I am witnessing the massacre in Gaza, which some continue to call a war even though everyone, including Israel, knows that Hamas is not an army, but a horde of terrorists hidden among civilians. I witness the complicit silence of all countries, including Canada and the United States, which condemn the murderous madness of Hamas, but invite the vengeful hatred of Israel to show greater restraint. I witness the hypocrisy of the United States and Russia, who confront each other through intermediary countries, sometimes in Ukraine, sometimes in Gaza, the first defending Ukraine against Russian aggression, but refraining from defending Gaza against Israel, the second supporting Hamas against Israeli aggression while engaging in the preventive destruction of a Ukraine virtually admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
I witness the usual impotence of the United Nations (UN), gagged by the Security Council and the geopolitical interests of all sides. I am witnessing the militarization of Canada, a large peaceful country and a small soldier on the international scene, which devotes more than 200 billion to orders for planes and warships. I attended COP28, which was held in Saudi Arabia, a great country for human rights and green energy…
And I wonder how humanity will be able to survive so much violence committed with impunity? How can humanity survive such cowardice? You will tell me that humanity has seen others, that it has survived all forms of barbarism throughout the centuries. Let us think, close to us, of the two world wars, the Shoah, the gulag, the victims of the Cold War (Vietnam, Korea, etc.), Iraq, etc. Precisely, will the accumulation of all these hatreds which are the increasingly better armed conflicts, combined with the unbridled exploitation of all natural resources, end up exhausting the world’s cultural capital which until now has managed to stem all this destructive violence since the founding of the world?
Where can we find the strength to oppose the reign of force if not in the very culture of the belligerents from which the belligerents have turned away? In Last fragments of a long journey (2007), I find these reflections by Christiane Singer, written during the last months of her life and which could also apply to the imminent end of our species. To ensure the defense of Europe, “to remake the European spirit into this alliance between politics, culture and faith that Jacob Burckhardt dreamed of”.
To avoid new wars, with or without religions which support desires for power, to rediscover the very spirit of all religions which contain “the germ of historical violence”, but are “so many paths of compassion to give form, rite and matter to the Invisible which founds us”: “Christianity which is in me like an incendiary void which I did not want to fill”, “Judaism which taught me “the other””, “the mystical and humanist Islam which filled me with its lyrical splendor, its intoxication with beauty and dignity”, without forgetting “the profusion and cosmic rigor of Hinduism”, “the extreme rigor and the most dizzying benevolence of Buddhism.”
At the bottom of this hope, of this work that is hope and which animates all true culture, lies the intuition that nothing exists once and for all, that we maintain ourselves in being through a process of creation. continuous which requires that we consent to die at every moment, to pass from one form to another. All individual or collective violence is born from the fear of disappearing, of being dispossessed of our strength, our identity, our territory, and ultimately of being driven out of this self of which we had custody.
It is therefore not a question of closing our eyes to the more opaque night which little by little invades us as death approaches, but of seeking there the same light which has carried us day after day, given birth until then. , because “even if man must die, life is given to him to be born and to be reborn…” L’Homo sapiens is 300,000 years old, but he has not yet learned to age, to become lighter in order to pass from one age to another, from linear time to that of metamorphoses, and this is how he predicts death that he wants to fight.
“We have become old living dead,” Singer writes, because “the cruelest old age is not organic; it is that of hearts. » Humanity only has a future if it can, like this admirable woman, pass from the weakened body to the still living heart: “I have water in my lungs. Yes, I believe that the only sensible thing to do is to love, to practice loving day and night in every possible way. I read Plato. »
To grow old or to die? This is the question that all realistic minds refuse to ask themselves, and we will all die from not having heard the answer from the “hotheads”: “Overthrow the established order to reinvent life […| ouvrir de grands horizons comme une armée d’amour et de lumière » (Catherine Dorion, Les têtes brûlées, 2023).