” have historically developed into cities, metropolises and today into mega-corporations and powers with fantastic economic power and military power capable of destroying all life with their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Scholars even see in the lethality of nuclear weapons a curious civilizing function in the sense of preserving the war that would be final. “Their usefulness would be in their non-use” because it would avoid “mutually assured destruction” (Mutually Assured Destructionin the words of Stephen Mennel, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global culture, Voices, p. 389.
The urgent issue that has not yet been addressed is the establishment of a global democratic governance. The new fact that everyone is within the same Common Home demands a plural body of men and women, representatives of all peoples and interests, to think about the destiny of humanity and, above all, to find global solutions to global problems such as Covid-19, the current global warming and the devastation of biodiversity.
We are currently experiencing a paradox: on the one hand, we are witnessing by all means the technical, economic, political and cultural interrelationships of globalization, the discovery of the only Common Home, as an irreversible fact, and on the other, the preservation of national sovereignties, in themselves obsolete with highly lethal wars to guarantee the boundaries of certain nations. The collective consciousness that we are “planetary citizens” and that “My homeland is the Earth” has not been formed.
Herein lies the real danger of future US President Donald Trump's mantra: “Make America Great Again” (MEGA) or the aphorism “America first” (“America First”), but what is thought is: “America Only.”
If the most powerful economic, scientific-technological and military power isolates itself and does not assume its responsibility to face the serious risks that weigh on life and humanity, together with all the others, we could see the severe words recently spoken by UN Secretary General António Gutérrez come true: “Either we will take collective action or we will experience collective suicide.”
Edgar Morin, at the age of 93, rightly observed: “It would take a sudden and terrible escalation of danger, and the arrival of a catastrophe to constitute the electric shock necessary for taking conscience and making decisions” (“World-society or empire” in Foreign policy vol. 1, p. 85).
Donald Trump and our ineligible candidate are notorious deniers who, according to Noam Chomsky, in a museum of evil “should have a special room” (How to stop the Doomsday Clock?, ICL Publisher, p. 22).
At the present time, we are faced with this dilemma: either we establish lasting peace among all and with the community of life, or we may experience a nuclear holocaust, a consequence of denialism and irresponsibility. When powers compete for hegemony, as in the case of the United States, Russia and China, scholars say, it usually ends in war. If it is nuclear, it could be a terminal war.
I echo the words of astronaut Sigmund Jähn upon returning to Earth: “Political boundaries have been overcome, as have the boundaries of nations. We are one people, and each of us is responsible for maintaining the fragile balance of the Earth. We are its guardians, and we must care for our common future.”
*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Caring for our Common Home: clues to delay the end of the world (Vozes). [https://amzn.to/3zR83dw]
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