How to check "Save the World" off your bucket list?
Welcome to Chapter 23 of Planet Republyk!
This is the final episode. The tenth of 10 chapters of the third and final part of the Planet Republyk project.
___________________
Chapter 23: Trying to Right a Wrong
To have faith is to climb the first step, even when you can't see the whole staircase.
Martin Luther King
We saw earlier that there were two historical periods of international activism aimed at establishing universal governance.
The first began before the end of the First World War, around 1917, and ended around 1920.
The second, by far the more impressive, began around 1937, and collapsed with the rise of the Cold War in the early 1950s.
In 2020, in his excellent book Histoire des citoyens du monde, about this brief but glorious period in France, Michel Auvray, explained this globalist outburst by a form of synchronicity:
Gary Davis (See episode 12) was only one of the first visible signs of the birth of a global consciousness and in one year the signs have multiplied: it now appears as a collective[i].
In 1950, when the embers of the movement were still hot, Robert Sarrazac, an important actor in these events in France, already sensed this possibility:
History, he continued lucidly, will likely record as an important phenomenon the dissemination, through several hundred radio broadcasts and several thousand articles, of the ideas of world citizenship, World Federal Government, Assembly of the Peoples[ii].
If it is the intellect that has led us to where we are today, perhaps it is time to let our hearts speak.
Rosika Schwimmer
In Planet Republyk's opinion, the stars that keep aligning at the beginning of this millennium, in this troubled period of our collective history, are conducive to another outburst. We are, for various reasons (of which the social, sanitary, financial, environmental, food, geopolitical, resource and social inequality crises on a planetary scale are not the least) at the dawn of a third major period of resurgence of a militancy for the establishment of universal governance.
For the sake of humanity and biodiversity, let us hope that this one is the right one.
The philosopher and essayist Normand Baillargeon wrote in 2006 that :
In matters of international relations, the moral law enjoins us to move towards cosmopolitanism, an ideal that is more than ever indispensable. The fundamental question that remains to be answered by us, citizens of the world, is: what do we agree to do, what actions are we ready to take, what battles are we willing to wage so that our elites and our masters, key players in the planetary drama, will finally agree to a post-Westphalian international order[iii]?
I believe that everything is always in question, that everything is always to be saved, that nothing is definitively acquired, and that there will never be rest on earth for men of good will.
Raymond Aron
We are all more or less aware that a world government is part of our nebulous collective future. Let those who are able and willing set about the task of establishing a legitimate and democratic version of it.
The technological explosion of the Anthropocene makes the millennial utopia of a unified humanity more accessible than at any other time in its history. Never before the Internet had the common man had the possibility, without intermediaries, without the censorship of the powerful, to share an idea with a large part of his cosmopolitan compatriots.
More and more of us are in search of meaning. Planet Republyk offers us meaning.
If we were to retain only one duty from our time on earth, it would probably be to contribute to leaving a better world for those who follow us than was left to us by those who came before us.
Unfortunately, our lifestyles, which we have not been willing to question enough, mean that, for the first time, the current generations will leave less than what was bequeathed to them.
Planet Republyk is an opportunity to try to redress the balance.
It can't ALWAYS NOT happen
Gaston Miron
______________________
That's it for Chapter 23!
On PlanetRepublyk.org you will find links to become a member, buy the book in E-book(PDF) version or make a donation.
Planet Republyk is a non-profit organization. Please help the cause by making a donation!
We suggest a donation (if you deem the research, content and presentation worthy) equivalent to 1US$ or 1€ per chapter/episode of the podcast read or listened to.
Also, please share!
Especially to those who seem interested in such a subject!
____________________
[i] Michel Auvray, Histoire des citoyens du monde, Imago, Paris, 2020, p.127.
[ii] Ibid, p.128.
[iii] Normand Baillargeon, "Kant et le projet inachevé de l'ONU", Le Devoir, April 8, 2006.