Year XXXVIII, Number 2, July 2025

Giampiero Bordino
Professor in Contemporary History and Political Analyst. President of the Einstein Center for International Studies.

The multiple crises we find ourselves, facing on a world-wide scale, which are environmental (the more or less recent pandemics for example), socio-economic, and political, offer particularly significant opportunities for reflection. Crises, as history repeatedly shows, guarantee nothing for the future. Just consider how wars, despite their inherently suicidal and murderous nature, have been mindlessly repeated over millennia.

In an interview published by Le Monde in April 2020, the French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, known as the theorist of “complexity” as a figure of the contemporary world, denounces the prevalence of “disjunctive and reductive thinking” in European and Western culture. A mindset that too often does not adequately grasp the relationships that connect the different parts of reality to each other and, also emphasizes and celebrates the specialization and separation of knowledge. “Science”, Morin observes, “is devastated by hyper-specialization, which is the closure and compartmentalization of specialized knowledge instead of its communication”. Disjunctive thinking appears powerless to grasp, or at least attempt to grasp, totality. In this way, reality is evasive and cannot, literally, be “comprehended”.

In conclusion, according to Morin, “deficiencies in thinking, combined with the unquestionable dominance of a frenzied thirst for profit, are responsible for countless human catastrophes, including those occurring now, since February 2020”.

But, concretely, what are some more significant “reductive disjunctions” that characterize the prevailing Western culture or, in other words, our prevailing, more widespread and introjected in the collective imagination “world view”?

To give just a few examples. Body/mind or soul (according to the Platonic, Christian, Cartesian tradition), nature/culture (that which has always been as it is, unchanging and, conversely, that which is instead cultivated, produced by man therefore changeable), human/animal (the conceptual pair at the origin, with others, of the environmental crisis and in particular the current pandemic), human/dehuman (as experience teaches, the inhuman is actually in-human, i.e., it is within man, and cannot be attributed to others or to anything else), individual/collective (conceptual pair underlying many different and conflicting political ideologies), economic/political (as if the economy were autonomous from society, ethics, and politics, and thus legitimized to impose its own logic and interests in people’s lives), scientific/ humanistic (the basis of “scientism”, a view of science without humanism, thus unable to give meaning to what it does and to perceive the limits of what it does), local/global (at the root, along with other factors, of the crisis of democracy in globalization).

The prevalence of disjunctive and reductive thinking has two fundamental and serious consequences, which it is appropriate to already briefly point out.

On the cognitive level, it prevents one from comprehending (taking together) the complexity of the world, that is, from adequately grasping the multiple relationships that connect the parts to each other and to the whole, from seeking the totality and attempting to observe it, beyond separations and dualisms. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, stems to a large extent from the failure to understand, generated also by interests and opportunism, the connections that bind the human world, the animal world and the plant world.

Second, on the level of praxis, it is essential to observe that the lack of global perception of reality results in a serious weakening of the sense of responsibility on the ethical and political levels. Each person feels responsible only for their own narrow role – what they see as “theirs” – whether scientist, politician, or citizen. This is a consequence of reductive, disjunctive thinking. Local/global for example: every man for himself, responsible only for his own house and for his own house, as if the different houses (sub-national, national, continental, global) were not increasingly connected to each other in a single community of destiny. One can therefore understand why democracies, in today’s world, appear increasingly powerless and endangered in the face of neo-nationalisms and identity populisms. Totality, a complex totality constructed from a multiplicity of relations, must therefore be, if we are to be saved, the horizon of cognitive research and ethical and political praxis.

Totality is of course, to put it in Kant’s language, a “concept-boundary”, a horizon to be pursued, a path that one never ceases to walk, because inevitably, no matter how far one walks, there is always something “further” to reach. Totality, in other words, is not an “entity” that we can definitively appropriate, but a complex and changing system of relations, which it is therefore necessary to walk and explore on a daily basis.

Thinking about wholeness, in the world in which we live, is particularly necessary with respect to two major problems that challenge our capacities to know and act, that increasingly put at stake and at risk the very survival of the human species, and that have an increasingly evident global dimension. First, the environmental problem, relating to all the different contexts (geological, plant, animal, even cosmic) in which human life on earth has always been situated. Secondly, the social, political, institutional problem, relating to their coexistence, and to the ability to deal with and resolve common issues peacefully and through consensus, as far as possible not by force (which as we know inevitably produces murder and suicide).

On the environmental level, it is useful first of all to put back together, a first totality beginning to build, human history and geological history. The history of the earth is measured in billions of years, that of the plant world and living matter in millions of years, that of humans in hundreds of thousands of years, that more properly of human civilization in tens of thousands of years. These are, as we can see, entirely different units of measurement and timescales, which give an idea of the relativity and limits of human history and, at the same time, of the anthropocentric presumption that characterizes our dominant cultural tradition. In this very long span of time, millions of living species have appeared and then gone extinct.

The human species is placed in this context, like all others it has no guarantee of eternity.

