Last Sunday I listened to a lecture by Alessandro Colombo, a professor of international relations at the University of Milan. The occasion was remarkable, as the three Jungian associations of Italy — comprising virtually all Jungian analysts — had asked him to present on the dissolution of the global order as we have known it.
Every single day now, patients bring with them in the analytical setting a kind of anguish about “the end,” which is not new, but has dramatically increased in the last few years. Virtually everyone feels it to some degree, and for some, its intensity has become crippling.
The analysts themselves feel it, just like everybody else, and Professor Colombo helped us who were listening to understand the concrete — i.e., not imaginative — dimensions of such a fear. He explained in clear and cogent words that several layers of order have collapsed.
The neocapitalist order born after 1989, which nourished two main illusions: that capitalism was over its cyclical crises — famously diagnosed by Karl Marx — and was going to feed everybody, and that democracy could be exported like any other good in the global market, provided that the hegemony of one imperial power remained untouched.
The post-WWII order, which gave birth to the United Nations and its agencies, and promised the end of wars through multilateralism, international law, and international courts of law.
The Westphalian order, which began in 1648 after the Thirty Years’ War, established the right of sovereignty of each state as a state, with clear boundaries and the prohibition against intervening in the internal affairs of other states.
These three layers have collapsed at the same time. Until very recently, they continued to exist together, somehow cohabiting on this planet, even though the most recent one was always trying to eat up the former two. But if it is true that all three collapsed together, and with them modernity itself crumbled, it’s no wonder that we find ourselves lost.
Of course, in the last 400 years or so, governments have often failed to respect the rules of international behavior prescribed by those orders, but while in the past those breaches were seen as shameful and the tendency was always to restore the order — a kind of homeostatic balance, we would say — today shame has disappeared. Sovereignty does not mean anything, international law does not mean anything, and even democracy in its Western form does not mean anything anymore. Sheer power and cruelty have the sway.
Notice that this was not the talk of a religious person, or a professor of ethics, or a Jungian analyst, but that of a scholar of international relations. Professor Colombo did not say that any of the systems of ordering international relations that followed upon each other in modernity was good or bad in itself — he showed their liabilities and faults instead — but he could not avoid transmitting the chilling impression that in each of them there were elements of morality which are now completely gone.
He insisted, therefore, that Trump is the representative of the moral collapse of the Western-dominated world, not its cause. He admitted that Trump is engaged in particularly perverse and damaging and psychotic forms of cruelty, but these are not just his own. The system allowed him to rise to power and allows him to remain in power. Or, rather, whatever we have now in place of a system, this blob of sheer interests, which risks blowing itself up in a nuclear war.
He said that it is a pious illusion to believe that once Trump is gone, everything will go back to normal. There is no going back after the collapse of the three tiers of reasonable, even if faulty, arrangements that have governed the modern world. There is only going ahead, following one single principle: the acceptance of the utter diversity of other cultures and political systems. This means the collapse of the American empire, but also the collapse of the notion that democracy is a universal value. Which means negotiating and trading with those who treat their citizens in ways that we may find repellent. Which means starting from scratch with a new system of international rules.
The audience was shattered, I think, not just by the grim scenario, but by feeling that he was right, for the most part. We just had never joined together the dots, which he did for us, in very plain language.
My personal reaction was to notice that religion was not mentioned even once in the talk, except as a background to the Peace of Westphalia, that is, as a negative element which brought about the wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, to which the Westphalian arrangement sought to put a permanent end.
But if religion, admittedly, has played mostly a negative role for humanity and the planet in the modern age, what about spirituality? Are we sure that a way forward, after the threefold collapse of the world order, can be found without it? This is the question which I plan to answer, albeit very tentatively, in my next Daily Meditation.
Banner Image: Seconds to midnight: comparison chart of the Doomsday clock shows a dwindling window for course correction. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you (partially) agree or disagree with the analysis presented? What impact does it have on your “praying the news”?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
