Where is the great theater of the world headed? We can have the feeling that the many advances of humanity –technological, political, social, health…– have led us to a time in which living conditions are better than in any previous historical period. But is it really so? Or is the ocean liner of the world headed towards collapse? Have the ideals of the Enlightenment been exhausted? Has sustained growth brought us to a point of no return? Dark clouds throw us warning signs that we are not on the right track: climate crisis, economic crisis, rise of populism, pandemics, wars…
At the beginning of the third millennium, we may have to rethink everything. This is what Philipp Blom does in this agile, erudite and astute journey through Europe’s past and present to try to understand how we got to the current situation and what we must do to correct a system of values that will end up leading us to disaster if We don’t act anymore.
The author uses Calderón and Asterix, evokes the Little Ice Age and its consequences, the persecution of witches, the emergence of the Enlightenment… Echoes of the past to understand the present. Because the time has come to search for new paradigms, new stories, new myths, new mental structures, new cultural identities. The time has come to reinvent ourselves as human beings and as a society
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