Animal species, insects, birds, plants and mammals are disappearing from the face of the Earth, the plurality of languages is on the verge of extinction, human beings are evolving in a world that is less and less varied. On all sides, plurality is drying up and homogenization is taking hold in people’s minds. This is the thesis brilliantly supported by Thomas Bauer in his captivating essay which sounds like a warning about the fading of our era marked by “less meanings, ambiguity and diversity in all fields of existence”.
The professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Münster offers an essay at odds with his specialization. The scholar notes that our ability to admit divergent opinions, tolerate contradictions and accept difference is diminishing. He notes that intolerance of doubt or ambiguity favors withdrawal into oneself and identity fundamentalism. However, without cultural diversity, there can be no tolerance. As such, ambiguity is essential, because it is at the source of our culture, of its openness, he argues.
In his reflection on “univocal becoming” (“ Vereindeutigung “) of our world, the Islamologist also notes several processes which tend to the simplification of opinions, in particular the obsession with the truth, the negation of history and the aspiration to purity, all elements today growing today which lead, according to him, to the inexorable rejection of others. Published in 2018 and finally available in French, this small book, light in terms of the number of pages, but very relevant, therefore comes at the right time given the rise of extremists in the four corners of the globe. Their narrow visions no longer make room for nuance, he observes.
Invoking in turn the reflections of Paul Valéry and Stefan Zweig, the short intelligent essay which looks at politics, the arts and religion highlights the sociological contradictions of our time, which while celebrating difference and cosmopolitanism, on the contrary reveal a standardization of lifestyles and an impoverishment of thought. For Thomas Bauer, Leibniz Prize 2013, “the universe of the senses is shrinking” in all spheres of society. No matter how much we praise our neighbors, different cultures or contrary beliefs, everything is just an illusion, the essayist emphasizes, since the world is becoming more uniform at an accelerated pace.
While the market offer develops in a capitalist society, a mass culture imposes itself. Everything looks the same, our lifestyles or the buildings constructed identically, the same towers in Dubai, Paris or Montreal. “Variety disappears within the human species; the same ways of acting, thinking and feeling are found in all corners of the world”, already announced Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19the century.