Society and Sustainable Development
The Earth is not flat, nor at the centre of the universe.
If someone had affirmed this before the times of Galileo and Columbus he would have attracted, in the best and healthiest of hypotheses, the accusation of being crazy.
Galileo himself had to face the consequences of his scientific publications which, in those times, seemed to be a tear in a thick and hard-wearing fabric.
And yet the philosophical, cultural and political approach of a large span of human history is based on some considerations which were in those times indeed thick and hard-wearing fabric,
1. The whole planet (the world then known) could be considered, with its cultural and social habits, to be a fresco in which man, the creature at the centre of the universe, was the receiver of a (profitable) plan which involved the whole of humanity (the Christian message).
2. It was necessary, therefore, to carry to far-off countries (colonialism) the cultural, thus social, model of the Roman Empire, that is to say, of that society in which Christianity had affirmed itself, paying scant attention to the cultural and social traditions of the colonised people.
3. This system contained a hidden logic, and thus a way of thinking, which believed it right and necessary to export the cultural model of that civilisation which, having grown on a flat world and in the centre of the universe, found itself having to assimilate the revolutionary and innovative model of the Christian message.
The newborn church itself, delivered from persecutions and some internal conflicts, commits some errors of presumption.
Perhaps you have seen a youth who, full of his own strength and boldness, commits similar irresponsible actions.
History has thus had grafted onto the fullest manifestation of organizational potential of the power of human logic (the roman empire) a model founded on the recognition of the evolutionary capacity of every component in the universe according to its potential and vocation. We can therefore define the Roman Empire to be the last expression of an old world guided by a limited human vision, and define its downfall as the first visible sign of the presence of Truth in history.
The evolution of history, though subsequent to this graft, can not be considered finished. It proceeds taking on new and sharper forms daily. Like in thermodynamic output, even history has not yet reached its maximum efficiency. Along this path, human fallibility (the result of an incomplete logic) has always generated through its errors social and racial inequality. Each creed which is blind to considering creation as a whole, as the integration of different parts which are useful to the entire mathematical model which permits the functioning of the universe, generates suffering and discrimination.
Any doctrine which holds someone or something to be more important or more useful than another, or that believes that there can be entities which are useless or of minor importance, is presumptuous. The Planner has not created a machine in which there are parts left over or where some parts can be considered less important. He does not care to waste anything, nor leave anything to chance.
The whole history of racism is the narration of the limits of human thought; all the struggles for the predominance of one race over another are the result of a culture which has a limited conscience and understanding of the truth about man.
Each struggle between towns, civilisations or religion is a wrong and imperfect interpretation of the only religion: the one that considers each man, be he great or small (according to the human rational categories) as unique and unrepeatable in the great Plan which leads towards Infinity.