Hungry, malnutrition, wars, poverty, deep inequality, forced migrations, environmental disasters, pandemics. The list could go on, but it would be enough to doubt this is not the best of all possible worlds. It is not very difficult to understand that all these phenomena are interconnected and they feed off each other.
It can seem strange, or paradoxical, but the adventure which lead us to this point began more or less 250 years ago under the sign of two-three main ideas (progress, development, economic growth) and of a strong universalistic vision.
Even if not in the same time and in the same measure, the progress has to reach all the humankind. After two-three centuries, this trajectory leads us on the edge of the abyss. The aspiration to the progress, understood mainly like powerful linear accumulation of economic, scientific and technological “know how”, becomes quickly a religious faith, a belief of common sense that no critical thinking manages to put in doubt. Neoliberalism is the contemporary ideology which include all these features. So, in neoliberalism we trust.
Our global social system founded on the faith in growth without limits of scientific and technological knowledge produces by itself —this is the doubt— adverse effects that needs a more advanced technological solution; a solution which generates new and more difficult problems, and so on. At the beginning of Seventies a little group of MIT young scientists tried to inform, at the request of Club di Roma and his President Aurelio Peccei, world’s elite about the very serious planet risks (population growth, pollution, natural resources consumption etc.). And they added there were no guarantee that in the future technology can find in every case an adequate solution to keep “growing”. The alert was totally skipped: but now their forecast results on the whole terribly prophetic.
Starting from 18th century, the essay tries to tell, in the form of a philosophical outline, this adventure, because only rethinking our cultural tradition, our occidental belief, our deep commonplaces on scientific progress and economic growth we can reach to the illuministic awareness of the social, political and environmental catastrophe produced by the poisonous mix of capitalism and scientism.