And what is it doing, in fact, to ensure its own survival? First of all, it is useful to remember, in order to outline the big picture, that 97.3 percent of living matter (biomass) is made up of plants, 2.7 percent from the animal world and only 0.01 percent from the species “homo sapiens” to which we belong. Thus, it is evident that the role of the plant and animal worlds is crucial to the life and survival of the human species. It is, in fact, one of the main, decisive for human life, “political” problems they face. Another “reductive disjunction”, between problems of nature and politics, and between the related traditionally established knowledge, political and social sciences and nature sciences, that is urgently needed to be understood and overcome.

According to a recent report by WWF, the leading international nature conservation organization, 420 million hectares of land have been deforested worldwide over the past 30 years, roughly the area of the European Union. This is a process that destroys biodiversity, since an estimated 80 percent of plant and animal species live in forests, mostly in tropical areas. An average of 10 million hectares are deforested each year for the purpose of making pastures for livestock and meat production, soybean crops, palm oil, etc. predominantly required by the developed countries of the Western world. For example, 97 percent of soybean meal is destined for intensive animal farms.

All of this, as is well known and is now recognized by all, is also one of the main factors of climate change, of global warming, taking place today. According to an FAO estimate, 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions depend on intensive livestock farming, only 13.59 percent on transportation. All this also produces significant health consequences, which are increasingly evident and recognized. According to estimates, 73 percent of the world’s antibiotic production is for animal husbandry, i.e., intensive livestock production, and thus enters the food cycle leading to the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance and the emergence of super- bacteria, a major and growing cause of death worldwide. With current trends, according to some predictions, by 2050 there will be 10 million deaths per year from these causes, compared with 8.2 million from cancer and 1.2 million from traffic accidents.

With this in mind, it is now possible to better understand the phenomenon of pandemics. The current Covid-19 one is the sixth since the “Spanish” flu of 1918. And it is unlikely to be the last, given that, according to analysis by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes), the body established by the United Nations to monitor biodiversity and ecosystems, more than 1.7 million unknown viruses reside in mammals and birds alone, half of which may have the ability to leap between species. Deforestation, the progressive destruction of many ecosystems (including by large fires, arson and otherwise, such as those that devastated Australia and California during the 2020s) pushes entire animal species out of their habitats, brings them closer to inhabited human environments, and thus multiplies the opportunities for species-hopping in infectious processes, in an increasingly densely anthropized context. The world’s population today is about 7.8 billion people, 4.3 billion of whom are concentrated in urban agglomerations that are expected to grow further in future decades.

As the aforementioned WWF report notes, since the first industrial revolution in particular (thus since the late eighteenth century) humans have significantly altered three- quarters of the landmass and two-thirds of the oceans, giving rise to a new epoch called the “anthropocene”, which the French scientist and botanist Gilles Clément recently renamed, ironically but not unfoundedly, the “stupidocene”. Stupidity, i.e., the ability to harm oneself without realizing it, is typical of the human species, and this determines, among other things, the need for politics, understood in short as the “art of governing”, to prevent and control its consequences, instead of using it for the purposes of power, as is too often the case today by populist and opportunistic leadership (Bolsonaro’s politics in Brazil, to take just one significant example). Many other phenomena, in addition to those outlined above, justify Clément’s definition of “stupidocene”: consumption patterns based on the waste of resources, the inability to give rise to new forms of “circular economy” capable of reducing this waste, and so on. However, it is unquestionable, to conclude on environmental issues, that the human species is by no means guaranteeing its own future and survival. This should be known and understood first and foremost by the generations to come, who will pay the consequences.

With regard to socio-economic, political and institutional problems, those relating to the coexistence of men and the art of government, it is equally necessary and decisive to think of them in their entirety. Given that hardly any man lives in isolation from the rest of the world anymore (Robinson and Friday on the desert island are only literary fiction) and given the technological revolution in communications and transportation and economic globalization (possibly in a new “archipelago” form characterized by the coexistence of large integrated continental areas), all relevant problems facing humanity now have a global character, and can therefore be thought of and addressed only from the point of view of the “totality” and the systems of relations that constitute it. Local and global are always interconnected (except for Robinson’s nonexistent island), and no one can really be “master of his own house”, given the interconnectedness between houses. At any level, it is necessary to “think the world”, i.e., the totality, because everyone has, in various aspects and to varying degrees, “the world at home” (in the form i goods, capital, images, people, etc.). A minority, the globalized minority, small but always influential, is then also “at home in the world”. Having the world at home without being able to be at home in the world is an obviously unpleasant situation, also perceived as unfair, and is a contradiction at the root of many social, political and even cultural conflicts of our time. It can help to understand the roots and reasons for these conflicts. If we add to this the growing economic and social inequality, particularly of income and wealth and more generally of life opportunities, an overall picture emerges that explains the crisis of representative democracy and the emergence by contrast, worldwide, of neo-nationalist, populist and anti-elite movements.

On the political and institutional level, thinking as a means designing and building multilevel institutions and policies, from local and national to continental and global, which in a coordinated form with each other (thus guaranteed by “foedera” pacts, of a constitutional nature) make it possible to address common problems in the different dimensions and at the different levels at which they arise. In this direction, the thought and experience of federalism can make a relevant contribution, first and foremost with regard to solving the problem of peace among states, which is, to use Kantian language again, the “condition of possibility” of every other public value or good. Beyond the “disjunctive and reductive thinking” denounced by Morin, there is another possible horizon, which is worth trying to pursue together.